out with the old

1 12 2010

ok, i admit it.  i tend to hoard stuff.

it’s not like i have an attic with a lifetime’s collection of McDonalds wrappers, scifi action figures, & milk bottle foil tops, but despite the periodic shedding of junk that’s inevitable after a lifetime of house-moving every few years inculcated from my parent’s lifestyle (a story for another day), i still tend to accumulate more stuff than i ever need or are likely to use in the foreseeable future.

despite what i like to think of as a less-than-normal compliance to the consumerist lifestyle, there’s a few exceptions:  clothes, movie/tv media, & technology.  today i worked on my wardrobe.  i’ve given several bags of clothes to the Salvo’s over the last 4 years since i moved in here, and turfed a bunch of sneakers only recently, but after a couple of hours this afternoon, this is what i had culled:

3 of those piles are well over a foot high, more than 3 full garbage bags of jeans/pants, shorts, tshirts, shirts, jackets & hoodies, underwear, belts, beanies…  and i’m not done yet.  it’s less than half my wardrobe, stuff that’s either too small, too big, worn out, styled-out, or i never liked it in the first place.  hopefully the Salvo’s can find a new home for it.

i’m getting rid of this shit that’s been not just taking up space, space that i probably won’t have as much of in the new place with J, but a constant visible reminder of of the last 10 years of my life, some of which is good, but some not so much.  to make way for the new, you’ve gotta get rid of the old, literally and psychologically.

and that’s just my wardrobe.  i’ve got two draws of ‘emotional baggage’, & an office full of past-life techyjunk.  i can’t wait to shed more shit!

i’ve been reading some minimalist lifestyle bloggers recently, something that i think might go hand-in-hand with life Up North (or even a nomadic life).  perhaps i’m taking my first step toward that…


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Categories : Good Stuff!

new chapter

22 11 2010

i’ve been itchy.  for a year or two.

metaphorically, of course, i haven’t visited one of those places where you’re likely to come home with more than you expected in quite a while.  oh wait…  um, nevermind.  i’ve been living in this 2 bedroom flat for over 4 years now.  i spent the majority of my ‘depression years’ here, and for the last 18 months i’ve felt the ‘itchy feet’ urge to move elsewhere; possibly on my own still, or possibly sharing with a friend.  i haven’t really understood why i’ve had that urge, until recently.

J & i have decided to move in together.

it’s a fairly monumental decision and change for me.  i’ve been single for more years than i care to admit.  and i’ve lived in a place on my own for 3/4 of the decade+ i’ve lived in Melbourne.

J & i have been getting along really well these past several months.  i love spending time with him, and always crave more.  we never argue or fight about anything, which is kinda weird given what a crotchety, tetchy, old curmudgeon i can be!  without any mutual discussion on our part, we always try to do different stuff, eat at different places, and get away for weekends – mutual rut avoidance.  as a former depressive, this is hugely beneficial for me – a partial definition of depression IS being in a rut.

though it wasn’t a straight-forward decision.  there’s advantages to us keeping things as they are.  J’s youngest brother, T, will be living with us, likely until mid-next year.  and his middle brother, C, is planning to move to Oz within the next year, and his mother might follow, too.  it’s likely C will need to live with us for a while too, until he gets on his feet.  with J still sharing with his ex, & his youngest brother T, & the likelihood of C replacing T next year, my place has been & would become even more a refuge for J away from all that.

regardless, another factor came into the decision.  aside from simply wanting to spend more time together, i want to make the most of however long we have together.  i’ve written in a previous post that J & i have quite different medium/long-term goals.  J wants to head overseas to live & work for a year or three.  i want to move to the NSW Northern Rivers area.  they’re not exactly compatible, sympathetic directions :).  but neither of us are in the right situation to do that, yet.  but in a year or three could well be a possibility, and i doubt i can postpone my deepest desire to move up there much longer than that.  hence, carpe diem.

