Little Running Bear

As a very young child my parents took me to Lake Mountain for a day trip. The quickest way for a city dweller to experience the snow, Lake Mountain is about 2 hours out of Melbourne and used primarily by uncommitted, recreational cross-country skiers and day-trippers like ourselves, it has an elevation of not very high and receives an annual average snowfall of not very much.

Having seen the snow on television, through which I developed much of my understanding of the world at-large, it was fluffy and white, manipulatable into snowmen, snowballs and fell from the sky in floating crystals that made the world beautiful. That was snow and that was what I expected.

My response, when I finally encountered the hard icy ground at Lake Mountain, was that of being significantly unimpressed.
possibilities
“You thought it was cold and wet and you didn’t like it,” my mother reminded me when I called her to tell tales of New York’s snow storms.

On Thursday morning when we opened the curtains in our hotel room, snow fell in giant floating flakes that looked like a foam factory exploded somewhere. Looking out of the sixth story window onto 23rd street, there was no evidence snow on the surface. I’d experienced this before.

New York City has a tendency to experience snow without the “stick,” much to my disappointment. This means that it melts as soon as it hits the pavement and evaporates into nothing rather than piling up and creating fun mounds of nature’s frozen play-doh.

In the elevator on the way down to get some breakfast bagels I remarked to a woman that these were the largest snow-flakes I’d ever seen. She said, “Yes, but it’s not sticking,” with a smile that I interpreted as a reflection of my own hope for sticking snow. Later I thought that maybe she meant “at least it’s not sticking” because here’s the thing: Snow can be romantic, fluffy and fun but most of the time it’s just cold and wet.

When it did start sticking, the snow made the footpath slippery for walking. Pedestrians were torn between walking quickly to get to shelter and stepping tenderly to avoid prematurely breaking a hip.

(As a side note, I asked some lawyer friends about the litigious possibilities of slipping on the snow outside somebody’s building. According to them, it is the building owner’s responsibility to clean the footpath outside any particular building. Despite that being the case, if somebody slips and decides to sue, they will sue everyone from the building owners to the city to the firm that designed the building and possibly even the band Snow Patrol just for the hell of it.)

The second day after the snow started sticking presented a nightmarish vision of the future. It was a Friday and just happened to coincide with the preview of the Macy’s One Day Sale.

Gum boots were 25% off and in high demand. While the rest of the department store was relatively quiet, the women’s boots section was reminiscent of the scrambling for lifeboats on the Titanic. Confusion caused people to just shout colours, patterns and sizes to anyone who would listen in the hope that a shop attendant would hear and return with the exact shoe required. Relief sales troops arrived from other departments only to hide for a few minutes in the shoe storage area to escape the horror. To paraphrase Martin Sheen’s famous line: “Macy’s. Shit.”

A walk through the city gave further signs of the snowpocalypse. Hot-dog and pretzel vendors were notably absent. I never would have imagined that in an emergency situation, street meat would be the first to go. This also meant that hot-dog vendors who had braved the ice-filled wind could charge a premium. They had area-based monopoly and they would use it to their advantage. Customers didn’t complain about the high prices. They just accepted that at the end of times, the remaining hot-dog man is king. Three bucks for a game of salmonella roulette? Whatever you say, your majesty.

Soon enough, but still too late for the man killed by a falling branch weighed down with snow in Central Park, the snow eased up and people came out to play. Parents and nannies on the Upper East Side took children our into the park in their little sleds and pushed them around, calling “Wheeeeeeeeee”, trying to convince the children it was fun. The children, for their part, were nonplussed at best.

By that evening, snow was piled up on the sides of roads and snow ploughs scraped up ice to create a filthy black mush that even New York City dogs were wary of.

Making our way from the excellent Barbuto restaurant in the West village, I saw a young man line his girlfriend up with a snowball. It looked, for all I could tell, like he was about to hurl the soft missile at her and she was going to give him a free shot.

“Don’t just stand there and take it,” I said.

Lyndal took the opposite tact, encouraging the boyfriend with “Do it. Do it.”

