Status Update

It's never seems to be boring in our home here in Toowong. Just as V. started to rise from her bed rest with a more manageable back, Will came down with some miserable virus. The poor guy has been running a fever and won't eat much. After 3-4 days of dramatic refusals of nearly anything we offer him, I'm really hoping this morning he'll wake up back and be his old self. V. will return to work on Monday. She's still taking a painkiller and can't sit easily on a regular chair, but we are staying optimistic that it's all going to get better. And maybe a little boring...at last.

Periods of Waiting

One surprise in moving to Australia has been the way that business practices are so different between countries. I mistakenly believed that in any competitive, "free-market" system, businesses would set up incentives and rules that would optimize choices for the customer. This was a rather naive belief, I now admit. For example, trying to make sense of the different mobile phone plans and broadband services here is a nightmare, especially as I ponder adding a data service when I finally (if ever) get an iPhone. There's even a website where people have serious discussions of all these plans. The absence of mortgages with fixed interest rates for the life of the loan is another mystery. Even paying the rent every two weeks is something new.

Another example of cultural differences in business practices is how health insurance works here. Sure, there is basic universal healthcare, which we have been using for the past year quite happily. But nearly everyone supplements this with private insurance. Depending on the plan, private insurance can include several extras, such as dental, eyeglasses, psychotherapy, etc., which are not normally included in the government coverage. In addition, with private health insurance one has more options for hospital and specialist care. After being here a year we finally got around to signing up for private health insurance last week. Interestingly, many of the extras that come with this new insurance require a waiting period of between 2 and 12 months, depending on the "extra." This is the time from when we started paying for the insurance to the time when we can actually make a claim for the service. Thus, there are several services that we will have to wait months to use.

In the booklet that accompanied our welcome kit, I found this explanation for the waiting period:

Before you can start claiming for hospital services, you must be in your chosen cover for a set period of time, (known as a Waiting Period). Customers can only claim benefits after they have served their waiting periods. This is necessary to keep health cover fair. Waiting periods protect existing customers who pay premiums to a fund over time, for when they might need health cover. If we didn't have waiting periods, people might join a fund to claim for a planned item and then leave.

That last sentence makes me wonder why this doesn't happen in the United States. That is, in the States there are no "Waiting Periods" (I think), so why doesn't this problem of people joining and dropping their coverage as soon as some procedure is completed exist there? I also like the middle sentence about "this is necessary to keep health cover fair." It captures the essence of many policies in Australia. There's a great emphasis on things being fair here that is best summed up by the belief in "a fair go" for everyone. (Here are a couple of interesting and contrasting takes on the Fair Go: here #1 and here #2). Perhaps it is this cultural value (one not widely shared in the U.S.) that underlies the Waiting Period. Then again, it doesn't explain why there are 15 variables to consider when choosing my mobile phone coverage.

Anti Anti-Smoking

I heard a little of Joe Jackson's 1982 hit "Steppin' Out" tonight, followed that up by watching a YouTube broadcast of the original video, and finally ended up looking around Joe's website. "Steppin' Out" was on the "Night and Day" album, which my roommate in college used to play quite a bit, so I remember all those tracks very well. There was always something magical about this song in particular. It has a smooth dance rhythm underneath a series of slow chord changes, creating a hypnotic feeling as you listen to the lyrics. The video itself is a great fantasy about early '80s New York City life:


I remember that Jackson was upset about this video when it came out, and vowed to not make another because he thought such videos unnecessarily associate images with the song that the artist never intended.

Anyway, as I clicked away on his website, I came across a section in which Joe argues against all the "anti-smoking hysteria." On my recent trip to Croatia I was slightly annoyed by all the smoking that was going on during the dinners and coffee breaks, but some of the other people I was with really started moaning loudly about the smoke. It wasn't that long ago that I was frequently standing among smokers (or sitting with my relatives when I was a child) and not really noticing the smoke. I wondered how much my recent reaction was due to years of listening to all these anti-smoking campaigns. Don't get me wrong...I am not an advocate for smoking. But I did find Joe Jackson's pamphlet interesting. He thoughtfully reviews the evidence for the causes of secondhand smoke, as well as the direct and indirect effects of smoking on health. He concludes in a section titled "How to be Healthy:"

I think there are two different approaches to living a healthy life. One is to try very hard to avoid everything which current opinion holds to be bad for you, be guided by ‘experts’ and statistics, feel very guilty about any human imperfection, and generally believe that if you work hard enough, you can achieve invulnerability. This is very American. The other is to enjoy yourself, be reasonably moderate, be sceptical of the ‘experts,’ and let the chips fall where they may. This approach is more European - or used to be. These are broad stereotypes, but they’re both reasonable and most people are drawn more to one than the other. The problem comes when the first group starts to dictate to the second. Especially when there’s no real proof, that either approach works best.

I think I'll go have another Diet Coke and ponder the evidence.

