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It's like I can feel my life coming together again.
Heading out shortly to get a bunch of stuff done today. I'm leaving in four and a half days - four and a half days! - and have a few things left to do.
I'm rapidly realising - as my new antidepressants kick in, I suspect - how my life has hope and promise again, how I can have ideas for the future.
Some of them are kind of "not yet" - for example, certain things I'd love to do that require me to be less injured than I am now, but that's okay - I'm recovering, I'm working on it, and in any case, long-term plans are for after three months from now. For the next three months, I'm busy having experiences and things.
One of the things about my plans - in Europe especially, but even in Britain - is that it's as much about the journeys between destinations as the destinations themselves. In Norway I'll be out to drive over 2,000km each way to get to the North Cape and back - that's a hell of a long trip, but the thing is, on the way, I'll be seeing things, and I can stop whenever I want to look at things more.
Every part of this will be new to me.
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Scenario: I am showing Chas the foreign currency I bought today, a stack of British pounds, Euros, and Malaysian ringgits.
Me: It seems strange that this is the most expensive thing I bought today - a handful of paper.
Chas: Not just paper.
Me: Well, no. A handful of promises.
It's the slightly more poetic way to look at currency - it represents a promise, and a faith, that this will be upheld as being worth something far greater than its intrinsic value, which is, after all, very little.
And now, having been all lofty and so on about that concept, it is time for crass parochialism: Australia still has the best money in the world.
Malaysian money - or at least, the 50RM note - is the right size and shape, but it's made of paper, which is problematic. Very problematic.
The British 20 pound note is too wide to sit comfortably in the hand, though the design is at least reasonably elegant. *And* it's made of paper.
The Euro is terrible - it's too wide to sit comfortably in the hand, AND it's ugly, yet at the same time kind of bland and bureaucratic-looking. It looks like joke currency! And it's still paper.
American money is possibly the worst out there. It's all the same colour, which means you can't glance at a stack of notes and tell what denomination they are. AND it's all the same size, which means that if you're blind, you can't tell what denomination they are at a *touch*.
Australian money is brilliant. Every note is a different, very distinct colour, and the notes are also different sizes - the bigger the note, the bigger the denomination, but even the hundred is still a reasonable size in the hand.
And it's plastic. Which means that if you leave a hundred bucks in your pocket as your jeans go through the wash, what you have, when you take your clothes out of the wash, is a clean, damp hundred. I have, today, acquired a bunch of money that can't get wet.
I remember it seemed weird, when we made the transition to plastic banknotes here, but it's so very, very much worth it.
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