An update.

(With apologies and gratitude to Anthony, who received an e-mail suspiciously similar to the text below just a few moments ago. Whatever, I'm sick and feel like a jerk for having fallen off. I'm trying to catch up, y'all.)

The Political

I saw this BBC article a couple of months ago, and I wish to god he had named the person quoted in this exchange:

A leading Republican, who was in Congress for more than 10 years, answered my question: "Who can beat Obama?" with a casual, "a mammal". Then he added sadly: "But they are all reptiles."

We're all hoping that they destroy each other and don't end up putting up someone who looks moderate enough to lure away disenchanted Dems. In the meantime, I'm usually too focused on keeping down my food anytime one of their god-awful faces is on my tele to pay much attention to what they're saying, and that's probably preserving my sanity.

The Personal

I had an interesting four-day weekend: I went to Florida to meet Colleen's family. They're in the suburbs of Tampa - which is to say, Tampa; the whole bloody city's one big suburb - and they are hardcore Republicans with Christian overtones and Tea Party inclinations. They've long since made their peace with their gay daughter, but loving her deeply and wanting a good and safe life for her somehow does not equal choosing not to vote for people who want her miserable or preferably dead. It's a conundrum.

I had been warned of their political leanings and Colleen had pleaded with me repeatedly not to get involved in any kind of political discussion with them, mostly because a) I'm obviously not going to change their minds, and b) her Dad is a... fucking fucking fuck, I've lost one of my Australian words... he likes to start trouble because he thinks it's funny... AUGH. I get really upset when that happens. I've started forgetting words and street names; I couldn't come up with the name of the Annandale a while back and I drove myself crazy with it. Stupid and unimportant, except that it isn't at all. Anyway, whatever the word is (and please post in the comments if you know what it is)*, that's what he is, so the only way to avoid getting into an ugly and unwinnable argument is to refuse to bite in the first place. But it's hard when you're pottering around in the kitchen and notice the Obama countdown clock prominently displayed on the counter, and when politics keeps coming up in conversations going on around me, and also, well, have you met me?

Fortunately I managed to keep well out of it, and it all went swimmingly and they liked me very much. But it was weird being in that environment. In some ways it felt almost disturbingly familiar - the beaches; the crazy flora I've never seen Stateside, including a bottle-brush tree in their front yard! - and in others it felt so completely unrelatable. The place has no soul, and that's a big part of it - it's all planned/gated communities and strip malls and chains, not an independent anything to be found anywhere - but the other was definitely the people. You'll hear that Southerners are much friendlier, but I don't think that's correct: it's warm, but it's automatic; it's manners, not friendliness. With the people, as with the city, there's no there there. It's dead inside. And the politics are effing terrifying. I really do fear for this country.

But I'm trying to focus on the good of the trip, which was that her family really did seem to like me. I was so fucking terrified: it's been a long time since I dated someone who cared what her family thought. It's a lot more nerve-wracking this way (even though it probably says some very good things about Colleen and the choices I'm making these days. Look at me, growing up).

The Patriots

Didn't happen. Did not happen. Don't know what you're talking about.

XOXO

* EDIT: The word is stirrer. Which I remembered while brushing my teeth, because why not.

Nano-no-NO.

My beautiful third-gen iPod Nano carked it on Wednesday, thanks to a passing S.U.V. with High-Powered Splashing Action! (Make your own at home: all you need is a mile-long slush puddle six inches deep, some rock salt, and one asshole driver with no fucking sense. Mix well.)

After four years of good service I really can't complain too much. I am entirely iPod dependent, though, so I had to replace it immediately. Off I went to the Apple store on Thursday, to pick up a shiny new 6th-gen Nano. I was a bit concerned about the lack of click-wheel but I figured I'd get used to it, and everything else seemed to be in order, so I forked out my spend and was on my way.

This was a mistake. Don't get one, you guys. It sucks.

