Sven's life in Oz

Lately I’ve been going through something of a blogger’s block – it happens from time to time – so I’m trying a new, adult way of dealing with it: writing through it. Normally I just make a guttural kind of “gahhhhh” sound, throw my hands in the air and give up till it goes away, but I figure I’m old enough and talented enough to be able to bluff my way through 500 words three times a week (and lately one of those has become a regular audio ramble, making it even easier) so I’ll just truck on and hope for the best. What do you know, 100 words down already!

A little while ago I went for the longest run of my life and rather enjoyed it, which is odd because normally I hate running. I’m not sure what it is about it that turns me off. I much prefer swimming, and when I say that to my friends they look at me like I have two heads. I’ve had numerous conversations to try to determine why I hold this freaky point of view, but to no avail. Why do I hate running and yet love swimming? Three reasons, all logically circular, and all utterly inane.

Running bores me

I’ve said it before and I shall say it again: running is dull. It’s just like walking, but faster. What is achieved? It feels like a total waste of my time. “Why not run on the treadmill,” one friend  suggested. “You could watch the television then.” I’ll tell you why: I’d go out of my mind. I never watch the television: I watch the clock. The minute I’m on the treadmill I’m watching the seconds tick by till I can get off it again. I’m looking around the gym at the guy on the swiss ball or the girl doing circuit training thinking “Oh, I’d much rather be doing that.” That’s not normal, is it? I should be enjoying the thing. I have no idea how far I’ve run in 20 minutes and I never remember how I did last time to be able to compare. Am I getting faster? I doubt it. At least when I’m swimming I know that I did 40 lengths in half an hour last time, and next time I’ll do 50. And that’s the other thing about swimming – the results are immediate. You can build on your performance week on week and those are the kind of results I like.

The distractions

Josh said in a comment that forgets all his worries and daydreams he’s famous, whilst Dr Lego said that he switches off totally, even going so far as to listen to the same song on repeat for hours. Kristie, my friend, said she actually enjoyed the distractions, looking around her the entire time and making up lives and histories for the people she passes. (It turns out, by the way, that I know a lot of runners. They’re everywhere, like lice.) For me, the prospect of a long run is offputting precisely because of the distractions. My earphones fall out all the time, there are people in the way, and at any given point I know that I could just stop running. Just stop. I could walk back to the bus stop and go home. Nothing would happen to me. In the swimming pool at least there’s the prospect of drowning to keep me going until I finish a length. I choose my times wisely and when I get to the pool there’s barely a soul there, so no one to swim in front of me. I can get in, get a nice rhythm going and let my mind wander. I think about work, about family and friends, relationships, happy memories, sad times, story ideas and shopping lists. It’s like the ten minutes before you fall asleep where your brain goes safely off the rails. The number of problems I have solved after an hour in the pool is phenomenal. It’s like therapy. I just don’t get that with running, because there’s always something new around the corner and the temptation to simply slow down, slow down, and stop.

The abstract distance

I ran 8kms the other weekend. Big whoop! How far is that? I have no idea. Can I see 8kms? No. Can I count 8kms? Not really. As I approach the pool I can say to myself “I will swim that fifty times”, and I do. I can see the entire length, I know what I’m in for, and I commit to it. I know I could approach a field from a hill and say a similar thing, but once I got into the field I would lose all sense of what I was doing and the whole thing would seem absurd. I know this makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s the truth. As a child I preferred the beep test to cross-country runs – I could see the finish line the entire time, even if was just a con to keep me going. Short term objectives: they’re the only way to keep me moving.

So there it is. It turns out I’m simply the wrong personality type for running: I’m too easily distracted, it requires personal willpower over survival instinct, and the investment in the long run is greater than my fantastically myopic vision of success will permit me to conceive.

Amazing what you can find out about yourself when you just write, isn’t it?

