Idling

What are we doing here? A number of people have asked us that. Its a good question, and one we should all ask ourselves from time to time. I suppose Matt is working at being idle, if that isn't a contradiction, and I am idly working. Jerome K. Jerome http://www.jeromekjerome.com/man.htm apparently once said that "It is imposible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." Our six months here are set against a life back home in which we both have plenty of work to do, so my sabbatical is meant to be an interlude of idling for all of us.

Sabbaticals, as far as I can tell, are meant for working and rejuvenation. I am trying to do both. So on most days, after dropping Jake at school, I bike to work (I am a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne law school with absolutely no academic responsibilities), have a coffee, check my email and look at the New York Times on line, do some work, go to yoga or pilates, have a quick lunch, do a little more work, and if by this point I have made it until late afternoon when the sun streams through my office window, then I am compelled by the need to articulate one idea before leaving for the day and by my sleepy, sun-induced delusions of originality to extrude a few more sentences of scholarly drivel. Then I bike home. As you might gather from this account, I work short, semi-productive days. My aim is idle work, to get just enough done to avoid self-recrimination and have plenty of time left over to be with my family. So far so good.

The content of my work is, in one piece, the way cultural evolution and fusion make certain cultural property claims problematic in that they implicitly invoke notions of cultural purity. I am looking particularly at the dispute over the use Native American mascots in college sports and have been intrigued by the way the politically correct and the culturally correct cut against each other in this context. The other paper I am working on is about law, film and translation theory and coniders the way that film visually translates legal ideas into the domain of culture.

Matt is on a leave of absence from his job and is not working. He is our domestic goddess. He hangs out with Lucy, does the shopping, the cooking and the laundry. Homemaking here in Melbourne has a vaguely romantic and European feel to it, especially if it's temporary. Laundry gets hung out on the line to dry. Shopping involves not only the grocery store, but the butcher, fishmonger, deli and bakery as well. Matt went to the fishmonger yesterday in fact, and brought home a local fish called John Dory http://www.theworldwidegourmet.com/fish/divers/johndory.htm. He then spent much of dinner saying, "John Dory, this is good fish!" Matt and Lucy have joined a playgroup of tots and mums, and Matt put a kid seat on his bike, so he and Lucy cycle around the city. I stay home with Lucy one morning a week, and we now have a babysitter named Fee who comes two afternoons during the week so Matt can take some longer bike rides. He hasn't ridden to Sydney yet. Fee (short for Fiona) is a former child care worker who has gone back to college, she lives next door to us, drives a red motorcycle, and is incredibly sweet.

The evenings are getting longer and warmer and allow us even more time for idling, eating out and walking up the street to get gelato at the Gelo Bar. After the kids go to bed, Matt and I have been obsessively working our way through a few HBO series on DVD. We are currently halfway through Deadwood, which, among its many virtues, elevates swearing to an art form. The weekends are dedicated to slightly more energetic and adventursome forms of idling, about which you will unboubtedly hear more.