Slow roasted gratification

I've been in the United States a year now. Still hard to feel like I have two feet on the ground here, perhaps both are right footed, like the cars that pass by my walking feet.

I think the biggest and hardest part has been the job transition, or lack of it. I've gone from being in a skilled in-demand adviser to a job market non-entity. I don't enjoy the job hunt, nor do I like being divorced so far from my work colleagues. My work is completed as needed but there's something ill-feeling about the distance. The work ego feeds into a male ego (men either work or go to jail said Tim Allen in his underrated and very unlike TV book) and so I've definitely been more muted outside of the house.

So presently I sit between the two countries. Outside of Australia, but Australian in my ways, and yet outside of the US as I've yet to produce anything for its benefit.

Hopefully some day I'll pass into the hands of an enthusiatic recruiter who sees I can help their company and life will be easier. I hope that day is soon.

Busy begets busy

When you're busy with work, or looking for work, or busy with the root cause of work ie money, the easiest thing is to get lost in it. The small tasks build into a growing wave and they can lift us up until we're looking at a big scary ocean, which makes us want to paddle faster and faster.

Back in my beach days, the days before the fear of Jaws overcome me, I always feared being dumped by a wave. I would ready myself for the bigger waves and then fling myself over them. Mostly it worked but sometimes I was dragged down. I'd see other people submit to it and dive through the salt water walls.

It's easy enough to build a house of worry through our daily events. When we see the outside world, the political mess, the money and power seemingly further and further out of reach, and disasters of every scale on the touting television we think we need a bigger moat.

I would say my creed has often been sledgehammer survival. Keep on hitting anything with as much force as I have, with the nuances being envisioning where the weakness in something else and hitting that point. But I think that works when you're a single man only. A single man can smash through doubt, knock down walls and walk away from any carnage. But when others rely on you, the results aren't the same. Like paddling against an ocean, sometimes you have to just calm yourself and let it ride, and sometimes you need to accept the wave and let it hit you. The difference for me is that this approach requires some thought, some space, before execution. Hopefully I can manage to create the restful space and put the sledgehammer away.

Revival

I stopped writing about a year ago for this website. My life changed, a move of countries, a move from being a single solitary man to a wife and kids, a move from being a citizen to being an alien.

An overseas move is a hard thing in many ways, even with an amazing, supportive wife. You can easily feel isolated and like a nobody, and while I can embrace that way of life at times, it also can get me down.

In the midst of trying to break-free from old ways and into a new life I decided not to renew the website. I tried to focus on other things but I've come back here as I know I feel better, more useful when I write.

So I'll try to keep writing and get this place restarted.

Memo to grammar Nazis

Hello grammar Nazis, please take a seat in the corner over there. Feel free to give the corner any name you choose, call it left corner, right corner, top-left, north-west corner or feel free to call it the "genius corner" or label it the "dunce corner" with just the right amount of a sarcastic upper lip. Yes clearly I'm aiming to be transparent here.

The problem with grammar is that it like fencing a river. Yes rivers can be directed or run through wandering watercourses, provided the fences are strong and bold enough, but at the end of the day the river still flows from its origin to its finish. Language is much the same way. Whether two 13-year olds text message in a shortened form that causes a wizened wizard of english to mourn his life, or whether a courier stammers in part pidgin to a sub-editor awaiting a manuscript, in either case language is communication, and the message is the only important thing.

Now of course, I hear the cry of the grammar gestapo. "But grammar helps the message you say!" - cue the bloody feud between which form of grammar is the purest and marvel as each proponent paints their puritanical pathways propped up by parentheses in order to fortify their formidable fiefdom of proper punctuation. Boil it away and see where lies the basis for these rules. Somewhere in Samuel Johnson's mind, in the past history of the British upper class using another tool to put down the poor. That is the history of language and yet no matter how powerful it becomes, words and names will take precedence. No matter how many misplaced colons precede or follow it, New York has a meaning in each person's mind. The same goes for many terms, the tone of which is often known only by the reader and of course the name of the author itself often conveys far more meaning than any semi-colon.  If you doubt that then ask yourself if a sonnet by Shakespeare outweighs Paul Smith's poetry and you'll have your answer.

So in summary, and restatement, the message is the key part of language, and like music or art it is controlled by the artist. Yes there are basic principles which need to be followed, but next time you find yourself debating a colon versus a semi-colon consider whether that hot air is better served as a by-product of more important exertion.

Is happiness the only progress?

Being a new year, with resolutions foregone, forgotten and foresaken it's a good time to think about what progress is. Many years my goals have been to survive, to become tougher but doesn't that make you the same as you were? Sadly on reflection it seems to.

I'm not going to subject myself to writing, or you to reading a long blog, so all I will say is that I think any progress must really be about happiness, attaining it or getting close. This post could be the definitive transcription of truism, but so be it.