I was right to be wary: the touchscreen is a right royal pain in the ass, especially when you're in cold-weather land and are wearing gloves all the time. And yes, I could certainly find ways around that if that were the only problem, but it's not: the battery sucks. I mean, SUCKS. It's meant to hold charge for 24 hours, but I used it for maybe 4 hours today and the battery had drained almost to halfway. That is not a viable option for someone who uses her iPod as much as I do, and certainly not for someone who's looking down the barrel of a 24-hour flight.

Turns out that this is a chronic problem with this model. I should have read up, because forums are ablaze with complaints about this and I could find no fixes from Apple. It's been out here for several months, so if they were going to sort it they should have by now. This makes me sad. I'm not used to being cranky about my iPod.

So I've ordered a refurbished 5th-gen from Apple, since people still seem to be happy with those. Tomorrow I'll borrow my Dad's iPod, which he still hasn't loaded with anything after six months (it was a gift, bless him), to get me through until my 5th-gen arrives; and I'll return the 6th-gen as soon as possible so that I don't accidentally bust it up in some bizarre Entropy Girl way. Because you know I will.

Incidentally, where do iPods fall on Maslow's pyramid?


XOXO

XKCD comments on my last post.

Well said.

Home Sweet Home

So yes. I've moved. Hey Dorchester, how you been?

I'm in a relatively good part of one of Boston's worst neighbourhoods - like, murder-capital-of-the-city worst - but because my house is on the main street it still looks a bit rough. Like, you know how on Enmore Road it's decent and fine but all the best houses are a block or two back and the main street looks rougher than the rest of the area? It's like that, but then drop Enmore Road and the surrounding nice houses into one of the better bits of, I don't know, Cabramatta. The odd gunshot in the night is the price you pay for low rent.

That having been said, my apartment is lovely. It's in a block of ground-floor shops with flats above, all of which were razed and fully renovated 4-5 years ago when the area was just starting to improve a bit. Flattie Karen and her ex-roommate were the first people to move into the flat after it was finished, and Karen's a neat-freak so it's still in great nick. And while it's a dodgy area generally, you definitely get the feeling in my part that it's coming back: there are lots of new businesses, people are friendly and chatty, that sort of thing. My street - Dorchester Ave, locally known as Dot Ave - is a main street and runs for miles in either direction, and it's funny to see how the gentrification is happening along it. You'll have two blocks that look pretty good, with awesome-looking bars and cafes and stuff, then suddenly you're in Fallujah. And then just as suddenly, it's fine again.

Gentrification in Boston is a constant, messy process: our population density is the 3rd highest in the U.S. (after NYC and San Francisco), and with the city at constant 98+% occupancy rates, landlords can charge pretty much whatever they like and they'll find someone to pay it. The cycle tends to be that a neighbourhood will go to shit and be a war zone for several years, then students will start to move in because it's cheap and usually convenient to uni and public transportation and all that; then property investors - often gay ones, here - will see the white kids arriving and start buying up and renovating the properties, thereby shoving out all the people who have lived there for years and need low-cost housing (who of course tend to be racial minorities and the elderly, because this fucking world); then businesses start popping up to support the new, (relatively) more affluent inhabitants; and then families come in and settle and by this point you're already several steps into the cycle in a new neighbourhood on the other side of the city. Basically it's what's happening in Redfern, but everywhere all the fucking time.

What makes Boston a particularly interesting case study for this is that it's geographically quite a small city, so the lines of gentrification are more clearly drawn here than anywhere else I've ever seen. For example, back when I worked at the health centre in Jamaica Plain, I would walk down Green St to get to work. Like much of Jamaica Plain, Green St is lovely - big, beautiful Victorian houses; lots of trees; cute little playground/park - but then you'd pass the train station and you were in another neighbourhood entirely, where the buildings were dark and heavy and everything looked dirty and dodgy and unwelcoming. Even the people looked different. But you could turn over one shoulder - you wouldn't even have to turn all the way around - and still see where everything was pretty and safe-looking. It was the difference of 10 steps, no more; but once you'd crossed it you were in another part of the city. It was still Jamaica Plain, but it was an entirely different Jamaica Plain. I walked it hundreds if not thousands of times, and it never ceased to amaze me.

