Well if you are striving to be me every time you go out to put rubbish in the bins you walk back to the front door frantically banging and swiping your head, shoulders, chest and upper back to ensure no spiders have landed on you and are going to kill you.

I hate spiders, bugs, cockroaches…….. I hate anything that can scramble across you, it sends shudders up my spine.

But spiders are the worst, Jenny has to be the man in our house casue i’m to busy shaking and standing on top of a pile of chairs squealing like a young boy going through puberty.

Well tonight I had to go take the rubbish out, it was dark and knew there was spiders about, there always is. To get to the bins you have to pass through the arch way of death. In the day time it’s a metal arch with roses on it but by night it’s the “ARCH WAY OF DEATH”.

I made it through swinging one of my arms around like a helicopter to break any webs of doom.

I didn’t feel any webs break with my arm so thought I was sweet.

It was on my happy trot back to the front door when I felt that horrible horrible crawling feeling on the back of my neck.

you know the one,8 little sticky feet making their way for the gap between your shirt and neck.

Being the well restrained gentleman that I am,I only whispered expletives as not to wake the neighbors.

I quickly ripped the shirt off in the doorway and began more hitting and swiping of my head, neck, back and chest.

I looked down at my shirt and couldn’t see anything.

1. Was it on my pants?

2. Was it on the floor about to run up my leg?

3. Was it all paranoia and actually just the tag of my shirt?

I was too scared to go for number 3, it was real, I felt it!

I decided to flick my shirt across the floor a bit.

And that’s when i got even more freaked out.

When you are freaked out, you make stupid decisions. mine was thinking ‘It’ll stay there for a minute, you should go get your camera’.

Well turns out it wasn’t that stupid as it did stay there.

Now i had to get rid of it, what if in the morning i wake up and it’s on my face!!!

I went and got one of my shoes as the thongs I’m wearing are thinner than my masculinity.

I realised I had one shot, and with this one shot I was to terminate the beast and probably also wake up wife and baby in the process.

So i hovered the shoe above the drop zone, and then BANG! Did I get it?

At first I didn’t know I was too busy trying to climb over the table to stand on the couch!

After a while i ventured back to the shirt and I had succeeded!

Now i’m siting at my computer with no shirt on wondering if I should really be telling people on the internet that I’m sitting here half naked.

I have been participating in trainings like this for many years. At Wayside, at Brookvale TAFE, at Rough Edges, studying communication while doing nursing and at Urban Seed. But now I am standing on the other side of the training. It is an interesting thing. I am being constantly confronted with the question – do I actually believe this stuff? What is it at I am asking of these kids to believe? 

As a learner I soak in infomation and take the information into the real world to see if it stands. Now as a teacher I realise it is my information being taken into the world. Does it stand? I should atleast model it. 

But when it comes to active listening I am constantly doing it wrong. So often I am planning what I am going to say next rather than listening to what someone is trying to say to me -  or I am asking all the relevant questions to guide the conversation down the path I want it to take. Or I am telling my friends to fuck off when they are honestly trying to tell me how i am making them feel.  

Anyway those are my lessons. This is one of the lessons the boys may have got tonight. We were talking about “I” statements. (If you do this, I feel this). There was one boy. I could tell he was on the edge because he sat by himself while the other boys sat in groups. But when we asked the question, can you give us some times when “I statements” would be useful. He piped up with ”when people pick on me I feel pissed off.” I was so proud. That took some courage. I said “when people have picked on me I feel pissed of too.”

Really when people have picked on me, I felt hurt and confused but I thought he gave it a good go. I just hope the other boys heard that violence can be not just physical but emotional and systemic. In our time together I have got “in” with them and I am hoping they might hear my overall message.

 Although I was there to focus on violence in Rough Edges I was much more interested in getting them to think about what is violence in THEIR world and what is violence in the big world. I asked them questions around what is emotional violence ie facebook taunts – what is systemic violence, ie companies that care not for the well being of their workers and, (I am glad I got this one in) what is sexual violence? One of our hypotheticals - is having sex with someone who is very drunk violent? Although I gave them no answers about what is right and what is wrong it was good to have the conversation. I realised the message about how much someone can consent if they are very drunk has still not fully gotten through. Look maybe there are situations when people purposely get drunk so they can have sex, but there also situations when people, especially young people, are taken advantage of, and I think that’s violence. But my job was to pose the questions, they have to themselves decide the answers.

Anyway it was good to have Ben with me. He loves acting. He came up with a great role play around the canteen line. We had three different scenarios, the last one ending in Ben prentending to be a chicken. Guess you had to be there but we all laughed a lot. I love my job. Thank you God I can say that.

Someone on Twitter posted about a new Australian-based online music service called Guvera. Its principle is free music streaming and downloading, paid for by targeted advertising. I love music, and I love free stuff – win win for me. So I was in.

You can register for a beta account at Guvera.com – I was worried that being in ‘beta’ might make it tough to get an account… but within a few minutes, I got an email saying my account was ready. Don’t know how readily they’ll be dishing out accounts, or when it will go completely “public” or out of beta – but there’s nothing to stop you from registering an account. I logged in, and was directed to update my profile in order to get “credits”. Essentially this just involves going through 11 different categories and saying what you like in each section… so that the advertising is aimed at you. Don’t totally understand the whole “credits” thing.

