All Tip and No Iceberg - When the Rubber Hits the Road

"Australian slang is part of the beautiful cultural value of this nation." - Bindi's Mum

"Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages" - Dave Barry

We Australians are known to pride ourselves on our "colorful language". From Bazza McKenzie with his "technicolour yawn" in the 1970s, Paul Keating and his "scumbag" insults in the nineties, to Andrew Hansen - best illustrated in the Eulogy video clip (below right).

War Against Everything - Eulogy
Classified 'M' [very course language]

But there is something endearing in American English's disregard of grammar and its unfettered creativity demonstrated in a multitude of ever-changing expressions.

I like the way adjectives turn into nouns, as in, "I don't like hot", and nouns such as "diary" verbing into diarize". Dropping the intransitive verb completely, as in saying to the cat, "Do you want out?"

Perhaps it is because Americans have no time to form complete sentences. So they just say anything. And if a more complex thought needs to be expressed - one that may need more than one sentence, there's often an idiomatic expression to substitute for it. Such as in the following except from an IBM database magazine.

"The Rubber Meets the Road -
How will DB2 Viper's hybrid XML-relational data server work in the real world? You can join the customers and partners who are revving the engine, kicking the tires, and checking performance and handling. Here's what to look for when you take it out for a spin."

I also like, "Am I about to step off the curb or step off the Grand Canyon?".

But sometimes I wonder - how would a modern American express, Jane Austin's first sentence in "Pride and Prejudice"? - "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"?

Or a 21st century Australian, for that matter? I can't imagine. Few people nowadays take care in sentence construction. We don't have the time. I don't think it's an English thing, an Australian thing, or a US thing. It's a twenty first century thing.

We are not into words right now. Our dinner party conversation don't measure up to those of Austin's heroines - or even the of the Beatles. Who was it said, "The media is the message"? Some sixties person no doubt. This is the time of the Obama-Michelle fist bump, of icon hieroglyphic symbols instead of words, of touch screens and ativars.

Meanwhile, I love the American language, a shorthand for thinking. Words that are halfway between perfectly formed sentences and Egyptian hieroglyphics,

Way to go ...

Purity, Innocence and Pornography

In the fifties and early sixties, the first exodus of young Australians set the stage for future generations to travel overseas after graduating from university.

Among them were Clive James, Germain Greer and Richard Neville - all of whom became successful in later life.
I wasn't in that wave of young aussies. But I was in the next - following the hippie trail through south east Asia, the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East and Europe, to end up in "Swinging London".

Why did we leave? For many of us we left to get away from the insularity and parochialism of Australia. I remember when Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned. When the copy of Michelangelo's David had his genitals covered with a fig leaf in Melbourne's Myer department store. And when a story book for sick children was banned because of its title, "Fun in Bed".

Sometimes I meet Aussie Expats who traveled and stayed overseas, mostly in London. Or I read about them in the press. People like Greer and James who remember Australia as it was in the sixties. A waspish country, the land of "the White Australian Policy" - Arthur Calwell saying, "Two Wongs Don't Make a White". New South Wales Premier Robin Askin surrounded by Vietnam protesters, telling his driver to "Run the bastards over".

I've argued with such friends, and shrugged of the remarks of Greer and her like. What would they know of Australia? They've hardly set foot in the place for any length of time for years. Australia has changed...

And it had. But now?

Recently the Prime Minister of Australia, Mr. Kevin Rudd - a man most of has had great hopes for - stepped into the Bill Henson debate. Henson is an Australian photographer of world renown. His art has been exhibited world-wide, including in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

Many of his works have as their subjects, adolescent girls and boys - "in their states of despair, intoxication and immature ribaldry" (Ashley Crawford, Bulletin).

But Prime Minister Rudd recently publicly condemned the photographer’s work, as "absolutely revolting", after the press took up the story of Henson's May exhibition being canceled following eight individual complaints made to police voicing concerns about an email invitation from the Gallery to a "Private View" that depicted an explicit photographic image of a nude 13-year old girl.

It makes me wonder. Is "wowserism" alive and kicking in Australia?

