John Lennon Was A Visionary

Its nearly the end of June already? Where did the last six months go? More importantly, where did the last three months go since EDM and Family returned from our happy life on the Sunshine Coast?

Yes, my head is spinning a little at the moment. I am seriously in awe about the fact 2012 is nearly halfway through and that 2013 beckons. Mainly because it just feels like my life is rushing along way too quickly and I’m not getting even half a chance to stop, collaborate or listen. (Really need to do something about those Vanilla Ice references. It's like I've got Tourettes or something)

I guess the main point I’m trying to make is exactly what John Lennon once said – “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” What a visionary. Because my life certainly seems like its steaming along and telling me to hurry up while I’m still trying to come to terms with what I’m actually going to do with it. I mean I’m in my mid 30s and have had a career for nearly 12 years now, but I’m still waiting to grow up and work out what the hell it is I want to do.

And with all the getting out the door in the morning, and daycare drop-offs, and meeting after meeting interspersed with more meetings, and daycare pickups, and then dinner/bath routines and a quick conversation/catchup with the wife, where exactly is there time to contemplate all that and come up with an answer? There isn’t. So you get back on the merry-go-round once again and repeat ad nauseam while consoling yourself with the fact you have a steady job and you’re supporting your family and...oh shit, I’m stuck on this train forever aren’t I?

Well actually, I do know what it is I want to do. What I think I’d really love to do. There’s just a small problem. Sorry, massive problem. In that it don’t pay well, especially at the beginning, and I already have a steady job and I’m supporting my family, etc etc. Guess I could give it a go at night after the quick-conversation/catchup-with-the wife and before-bed stage. Yeah, maybe then. But then again, that stage is extremely short. Could be measured in minutes some nights in fact.

But if you want something so bad you should be able to find the time surely. Isn’t that what all the self-help books would say? Or maybe Chuck Norris? Well yeah, I do want it. But I don’t want it so bad that I’m willing to become a tired, cranky bastard and bankrupt my family following my tendency to fall asleep at my desk and fail in my duties to keep this State up and running. (I may have exaggerated that last point. But no-one reads this blog anyway)

I’ve digressed. Yes, I am just feeling that my life is a little out of control at the moment and that the weeks and months are flying by without any real appreciation or acknowledgement. I’m not getting any younger, as the thinning hair on my forehead tells me, so shouldn’t I be living every minute and every hour to the full? Shouldn’t every week and every month be ‘lived’ rather than ‘lived through’?

I don’t know what the answer is. Another stint on long service leave up the coast maybe. I did thoroughly enjoy those six months and certainly felt like a lived a truly simple life that allowed me to ponder and contemplate as well as spend quality time with the son and wife. I’ve certainly come to realise that I do love a good ponder and a good contemplate. You know, ‘I think therefore I am’ and all that. But I can’t keep taking long service leave every few months as there wouldn’t be enough service being served to constitute ‘long service’.

I just need a remote control for my life I think. One where I can go into slow motion mode and take a good look at everything that is happening around me and put some appropriate time and effort into the things that matter most to me. One with even a rewind button. Yeah, that’d be great. Especially on those mornings I wake up with a hangover and a nagging feeling that I said something out of the turn the night before. Who knows, even one with a fast forward button. Just to make sure that everything ends up working out for the best and that things will be all right. Particularly on the family stuff.

Hang on. A remote control for my life? Jaysus, is this what I come up with when I do get a chance to ponder and reflect? I sound like a screenwriter for a bad Adam Sandler movie. And it’s not even an original idea at that. I'd probably lose the bloody thing down the back of the couch anyway.

Oh well, perhaps I should just stick to my day job then. The one that supports the family and pays off the mortgage. And the one that’ll help me pay for the mid-life crisis that is so obviously just around the corner.

Til then,

EDM.

 

Just The Messenger

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/how-to-sack-20000-queenslanders-or-more-20120613-209a1.html

Media Times-A-Changing

Big news yesterday was the announcement from Fairfax Media that it was culling 1900 staff, moving their broadsheets The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald to a tabloid format, closing two printing facilities in Melbourne and Sydney, and setting up a paywall for its online content.

In some circles the news has been massive, while in others its hardly raised an eyebrow. That’s the society we live in. Personally, I have a great interest in the media landscape so it was a news item that both surprised and left me pondering. So along with 1000 other bloggers and opinion writers who’ve written about it in the ensuing 24 hours, here’s my take on the whole thing.

