Unexpected

Hi everyone,

Not sure what my state of mind is today. Partly because I just spent a significant chunk of time lurking at a very chilly tram stop due to a collision of some type back down the line. This is not an experience it‘s easy to feel positive about.

Added to which, tomorrow is a public holiday, which would be great if I didn‘t know full well I‘ll be at the office. Some more of my hallmark incompetence came out today, leaving me wondering if decency mightn‘t require me to refund quite a lot of wages to my employer. Or at least to pay back to them the difference between what they‘ve spent paying me and what they could have spent had they instead employed a chimpanzee or perhaps a moderately intelligent houseplant.

As I said, I‘m having a hard time thinking constructively this evening.

When I was finishing my law degree, back in 2001, I had a quotable quote all set to go with my photo in the law school yearbook. (I don‘t actually have a copy of the yearbook, I should add: right after my photo was taken I had a sudden attack of fear over something - it‘s a long story involving coffee - and walked out; I expect my photo is listed as “unidentified“ which, with its denial of identity, seems quite appropriate). Anyway, the quotable quote was going to be “talent is no substitute for hatred and desire“, referring to something at law school I had very little of and the two things I had in spades. The point is that, if I‘ve learned nothing else from the last year and a bit, I‘ve learned that talent is an astonishingly useful thing. I‘ve also learned that (pace Clive James) desire can be sated, or at least, exhausted. And I‘ve learned that hatred will eventually burn itself out.

* * * * *

Well, I‘m back at the Casa, and in a rather better frame of mind. For one thing, I was back in enough time to watch a new Big Bang Theory on Channel Nine, and there‘s nothing like something that makes you laugh for improving how the world looks. And I had dinner with a cluster of the housemates downstaies which was also a welcome change from listening to the voices inside my head. And now I‘m lying in bed with ABC FM on having read some of the book of Hosea and now, typing this.

I‘ve been missing the girls even more than usual lately. Whenever I see parents out with kids, or even a picture of a parent holding a child (like the one on the Coles delivery vans) I just get a pang. It‘s more than just missing my little princesses. I think you‘d say I miss feeling like a father, and doing all the little things I used to love doing, like going to their room last thing at night to make sure they had noonies and were covered up, or playing little games with them on the floor, or reading them Henry‘s Awful Mistake with all the hand gestures (Rachel always thought that was hysterically funny), or keeping those busy little hands occupied long enough to change them.  Thank God for the future, that I get to be a dad for the next three score years and ten (yes, that adds up to 104 years once you count my current age... I come from long lived stock).

All of which leads me to a reminder (one can‘t call it a conclusion) I didn‘t expect to reach when I started typing: Bugger law school. Bugger my job. Bugger a whole swathe of other things. I need to find a way of always reminding myself that the list of really important things in life is pretty short. And that Joni and Grace and Rachel are always going to be at the top of mine, and never need to be in doubt about it.

And BTW, skype date tomorrow morning!!! I am a happy little Vegemite!

See you tomorrow.