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.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied Is Part Of Everything We Need, More Than We Deserve

I haven’t been following the Yassmin story. Partly because she’s a "TV person" and I don’t own a TV. Partly because white privilege means white girls don’t have to keep close tabs on what happens to brown girls - not because white girls don’t care what happens to brown girls, but because white girls aren’t scared of the same thing happening to them. (First they came…)

I had an idea of course that Yassmin posted something about ANZAC Day on Facebook this year and it made some people angry, because there’s nothing so insulting to the memory of ANZACs dying for our freedom as remembering other people to whom we have not extended the same freedom. So when a friend had a spare ticket to hear Yassmin speak at UWA last night, I was like ‘cool, free tickets’, and I thought Yassmin would probably be interesting in an "outspoken", "controversial" sort of way.

Even if I had been paying attention to the Yassmin story - even if you had told me exactly what to expect - I could still never have been prepared for the sheer brilliance that is Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

Co-founder of Youth Without Borders at 16. 2015 Young Australian of the Year for Queensland. 1.8 million views on her TED talk What does my headscarf mean to you. Guest panellist on Q&A, The Drum, and The Project. Author. Mechanical engineer. Petrolhead.

"Did you know" said my friend, as we settled into our seats, "that she’s only twenty-six?"

What?

Yassmin is bright, intelligent, funny, bold, fearless, cynical, truthful, humble. She also has the best self-deprecating humour, a wicked broad Queenslander accent, and a fierce fashion sense to boot. On top of that, she didn't seem outspoken or controversial at all - just genuine and kind, caring and optimistic. Everything she said was backed by the weight of experience, the wisdom of an examined life, and common sense. I liked her straight away, and I usually don’t like people who are that good at everything.


Yassmin began with a story about how when her family first arrived in Australia as skilled migrants, one of the neighbours invited them to a party and told them to "bring a plate". How poor must these neighbours be? her parents wondered, so they brought plates, knives, forks, and a chair as well - just in case.

It’s unbelievable, shameful that people would send her death threats. How can you meet someone like Yassmin and think "yes, Australia will be better without her in it. I will send her details of what guns I want to kill her with"? (And her own received her not...)

She was asked how she deals with the personal attacks. To paraphrase, she said something like "Some days I remember it’s not personal - once you’re in the media, you’re an idea, not a person, and people are attacking the idea. Other days I don’t want to leave the house. But I know in my faith that I will not be given more than I can bare, so I look for what I can learn from it."

But that’s not what Yassmin came to talk about last night. Mostly she talked about unconscious bias - those unchecked assumptions and mental shortcuts that we use to justify our own limited perspective and that results in a lack of diversity.

We don’t need diversity just because it’s Nice or Fair or The Right Thing To Do. We need diversity because without it we only see things in one way and we make multi-billion dollar mistakes. Diversity - the combination of different perspectives - has economic value.  We need those different perspectives in Australia - which is why, by the way, Yassmin Abdul-Magied is only part of everything we need, because no one person can “be diversity”. That’s not what diversity means.

Similarly it isn’t one single person’s job to dismantle bias and promote diversity - it’s everyone’s job. We can all do it; and we all need to do it. We all need to speak up for each other because once you become an advocate for someone else - as Yassmin can attest from her own lived experience - you also become a lightning rod for vitriol and hate and no one should have to endure that by themselves.

Australia’s diversity is a gift - we should use it for our benefit. Where's the controversy in that?

Yassmin is moving to London, and if she’s doing it to take some time out from the hate and death threats she faces in Australia then who can blame her. But Yassmin also struck me as the kind of person who doesn’t back down; the kind of person who can smile at her enemies and find common ground over a shared love of Ducati motorbikes. She’s vulnerable and tough and warm - ‘indefatigable, blisteringly funny, and outrageously smart’, as Benjamin Law puts it- and she’s more than we deserve right now but Yassmin, I hope you come home soon. We need you.