Firstly, there’s no doubt the old newspaper business model is dying and there’s no chance of it being resuscitated. That’s not news, pardoning my pun. But the events of yesterday certainly legitimatise that view. The days of having a team of full-time reporters running around getting stories for you while paying them with the revenues from classifieds and advertising are long gone. The internet has changed all that as well as subscriptions to news services where you could possibly run a media service with no reporters of your own at all.

What that means for the future of investigative journalism is a big question though. What media proprietor is going to pay a seasoned reporter for six months of hard graft and worn out shoes from pounding the beat when the actual outcome in the form of a published article is so far off? Will the likes of Watergate ever happen again if there’s no appetite for delving in and exposing a story based on developing a relationship with a source and meticulous research and cross-checking?

The paywall is an interesting aspect as well. Again, it’s not a new thing with The New York Times first asking the public to pay for their online content a few years ago and the likes of The Australian and The Herald Sun following suit as local examples. The thing is, most people will not pay for something that they can get elsewhere for free. So a paywall will likely cause a decrease in readership but of course those who do pay up will result in an increase in revenue for the media outlet. And of course for the media companies it’s about the revenue so they’ll probably be happy to take that hit on readership numbers.

Then again, paywalls will no doubt be seen more and more over the coming years and we may well be in a situation soon where every media outlet charges and the balance of market share will return. The result? A win for the media outlets of course as they’ll have us paying for their content once again which in many ways is a mere reconstruction of the old business model where they had us paying for a hardcopy of the newspaper at our local newsagent. The more things change....

For me, I’m a regular user of The Brisbane Times, a Fairfax online news service, so I have some concerns about what yesterday’s announcement means for my access to it. It would appear odds-on that it’ll have a paywall soon so I’ll have an interesting dilemma when that time comes.

I currently use BT because I can’t stand The Courier Mail with all its sensationalism, dumbing down and focus on inconsequentials. That’s my own bias and point of view, and I happily admit it’s probably different to a lot of people, but I know for a fact that the CM has merely regurgitated a Government media release without any checking or questioning, whereas the BT article on the same thing actually did some research and analysis and questioned the slant the Minister/Government was trying to promote at the time.

Being a Fairfax entity, BT also has access to articles and opinion pieces from its sister publications such as The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. For mine, the opinion pieces and engaged blogs on those two are great reading and always open my mind to new opinions and views or promote a greater scrutiny of an issue at hand. Far greater scrutiny than the CM provides that’s for sure. That's even if they do publish something on it rather than MasterChef or The Voice updates and articles congratulating themselves on their coverage or distribution results.

But the question remains, would I pay for access to BT? Geez, I really don’t know. I could get on my high horse and say of course I would, I'm all about high quality journalism and the costs be damned. But I have to be truthful that I might just go elsewhere the very moment it asks for my credit card details to read a particular article or opinion piece.

The change to a tabloid format isn’t much of an issue for me though. There was an old world view that broadsheets were quality while tabloids were populist but that demarcation is irrelevant now with digital media changing everything about formatting. It’s an issue for the old business model perhaps but as I’ve said earlier, that model is dead. And anyway, a tabloid is actually easier to read on the train.

Another interesting point about these decisions from Fairfax is that they coincide with a battle for control of its Board. Gina Rinehart, mining magnate and Australia’s richest woman, is wanting to be appointed Deputy Chairman of the company and have two other Board positions given to her ‘representatives’. As part of this move, Rinehart has told the rest of the Board that she and her reps will not be restricted on commenting on editorial matters, including the hiring and firing of editorial staff. This goes against the current Board protocol that Directors do not interfere in editorial matters.

This obviously raises some questions about editorial independence within a future Fairfax company and some worries about its entities becoming mere mouthpieces for Rinehart’s interests in particular and the mining industry in general.

And if you think that’s just me with my particular bias or slant on things, both the Government and the Opposition, in all its anti-carbon tax rage, have raised concerns about the moves and the risk that the likes of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald could become ‘spokes-vehicles’ for the mining industry.

I mean, with all of Rinehart’s fortunes and all of her mining-related activities, why does she want to be involved in a media company anyway? Especially one whose own survival is requiring massive changes to its current business model. It can’t be for the profits and money-making that's for sure.

Yes, yesterday’s Fairfax announcement made for some interesting reading. I’m not sure what the media landscape will look like in a few months let alone a few years as a result. Particularly as News Limited is expected to announce its own massive changes in the not too distant future as well. The rumours swirl and all manner of speculation will continue.

As the Chinese proverb goes, “May you live in interesting times”.

EDM.

Glory Days? They're Long Gone

On a rare commitment-free weekend just gone, I had an opportunity to sit down and watch some footy while the son had his middle-of-the-day sleep and the wife had her head buried in a good book.