Troy stood still, probably wondering why we weren’t just crossing the street.

Both of them looked at us with amusement. Our Roman circus-style audience participation pleased these rugged up gladiators. But it also pleased someone else. From behind we heard laughter. Then the young man’s eyes widened and his smile changed to one with a cunning plan.

“You’re right,” he said to me and within nanoseconds my head was covered in icy crystals.

The gauntlet hit the floor and I picked it up instantly. I dived for the nearest snow pile, gathered some in my hands and began hurling.

The fight was three against four but we held our ground until a lady in the opposing team tripped over a tiny railing around a tree stump, landing arse-first in some untouched powder.

A ceasefire was called and the fight declared a tie.

Survivors of the snowpocalypse, we were all victors. New York City threw some of its worst behaviour at us and we came out stronger than before.

Dateline: Somewhere over the very fucking large Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and California.

It used to seem so miraculous to me. The idea that we could cross oceans via the air and within a day or so be in a completely different country that we would only otherwise get to experience on television filled me with a sort of wonder.

As a younger man living in Australia, the ability to travel internationally was akin to mastering the secrets of the universe. It was a means of controlling time. Flying from Melbourne to LA and arriving 5 hours before I left became a bragging point. “I will travel into the past and fascinate people with my knowledge of the future,” I’d say, joking to my friends. Actually I was probably boring my friends because, let’s face it, travelling backwards over the international dateline is:

1. Nothing special; and
2. Merely the spatial manipulation of the arbitrary labeling given to ease our tiny minds into a construct paradoxically and simultaneously abstract and very real: ie TIme.

Still, it seemed largely magical to me. Especially the first time it went smoothly. Flying from Melbourne to Greece via Singapore when I was 22 gave me my sense of wonder about air travel. Before then I’d travelled to New York on the worst route possible (Melbourne -> Auckland -> Honolulu -> San Francisco -> New York, a forty hour trip of little to no sleep and a mix-up with the meals leaving me both hungry and slightly food-poisoned) and London via Bangkok where the plane’s hull was damaged by someone driving one of those luggage trolleys directly into it and my grandfather, who spoke very little English, displayed his frustration by muttering “shit, shit, shit, shit” and shaking his head ever-so slightly.

On that flight to Greece I sat next to a Korean man and we made conversation the whole way to Singapore. To this day I speak almost no Korean and I’m sure he hasn’t made much progress beyond the zero English he spoke. Through the magic of air-travel we had quite a marvelous conversation about our home countries and other things that fail to come to mind. By the time we parted in Singapore, we had exchanged phone numbers and addresses. I’ve never heard from him again but didn’t really expect to.

In Singapore I ate noodles with roast duck before catching my connecting flight to Athens and I was like Marco Polo discovering the orient and bringing its secrets back to Europe.

My parents immigrated to Australia, arriving by boat after months of travel. When they spoke of France and Italy, Poland and Russia, these places seemed unreachable due to their distance. Months they spent on boats to come to Australia, battling illness and cultural barriers, and I make the return journey in less than a day. That’s amazing.

At least, it was amazing. Now it seems like the most ridiculous thing ever. It’s taking me 20 hours to get to New York. Almost an entire day of travel to get between two first-world nations. That just doesn’t make any sense to me anymore. It feels so primitive despite the fact that I KNOW there’s no faster way to get there.

Eleven hours into the fourteen that make up the first leg, Melbourne -> L.A. and I feel beastly. I’m looking around the cabin wondering what kind of thin line there is between everybody sitting patiently in their seats and some horrible prison riot-type scene where passengers start burning their own seats.

We’ve been stuck in our assigned positions for so long that we remember no past and are aware of no future. I am now, have always been and will always be 70B.

Technology allows us to use microwaves to defrost lasagne in a matter of minutes but it still takes me 20 hours to travel to New York and, more to the point, I’m still too poor to afford one of those airline seats that convert into a bed. The world continues to be a mystery.

Here are some real reviews on the internetz of my favourite Chinese dumpling restaurant in Melbourne.