Dw'i eisiau byw yn Gymraeg

Facebook reminded me this week that I went to Welsh Bootcamp three years ago.

Three years.

The last English-language status I wrote before bootcamp was about being nervous. I’d forgotten about that. I mean why wouldn't you just throw yourself into a holiday in the tiny seaside town of Tresaith with a dozen strangers who had all completed Cwrs 1 of the Say Something In Welsh online language lessons and who all had a perverse desire to speak only Welsh and definitely no English for a week and who were therefore, probably, a bit mad.

You guys, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

There is nothing - nothing - like sitting in a tavern on the west coast of Cymru, drinking cwrw and watching the sun set and listening to a bar full of Cymry Cymraeg break into a folk song about, I believe, a small saucepan - because that is a thing Welsh-speaking Welsh-people actually do.

I got free hot chocolate because the bar tender was so impressed I’d come all the way from Australia and I spoke more Welsh than he did. (Showoff.)

We didn’t spend all our time in the tafarn, of course. Just most of it. The rest of the time we went about the Welsh countryside on excursions designed perfectly such that we would only encounter other Welsh-speakers: to the cheese factory and the wool museum; to learn about sailing in a cwrwgl and the history of some castle or other - I don’t remember the name of the castle but I do remember several of us looking at each other at that point and saying “wait, we understand the tour guide”; to eat pizza and listen to a Welsh folk duo from America in a tafarn; to partake in Welsh folk dancing and singing with a côr in, okay, fine, a tafarn.

I also experienced my first Noson Lawen on that trip. I didn’t really know what a Noson Lawen was, but when on Bootcamp, fake it until you make it. I got the gist that we all had to perform something, so I wrote and illustrated (I mean) a picture book called "Ble mae …?" ("Where is …?"), with each page dedicated to one of my fellow bootcampers. It was totally rubbish and a huge success, although I did pick up afterwards that reading a children’s book you’ve written in an afternoon was perhaps an unusual choice for a Noson Lawen - but whatever, I’m Australian, so. I wish I’d kept the book. I also remember the toffiest English bloke (who was actually lovely and drove a red Ferrari and had no clue most of the time and will never read this blog, I hope) got up to sing, and I was like "this guy" - and then he sung and I cried. He had the most beautiful voice.

My friend Elizabeth Corbett visited Wales recently to research her next book (about Owain Glyndwr’s wife - it sounds fascinating); and she was interviewed by the TV show Dal Ati. I watched the clip one day in the language centre in Kununurra and okay, I got teary-eyed (this is a bit of a theme, you guys), because three years after Bootcamp, with opportunities to speak Welsh few and far between, I still understood most of what they were saying.

Dw'i eisiau byw yn Gymraeg 

I’m not Welsh. There's no Welsh blood in my family. The redhair gets pretty good mileage in Cymru and I have friends I know mostly yn Gymraeg, but this is not my heritage; and yet nevertheless listening to and speaking a few words in Welsh reminds me of a time in my life and a part of my identity that makes me happy and that sometimes I forget about, and I would love to move to Wales for a few years and just live in a community of Welsh-speakers, who - like stubborn-ass mountain goats clinging to a vertical cliff - hang on.

But as I learnt on Bootcamp, spending even a week speaking only Welsh requires careful orchestration. In the Welshiest parts of Wales, Welsh-speakers still have to use English daily to interact with non-Welsh speakers. You cannot live solely in your Welsh-language identity.

There isn’t a single Indigenous group in Australia that has the numbers Welsh has. In many Aborignal Australian language communities, spending a day in language would be a dream. Most endangered Aboriginal Australian languages also don't have the same money, or political power, or resources, or time, and who knows what 'success' will look like for these communities. Maybe it’ll be a new generation of first language speakers. (I’m an aspirationalist, fight me.) Maybe it’ll be kids learning greetings and songs and animal names in school and knowing that a whole language exists in archives, somewhere, waiting for them when they’re ready to take it on. (In Kununurra, I got to see the language workers travel between daycare centres and schools each day to provide twenty-minute language lessons to kids age 3-7. Some of those kids are now as comfortable playing "Mr Potato Head" in Miriwoong as they are in English. It was really cool.) Maybe it’ll be Welcome to Country openings in language, and some bilingual signs.

