Can't Say I Wasn't Warned

I should have heeded my own warning. SLOW, or Sudden Leisure Onset Wellness is real, and it causes irrepairable brain damage.

Actually, I should have paid more attention to the very clear sign posting at the entrance to Denarau Island.
There were other, less obvious signs of SLOW everywhere too, if only I'd known then just where to look...

...clocks with the numbers mysteriously jumbled and out of order, bookstores with nothing but titles by Clive Cussler, Danielle Steele, Dan Brown, Anne Rice, Wilbur Smith and a raft of others, none of whom had ever won a litterary award of any note. Add the very awful Malaysian Star TV Satellite network that seemed to be running Really Bad Science Fiction Week. It took me too long to realise that each of these was a sign of impaired cognitive ability.

Let's not forget the drinks with fruit and little umbrellas too... a different one each day. At $10 a hit, that we kept buying them was a true indication of the rapid degenerative progress of this disease.

And it's Fiji, where it seems anyone within 50 metres of you has to shout "Bula", which the locals claim is "Hello" in whatever language they speak when we're not watching, but which I'm actually fairly certain roughly translates to "oh look... another stupid foreigner". It has to be an in joke. Why else would they smile every bloody time they shouted it at you? It's not like western tourists are actually likeable.

I've been back for nearly two full days now, and fear it might be too late. I recognise some of the symptoms. I've been wearing very bright shirts around the house, and even up to the local store once. Short sleeve. In the middle of winter. There 's the pile of mail that was in my mailbox too. It just sits there unopened, and my interest in its contents is best described as CGAF. I can't even remember where the washing machine is. I just stuffed my clothes in a big plastic bag and left them at the door. I can't understand why they're still there, nor do I comprehend why the fridge hasn't been filled up with beer, wine and coke while I've been out. Somethings just not right.

Ah well. They say if one heads for a warm oceanside tropical climate, the symptoms of SLOW are less noticeable. Maybe I'd better start looking at real estate with coconut palms.

Priorities and Standards

One of the true pleasures of travelling is reading the local newspaper and the good folk at the Westin Denarau delivered a copy of the Fiji Sun to our door each morning.

Ah. Fiji. Such an uncomplicated place...

And it's nice to see standards being maintained somewhere in the world. Take this story from the front page of Thursday's edition...

Grog Vomit Priests Face Ban
By Maika Nagalu
The Methodist Church does not allow its ministers to drink too much grog, and if anyone is found vomiting from it, he will be suspended, said its General Secretary, Reverend Ame Tugau.

He said that the church had been practicing all this proceedures from a long time. However, he said that they only drink grog during occasion and not something that they do every day.

For my American reader, 'grog' is Aussie slang for booze.

Now isn't this a comforting story? It's nice to know that if you're a minister in the Methodist Church in Fiji, you're allowed to drink yourself under the table, but a technicolour yawn is going to get you suspended.

Now THAT's called maintaining standards!

Epidemic

The last time this bear got on an aeroplane for no reason at all other than the pursuit of leisure was July 2005. I remember it well... I was in Miami, had a week to kill, and shuffled myself off to Club Med Martinique for a week.

So today, dear reader, is a very historic day. I'm officially on 'holidays', and in about two hours, I fly off to Fiji (sans mobile phone) to sit under a palm tree, read a book, play a bit of tennis, play even less golf and generally do nothing much at all.

Like any workaholic, I'm a little nervous about this. I understand there is risk of serious and permanent brain damage. Dr J says the medical name for it is SLOW or Sudden Leisure Onset Wellness. It's characterised by an overwhelming sense of "couldn't care less", and an inability to see the urgency in any task at all. She said it's impossible to go to the tropics without being exposed to it, and millions of people around the world have undiagnosed SLOW.

She's not all that familiar with it... she doesn't see many cases in her practice, but one of her colleagues, now working in Brisneyland, a large city on the south eastern corner of Queensland, sees it there in epidemic proportions.

He says it's the unsung global pandemic and laments that it's a condition that doesn't get the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ah well. If I'm somehow "different" when I get back, you'll know why, and you'll be able to go out and start warning your friends of the dangers of this insidious condition.

