The perks of late-night writing sessions

I’ve been a little busy lately. And when I get busy I make like a bat and forsake normal sleeping hours. I also hang upside down and lick nectar from flowers and fruit.

Like this:

The down side is that I miss a lot of daytime (and particularly breakfast) action. However since I’ve always worked better at night, most of the time I’m pretty thrilled with my regimen.

And recently I found another perk – listening to Mark sleep.

That sounds a lot creepier than it is. I don’t stand over his listless, vulnerable body holding a giant horn-like device or anything. And I’ve only toyed with the idea of taping him a couple of times; in my defence a) I was desperate to procrastinate and b) it’s because he’s a total freak.

Every night – and I mean EVERY NIGHT – at some indiscriminate time, Mark breaks his soft, regular snoozing and spends a good minute heartily chuckling to himself.

Then he falls quiet and continues to sleep.

Every. Night.

I’ve often wondered what these nightly outbursts were about, but by the time he wakes up he doesn’t remember anything.

Today I finally found out.

Once again I was happily typing away at my keyboard with the faint staccato of his breathing for company, when suddenly at 2:00am he stopped, raised his head a fraction, laughed from the very centre of his being and happily proclaimed – as if sharing some great joke – “Family To Family”.

I asked for clarification, “Family to family?”

Apparently this was the funniest thing I had ever said.

“Family To FAMILY,” he repeated, finding endless joy in the wit contained therein.

But, alas, he laughed just a little too hard and woke himself up, then just got kind of awkward – like a person caught skinny-dipping by a nun – mumbled something and promptly returned to his dreams. Silently.

I’m assuming this is what he was dreaming about:

Mystery solved!

Update!

Oh wow, so yeah it has been quite a while since I’ve been here. Terribly sorry about that…something about being awfully busy with work and the occasional social engagement.

I’m going to be better from now on. Although, I have to tell you, August is a big month. Big things are happening in August. For one, The Hausfraus (that is Simon, Mark and I) are moving out of Palace de Geyerstraße and into a bigger, brighter apartment. We are so devastated that at any moment any one of us could kamikaze into oncoming traffic or lick a power point. I am not even kidding.

In case you’re interested, I’ve dubbed our new stomping ground “Block 130” (I’m going for a feeling of darkness and foreboding. Work with me please). Although the apartment is quite large and sunny, it’s located on the rough side of town. In Munich terms, this means that when someone accidentally bumps into you, they might not apologise. I’m buying a switch blade and pepper spray for just such an occasion.

It’s also a good five-minute U-Bahn ride from the centre of town – rather than the ten-minute walk we’re accustomed to. So, in other words, in my mind it’s akin to a dirty hovel, if a dirty hovel were a jail cell, if that jail cell was onboard a ship, if that ship was headed for the edge of the earth and if the crew was made up of homeless men with explosive diarrhoea – like the one who squatted behind a bench, which was being occupied by an unsuspecting friend of mine, and let it rip.

I’m expecting a similar scene to play out in our new living room.

We’re also preparing ourselves for the loss of Mussa. We’ve decided that it would be entirely unethical to smuggle him away with us, no matter how much we know he wants us to. And he does. So for the moment he’s blissfully unaware of our pending desertion and has ramped up his visits to include times when we’re not even at home – we walk through the door and just find him contentedly curled up on the bed with a look of entitlement like, “I’m here, I’m dear, get used to it!”.

But it’s not all bad. For one, we are very excited to have found an apartment because we had feared that we might have to adopt Mussa’s technique of climbing through random windows in search of comfort in the arms of strangers. Secondly, the people we’re subletting from are pretty awesome and have made the whole process really easy. Thirdly – and this is a biggie – we’ll have a living room and a window in the bathroom. You have no idea how giddy this makes us – a toilet-window of our very own!

