Review: Stepping Off

 In the latest edition of Limina journal, I reviewed Thomas Wilson's Stepping Off: Rewilding and Belonging in the South-West.

I've always been a South-West girl: growing up in Goomalling; visiting my grandparents in Toodyay, and then Beverley, and then Northam; family holidays each year to Albany or Denmark or Rudyard’s Beach; my other grandparent's holiday home in Myalup, and then their vineyard in Kendenup; road trips with my sister or friends through Walpole, Pemberton, Balingup, Augusta, Busselton, Margaret River; year 12 drama camps to New Norcia; hiking day walks and overnight stretches of the Bibbulmun track.

This is my country.

And then I read Stepping Off while I was traveling for fieldwork (I mentioned it here), and on every page was something new I didn't know about the South-West, and I was like - oh, this is my country.

I highly recommend this book for sandgropers and visitors to the South-West alike, and anyone who has an interest in history, sociology, ecology, geology, botany, agriculture, rewilding, sustainability, and how we live. (So, everyone.)

You can read my review here:

http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-23.1-2017/review-budrikis 

Notes from Geraldton: People are the Best People

I grew up believing that, all things being equal, the difference between getting what you want and not getting what you want was whether or not you asked for it.

This is obviously the worldview of the youngest child.

As I got older I learnt that all things are not equal, and privilege has a lot to do with it, as it always does - either that people are more willing to give young white females what we want (I think, perhaps, under the assumption that we really are a bit helpless and needy?), or that being young, white, and female engenders us with the confidence to ask.

However I still think - at an interpersonal level, if not a societal or political level - that sometimes we underestimate the generosity of people to meet our needs because we don’t show people our needs.

So I know this. I live by this. And yet each and every field trip I am humbled by and in awe of how open-hearted and generous people can be.


This field trip started the night before when I went out for coffee with the friend who was going to look after my cat, for two weeks, for free, even though my cat is Such A Jerk. We came back to my car and discovered someone had broken my driver side mirror. The absolute and  unnecessary inconvenience of the whole thing still annoys me - and yet within half an hour, like platelets rushing to the site of a wound, my mum was offering to pick me up, my best friend was driving around Perth looking for a single roll of duct tape, and my cat-sitting friend was putting a Seinfeldian spin on things until we were both hanging in anticipation of what absurdity would befall me next.

The next day, when I realised how long it would probably take to get a replacement part on a fifteen year old Corolla and how much the delay would mess with the very tight schedule of my fieldtrip, I told my grandmother what had happened and asked to borrow her car - and just like that, my trip was back on.

(The irony of course is that the passenger side mirror on my grandmother’s car is also buggered; but it looks roadworthy, so it'll do.)

I’m staying at an airbnb while I’m here. The other day my host said to me, "I was really worried when I saw that you had booked for two weeks. I thought, what if you turn out to be horrible?" And yet this woman was going to cook a roast for me on my first night (until I convinced her I was vegetarian), stocks the fridge with other good things for me to eat, asks me how my day has been when I get home each evening, offers me advice, and calls me "Missy", "hun", and "chook".


 And then there are my interview participants. I will never get over how generous everyone has been, on every trip, to sit down with me for an hour or so and just teach me; to answer my sometimes badly worded questions and to explain things until I understand and talk with me like it’s not weird at all that I’m recording our conversations as data.

I guess the thing about working with people is that you’re forced to make yourself dependent on them - not necessarily an easy thing for researchers, even those of us in social sciences, because all research is in some way motivated by a desire for certainty and control - the opposite of dependence.  You want to know How Things Are (as if there is a single and knowable way things are), and you'd like to do it at minimum inconvenience to yourself, if possible. (Researchers who work with inanimate entities, please tell me that you at least enjoy the illusion of control?) And sometimes when you make yourself dependent on others, it doesn’t work out. For any number of reasons, it doesn't work out. But when it does - when you show up with your own needs and ask "hey, will you help me with this?" and they say "I'd love to" - it's so worth the risk.

On Writing

I started this blog a year ago and in all that time I haven’t written about writing, which I think shows remarkable restraint. (What utter cheek to call this post On Writing, the same title as Stephen King’s very excellent book. The nerve!)

