Dodo Au Go-Go

Lately, I've found myself wanting to retreat from social media. Not that I was ever a huge user, but I did love playing with microfiction and creativity .  Now, more and more, it feels like Twitter has shrunk from a galaxy full of inspirational wildernesses and stars and oceans... to a tired, concrete playground, ravaged by rust, garbage and graffiti, and populated by rival, frothing-at-the-mouth mobs roaming around just to shout insults at each other. Unaware, oblivious or delighting if their venomous words make a mark. And I should add: the issues that get frequently amplified are important. But. But. But there are lots of piles of utter rubbish that get deliberately flapped into ugly fires too. And the ugliness spills and stains and leaches. How do people hang around that energy all the time and not let it soil their souls? How? Can it be done? I really don't know, but right now, I don't think so. I saw this tweet tonight from @SarahBrentyn I wish I had an answer for Sar...

I mis-managed my bananas. I got my timing all wrong and they were suddenly too ripe and too spotted and dotted to eat, and were sitting there looking at me with accusatory and reproachful looks. Banana cake was the obvious solution. But why go the way of regular banana cake, when there's the distant call of Mauritius-style gateaux bananes (you guessed it: banana cakes). 

As I sit here, winter in the tropics means a warm day without humidity. Leaves sing noisily in a strong breeze. I'm sitting in Dodo-Land - aka Mauritius - after a very long absence of some double-digit years. I'm older, everyone I know is older, and the island has changed much in that time. I want to jot down my initial impressions now, before the memories fade and disjointed sensations of newness fall into a temporary familiar.

It's my second day in Mauritius. I'm still jet-lagged. Yesterday, I was too tired to be awake and too awake to sleep, as my brain and body struggled to join the dots across timezones, places and the past and the present. Of getting no sleep the night before starting the trip to the airport at 1:30am, and hoping that the new proposed second airport for Sydney will go ahead soon, without planes dumping fuel over the Blue Mountains conservation/heritage area. Sitting in an empty airport with lines of light in the hours before the world has started to turn properly.

There was a Twitter hashtag which did the rounds recently: #tweetjustyourvoice. The idea was to use record an audio of your voice with a visual that didn’t include your face, and then post it onto Twitter so that your communities of tweeps (Twitter folk) get to hear how you sound. I would have probably continued on my merry way, happily ignorant of all things connected to this hashtag, except that it got embraced with gusto by the FridayPhrases community , with a certain FridayPhrases host (the very persuasive @AdeleSGray ) inviting me to take part. If ever there was a hashtag designed to wallop me well out of my comfort zone, it was this one. Why? Thank you for asking. There are several reasons.