Anniversary

It's coming up to the 5th anniversary of 9/11.

I was going to put a picture here of Chester The Bear. It's a picture shot at the WTC a year or two before the attack when the bear was travelling more than any bear should. I was going to write some words about what an awful act of cowardly bastardry happened on that day.

That's what I had planned.

But when my fingers started reaching for the keys, a different story started to come out, one far more personal. Do I write it? Do I keep it inside? And if I write it, is it really something I want to share with the three or four people who actually come and read my blog? That you're reading it here gives you my answer. Perhaps this is self indulgent, but hey, it's my blog, and I'll cry if I want to.

I'm not American. I don't live in New York. But 9/11 effected me directly and personally, and in ways you, my readers, are unlikely to understand. You see, life as I knew it ended that day, and the chain reaction that was to follow is yet to fully play itself out.

First, a little background. For ten years before 9/11, I had been a business development guy. Now sometimes "business development" is just a euphemism for "salesman" but that wasn't my role. My job was to find business, either to start or to buy, to grow a global company. It was well paid, fast paced, and kept me on aeroplanes and out of Australia for at least two weeks in every month.

It was one of those "dream jobs", where I got to travel anywhere I thought I needed to go, any time I thought I needed to go there, flying biz class all the way, staying in 5 star hotels and burning up an almost limitless expense account. Sounds glam, yes? I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it just a little, but I will tell you that when your record is 13 trips around the world in 12 months, it really stops being fun.

So that was my job, and I've lost count of the number of times I took a United flight out of Newark, Logan, Dulles or JFK bound for San Francisco or LAX.

I was at home that week. I'd been with a new company for about a year, pretty much doing the same as I had been doing for the old company. My title was "General Manager, Special Projects", which was a completely made up title, but which sort of conveyed what I was supposed to be doing. The special project I was buried in was a biggie, and it meant I was getting to spend way more time at home than normal.

At about 4pm on the afternoon of 9/11 (that's about 5 hours before the terrorists did their stuff… remember that Perth, where I lived at the time, is 12 hours ahead of New York) I was called into my boss's office. The board had, that afternoon, decided to pull the plug on the project. At a risk of US$180m, it was too big for the company to handle, so they were pulling out and that meant waving bye bye to me.

Stupidly (or maybe that should read "arrogantly"), when I signed on, I didn't build one of those golden parachutes into my contract but that was OK. I was bloody good at what I did, had given keynote papers at international conferences, and even testimony to a state legislature in the US as an “expert witness”. I was confident all would be right.

My (now ex) wife (let’s call her Elle, which isn’t her real name but it’ll do, and it’s better than the two other things she gets called around here, PBFH and TEO) was away that day on the other side of the country visiting her parents. That's another advantage of a job like mine... an almost inexhaustible supply of frequent flyer points. We could go anywhere we wanted to go, whenever we wanted to go there, and the previous weekend, she'd decided to head east and take a little time with her mum and dad in a small town in New South Wales called Wagga Wagga.

I spent the next few hours at home, calmly calling business contacts and lining up my next contract. I was talking to some guys in London... actually, the clients for that very big project my previous employer had just killed off. The project was still on... just not with my guys.

"Chester, turn on your TV. A plane's just hit the World trade centre in New York. Got to go old chap" and he hung up.

I thought he was talking about some Cessna 172, and I figured I’d catch it on the late news. I tried to make a few more calls but couldn’t get through, so eventually wandered downstairs and switched the TV on just in time to see the second plane.

Like the rest of the world, I sat in stunned disbelief. I knew people in those towers. Not close friends, but business associates. I had meetings there… plenty of meetings. It was, after all, the office of the Port Authority and my field was maritime. I knew those guys.

The unthinkable was unfolding before the world. No-one believed what they were seeing. I remember when the first tower collapsed… it was quite clear from the pictures that the tower had come down, yet even the reporters couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing. The commentary went something like “oh dear, there appears to have been another explosion”.