Rudd appears to be objecting largely on the grounds that the subject are not able to "consent" to their images becoming publicly available. And of course to the nudism. But where is the nudism here? -

Mr Rudd rcently slammed an art magazine's decision to publish this photograph of a six-year-old girl, taken by Australian photographer Polixeni Papapetrou of her daughter Olympia, on its cover.

"A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way," Mr Rudd said. "Frankly, I can't stand this stuff."

I just don't get it. The depiction of the child is hardly "nude". How many of us have photographed our children and put the photos, running half naked under the hose on the front lawn, at the beach, being breast-fed? And we've posted them on-line at Flickr, Smugmugs etc.? Did we ask our children's permission? The photos are kinflicks! Surely a parent can consent for their own child. Surely a parent can make public, photos of their kids. Or do we have to analyse them in case some pervert might drool aver them.

No, Mr Rudd, the problem is not with the parents or the photographers - it is with people who see the bad things in the innocent. After all, you have to be pretty sick to see innocent photos of innocent children as pornographic.

You are attacking and condemning the wrong people.

The Happy Country

The Happy Map

A group of academics at Leicester University, have managed to attract headlines with a "happy map". It's meant to tell us which countries are "happy"

It doesn't mean much. I tried hard to find the details of the researcher's methodology - but it's been buried somewhere beyond the reach of inquiring minds.

What IS amusing about the "happy map" is that Denmark comes out on top with a score of 273. Australia scored 243 and the U.S 247.

Denmark? I can't believe it. I'd just finished reading about the "Happy Map" when I came across an article about Muslim scarves and the Danes. A Veiled Threat.

Apparently a beauty pageant and a proposed law have Danes locking horns over one potent symbol of Islam: the headscarf. Virtually all sides of the political spectrum in the happiest country in the world are up in arms over Denmark's first "Miss Headscarf" pageant.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen's Liberal Party sees the competition as anti-democratic and woman-hostile.

Many imams have criticised the pageant as disrespectful to Denmark's 200,000 Muslims. Scarves are OK, but wearing them in pageants is not.

And all this follows on from a nationwide debate over whether judges should be allowed to sit on the bench while wearing the headscarf, or hijab. The fact that there are no female Muslim judges in Denmark, and in fact there are not even any on the horizon, is beyond the point ...

The best comment came from Liberal Party MP Eyvind Vesselbo. "Muslims feel yet again that they are being trampled on, that they are not welcome, that they are not liked," he said, insisting that delaying integration "goes against the interests of society".

Now I'm not a great supporter of beauty pageants, head-scarved or non head-unscarved. But surely Mr. Vesselbo, integration is not best served by advocating non-integration.

But forget the spoil-sports, Huda Falah (the WINNER). I hope you got a good prize. And it's a great scarf.

And what about Miss Hot Legs - Nigeria, Miss Motor Pageant Italy and Miss Nude Australia.

My favorite though is


Now that's what I call, HAPPY!

Going Bush

"She lay on the mudflats between nightmares and the ropy unknown day. A magpie sang. In November, the creepy Rabbitoh had told her , the magpies pecked your head and made blood pour down your face. Some country she'd been sent to." - His Illegal Self (Peter Carey)

Bush Near Merrimbula

The "she" is one of the main characters in Peter Carey's novel, His Illegal Self. A young Boston woman who has fled the U.S. to Australia.

Peter Carey is an Australian expat who lives in New York. So am I. I love reading his latest novels as they invariably straddle the two countries. Not only that - the places in those two countries are my favorites - Manhattan, and the Australian bush.

And I love novels set in the Australian bush. Janet Turner Hospital's Charades, Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, Keneally's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, and of course almost any of Patrick White's, are just some of the novels, that when read in another country, transport Australians back to the Australia of their minds.

What is it about the Australian bush that we Australians love, and that we Aussie expats yearn for? After all, 84% of Australians live in urban areas, and rarely set foot in the bush - though we all claim to know it.

