Make your own Bush speech

Fun for the whole family. Practice writing your own presidential speeches for GWB! Who knows, he might even use one!

Padwanna!

I found this little bit today on the BBC News site.

Most metrosexuals will know that blogging about their podcasting is perhaps a bit passé, while flashmobbing is decidedly retro.

Well it made me laugh! I knew all about the blogging and podcasting bit, but the flashmobbing had me totally stumped. So being the curious bastard that I am, I just had to find out. Wikipedia had this to say about it:

when a crowd converges at a specific time and place, to participate in apparent random acts, and then dissipates.

So it’s basically a high speed – ninja strike – demonstration by a bunch of people pissed off about something (or someone). Pretty much a Greenpeace rally on speed.

You know it’s all a sign of the times we are living in now; the age of instant gratification, where we wait for nothing and want everything at our fingertips. It’s like we have no time anymore for anything, and no desire to wait. Even protesting is changing in the new millenium. I mean I remember going on a Free Tibet rally in London 5 years back and it took the bhuddhist center weeks to organise. Not anymore! If you want to protest, get a bunch of eco-terrorist types, and charge an offending place like stormtroopers, and then leave. It doesn’t take more than a few hours now.

I often wonder though, for all the advances in what I call instant gratification technology (media download sites, portable media players, and the like), we seem to have less time to use any of it. Most people in the first world are working longer hours, both parents have to work to earn enough money to support a family. None of the technology we use is helping us to work less or spend more time with people we want to spend more time with. So what’s the point of it all? It’s almost like we as individuals have become like mice inside an exercise wheel; we are frantically running as fast as we can, but we aren’t actually getting anywhere at all. At some point I think you have to stop and ask, what is it all for? If we continue living in a society that wants everything now, and treats everything as disposable, then what is the value in anything our lives? Including ourselves and the people around us!

It seems to me that the real value of not being instantly gratified in all our desires, is in the feeling of appreciation you get when you do get the thing you desire. If we get everything now, then we ultimately will become bored with everything we have, because we will only be interested in the things we don’t yet have, and how to get them.

Everything becomes merely a thing of the moment, and we lose all sense of value.

Perhaps the real value of waiting is that we ultimately give ourselves more time to live our lives in a way that will actually make us happy, rather than just running from one quick fix to the next!

Padwanna!

I was going to try to get to bed early tonight because I had a big weekend and didn’t see much of my bed for most of it. I have learned also that your body does not recover well from tequila hangovers in your thirties as well as it did when you were in your twenties.

Saturday night was worth the sore head on Sunday though. I went to see a physical theatre performance from my Venezualan friend, Balduino (the chick magnet). It was so impressive to see, and I can honestly say that even though I am not a big fan of this kind of artform, I really lurved seeing him up there doing his performance. Very entertaining and really engaging in the way it made you laugh, and feel sad, and think about the human themes he was trying to portray.

Afterwards I went out with him and some Venezualan friends that had come from Spain to see him perform, as well as some friends of his girlfriend. We found a cheesy salsa bar and danced away till the wee hours, drinking liberal amounts of tequila while taking turns twirling in the middle. I found out that in the event of not knowing how to salsa properly, you can improvise by just shaking your hips a lot, like you are trying to get change out of your pockets without using your hands.

The big weekend has made me lazy today too. I didn’t make it to exercise and now I feel guilty about that because I really don’t miss exercise sessions. Health is important, and I take mine very seriously. You sort of have to when both your grandfather and father got cancer in their 60′s from basically letting themselves go over the years. But I was so flat today from the weekend excess I figured better to take the day off and go tomorrow when I am more normal feeling. I can’t believe I used to do this every weekend sometimes 3 nights running, 10 years ago. Nobody told me getting older was going to be like this!

Padwanna!

Your Superhero Profile

Your Superhero Name is The Speed Rat Your Superpower is Kissing Your Weakness is Reruns of the Cosby Show Your Weapon is Your Flash Saw Your Mode of Transportation is Bubble

This seems so oddly like me, I wonder if I actually am a superhero, but I just don’t know it yet!

Padwanna!

I was made painfully aware of the fact that the European Summer has passed this morning when I woke up to a dull grey lightless day, heavy with mist and a real nip in the air. It’s still strange to me to feel the weather getting colder as we get closer to christmas and New Year. Christmas day is all about your grandmother slapping suncream on your face to stop it getting burned, and drinking beers outside with the relatives as you watch an uncle burn all the sausages on the barbeque. It’s about opening up presents and playing backyard cricket in your shorts and bare feet, and trying to stay cool in 30 degree heat. Even after 7 years it still feels strange to have a cold christmas, especially if there is snow!

This year I hope we don’t have one of those stupid cold spells where we get a blizzard that dumps a meter of snow on the ground, because believe me, it is the hardest thing in the world trying to ride a push bike on roads covered in snow and ice. I am not very good at the cold. Safe to say for me I could do without it. I love autumn, but I would prefer spring to come after autumn and then go straight back to summer again. If we could skip the cold period between December to March, that would suit me fine.

Somehow though, I have the feeling it’s going to be a bitch of a winter!

Padwanna.

