Holidays and domestic bliss

Last week I had a mini-holiday before the conference season kicks off. Proof:

It involved staying at a yuppie enclave (a “resort” of beach “shacks” - contradiction much?) but then sneaking through the caravan park to play on the swings and live out my childish fantasies of unrealised beachside holidays. I never got to experience the mythologised Australian family seaside holiday/road trip because I grew up where people go to have them. I wonder sometimes whether that has affected my ability to treat holidays as “normal”. And then I get over it, because there are more important things to worry about.

Being on a holiday isle in the low season is eerie: hundreds of empty homes and cabins huddled around gorgeous beaches too chilly and ill-timed to beckon. Like being on campus today, the first day of mid-year break. What’s been for months a dry and dusty and crowded campus is now soggy and silent: my coffee is made before I’ve even paid for it, my office is too cold to work in and the only sound is the excavator equipment that’s taken over the Great Court, mysteriously drilling into the ground and laying down pipes to drain away heaven knows what.

Postdoc life in June is even more lonely than usual: watching other staff bring their kids in to work, taking care of school holiday duties; trying to read through lunch at the usual cafes while teaching colleagues have end of semester catch ups; sharing the bus with exchange students finally laughing and relaxing and chatting on the way to shopping centres in languages you’ll never know. So I print out my reading and head back home, to take things up on the couch, and tustle over ideas in a more cosy place. It’s not often that Brisbane feels like Hobart, but on short, drizzly days, curled up in Nanna rugs, cursing footy results and having dinner early, this is about as close as it gets.

This week I’m working on an article that’s drawing together a couple of big issues doubtlessly nagging a few of us. Then I’m off to Sydney for Mobile Media where I’m chairing a session and also giving a version of the paper I’ve just finished on wireless technology and labour politics (I have a draft of that if anyone’s interested). Back in Brissie, there’s the Pig City Symposium I’ve been helping to organise on July 13, then it’s onwards to London. More on all that soon… once I’ve worked out why domesticity ain’t exactly bliss for everyone, even tho it’s been fun for me the past two weeks.