By about 3am, I started to realize that my world has just come down too. The work that I did wasn’t going to be much in demand and anyway, I’m not sure I had the stomach for it any more. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was relieved that I didn’t have to get on another aeroplane the next day.

Ok. So the towers came down, there was lots of grief, many tears, shock, disbelief, all of the emotions that any sane human being would have had on that day. So why was Chester any different? After all, I wasn’t in the towers. I wasn’t on the planes, I didn't lose loved ones... but I sat empty, not daring to take my eyes of the TV. For the next day and a half I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat. I just stared at the TV coverage. I couldn’t believe it, and I knew what it meant (or at least I thought I did).

Within 24 hours, the next big hit was heading my way, and there was nothing that could be done to stop it. Remember those frequent flyer points? Remember how they would allow me to travel anywhere I needed to go? They were a security blanket, but the airline they were held with was about to go under. I had managed to drag myself away from the coverage just long enough to get Elle on the last flight that airline ever operated.

Whoosh. Career, WTC and about a million points, all gone in the space of 48 hours.

I just withdrew into my shell. I’d put on the brave face, of course, and I’d make a few calls every day… a sort of half hearted effort to get back into the game, but the game just wasn’t there any more. It would take me ten months to get back into full time work, by which time, it was too late.

You see, readers, what was coming next was a body blow.

Elle had been unwell. Very unwell. She didn’t have cancer, but she still needed chemotherapy and it was only now that she was getting strong enough to pick up her career. She’d actually headed home to see her parents because she was starting a new job the following week, her first in four years. She knew this was the last opportunity she’d have to travel for a while.

What I didn’t know, though, was that she liked it when I traveled a lot. It gave her time for some extra curricular activities. She loved me being around just a little, and hated me being around all the time. She even managed to shuffle me off to a sculpting course one weekend just to get me out of the house. In retrospect, I have a pretty fair idea of what she was doing that weekend. At the time, it was just “a few drinks with the girls”.

I also didn’t know that for the entire time we’d been married, she’d bled me dry. She was spending cash at a rate of $1,000 bucks a week (and that’s on top of the grocery bill and her medical care, all of which were charged to the Amex). This was a thousand bucks in cash, cleverly disguised by shunting money from one account to another before she pulled it, little bit at a time, out of the ATM, and I was too busy to bother with trivial things like bank accounts. That, she insisted, was her job, and she fiercely defended it as the only contribution to the household she could make while she was so ill…

… which of course meant that she didn’t like it much that the money and jet set lifestyle had dried up too.

So she left… she wasn’t happy in that new job and called me one afternoon to tell me she would be late home. She was going to an interview. I wished her luck. She got home at 5am, and moved in with her interviewer the next day. And can you believe she actually charged the dinner with this arsehole to my credit card?

The best bit was, he was a con-man, facing criminal charges in another state for defrauding little old ladies and disabled people of their life savings… something like $4mil in total.

So she decided that life with a criminal con-man was better than life with the guy who held her hand at every chemo session, who shaved his head when her hair started falling out, who proposed to her atop the Empire State Building in New York on very chilly December evening eight years before, and who sold his house to pay for the uninsured part of her medical treatment. No. That guy wasn’t good enough. She wanted Mr Conman. He had more money.

I know some of you will be thinking "big deal... some friggin high paid exec lost his job... get over it." You're right, of course, (though it wasn't as 'high paid' as you might think) and the purpose of writing this was not to elicit sympathy but to simply say "yup... special day".

I also know that some of you will be reading this and thinking Chester’s got an over-active imagination. One of you, though, knows it’s all true, and if it hadn’t been for CAW, I’m not sure I’d have survived to the end of the blizzard. I love you girl. You are the very meaning of the word friendship and that American of yours had better look after you!

And CAW also knows this is just half the story, but I’ll stay on topic and end by saying the crushing devastation was now nearly complete. While I don’t blame the events of 9/11 for all of it, that next twelve months, the second worst twelve months of my life, will be indelibly linked to the tragedy of that day, September 11, 2001.

I will reflect at 8.45 on September 11. I will say a prayer of thanks that I am here telling this tale. I will observe the silence and think much about how the world has changed. And some of that thought will be very personal indeed.