after only 1 weekend of house-hunting, our first application was successful, and we’ve signed a lease on a 3 bedroom apartment in Richmond.  when pretending to be a gay couple while house-hunting with my friend A2 twice before, gay couples really do seem to be attractive to agents/landlords – it’s the quickest and most painless house-hunting process i’ve ever gone through!  if that hippy-spiritualist ethos – which goes something like “if it’s meant to be, The Universe will provide” – is anything to go by, perhaps we’re on the right track?

as my mind navigates the myriad issues & stuff to organise for the move, i’m buoyed by the potential & possibilities of this fundamental change, of shedding hopefully the last vestiges of old/bad/unhelpful habits & routines that infiltrated my life during The Depression Years, and taking the plunge with J.

though integrating two Mac geek’s stuff aint gonna be easy!

 


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Categories : dating, Good Stuff!

comfort in point c

23 09 2010

it’s said that the best (or fastest, or easiest) route between Point A & Point B isn’t necessarily a straight line.  sometimes an apparently longer, more circuitous path through Point C can be better (or faster, or easier).

when i returned from a month of holidays up north, i started hatching a plan to live up there permanently, in perhaps a year or so.  it involves developing new skills (or exploiting old ones) to create new source(s) of income, to replace what would undoubtedly be a loss of income – partial, or total eventually – if i were to move away from my Melbourne-based clients.  that, and also to get into stuff that i hope i’ll be a lot more passionate about than i am now about small-biz IT consulting.

then J turned my life upside down (again), and for the last few months we’ve been rekindling what we began late last year.  that journey is progressing nicely :)

but i use the word journey deliberately.

J & i have started brainstorming ideas, for web-service &/or iDevice apps.  we briefly talked about doing this a year ago, and was one of the avenues i was considering taking recently.  whilst these ‘ideas’ may or may not generate revenue, they’ll certainly develop the skills that should lead to further projects.  going down this path with someone so talented in the visual & UI/UX area is a major bonus.  going down this path with someone who also shares my bed is also kinda cool ;) [& yeah, i know, fraught with danger]

but as i mentioned in that earlier post, J & i have quite different medium/long-term goals, at least geographically speaking.  J wants to go live & work overseas for a year or three, likely Europe or the USA.  i on the other hand have a burning desire for a sea/tree change in Byron Shire.

where this journey will go or end is totally unknown to both of us, an open question, a journey with no set destination.  and i think i’m starting to like that.


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Categories : Apple, dating, iPhone

Gaydar – i told you so

19 08 2010

it’s not often you’ll find me using the expression “i told you so”, but nearly a year and a half ago i had these harsh words for Gaydar – one of the largest ‘gay dating’ websites in the world – for sticking their head in the sand in the face of the ‘mobile revolution’ by charging a premium fee on top of their already-significant monthly/quarterly/etc paid membership fee, if you wanted access to a mobile-browser-optimised version of their website. wtf?

since then there’s been an explosion of ‘gay dating’ iPhone/iPad apps (they don’t like that term, they prefer ‘social networking’ – yeahwhatever) – most of them new, nimble upstarts with little to lose & everything to gain from ‘first mover’ opportunity – that’ve surely been eating into the big-boy’s revenue, particularly Grindr, who offer essentially the same basic service with the hugely engaging & useful ‘location awareness’ features, for free, or a few $/month for Push Notifications of messages & no ads.

well wadda ya know, Gaydar finally came out with an iPhone app a couple of months ago, and guess what? no premium fee to use it, over & above normal paid membership!  unfortunately version 1 was a pretty poor effort, but i guess the only way is up ;). (i haven’t looked at it since)

i’m aware that Manhunt.net – another of the web-based ‘big boys’ – also have an iPhone app in the works, and are working through the agony of complying with Apple’s puritanical ‘decency’ conditions.

the question remains though, is this too little too late?  i estimate it’ll be 6+ months before Gaydar’s iPhone app will reach some reasonable level of useful maturity, and you still need to be a paid member, a price well above any of the iPhone newcomers.  Manhunt remain to be seen on the mobile.

have the new kids on the iPhone block (and other mobile platforms) stolen too much mindshare for the big-boys to recover their losses?  or will the big-boy’s superior established large-scale infrastructure & reliability be matched by an eventual maturing of their iApp offerings and leave the new kids in second place?


