post-famination

for reasons i can't quite bring myself to announce, yesterday i opened a 12-year-old bottle of single malt i'd been saving for a particular occasion. i will be less annoyingly cryptic after i've got my good news in writing. let's just say i'm feeling quite pleased with myself, if a little frayed around the edges today.

2008 is going to be a heads-down, hands-dirty kind of year, i can feel it. i wrote a few resolutions down before i headed out to party at a mate's block on the other side of the macdonnell ranges, and one of them was a screenplay. within hours of watching the halfmoon rise over our midnight sandpit-and-inflatable frippery, a few of us were organising our first meeting. look out world!

this year you will also find me over at new matilda, where i'll be a regular correspondent on various matters of import. this is an exciting development, partly because i get paid to have opinions and be funny, but also because the mag itself is a great venture to be a part of and i'm pleased to be continuing the relationship with its new and awesome editor.

and pleased, also, to be continuing the relationship i seem to be in with the northern territory. i'm increasingly disinclined to live elsewhere at the moment, which is a typically hedgy statement of commitment. having a housesit with a pool doesn't hurt. i've also had my brother here (the academic one), and showing off always makes us love alice more. he put up with the unrelenting 41-and-sunny very gracefully. along with all the lifestyle reasons, i am acquiring things to look forward to, like participating in the wordstorm festival in may.

so walking and falling welcomes the international year of the potato, despite the politically contentious nature of that tuber in the history of my peoples. i will eat hash browns for breakfast and think hard about british imperialism. i will celebrate staple foods, starchiness, and the new world. i will make solid things grow surprisingly under an appearance of innocent straw.