Trouble At The Kebab Shop

A Beef Kebab... Food with near "National Dish" status in Australia

Photo courtesy of AliBaba... a great Kebab Shop.

There are few things an Aussie delights in more than a bloody good kebab. If you're a fellow Aussie reading this, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If not, try and follow along anyway.

The kebab, you see, is almost a national dish in Australia, and in the big cities (we only have 5 of those), it enjoys status equal to, if not beyond that of the other great Aussie delicacy, the meat pie. I guess it's one of the rare triumphs of a cultural diversity policy that's seen people come to our great land from just about everywhere on earth. Few readers would know that it's part of our national immigration policy...

IMMIGRATION OFFICER: Where you from?
YOU: [insert country here]
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: What's your national dish?
YOU: What?
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: Food mate. What food do you eat?
YOU: Oh. [insert favourite national dish here]
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: Taste good?
YOU: What's this got to do with my immigration application?
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: Just answer the question, or I'll move on to one of the other 973 million people waiting outside who clearly want to come to Australia more than you do.
YOU: What was the question?
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: The [national dish]. Does it taste good?
YOU: Yes, I suppose so.
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: Can you cook it?
YOU: Um. Now?
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: No mate. When you get to Australia. It will be a condition of your immigration visa approval that you open a restaurant or take away bar offering [national dish].
YOU: But what if Aussies don't like [national dish]?
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: Mate, if we don't like your food, then you can bugger off back to where you came from... you won't be welcome in Australia.

And so it is that we have a magnificent assortment of foods to choose from... all the usuals, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Hungarian, French, Spanish... plus a few exotics, and something called "Fusion", which is what happens when someone like Japanese born Tetsuya Wakuda heads off to France to learn how to be a chef before he has the above interview. The bottom line is, if they've migrated to Australia, they have a restaurant to prove it.

So... back to the Kebab, a dish of Middle Eastern origin, usually presented in Australia in one of two forms... the Turkish kebab or the Lebanese kebab. All that means is that two large ethinc groups here, the Turks and the Lebanese, both nominate the Kebab as a national dish. The only real way to tell them apart is that the Lebanese usually plaster the Lebanese flag all over their shop, which in turn means that good old fashioned xenophobia makes the Lebanese kebab less popular, plus the Turks seem to be able to overcook the meat a little better. (Also, you need to be driving a particular kind of car to park outside a Lebanese Kebab Shop... one that is purple or orange, with very fat mag wheels on the back, and a doof doof stereo system that can be heard on Mars, but that's perhaps a subject for another blog.)

There are some essential ingredients for a great kebab... the aforementioned overcooked meat that's been going around and around on that vertical spit for just a day too long... some slightly limp lettuce, over-ripened tomato, a little of some secret recipe humous just like their great aunt used to make back in the old country, really fresh tabouleh that gets stuck on your teeth...

...and at the end of the essembly process comes a question... "wohsorsedyowonmate?" as he points to an array of big plastic squeeze bottles. There's usually four to choose from, tomato, chilli, barbecue and garlic and you can have any combination. That can be a daunting question for the uninitiated... but your choice of any sauce is safe (though only the very bold or very drunk will choose all of them).

One of the reasons the Kebab's achieved "national dish" status is it's mythical ability to prevent/cure hangovers, and that means they're often available on a direct route between your nearest pub and home.

But readers, there's trouble at my local kebab shop. It's changed owners, and like all stupid people who buy someone elses successful small business thinking they need to change it to make it better, the new owners decided they needed to play with the formula, and the recipe.

They've DROPPED the garlic sauce!

It's a bloody disgrace. Where's their national pride? Where's their respect for their adopted country? What made them think that the creamy garlic mint sauce available as an optional extra is what I wanted when I said "jusssumgarlicthangsmate".

If I'd wanted Garlic & Mint, I'd have said "garlicnminthangs" when they asked me the question. Did they hear me say "garlicnminthangs". Bloody NO. I said "jusssumgarlicthangsmate".