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Categories : Apple, censorship, dating, iPhone

“depression – my story”, 1 year on.

11 08 2010

it’s not quite a year since i wrote “my story” for Riding4acause.org, but i’m feeling the urge to talk about this black dog thing again.  seems to be topical lately!

last October 09 i “woke up” and realised that the ground of life was rapidly rising to meet my slo-mo free-fall.  the consequences of 5 years of blocking out life in a haze of THC smoke loomed like a tsunami  SFX in Hollywood movie.  thus began a tumultuous process of getting my life back into sobriety, balance, positivity & connection.

i quit dope cold turkey, which was a huge step forward in clearing my head to re-engage with life.  curiously, this was easier than one might have expected, though i can’t really explain why.  i guess i’d been in the pot-hole-of-depression long enough to finally realise that nothing was going to change, until i changed.

i saw a psychologist for several months, turning over several of the rocks in my mental garden to see what scurried out.  i can see now there were significant contributors dating back at least 10-12 years (5-7 years before Dysthymia struck), all of which layered additively, like blankets over my life’s fire.  sometimes it’s helpful to simply become aware that specific factors in your past have had an impact you were previously unaware of, and sometimes you need to dissect things a little more.  that’s where a qualified psychologist can really help.  i may yet go back for more, if and when i feel the need to peel away some more layers of my onion.  the $80/session Medicare rebate certainly helped there, too!

getting back into my physical self has also been critical.  it’s hard to beat the natural high that comes from a mildly exhausting cardio or gym workout at least a few days each week, especially when it’s one of the first things i do in the day, it leaves me feeling good for the rest of the day, and helps with sleep, too.  sure, it’s hard to break old lazy habits and establish momentum, but i just take it one day at a time, and i don’t berate myself if i miss a day’s scheduled exercise.

having several friends who have used or currently use anti-depressants, i carefully weighed up that option for myself.  i believe they can be of tremendous benefit, even necessity, for some people.  but my gut instinct was that my issues were more – for want of a better word – situational & attitudinal than brain-biochemical, and thus far i’m not regretting that decision.  i’m also wary of the “life on ADs is ‘nice’. nice can kinda suck though” factor, as articulated so eloquently by my friend Richo.

and last but not least, there’s the people factor.  one of those ‘blankets’ over my life of the previous 5 years has been a major erosion of my ‘inner circle’ of friends for a bunch of reasons, leaving me feeling isolated and restless.  i don’t make friends easily or quickly, so it’s a slow process, but i’ve pushed myself to connect with new people, and reconnect with some ‘lapsed’ friends.  it makes a hell of a difference.  it’s nice to complain of not having enough hours in the day when the main reason (other than work) is time spent with friends, instead of time spent in the pot-hole-of-depression in front of the tv!

it’s an ongoing process, a work in progress, and some say that’ll always be so (i’m not so sure about that).  but it’s a state of mind so different to where i was only a year ago, it’s starting to feel like a receding memory.  my spiral upwards out of depression and the things that propel it bear a curious symmetry (equal but opposite) to the habits that dragged me down into it years ago.  i couldn’t have done it without the support & understanding of my friends & clients alike, a professional psychologist, and a huge bunch of awesomely inspirational people on Twitter :).


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Categories : depression, do something!, Good Stuff!, shrink

best friend

24 07 2010

i’d never used the expression “best friend”, ever, until “one of my closest friends” Tony passed away suddenly & unexpectedly (brain aneurism) just over 3 years ago.  “best friend” always seemed too exclusionary to me. *i* had an *inner circle* of friends, where all were equal, thankyouverymuch!

it’s his birthday today, and a bunch of his inner circle & family are descending on Melbourne for a warm dinner of reminiscing & laughs, should be a great night, & brunch with some of them again tomorrow.

call me lucky (particularly with the AIDS epidemic deaths of the 90s), but other than my grand parents, Tony is by far the closest person i’ve lost to the randomness of death.

we met at the Flinders Hotel (twinkville, ah those were the days ;), one dark wintery night in ’95.  my version of the story is that it was him who tried to pick me up, tho he always politely begged to differ, as apparently it was me who offered my phone number first ;).  whilst we never actually got around to doing what two gay guys do so readily, thus began the closest and most intimate friendship i think i’ve ever had.