One Year On

It was a year ago today that we arrived in Australia with our six suitcases, three carry-ons, a car seat, and a stroller. Despite everything that has happened since, I can't say that I feel like this is "home" yet. Partly this is because we still own our old home in Atlanta, as no one has yet made a serious offer on it for nearly 17 months (we've now lowered the asking price to below what we paid for it). But the main reason is that it's going to take more time than I thought to develop real friendships--a "social support network," as they say in my field--to replace what we lost by changing continents. Sure, we still have contact with many of our friends and family members back in the States, but the effect of the great physical separation that now exists is tremendous. I think if we had moved to San Francisco instead, for example, it would have been much easier because we would be only a couple of time zones and a $400 flight away. Now, we face $6000-9000 plane tickets for the three of us to go back, in addition to lots of logistics when it comes to planning a time to make phone calls.

The effect of not having of a fully developed social support network was quite acute this week when V. was knocked down with severe back pain. On Wednesday night she suddenly woke up screaming because she was unable to move. The next day her physician arranged to have a CT scan of her lower spine made, and it turned out that she had 2-3 herniated discs! It appears that V. has been living with back pain on and off for many years, but never really dealt with it. This probably got worse recently due to our long plane flights and her having to lift heavy luggage and Will during our travels. The doctor immediately ordered V. to go on bed rest for a week, prescribing a strong painkiller and another drug to reduce the inflammation. Since Thursday I have been taking care of Will during all his waking minutes, and this will continue until the end of the coming week, except when he is at daycare. I will need to do all the shopping, cleaning, and cooking while trying to catch up with my work. More importantly, I have had to cancel my July 9 trip to the States, which included visiting my parents in Arkansas and Oklahoma, because it is unclear when V. will be functioning again. She can't even pick up Will from his crib at this point, so leaving them on their own for 10 days is impossible. I have far too much to do at work, so all of this couldn't come at a more inconvenient time. Alas. I suppose health problems never come at convenient times, do they?

As some of you know, V. was on bed rest for nearly 4 months when she was pregnant with Will, so being bed rest veterans, I know we'll be OK. A big difference this time, however, is that we don't have all our friends around to help out like we did back in Atlanta. If you are ever contemplating moving to another part of the world, don't underestimate the presence of your friends in your decision. Some people can do quite well on their own, as we have, for the most part, but I can assure you that making lots of new "old friends" requires much more than a year when you move to a new country.

Lagged

We are home in Brisbane safe and sound. Of course, all three of us are messed up with jet lag and major sleep deprivation. Will didn't sleep at all during our second flight from Singapore to Brisbane, but he did sleep from 8 am to 7 pm once we got home. Now it's 4:51 am on Thursday and Will is watching "In the Night Garden" on a DVD that we bought in England. I have been wide awake since 1:30, worrying about everything I have to do in the next three weeks (before I leave for another overseas trip). It also gives me a chance to update you about what I have been doing for the past week.

The photo above is of the harbour in Opatija, Croatia. As you can see, it is a beautiful place. In fact, I was impressed with the beauty of nearly every part of Croatia I saw on this trip, from the small villages that look like their Italian counterparts in Tuscany to the mountain ranges that have been tackled by a series of amazingly long tunnels. The tourism board advertises that Croatia is "The Way the Mediterranean Used to Be" because it is fairly undeveloped and uncrowded, compared to other parts of Europe. I did notice lots of major construction going on, however, so it is likely that Croatia will "catch up" to those places in a few years.

I skipped the last day of the conference to go on a day trip to Venice, arranged by a local tourist agency. My colleague Aarti and I took a 2-hour bus ride to the port city of Porec, where we then boarded a boat for another 3-hour trip in choppy seas to Venice. It rained for the first two hours we were there. Walking down all those narrow alleys with umbrellas was challenging. We had only six hours in the city, so I separated from Aarti to find some of my favourite spots that I had discovered on one of my previous two trips to Italy. I didn't have a map, so I became a rat in a maze, running into blind alleys and assorted dead ends. Of course, this was Venice, so being lost wasn't such a bad thing. I finally ended up at Scuola Grande di Rocco, which is the site of Tintoretto's own "Sistine Chapel." I am a sucker for 16th Century religious paintings...Finally, after a quick 30-minute water taxi ride around the city, we boarded our boat at 5:00 for the 5-hour trip back to Opatija.

The next day I headed to London, which became an ordeal because the trip involved a long bus ride to Zagreb, two flights that connected in Frankfurt, a landing at Heathrow where I saw Air Force One parked (Bush was in London), a 45-minute ride on the London Tube from Heathrow to Victoria Station because there was no room on the airport bus that I planned to take, and then a train ride from Victoria Station to Brighton, where V. and her dad picked me up at 10 pm. The next day was spent with V.'s family and Will playing in their garden. When we began packing up the car in the afternoon, we found Will sitting in his car seat by the front door, all ready to go. If only he could carry a suitcase or two! We took a two-hour bus ride back to Heathrow, where we waited around the airport for another four hours. We finally took off for the first leg of our trip at 10 pm, arriving in Singapore 12 hours later. The Singapore airport is fantastic. We were at the newest terminal (3), which rivals any major shopping center and it includes gardens, waterfalls, a free cinema, and plenty of cafés and restaurants. Will spent a lot of time at the indoor playground with some other kids. I was excited to see the new double-decker Airbus 380 parked at one gate. I got a few hours of sleep on the first flight, and none on the second because Will was wide awake and raring to go the whole time. It didn't help matters that Singapore Airlines likes to spend the first three hours of each flight with all the lights on so that they can serve you "dinner" in the middle of the night. Then, just after you have had time to digest your food for a few hours in the dark, they turn on all the lights again to serve you breakfast. Ugh!