The trouble with writing about writing of course is that it very quickly becomes a display of self-flagellation (at best), which might be relevant to writers who are generally a self-flagellating lot with weird interests in other people’s suffering, but please God may we have enough awareness to realise this spectacle is not always actually worth reading about.

This is also I think the trouble with being someone who writes - there's a temptation to think that everything you think is worth writing about - that every thought is worth documenting, that every emotion is worth capturing in words, that every thing needs to be commented on all the bloody time.

Things don’t, though. Probably. Probably there are ways of experiencing things without commenting on them, without writing about them, without pinning them down with language; ways of getting to the end of a day and saying 'well that was alright' and then going straight to sleep.

Listen this is my anniversary post so I’m going to write about writing, it’s inevitable, sue me.

The first job I wanted that wasn’t teacher or doctor or banker (that is, the jobs I saw other people having) was 'writer'; whether that meant actually to write, or to live in an apartment in London filled with books and a cat, I wasn’t fussed. But it became a thing I was sometimes good at and, more to the point, enjoyed, so long after I've let go of the idea of being a professional writer (a what now?), I still write everyday.

Occasionally I think I would like to stop writing, to stop turning everything into words in my head, but I’m pretty sure it’s too late. What started as a few lines to take the edge off has become the monkey at my typewriter, and I’ve grown fond of the little fellow.

There’s a rush you get when you nail a sentence, that you can’t get from anything else; a lovely dream you never quite give up on where maybe if you write enough, all your thoughts will join up and everything will be connected to everything else, and you will one day be a complete sort of person, a perfectly organised human being.

Imagine.

There’s also a stubborn shard of hope (all hopes are shards, and stubborn af) that says maybe one day you will write something that causes someone else when they read it to say "Oh!", and they will understand themselves in a new way, a better way, a more dangerous way, and your work on earth will be done - or at least you won't be alone in your understanding of yourself.

Writers are wannabe surgeons - good writing will cut you open where it hurts the most and leave you with just enough words to mop up the mess, and writers don’t even use anaesthetic or take the Hippocratic oath or anything, it should be illegal. I don’t know why we aspire to do this. Maybe because we’ve done it to ourselves so many times, we forget that others Might Not Like It. And all it costs us is obsession.

(This, by the way, applies as equally to academic writing as it does to poetry - truth is truth, and nothing cuts you open like truth.)

The joy of writing this blog - because it is a joy or I wouldn’t do it - is that it has become a space I have created for myself where the condition of entry is not to say something perfectly, but to say it at all. Over the year I’ve sorted through some of my thoughts and sewn them together in not too Frankenstein a fashion, I hope; and behind the scenes I’ve had some really interesting responses which (as my sister pointed out), are more than an academic might ever get from a peer-reviewed journal, so I’m practising gratitude for that: thank you. May you all keep doing whatever it is you do to make sense of who you are and your place in this world, and may you all share as much of that with other people as will make you slightly uncomfortable.

How To Make Your Vote Meaningful In A Meaningless Postal Survey

On the weekend I was honored to witness two dear friends marry each other; to see them turn to each other and say "I do". Of course they’ve been saying "I do" to each other for a long time now, in a myriad ways - but this time they did it in front of friends and family and a marriage celebrant, and they signed a piece of paper, and their "I do"s made something happen. It made them husband and wife.

In speech acts theory, marriage vows are a perfect example of a performative utterance, which is when you say something that doesn’t just describe the world, but changes it as well.

The Australian government is holding a plebiscite postal survey about marriage equality, and it’s dumb and offensive and the result of the plebiscite  postal survey isn’t legally binding. Moreover, the Paradox of Voting means that you are very, very, very unlikely to cast the vote that will change the result from 'no' to 'yes', or 'yes' to 'no' - it essentially makes no mathematical difference if you vote or not. So, in a sense, neither the plebisicite postal survey in general nor your vote in particular are performative utterances. They are not designed to change the world. Should you boycott the plebiscite postal survey?

No.

Also:

No.

[*edit: thank you to a friend who pointed out that it isn't even a plebiscite, it's a postal survey, which makes it even more ridiculous.]

To the people who are disgusted by the idea of voting for marriage equality: I take your point, it is disgusting, but - and I will never stop saying this - if this is the most disgusting, humiliating, or undignified thing that you have faced for LGBTQI rights, then you’re doing okay, honey.