The move is just about the biggest thing in our lives at the moment – especially since we’re in the process of packing and shifting. But just in case you’re bubbling over with curiosity about what else we’ve been up to, here are some recent events in non-chronological order:

1)     We suffered aggression at the hands of a waitress we dubbed McBoobie. She had enormous knockers which threatened to spill out of her inappropriately-sized dirndl during every wrathful move and glare. Her nipples wanted freedom, but all she wanted was our immediate and ultimate end.

2)    We dressed up in costume for two separate gay pride days and I was only taken for a trannie a handful of times, which is flattering by any measure.

3)     I took a solo trip to Regensburg for a weekend to dedicate time to my multiple personalities: Agnes The Shy (who refused to take selfies in major tourist spots), Agnes The Inappropriately Vocal (who made appreciative noises while dining on delicious food) and Agnes The Creative (who made up for Agnes The Shy’s inability to self-photograph by documenting her presence in Regensburg with obscure photos). Should you ever find yourself in this part of the world, I heartily encourage you to visit R-burg. It is gorgeous, charming and everything nice.

4)      I had a confronting, near-naked experience with a doctor while wearing improper undergarments.

5)      We met a strange artistic type on an evening outing to Gärtnerplatz who completely backed our Hausfraus idea. He was an artist who suspected he was bisexual because he had slept with a man and liked it, but was in a committed relationship (of ten years) with a woman. He drank wine out of a crystal glass.

6)      While smashing sausages on a solo lunch outing, I met “Harry from China” and his father. They were delightful and showered me with complements and gifts. Or just one gift, to be precise, but I was blown away.

7)      One evening Simon went out without keys while the rest of us – that is Mark, two gorgeous ladies who were visiting from Australia and I – went home. The following morning we found him peacefully, albeit mysteriously, asleep in his bed. Nobody had let him in and he couldn’t remember how he ended up indoors. Based on havng spotted him leering near the window at odd hours of the morning, we formed a hypothesis that he had applied the Mussa technique and, unable to open the front door, had scrambled in through the only other available opening. It turned out that Mark had let him in. Disappointing.

8)      Cloacas!

And more stuff, but I think eight is a good number, so I’ll leave it there.

My answer to Carbon Tax comment

I received a comment relating to my Carbon Tax rant and since I love comments (and I really do), I wanted to prepare a thorough response. Unfortunately I got a little excited and now Blogger won't let me post it in the comment box (presumably for being too long).

So here's the comment:
Its seems this argument is a little shallow as it does not look at all the areas inluding historical factors - people in austrlia and around the world listen to so-called scientists who claim they can foretell the future when our economists could foretell the gfc, we cant even see 2 years in front of us - here we are bantering over a point less tax - which is a band aid solution as with all and most austrlian solutions - short term. if you understand the human physiology it is not difficult to understand that reward is far more plausible than punishment. We do it do our kids and pets when they are growing up - this leads to autonomous behavior which means the government can focus on larger projects/ developments. The other interesting topic I find is that the general public don't pickup history books and learn do THEIR own research and try gasp the so called climate issue. As you may learn the earth over periods of years (thousands of years) goes through cycles hot and cold. The more solar activity we have the more earth quakes and volcanic activity we have. None of which is controller able. If you think you can control it - you're greatly mistaken. A volcano can simply run for 10 days straight and product more harmful chemicals and natural co2 than an entire country of several years.

Folks like everything, make and informed decision - unlike your last election - based on hopes of change aka USA and Australia labor party.

great example - is this NBN - I've asked a lot of under 25 year old who and why they voted for in the last election here in Oz. their response - Labor - Why? cause im gonna get faster internet..." that is an uninformed decision.

Education is key!

Good luck researching folks.

And here's my response:

My argument doesn’t go into depth about climate change because there are hundreds of scientists, universities, research bodies and governments who have done that for me*. The vast majority of experts in the field of climate change have unanimously agreed that it is anthropogenic and that if we don’t do something about it soon, we are going to have a real problem on our hands.

