Hieronymous the Anonymous

The pay-off

I was up bright and uncustomarily early this morning. When I left the house the sun was a bright orange orb just over the horizon.

I was on my way to a suummit on Collective Intelligence hosted by IBM at the Hyatt Hotel. It was a subject that interested me personally and professionally. That professional interest is piqued by the need to network and market my services on an ongoing basis to professionals across industries and a variety of roles. This was another opportunity to do just that.

As hoped the summit was largely fascinating. I love learning things, I love coming to some kind of understanding. I'm motivated by a lot of things, and amongst those curiosity should not be discounted. I sat there and as usual found my mind putting the little bits of information fed to it into different constructs. As is my thing I looked at the potential of what was being presented into an integrated perspective. It excites me when that happens - I guess I'm a geek - because I yearn for the opportunity to actually put it into action.

The bonus out of the day was that I connected with a guy who might become a potential client. We'll see on that.

This is pretty much my world today. If I had not been with IBM today I'd have been over the river connecting at the Microsoft event. Yesterday I attended a lunch at the Australia Club for the Financial Executives. We sat at a long table with CFO's at some of Australia's biggest companies interacting over a glass of wine and a chicken involtini while someone - in this case Craig Drummond, CEO of Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia - presented a topic.

It was not really my crowd - my target market is logically SME's - but it was interesting and enlightening to be there. I always think I'm a poor networker. I cringe at the thought of blatantly selling myself, a skill some of my friends have in spades. I engage well though. I can march up to strangers and begin talking and within a minute or two have the run of the conversation. There were many there with same skill in great abundance - more so than me - but also many more deficient.

The venue was a bonus. Very old world la de da, high ceilings, polished wood furniture, gilt edged artworks as well as a few painted directly on the wall, a grand staircase and apparently a big poolroom where no doubt a few leather chesterfields are in evidence.

Last week I attended another function of slightly more casual nature. Upstairs at the Leveson hotel in North Melbourne was a panel discussion on Outsourcing Offshore. It's an interesting topic and once more something that is trending upwards. I took a lot out of the discussion, but the bonus was intereacting with the rest of the audience over a beer or wine before and after the event.

Almost aeveryone there was either an entrepeneur, a small business owner or a software developer. Everyone one of us have pretty much the samne challenges and so amongst us there was a common understanding. We exchanged information about this and that, what we do, how we do it, how we market, and tips we might have. Details are exchanged and agreement is made to keep in contact. There is the sense of the community because we know we can't do it by ourselves. Pay it forward works because if we do it for someone else, someone else will do it for us.

It was an enjoyable experience because I found myself sympatico to so many there. It makes you realise that generally it is a particular type of character who sets out on this independent road.

I've sort of enjoyed much of this, though I also see it as a necessary evil. It might take a while, but I see a lot of opportunity in this: I believe it will pay-off.

More than gay fiction

Cover of A Single Man

Killing time in Sydney the other week I went to the Kinokuniya bookshop for a hour. This has become an unexpected ritual for me. There is something about the store I like though I can't explain what - it is far from the intimate bookshop of cliche. I've been to the store in Singapore also, a vast space you could spend days in; and the store in KL to, in the Petronas tower.

This time walking in I stopped at a table of so-called gay fiction - the gay mardi gras was days away. A few days before I had watched The Hours for the very first time and been impressed by it. Though greatly reviewed I hadn't ever considered reading the book. That changed after seeing the movie - and there it was. It seemed meant to be.

I picked it up thinking that it didn't really fit my idea of 'gay' fiction, though it touches upon the subject. That wouldn't have stopped me reading it necessarily, my problem hitherto was that it seemed too feminine a book. That was my ignorance. The main characters are all women which makes for an emphasis that is vaguely feminine and sensitive, but the themes are universal. I wanted to read it.

Beside it on the table was another book very much of the moment: A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood. The movie adaptation of this was one of the best things I saw last year, so this too I collected and took to the counter.