But also consider - performative utterances are performative under a certain set of conditions. They’re not just words - they’re words in context. Marriage vows change the world when they’re uttered in the presence of a celebrant, accompanied by signatures. Likewise, a ‘yes’ vote can be made to be performative by changing the conditions of it.

In fact it’s really, really easy to make your ‘Yes’ vote performative: you tell people that you’re going to vote Yes.

(You don’t even have to actually vote to do this, but after you've told people that you'll vote, you may as well do it - it’ll take all of a cumulative two minutes to make an honest person of yourself.) 

One private vote may be pointless, but one public expression of ‘Yes’ has the power to make something happen.

We haven’t even started voting in this plebiscite postal survey yet and I can’t stop crying over how many groups on my Facebook feed - groups that ostensibly have nothing to do with LGBTQI rights, like the WA Youth Jazz Orchestra and the UWA Postgraduates Student Association - have shared 'how to enrol' information to their followers and said that they will be voting 'Yes' to marriage equality. Acquaintances put banners and frames on their profile pics to say the same. In real life, the City of Vincent recently declared its commitment to marriage equality, and will raise a rainbow flag outside its admin building.

Thing is, it hasn’t always been like this.

In the early 2000s - not even 15 years ago, really - I never heard any of my friends or classmates talking about gay stuff (although looking back, I’m pretty sure some of them were a lot gayer than I gave them credit for). If support for LGBTQI rights had been more obviously visible back then, we would all have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. I also grew up bisexual in a church that I was pretty sure couldn’t accept me.  Now, I’m still bisexual, and I’m still a Christian, and I go to a church with people whose support I don’t even have to ask for because they're just vocal about it.

You guys. This is not a small deal. Christians are supposed to be the ones against marriage equality and yet Australian Christians for Marriage Equality have just declared their campaign for Christians who will be voting Yes. We didn’t have this kind of visibility for queer little church kids fifteen years ago; we didn’t know who to ask if we would still be okay.

When you start the long, sometimes lifelong process of coming out, the first person who accepts you becomes a tiny island of security in an ocean of confusion and aloneness. If you're lucky, you think, you might find one other person who is okay with you, and you can swim between islands. The more people who accept you, the more islands you have, until one day you realise some of your islands have joined up and formed whole peninsulas, countries, continents of solid land and you don't have to swim any more. Declaring that you will be voting Yes makes you another safe place to tread.

There are lots and lots of ways you can support LGBTQI people generally; and lots of ways you can support marriage equality specifically. This isn't the final word on equality, not by a long shot, but this is a moment we're leaning in to, and we promise, if you cast this tiny, meaningless vote, we will hold it to your credit as meaningful. Your private vote is not performative, it’s not pivotal, but when you vote for marriage equality and then declare your intention to vote for marriage equality (how easy is that!), you change the world for someone you know.

Observations About Kayaking That Are Also Metaphors For Life, Like, Just If You Think About It

In an effort to get more exercise, avoid thinking about the inevitable heat death of the universe, and Try Something New, I started kayaking lessons.

Kayaking is dumb. It’s the dumbest thing you can do on the water in an oversized plastic coffin with a plastic stick. I love it. I’m so bad at it, you guys. Here are some observations about kayaking that are also metaphors for life, like, just if you think about it.

To paddle your kayak in a straight line you need to draw your paddle as close to the kayak as possible. This is a lot harder than drawing your paddle away from the kayak, which will send you spinning in a circle, so you need to practice it.

There are lots of reasons why you can’t draw your paddle close to your kayak - the kayak is too wide, the water is too choppy, the drag of everyone else’s kayaks is putting you off. When you can paddle in a straight line, all those things suddenly stop making a difference. Weird.

If you flip your kayak and fall out, you have to leave your kayak upside down, swim with it back to shore, and start again. If you try to flip your kayak back over in the middle of the river, it will inevitably fill up with water and sink to the bottom.

If you’re kayaking on your own, you need to think about the shoreline and how you’re going to get your kayak out of the water if you flip. Make it easier for yourself. Don’t kayak next to a wall.

You cannot get more wet than when you deliberately flip your own kayak, fully clothed; after that, getting rained on is like being towel-dried with tiny drops of water.