But now we are back in the land of clean air, uncrowded places, and silly breakfast TV shows. I must say that I am really glad (and lucky) that we live in Australia. Sure, it's a pain to get here from anywhere else in the world, but it always feels a bit like coming back to paradise (and now, "home") when I step off the plane.

Croatia Wins!

Greetings from Opatija, Croatia. I realize that many of you may not know exactly where Croatia is, so here's a map to help orient you to my present location:


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I am attending a conference meeting of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, which occurs every three years. It's really not that different from any other conference that I attend, except that there are many more smokers. I can't remember the last time I was at a coffee break with a bunch of academics and had cigarette smoke blow into my face, as happens every morning and afternoon here. Croatians themselves like to smoke, and the restaurants I have visited don't have separate smoking sections. Perhaps you would like a little Camel smoke with your cheese strudel? This is your place!

Opatija is an old seaside town, with many small hotels overlooking a beautiful harbor. My guidebook says that it is a popular holiday destination for people from all over Europe. Someone told me that tourists from the Czech Republic like to bring along all their own food on vacation, and therefore don't contribute much to the local restaurant business. Thus, a controversial proposal is being floated to ban the bringing of food into the country by visitors, which the Czechs very much resent. I suppose another group of tourists unhappy with the Croatians today are the Germans, who were thrashed last night in the Euro 2008 soccer tournament. My room overlooks the main street through Opatija, so I got to watch (and hear) crowds of red and white checkered Croatians celebrate underneath my window well past midnight. There were even a few sirens now and then, so perhaps things got a little too wild.Tomorrow I am skipping the conference to take a day trip to Venice. We're only a couple of hours away, so how could I resist my third visit to that spectacular place? It's been nine years since I was last there, but I imagine things haven't changed very much. More later...

Tragic Biographies

I am writing this entry from a hotel room located just a few hundred yards (or meters) from one of the runways of Heathrow airport in western London. We have been in England for about 10 days visiting V's family at a holiday resort in Lowestoft, which is in Suffolk on the east coast. Consistent with V's predictions, it rained nearly six days in a row. Our resort was sort of a sad place, with no internet connections and few people under the age of 70. Will has been doing great the whole time--even the marathon pair of flights via Singapore went well. This morning I am leaving them behind in Brighton while I attend a conference in Croatia. Now that I am back in the land of the living, I hope to be blogging regularly again.

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About the title of this entry: it was the name of a section at a WH Smith bookstore in Lowestoft. I like the idea that when someone happens to be in the mood for a "tragic biography," they can easily find it there...

Some Perspective

I should be marking student papers, but I got distracted thinking about the following "little" exercise. Most of my information came from the ever-helpful Wikipedia. Note that I pretty much had to stop after the age of 50, but I will try to add more in the next month.

How Old Are You?