The Australian bush is frequently described as harsh, uninviting and beautiful - at the same time. It pervades our literature, our paintings and our films. It is at the hear of our very culture. It is and was the heart of the first Australians. It created their Dreamtime.

And many of us grew up fearing the Banksia Men, and adoring Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. We proudly learned Dorothea MacKellar's Sunburnt Country" at school - a poem that celebrates the beauty and terror of the bush. More Australian films, from the first feature length narrative film - "The Story of the Kelly Gang" (1906) through Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Breaker Morant (1981), Gallipoli (1981), Man from Snowy River (1982), Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Evil Angels (1988). Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) , Ten Ten Canoes and Jindabyne (2006) use Australian bush as either background or setting.

The bush is part of our language. We have 'Bush Telegraph' ('Grapevine', word-of-mouth), bush tucker (food gathered from nature, in the outback), bushwalking (hiking in the bush), 'gone bush' (disappearing, leaving the city), Bush Bike wines (Western Australia). When we are tired we are 'bushed'. A national hero, Ned Kelly was a bush-ranger (bandit). We have bushfires (wildfires in the US) and bush lawyers (untrained people with opinions).

Sidney Nolan - Kelly and horse, 1946

I wonder when I last went to the bush? I know that it wasn't on my last two trips to Australia (2007). Perhaps before that - 2003? Five years ago then. And yes I miss it, though I probably won't go on my next trip. It's a bit like living in New York and rarely going to MoMA or the Met. You don't need to; it's enough to know that it's there.

What I'd REALLY like to do is "go bush", although that term has some weird connotations in the current U.S. context. And I AM "bushed", bushed-out as well.

Where I would REALLY like to be right now, is to be camping somewhere in the Flinders Ranges. Lying on a banana lounge under a shady gumtree, drinking too-hot black tea. And what would I be reading? A book set in New York, of course ...

Who? My Generation, Barack

I now understand the line in The Who's "My Generation" - "I hope I die before I get old". I used to think it was because they thought that if they grew old that they'd end up like their parents. Now I know better.

So with apologies to The Who ...

People still try to put us d-d-d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we're still renowned (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
The things you say are more of the old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
But we took action no one foretold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

It is my generation
It is my generation, Barack

Why don't you just f-fade away (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
And don't try to scorn what we all s-s-say (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
You know who worked to change this n-n-nation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Yeah, I'm talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

It is my generation
It is my generation, 'Bama

Why don't you just f-fade away (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
And don't try to scoff at what we s-s-say (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not sending you a d-d-donation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

It is my generation
It is my generation, Baby

You can try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we got things done (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Our changes were wonders to beho-o-old(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Yeah, and we made them before we got old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

It is my generation
It is my generation, Barack

The Joy of Slob

I'm not an overly neat person, but neither am I a slob. On scale of 1 to 10, I'd probably rate a 6.5 on tidiness.

And for so one so neat, I seem to know an abnormally large number of untidy people. The first really untidy person I've known, is one of my best friends back home.

I remember years ago, driving around Anglesea in Australia. Anglesea is a small sea- side town in Victoria. I'd heard that my friend was staying there over the Christmas holidays, and being in the area, I decided to look for her, though I did not have her address. Unphased I drove around the sleepy town till I saw a car parked in a driveway, full of old newspapers,

My Friend's Kitchen Floor

unmarked exam papers and several half-read novels, anarchically disarranged amongst children's toys and discarded audio tapes. Between the car and the front door was a trail of old towels and kid's clothes. Eureka. I'd found her. There was no doubt in my mind, and I was right. "There you are," I said as she opened the door. "How did you find me?" she asked. "Oh", I lied, "I recognised the car."

A few years later, I hired a cleaner. I found her details from an ad in the local rag. She turned up for an interview. Her name was faintly familiar but I couldn't work out the connection.

We had a cup of tea together and she explained that she was needing some extra income as her ex was a bastard and she had no other source of income. She explained that she was a writer, and not really a domestic. She went on to say that her own house was a rubbish dump and that before deciding on taking up cleaning, she'd toyed with the idea of moving to Los Angeles and setting up a practice for people wanting to realise one's inner slob.

