24th December 2014 in Melbourne Diaries

It’s Christmas Eve and I have arrived to a largely empty office and am not inclined to start work right now. Monday and Tuesday were pretty hellish, though (largely thanks to Microsoft’s legal team and several telecommunications companies), so I have earned a few hours downtime.

I haven’t written for a long while, a combination of personal laziness, work business, and, if I’m being honest, some mild depression that has made me increasingly reticent to write, let alone talk, about any life affairs.
There is some good news. I have been having issues with the other lawyers at my current job, feeling that they have hypocritically expected me to handle a whole range of large, complex and inherently faulty commercial arrangements that they have left dormant or stuffed up for years. The level of corruption at the senior executive levels is also higher than was the case in my last role.
However, as the result of a change of government, I will be moving next year into the legal team of a more prestigious and very central state government agency. I’d rather not identify the place, but it’s a workforce that many people in spend years of their career trying to enter, and I’ve got a chairlift ride into it within a few months. It’s not a financial promotion, but almost nobody in my line of work gets significant pay increases any more – the pay rise at the end of this year is 1.5% (half of national inflation), and even that’s better than my last job, where my former colleagues, at least those few who weren’t sacked or pushed out, are still haggling over their 0% increase. In a year when I lost half of my workmates to government change, a par score at the end of it all is a good result. Still, I miss the crew from my old job, who were younger and livelier than the team I’m with now. In my new role, I get on well with the people around my age, but the older and more egotistical staff can be a bit of a pain. The main benefit of my position is getting to engage with Amazon, Google, Oracle and other IT behemoths, so at least the work I have on my desk is interesting.

Tomorrow I’ll drive over to my parent’s place for the usual family Christmas. These are increasingly a bit of a torture, and I’m half glad that I have to be working from next Monday and therefore don’t have to stay too long. In what is hardly an unusual trend, my parents are becoming increasingly conservative day by day, yet don’t recognise it in themselves. To them, they are rational moderates drowning in a sea of crazy liberals. They accept most of what the right wing papers preach at face value, and view anyone in a hijab as a terrorist in waiting. I’ll have to sit through the usual anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, anti-liberal rubbish. Whenever any paper or TV show is even slightly critical of Tony Abbott, the Australian PM that’s a drain on anyone who has to work for a living, but a godlike entity to the retirees that did so well out of the 1980s boom, they fly into an odd, impotent rage about media discrimination. It’s sad, as these are children of the sixties. Is this is what is going to happen to me? I’ll hit fifty and the world will automatically become a place of secret terrors, and my own stupid, bigoted beliefs a cave to hide in. I’m currently the golden child within my family, but that’s only because I actively try to avoid talking politics and society with my parents, so nobody knows what my views are. My brother, in addition to turning vegan this year and having a Polish foreigner for a girlfriend, has made the mistake of forgetting how irrational my parents are on these subjects, and he and his girlfriend (who my parents hate) are consequently persona non grata.
I was going to talk about some personal issues at this point, but it may have to wait. In OpenDiary there was less restraint, but I’m less familiar with the PB community, and those I used to have contact with have largely left the site (if they’re here, they’re silent). The older I get, the less I like to reveal. To those around me I am a blank slate, a man with no history, and I’m sure there are questions as to whether I’m gay, straight, asexual, whatever. Part of it is middle aged stoicism. You’re not supposed to complain; you should have done everything you were supposed to do, and if you didn’t, well that’s too bad. A lot of people are in the same position as I am, and doing a lot worse. Particularly women. The 38yo next to me with no boyfriend, who was kicked out of her job this year and queried me about illusory job opportunities between crying fits; the 34yo girl from my old workplace who still contacts me hoping that she can get a position where I work – she at least gets laid a lot, but largely to anonymous younger men she meets on Tinder and the like, in between alcohol and cocaine abuse; the 36yo who has taken up insane fitness regimes in her middle age as a way of distancing herself from her husband (who hasn’t had sex in years – I actually want him to cheat on his wife); the Filipino 39yo who I got on very well with at my old job, but she fell off the radar upon losing her position and her boyfriend – nobody knows where she is now. I’m probably doing quite well by comparison.

In terms of other belated updates:
• in November I hiked in the Victorian mountains. On the first day it snowed (in late Spring!), ruining any views, but transforming the landscape into a forest of white;
• otherwise, my fitness is poor, and I suspect there is some osteoarthritis in at least one knee. Still running, but physically things are getting harder – I might have to think about moving to a weights regime long term or else I’ll be in a wheelchair by the time I’m 40;
• because of the three job changes, I had to cancel any large holiday this year. I have vague plans about travelling from one end of China into the other (and into Kyrgyzstan (now that I’ve worked out how to get out of the country)) next year but nothing is fully formed. Fitness again is a consideration, as I want to be able to at least run 10 miles to a half marathon before trying this trip out;
• looking to get a house in eastern Melbourne next year, if possible without any parental intervention.