• If you’re 13, you’re the same age as Michael Jackson the year he and the rest of the Jackson 5 had four number one hits, including “ABC.”
• If you’re 14, you’re the same age as Miley Cyrus when her debut album “Hannah Montana” went triple platinum.
• If you’re 15, you’re the same age as Tenzin Gyatso when he was enthroned as Tibet’s 14th (and current) Dalai Lama.
• If you’re 16, you’re the same age as Neil Patrick Harris when Doogie Howser, M.D. first aired.
• If you’re 17, you’re the same age as Martina Hingis when she held the No.1 ranking in both singles and doubles women’s tennis.
• If you’re 18, you’re the same age as RIngo Starr when The Beatles released “Love Me Do.”
• If you’re 19, you’re the same age as John Tyler Hammons in 2008 when he was elected mayor of Muskogee, Oklahoma, a city of 38,000.
• If you’re 20, you’re the same age as Bill Gates when he founded Micro-soft in 1975 (the hyphen was dropped shortly after).
• If you’re 21, you’re the same age as Mick Jagger when he recorded “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with the Rolling Stones.
• If you’re 22, you’re the same age as Jayde Nicole, the 2008 Playboy Playmate of the Year.
• If you’re 23, you’re the same age as Tiger Woods when he won his last four starts, including the PGA championship, and finished the season with eight wins—a feat not achieved in the past 25 years.
• If you’re 24, you’re the same age as Lee Harvey Oswald when he assassinated John F. Kennedy.
• If you’re 25, you’re the same age as Steve Jobs when he and Steve Wozniak released the Apple II computer.
• If you’re 26, you’re the same age as Albert Einstein when he published his paper stating that e=mc2.
• If you’re 27, you’re the same age as Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, when he killed himself.
• If you’re 28, you’re the same age as Julie Andrews when she appeared in "Mary Poppins."
• If you’re 29, you’re the same age as Olivia Newton-John when she played Sandy in “Grease.”
• If you’re 30, you’re the same age as Schubert when he died of typhoid fever (after writing nine symphonies and hundreds of other pieces of music).
• If you’re 31, you’re the same age as John Lennon when he wrote “Imagine.”
• If you’re 32, you’re the same age as Thomas Edison when he invented the electric light bulb.
• If you’re 33, you’re the same age as Matt Groening when his first series of shorts called “The Simpsons” debuted on The Tracy Ullman Show.
• If you’re 34, you’re the same age as Harper Lee when her To Kill a Mockingbird was first published.
• If you’re 35, you’re the same age as Harrison Ford when he appeared in the first “Star Wars” movie.
• If you’re 36, you’re the same age as Ann Bancroft when she played Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate.”
• If you’re 37, you’re the same age as Frances Crick when he, James D. Watson, and Maurice Wilkins co-discovered the double helix structure of DNA.
• If you’re 38, you’re the same age as (Sherpa) Tenzing Norgay when he and Sir Edmund Hillary became the first people known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest.
• If you’re 39, you’re the same age as Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was assassinated.
• If you’re 40, you’re the same age as Isabel Allende when her first novel, The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espiritus), was published.
• If you’re 41, you’re the same age as Ernest Hemingway when he published For Whom the Bell Tolls.
• If you’re 42, you’re the same age as Elvis Presley when he died.
• If you’re 43, you’re the same age as Tony Blair when he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• If you’re 44, you’re the same age as Jerry Seinfeld when “Seinfeld” debuted its final episode.
• If you’re 45, you’re the same age as Nelson Mandela when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 for his involvement with the African National Congress.
• If you’re 46, you’re the same age as O.J. Simpson when his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were murdered.
• If you’re 47, you’re the same age as Barack Obama when he won the nomination for the Democratic candidacy for the U.S. presidency in August 2008.
• If you’re 48, you’re the same age as Jeannie Longo, the greatest female cyclist of all time, when she won her 14th French Road Race.
• If you’re 49, you’re the same age as Gandhi when he led his first protests against the British in India in 1918.
• If you’re 50, you’re the same age as Charles Darwin when he published The Origin of Species, the first time his theory of evolution appeared in print.
• If you’re 61, you’re the same age as Abraham Lincoln when he was elected president.

Up, Up, and Away

A few weeks ago V. and I went on a hot air balloon ride over Brisbane for her birthday. Will spent the night before at our friends' house (where he enjoyed himself!) so that we could get to the balloon meeting point at 5:45 a.m.  It was the first time Will had slept away from both of us, so that was a bit of an event itself.

Anyway, we met up with the staff of Balloons over Brisbane in a park in West End.  We then piled into one of two vans, each pulling a trailer with a balloon basket and the balloon itself.   There are several places in the metro area where balloons can launch, with the particular location determined by the weather conditions that day.  We ended up driving to a vacant lot in one of the western suburbs. Interestingly, a competing balloon company was there as well.  It took about 20 minutes for the crews to unpack the trailers and inflate the balloons with large fans.  Once the balloons were nearly full (and still lying on their sides), the crew then heated the air with large gas burners.  In a matter of minutes we were climbing into the basket and we had lift off.

We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful morning to go up in a balloon.  Except during those moments when we had to climb higher by turning on the burners, it was extremely quiet.  We could hear all the sounds of each neighborhood as we flew overhead at less than 1000 feet (and usually around 500 feet).  Every dog who happened to see us would start barking, which would set off a cacophony of barking throughout the neighborhood.  Our captain told us that all that barking was the biggest complaint they received at his business.  We continued to peacefully drift westward, and slightly south, for the next hour, watching the city slowly wake up on a Saturday morning.

The landing was especially exciting.  It took about 20 minutes of low flying before our captain finally found a small park where we could land that was also in our flightpath.  In the meantime we flew so low that we brushed the tops of trees.  People on the ground could hear us coming because of the gas burners, so they would be waiting out on their verandas as flew over their rooftops and found them in their pajamas eating breakfast.  Everyone waved, and children chased after us on their bikes.  The ground crew that had been chasing us all along managed to run out of the van to grab us just as we came down.  When we finally landed with a big thump, several people in the surrounding neighborhood came out to meet us.  It took another 20 minutes to deflate the balloon and pack it back into the trailer.  We then headed back to the West End for a champagne breakfast.  What a great way to start the day!  More pictures of this trip can be found here.

