Rocky Horror

As I mentioned in my first Cairns post, when we started our vacation I already had a half-drafted post about the week before we left. Now that my exhaustive coverage of the trip is complete, its back to regular programming. This post will be a bit weird - the first part is from pre-trip and the second part is from post-trip. But it will get you all caught up with Justin & I's adventures.

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As I've mentioned many a time, part of moving countries involves having to make new friends. It turns out that grad school is actually a pretty good place to do this - there are lots of people around the same age, many of whom have also recently moved (usually interstate, not international), who are also in the market for friends. The only down side about making friends with fellow grad students is that you are all doing the same thing with your life - graduate school. This means that even when hanging out outside of work hours, its not uncommon to end up chatting about school. As graduate studies tend towards being all consuming at the best of times, its important to try and make friends with normal people. You know, people with actual jobs, who don't spend their days working on ultra-niche, all consuming, and intensely overwhelming projects. People with work-life balances and reasonable priorities.

It sounds like I'm engaging in hyperbole here, but I swear I'm not. One of the massive pitfalls of graduate school is how easy it is to get sucked into this mindset of working all the time on very hard and very specific projects. You get so caught up in the details and minutia of what you are doing, you completely lose perspective about literally everything else that's happening, both in the world, and in your own life. This is a shockingly common experience for PhD students. Its one of the reasons why a piece of advice very frequently given to new grad students is to make sure you have friends/hobbies/something that is completely unconnected to your school work. So I was delighted when Justin started to make friends with one of his colleagues from the brewery.

Turns out that Justin's colleague and his wife are both huge musical theater nerds. This all came out a few weeks ago when Justin won tickets for us to go see Cursed Child. After that it was decided that the four of us should all go see a show together. Justin & I were planning on seeing the stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture show (because we will always go see Rocky Horror when its on, it is a cultural masterpiece). We decided this would be the perfect time to all go out together.

So the interesting thing about moving to someplace new as a couple is that not only is each person in the market for individual friends, but you are also looking for couple friends. Making couple friends is a bit more complicated than making individual friends, because there are more relationships to manage. In my experience, this is how it happens: one person from one couple meets one person from the other couple. At some point there is identification of the fact that both people are married/in long term committed relationships. Then you start comparing couple activities to see if you could potentially be compatible and checking whether either couple has an opening for new couple friends. Common couple activities include: Brunch/going to farmers markets, board game nights, drinking events/partying (wine tastings, beer festivals, etc). Musical theater is kind of a niche couple activity, but it definitely counts. Once a common activity is found, and if both couple have an opening for a new couple friend, a try out of sorts is planned so that both people in the couple can meet both people in the other couple. I'm not saying couple friend formation has to work like this, but so far this has been my experience a lot of the time. When I was talking about my Rocky Horror plans at work, I actually called it 'a couple friend try out'. The younger single people had no idea what I was talking about, but the older, coupled up people definitely understood.

Our couple tryout with Justin's colleague and his wife was the Wednesday before our Cairns vacation. We met them downtown near the theater. Justin's colleague, whose career is based in the hospitality industry, picked the restaurant. It wasn't a place that Justin or I ever probably would have picked (Asian fusion with lots of things on the menu that we had no idea what they were), but the food was tasty and we both tried a bunch of new things. After dinner we still had time before the show, so we headed to a place for drinks. The other couple knows Justin & I like classic old school drinks (dirty martinis and rusty nails) which are surprisingly hard to find in Melbourne, so they took us to a place that specializes in high end cocktails. The place was actually a rooftop bar on the top of a very swanky high rise hotel. It was a beautiful night (clear sky, not too cold), and the sun had just set so it wasn't too dark yet. All around us were other high rises and skyscrapers, lit up with lights. It was like no other bar we had ever been too before. It honestly felt like something out of a movie.

After our drink, we headed to the theater. The show was fantastic - tons of fun, with extra time to do the time warp at the end. We had seen Rocky Horror not long before we left at Neptune theater in Halifax. That performance had a much prettier Dr. Frankenfurter, but this one felt more authentic (at least to me). One member of the other couple had never actually seen Rocky Horror before, so after the show we headed to a British style pub to grab a final drink, hear his thoughts, and discuss the show. By this point it was pretty late, so they gave us a ride home (one of them wasn't drinking). Overall, it was the most quintessentially Melbourne evening we have had since we got here. But it was great fun, and we will definitely be making plans with them again.

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Things have been pretty laid back since we got back from Cairns. We were very busy leading up the the trip. And then spent 4 of the 5 days in Cairns doing intense physical activity. And yet, somehow I was surprised that I was still tired during my first week back at work. Overall, things have mostly settled back into a normal routine. The PhD work is still going well. It was nice to get a break from it, and now that I'm back I'm working on being a bit less obsessive and trying to enjoy the process more. We will see how that goes. Justin is still working at the brewery. He has a couple of leads on paramedic & paramedic-related jobs though, so that is promising. We still know its going to be a slow process, but there are things happening there.

Its still technically winter in Melbourne. And while it isn't cold by Canadian standards, its definitely not warm out. We did get a month or so of heat when we first got to Melbourne in Feb, but that's pretty much it. I have been thinking of winter as a sort of extra prolonged spring. But I think going from winter to winter is finally starting to get to me. I've lost all sense of what time of year it is. I know its August, but I have lost all association with how annual cycles work. In my head, August is a time of hot weather & vacation, a month when everything is a bit slower before it picks up in September. But here, August is just a regular winter month. I've been feeling kind of unproductive in the last few weeks. I assumed it was leftover fatigue from Cairns (which it probably is, at least to some degree). But I wonder if another part of it is my bodies association with August and vacations. I guess we will just have to see what happens in September.