Regardless. What I’ve seen in each of the three communities I’ve been to now is the same perverse stubborness of individuals to hang on to those parts of language and culture that allow us to inhabit identities that, despite the crushing press of English, we refuse to forget.

Notes from Kununurra, Week 2: What a Country

Right this second I am sitting in Cornerside Cafe, a properly hipster joint on the Kununurra main strip, complete with exposed lighting, fake plants, and a morning crowd of lycra-clad park runners getting their protein smoothie fix.

(I’m drinking the protein smoothie, actually. It has cherries, beetroot, raspberries, banana, protein powder, ginger, almond milk, and lemon juice in it, and it tastes a bit like dirt - but, like, healthy dirt.)

Cornerside does brunches like this:

I tried to recommend the cafe to a French backpacker. He started learning English eighteen months ago when he first arrived in Australia and so far he’s picked up a great collection of swear words and does a pretty good job of pretending to understand Aussie accents but somehow he’s not yet come across the concept of brunch.

“Brunch?”
“It’s like breakfast and lunch.”
“…”
"Smashed avos and poached eggs."
"..."
“Young people eat it.”
“…”
“You don’t have brunch in France?”
“No.”

A friend of a friend has a car so yesterday we drove out to Wyndham and saw the sights along the way. Given the number of Wyndham license plates in Kununurra I thought Wyndham was a major service town, but obviously that’s the wrong way round; Kununurra is the major service town in this area. Wyndham is the major crocodile town:

All these dogs were eaten by a big crocodile.

"What do you mean 'please do not climb the crocodile'?"

Can’t get over how freaking beautiful the country is out here, nor do I want to get over it. It reminds me of every Namatjira painting.

(I think this is by Oscar Namatjira, not Albert. Can someone help me out?)

Except obviously the Namatjiras were painting the country around central Australia and I'm not sure how different central Australia is to the east Kimberley, ecologically; but a lot of the colours are the same - red and purple hills, yellow spinifex, white trees with bright green leaves, blue sky.

On Friday afternoon after work, one of the language teachers (who, by the way, describes himself as mad), wanted to go on a bush “walk” in Mirima National Park; and by “walk” I mean crossing streams over upended signposts and rockclimbing up the side of a water hole.

“Yes,” I said doubtfully, looking at the rock face. “But how are we going to get down?”
“Nah, don’t worry about.”

Normally when people say “don’t worry about it” I worry about it even more, and I definitely worry when people (Mum stop reading this) carry beer instead of water for hydration, but somehow, even when we had to cross back over the stream after dark, using our mobile phones to light up the cane toads along the way, it really did turn out alright? Trip highlight.

Amongst all this traipsing around the countryside of course I’ve been having really interesting chats with the Aboriginal language workers at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring - you know, project stuff (which I’m not really allowed to write about); and I've been trying to get my head around the Miriwoong verb system, which is legit complex. The fun challenge seems to be how to present two thousand verb forms without freaking people out. I tend to think that all languages are complex in some ways and simple in others, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite as complex as this. I’d love to do a little side project about how people teach - and learn - so called “difficult” languages. Post-doc one day, maybe.

The other constant in my life right now is backpackers.

Honesty, I’m warming to them. They’re like small children - small, drunk, stoned children. They’re loud and don’t clean up after themselves and they sleep weird hours and have ambivalent standards of hygiene and some of them don’t wear pants to breakfast and they need constant amusement or they get bored and fight each other.

On the plus side - well, on the plus side, they’re seriously entertaining.