I am now reading The Hours after completing A Single Man.

A Single Man was great. Gore Vidal described Isherwood as one of the great prose stylists, and there are passages and scenes in this small book that are beautiful to read and perfectly constructed. As you expect there is a depth and sensitivity to the story that magically made its way to the screen. George is a flesh and blood character easy to understand and identify with. You care for him. As his tale unfolds, as he goes about his business with fleeting thoughts across his mind, deeper reflections and occasional encounters with others, a life is revealed very true to what we know I think, and how we live no matter our desires. It is rich in experience and memory; it touches upon the poignant hopes and regrets all of us harbour.

It is a beautiful book, but though the movie is very similar it is different in very key aspect. Right from the first moment of the screen version George has committed himself to ending his life at the end of the day. He has battled on since the death of Jim, but it seems a hollow, futile exercise. What he had won't come again; the peak has past, his moment come and gone. Why go on? And so we follow as he prepares solemnly for that end and goes about his daily rituals for the last time.

Surprisingly that is an invention of the screenwriters. In the book George has no thought of doing himself in. He repines for Jim, he recalls constantly different moments of affection and happiness which make it to the screen. He is not unhappy in the book, but nor has his grief outworn him. He will go on even if existence is thinner, if meaning is less tangible. He is no automaton, but he will continue in the groove until his time is done.

It's rare that I prefer the movie over the literary version. I think it is a great book, but the expedient used in the movie makes it more powerful. It is the medium perhaps that makes this little contrivance so effective. The clock is ticking, an understated urgency pervades the film as George goes about his life knowing as we do that these are his last moments, the final occasions. For this to be realistic George's grief must be deeper, more pervasive - or seem to be.

I loved the book - to read is a different experience, and this is the work of a great writer. The movie is great also, perfectly wrought from the material and with the astute change which might not have worked so well on the page. Just for the record I've since bought Isherwood's Berlin Stories, some of which are the basis for the Bob Fosse movie Cabaret.

I have since started The Hours and am about halfway through. It is expertly written. In sections it echoes Mrs Dalloway, which it mirrors in style. It is a dense reading experience, deeply felt, though it is perhaps a little over-written for my taste. It seems a harsh quibble. That's a subjective assessment, and it is meant to take on much of the dense style of Virginia Woolf. There is no question of how authentic it feels: this is how we live also.

Related articles

• Isherwood diaries show a sharp-eyed observer of his time (pbpulse.com)
• Diaries Vol 1: 1939-1960, By Christopher Isherwood (ed Katherine Bucknell) (independent.co.uk)
• A Single Man: Glossy in Motion? (lemonochromatic.com)

Staining the sheets

Image via Wikipedia

I'm reading Portnoy's Complaint again this morning and laughing every couple of pages and thinking to myself that every woman should read this if they want to understand men. Not all of it is relevant - I mean the Jewish guilt thing won't apply in most cases, and perhaps most men aren't quite as sex-fixated as Portnoy is, but every man has that in him. They might have smaller doses, they might be cleaner, less scatological, in their sexual outlook and desires, but in every man I bet there exists to a lesser or greater degree that sexual focus.

It's not all about that, though everything ends up there. Portnoy has a Jewish angst in spades, he can't get enough of pussy in all its many varieties, and he's also an intellectual snob. For all it's ribald humour and brilliant exposition the book is a journey from an amusing bitterness at his prototypical Jewish parents and all they have done to him to an understanding of how judgemental he has become as a result.

'Monkey' is not not good enough for him ultimately because she comes from backwoods Southern stock, is poorly read and can't spell to save herself. I know plenty of people ready to make swift judgements on the same criteria, so it's not particularly unusual. Portnoy is the human rights commissioner however, a paragon of liberal virtue supposedly, and while plenty will rule someone out because of bad spelling (all my female friends do), Portnoy - Port-Noir - in his role as friend to the downtrodden should be better.