Tony was awesome.  i could list two dozen superlative adjectives right off the top of my head now and still not come close to doing him justice.  despite having an enormous circle of friends all over the world and Australia from his extensive travels, somehow he was able to make each one feel like the most important person in the world, when ever he was able to spend time with them – and he always went out of his way to do so.  i often felt a little intimidated that despite having so many extraordinary friends from such diverse walks of life, i held a place in his life that few did.

out of the blue one day around christmas 2005, he pensively confessed he was in love with me.  i was gobsmacked.  why now, after a decade of friendship?  such is the mystery of love.  whilst he was the closest person to me in the world, and i loved him greatly, it just wasn’t that kind of love.  but could it grow to become that, given this prod, this opportunity with a man who had such a huge heart?  i’m ashamed to say, i never gave it a chance.  and for many months our friendship suffered, including a very awkward holiday to Perth & Byron Bay a month later.

time passed and wounds healed, and Tony’s heart moved on – though sadly, to someone else who didn’t reciprocate his love.  in that, Tony & I were also alike, having not found true equal love for great stretches of our lives.

i’ll never know now if that could’ve worked for us.  but i wish it had.

Happy Birthday my dearest Tony.


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moth, flame and confusion

24 06 2010

so J tried to kiss me the other night 8-0

it was at the end of of the night, at his front door saying goodnight. i flinched, grasped my chest, took a step back, wide-eyed, speechless and in shock. i made a hasty departure.

the 42 butterflies in my stomach were frenzied as i walked back to my car; a cigarette barely touched the sides as i paced back n forth, a maelstrom of conflicted thoughts. the possibility that i had deliberately avoided considering had just occurred.

i spent the first 3 months of the year getting over J.  after April holidays i realised i hadn’t thought about him much at all, and felt pretty good about that. i told him, and myself, when we broke up that i wasn’t going to wait for him to sort out his situation; i’ve seen too many people waste too much time waiting for their love boat to never come to shore.

we’ve been spending a bit of time together since i returned from holidays, much of it initiated by him, & more recently him being physically affectionate toward me – which i’ve furiously avoided reciprocating.  my spidey sense had wondered if something was going on for him beyond the friendship that I was happy to see getting back on track, but my skeptical head dismissed it as me being overly sensitive to the situation.   turns out my spidey sense was right :).

call it cutting my Melbourne losses, or taking the path not taken 10 years ago, but after a month away the whole idea of moving up north – perhaps within a year – has been feeling more and more comfortable. and a relationship in Melbourne hadn’t figured into that equation!

but with one attempted kiss, my world felt like it had been turned upside down again.

so i went back inside and we talked for another hour. to cut a long story short, J’s gone through his long dark tea time of the soul with his break-up with his ex, not found single life to be all it’s cracked up to be, and misses me & what we’d begun to explore late last year. but just to make life interesting, J also has the itch to live and work overseas for a year or two…

with so much uncertainty on both sides of this story, how can this moth stay away from the naked flame? lol

some people take a pretty severe, disposable attitude to situations like this, “nope! he had his chance & he blew it, don’t go back!”.  i know J fucked up pursuing something with me before he was really ready to move on from his previous relationship, but i’m as confident now as i was at the time that he didn’t do it with bad intentions.  naivety perhaps, but not recklessness.  he wasn’t responsible for the intensity of my feelings toward him – i let that happen all by myself despite the warning signs.

so maybe life’s about to get interesting again…


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Categories : dating, Good Stuff!

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