I hired her on the spot, and after she left I realised what was familiar about her name. Her ex was in fact a childhood friend of mine, directly descended from Fra Filippo Lippi. He'd told me a few year's prior that he'd married a very untidy woman. And I'd thought he was exaggerating. See what happens when people emigrate to Australia. From angelic Lippi to Melbourne slob. Remarkable.

Then there's my husband of eight years. Of German birth. "Well at least he'll be tidy, being a German", a friend commented. ASIF! Before him I'd had an American lover with bad teeth. So much for stereotypes!

My good friend, my old cleaner, my husband - tidiness doesn't worry any of them. How can they be so messy?

But two weeks ago I had an epiphany. Husband away. No house guests ... why tidy up? Let's see what it's like to let it all go. So now, if I drop something, I wont pick it up. If I spill something, I wont wipe it up. I open the mail after work and instead of organising it into neat piles, I just leave it on the table. I've stopped making the bed. I sling dirty dishes into the sink, not even rinsing them. Instead of eating at the table, using a plate and flatware, I eat out of cartons, sitting on the couch, and when it is bed-time, I just leave the wrappings and half empty wine glass on the floor.

I throw my clothes on the floor instead of hanging them up. I leave the groceries at the front door in their plastic bags after shopping in the supermarket. If I need anything from them, I get it directly from the bags, rather than the fridge or cupboard.

When I take clean clothes from the drier, I chuck them onto one of the many piles of dirty clothes. I don't clean the grill. If I want a glass of coke, I just open another bottle, not worrying about the various half-drunk bottles lying around the apartment.

When I get up in the mornings and try to get ready for work, if I can't find clean clothes, so I just put on anything.

And guess what? I feel LIBERATED!!!!

Way to go! Now I just have to find the ex-wife of Lippi's descendant. I'm sure we can set up a successful Californian pop psychology company.

Discover you inner slob and find true happiness.

Nightmare in Manhattan

I stepped out into rush hour on Fifth. There was blood in my mouth.

I clenched my lips together, squeezing the blood-drenched gauze that the dental nurse had squashed onto the place where a molar had happily lived for more years than I care to remember. The nitrous oxide was wearing off.

Ah, the dental nurse. I remembered. I had realised we were off to a bad start when I sat in the dental chair, a view of high-rise offices eighteen floors above ground level facing us. She was putting the lead apron over me, ready for the xray.

"Here's your bullet-proof jacket", she joked. "To protect you from the snipers". She waved her hand towards the window. "Or a crane falling", she added, lest I failed to latch on to her sense of humour.

Now normally after a fix of nitrous, I leave the periodontist with an urge to buy clothes. But not today. I half-heartedly entered Cole Haan's. But how was I to buy anything? The periodontist had told me not to talk. But for how long? I thought of the blood, of cranes falling in Manhattan. The traffic seemed noisier than usual. The people around me looked like the people in the carriage on Anna Karenina's last train ride. Time to go straight home. I took a cab and opened my Kindle. I'm reading Tom Rob Smith's Child 44.

"The system might carry them into the Gulags or to a building, just behind this one, on Varsonofyevsly Lane, another State Security compound fitted with sloping floors, log-paneled walls to absorb bullets, and hoses to wash away rivulets of blood".

I snap the book closed. The day had started badly anyway. And I'm not referring to the periodontal experience.

I'd called my daughter back home before I left. It appears she's being stalked. A long story. Frightening actually. But maybe it wasn't true. Nothing about it had made sense, but you never know ... It had had an Ian McEwan like quality in the telling.

Back home. A dose of Hydrocodone/Acetaminophen eases the pain and I fall sleep, the TV blaring. A nightmare of a day obliterated. Temporarily.

I awake an hour later. The TV news is no longer on - it's now showing a documentary on Pete Seeger. "There is a season turn turn turn". Wonderful", I think. "The world is not such a bad place after all." My mood brightens. Life is good.

Then just as Seeger breaks into "Guantanamera" the phone rings. I look at the display, and the time. It's an Australian mobile number and the time there is six in the morning. No one I know wakes up that early. My heart hits my stomach.