It's not as simple as that naturally. He doesn't mean to be. Often he doesn't really understand he's making those judgements. And if he is it's in large part because of the judgements he has been forced to grow up with - to be this, to do that, to live up to the impossible and occasionally ridiculous standards of a neurotic Jewish mother.

Amid the laughter and familiarity in reading this I find myself wanting to share the random thoughts that are refracted from the page. It's one of those books that makes me think, and want to share what I think. In a funny way my inability to really do that (outside of these pages) leads me around to Portnoy's view.

I'm a democratic character and have trouble in believing in subjective concepts of 'better'. Am I a better person by being smarter, taller or prettier than you? Of course not. Am I better than you because I spell better? No. Yet that's a judgement many people make every day. And I understand it.

There's a lot in this book that resonates with me. I have an IQ of 162. I've got used to the reality that much of what happens in my head I'll never get to share with anyone. Most people don't read as I do, don't read what I do, don't go off spinning ideas out of it. That I do doesn't make me better, but it makes me different to most of the population. That's life.

Reading this book though has re-awakened whatever angst I might feel at this. Part of Portnoy's complaint ultimately is finding someone he can be on equal terms with, without any of the great baggage he carries with him. He finds sexual companionship that is almost manic in it's obsession and imagination. If he allows himself he might find something of the emotional equivalent of it - though he doesn't allow it, not for long. What he doesn't find is the  solace that comes from opening your mind entirely and letting the intellectual bibs and bobs flow from it to another.

It may sound pretentious, but what the fuck, I remember now how I miss that myself. So much seems wasted, so much that with the right person becomes an integral element of a rich life together goes nowhere instead. Funny reading a book in which masturbation features so much to be thinking this because so much is intellectual onanism. I get up from bed reading my book, my thoughts staining the sheets.

The mutt and I

I left Rigby at my sisters last Saturday week. I was flying to Sydney on Monday and upon return was heading off down the peninsula for the weekend. In between I was without car and so Rigby was  locked in for an extended absence from home.

I missed him. I went out for dinner that first Saturday night and when I got home anticipated his greeting as I opened the front door, only to remember he was not there. The next couple of mornings waking up I missed his ministrations, how he sits his snout upon the bed looking at me with his big brown eyes, how he bounds up to join me, curling his body to shape to mine. I missed him following me around the house, his tail wagging, tail thumping, his beseeching glances as he looks to join me on the couch watching TV, and so on.

I love him, but I was surprised at how deeply that cut. You become familiar with a presence being there and unconsciously adapt yourself to that. When that presence is much loved the absence is felt very keenly. I'm an independepent and self-sufficient character and have spent much of my life doing my own thing - yet it only takes a couple of years for that to erode. I was in familiar territory and yet I pined for him in a way that everybody understood.

He's back now. It was a grand reunion. He's had a holiday and probably enjoyed himself, though my sister tells me he was a little lost for a few days. He is much loved - the boys call him the best dog in the world, and were excited to have him. My sister adores him.

So he's back now and I understand just what I feel for him. It's nice.

Empire building

I was reading Portnoy's Complaint again this morning sort of laughing along with it because besides being a brilliant book brilliantly written it's actually pretty funny and nodding my head at the same time every so often, knowingly exactly what Alexander Portnoy was all on about.

I'm not Jewish so I don't have Jewish parents, and while I find his neurosis caused by his overbearing Jewish folks wildly amusing I can only admit familiarity with the commonnly accepted truth - or caricature - of Jewish parents, and mother's particularly. That was not our common ground.

There is Portnoy in his mid-thirties, successful, maybe even brilliant, sex obsessed and single. There's at least a couple of things we have in common there. Another is the nagging by his parents - paricularly his father - about how he is single and how nice it would see him settled and with a grandchild on the way. I don't get that from my father, but it would not surprise me if on her deathbed mum exclaims her regret is not seeing me married up.

