The familiar sounds of gentrification

Tito said it best in his piece about Berlin:

And now, in 2011, every second person in Kreuzberg is contributing to the gentrification processes by passionately complaining about gentrification.

I stole this photo from his blog too.

Mums poaching pears in the 80s

While I’ve been on a work break (for the last 15 minutes) I have been enjoying the blog Orangette.

Read her post To Poach a Pear for a lovely reflection on what seems like old fashion family life (certainly looks nothing like my life today).

My favourite bit:

My mother is usually the one who makes poached pears. I have a photo of her in an old family album, holding a platter of them. By the length of her hair, I’m guessing that the year was 1982. My father must have snapped the picture as they were leaving for a holiday party. That was the kind of thing he liked to do. She’s standing in the wood-paneled den of the house we lived in until I was 13, wearing what appears to be a sand-colored fur jacket. She must have curled her hair with hot rollers, because it sits on her shoulders in soft loops, and where she’s pinned it back above her left ear, you can see the sparkle of her earring. Her eyes are lined in dark pencil, and her lipstick is as red and glossy as a Robert Palmer girl’s. She’s staring at something just beyond the camera, probably waiting for the flash to go off. The platter is in front of her chest, tilted slightly downward, so you can see the pears in neat rows. For her, that’s clearly what the photo is about: a dozen pears standing upright, each carefully peeled, poached, painted in dark chocolate, and topped with a sprig of fresh holly leaves. I like that for my father, the photo is clearly about her.

Work break

It’s 3.46pm on a Tuesday and I can’t do any work right now. I have a project with deadlines that are painfully overdue and no clear sense of when the worst of it will be over. Or even whether this project will be completed on time. Well, I assume it will be completed on time because it has to be. There is no flexibility with the ultimate deadline for this one.

But it’s 3.46pm and after working solidly and soldiering on I have hit a wall of boredom. I need to find my way back into the pool of anxiety, because although that was horrible, at least it got me moving. I would prefer to be moved along by a wave of enthusiasm and motivation but I will settle for anxiety.

I just booked a flight for a long overdue overseas trip in a couple of weeks – right in the middle of this too-long project. It’s fun to book trips for the middle of projects. Part of my rationale was that nothing says “meet the deadline” like an international trip and two weeks away from my desk.

OK, feel ready to work again.

Poetry break – Wendell Berry

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

~ Wendell Berry ~

Happy New Year

Resolution – more time spent in hammocks.

Christmas was great

I was pretty ambivalent about Christmas last week. But you know, in the scheme of things, it’s more fun than the average day.

I even found it really fun to have bought everyone presents. No one went overboard so instead of feeling appalled by consumerism, it just seemed nice that everyone was thinking of things to give each other.

It hailed and rained for most of the afternoon and evening, so the ideal patio Christmas at Jess’s new house was not fully realised. Eventually we had to concede and find a way for 20+ people to eat indoors. Which we did and it was fun. Kev made oyster shots with a bloody mary base – yes, delicious.

The only downside was that I was mean to MJ. I don’t really know why, but I was in a bit of a grump (just a general end-of-year weariness grump) and took it out on her. Hopefully she hasn’t taken it personally.

Christmas starts well. Santa attended. Champagne was served in pink glasses.

Silly picture through the window, but too funny not to share. A bunch of hyperactive kids stopped in their tracks by a very compelling TV show. I wonder was it was…

Then the hail started…

Which provided plenty of entertainment…

But then it started raining and didn’t stop for a long time.

Hava stuck inside…

And eventually it stopped.

Marcel the Shell

 

Writer’s lives

Why, oh why, do we find it so fascinating to learn more about writers’ offices and book collections? I don’t know why, but I do.

The latest addition is all over the internet right now:

Read it about it here and here.

 

Thoughts on ambition and complacency

I link to Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project all the time. It helps that she sends me emails each day with wonderful quotes from people I want to hear quoted (this week – Samuel Johnson, Eugene Delacroix, Leonardo da Vinci and my favourite, Virginia Woolf).

You may recall that Gretchen’s emails led to me writing the same email twice - 12 months apart.

Even though I enjoy Gretchen’s blog, I’ve not really been inclined to adopt her very structured approach to happiness. I tend to be more dramatic in my life changes – if things are getting a bit bland, I move countries.

However, I finally got around to buying a copy of Gretchen’s book and am reading it now. Despite knowing Gretchen’s model for her happiness project inside out, something about this book – pages and pages of this stuff all in between a front and a back cover – is really bringing home the structured model of incremental improvements to daily life.

Anyone who has been around me lately (say…the last six months) has known I have been in various states of contemplation, over-thinking and restlessness. Despite planning on talking about anything other than myself and my life trajectory today, I dealt MJ a massive serve of inner dialogue. One of these conversations centred on the contradiction of wanting to feel content in daily life but also wanting to strive for more.

MJ left and I picked up the book and this is the passage I read next – a nice addition to the dialogue:

Studies show that many creative, influential people in the arts and public life score above average in “neuroticism” (i.e., they have a greater propensity to experience negative emotions); this discontent arguably urges them to higher achievement. Other studies, however, show that people tend to think more flexibly and with more complexity when they’re feeling happy.

But whatever a wide-ranging study might show about the connection between ambition and happiness generally, I realized that for my own part, I was much more likely to take risks, reach out to others, and expose myself to rejection and failure when I felt happy. When I felt unhappy, I felt defensive, touchy, and self-conscious.

Saturday Leunig

Leunig capturing the moment perfectly – as usual.