There's an X-generation voice on the other end. Things were certainly taking a downward turn! "This is your daughters friend", it upwardly inflected. "Yes, yes, what's the matter?" I snapped. "Oh nothing. She's together. I'm at her place now. She's asleep." Then silence. Then ... music.

I recognise it instantly. Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side". From Seeger to Reed, from one extreme to the other. It's a long song. Precisely 5.58 minutes later the X-generation voice returns. "And the coloured girls go Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo". I interrupt. It's one thing to listen to Lou Reed playing over a phone line 12,000 miles away, but I didn't really fancy listening to Ms X-Generation's rendition.

I was fast losing the gentle visions of world peace brought about by "We Shall Overcome". The world suddenly reverted back to horror. In any case, I mused, Seeger probably supports Obama!

"Did you like the song?" Ms X-Generation again. "Oh yes", I yawned, "I've heard it many times. I think he first sang it before you were born. I see him round Manhattan sometimes. He's old and ugly. Like me."

I don't think she heard me. She was in free-fall, talking about a cousin who was a neo-Nazi, and Christians who are intimidated by women. I let her talk, asking a question now and then.

I find out heaps, but nothing adds up. Her story and my daughter's are worlds apart. I tell her this. There's silence and then she speaks. "Oh I probably shouldn't have talked", she tells me. "That's what happens when you drink all night", I snap.

But she's off again. "MY parents are tolerant and forgiving", she says in tones reminiscent of religious hippie cultists, looking pityingly at the world of men-in-suits, or just "suits" as they now call them.

I look at the clock. Over an hour has passed. I suggest she get some sleep. She agrees. We hang up.

I look around my apartment. NOW what am I to do? Read the book about Gulags? Look at the gaping gum in the mirror? Love my neighbour?

Lou Reed or Pete Seeger?

"A hustle here and a hustle there
New York city is the place where ..."

Lou Reed it is.

Sleeping in the City that Never Sleeps

A Qantas flight. Sitting in the emergency exit seats. Two female flight attendants buckle up opposite us as the plane prepares for landing at JFK. The usual small talk. "Where do live?" "We live in New York," I answer.

"How wonderful", the flight attendant opposite me answers. "Going to Broadway shows every week!"

ASIF!

When I first came to New York I made sure that I saw a Broadway show or two - but every week? I don't THINK so. In fact the only time I see anything at all of the island, is when I show a visitor around. And of course on my daily commute to Queens and back.

So, what DOES a woman of a certain age DO in Manhattan in her spare time?

The answer is - SLEEP.

I think most New Yorkers sleep-in on the week-ends. I think this, because on the rare occasions that I've been up and about early on a Saturday, the shops have all been closed. I used to think that everyone was asleep because they'd been out partying, our attending shows. Now I'm not so sure.

I was an insomniac before I lived here. A good night's sleep was something I NEVER experienced. I'd toss and turn until around four in the morning and then doze off, only to awake around six.

New York has cured me of insomnia. In fact, sleeping is now my favourite activity. I have become a connoisseur of sleep.

Before living in New York I saw sleep as an unattainable boring thing. Something akin to death. A just not-being-there sort of thing. A negation of the experience of living.

But this is not the case at all. There are all sorts of sleep. And by that, I don't mean the scientific categories of REM and NREM sleep; I mean the different types of sleep experiences.

My favourite type of sleep is the starting-at-eight-in-the-morning-weekend-sleep, when you drift between a state of dreamy wakefulness and actual sleep. When you hope that the phone won't ring or that there'll be any other distraction to jolt you from the floating bliss into the harsh reality of being fully conscious.

Then there's those few moments before sleep when thoughts become vague and almost meaningless. One minute you are thinking about a work meeting and the next you are wandering in a meadow picking daisies. And by the time you realise how silly this is, you are out of it and darkness truly descends.

The most annoying sleep-type is the being-asleep-with-the-telly-still-on. This type of sleep is not at all restful. Dreams tend to blend in with the telly, ... or is it the other way around? The drifting an and out of this type of sleep is not pleasurable like the starting-at-eight-in-the-morning-weekend-sleep, especially if you've left the telly on CNN. Not in my dreams, Obama!