My friend who got the dumplings went home feeling gross! I would not go back.
–ChiaraB

The place stinks, it needs a clean, the staff are rude who can’t be bothered giving good service and I felt angry that I even handed money over. I love in these places they say they don’t accept cards; these are cash only businesses because they don’t pay tax like everyone else does.
–Ckermeen

I like how this one started as a restaurant criticism but turned into a little rant of… what is that? It smells a bit like… indignant xenophobia.

The taste is good as well. But when you enter the premise it smell awful, smell very vinegar.
–Tjhia

Yeah, that could be all the vinegar. Personally, I’ve never noticed the smell. I’ve been in restaurants where all I could smell was toilet cleanser. I’ll take the smell of COOKING and INGREDIENTS over that any day.

The atmosphere there makes me expect that Jackie Chan will be thrown from the upstairs in a Chinese movie brawl.

–Daniel

Yes. This is the most accurate review so far. It was one of my first thoughts too. The balcony is perfectly designed for throwing someone off. That, to me, says “Authentic Chinese Food Here”.

The meals, nothing special and nothing which I couldn’t have gotten at Shanghai Dumpling House within a matter of 15 minutes. Unpleasant and and unsatisfactory.
–cindyc

Very strange indeed, they just lost our (rather lucrative) business. Very disappointed.
–Etak_tseug

I eat at Shanghai Village regularly. I’ve done so for the past 10 years. I personally don’t mind the way it smells or the hot-pink walls. I focus on the menu and the food.

When my friends and I go there for or dinner, we walk/roll away 40 minutes later unable to imagine anyone ever eating as much food as we did. Especially for what works out to be about ten bucks each. It’s extraordinary.

My major complaint is that they used to have these delicious red-bean sesame balls that were little, deep-fried mouthfuls of artery-clogging goodness but they have fallen off the menu.

Bring those back, SV, and you will have my heart, stomach and tongue forever.

A while ago I asked my personal trainer (PT) if I should ask my friend to get in touch. We trained together a couple of times and my friend had very quickly fallen off the self-improvement wagon. PT told me not to. The theory being that if he wants to become fitter my friend will take the steps required and contact PT himself.

If there is any sense that PT is chasing my friend the dynamic of professional service provider and client shifts. No longer a professional relationship, PT is doing my friend a favour by checking up on him. The relationship is then dependant on a whole different set of emotions. Instead of my friend wanting to improve, and PT is in the improvement business, it becomes a game of guilt. My friend feels guilty because he hasn’t sought his own improvement and that becomes his soul motivation for turning up to training.

That scenario reminds me of dentists and mechanics. How often have we put off going to the dentist or the mechanic because we haven’t taken care of our teeth or cars in the way they told us to? How many times have you had your dentist tut-tut or actually scold you while in the chair. They might think they’re doing it in a friendly way and they’re definitely doing it with your best interests in mind, but that tiny action infantalises rather than empowering.

Guilt does not lead to responsibility. Responsibility comes from a desire for self-control and self-improvement. As such we can’t be responsible for other people. When they want the help they’ll seek it. If they are only doing damage to themselves there is nothing we can do to protect them.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I find myself in a similar position. One of the things I do is help people improve their work/life balance and achieve their goals by helping them understand what’s important and then look at what tools they have at their disposal to help achieve those goals.

In work like this, I sometimes receive partial payment up-front. I put in a lot of introductory work and research to tailor sessions for particular clients and I’ve found that they aren’t always willing to put in their own work. If I don’t get some payment up-front I end up losing out on the deal.

The desire to chase clients, to encourage them to do their homework and contact me to organise a session is strong. It feels like bad customer service to just ignore them until they get in touch. After all, I’m holding onto their money.

Chasing them is not going to help them improve themselves. Efficient work practices and personal fitness are both about taking responsibility for one’s actions. There are penalties we face for not taking that responsibility: bad work/life balance; poor health; increased ongoing car costs; loss of teeth.

Providing a professional service is not doing someone a favour. It is maintaining a business relationship with remuneration for work. The money has been paid up to a point and the services should stop at that point. If there is more take than give in any direction, one party is being screwed and nobody wants to be in that situation.