I feel really fucking directionless today. Sort of like being a passenger on a boat that’s just drifting along on the ocean, going nowhere quickly. There isn’t any one reason why, but the reasons all basically boil down to a general lack of satisfaction in life, work and relationships. Actually the relationship thing is a bit tricky because I don’t really have one, and don’t really want one, but I sometimes think it would be good to be in one for a while because they do give life a special twist that is missing (if you manage to be in one that’s fun). Yeah well I’ve tried relationships with Dutch girls and they more or less end up in disaster. Cross-cultural difficulties invariably result in terminal relationship problems. It seems fun and interesting in the beginning, but after a while, those interesting quirks become chisels that chip away at the foundation of your relationship until it breaks. And then its only a matter of time till the whole thing crashes to the ground. If you’re lucky you land on top of the wreckage and walk away more or less intact. If you’re not, it all lands on top of you and basically, you’re fucked!

Well I didn’t start writing this with the intention of sounding like a bitter and cynical ex-boyfriend type, but that’s sure what that last part resembles.

Being honest though, I’m not really bitter, but I am wiser and I know that having another relationship with a Dutch girl isn’t something that I am going to get into. After all, this isn’t my home, I am just living here for the time being. In about a year and half I want to move back home. That’s how long it will take me to finish a journey that I started about 2 years ago. If I leave before then it will be premature and I won’t get the benefit out of some plans I made.

Back on the 2nd of August was my 7 year anniversary of being away from home. Amazing how time flies! I remember about a month before I left for London that my mum was crying and said she would miss me. I told her not to be sad, I’d be back in two years tops. The wise woman that she was looked at me and said, you might be back in two, or you might not be back at all, you just never know. Now looking back on 7 years away I can see how true that was. The time away has changed me too. Now I am not a real ‘true blue’ Australian; I don’t even know if I am an Australian at heart anymore. And I know I am not European either; I will never be Dutch, not even if I live here the rest of my life. In John Fowles book, The Magus, an Australian girl who is the one time love interest of the main character tells him – Nicholas Urfe – that when you live away from your home country for any length of time it invariably changes you. You lose your identity and you become lost because you no longer identify with any one culture. You become something else, you live an existence where your only home is that small space where you hang your clothes and sleep. The moment I read that conversation in the book between the two of them, I knew exactly what she was saying, because I keenly feel it myself. I think anyone who has lived for 7 years away from home would.

So I sit here today, on a day off from work, thinking blankly about the prospect of living like a ghost for the next 2 years, and if it’s going to be more or less like this; like being on a drifting boat with no land in sight.

Padwanna.

Yesterday I wanted to do something nice for my friend – the one having a trial seperation from his wife – I figured something to brighten up his life would give him a lift so I was going to go and buy a game voucher for him in town. It was a nice afternoon when I got going, sometime around 1.30pm. I jumped on my trusty (rusty) pushbike and made the ride through Vondelpark (the central park of Amsterdam) into the city and parked somewhere parrallel to the main shopping strip smack bang in the middle of the action.

Now it’s important to understand that the Dutch and Saturday afternoon shopping are like Peacocks in mating season; everybody puts on their dazzling best and they parade around as much to be seen as to shop for luxury goods. The first time you see it you are not sure if you are shopping or part of a grand fashion show for the public.

The center shopping strip is a kilometer long road that is seperated into two halves by a small intersection at about the middle. Human traffic follows the road rules in that you walk on the right and if you want to turn around you pull out and do a U-Turn into the other lane and make your way forward. Under no circumstances do you just turn around and walk against the tide of people coming at you – you seriously won’t last long before you get trampled under a stampede of angry fashion victims on their way to bargains.

Now I rarely join in this ritual prancing about because; one, I don’t really buy a lot of fashion stuff so I have no need to shop on Saturdays apart from groceries; and two, I can’t cope with the bruises afterwards. When I entered into the fray at the top end of the street, I could tell this was bigger than the usual Saturday crush. I wondered if I had accidently stumbled upon ‘Sale of the Century’ weekend and every man and woman with a creditcard had come running in the hope of a cheap buy. Whatever the reason, Kalverstraat was seriously packed out, and there was an intensity to the movement like a MOSH pit heaving at a live Korn concert! I was carried along shoulder to shoulder with jazzed up people all armed with bags and boxes which they used to lethal effect on lesser shoppers such as myself. I was smashed about too by a platoon of mothers pushing prams much like pilots in the US armoured division drive Chieftain Main Battle Tanks around Iraq. Hell, even this one little kid of about 8 fully headbutted me in the nuts at a half run as he was playing tag with his friend in the crowd. When I stopped and tried to let the pain subside from my swollen testicles the mother just then turned around and said to me with a plainly irritated look on her face, ‘watch where you’re going’!

It was then that started to see that this, this shopping trip was just another MOSH pit of life. Sure a different setting from the ones I used to jump around in when I was in my foolish and reckless 20′s, but nonetheless essentially the same thing; tons of people all voluntary throwing themselves together in small spaces in the name of entertainment!

I managed to visit 4 shops, none of who had what I wanted, which annoyed me no end because in this shopping mecca where you can purchase just about any luxury good made in Europe, they didn’t have this one crappy little game voucher I wanted. If I didn’t know better I would think it was a conspiracy by aliens or something. However, thinking that would mean I just watch too much TV… right?! So in the final store when the 16 year old bored-as-fuck shop assistant said they didn’t have what I wanted, I decided to leave. But not before being elbowed in the floating rib by a woman eyeing off the Power Ranger boxed set in the stand in front of me.

I really only do this to myself once every few months. Basically when the memory dims on how bad the last time was, I do it again, and then remember why it is I don’t do it more often.

All I can say is, thank god for internet shopping.

Padwanna!