Mac Nostalgia

I have been an owner of at least one Apple Macintosh computer for more than 23 years now (sometimes I have owned and/or personally managed more than ten Macs at once).  In fact, my very first Mac was the original 128K (the total memory of the machine) model, complete with a black-and-white, 9-inch screen and an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor.  Everything (i.e., all my files) was saved on 400 kB single-sided floppy disks, and you had to run all the applications off the floppy drive as well, as there was no internal storage.  I bought it as part of a university student package in the fall of 1984, which included a modem and an ImageWriter (a nice dot-matrix printer).  It cost me about $3000, which was equal to my entire federal student loan that year.  About a year later I was so in debt that I had to sell the whole thing off to pay some loans.  But, I quickly bought another Mac, and another one after that, and so on.  I remember watching other students working on their IBM PCjrs or clunky big PCs, always wondering why they preferred the ugly interface of their machines over that of my cool Mac--except, of course, I knew that their machines were much cheaper.

Anyway, I have endured many changes in my Macs over the years, and have spent tens of thousands of dollars on Mac products.  I finally decided to invest in Apple stock in 2002.  Lucky for me, I bought most of my stock prior to the launch of the iPod for Windows, and when I sold off my final Apple shares last year, I had made a very healthy profit, quadrupling what I had originally invested.

It's strange to think about how so many aspects of my life have been enmeshed with this specific computer line all these years. My Macs have helped me with dozens of undergraduate papers, scores of applications for graduate school and academic jobs, online chats with hundreds of people, thousands of email messages, statistical analyses of every research project, editing photos of my family, and even writing this blog.  Is it no surprise then that I get a bit nostalgic when I come across pictures of old Mac desktop screens, a story about the original start-up sound, and a link to download a collection of early OS alert sounds? Yes, I am sure that you Windows users have similar pangs of nostalgia, but I think they would be even sweeter if you had owned a Mac!

Opposite Days

Will has mastered the concepts of "up" and "down" in the past few weeks.  He loves repeating those words while he points in the corresponding direction.  Even during the drive home from his daycare he helpfully narrates every segment of our journey as we go up and down the hills.  

I am looking forward to the day when he can remind me of the seasons as well.  What I thought would be the most obvious and easiest part of living south of the equator has turned out to be one of the most challenging.  After decades of learning what to expect during October, January, or July, my brain seems unable to comprehend that everything has changed.  I didn't really enjoy the summer months the way I might normally do (it didn't help that the Christmas and New Year holidays interrupted things), but now, just when I am finally feeling ready for summer, it's getting cold in Australia.  Sure, there isn't any snow, and I will probably never wear gloves and a scarf in Queensland, but it just doesn't feel right turning on the heat and putting on a sweater in late May!  What's more, my friends and family in the U.S. keep mentioning their warmer days and the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, which I have long associated with the beginning of summer.

It appears that even long-standing transplants from the northern hemisphere never really master the opposite seasons.  I have noticed one American, for example, who has lived here over ten years but still refers to the upcoming "summer break" between semesters at UQ next month.  Another expat mentioned a "fall" conference that will occur in October.  The other day an Australian asked me, "when did you move here?" and I quickly answered, "last summer," which either shortens our stay or lengthens it by six months, depending how he interpreted "last."  To avoid such errors, I have been trying to rely more on using the months instead of the seasons in my conversations, but that feels quite awkward (e.g., "I am looking forward to getting a lot of work done next December-January-February").

Because Will will learn the opposite associations with the calendar, maybe he'll be able to help his father with this problem someday.  Of course, this might also create another source of confusion in the parent-child dynamic.  Perhaps then we'll just have to move to the equator.

Incompetent and Unaware

One of my favourite articles published in social psychology in the last 10 years is Justin Kruger and David Dunning's (1999) "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," which was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121-1134.  Across four studies, different participants were tested on their sense of humor, logical reasoning, and grammar. They were also asked to indicate what they perceived their abilities in these areas to be, relative to other people. Across the four studies, participants always believed they were better than average--sometimes dubbed in the literature as the "Lake Wobegon" effect, after Garrison Keillor's mythical Minnesota town, where all the children are "above average."  The problem, of course, is that everyone can't be above average.  In fact, half of the people are in the bottom 50% of scores on whatever ability we're talking about!  Thus, it turns out that the people who are most incompetent on a task are also the people who are most unaware of how incompetent they are.  You can see this pattern in one of the figures that appears in the Kruger and Dunning article:

In the years since this article was published, I'll admit that I have been prone to make occasional observations about other people whom I believed were unaware of how entirely incompetent they were, whether they were salespeople, clerical staff, students, or even other academics.  Interestingly, and predictably, I never really wondered about myself with respect to this article.  That is, as an academic (for example), I like to think of myself in the 3rd or Top Quartile in terms of teaching ability, creativity, writing ability, logical reasoning, etc.  But, of course, on any or all of these dimensions I am likely inflating my own competence.  In my defense, I should point out that in my occupation there are few objective measures of these talents. Regardless, the past month at work has been very challenging for me--which has caused me to re-evaluate my general competence as an academic.  On top of that, yesterday one of my manuscripts, which had been under review since December, was flat out rejected from one of the most prestigious journals in my field.  The reviewers' comments were somewhat harsh, such as, "one wonders what the point of this study is," and "who would want to read this article?"  I can't help (today) feeling a bit like I'm "unskilled and unaware of it."  To keep touch with reality, perhaps I should post the following amended figure above my desk:

