Dusk

Clouds. Oh how I love them.

(Image from Nathan Oldfield's blog)

Every evening, I watch the sky as the sun sets. Every evening. I love the colours, the shapes, the light, the end of day. And every evening, without fail, I wish I was watching it from the water, from the sea. For now, that wish is rarely granted, but I happily make do enjoying it during long walks, or from our veranda. From where I live, I can watch the sun set behind green hills that dominate the city skyline. We're pretty lucky here in Brisbane.

Yesterday, I surfed into the dusk with some friends. The waves were small (and that's being generous), but the sunset was something to behold. The clouds were more sparse than Nathan's castles in the air, but smoke from a (bush? cane?) fire in the hills turned the sun a bright, neon red as it sank. As we surfed the warm, tiny waves, we watched the colours glow and shift and change and fade towards night.

It was perfect. 

Fucken astounding

So, here is the text of an email a friend just sent me:

Subject: Surfing Magazine - All class

Latest issue has an article titled 'Waves are Women' with the subtitle 'Please no red tides'.

Fucken astounding...

Yes. Yes it fucken is. I'm not sure what the rest of the article says, but the delightful word-smithery of 'Please no red tides' (see what they did there!! Coz, like, chicks get periods. LOLZ!) is so offensive and sexist that I can't actually cope. Please no red tides? Are you serious Surfing Magazine? ARE YOU SERIOUS? Did you realise that it is 2012? Have you come across many women who laugh at your crap jokes about periods in the past? Did you think for more than a millisecond about publishing that line? Maybe this is usual fare from this publication? Maybe it's an anomaly? But I can only imagine that the rest of the article is as shitty as this subheading and heads in one of a limited number of projected directions: 1) waves are fickle, uncontrollable mistresses that cannot be tamed, 2) waves come from mother-nature and are a precious gift that must be adored and treasured as mystic and spiritual and their maternal-ness should make us all want to be better people, or 3) a combination of the two.* Obviously, I could be wrong, and maybe Surfing Magazine is going to laugh in my face when I read their article to find it is otherwise free of any sexist stereotypes, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

The most irritating thing is that to read the article, I'm going to have to give them some of my money. Ugh. Until then, if you have read this piece of bullshit article, please do let me know if I've got this totally wrong. Or not.

*I'm going to assume that there is no allusion to surfing waves as some kind of metaphorical sexual conquest or rape. Surely. I mean, that kind of comment would even be beyond the editorial justification of even a moron like Derek Reilly, who sets a low comparative bar.