When I first moved to Australia and decided to write this blog, I envisioned something quite different to the way it has turned out. I naïvely imagined a life-long holiday full of wonderful trips and glorious sights and being able to write about them all from a sun-drenched verandah with a G&T on the go every night.  Of course, life isn’t like that: the full-time job, the break-up, the shopping for groceries and paying the bills all brought the permanent vacation to a creeping end.  The other day as I was trekking back to the supermarket for a cake ingredient I had forgotten I realised that I lived here now, and it was the same life, but in a different place.

This evening, I watched Julie & Julia and took it all back.  Not only am I famished and inspired to cook, but also to get back in control of things, starting here.  I live in Australia!  I am too lucky!  Not everyone gets this kind of chance to see this amazing place – and all the other amazing places nearby – and I should try to share it with you as best I can.  It’s easy to take it for granted – it’s far more difficult to remember how amazing things are when you see them every day.  Case in point: Sydney Tower. Gareth and were keen to go – it’s the highest observation deck in Australia – and I trotted along with them in skeptical Sydneysider fashion, wondering if the cost would be worth experience.

The view from the top of the tower is amazing.  From the ground you forget how massive the harbour is and how it winds its way out to the ocean through the heart of the city.  You imagine the beach is miles away and the sights are too far to travel to when there are other things to be doing.  From the air you can see how wrong you are.  Seeing things from a different angle brought back the magic and made me appreciate how amazing they are, and how unlikely it is that I would ever be living here to enjoy it all.  Sure, the Tower isn’t the cheapest sight around, but it’s more fun than you think and worth a trip on a sunny day.

This week’s weather is atrocious – more like the UK in October than Australia in the spring – but next week will be gorgeous.  I plan to make the most of it and tell you all about it.  Don’t worry – all the ups and downs of a single boy in Sydney will be in here too but, man alive, life’s too short to be glum. Let’s turn that frown upside down and get on with it, shall we?

I’m back! I decided that connecting up my internet was daft since I was leaving the country for three weeks, so upon my return I set about getting myself back online.  This week I finally received my new modem and got back online, meaning I can blog, tweet and browse from the comfort of my sofa again! (I could do all that with my iPhone, in truth, but the keypad is RSI waiting to happen if I tried serious browsing on that tiny device.)  More importantly, I can get back onto feedly and catch up with everyone else’s blogs…

…erm, maybe not.  I might just have to scrap the lot and start again.  If you read me maybe you could leave a brief summary of your past couple of months in the comments, or pick one or two posts that could bring me up to speed? Thanks so much.

So, my sojourn in the UK is over and there isn’t time to write up everything that happened – it was non-stop from the moment I arrived to the time I left.  Much fun was had and the photos are up on flickr (several of me looking trashed and disheveled, you’ll be delighted to know), but more than that, I learned a few lessons about myself which I think I needed my friends to remind me I already knew.

1. I must write. The number of friends who gave me a serve for not having moved my novel on at all can’t be counted on my fingers.  Having a job where I get to write is good, but it’s not enough for my friends who, for some crazy reason, have faith in me and get disappointed when I’m not fulfilling my potential.  I know, unreasonable, right?  However, it’s not all bad news – this month I am researching my MA options properly, so hopefully I can start study in February.  I need someone to beat me into completion, so I figure an MA is a good way to do that whilst also networking for a future career.  I’ll keep you posted.

2. Being single is nothing to fear. I haven’t really been alone before in my life. Obviously I’ve been on my own, but I’ve never been properly on my own – I’ve always had my family, flatmates or a partner to keep me company. When I visited Liccy and Robin in London and they headed off to work on Monday morning, I think it was the first time I have ever been truly left to my own devices. Nothing depended on my achieving anything that day: I had only myself to please and the whole world to do it in. I went around St Paul’s Cathedral, and walked to Hyde Park Corner, Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park before heading back to meet my hosts for dinner. Some of that was new, some was well-trod, but all of it was my choice – no stopping to eat when someone else was hungry, no going somewhere or missing somewhere else as a compromise.  At the start of the day I was almost paralysed with the prospect; by the end I was pleased with what I had done.  Being alone is no big deal, and certainly nothing to fear.

