Lifeworld Experiences and System Events

There has been a couple of slightly beneficial moments in the past week. On Tuesday I saw comedian Daniel Sloss perform at Hamer Hall and reviewed it on Rocknerd the following day. It was a nice bit of temporal synchronicity that I realised that it was exactly a year prior that he had been recommended to me. Further, because life likes to do things like this, that a friend of mine turned out to have worked with his mother (who is amazing in their own right). I was quite excited by these very few degrees of separation. The second event, the following day, involved a trip out the Dandenong ranges (Belgrave, Sherbrook, Kallista) with a friend, Virginia G., from my Timor-Leste days who had been working in international aid since. We hadn't seen each other for more than fifteen years, and they gathered from some of my recent posts that I could do with a bit of "forest healing". They were right of course, and it did lift my spirits. Despite being a very urban individual (for it is the polis is where the social world is negotiated and developed), I absolutely adore nature environments; it appeals deeply to my experiential pantheism. The encounter with a Morgan 3 Wheeler during a coffee break was a highlight as well. I'm not a car nut by any stretch of the imagination, but the Morgan has a special exotic beauty.

Outside the lifeworld of culture and friendships, there have been some interesting events for me in the world of the social system. The first was receiving an estimate for my 2020 tax return that is much larger than I expected, to the extent that I feel ashamed of it. Yes, I do deliberately overpay my tax every fortnight, I do donate significantly to charity, and I do have self-education deductions. But this return is more than what some unemployed people receive in benefits for a year (you do the math). I can only guess that's it's an effect of the substantial tax cuts for higher-income earners that our Tory government has introduced. The other news is a job application for a new role that's opening up in the department; it's an induction and onboarding position that will require a weird combination of scientific domain knowledge, information systems knowledge, project management, systems administration, and advanced adult education. In other words, I think I am particularly well suited for it. Finally, I have just received my new passport (hey, complete with a mohawk photo, nice). It had been sitting at the LPO for six weeks and I hadn't received any notification. Anyway, here it is. I have annual leave saved up and I did have a one-month trip planned for NZ.