by On Friday I went to the theatre at Bats, a Wellington institution that, to my shame, I hadn’t been to before. I never normally have anyone to go to the theatre with, and unlike the cinema, I wouldn’t go by myself. I saw Love and Information with the bloke from the tennis club and his brother who had come over from Singapore. The play was weird. It flitted between dozens of seemingly unrelated scenes with no discernible plot. I think the play was about the sheer quantity of information, some of it deadly serious, some of it less so, that gets thrown at us almost constantly in the digital age we live in. We can’t possibly take it all in. Each piece of information, each tweet, each Facebook message (I guess, I don’t do Facebook) has an implied “you’re supposed to care about this” tacked on to the end. But we can’t care about it all. The trick in the digital age is deciding, out of every ten pieces of information chucked at you, which seven or eight to ignore. The star of the show for me was an old guy who in some scenes had dementia, and at one point hilariously described online sex as “virtual and great”. In one scene somebody rattled off umpteen words for “table” in various languages and I was disappointed not to hear the Romanian word masă.
Yesterday I went on a walk around Island Bay with a Meetup group. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had great views including of the South Island. Wow, what a difference. A few weeks ago a walk like that would have been a serious struggle. Even walking up the stairs was an effort. It’s great to have my physical energy back. I noticed the difference again today on the tennis court. My play was still very scratchy and I still had problems on serve, but at least I could move to the ball. One of the women who ran the English teaching course in February was there.
Someone recently put me in contact with a Romanian woman, and I got to speak with her yesterday. She seemed very nice but wasn’t really able to help me, mainly because she’s been out of Romania for such a long time. I think she thought I was nuts. She certainly managed to sow a few seeds of doubt in my mind. Should I even be doing this? She said it would be daunting for me because I don’t know anyone over there. But I think of the alternative – team meetings, strategic goals, service level agreements, performance reviews, desk moves, restructures, playing the pretending-to-care game where the avoidance of bad outcomes is the best possible outcome – and daunting doesn’t begin to cover it. And if I only ever went to places where I knew people I’d hardly go anywhere. (The possibility of long-term isolation is something that concerns me, I’ll admit that.)
Last Thursday we had our latest body corp meeting about seismic strengthening. We didn’t make all that much headway. There are so many decisions to make – what percentage of new building standard to strengthen to, when to have the work done, whether to employ a project manager or facilitator, and how to apportion the costs. The fact that these decisions depend on each other to an extent makes it especially hard. On the matter of dividing up the costs, I was amazed at the number of people who wished this to be done equally between the apartments. “We’re about fairness and equity here.” So am I, but an equal allocation is surely unfair, inequitable, and plain wrong. Some of the upper-level apartments have almost twice the unit entitlement of my apartment and the others on the lower floors, which means they’re almost twice the size and are worth nearly twice as much. Nobody would seriously suggest that someone who owned two apartments should pay the same as someone who owned one, would they? Would you like to pay the same income tax as your boss? This reminds me of the Poll Tax in the UK in 1990. It led to riots and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.
I haven’t seen any of the French Open because I haven’t found a stream that works. Muguruza’s win over Serena last night didn’t surprise me that much. People forget that Serena is in her mid-thirties, and Muguruza has looked the goods for a while. I predicted the Spaniard to win the title in an email to a friend when they were playing the third round, but unfortunately I forgot to place my $20,000 bet. There’s a lot riding on the men’s final. Djokovic is surely the favourite to complete his career grand slam but I certainly wouldn’t write Murray off.