Anyway, I'm reading and sort of laughing and at the same time ofyen thinking I know exactly what he feels, exactly what he's on about. And it made me think.

I don't want to be that way, yet the alternative - barring a committed relationship - is pretty tame. As Portnoy when on about the absolute treasure trove of choice I understood completely. Into my head popped my own metaphor, how each woman is an undiscovered country you long to explore and, ultimately, claim. Each is different, and in this world there are millions of these countries with their own unique geography, climate and culture. What a rich experience it is to be an explorer of such lands!

Yet unlike Portnoy I want to settle. I'm not done planting flags if the alternative is living frugally on my own desert island - fuck no - but if given my dearest wish I would find that one person, that one world where I would find myself at completely now and forever.

And so I went out into the world with these not unfamiliar thoughts running through me. I've been in love a few times and miss the feeling. I've been in lust many more times and never get the opportunity to miss it. I like all sorts of women, and when I look at the women I've fallen for they vary quite considerably but for a few key attributes: they're all smart, and all have their own distinct individuality.

Fact is it's very rare for me to feel much more than lust and the occasional passing fancy for someone these days. That's a matter of regret for me. I argue to myself that the women I tend to meet romantically seem to play it safe, and that has no attraction to me at all. Consequently I find myself more and more to those rare individuals with something different. How do I characterise that? Best I can is from film. I had the hots for Ramona from Scott Pilgrim vs the World. She had attitude. They both have their unique take on the world. I like that, and the spirit they show taking it on.

Like I said, that's hard to find though. And tonight as if in counterpoint to this morning I was forced to consider something different. I met in passing a woman who was unlike those feisty women. What she had was a very sincere warmth that verged on the empirically good. In my brief exposure she seemed someone to admire.

I'm not a bad man. I'm a good person I think, and think commonly considered to be a kind, thoughtful and decent person - I hope so - but I think also I share some of the attributes commonly attributed to the 'bad' boy. Among men particularly my personality is strong, sometimes dominant, often unconsciously so. I like women and it's no secret to anyone. And I'm notoriously, automatically and almost addictively glib.

Those attributes meld well with the women I'm attracted to because they have strong identities themselves. It worries them not one whit because they see through it or challenge it. And that's what I like. They force me in their own way to become more intimate because they know better.

Tonight it struck me that a 'good' woman like the one I met may be equally effective, though in a very different way. I can see myself becoming direct and sincere because that is what they are; because, in a sense, anything else seems trite and I am shamed into it by their authentic personality.

I don't know if it works like that. I know pending the moment I find the person I can be absolutely myself with then I'll continue to be as Portnoy is. But I live in hope for something more.

Related articles

• Men and sex: not a healthy relationship (thepunch.com.au)

What's happening now

I flew up to Sydney last week to kill several birds with one stone.

I got to see dad again, and stayed with him the two days I was there. We had dinner and shared a bottle of wine and had a characteristically long and rambling conversation about everything from the state of Australian political debate (diabolical) to his burgeoning romance.

I also saw my brokers, who took me out to a lovely dinner at Wildfire. I've been investing with them for about 2 years and have built up a relationship that is more than just business. My main broker, Ben, is a genuinely nice guy. We had brunch last year when he visited Melbourne and he was keen to get me out for a meal should I visit Sydney - ergo last week.

It was a good night. Accompanying him was his offsider Chris. Both are from the NSW Central Coast, an area in my mind associated with bonzer people. I've yet to meet anyone from there I didn't like. These guys are no different, though are of a very particular type. Ben is about 30, Chris about 27. They both live in Bronte and are regular surfers first thing in the morning before work. They work-out just about every day, and while they like to enjoy themselves have an inclination towards a healthy lifestyle. Both are very fit. They're open minded, respectful, inquisitive, both with very liberal attitudes towards many of the great questions of the day, and - as befits the business perhaps - have keenly searching minds.