It's just fortunate I was paying attention. I stopped them from ruining my kebab. Sadly, Dr J's mind was elsewhere and she didn't notice the garlic and mint going onto her kebab before they wrapped it up and threw it under the toaster.

She ended up eating half of mine.

This is not the end of this. Not by a long shot.

I'm Watching Again!

Yup.

World Poker Tour. Friday night... Fox 8.

It's compelling viewing and I still have no idea why.

Inappropriate

There's something curiously wrong with deciding that 2am is the right time to clean the bathroom. It's not that I have insomnia... actually, I have no trouble sleeping at all. It's that I have ADD. Got the brain scans and really cool drugs to prove it, and when the attention goes into deficit, that spot on the bathroom floor isn't safe, so matter how inappropriate the hour.

Just look at my day yesterday. I have a to-do list that runs into pages. Yeah. So what. Big bloody deal. Everyone has multi-page to-do lists. Mine's even sorted into some vague order of priority, if for no other reason than to give the list symmetry and structure. It certainly isn't to give my life symmetry and structure, or to focus me on the jobs that need doing first.

Yesterday, I HAD to get a briefing paper prepared for one of our business partners. We're talking about a big deal here... the sort of deal that delivers a high enough pay-off to focus anyone's attention. And I decided, half way through the intro page, that NOW was a good time to edit the video that runs in the window of our pilot store. NOW. Bugger the big deal. Bugger the 300 other things on the list. No Chester... you go edit that video. Forget that it's not on your list... the creative spark's flickering in your straw brain right now.

Some would just say I lack discipline. Maybe, but at least I can sleep knowing I have a very clean bathroom.

A Magnificent Design

Ok. So I don't know if you believe in God or not. It's really none of my business, and this little rant isn't about that, it's about something that puzzles me... Creationism.

I had a coffee a week or so back with an old friend... except that she's gone a little loopy, and has become a fundamentalist. I was telling her about our flagship product that matches a medication to a person's DNA. She wouldn't hear of it. Told me the whole DNA thing was just part of the evil godless evolutionist conspiracy, and that God created Adam and Eve on the 6th day.

Of course, there's no point arguing with someone's core belief.

But on the way home, I was still having the argument in my head. You know... when you don't get to say what you wanted to say at the time and you finish the argument with yourself later. (Usually, I just don't think of the really good arguments until later, but in this case, I was just being too polite.)

So somewhere between the South Pylon of the Harbour Bridge and the Artarmon exit of the Gore Hill Freeway, I started talking through the alternatives possible to my friend. This, by the way, is the true freedom the age of the mobile telephone delivers... you can sit in your car all alone, talking to yourself, and the person in the car next to you doesn't give it a second's thought. Sorry, I digress...

...She believes in a Divine hand in the creation of life, but she just can't bring herself to believe her ancestor may have been a monkey.

THIS is the bit that I can't understand in people like her...

Behind door number 1 is the Creationist version... life created by this being who designs each living organism, each animal, each vegetable, and places it on a created world as though it's a train set. It's a simplistic, child-like model, and if I was God, I think I'd be just a little insulted.

Or

Behind door number 2 is a different version that still involves a Divine hand (because that's a necessary part of her fundamental beliefs)... of life created by a being who makes a single celled organism, and creates within it, a learning. adapting self replicating programmable instruction set, so that this single celled organism can adapt to whatever conditions it finds, and can grow, multiply, mutate and evolve into whatever it's surroundings allow it to be.

Surely, of the two choices, it is the second that is truly magnificent, yet she chooses to believe in the first, a version that reduces her God to the status of an engineer.

I just don't get it, though she will tell you that this thinking only serves to confirm something she's believed about me for some time, which is that I will burn in hell for all eternity. Ah well. Never mind. At least most of my friends will be there.

Now before anyone thinks I'm suggesting that these are the ONLY alternatives, you're not paying attention. I was just arguing through the alternatives that would be acceptable to her.

There'd be no point canvassing the third option, where the whole thing develops by random chance, and I'm definitely not going into the fourth option... you know the one... involving aliens and experiments on cows...

What Passes For Entertainment

Following on from my meanderings about humour, I found myself pondering the definition of "Entertainment" tonight.