Dot Ave is like that too, a series of wildly different neighbourhoods separated by 10-step border towns. But it's exciting, in a way. I don't know this part of the city at all, so I got exactly what I wanted in terms of being in a new place. As much as I love Jamaica Plain, and despite all of the reasons it would be a perfect place for me to live, I had to get away from the part of town I grew up in. I'm trying to delineate between my childhood and my current life in as many ways as possible, and this was an important part of that for me.

*****

To answer a question several of you have asked, a 'boxspring' or 'foundation' is what's called a bed base over there: the big, heavy, solid thing that goes under your mattress unless you have a futon or platform bed or are a uni student. For queen- and king-sized beds you can get them in a single piece or in two pieces; the two-piece kind is known as a split boxspring and is easier to maneuver through tight spaces.

Now, obviously, you would need both halves of the split boxspring for it to work: with only one, you'd have half your mattress hanging off it unsupported. Selling them as individual pieces makes about as much sense as selling left and right shoes separately. Yet this appears to be what Sears does... maybe. It's what they do online, for sure; but having spoken to a couple of clerks in stores, they all seemed to be under the impression that the two halves were sold as a single set for the same price. It's deranged, and a great example of why the company has been plummeting for the last few decades. Problem is, their prices can be awesome (I found the mattress on their website for less than 1/3 the regular price), so you make the deal with the devil. And sometimes it works out, like with my mattress; and sometimes not so much, like with my 0.5 boxspring.

*****

A professor here has changed her e-mail signature for the season to 'Happy Holiday.' Just the one, apparently. That's all you get.


XOXO

Enter the Confessional #3: But I've got a really good personality!

Wow. So I'm doing really well with that 'keeping to a weekly schedule' thing, huh?

It would be easy to blame my extended fail on a long list of recent events, so that's exactly what I'm going to do. Some of them are easy to discuss in a public forum: Thanksgiving, moving house, busy time at work, lead-up to Christmas, etc. etc. etc. Others are more complicated and more personal, and have involved an intense mix of joy and pain (and sunshine and rain, sing it all god's children...) and fear and triggering and triggering and triggering. I'm dating a couple of girls, one of whom is awesome and good to me, and the other of whom I actually like - and you all know me well enough to know what that means. I'm settling into a life here that after only a handful of months is already uncomfortably rife with overlaps and I'm making decisions that aren't always good. I'm broke, of course. And I'm going to rot my teeth out with candy canes if I don't slow my roll.

Returning to the topic of moving, it's been... hard. The physical move itself wasn't too bad, but this was the first time in many years that I've packed up my room in my parents' house and not been taking it all to Sydney. I've been dreaming of home a lot lately and I know it's just my brain trying to sort through things and move on, but it's exhausting and it's starting to wear me down. I never thought I'd be living in an apartment in Boston. It's a great apartment, and I have a great new flattie named Karen, and it's in an area that I don't know so it feels new. All good. But I can't help but think back to this time last year, when my life finally felt like it was coming together again after far too long - job I liked, house I liked, friends I loved, new prospects on the horizon - and then how quickly it all got pulled out from under me, and how much I lost in the process. And that's happened too many times in the last few years, that thing of going, '...finally.' right before having my whole life go tits-up, for me to be able to even begin to believe that good things may be on the horizon. Which is all apart from the fact that I still struggle to see Boston itself as a good thing. It was the right thing, I know that, but it doesn't feel like a good thing. So there's that to contend with.

On a less fraught note, my bed is cursed. I'm not sure what the hell is behind this, but it's one damn thing after another: first, the queen-size mattress and boxspring arrived as scheduled, but the boxspring didn't fit up the stairs. They took it back and advised me to order a split queen, which I did... but no one told me I had to order two of them, because for some reason they sell the halves individually at Sears (Flattie Karen said she was going to go by there and ask for one leg of pants), and none of the three people I discussed my order with saw fit to clarify it with me. And so a week later - this past Saturday - the delivery men arrived with one half of a boxspring. And when I called Sears to give them a piece of my mind, they put me on hold for 20 minutes and then asked me to call back later because their systems were down. No, really.