Our conversation was rich and provocative going and backwards and forwards and then peering into the future. The churrasco would visit our table from which we would partake, before returning to the conversation. Whilst genuinely curious and engaged the reality is their business is to look forward, to predict trends, to find links and dependencies. Much of them are economic and financial, but many also are political, even social. And so we discussed the unrest in the Middle East heartened by what was happening and hoping for more - whilst considering the market implications.

I also met up with an old boss of mine. Peter E was my boss when I was an IT Consultant. We got on well right from the word go, and he's the only one from those days I still have any contact with. He's a rangy Swede, good looking, intelligent and affable, we clicked because we saw in each other some reflection of ourselves - independent, restless and free spirited.

He has now resigned having risen to the role of regional manager. He got bored and is now looking for something that suits his state of mind. As much as our lunch was a social reunion there was also the opportunity to network to our mutual benefit. I gave him some tips - never sell yourself short, never worry if you can do it or not (you always can) - and we agreed to look out for each other and potentially for opportunities to work together.

I've been busy in general doing all sorts of things to generate business. I'm attending functions, presentations, joined networking groups, was to attend a SharePoint conference (tomorrow), and have met with industry types who have given me some great tips. It's a largely tedious process, but absolutely necessary. The most promising job opportunity is one in Jakarta, a short term role that normally I'd jump at - it sounds interesting, fun - but which I can't do because I can't leave mum.

That's where it's at.

Another one down

I'm not big on these things, but it was my birthday Friday. A bunch of us went out for drinks and dinner and the newly re-furbished Newmarket hotel in St Kilda. The Newmarket used to be a pub where you could get a decent schnitzel or goulash while perving on one of the topless barmaids. Times have changed. It's now a very trendy and popular nouveau pub, slick and with aspirations towards the gourmet end of the market. Not bad.

I spent the night at JV's because my car's in the shop and because we set off saturday morning for a boys weekend away. We hooked up with Cheeseboy and on a sunny Melbourne day headed down towards the peninsula. We stopped on the way in Red Hill where we had lunch amongst the pumpkin patch at Montalto, a good pizza each and an excellent bottle of pinot to share. Very pleasant.

Early afternoon and we're in Rosebud and about to play golf. Eighteen holes later the four of us - another has joined us - are buggered from traipsing around 7000 metres of golf course, zig-zagging to follow wayward balls and towards the end peering into the dusk searching for the way home. We even lost once on the poorly signed course, playing a hole on the other course.

Dinner was in Rosebud at a place called the Rose GPO. It was excellent. I had the roo and a beer and then back to the rooms for a night of poker playing and drinking. Finally hit the sack at about 2am feeling very sore and sorry - which I remain having done something untoward to my back.

Yesterday was a leisurely drive home, stopping first to have a hot breakfast. That's it - another birthday out of the way.

 

iPad dreams

Image by Jennifer Maddrell via Flickr

So today's iPad 2 day. Like many have been waiting for this day. Like a lot I had every intention of finally joining the iPad in crowd with this release. I was champing at the bit in fact...but, methinks I'll now wait for the iPad 3.

No doubt the iPad 2 is an advance on the original. It's smaller and lighter, and probably cuter for all I know, and has some nice improvements, including the much discussed camera. On balance though, and judging only by what I've read, there's not enough for me to splash my hard earned knowing at some point a much enhanced iPad 3 is going to hit the market.

That's it really. This release seems interim, it's got enough to get the punters excited, but not enough really to justify someone like me - more discerning, a little more tech savvy - to jump in. I want an iPad. I crave an iPad - I already have the apps. I don't need one though, and for all my drooling I'm willing to wait for v3 to fulfill all my iPad dreams.

Related articles

• Forget the iPad 3, The iPad 2 Is Awesome Right Now! [Opinion] (cultofmac.com)
• Appel unveils iPad 2 (slyvisions.com)