Once that was completed, it was onto the music. First thing was that the streaming wasn’t working – both at work on my PC using IE and on my Mac using Safari. Little bit annoying. But the downloading works perfectly.

It seems to all be done based on ‘channels’ – each channel is an advertiser who then sponsors those downloads. Whether that happens in actual fact, or whether money just changes hands in bulk amounts that’s then paid onto the record companies, it isn’t clear. Doesn’t matter I guess. But when you search for a song, you’re presented with a handful of channels who’re offering that song. And you visit their page, which is filled with plenty of info about their product, and you can then download a 256kbps MP3 of the song.

Pretty sweet deal.

So what’s the catch? There doesn’t seem to be one – just that there’s copious amounts of advertising. But that’s obvious based on the fact that those guys are paying for your music. And another very minor downside is that you don’t have the ability to download full albums – you have to search for and download all the individual tracks, but again, this is expected because you therefore have to see more advertising to get your music. There’s a bundle of terms & conditions, but none of them seem anything much different to what you’d expect from an online music store (such as iTunes) – it just states that your login is for your personal use only, and that when you download the song, you receive one licence to play the music only on your personal equipment. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

As for the music available – Guvera say they have the whole catalogues of EMI, Vigin and Capitol (pretty much just EMI) on board right now, and say they’re working on IODA, Universal and the rest of the world’s music. Presumably, when they say “the rest of the world’s music”, that will also include Warner and Sony. Really, if we just do some generalisation of the Big Four music labels (EMI, Universal, Sony & Warner), they’ve only got 25% of the world’s music at the moment. But it is only in beta I guess. They do say in the registration email that throughout 2010 they are “expanding available music to every major music artist in the world.” That’s a big statement. But hopefully it will mean that the missing labels of Warner, Sony & Universal aren’t far away.

Legitimacy? Well, I am very certain this is totally legit. From what I understand, there have been press releases about Guvera, and they’ve been saying loud and proud that they have EMI and Universal on board. Their company is based in Queensland, and so I’m sure that they would’ve been quickly and swiftly dealt with by those music lawyers had any of this not been legit. So fear not.

As far as artists getting paid any more or less than, say, iTunes Music Store? As far as I understand, it doesn’t make a squat of difference whether you pay $1.69 per song, or whether you deal with looking at ads and download it for free now via Guvera – the record company is still getting whatever fee the outlet (iTMS or Guvera or Bigpond) has negotiated with the individual record label, and thus the artist then gets their agreed royalty that they have with their record label. It’s just that Guvera have set up their company to have advertisers pay them plenty of money to cover all their charges to the record companies.

I’ll certainly be looking to use it next time I think of an album or songs that I want – advertising sucks me in any normal time… surely I can’t be that much worse off looking at a little more to get some music :) And I’ll just say a big thanks to McDonalds or Contiki or Bacardi  for buying me some new music.

I think it’s great to see something like this in Australia – the US have a bundle of free music streaming sites (that are strictly for US users), but I’m not actually sure if they have anything like this where they can download music for free. But at the moment, Guvera is strictly Australian – run by a company in Queensland, solely for Australians. Pretty cool.

And I like the sounds of something in their ‘about’ section: And if that’s not cool enough, film & TV isn’t too far behind.

I think I might take a leaf out of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and go to the art gallery a bit later … Coffee and a waffle perhaps …

Mine are:
Gilead- Marilynne Robinson
The History of Love- Nicole Krauss
East of Eden- John Steinbeck

i went to melbourne

i went to the pub 5 times

i shared 2 bottles of indigo ridge red wine

i saw 3 movies

i had a birthday

i got a helicopter

i baked a pudding

i took up swimming

all that in only 1 and a bit months.  wow.

of course the big difference here is that they have teh black white issue which makes australia’s challenges look pretty nothing. in central australia we talk about town camps with hundreds of people. in capetown we have had teh honour of staying in a township (one of teh many) where tehre are probably 10,000 in just this one. most have humble but perfectly pleasant little houses, whilst thousands of others lives in makeshift shelters that makes alice spings towncamps look pretty comfy. thats the physical stuff but it is the spiritual stuff that has left such an impression.

the black freedom movement and what it has done to this place has to be one of the miracles of our time. so many amazing people like mandela. biko, subukwe, sisulu, mbeki, tutu all had the wisdom to fight for all south africans and not just black south africans although their task was undoubtedly to emancipate black south africa. 30 years in jail studying, teaching inmates, teaching their white prison guards,teaching to anyone who would listen, always believing that they were preparing themselves to govern the country for all south africans. robben island was a university inside a jail.

unlike in australia there are black people at every level of work although they still have a long way to go on this front. still it gives me hope for aboriginal australians who seem to have no such underlying spiritual paradigm that links their history to their future that can sustain them.

If one was looking for an African Che Guevara then Steve Biko is your man. the most insanely sensible, eloquent and courageous man i have heard for many a long time.

this trip has been a wonderful opportunity for me to stop a smell the daisies a bit but also to learn what a remarkable country this is. the people black and white are actually trying to do something i am not sure has ever been tried before. south africa must succeed. in a strange way it seems like all of our futures depend on it.