At this point I decided to just get a cheaper set from the furniture place downstairs, and that arrived yesterday without incident. And having the boxspring meant that the bed was high enough off the ground for me to put my brand-new, custom-designed, hand-painted doona cover on without it dangling onto the floor. So I did, only to discover that the lovely cherry-blossom detail that was meant to have bright red flowers instead had anaemic red-pink ones, which is... not what I wanted. And kind of icky. And has prompted Flattie Karen to start calling me 'Salmon'. So now I'm trying to organize a return on a custom item, which is always a joy. I also still have a stray half-boxspring lying around my room because I'm trying to arrange the return of that to Sears, but they seem unwilling to get in touch with me about it. Oh, and my actual bed frame, which I thought was being delivered at the end of this week, won't be here until sometime next week, or possibly after due to the holidays.

[Sigh.]

I mean, all I can do at this point is laugh, but it's beyond ridiculous. The rest of the move has gone pretty smoothly, and I do have furniture (and credit card debt) thanks to the proud Scandinavian meatball merchants at Ikea, but the fact that the main feature of my room is unlikely to be sorted within the first month of my living here is starting to bug me. I will say that the mattress is amazingly comfortable, though, so I'm lucky there. And half expecting it to spontaneously combust in the night, or possibly be harboring Julian Assange without my knowledge.

In better news, the dancing's going well. It's been a busy few weeks, but now I've got two shows down and only one more to go - but the remaining one is the biggest and scariest one. I'm doing a fusion number with a dagger; it's to a song called 'Dr Sin' by Chasing Shadows (highly recommended), and my character is an assassin. It's a bit martial-artsy and a bit tribal and entirely fueled by my latent rage issues, but it seems to be going over pretty well so far, apart from how I almost took out an audience member a couple of weeks ago when my dagger slipped from my hand and went shooting out into the audience. First time I've ever dropped it, let alone flung it, and of course it happened at a show. Luckily no one was hurt, but the event has already passed into legend and my teacher is never ever going to let me live it down, not that I can blame her for that.

So that's me. For now. I won't do anything so stupid as to promise another post between now and February, but I'll see what I can do.

XOXO

Um, hi.

It's been too long. I know it has. I've tried to stick to an at-least-weekly posting schedule, but the last few weeks have involved a lot of feeling crazy and running around in circles, partly for real reasons and partly because my head broke. Having re-read my last few posts, I don't think that news will come as any great shock, but it's nothing to worry about - it was a quieter break, more of a blown fuse than a full-on outage. I just needed to sit in a dark corner for a while, and with that having been accomplished, I feel a bit more together.

Fall has come crashing down around us, and so far it's been cold, wet and miserable. I'm hoping the weather will pick up and give me some of those crisp, sunny autumn days that feel like apples taste, but for now it's weighing heavily on everyone. Winter's on its way, no mistake, and it's a cunt of a season. Fall also means the end of baseball (no playoff run for the Sox this year), the start of football (Tom, darling, the hair), and a whole new menu centered around butternut pumpkin. In the last week, I have seen three new recipes involving butternut, including an amazing-looking butternut lasagna, and I've had an impassioned plea for pumpkin pie from an unpindownable Floridian refugee who compensates for New England weather by charming baked goods out of people too sympathetic to refuse. She also has a very sweet dog and uses him shamelessly. (Please do not take this opportunity to list the many reasons I should know better. I do. It's out of my hands. The dog's too cute.)

In better news, Lynne and Laura are coming for a visit. They arrive on Tuesday, and we'll kick around Boston until Friday, when we'll head up to Montreal. That's right, kids, I'm off to visit our moose-strewn neighbours to the north. Never thought I'd see the day. Still, I take comfort in knowing that at least the Quebecois are smart enough not to want to be part of Canada either. Either way, I'm looking forward to having some friendly accents about the place.