The main argument against anthropogenic global warming comes from a mathematician with no formal scientific qualifications and – most recently – a retired palaeontologist with no expertise in the field of climate change. A lot of encouragement is also given by newspapers with a shameless and obvious agenda.
I think evaluating scientists based on the performance of economists is a strange link to make. It’s a bit like saying “how can you trust taxi drivers when bakers all over the country continue to burn my bread?” The professions aren’t linked by any universal web of relativity…that I know of.

In saying that, however, I have to defend our capable economists, because if you would have had a look at economic reports before the GFC, you would have noticed plenty of warnings about sub-prime loans and the way the system was structured. Australia has always had one of the world’s highest regulatory systems in place (hip hip to economists), which is why, to some degree, it was buffered from the worst effects. Naturally things are always better with hindsight and no economist pretends to achieve 100% accuracy, they do work with models after all.

However if you really don’t believe that economists can offer fair predictions, than I wonder why you don’t keep your money tucked away in a sock drawer? You must be aware that all financial modelling done by banks (including how the money in your savings account is invested) is performed under the advice of economists, as is the RBA’s monetary policy…and so far we all seem to be doing quite well.

The tax is not pointless. It’s not a perfect solution and it certainly isn’t as effective as an Emission Trading Scheme would be, however it will turn into one so problem solved.

I’m also not sure that you understand the structure of the tax and the ETS – the whole idea is to provide companies with economic incentives to switch to cleaner means of energy.

Whenever a company cuts down on carbon emissions it saves money by avoiding the tax. Reward. When the ETS comes in, companies that fall below their permit amount will be able to sell their left-over permits to other companies for money. Reward. Some media outlets have been spinning it pretty hard as a ruthless punishment and a way to run various industries into the ground, but that’s simply not true. The companies most affected by the tax will receive help from the government, but will also have a good fiscal reason to switch up the way they view their business.

The thing is, whether or not you believe the overwhelming amount of evidence to support anthropogenic climate change, you have to be aware that fossil fuels are running out and the switch to renewable energy is going to have to happen at some point. The tax is very small scale, but the point is that it’s a start. If structured well, the ETS will make a much bigger impact and it is a long-term solution aimed at changing behaviour. If there is a better option out there I’d love to hear about it, right now the carbon tax and the ETS are the best things going round. Mr Abbott’s idea of throwing money at selected industries and hoping that it’ll affect the future is the definition of short-sightedness – even his own party can see that.

Reading history books is great – knowledge is power and all that – but if you’d like an informed view on climate change you need to read the reports that are released on the topic. You simply cannot hope to understand the complexities of climate science by reading up on ice ages or even previous CO2 fluctuations. There are thousands of various factors involved (including the relatively recent introduction of humans) and hundreds of scientists have dedicated their lives to understanding them.

And you couldn’t be more wrong about volcanoes. According to studies performed by Gerlach (1991), Varekamp (1992), Allard (1992), Sano and Williams (1996), Marty and Tolstikhin (1998) and Gerlach (2011) among many, many others, volcano eruptions are insignificant in terms of this debate. On average, all of the world’s volcanoes release between 0.15 and 0.26 gigaton of CO2 per year (these are the most generous estimates…most experts have recorded a far lower number), whereas the anthropogenic CO2 emissions for 2010 (too early for this year) were 35 gigaton (so about 80-270 times more). In one year. So the compounding effect takes volcanoes out of any serious global warming discussions.

I can’t speak for the 25 year-olds you interviewed, but I do agree that a large part of the electorate (of all ages) doesn’t understand the issues or policies and runs with popular opinion – which switches from time to time. It is a shame that there isn’t more political dialogue going on.

Also I just wanted to say thanks for commenting, even if I don’t agree with all of your views I really do appreciate you sharing them.

*I'm too lazy to include links to the most influential and comprehensive of the reports and findings, however Wikipedia has strung together a pretty good list of scientific bodies et al. and it's a great starting point if you're interested in some further reading.