What stimulated this was that I ended up watching "World Poker Tour" after the footy the other night, and the remote was too far away for me to be bothered getting up to change the channel. It was, after all, just background noise.

Now I barely know the rules, and while I can frit away an hour or two at the blackjack table, poker's always seemed a silly game to me.

I will admit, though, WPT was actually gripping entertainment, and I have no idea why.

Another Man's Poison

I received an email from my dad today. He's 80 which means he and his friends have way too much time, and are still mesmerized by email. He must get 50 jokes a day, and he dutifully filters them and sends me the only ones he thinks I'll like.

The email had the subject "Symptoms of Mad Cow Disease", and was photo of a buff, rippled guy taking off his towel and exposing 4 shlongs to his doctor. Dad thought it was so funny, he actually called me to make sure I had received it. Ok. It was mildly amusing, but am I out of step? I just didn't think it was THAT funny. (And NO, I'm not going to put it up on a website so you can look at it.)

It set me to thinking... what is it with humour, that makes something riotously funny to one, yet lame, or worse, even insulting to another?

Is it generational? Not entirely. Dad and I have been known to enjoy a joke or two together and most of the stuff he forwards is worthy, so I thought I'd look a little further.

Is it "class"? (Dare I use that word in this neuvo egalitarian world?). If you believe TV sitcoms, trailer trash think anything involving a bodily function, and especially a fart, is a riot, but some of my friends think that's funny too.

Is it cultural or national? Of course different countries have differing humour, but humour can also cross borders. Take the Danes for example. Now there's a people who can enjoy a joke, so much so that they named the highest point in Denmark "Himmelbjerget", or "The Sky Mountain". It's a towering 147 metres (482ft above) sea level.

There's a picture of Sky Mountain HERE, captioned as "The Frightening and Very Impressive North Face of Himmelbjerget", but if you don't get why calling it "Sky Mountain" is funny, then you won't get the rest of the site either.

It's a mystery to me. Really. Humour is universal, in that there's not a people on the planet who don't have something they think is funny, but what's funny to them probably isn't going to be funny to me, and even worse, what's funny to me today will probably be just plain bland in a few years.

By co-incidence, while I'm typing this, "Team America - World Police" is on cable in the background. Bloody hillarious, but my partner, Dr J just doesn't get it. Why? "Because it's not funny", she said as she wandered past my desk. Yes it is!

She says the same about my all time favourite movie, "Flying High" (or "Airplane" in the US, Canada and some other less interesting places). Surely Flying High/Airplane just has to be in the list of top 5 funniest films ever made.

Humour. How would I know?

The Power Of Zero

I call them "Zero Days".

They come along every now and then, and usually when there's a deadline approaching, but not quite close enough to switch the brain into hyperdrive. I guess it's my ADD taking over, but on Zero Days, I do absolutely nothing.

I sit at my desk, shuffling columns around in a spreadsheet, changing background colours in an Illustrator label project, or some other pseudo productive activity that actually has no beneficial outcome but makes it look like I'm being awfully busy.

You know what I mean. "Oh yes, that report's due for the meeting tomorrow, maybe I should clean up my inbox." or "The future of the company relies on you getting this software finished... great... I'll write a blog about it."

Not that I have to look busy. It's my company, and I work from home most days anyway, so what I do to fill in my day is up to me. I'm also a borderline workaholic right now, which is what happens when you try and build a new company, so it's not like I don't work hard and could use a day off...

But I hate Zero Days. I get to the end of them and think "I'll just do a few hours of real work now". At midnight. It's not the most intelligent time to decide to "do a few hours work", though it is rather quiet and I can be pretty sure I won't be interrupted by phone calls or emails (unless you count the ten or twenty viagra/cialis spams I get a day).

The worst bit though, is that if I really don't want to do any work at the keyboard, that's ok... there's plenty of other stuff to do, like cleaning the house, doing the washing, emptying the dishwasher, filing, even getting out into the fresh air. Maybe I could make a few calls, or do some reading, or even take my bicycle out for a spin. I could have done any of those things today.

But it was a Zero Day. I did none of them.