That’s about the only plus side, but it’s kind of worth it.

All the Italian backpackers hang out together, and they drink proper stovetop coffee and bake cakes, because, of course they do. Similarly the Germans hang out with each other, as do the English. The Belgians and the Dutch claim a more general European identity, and hang out anywhere in the Eurozone.

Everyone loves Mumford and Sons, and knows all the words to the ‘Sigh No More’ album. They will bust out tracks from that album any chance they get. They also listen to a lot of Guns and Roses.

You can leave your phone/laptop/kindle/backpack/boots/wallet/passport anywhere and three days later it’ll be exactly where you left it; but leave a packet of cigarettes or cutlery out in the open and it’ll get nicked as soon as you turn your back.

They’re all incredibly tan, and don’t believe I’m Australian.

They read real books, made with real paper. One particularly tan English puppy was carrying five big paperbacks in his luggage, including the Count of Monte Cristo.

They stay up to 3am and drink Emu Bitter and sing 'Little Lion Man' like they mean it, but if you turn the dorm light off, they know that means “no talking”. It’s the one “no talking” sign in this place full of passive-aggressive, completely ineffective signs they actually respect.

So while I’m looking forward to getting back to my own place in Perth, and I won’t miss getting kicked in the face every time the girl in the top bunk gets out of bed, I still can’t believe I get to do this, this phd life.

Notes from Kununurra, Week 1: Are Boab Trees Even Real?

"Flight duration is three hours and ten minutes, and the expected arrival time is 3pm."
The man sitting next to me on the plane turned to me. "Three hours?"
"I know," I said, "I thought it would take longer to fly so far north."
"I thought it would only take an hour," he said.
I had to ask. "Where exactly do you think you’re going?"

Kununurra country in Warnka-nageny (cold season), after a particularly rainy Nyinggiyi-mageny (wet season), is fresh and green and bright and expansive; a cool breeze after a hot day; water after salt; air after smoke. Kununurra country in Warnka-nageny is the unbearable lightness of being.

First day, the dormitory door at the backpackers wouldn’t lock. Next morning, the door wouldn’t close. That night, they fixed the door so it can be both closed and locked. Luxury.

I don't have a car in Kununurra because car hire is expensive; also you don't want to get known as the person who has a car. I walk to the language centre each morning, past the bougainvilleas and the boab trees, wearing my three-dollar thongs, carrying thousands of dollars of computer equipment in my backpack, and holding my hat on top of my head (my head is too big and my hat too small to sit comfortably by itself). So here I am traipsing blithely around the top end, ready to ask a bunch of strangers to sit and talk with me about their languages, and I have to say (not for the first time) that linguists are an odd bunch - and maybe I am one of them.

Apparently in New Zealand, thongs are called 'jandals', and in South Africa they're called 'plakkies', which has to be the most South African thing I've ever heard.

At the backpackers I've had the opportunity to extend my German vocabulary to include such words as Gemütlich. Google Translate suggests gemütlich mean ‘pleasant and cheerful’ but it’s probably best understood as the experience of savouring a beer in good company on a chill night.

I drank my first ever VB (yes), with a "reclaim" Australian and an English veterinarian. That's the genuine Kunners backpacker experience right there. And it turns out I do have something in common with racists - namely, an appreciation of the Harry Potter movies. (I know, I'm confused too.)

This is my favourite vet story (but it's not made up, it's completely 100% true): a rich young couple go to the vet to get their new Rottweiler puppies vaccinated, and they're very excited to have gotten such a good deal on the Rottweilers - only $500 a puppy. So they put the puppies side by side on the vet's table, and the vet looks at the puppies, and looks at the couple, and looks at the puppies, and looks at the couple, and finally he says, "They're effing guinea pigs."

Bathroom trips interrupted by frogs in the toilet bowl: two.
"You just do your business and flush them down," advised the admin assistant at the language centre.
"I am not shitting on a tree frog."