To Catch an EgoSurfer

I just woke up from a dream in which I was talking to someone I knew when I was five years old.  One of the drawbacks of having changed towns every few years is that I don't have contact with any childhood friends.  I believe the friend I have known the longest is Laurel Anderson, whom I met when we moved to Rockford, Illinois in January, 1979, when I was 15.  Laurel is an artist living in San Francisco with her husband Craig.  I met her on my first day at Guilford High School because I was assigned the seat in front of her in English.  Our lives became intertwined over the next few years as she talked me into joining the debate team, we went on a double date (or two), we gave the commencement addresses at our high school graduation ceremony,  and we went off to attend rival colleges in Iowa.  She eventually saw the light and transferred to my university (the University of Iowa), so we got to spend a couple of years there together.  I attended her New Year's Eve wedding to Craig a few years later (1990?), but that's the last time I saw her.  We recently reconnected on Facebook, along with another high school friend, and Sadie Hawkins date, Lisa Weissbard.

Before moving to Rockford, however, there were are other places and other friends.  I first attended Oakwood Elementary school in Plymouth, Minnesota (a suburb of Minneapolis near Wayzata).  There I remember John Yngve (or was it J.P.?), Steve Ruff, and Lisa Crocker (my first crush).  I used to know more names from that era, but that part of my brain has been taken over by being a parent.  By the way, the person I was dreaming about just prior to writing this was Deirdre Hansen, the daughter of one of my dad's friends.  I caught up with her father at my aunt's funeral a couple of years ago.

We moved to Dixon, Illinois in 1973, when I was 10. There I immediately became friends with two neighborhood kids my age--Stephan Mayfield (or was it Stephen Mayfield?) and Scott Smith.  At school I had a few tangles with Janet Trent, who was my 5th and 6th grade nemesis (blood was involved on at least one occasion), competed with Kim Taylor (who seemed to beat me in any competition), "stalked" a gymnast named Elizabeth Nehls (Franklin), and became best buds with Chris Shaw, Howie LaFevre, Andy Near, and Larry Knicl, whom I think I had an email exchange with about ten years ago. I also rode the bus with Beth Stitzel.  Beth later attended Iowa while I was there.  I saw her a few times during my freshman year, but we lost touch.  It's funny, but I know that there was another girl whom I became obsessed with in 8th grade, and my friends at the time tried unsuccessfully to help our budding romance, but I can't remember anything about her. Oh, how love is fleeting...

It was during this time in Dixon that my family spent a summer in Wagga Wagga, NSW.  There I had my first kiss behind the tuck shop with Marie Manning, and I hung out with the Arbuckle brothers and Rodney Waters.  I received a message before we moved to Australia last year from a member of the Arbuckle family, as a result of that earlier blog post.

If you have read this entire entry, I do apologise for boring you out of your mind.  But, by listing all these names and places, maybe I will catch one of these childhood friends while they're engaged in a little egosurfing.  And, if I did happen to catch one of you, please drop me a line before I forget another name!

Boy Time

V. has been away during this long weekend (ANZAC Day was on Friday), leaving Will and I to fend for ourselves.  Actually, it's been very nice spending so much time with him, although I haven't had a real conversation with someone over the age of 3 in the past 72 hours.  The two of us have been going on various outings, including visiting several "playgrounds."

One of these playgrounds was IKEA.  I had to buy a few items for our home and for my laboratory, so I put Will in his umbrella pram and pushed him among the Saturday hordes of shoppers at our quite large local store.  Despite its size, we repeatedly narrowly missed crashing into someone else.  I have been a long-time IKEA shopper, having been introduced to my first in Burbank, California in the early '90s. I can tell you that there are definitely some universal IKEA shopper behaviours.  Because it is so family-friendly, the place is always packed on the weekends with lots of kids.  The children's playroom normally reaches capacity by late morning, so there are still many more running around the mock-up apartments (measured in square meters here, of course).  Many customers walk through IKEA like it's a museum.   The unidirectional pathway that meanders through all the showrooms was chock full yesterday of slow-moving adults gawking at the inventory as if they have never seen cheap, Scandinavian-designed, East Asian-made furniture before.  To keep our trip under an hour, Will and I were darting around displays and taking every short cut that only an experienced IKEA shopper knows about.  Of course, I also had to keep Will from grabbing every fragile item within reach as we zipped around.  Finally, there was the inevitable long checkout line at the end of the whole thing.  By then, the rest of the shoppers and I were balancing oddly shaped items that were falling out of our yellow plastic bags or balanced on those flat trolleys that only IKEA seems to know about.  It was at this point that Will decided to throw a tantrum because he didn't like either the juice or the bread that I had brought for him.

