Sarah Wilson

good reminder #1: you only get one shot

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This video says it all in pictures.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43L1IR5qHIU&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

These moments seem like flukes. But nothing is a coincidence, ever. If you’re meant to live, you will. Everything flows in that direction as if by magic. I’ve been saved from death a number of times, by millimetres. Most of us have. It’s just we don’t see the “hand of God” that swoops in to save us. Or we don’t reflect on it when the moment passes; we take it for granted that the bus changed lanes just at the right moment. Or whatever.

This week death is close to me. My beautiful Uncle Pete, who is also my godfather, has a brain tumor. He’s being operated on, on Friday and he has a 60 per cent chance of coming out of it unscathed. Then comes chemo.

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sunday life: in which i check in with my inside people…and Eugene Tan

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This week I check in with my “inside people”

a happy shot by Uge
a happy shot by Uge

You can spend a lifetime reading books about how to get happy in 11 easy steps while not sweating small stuff. There are a lot out there, generally written by some of the most tortured souls around (in the same way neurotics often become psychiatrists and awkward nerds generally become models).

But I find the most powerful life-bettering lessons emerge from everyday people you meet in the street. Randoms, in the act of happiness.

On Monday I ran into Eugene, a surfer I’ve known from around my neighbourhood for a while, sitting in the sun having a coffee. I asked what he was doing because he wasn’t reading the paper or talking into a phone. He was just sitting. “Sez, I’m checking in with my inside people,” he said everyday-ishly, like he was posting a letter.

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do not adjust your screen!

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I found this new ad for a sustainable development company that invites us to rethink the way things are done. You can’t actually access the link via youtube, so click experiencere… The visual effect of the youtube interface splitting at the seams is clever, technologically. But so is the symbolism. It got me thinking. Very … Read more

why I like men

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I’m meant to be writing my Sunday Life column, due in two hours. But there’s a great survey published on The Punch today – blokes’ take on female body image. And it’s given me an inspired jolt.

3556385470 939dcfd0e1 why I like men

On Thursday I drank wine and ate sushi with The  Punch editor Penbo (he gave me the gig writing an indulgent column in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph a year or so ago when he was editor) and he we were talking about the survey. He was getting responses on his blackberry from male readers as we ate. He made the startlingly obvious point that everything we (women) think we know about what men think about us is wrong. We kind of know this. But it’s another one of those things about men we just refuse to accept.

I like this observation from the survey, because it opened my eyes:

Interestingly, men think women are more turned on by a good physique than they are.

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sunday life: in which I plunge into mess

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Lucy-Atkins-001

This week I plunge into mess

So tell me what you make of this pop-cultural collision? Californian fashion label Ed Hardy has launched a range of hand sanitisers. The tattoo-motifed label is best known for dressing trash-tastic celebs like Tara Reid and Tommy Lee in expensive, tough-nut versions of your aunt’s experiments with a BeDazzler gun in the early 80s. So this foray into handbag-sized disinfectant is a bit off-kilter, don’t you think? A bit like Mack trucks doing a diffusion line of tampons.

Anyway, hand sanitiser happens to nick an old wound of mine. I despair when I see more evidence of our desperate attempts to control life – be it the germs, dirt, traffic or noise.

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good thing noticed #2: paper radio

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This is a cute little idea from Melbourne – a podcast service that uploads aspiring writers’ works as audio. Do you write? Contact paperradio direct and see if they like your style. They’re accepting prose, poetry, political rants, profiles…most things that are about pen to paper. Sadly they don’t do Venn diagrams. Yet. The content … Read more

more (pretty) whimsy: The Middle East

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Four things I like:

* songs in a minor key

* songs about life’s inevitabilites

* new Australian bands (that aren’t force-fed to me by Triple J)

* beautiful, whimsical film clip.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjB2hbMYIXo[/youtube]

The colours are so pretty. They remind me of my grandmother’s tea cups.

The Middle East is a collective of whimsical kids from Townsville who don’t seem to be trying too hard to prove themselves.

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sunday life: in which I fly naked

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This week I declutter my background reading

read it now
read it now

I can get disproportionately excited about new online devices. Like, a while back, I was frothing about Instapaper, a 2.0 equivalent of the Post It note.

It works like this. You’re wasting time online and stumble upon an interesting blog post or New York Times article. You can’t read it now; you’re meant to be finalising a spreadsheet or something. Printing it out is just wrong. After all, you have one of those Please Consider the Environment email signatures. And you offset your Virgin flights.  Perhaps you could email it to yourself and flag it.  But that seems way too clunky and cluttery.

What to do? Glad you asked. Once you’ve installed Instapaper (three easy online steps, or thereabouts), you simply click a “Read Later” button on your Bookmarks menu and your article is filed in a special folder in cyberspace. For perusal at a more languid juncture.

Is it just the Capricorn in me, or is that really nifty?

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