The room where ideas are born

I went there yesterday, to the room where ideas are born. It was terrifying.
My colleague and I walked through the lift lobby; a judge swept past in the other direction, resplendent in his silks and wig. The lift was a glass box on the outside of the building and it shot up like a bullet. Within seconds I was hovering above the surrounding buildings, looking out to the suburbs and mountains beyond. If I wasn’t so scared, maybe I would have pretended I was in Willy Wonka’s glass elevator. But I was petrified, grasping onto the handrail until my knuckles turned white under two mistaken beliefs that:
1. The lift would break off the side of the building and I would plummet to my death; and
2. Holding onto the hand rail would save me.

It wasn’t the kind of situation for indulging in childhood memories anyway. This was a grown up place; pristine and powerful. Out of the lift and in the most beautiful office space I have ever been in, we were ushered into a meeting room looking out over the whole Eastern Suburbs and lower North Shore of Sydney. Wow. I thought the view would distract me from the meeting. Not a chance. The three men I sat with tossed around deep thoughts, complex concepts and far thinking plans. All I could feel was the difference between their intellect and mine.

It really was a room where ideas are born. I wondered how many other people had sat in this room to solve high level problems and generate amazing strategy. How many cornerstone decisions had been made by people sitting in my seat? In such a dizzyingly high room, I was way out of my depth. It made me scared of how much I don’t know and it whet my appetite for a smarter, more strategic mind. As the meeting wrapped up I found myself secretly desiring the kind of wisdom that would let me think on equal terms with these people.

The meeting ended – one of the men needed to rush off. Fair enough. A man like that would have many other places to go. But he startled me with his comment:

“We need to pray before we go.”

Like a slap in the face! How easily I forgot God sitting nearly 40 stories in the air, staring out over the houses of the richest people in Sydney! How easily I forgot God as I glimpsed the brilliance of the people around me! How quickly I had indulged in selfish desires to improve my skills and status! It was just another situation where the creation was so dazzling that I forgot the creator behind it all. He is quiet and modest and he turns everything upside down. He defines glory as being born as a human in a feeding tray, loving and serving the people who are weakest and being publicly tortured and executed.

At least some of the people in the room hadn’t been fooled, even in the midst of all the things that distracted me. We descended back to earth in the glass elevator. I wanted one kind of wisdom, but I know I need a different kind. I have lots of thinking to do about the kinds of things I want for my future.

High Culture

Within the last week, Matt and I have done three particularly cultured things:
1. We saw Bell Sharkespear’s performance of Twelfth Night at the Opera House.
2. We visited Sculpture by the Sea.
3. We went to the Opera House again to see the Australian Ballet’s Edge of Night.

Sculpture by the sea was alright, but the events at the Opera House really took the cake. Twelfth Night made me laugh until I cried, multiple times. And, amazingly, so did the ballet! The final piece, Molto Vivace, was a hilarious parody of traditional ballet set to some of Handel’s most beautiful and upbeat string music. I was in stitches as an extremely tall ballerina entered the stage in the middle of the piece (obviously sitting on another person’s shoulders, who was hidden under her enormous skirt) and demanded to be romanced by her male partner. I nearly fell off my chair laughing when she slipped away leaving her partner dancing with her torso-less skirt.

Rivers, bays and beaches

Today I almost acomplished a long-held childhood ambition – to cycle all the way from my home to Kurnell. It has been a dream of mine ever since I began exloring the Cooks River cycleway as a novice primary-school-aged cyclist. Today the dream only just eluded me – finding myself at the intersection between the route to Kurnell and the route to Cronulla, I tried to push on to my goal, but I had to turn back and head for Cronulla instead because of the pain in my legs. My decline in fitness as I have grown up is really distressing. But even though I was in pain, I did manage to get to Cronulla in an hour and 45 minutes, which is faster than I expected!

Frost

It was colder in Hurlstone Park than I ever remember it being.
This morning I got into the car and there was a sheet of frost on the windscreen. I sat there for five minutes with the airconditioner on waiting for it to clear enough to drive. That has never happened to me before. What are you supposed to do when your car window frosts over? Maybe I should have tipped warm water over the windscreen. It was very cold.

When I came over the hill at Canterbury I had a sweeping view of the racecourse. The track and the grassy carparks were white with frost. It was very pretty! But very un-Sydney.

In praise of Marrickville

Lame doctors and appreciating Sydney

This morning involved an early trip to the doctor to get some antibiotics. I hate taking antibiotics, so it’s kind of unfortunate. But sometimes you just need to take them, and this morning I realised that I was facing one of those times.