The game in question was Geelong v GWS which didn't promote too much interest in me other than getting a chance to see some of my AFL Supercoach players perform. Before the game, as is their want, the commentators went through each team and put up player profiles and co.

Now, I knew the GWS boys were young. Of course, they are. Just as the Gold Coast boys were last year. However, knowing that hadn't really sunk into my head at all up until the year that each one of them was born came up. 1993. Given most of them come from last year's draft, 1993 came up again and again and again.

My mind launched into one of its pondering moods and the number 1993 kept turning through the screws. What does 1993 mean to me? What of significance happened to me in 1993? Shite, I was in my last year of high school. I was 18.

The 'fact' is of course a given. Yep, I was 18 in 1993. Just as these GWS boys are. But what really struck me and set off reverberations in my head, was the fact that it doesn't feel like 18-19 years since then to me. Very far from it. While I certainly don't feel like I'm but a few years out of school or a few years out of uni, I certainly don't feel like high school was half my lifetime ago.

I know that the maths tell me something different, and I know plenty of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge since my high school days. University. Travel. Career. Marriage. Mortgage. Parenthood. But alas, I just don't 'feel' like I'm twice as old as then and that those days are so far behind me.

What is it then that is holding me back from acting my age or coming to terms with where I sit on my life's timeline? I mean, while I haven't tried it for a very long time, my mind still thinks I can kick a footy 50m and jump over others to take a speccie. Or throw down a thunderbolt yorker that rips through a batsman's stumps. Or carry two or three blokes over the tryline with me after storming on to an inside ball. Because I used to be able to do that, so why couldn't I now?

That's the way my mind seems to operate. Well, up until now anyway. Not on a conscious level mind you. Not in a thinking/calculating way. In fact, I don't reflect on any of that at all during my waking/working life. There's too much else going on. But subconsciously, in a non-calculating way, yeah of course I'd still be able to do that. Why not?

But there are reasons for why not aren't there? I just don't think about them so there's nothing to pull me back to the reality. I mean there's the sheer fact that I haven't even tried all those things in years. There's the fact my reconstructed knee might not be able to cope. Especially as it was the reason in the first place I stopped doing all those things. And there's the fact that my body certainly isn't trained to do all those things like it once was. I used to train 4-5 nights a week and play both a seniors game and an agegroup game every weekend so of course my body was far more tuned towards those sorts of activities back then.

That's the reality. And those are the realities as to why I've stopped doing those things. But the mind just doesn't compute all that and seems to conveniently forget certain things while romanticising others. You played with the likes of Michael Voss, Jason Akermanis and Ben Tune. You played against the likes of Fraser Gehrig, Nigel Lappin and Joe Roff. You could have been a contender. You could have been a...you know the rest surely.

So there I was, watching the GWS players' profiles pop up and the year 1993 kept on coming up. And those thoughts just above and those names pop into my head and it hits me even harder. Jaysus christ, those guys have been 'retired' for years! They played long and illustrious careers but haven't been around for nearly a decade in some cases. Shite, the realisation that even my 'glory days' and the guys I shared them with are outdated and old.

I'm not sure if I'm relating the feeling I had on Saturday very well with these words. It's a hard one to pinpoint and to explain. I didn't feel 'old' as such. Not like when people talk about cops looking so young and that's when they felt 'old' for the first time. No, it was more like a realisation that my life has come a long way since my so-called glory days and they're not coming back.

And while many of you are no doubt saying of course they aren't, they're long gone, I guess my psyche and my consciousness had never really confronted that reality and had chosen to ignore it. Or just chosen to concentrate on far more important things. Like career. Like marriage. Like mortgages. Like fatherhood.

Yes, that must be it. I'd moved on. Well, some parts of my mind had while others had not. Hence the profoundness of the lightening bolt that went off in my head when Taylor Adams birthdate came up on the screen. My days as an 18 year old are half a lifetime ago. My days when all of life's opportunities were ahead of me are long gone.

That's not a bad thing though, nor was it a sad feeling full of regret or anything. Far from it in fact. I have a lot to be thankful for and none of that would have happened if my life's journey had taken a different path. It was just a realisation. A thought bubble. A recognition of the reality.

Yes, quite the realisation to have on a lazy Saturday afternoon in front of the telly watching the footy. I'm sure Aristotle must have had similar moments watching nude guys run around at the Ancient Olympics. Or Nietzsche as one of the first games of football took place on the university lawns under his office.

Now, where's that son of mine? I just need to take him down to the oval and show him I can still kick goal from 50m out and....

EDM.