Haikus

Straight after posting that haiku on Wednesday, a colleage came in and said she was doing a presentation on haikus.  She is the first person ever to talk to me about them, and it happens straight after I share my first one with the world.

 

We have a long-standing joke that I am a chocolate addict, and after I just finished all of my chocolate and sent an email about it, she replied:

 

Chocolate meltdown

Supplies in danger; worry

Desperate email

haiku

mind full of caffeine and emails

finding no calm

the office closes for the day

No more Mr Nice guy

I am exercising my 'no' muscle and finding it quite satisfying.

There's plenty of fun to have here like in any city, but I'm finding I'm tending towards spending more time on my own than with others. Something I'm finding out about myself is that I find it hard to say 'no', dissapointing people (even an incy little bit) is not something I find easy. I'm trying not to make excuses, just to say 'no thanks' when I'd rather not do something. It feels strange but is pretty empowering as my free time becomes my own - to choose what to do with it, not have the choices forced upon me by friendly people.

And now I'm extending it to my job, and am able to have difficult conversations without trying to gloss over or ignore the bits where I have to be the bad guy. I'm even take a hard line on pesky house officers who are being slack and not doing their job properly - no more "well, I guess it's OK, but could you try a bit harder please?", more like, "we're paying you this much to do so-and-so, and so would you please do it" - as simple as that.

Beauty and Style

My teeth are better, hurray! No root canal needed - I don't know what fixed them but I'm not complaining.

I've been spending some time in Japanese poetry lately, and on the rugged west coast of North Island, and the beauty I find in places like this resonates deeply with me. Like catching a glimpse of another dimension, deeper level of reality, transcendence...whatever.

I recently watched the film 'Azumi', which is a bloody but beautiful portrayal of the lives of some assasins in the feudal age of Japan. The cinematography is imaginative, and - though a bit cliched - the characters and landscape present a kind of tragic beauty that moves you (well, me) deep within.
In what I see of the modern world, the beautiful is something almost fundamentally different to this, a sanitised abstract that has somehow manifested itself in our dimension. I live in a city of style (Wellington), where what is appreciated is the ultra-cool, the sleek, the minimalist (of course I'm wildly generalising here). Cafes, paintings, cinema, photos. I-pods and internet designs. Logos and fashion.

Are we replacing beauty with style?

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Teeth

I feel like I have been given a new set of teeth, but had to pay a heavy price for it. £50 to be exact. There is no NHS in NZ and so everything is expensive.

I was getting a bit of pain so had a checkup, good news is my teeth now look great after he cleaned a couple of years' muck off them, bad news is that I might have a tooth fracture! I didn't even know you could get a tooth fracture! The tiny little x-ray showed a tiny little line through one of my teeth. Scratching my head as to how I did that. He said if the pain doesn't go away I might need a root canal. How expensive and painful does that sound!?!