When I try to cram the doctor in before work, I have only one option. I must go to the worst doctors in the universe, the ones at Campsie Medical Centre. Capmsie Medical Centre is like the upmarket fast food restaurant of doctors surgeries. The centre is open from 7am to 10pm. There is a giant waiting room, and up to 8 doctors work at one time so the masses can be churned through at a helpful speed. It’s hard to have a regular doctor there. You just go and see the first doctor available to you. So it’s a convenient place, although I have had some slightly negative experiences there. Like one time, there was only one doctor working, and it was busy. I had a vaccination and the doctor left me to recover while he spoke to another patient. In his absence I had a seizure, much to the fear of my Dad, who was in the room with me at the time. When the doctor came back in he told me not to worry about it and made me go home. Quality care! Another time I had to get some tests done and the doctor was very busy, so he prescribed my drugs before I did the tests and then told me to go to the nurse for my tests. I’m sure that is a super-unethical thing for doctors to do.

Anyway. One of the nice things about going to Campsie Medical Centre before work is that I get to go to Campsie at 7:30 in the morning. Campsie really is a magical place. I keep joking to Matt that I want to move there, except that I don’t think I am joking most of the time. This morning I got to witness about 20 elderly Chinese people doing their exercise regime in Anzac Park. The park is not very big. I think it could be subdivided into 6 or 8 properties. The old people were scattered around teh whole park, and one man stood in the middle and shouted out instructions for the others. They were star jumping, and squatting, and running on the spot. It was beautiful. When I got out of the doctors an hour later, they had been replaced by a slightly younger group of chinese people doing Tai Chi, but I guess that’s not that unusual.

The doctor meant I was late to work this morning even though I drove in. I missed out on getting good parking, so I had to park on the distant side of Harris Park. It wasn’t that bad really. Parking over there means I get to walk to work via the Harris Park Heritage walk, which takes me through the old farming estates that were established 200 years ago. There are still original buildings standing, and original trees. It was a beautiful walk to finish off a hectic morning. I will walk it again another time and take photos to share.

You make me happy when skies are grey

Things that are fun to do?

Currently, there are a number of thing that I really really love doing. They are the things that I look forward to when I am at work or doing jobs. I love teaching myself to knit. I love riding my bicycle to Campsie and wandering up and down Beamish street. I love going to the Campsie library and reliving my childhood. I love sitting on the couch in Matt’s arms and making plans. I love sitting on the couch in Matt’s arms and discussing theology. I love tending the plants that we grow and looking forward to some time when we’ll have a garden. I love playing around on Photoshop and making icons from High School Musical, Black Books, Holly’s Heroes and any Jane Austen adaptation. I love listening to my music at home, and in the car and on my bike. I love dancing to Justin Timberlake. I love dwelling on the lyrics of Sufjan Stevens. I love getting lost in Vivaldi’s counterpoint. I love watching girly movies with friends. I love watching girly movies with my husband. I love the feeling of making something from scratch. I love the feeling of finishing the washing up. I love it when the windows are open and I can smell fresh mint and drying roses. I love it when friends come over unexpectedly. I love seeing my grandparents nearly every week. I love it when they are happy. I love having enough time to take the long route by public transport.

I’m going to go and do some of those things now. After I clean the house 😛

A visit to Con

Matt has worn through the soles of his good pair of shoes, so he asked me to take them over to the local shoe-fixing man, because they are that good. He would rather fix than replace them.

The local shoe-fixing man is Con. He is not a shoe-fixing man like the ones at Mr Minit or Shufix, the chain stores you see in the middle of your local shopping centres where you get your keys cut. Con is a cobbler. He doesn’t just fix shoes – he makes them! He has a little shop on the main drag of Hurlstone Park. The walls are covered in shoe moulds and huge sheets of leather in all different colours. The little counter at the front is cluttered with cobblers tools; to the side of the counter is an old-school, unelectrified sewing machine. Pinned up around the place are yellowed newspaper clippings recalling past Greek soccer victories. Between the months of September and March, there is a little stand at the door of the shop, from which he sells herbs and other plant cuttings from his garden. He also has a large collection of cats. I’m guessing none of them are desexed. When the herbs come out in the spring, there is also a new collection of kittens that plays among the pots at the front of the shop.

Con kept me in the shop for 10 minutes to give me marriage advice, to give me investment advice and to tell me about his history, how he moved from Thessaloniki to Earlwood to Hurlstone Park and has four kids and five grandkids. It was like going back in time – a shop which probably hadn’t changed much since he started it in the 60s, when business owners knew all their clients personally and you didn’t just visit shops to buy things, but to call in on your neighbours. I didn’t realise how much I was missing all those times I have gone to Mr Minit.