It’s harder to flip a kayak if you are physically light.

The best way to get warm at the end of your lesson when it’s ten degrees and raining is to help everyone else drag their kayaks up the beach and load them onto the trailer.

Kayaking is really tiring if you have noodle arms, but then you get to see everything - your university, your city, your life - from awholenother perspective and it’s worth it. (You guys. I got to go inside the blue boat house. Technically the blue boat house is private property and I will deny everything.)

Sucking at kayaking with a bunch of strangers who also suck at kayaking is so much fun.

You cannot think about keeping your kayak in a straight line and the inevitable heat death of the universe at the same time.

Everyday Things

Okay.

I’ve been going back and forth about what to write on this blog, like do I want to write something about Charlottesville, about the threat of nuclear war, about asylum seekers in detention centres, about this plebiscite for marriage equality, do I not want to write about these things, should I even write about these things or should I shut up and not presume to have anything new or interesting to say because others have voices that need to be heard more and because really, we don’t need any more White People Having New Feelings About Things, and ultimately I think yes, I should shut up and not presume to have anything new or interesting to say about these things - except to say two things:

One - and this does need to be said because staying silent and "not taking sides" is taking a side, although I hope you know me well enough to know which side I am on - but I’ll say it again for the record:
I am against white supremacy.
I am against nuclear war.
We need to bring asylum seekers out of offshore detention and into Australia and begin to do the work of admitting our mistakes, asking for forgiveness, and making repairs.
The marriage equality plebiscite is dumb and offensive, but kudos to the government for motivating so many people to update their electoral details, this will come in handy when we vote them out. Democracy!

Two - if you’re a grad student and you’re taking stock of how much work you’ve done in the last few days/weeks/months and you’re feeling kinda shitty about that, remember that trying to understand and respond to the world is also a kind of work, so don’t beat yourself up about it, you’re being an adult with normal emotional responses to awful situations and that takes effort too.

So those are the things I wanted to say, and here are some things I’ve been reading and pondering specifically in relation to white supremacy which may or may not be helpful to you. Ironically and unfortunately they are mostly from white writers, because those are the people I still tend to read the most, but I want to correct this.

What to do about Charlottesville
Here is a list of organisations in Charlottesville that you can donate to if you’ve got a spare couple of bucks. You can’t change people’s actions but sometimes you can meddle with the consequences of their actions, and it’s vaguely comforting to think that one of the consequences of white supremacy is more financial support for organisations that white supremacists hate.

White People: 0-60 for Charlottesville
This is about white people having new feelings about things that POC have been having feelings about for a long time, and what white people can do about those feelings.

Brene Brown did a facebook live video last night about Charlottesville from her perspective as a researcher on shame and fear, and she has a lot of interesting things to say about pain, owning our history, and the difference between shaming people and holding them to accountability. (For example, is it okay to find and publish the names of white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, even if they lose their friends and families and jobs? Yes. That's accountability.)

IndigenousX
We don’t get to shake our heads at the US and say "we're not like that" or "that'll never happen to us". Australia has its own white colonial past and present that we need to reckon with, which includes giving more space to the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. IndigenousX is a really cool organisation that amplifies those voices.

Rave Sashayed is one of my favourite writers and she very frequently has something useful to say about Feeling Things, I found this post particularly helpful:

" [...] a really good thing and a thing i highly recommend in times of crisis is to get off the internet for a while. your brain thinks that only YOUR PERSONAL rapt, terrified attention will solve the problems that beset us as a world and a country, but god bless it, it is wrong […] i don’t know what it’s like where you are, but it’s beautiful outside in DC today. go breathe in that good air, if you can. get strength from that good sunlight. think of yourself like a tree. make your roots strong."

***

It’s weird when you drag your personal, rapt, terrified attention away from the news and people are doing other, everyday things - shopping for groceries, tweeting about their research, hanging out with their pets, getting married; so I’m going to try and get back into writing about the regular, everyday things that makes up being a linguistics grad student. This is the stuff of our lives, too, and I guess this is what we’re fighting for, to be able to live them as we see fit.

Motivation Is Overrated, Hack It Anyway

Winter is here, and productivity is low.