Last week a Melbourne friend emailed me about such a sleep. We'd been discussing movies about Alzheimer's.

"... We had visitors and red wine and after they left post 1.a.m. I watched "Away from Her" in a drunken haze and kept nodding off and having to rewind so many times that the lines became blurred between Julie Christie's condition and mine!"

I know the feeling ...

The worst type of sleep, isn't really sleep at all. But it deserves a mention. I call it the post-sleep-horror. And it's when you wake up thinking that whatever you just dreamed is real. Another friend of mine had a terrible post-sleep experience several year's ago. She dreamed she had brain cancer. When she woke up she made a cup of tea and sat down to work out the best course of action. Should she tell her family? Should she go for treatment? Or should she act like it hadn't happened and continue a normal life until the inevitable? It wasn't till eleven o'clock that she realised it was just a dream.

The other morning I had a similar experience, although fortunately it didn't last for hours. But for at least ten minutes I believed that the dream I'd had prior to waking was real. I was in a really bad mood. I'd dreamed my husband had bought a twelve feet high ceramic camel. "Where on earth does he think we'll put it!" I mumbled to myself.

The phone rang. It was him, phoning from a ship on Australia's Bass Strait where he works. "Oh, it's you", I snapped, "now about that camel ..."

"No", I told the Qantas flight attendant as the plane touched down at JFK, "most New Yorkers don't go to Broadway shows every week". I should have added, "We don't need to!"

and then snow flew everywhere

"Bloody photos!" he emailed after describing a long ago Christmas in the London snow. By chance he'd come across an old photo and was describing it to me. It was of us - me, him, another couple, making sexual snow figures in a street in Golders Green a million years ago. "You and Val made snow breasts and Ray and I made snow dicks and then snow flew everywhere."

Going through old photos, moments of pure mentalese¹ - words being unnecessary and in fact, insufficient to describe the memories invoked - transport us back into half-forgotten worlds of pleasures remembered with a painful sense of loss.

And for the long-term expat, these memories are distanced not only by time, but by place.

I recently came across this photo when I was cleaning out some old boxes. I wonder who took it. The composition is excellent, and there it was wedged between appropriately out-of-focus photos of people long since gone from my own or my family lives and memories.

I recognised the girls in the foreground. The little swimming one is myself and the one on the right of me is little Jeanette Griffiths. I wonder where she is now ...

Summer in Australia - the days of those seemingly never ending Christmas holidays. A world away from Manhattan 2008. A world away from Manhattan 2008.

Whether photos evoke happy or sad memories, why do they make us feel a sense of poignancy when we look at them? They remind us of our lost youth, of the comparative innocence of us way back when. So distant are our old selves in the photos, that they may as well be of other people.

I'm going to put all my old photos on my Flickr. Then I'll throw them all out - well not the ones of my children, my weddings. And I'll have to keep the ones of my mum ...

And while I'm at it, I'll throw out or give away all my books. Well, maybe I'll keep that old battered "Crime and Punishment". And my D.H Lawrence's ... Anything I want to read will go on my Kindle.

If only I could get rid of it all, but the past clings.

I shall cleanse the past by assigning it to digital media, to a pristine series of zeros and ones.

Nice and clean. In the words of Dory Previn,
"... a bloodless death
Not grim
Not gory
More like Ali Macgraw’s new enzyme detergent demise in 'Love Story'"

Far-off beaches in black and white, London snow on Christmas days, people long forgotten staring back at me from dog-eared photos - into the hard drive you go!

Bloody photos!



1.Mentalese:A hypothetical language in which concepts and propositions are represented in the mind without words.

Letter from New York is now a blog

For years I've pondered turning Letter from New York, which started many years ago, into a blog. You'll still be able to see the old style Letter from New York HERE, and I'll be putting a link at the side.

Why now? Well Letter from New York has been quiet of late, and I THINK that using blogger software may encourage me to

WRITE AGAIN.

Stay tuned!