Jeremiah was a bullfrog.

Planning a wedding sucks so much. Earlier on in the year, I noticed how the experience swung between good and bad times, with the good gradually getting better and the bad gradually getting worse. And now it is the worst possible thing it could be. I fear that it won’t pick up until the actual wedding day itself. It sucks to be at home, because everytime my mum gets a chance to talk to me, it’s to tell me about how stressed she is, and then we sit down and make yet another list of things to do in the lead-up to the wedding day. I’m aching for it to be over and done with.

The last couple days have been a little bit of an escape. Matthew is away running an event for CMS (the missionary society he works for) for the next week. Yesterday I went up to Katoomba for the first day, and it was lovely. There were lots of new people to meet nd lots of old people to catch up with. They introduced lots of missionaries who are home for the summer, either about to go out or having a break after a 3 year stint overseas. It was so encouraging to hear their stories and see the things they are doing. Quite a lot of them were going to Japan and Slovenia. I don’t know why – they seem like such random countries. But there you go. I guess God will be doing some cool things there! Please keep these countries in your prayers! The churches there are very small, and the missionaries work very hard. Another cool thing I got to do was hang out with Kristi while Mark sold books, which, apart from seeing Matt, was pretty much the coolest thing I did all afternoon. The second coolest thing I did was see my friend Andrew, who has been overseas in South Africa helping out another missionary family. He has had a very tough year. He went straight from uni to ministering to homeless people in Johannesburg. His house also got burnt down a few months ago.

Today I have continued my escape from wedding planning by not going home after work. Instead I went back to Matt’s empty house. I have spent the afternoon in Ewen park, the lovely park of my childhood. Once we would have to spend a day at the end of a primary year at Ewen Park for our school Christmas picnic. It was a half an hour walk from school, which was traumatic for 10 year olds in the summer. One year, our teacher, Ms Viswanath, got to drive down because one week earlier my classmate Lindsay fractured her ankle when he threw the bat playing T-Ball. They always told you not to throw the bat, and I guess that was why. So I am sitting in the park with our new wireless internet thing – just like in the TV ads when they show all the cool people using the internet in a beautiful meadow or something. Except that the grass is really itchy, I am being harrased by ugly bugs and I’m sitting looking at the Cooks River.

Fortunately the tide is not so low as to expose the car parts on the side of the riverbed.

Well, that’s the end of that stream of consiousness…

39 days.

We had our last week of scripture this week. Anyone who has seen me on tuesdays this year has probably heard me complaining about how hard it is and how much I hate it, but in retrospect, it’s been fantastic. Our last class in the classroom was actually last week. It was the second best lesson I had. I got to give away a bible, the kids were really into the class, and everyone listened to me (a really rare event). My classroom teacher was beautiful, she came and told me how much I had grown in skill throughout the year and apologised for not being around to help out more. I’m really going to miss her, and all the kids.

This week, our church was responsible for the combined assemblies. My friends Andrew and Fiona did all of the work to prepare it, but Fiona was away so I got to help out at the front. We sang “My God is so big” with the infants kids, and the primary kids sang some sort of Christmas carol rap fusion that Andrew put together. The kids loved it. Instead of a silly nativity play thing, Fiona had put together a slide show of the Christmas story where her year 6 kids had dressed up and taken photos. And Andrew did a sweet talk. It went so well, even the principal was impressed with it, which was very reassuring for Andrew.

I will also miss the other Scripture teachers, after spending time with them every week, and listening to their health problems, their teaching advice, their stories about their families, their particular church politics and their daily reading habits. The best were Effie (in white) and Thelma (in pink, with her back to the camera). I won’t be back next year, but I am thinking of going back a year later, if it works. Maybe they will still be around then.

The other big thing that happened recently is that I went on National Training Event. Except that I didn’t go to the first half this year, the conference in Canberra. I only went to the last five days, where I went as part of a team of 15 to help out at a random church.

It just so happened that the random church I was allotted was Summer Hill Anglican. Summer Hill is the parish next door to Ashfield (my normal church). It is also the suburb where I spent much of my early childhood (my grandparents live there), and my adolescence (Mysty lives there, and the Muse cafe is there). So it was pretty cool ministering to the area, because there was so much connected to it. We ran scripture, we surveyed people (door knocking and talking to people on the main street), we held a kids club and a community working bee, we played chess with people in the town centre, we went to a Christmas party for the Friendship Group (a group for people with mental illnesses), visited Bethel nursing home and helped run the church service. As usual, it was a fantastic experience.