Vanity Projects

I snapped this pic with my iPhone as discreetly as possible while on a bus in Sydney.

I assumed this guy’s hairdo was a fashion statement. I wish men wouldn’t make fashion statements, but never mind.

But now I wonder. What if it wasn’t? Should I have said something?

My short hair is always in excruciatingly tight order à la Emily Dickinson. My husband says I look like a band member from Kraftwerk. So last week at the hospital I went to the bathroom after a tutorial to find that I had a sizeable chunk of hair sticking straight up in the air. No doubt this piece had been blown out-of-place by a forceful wind, but was still stiff enough from hair paste to stay stuck pointing north.

I was shocked and hurt that none of my classmates, nor the tutor with whom I was friendly, saw fit to tell me. Could they possibly have thought it was purposeful?!!!

I blame that guy on the bus (and others like him) for confusing the matter.

iPic: Sydney by the Rules

One of the first things that struck me about Sydney when I arrived from New York was how clean and orderly this city seemed. Where’s the trash? New York is actually pretty clean these days, but Sydney had an almost futuristic tidiness about it. And that tidiness extended to public behavior.

In walking through the shopping district at Chatswood or through the Central Business District, I was struck by the good behavior of pedestrians and drivers alike. A honking horn in Sydney is as rare as a “Hallelujah!” in a white church.

And everyone waits for the green light to cross the street.

Look closely, and you can see the little green pedestrian symbol indicating to law-abiding Sydneysiders that they’re permitted to cross the street.

This ain’t New York.

In New York, you walk when you want. To hell with the pedestrian light. You walk where you want. The middle of a block will do just as well as a cross walk. You don’t wait for the traffic to stop: you stop traffic. And don’t think that pedestrians rule the road. Drivers will retaliate, speed up, honk and try to muscle their way through your impertinence.

Try any of these things in Sydney, and pedestrians will look at you with disdain. Sure, there are some pedestrians with a New York spirit. I’m one of them. But my spirit is being slowly crushed under the weight of collective disapprobation. In their glares and silence, I can feel their indictment of my pedestrian crimes.

These days when I think about crossing the street, I give it a second thought. I’m not really in a hurry, I say to myself. Perhaps I can wait twenty seconds like the rest before crossing, I think. The cross walk is only 7 meters down the road. That’s not so far to travel, I conclude.

So yesterday I followed the rules. It felt nice. I walked through the city free of guilt and without fear of being flattened on the road between two cross walks. And I made it to my ferry home in perfect time.

There’s something pleasing about Sydney’s order. Walking in New York is a contact sport. It’s a struggle. In Sydney, it’s like synchronized skating. Not so bruising.

Not so lonely.

iPic: A flying fox no more

You might find the occasional bat in an old house attic in my small town in Pennsylvania. Good luck seeing more than a small blur of black though.

And you would often hear a rustling in the trees that lined my Jerusalem neighborhood at night. But the noisemakers would never show their faces.

But Sydney -

This is the city of bats.

For me, the beginning of a Sydney summer is defined neither by the lengthening of days nor the blooming of the Jacaranda; but by the recommencing of the northern migration of the flying fox. Every summer day at dusk, the flying pack departs the Botanical Gardens to sweep across my window for northern parts unknown. I never see the return trip.

The poor fellow above seems to have fallen from a tree in the Eastern Suburbs. But this is the wrong season, the wrong setting, and the wrong outcome.  After last week’s red day of dust, I hope he doesn’t herald a deadly summer.