synchronicity

A soldier with a broken arm made Bowie stare at the wheels of a Cadillac. It wasn't an intentional reaction. That's just where his eyes fell. 

chordination

When I was learning to play guitar, I didn't think I would ever master transitioning from one chord to another. I always had to stop and move my fingers, then start playing again. How can you even do that? How can you reposition your fingers in zero time? 

But I kept practicing and then one day I had the idea of moving my fingers just before the transition....that's the thing - you have to do something different from what the music seems to require. Drumming is like that, as is singing and playing guitar at the same time. 

That was pretty much it...once I started moving my fingers slightly before the transition, I had it. 

a greater plan

It's weird in a good way, how things work out. In my HSC, English was my worst subject, I didn't do History at all, I did all maths and science subjects, along with English and Economics, I had no interest in doing an arts degree or becoming a teacher, and yet, later on in life, that all changed. I ended up doing an arts degree with a double major in English and History and then doing honors in English. Education became one of the main drivers of my career. I know that somehow things worked out for the best. I wouldn't want any other degree and I think teaching is such a great vocation. 

I see the same thing in my personal life. I have ideas about what I want and what I should do - how things should go - and things unfold in a much better way than I could have planned. A good example is how the challenges of stopping alcohol and tapering off valium have led to positive changes in my life, which can be summarized as a movement away from rumination and withdrawal to action and engagement. 

When things go wrong or you're really struggling the link to positive developments is not clear at all - you just don't see it - but it's real. 

against the day

I'm not very reactive in the moment. If someone tells me something that I feel strongly about, for good or bad, I don't respond then and there. Instead, I go away and think about it and then react. Not that my reactions are always considered and deliberate. Sometimes I get angry or upset, but it's always later. 

give

An important discovery I made was that it’s actually up to me whether people are friendly towards me. The balls in my court. If I thought people weren’t being friendly in the past, I would withdraw, and go away, and I would feel bad. But then I realized a simple solution. What I want is for people to talk to me, and I can always make that happen by talking to them.

all that

I'm hearing that web 3.0 isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some people are saying that the 'personal web' or 'indieweb' is much better. It's a quiet rebellion against the corporatization and algorithmization of everything. 

It's partly about going retro, back to the early days of the internet, and developing your own website in a very quirky and particular way. Some of the main websites that allow you to create this kind of website are: neocities, nekoweb, and Github pages.

Žižek's cat

I recently sat down [in my dreams] to discuss my latest novel with Jennifer Byrne.

This is an excerpt from the transcript. 

JB: It seems to me that there's a common theme in your memoir and your most recent novel, Žižek's cat, about the tension between home as a place of nurturing - a refuge from the world - and home as a stifling influence - somewhere that you want to escape from to seek adventure and excitement in the wider world.

DJ: Really? Where did you get that idea from? 

JB: Well....you're a writer and the main character in your novel is a writer and it just seemed like there was this idea of home as a place where the writer goes to work but then finds themselves isolated from the world and the kind of stimulus they need to be truly creative. So, there is this tension between the need for refuge - in order to write - and the need to escape refuge to pursue adventure, to have something to write about. 

DJ: That's a very interesting idea, and I think it's a good point, but the tension in my novel, that I was most consciously aware of, was all about the cat. I saw the film, The Hunger Games, and I kept thinking about catness....what is it about a cat that makes it a cat, y'know? Then, the tension comes in with the anti-catness. The tension between catness and anti-catness makes the cat qua cat really worth exploring and writing about.

JB: So, that was why you called the book Žižek's cat? But why Žižek? Why his cat? Why not someone else's cat? 

DJ: Well, it's partly an allusion to the kind of dialectic that Žižek is so preoccupied by...Ernaldo - the cat - embodies that dialectic in reverse...Instead of moving through the stages of thesis and antithesis to synthesis, Ernaldo devolves from a state of synthesis into the antithesis of a cat, which is a writer.....but of course, that only makes sense within the context of the story. 

Also, it's not his cat in the sense that he owns it as a pet. It's just a very Žižekian cat. Žižek doesn't like cats. He once said in an interview, 'Cats are lazy, evil, exploitative, dogs are faithful, they work hard, so if I were to be in government, I would tax having a cat, tax it really heavy.'

JB: What inspired the idea of the cat being the antithesis of the writer?

DJ: Have you ever seen a cat write? Has there ever been a writer who was a cat? So, that's where I got that idea from.