And in weird food news for the day: carn the pies! I don't know if I'm shitty that they're going to be all the way over in Southie or seriously grateful that I won't have easy access to that kind of calorie bump. Either way, I'm thrilled to bits to have them.

XOXO

Oh, and...

...I'm not entirely sure, but I think my new and mostly-improved phone does not handle international calls/texts well. If you have tried to contact me and I haven't replied, I'm sorry; I simply haven't received whatever it was. So, again and some more, the best way to reach me is by e-mail.

[Sigh.]

Mo' money, mo' problems

So first of all, thank you to everyone who was prompted to write to me by my rather desperate appeal a couple of posts back. It's been so good to hear from you all, and I promise I'll reply properly soon. Work has gone a bit mad because the semester starts tomorrow, so I've been low on time and haven't had the chance to get back to everyone the way I'd like to, but I will.

In other news, it *looks* (fingers crossed) like I'll be getting my super back. For those who don't know (i.e., the non-Australians), your superannuation is your mandatory Australian retirement fund. If you're a foreigner who has been working legally and leaves Australia permanently, you are allowed to reclaim this money... but it's not quite as straightforward as that sounds. I want to put this down because I know a lot of you know people from overseas who are living and working in Australia, and for many of them their super will be a significant amount of money by the time they leave. So:

1. If you don't reclaim your super within six months of your permanent departure, it will be given to the Tax Office and you will have no chance of getting it back, ever. I cannot stress this enough: if you fall outside that six months, you've lost it, full stop.
   
2. Furthermore, this means that you must have COMPLETED the application process within six months. Nowhere I've seen makes that clear, nor do they lay out that it can take up to four months for all of the paperwork to be completed by all of the relevant agencies (the ATO, the Department of Immigration, and your super fund). Again, it doesn't matter where you are in the process when the six months ticks over, or whose fault the delay is: once that timeframe is up, it's up, and you've lost your money. I nearly lost out on mine because of this, and ended up on the phone pleading with a lovely woman in Hobart named Sue to queue-jump some of my paperwork. (Sue, if you're out there: you're my girl.) I got lucky in that she was sympathetic, but you can't expect that.
   
3. You can't apply for a super refund until after you've left Australia permanently. Don't even try, because there aren't even any initial steps you can take. You have to be gone for good first.
4. I take that back, there is one thing you can and should do before you leave: If you have multiple super accounts (e.g., if you've had different jobs and some/all made you use their preferred super fund rather than allowing you to nominate your own), roll them all over into one. You have to lodge separate applications for each account, and there's no good reason for maintaining multiple ones anyway.
   
5. Start on the process as absolutely soon as you are able after your departure. (See point 2.) Both the ATO and the Immigration websites have the information you need (I won't give links because those websites get tinkered with a lot); you can also contact your super fund or check their website for help, but understand that your super fund can't do anything until you've sorted the paperwork from Immigration and the ATO.
   
6. The process will be streamlined if you have an Australian bank account they can pay into. They will do international transfers or bank cheques, but there are fees associated and they make it very clear that if anything goes missing, they don't give a rat's. Personally, I reckon that even if you don't have any other reason to keep an account open in Aus, this alone is worth the few months of extra fees.
   
7. Be aware that the government takes a cut of 35-45%. This is only to be expected and shouldn't put you off too much; apart from that, there's only one $55 fee associated with the paperwork, and whatever's left is better in your pocket than the government's. They'll only spend it on Tony Abbott's skin polish anyway. (Seriously, why is that guy so fucking shiny all the time? It's not natural.)
8. See point 2. Again. Really. I almost lost a LOT of money - the money that's going to clear my very substantial moving-related credit card debts and allow me to start looking to move out of my parents' house, thank Christ - simply because I didn't understand a) how long the process would take, and b) that they would be such hardasses about the process being completed within that timeframe. Mind you, I didn't understand it because it's not made clear anywhere (hell, the basic idea of reclaiming your super isn't really advertised, let alone the details; and let's not even start on how much harder this all would be if you weren't a native English speaker), and if I were the cynical type I'd say that it's awfully convenient that the government would impose these rules that make it more likely that the super will not be claimed within the required timeframe when they themselves will be the beneficiaries of any unclaimed super... but that's just me being suspicious, I'm sure.
   

