::waves:: Hello, everyone.
I'm in Sydney, cooling down from the heatwave in Melbourne (38 degrees and not a breath of wind). We arrived in Australia last Thursday morning and spent four days settling into Jenny's house and buying me clothes and shoes for the heat (Australian heat is different from English heat), plus sun-block and insect repellent (too late for the fifty-three bites on my hands and arms, though), then took a twelve-hour train trip to Sydney, through the wide brown land, which Aren had told me was very boring, but I was rapt; dead blasted gum trees, and yellow/brown expanses like the surface of the moon with rocks littered over them, and dry creek beds, and everything different shapes and textures from Europe. No wonder it took fifty or a hundred years for European settlers to learn how to paint the landscapes.
And so now I'm in Sydney, resting up for the night between the Queer Space conference and the Queer Asian Sites conference. The Queer Space conference has been pretty mixed, but I loved Elspeth Probyn's keynote talk on choice, youth, sex and intimacy (young people are refusing to choose between friendship, love, and intimacy - isn't that excellent? You go, young people!), and I'm really enjoying hanging out with Aren and Jonathan. My paper went okay, but attendance was underwhelming - I'm not taking it personally, though (my panel was scheduled opposite two of the papers I would have most liked to go to, so I can't blame anyone else).
More content, both about my life and about the intellectual stuff that's going on, when we get back to Melbourne and get the internet installed in Jenny's house.
