Things I loved about Sri Lanka

• Seeing elephants bath in the river whilst having lunch
• Delicious food
• Fantastic tea selection (to buy)
• Widespread wifi (albeit a bit unreliable)
• Red bananas

Things I didn’t like about Sri Lanka

• Tea served
• Roads and traffic (averaging 20 km/h)
• Being seen as nothing but money – pressured to buy gems/herbs/tea etc

“DJ Ajax was crossing a road in Parkville, an inner-Melbourne suburb, in the early hours of 28 February 2013 when he was hit by a truck and died at the scene.”

RIP dude.

It breaks my heart, but at the same time I love how close we have become in such a short time.

One thing I’ll never regret doing is taking a couple of months off when each of my kids were born to bond with them. I’ve not yet met another dad who has done this: either they think it’s pointless (‘they just sleep’) or have a large mortgage and can’t afford time off. But for me, it’s the best thing I have ever done.

Early infanthood and childhood is such an amazing time, but so critical in that you need to get it right otherwise it’ll have lifeline effects on your kids. That’s why I am continually amazed how modern society outsources raising of our babies to random strangers in childcare centers. I guess that’s what large household debt does to people.

Every day I am grateful that we have this amazing time with our two sons and no debt. We are also very excited to be expecting a third child in July.

Autonomy and Freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy.

Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.

—quoted from Ch.5, The Paradox of Choice, 2004

The iTunes movie of the week is a fantastic idea as each week they have a hand picked movie rental for 99c which is pretty much guaranteed to be a good movie. I love not having to make a choice about what movie to watch, I just watch whatever they’ve chosen for me, for less than a dollar. Today I watched ‘Two Hands‘ (for some reason I had never seen it before) and a few weeks ago I watched ‘The Company Men‘: both were excellent films and even better in that I didn’t need to choose them.

I think that last picture is a perfect reflection of the life many of us lead. Always behind cameras/iPhones/iPads, giving up a current experience for a future reminiscence, not realizing how many professional photographers will take much better photos than you can and they will be freely available on the web for anyone to see at any time.

It isn’t an isolated occurrence, take the Queen’s visit to the races in England last year.

Seriously? Stop living behind a 3 inch screen. As a Jason Mraz concert goer recently wrote:

The Mrs. is a HUGE Jason Mraz fan (I’m like “meh”, but whatever). We got 3rd row center seats to his show last night. Throughout the whole show just about EVERYONE around us was holding up their cameras, ipads, whatever for the ENTIRE FUCKING show.

 

The funny thing is, he has a very large band spread out all over the stage (bass, drums, horn section, violinist, bongos), so all these idiots missed everything that was going on around the stage just to hold their stuff up in the air so they could show their friends how cool they were, not to mention potentially blocking the view of the people behind them. I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes…I wanted to yell, “PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE, YOU’RE MISSING A GREAT SHOW, DUMBASS!”

“Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”

~ Peter De Vries

I’ve been thinking about travel a lot lately. In the past I have made a big mistake of returning to places overseas I’ve already been to, and inevitably they were never as good as the first time. So, I’m proposing some new rules for travel:

1. I will never return to an overseas destination that I’ve already been to before. It will never be the same so I should go somewhere else!
2. I will never travel to an overseas destination to relax on a beach. We have some of the best, and cleanest, beaches in the world on the east coast of Australia and it feels kinda criminal to fly across the world when we can drive 50 minutes in the car to experience the same thing.
3. I will never travel to an overseas destination to do ‘cheap’ shopping: that’s what the Internet is for.
4. I will seek an experience overseas that I won’t forget and can’t replicate at home: I don’t really want to just surf the net or watch movies in a hotel room on the other side of the world.
5. I will do it for the experience rather than the memories. I once read an article about how we’d all be better off it we treated a holiday as if our memory of it would be erased when it was over. That way we’d actually experience it, rather than just try to accumulate memories of it for later.
6. I will turn off the work email on my phone: and not check twitter either.
7. I will eat local: no food like you get at home, or fast food like McDonalds either.
8. I will focus on enjoying the travel rather than taking photos of it.

“Didn’t have a camera by my side this time

Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes

Today I finally overcame trying to fit the world inside a picture frame

Maybe you should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes

It brought me back to life”

~ John Mayer:  ’3×5′

Update: 8 October 2012

I probably should clarify: traveling domestically to the same place, eg. Byron Bay, to relax is good, and preferable. Traveling overseas for adventures should be to different places and traveling overseas for relaxation is not on.

“I fear we’re turning into a nation of wussbags. Softies. Princesses. People in need of a big bowl of cement for breakfast. Everywhere you look, there’s wuss.”

I really liked, and agreed with, this article by Mia Freedman published last weekend on toughening up.

But then I read Fiona Scott Norman’s article in The Big Issue about Grant Hackett and his recent relationship issues:

“Australian men are not encouraged to talk, sportsmen in particular. Any emotional vulnerability has been traditionally met with an exhortation to ‘suck it up, princess’. Until recently, when at least one code has moved into the appropriate century, footy players complaining about sledges targeting, say, their wives and mothers were told to ‘toughen up’.

 

This is our culture, Australia. Where men are commanded to bottle any feelings that relate to woman.”

So, whilst I agree with Mia that we need to toughen up on a lot of things, we also need to be able to have close friendships that allow us to share what’s on our chest, in those tough times, where toughening up might not be an option.

“I think I’m gonna spew,” said Brad Cranfield, winner of The Block, which is certainly how this viewer felt watching the Channel Nine renovation show last Sunday night.

As the contestants listened to hundreds of thousands of dollars pour into their bank accounts in the show’s finale, a glassy-eyed, almost drugged stupor took hold of them. It was like watching a coked-up businessman fondle a stripper during a lap dance: naked human desire, stoked for 10 weeks, then sated with a Bacchanalia of ”Block-tion” bids.

Religion may well be the opium of the people but nowadays it’s a little old-fashioned compared with the meth-hit of consumerism; the result, a zombie-like lust for crap we do not need, for a house we cannot possibly fill, a life most of us will never lead.