I’m sitting here reflecting on wacky, weird and wonderful week.
1. Tuesday and Thursday off work doing nothing except reading, listening to music, playing music. Oh and I did also manage to vacuum the house.
2. A new obsession was born thanks to Youtube. I can now bore my facebook and twitter friends to pieces with neverending iPhone videos of myself playing the piano and sometimes singing. Apparently, I am the 63rd most subscribed to channel in Australia this week. (That required six subscribers by the way). I wonder who was 62nd?
3. Out of the clear blue sky a journalist from Crikey rang me on Monday for a quote. That never happens.
4. Then on Wednesday the producer from the ABC Unleashed site contacted me about writing about John Safran (see post below). It appears there are quite a lot of John Safran fans out there going by the responses to my article. It’s very interesting. The only one that annoyed me a little bit was the person who made a slightly derogatory remark about my location in “Central Queensland”…Surprising as it may be to some there is life outside the capital cities. And I liked John Safran’s Music Jamboree. Just saying….
5.I arrived home today to find my 1930s songbook had arrived in the post. It’s “yuge” as we bogans, who don’t live in metropolitan areas, like to say.
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I wonder where that rude commenter was? Because I suspect it’s not just the “central” part that sparked their ire, but the “Queensland” part. When I was planning to move here (from, broadly speaking, Sydney), I was astonished at the number of “don’t forget to leave half your brain at the border”-style jokes I heard.
And though in academic circles the prestige of the university I studied at is well established, people were scornful about my attending a Queensland university for postgraduate studies, as well.
It boggled my mind.
So you’re suffering (in that commenter’s eyes, at least) from a double disadvantage: you’re not only in a rural area, you’re not even anywhere near Sydney or Melbourne.
Shock! Horror!
😉
Yes it is indeed shocking!!! Maybe there should be a special Centrelink payment for people like me…. 😉
Actually, seriously, I hadn’t thought about the Queensland thing but I think you might be right sadly. Although I do find your own experience quite amazing, I did encounter some similar attitudes when I went to postgrad seminar at ANU many years ago. Everyone else was from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart. It was evident they had never considered the possibility of someone living and working in regional area. It was clearly quite mystifying to them. A little funny really.
I find people have a similar reaction when I say I like living in suburbia. Okay, “suburbia” in Brisbane starts about five minutes’ drive out of the city centre (it’s one of the things I love about Brisbane) and it’s not one of those paint-by-numbers new estates, which have a whole raft of problems associated with their relative age, their isolation, the density of peer-grouping, the lack of necessary infrastructure, and so on–but it’s still suburbia.
I love it.
I love the space and the wildlife.
I really wouldn’t want to live cheek-by-jowl with my neighbours in the inner inner city, no matter how funky it is.
well then I’m really not funky at all then I guess. because i like living here away from the busyness of the city. although i quite like to visit. but i’m always happy to come home.
Ah, the Regionals, almost but never quite as good as a Capital. Know the feeling well!!