3. I am a catch. When I discussed with my good friend CaroMel how I was a bit intimidated by dating someone who was older and more successful than I was, she practically jumped down my throat.  “You are brilliant and anyone would be lucky to have you,” she roared vehemently, “don’t let anyone make you feel like you aren’t.”  This is exactly what I say to others in my position but sometimes you need to hear it from someone else to remember that it also applies to you.  (I remember telling my self-deprecating friend Al: “Oh, I’m not having any of that” when he tried to suggest his now wife might be out of his league.  “You’re fantastic. Now get over there and talk to her.”  I’m nothing if not direct.)  No one should intimidate you: we’re all just muddling along as best we can, hoping people see that we dressed for the party and don’t notice our fly is open.  Confidence is sexy: if you’re intimidated by your date, he’s not going to be your date for very long.

4. Friends are food for the soul. No matter what, there is always someone who would be thrilled to hear from you. Good friends give so much, even if you feel like you have so little to give in return.  Even though my holiday wasn’t restful in the traditional sense, being with people with whom you “need be neither brave nor reticent” is a rest in itself.  Starting a new life in another country takes stamina and perseverance, so going home to familiar faces and being able to share the bad stuff as well as the good without seeming to whinge is a relief.  Listening to friends fills up your soul; their stories, their care, their advice all help you to grow.  So long as you have friends, you can do anything.

Leaving England was harder this time, perhaps because it was not the big adventure it was last time, but more likely because I better appreciated what I was leaving behind.  The flight itself was uneventful and I slept most of the way so my jetlag only lasted a couple of days.  Within a week things were back to normal and it was like I had never been away.  My Australian friends were as thrilled to have me back as my English friends had been to see me, and they were keen to fill my diary with all manner of parties and events.  Of course I took them up on the offers, such as tonight’s Sleaze Ball.  I’m still a big bag of insecurity and overconfidence and arrogance and doubt, but I’m damned if that’s going to stop me having a good time.  I am who I am, and life is too short.

This week I registered for my Facebook username and I had a really quandary: which name to use?  Back when I started blogging in 2005 (eek, has it been that long) I decided that I wouldn’t use my real name.  My friends call me Sven but it wasn’t my parents’ first choice.  They got inventive when my sister came around but my name was a compromise between two questionable alternatives: Carl (which I hate) and Zachary (which I love for its “Saved by the bell” qualities).  ‘Sveny’ came about at university and I liked it so it was a natural choice for a nom de blog.  It’s not that my real identity is a secret, but I’d rather keep traffic between my blog life and my real life one way which is why, although you can find it, I’ll never actually type my real name into a post.

There are a couple of reasons for this.  When I started blogging, I worked for a company that (a) I hated, and (b) would quite happily sack me for publicly announcing that I hated them.  The last thing I wanted was to end up a cautionary tale for a generation of net users on how not to vent about your shitty work place.  Secondly, I don’t want an internet stalker.  Or identity theft.  Or a dead cat turning up in my letterbox one day from an “admirer”.  Keeping a bit of distance between the internet me and the real me seems to have kept the loonies at bay for now.  But the main reason for creating an online alias at the time was that I was going on A LOT of dates and, without exception, all of them were awful.  I felt a bit bad slagging them off if they could search for it but with a secret identity (and providing I didn’t use their real names) I felt much better about the Chef of Death, and the tale of two housemates.

Recently I was thinking about merging my identities and, I suppose, legitimising my blog as a part of my life.  Now that I’m single again I have reconsidered.  No doubt before long I shall be going on more disastrous dates and I’ll need somewhere to tell the world about it.  It won’t be for a while but when it happens, you’ll know where to look.

Woo! New MacBook, new iPhone, new all sorts of things. You woud think that I would resume blogging immediately, but I’m off to Melbourne this weekend. Normal, more punctual and infinitely more entertaining posts will follow. Happy Easter, everyone!