During the rest of the weekend we visited three other playgrounds that were also more crowded than usual but more suitable for Will.  At each I watched my little boy try to emulate the actions of older kids.  These 5- and 6-year-olds seem to delight in climbing on the playground equipment in some unsafe way, and Will feels compelled to do the same.  I look forward to the day when V. and I can rest comfortably while we watch him play.  Today, however, I still need to stay close by as tries to jump off a swing in mid-flight or climbs a ladder that is too high.  He also has the curious habit of inserting himself into some other person's parent-child interaction.  For example, this afternoon another toddler was repeatedly jumping up to yell "Daddy!" to his father, so Will stood next to him and yelled "Daddy!" at the stranger too.    

We then came home and played with his new IKEA wooden train set, available for $20 at your local store.  Just please keep it moving when you go there, OK?  There might just be a harried father pushing his toddler behind you.

  

World Leaders

Last weekend Prime Minister Kevin Rudd led the Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra. A thousand accomplished Australians representing different fields were invited to share their ideas for developing long-term strategies for the nation in ten key areas. The news media were particularly interested in Cate Blanchett's leading the "Towards a Creative Australia" stream with her one-week old baby in arm. "Ordinary" Australians were invited to send suggestions before the start of the conference and then the 100 delegates in each area spent two days developing a consensus about the best ideas. A full report will be presented next month for Kevin to ponder, but a preliminary one was already available at the site's web page on Monday morning.

Although I haven't had a chance to read every page, I am struck by the optimism that permeates the report. In particular, I am fascinated by how often the goal for Australia to be a world leader in a particular domain comes up. For example:

• "We'll know that we're on the right track [by having] Australia attracting and enabling the best minds." (p. 6)
• "[Australia should have] a world leading education and innovation system. (p. 6)
• "Australia should be the best place in the world to live and do business." (p. 10)
• "the GDP per capita [should increase] so that Australia is among the top 5 countries in the world on this measure..." (p. 10)
• "Our aspiration is that by 2020 Australia is the world's leading green and sustainable economy." (p. 13)
• "Be a world leader in research and translation (including technology." (p. 20)
• "...reaffirm Australia as an international leader in bioengineering." (p. 21)
• "Assert new leadership in global governance" (p. 36)

Dozens and dozens of interesting ideas are presented in this report, such as digitising the art collections of major national institutions by 2020, providing tax concessions to get private industry involved with indigenous communities, making social inclusion a national priority, putting taxes on, and banning advertising of, junk food to children, adopting a National Sustainability, Population and Climate Change Agenda, and developing an immigration plan that is a model for the rest of the world.

I have experienced a similar sense of enthusiasm for new ideas and the desire to be among the world's best at the University of Queensland, and it's something that I find inspiring for my own goals. I suppose that, as a result of growing up in the United States, Americans don't often think about being the "world's best" because (1) they're too busy competing with each other, (2) they arrogantly think they already are the "best", and/or (3) the country is so large that they don't really consider their place in the world until the economy starts to tank or the country becomes involved in another war. What constantly amazes me about Australia is that despite its small size (having roughly the population of Southern California), it has such huge aspirations. Maybe its size and location in the world are precisely what drives this desire to be a "world leader." How else can you explain one of the report's goals that in 2020 there will be a "greater international understanding [of Australia] as a mature, creative, innovative society?" (p. 29) I am looking forward to what happens next.

Thinking About 'Racism' at 2 in the Morning

I woke up wide awake at 2 am, and can't get back to sleep because it's so terribly quiet. Even with the windows open, I could hear absolutely nothing--not a car, a cricket, nor a gecko. This is in sharp contrast to the usual chirping and squawking one hears all day from the many birds around our place. I guess even those obnoxious crows have to sleep sometime.

Well, it seems to be a good time to write about the following story of the firing of an Aussie television news journalist, which my American readers may find interesting as a cultural contrast. It appeared in the The Australian last week:

Nine to Challenge Spiteri Claim
April 16, 2008

THE Nine Network will ask a judge to throw out a breach of contract case brought by reporter Christine Spiteri.

In the Federal Court in Sydney today, Justice Richard Edmonds set Nine's application down for hearing on May 23.

Ms Spiteri, 40, is seeking damages of more than $500,000 under the Trade Practices Act after she was told her contract with the network would expire in March this year.

In her statement of claim, she says she was racially and sexually discriminated against.

She alleged Nine's news director John Westacott told her: "You should work for SBS, you certainly have the name for it."

She also alleged Mr Westacott told female journalists "to make it in this industry, you gotta have f***ability. To make it in this game, women have to be f***able".

The basis for the claim of sexual discrimination should be obvious from the last paragraph. In fact, this article is consistent with a string of stories about the Nine television network that has established a consistent pattern of sexism, especially in the newsroom. But notice that this lawsuit also includes a charge of 'racism,' which is supposed to be supported by the alleged quote from the news director that Spiteri should work for SBS, a public television channel that includes the rebroadcasts of news programs from around the world. When I first read this quote, I thought I was missing something. Why should the suggestion that someone work for a more multi-cultural network connote underlying racism?

