August 19

Whoa. It's already Monday. Granted it's only 12:12 a.m., but i'm feeling a bit inclinded to start freaking out about uni work and how much i need to get done this week. See, the problem is that i work best under mass amounts of pressure. This means I usually find it necessary (although usually by accident) to leave any important projects until two or three days before they are due, not sleep, come out of my room, or eat until they are finished. Needless to say, this may not be the best method. But it works.

So my friend Jenny is visitng from Montana, and has been here since Tuesday. she leaves Saturday, which seems very soon> We spent the weekend at my friend's beach house on the south coast, in a place called Malua Bay (just south of Bateman's Bay.) Her parents have sold the house, adn she wanted to say good-bye to it.Some of her mates from Canberra came up and we had a good time drinking, just relaxing.

I spent a fair bit of time on the beach, not because it was warm and sunny, quite the contrary, it was rainy and cold, but because I could. it's a novelty to have the ocea there, to be able to sit and watch the waves come in, watch surfer's get pummelled, and kids skip around in the surf.

Something about the ocean makes me think deeply, consider areas of myself and my life that i've put on hold, pushed to the back of my mind. There's something about its vastness, darkness, and rhythm that stops everything else.

My friends Jenny and Kim walked down to the beach with me late saturday night. It was still rianing, the clouds making the sky dark and impossible to separate from the ocean on the horizon. A large black world, broken only by strips of white, the incoming waves, offered a new perspective, the one people are always looking for. You see, last night, the world was black and white. The waves broke out of the blackness, rolling in white until they splintered along the sand, and leave no trace. There were no shades of gray.

The largest, most complicated issues of this world are those that are not black and white, but are colored by shades of gray. Matters of the heart, of the sould, of the mind, we keep hoping one day we'll wake up and find there was a right and wrong all along. That the waves on teh horizon always emerged white from a black night.

But the world's not like that. We won't ever be able to erase the gray, replace it with a solid.