Nits and Gnats


Wherein out narrator pauses, briefly, to complain.

Oooh, another rainy day in Sydney. For all the quality of the weather - quite the reverse of what we had in June - this could be Seattle. Although the temperature has shown some very San Francisco-like variability. It was nearly 25C when we got off the bus ot AFTRS yesterday, sunny and a bit steamy. On the way home, it was cloudy and coolish, down to maybe 20C. And as I walked to dinner on Oxford Street last night - a very excellent Thai restaurant that Brendan knows of - it began to rain. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, it's not as though fronts are coming in and out. Rather, I think the pattern is what a meteorologist would call "unsettled" - neither this nor that. But you can't do anything about the weather, as everyone says.

You can do something about the cold, though, and we folks in the US usually like to use heating to take the edge off of the colder evenings - which there have been one or two of. On the first of those evenings - when still quite sick with my cold (my first night in the apartment, I believe) I looked around for the thermostat, because I wanted to turn the heat up a notch and get comfortable. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it. Bernard was over the next morning, so I asked him where it could be found. It couldn't, he said. Ah, I responded, the landlord controls the heat? No, he replied. The building has no heat.

Now I know that the Sydneysiders are all perfectly convinced that they live in a near-tropical environment, but - as far as I can tell - it gets downright chilly here in the wintertime, probably down to 5C on some occasions, and certainly down to 10C. Brrr. I can't imagine how these folks live without heat - but then I remember it took me over two years before I discovered (well, Jeff discovered) that I had a heating unit built into the floor of my Laurel Canyon home. I bought a space heater which I had to keep on "low" because otherwise I'd blow the circuit breakers. And I lived in layers & blankets. So I suppose it can be done. But year after year? Euch. It never even occurred to me that a modern apartment building - the building probably isn't more than a decade old - would be built without an HVAC system. Those sorts of things are required by law in the US, if only to give the apartments some ventilation. Me, I've got the windows.

My Sydneysider friends in the US were all deeply concerned that AFTRS is so far away from the center of town - and it is - that I would most certainly need a car to get to work every day. They claimed that Sydney's public transit system would just be untenable for such a long trip across the area. Certainly it would be fine if I were staying close to the city, but for North Ryde, well they just clucked their tongues and sighed. I'd most certainly need a car.

They're wrong. Hilariously wrong. Between the trains and buses, I can assert that the service to AFTRS is at least as good as anything I was used to in Boston - a city in the USA renowned for its public transportation system, and while I don't know that it matches New York City - I don't think Sydney has the same coverage with subways, frankly - there are plenty of buses, absolutely everywhere you might want to go. So while the Sydneysiders do feel as though they have a poor mass transit system - and stay locked up in their poor cars, as a result, in nasty sorts of traffic jams - I've been humming along, taking the trains and buses. I do feel that just about everywhere I might want to go in the locality, I should be able to get to, on train or bus. Which is pretty damn amazing.

With any luck, tomorrow I'll take a long-ish bus trip up the North Coast all the way to the most exclusive community in Sydney, Palm Beach. That's where my friend is in residence, doing a bit of writing and a lot of thinking and meditating upon his future. He's got plenty of reasons to meditate, he is at a classic middle-aged cross-roads - set out and achieved what he wanted to do, but is perhaps now thinking that this is somehow not enough, and that he's got to find a different path, a different way too offer himself up. That's always an interesting point - I think I've come to that, in my own way, from time to time - and could turn him in all sorts of interesting directions. We'll just see.

I went over to Oxford Street last night, the heart of queer Sydney. I'd been there before, so nothing really surprised me. It's just the same-old same-old. It could be the Castro, or West Hollywood, or Capitol Hill, it's all pretty much the same, with slight (but only slight) adaptations to the local style. Queer ghettos are queer ghettos and they're really not all that interesting. Although it is always encouraging to see two men, very much in love, holding hands as they walk down the street.

Then there's the jet lag. You don't get over 8000 miles of jet lag in a few days. It dogs you, night after night, morning after morning, as you realize your wake/sleep cycle bears no relation to the local diurnal cycle. I had to take an Ambien last night - though I really didn't want to - because I felt as though I needed to get a decent night's sleep. That still didn't keep me from waking up, groggy, at 5:50 AM, but fortunately I was able to fall back to sleep afterward. I slept in today, until 7:15, which meant a foreshortened yoga session that will have to be completed this evening. After all, I need to keep my cool.

One thing I have noticed, on the bus trip to AFTRS every day - the Suburbs of Sydney remind me of nothing so much as a time in America when everything was far more simple and safe than today. As if Australia is going through it's 1950s now, with a big real estate boom, a thriving suburban culture, and social quietude. I can't know of sure, but that's certainly what it feels like. As though I've dropped into a bit of a time machine.

Epping approaches.

Posted: Fri - October 17, 2003 at 08:38 AM        

©