Finding this picture of Spiteri didn't help answer the question. Her ethnic background appears to have a European origin, just like that of her former news director, John Westacott. And, according to a Google search, Christine's surname is shared by a few significant people from Malta, so I am assuming that her ancestors immigrated to Australia from Malta or Italy. So, I was still left wondering why this could be considered a case of racism.

I think the answer to this question lies in two ways (among many others) that Australia differs from the United States. First, many Australians consider their country to be culturally "diverse" as a result of the many non-British immigrants who ended up coming here in the latter part of the 20th century. For at least 100 years Australian immigration was comprised of a high proportion of immigrants from Britain and Ireland. In fact, an official Australian government program ran from the 1950s through the 1970s that encouraged Brits to immigrate to Australia for just 10 pounds--the rest of the cost was subsidised by the Australian government. As I understand it, Australians were greatly concerned after WWII that they desperately needed to increase their population to avoid a future threat of invasion from their Asian neighbours. During this same period, however, many other Europeans, particularly from Greece and Italy, also came to this country, under the guise of a "White-only" Australia policy, which also had atrocious consequences for the indigenous population. This all changed in the 1970s when the Australian government finally began to allow greater emigration from Asian countries. It is primarily this mix of Greeks, Italians, and Asians that I think people are referring to when they speak of Australia's diversity. Consistent with this, the suggestion that Christine Spiteri should work for the SBS probably reflected the perception of a descendant of British immigrants (Westacott) that Spiteri is a descendant of Italian (or Maltese) immigrants.

In addition, the charge of "racism" here reflects a different use of the word than I am accustomed to in the United States. I remember reading not too long ago a story in the Australian press about British People Against Racial Discrimination. It sounds like this would be a group concerned about promoting better interracial relations, doesn't it? Well, it turns out that BPARD were only concerned about a specific issue--banning a Toohey's beer commercial that depicted British people as whinging (complaining), warm-beer-drinking, wimps. A member of this group was even quoted as saying that the ad constituted a "racial slur" against the British by Australians. Although that example borders on the ridiculous, I am left thinking that any instance of prejudice involving a person based on their ethnicity or nationality can be called "racism" in Australia. Thus, the term isn't limited to just instances of expressed antipathy based on a person's "race," as it would be in the United States. And that also probably explains why Spiteri considered her news director's SBS comment to be racist.

I'll have to keep all of this in mind the next time an Aussie makes fun of my love of Reese's peanut butter cups. Now it's time to go back to sleep...

Happiness

I am a bit burdened with all sorts of work-related responsibilities right now, including writing programs for my four honours students in a new language (Revolution).  While I'm programming, I find that listening to Groove Armada or Goldfrapp really helps.  Here's a new one from Goldfrapp for your viewing and listening pleasure.  I've been hooked on this one since seeing the video Saturday morning on "Rage:"

 

The Weight

Will keeps surprising us every day with some new mental feat. Mimicry is an important part of his repertoire. Yesterday he repeated nearly every letter of the alphabet that I said. At the playground he's now trying the higher slides or the rope climb or some other dangerous apparatus just because he sees another (older) kid doing it. He also requests that I carry him out onto the veranda before his bath at night so that he can look at the Brisbane skyline. Last night he was thrilled when he could see lightning in the distant sky. This elicited an excited outpouring of conversation, of which I could only understand about 10%.

Each morning after I have changed his nappy, he grabs his blanket and then runs into my arms so that I can carry him downstairs. Although he's tall, he is on the slender side, so it's still easy to carry his 26 pounds (11.9 kilos). I do very much relish every moment that I can carry him. It is clear, however, that we can't stop him from growing. He has outgrown nearly every item of clothing that we brought with us to Australia over nine months ago. That got me to thinking about when the inevitable day will come when I will no longer be able to carry him around in my arms. In the picture above you can see me standing on the left, when I'm about four years old. My mother is on the right holding my brother Darron. There must have been a day when my mom or my dad carried me like that for the very last time. The next time they tried I was either too heavy or refused to be carried. I wonder whether I will recognize when it's the last time I can carry Will.

Telstra is So Nice

Remember my earlier posting about that huge bill for our broadband service?  Well, I just received word from Telstra (BigPond) about my request to forgive those additional charges that I incurred when we went over our bandwidth limit:

Dear Eric,

Thank you for completing and returning the BigPond Request for Credit Form.

This email is to advise that your request for credit has been accepted.

BigPond will credit your account with a once-off amount of $ 673.67.

How nice is to receive sympathy for my stupid mistake from such a big corporation, huh?!  Thanks, Telstra!!

New Zealand Photos

Today I posted some photos from my New Zealand trip on Flickr (the same ones that appear on Facebook, my FB friends!). I found it quite hard to take pictures with our little Fujifilm FinePix--without my glasses I can't see the little video display when aiming the camera. :-(