Moving Day
I have some big news!
I’m making the switch to WordPress. I’ve been with Tumblr for a year and love it dearly, but I want to be able to have a bit more control over the look of the blog and also to integrate the blog with my author website.
My new blog is at: http://margotmcgovern.com .
I’m not abandoning Tumblr completely. My garden blog, The Urban Patch, is still going strong and I’ll still be following all my favourite blogs on Tumblr. I’ll also keep posting links to posts on my new blog here.
Thank you all for following and I hope you’ll come visit me at my new address!
M.
A Letter to My High School Biology Teacher
Dear Mrs D,
I can count on one hand the number of non-fiction, non-academic books I’ve read since I finished school. One of them is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Apart from blowing my mind on a number of levels, it showed me that I owed an apology.
I’m sorry for being such a disrespectful little pot stirrer. I’d like to pretend I was seventeen and immature, but it isn’t the truth. As a little kid I was fascinated by science, I had a space encyclopaedia that had all kinds of information on black holes and super novas and trips to the moon, and I was completely obsessed with volcanos. There was a series of documentaries following a group of volcano specialists that I watched with near religious devotion. The explosions and flowing lava were mesmerising. I wanted to know how they happened. I had to know how everything worked. Then one of the guys in the volcano documentary doco died in an eruption. At the same time I figured out Mum was probably lying when she said astronauts threw socks ahead of their spaceships so that if the socks disappeared they’d know there was a black hole up ahead. Suddenly I realised we lived in a universe where we could be obliterated, without warning, by these huge phenomena that were completely indifferent to us. Even the universe itself was terrifying. The smartest people on the planet don’t really understand it. It was the great unknown and it was all around us, part of us, and I couldn’t reassure myself that one day I would have all the answers to it. Worse than that, it was so big and so old that our existence couldn’t possibly matter. I didn’t matter.
So I shut it out. When you tried to teach us about atoms and eco systems and cell reproduction, I was insolent and refused to listen because each of those things only confirm that the entire human race is nothing but the most infinitesimal (probably completely pointless) cog in a machine so big we can’t even comprehend its size.
As soon as I realised science would continually confront me with my own significance, I turned to the humanities: a whole field of study devoted to the miracle of us. Books, plays, films, pictures, sculptures, philosophies there to teach us about ourselves and document our progress. When I read a story, listen to a song, watch a play or look at a painting, no matter what their subject is, I’m reassured that our thoughts and feelings and experiences are deeply important. Even art about an imagined apocalypse is reassuring because it’s narrated from a subjective, human perspective, rather than the scientific objective.
In writing, I can take things a step further. I not only place myself in a world where human existence matters (as I do when reading), I create that world and control every element in it. The universe isn’t such a scary place when you’re god.
Does this make me self-indulgent? Yep, me, and almost everyone else on the planet. Of course we want to reassure ourselves that we’re special and that there’s a point because otherwise how would we cope? How would we convince ourselves to keep reproducing, or to even get out of bed in the morning?
It was natural for me to be introspective as a teenager, unable to grasp that there was anything in the universe more important than what the group I sat with at lunch may or may not have been saying behind my back. My friends and I were clearly the lead players in the most exciting, all-consuming narrative of all time. Now that I’ve finally realised that’s not exactly the case, I’m curious to see what else is out there and start engaging with the wider world and universe, even if it is still a little terrifying.
I’m not ever going to give up on the Humanities, because they are important. We need to make sense of ourselves as well as the wider universe and we need to know that we as individuals aren’t alone. That’s where I want to focus and it’s what I’m good at.
But I am sorry for being rude and disrespectful. I was so afraid. If there are little shits like me still popping up in your classes and annoying the pants off you, don’t take it personally. You are a great teacher, but the sciences are mind boggling and terrifying and some of us need a little extra time to work up the courage to face them.
M.
The Corner Store
As a reward for getting up at a time so early it was still night and hauling my bike along Yarra Boulevard, Alex took me to brekky at Roweana Corner Store in Richmond.
I am in love. The cafe looks like ye olde corner store (hence the hipster Instagram pics), the shelves lined with provisions and the counter stocked with candy you’d expect to find in a 1950s malt shop. There’s also a gorgeous little courtyard all leafy green with shrubs. Best of all, it was full of young families and people out walking their dogs and not a hipster in sight, except maybe me.
We’ve got out eye out for places to move when our lease is up in Sept. and afterrolling through the back streets of Richmond, I could be tempted to cross the bridge for one of the weatherboard cottages or Victorian terrace houses.
Taken with instagram