I’m not sure whether to cast this as a productivity problem or a motivation problem, actually. The problem with motivation is that, like passion and Pottermore, it’s overrated.

Let me clarify - when we talk about "motivation", we’re usually using the word in one of at least a couple of senses.

The first sense is the reason you want to do something - the reason you want to learn a language, or do a PhD, or run a marathon, or shear a sheep and knit a jumper from its wool in a day. This is a good kind of motivation, I think - it’s good to have a reason for doing something.

The second sense of motivation is the drive that makes you think Doing The Thing will be better than lying on the couch binge-watching Terrace House: Aloha State.

Y’all, this kind of motivation is overrated because your brain isn’t stupid. Your brain knows that nothing is better than lying on the couch watching Terrace House: Aloha State all day ("Torichan! Torichan!") and it will fight you to take this path, the fun path, the path of least resistance. That's its job.

The problem, then, with blaming your low productivity on "lack of motivation" is that this sort of suggests the solution is to get more motivation, and good luck with that.


Before I started this PhD I was working full time, so I approached my project much like I approached any job: show up 9 to 5, keep regular lunch hours, don’t watch youtube when people can see your computer screen. You don’t need drive to work a 9-5 job - you just need the desire to comply with the societal norm that this is how work is done, and the fear that you’ll get in trouble if you don’t.

But PhDs are not like jobs (not least because I don’t think you can legally be paid below minimum wage in Australia? Maybe? Who knows anymore?) When you do a PhD, you don’t get in trouble if you don’t work 9-5 - literally no-one cares - and so the work habits you spent years building up start to slip away.

In the first year of my PhD I thought I had productivity figured out. I went full-Hermione. I read books about it. Books that promised me I could hack productivity if only I knew the right strategies, the right approach.

But productivity - motivation - is tumultuous, frustrating, exciting. The relationship you have with productivity is, after the relationship you have with the person who makes your coffee in the morning, the most intense, rewarding relationship you’ll have during your PhD. (My barista knows my name. She gives me a bit of my soul back every morning. I don’t know her name. It’s not that kind of relationship.)

The one thing I’ve learnt about productivity and/or motivation in the eighteen months I’ve been doing a Phd now is that, for me at least, there is no guaranteed method of being productive. Productivity is trickery, sorcery, voodoo; as much an art as a science. To be productive is to be creative, to generate new ways of working and to alchemise the old. What works one month, one week, one day, doesn’t work the next.  You cannot "just get" more motivation, but you can create cheap knockoff copies of it. So, without further ado, here is a shortlist of my productivity tricks:

• Get to uni early. There’s no way you got out of bed at Stupid O’clock just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
• Stay at uni late. There’s no way you stayed after everyone else has gone home for the day just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
• Study in the same place everyday; the repetitive environment cues your brain to the fact that it’s time to work, and if you’ve had a few successful days in a row, it gives you confidence.
• Study in a different place. You haven’t yet procrastinated in this place, so it doesn’t automatically trigger your procrastination habits.
• Pay for all day parking. If you pay for an all day parking spot, you’re going to stick around to make the most of it. (You guys. I know I’m not the only one who does this - if I spend $2 an hour on parking, you better believe I will use every hour. If only the government knew how little value I place on my own time.)
• Catch the bus to your study place. (Honey I did not fight a seventeen year old sporting a Backstreet Boys haircut for a seat on the bus just to stay in my office for one hour and then leave.)
• Work in short bursts. You can do whatever you should be doing for twenty minutes. I believe in you. The time will pass anyway. And then you might want to do more.
• Study with someone else. It helps to see someone else working. (If they also procrastinate on facebook all day, dump them.)
• Surround yourself with people. Study in the library. Study in the Galleria, it has three hours free wifi. Study in Ikea, it has crappy cheap coffee.
• Reward yourself. Tell yourself you can have chocolate/coffee/the next episode of Terrace House when you have done two hours. (Just joking. This almost never works for me, I take the reward first and then don’t do the work.)
• Find a task that you want to do less than the task you should be doing. Procrastinate on the new task by doing the old task.
• Hang out with friends and family who care - about your PhD, or about you. Sugar, you are a lot to care about. You cannot care about yourself all by yourself.
• And, as always, remember that finished is better than perfect.

Any more tips and tricks? Answers on a postcard, please.