I hope this ends up being useful to someone. I don't want to sound like too much of a humbug because as I said, it does look like I'll be okay; but the simple fact is that the process is obviously designed to make it less likely for departing workers to be able to access this money that they worked for and that came out of their paycheques, and that's pretty shit. Feel free to hit me with questions, if any arise.

XOXO

A short play about American mobile phone service.

Me: Did you just send me a test text?

Caitlin: Yes. My phone has stopped receiving texts again. So infuriating. They promised me this would not happen again. Did you reply?

Me: No, because I'm on the phone with Verizon because I have stopped receiving texts as well.

Caitlin: Awesome. Although it seems you got mine?

Me: Yes, but I missed several from Colleen all day. And I still can't work out if Liz can send to/receive from me. $60/month! Oh, I replied, by the way.

Caitlin: Yeah, I didn't get it. Fuck.

Me: I find it more than a little ridiculous that they thanked me for joining Verizon at the end of a call consisting almost entirely of my ranting about how I should never have joined Verizon.

Caitlin: Good stuff.

File under 'things that shouldn't be this complicated but have decided to be anyway'

I've finally broken down and signed up to a two-year mobile contract. I had been on a pre-paid thing with Virgin, who are very much a third-party carrier here (Caitlin: 'Ohhh, you're the one.'), but the phone was dodgy as fuck and the service was spotty, so when I learned that my work has a deal with Verizon, a major carrier, that meant that I could get a two-year contract and a great phone for only $15 more a month than what I'd been paying with Virgin AND keep my phone number, I was in.

Oh, silly girl. As if it could be that easy.

Something's gone wrong somewhere along the way that means that my new phone is screening my texts and phone calls without my consent. Not consistently, mind: I'll get one text from someone and then not hear from them again for 24 hours, in which time I have of course decided that I have mortally offended them and they now hate me, but I don't want to get in touch because I don't want to be pushy. And then my brain goes in circles for the next several hours until it explodes into a million fleshy pieces and I'm weeping into a bag of Nutter Butters. (Bad enough when it's real people; you should see what happens when Wil Anderson's Twitter feed mysteriously disappears.)

Why yes, I *am* looking for a therapist! Funny you should ask.

[sigh] Yes, I really am. Things have been increasingly rough the last few weeks. I think what's happened is that now that I don't have the worry of job-searching, everything else has come banging to the front of my head. And not to sound self-pitying, but there's a fair bit of everything else to process. I'd suspected that I was dealing a bit too well with the move, and that there might be a crash coming eventually; the small mercy here is that the crash waited until my health insurance kicked in and I could afford to see someone. So now I'm in the process of trying to find that someone, which is a bit tricky because the only recommendations I've been able to get so far have been for people who don't accept my health insurance. But I found a few on my own who look promising, so cross fingers one of them will work out.

In other news, I have just re-read all of Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree series (collections of his book reviews for The Believer, McSweeney Press' monthly magazine), which has inspired me to start doing my own monthly book reviews. I like his format, wherein he lists the books he's bought and the books he's read in that month, so I'm stealing that. Unlike him, however, I am not restrained by The Believer's policy of not permitting negative criticism, so if I read something I don't like, I will absolutely tell you about it. I expect to have the first of these up by the end of the month.

Finally, a last note on my mobile: My old Virgin phone wasn't great with international texts because my receipt (or not) of them would depend on how much random cash was floating around in my account. I've learned that some people did text me and I never got them; if at some point you did text me and didn't hear back, that's what happened. This should be different now because those texts will be added to my bill rather than debited from my account, but given the way my first three days with my new phone have gone I'm not overly confident. So I guess what I'm saying is that e-mails are still and always the best way to reach me, and also there's a bunch of you I haven't heard from in ages and I miss terribly, so if you're feeling so inclined please drop me a line, or even just a comment. I don't care if it's the most boring stuff about your day, I just like to know you're out there. xoxo