personal political

time-poor

I hate that expression, time-poor. But I seem to be experiencing a bit of such poverty at the moment, just when many possible blog posts filter through my thoughts.

I have an e-friend, who I have also met in real life (he is in his 60s), who says that he has a strict policy of never allowing himself to become "busy" - by which I'm pretty sure he means a state of mind: a state of uncentred dispersal. It's a policy I'm happy to try and emulate.

Other expressions I'd like to consign to the dustheap of recent history: the "juggle" of work and family; finding "work-life balance". They have become too trite - they gesture towards something, but are empty in themselves. At least, I find my mind turning off whenever I come across those expressions these days.

Anyway, despite my best efforts to reject these concepts, I find myself with a lot to do just now. So I've made a feeble attempt to crank up this blog and then left it standing idly.

But I will be back.

 

terms of endearment, terms of communication

'You're still in my feed reader' - words to warm my heart.

Gee, since I last used Typepad, it's become very fancy. It's all one-click and drag and link these days. Which is almost enough to turn me off blogging, for I, strangely, enjoy talking in this forum to you, my feed readers, rather than to my in-real-daily-life people. A little bit of distance enables an intense form of intimacy and allows the thoughts and feelings some space to emerge. But two years on from this kind-of-anonymous blog,  Facebook and Twitter have just about dashed anonymity to pieces, as we've seen in the recent Grog outing and as discussed by Annabel Crabb.

I've been Facebooking with the best of them, at first under my nom de keyboard and then with my real name. But that's a fairly limited vehicle for development of ideas. Which is why I'm drawn back to the blog. But I'm unsure whether to draw the attention of all my FB Friends to the blog, as there would go the remaining shreds of pseudonymity.

Still trying to work that one out...

[I don't think I have the subscribe-to-comments feature enabled, anyway, I will add some comments to the last post.]

futures

In September we'll be moving to London for a few months. I'm thinking of doing something different then, blogwise.

flying off

I'm not sure why I haven't blogged much lately, I've certainly had a lot of bloggable thoughts running through my mind. Anyway, no time to write now as it's late-ish and I'm getting up early to catch a flight interstate - and wouldn't you know it, a gale force wind has sprung up, making me quite nervous. I won't sleep very well, given that I'll have to get up before 6am and I can hear wind chimes and rustling roofs and swaying trees all over the place. Next week I will try and share some of my recent, extremely interesting thoughts with whoever still reads this blog :-)

happy bloggers

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Elissa for an article about blogging and 'mental health' - now her article's been published in The Age and it's a good one - clearly written by someone who understands and doesn't see blogging or the Web as some kind of weird netherworld (as too many journalists still approach it).

just because...

... I love Jo's blog (I met Jo last year at an election party), here's a link to it. She takes photos, mainly of Waverley Cemetery, which overlooks the ocean a few kilometres from where I live - we've often been for walks in the cemetery or along the ocean path, so it's very familiar to me. It's endlessly interesting - there's a big memorial to the IRA hunger strikers, numerous interesting gravestones (including Dorothea McKellar, who wrote 'I love a sunburnt country') and even one of my relatives, from the early 20th century.

posting month

Because it's very boring for me and probably for my readers to keep a blog and hardly blog in it, I've decided to declare June the Personal Political posting month and try and post something every day this month.

blog for human rights

Cross-posted at LP

It’s Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day. Here’s a quick focus on two blogs/bloggers:

- Burmese Bloggers Without Borders is an independent voice reaching out to the rest of the world. In March they highlighted the case of two Rangoon journalists who were imprisoned. Amnesty International has also taken up the case of Thet Zin and Sein Win Maung.

- Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer has been in prison for over a year now, for writing about political repression, religious extremism and discrimination against women. Amnesty is also working for his release.

dear reader...

Thanks for still reading my blog even though I hardly ever post and my posts are a bit distracted.

Actually, I've been away for a short holiday in Adelaide, or more accurately for most of the time, in the Adelaide Hills.

citizens

M/C - Media and Culture is calling for contributors to the 'citizen' issue of M/C Journal.

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal.