Countdown to departure: T minus 17 days
Nervousometer: 2/10 - now officially on the scale.

Things are moving quickly now. On Friday I will leave home for Tassie via Sydney and the adventure will begin. On Sunday I will be in Hobart preparing for field training, and not long after that I will be on the ship. I spent today going over the calibration and maintenance procedures for the equipment in Antarctica, and yesterday I braved the nightmare that is Charlestown Square to get the horrible ordeal of pre-departure necessity shopping out of the way: searching for unedifying things like underpants, spare camera batteries, socks, sunglasses, blah blah blah.

Charlestown Square represents every soul-sucking facet of modern suburban life and concentrates it into one big fluorescent-lit, muzac-saturated, fake, sour, pushy, trashy, consumer-infested hell-box. All I wanted was one t-shirt without advertising on the front and instead I came out empty-handed and hoping never to see another 70s-style pus-green girly top ever again. New list for why Antarctica will be great: (1) no bored, sneering teenagers pushing prams, (2) no endless parade of summer-fashion lemmings, (3) no 80s 'classic hits' on incessant repeat, specially selected to make you buy more stuff, (4) no storey-high signs saying "Paul Frank is Your Friend", (5) no robotic aquiescence to advertising propaganda, and (6) no eternal spiralling through carparks as a kind of tired, pre-shop, ritual squaredance.

I find recently that I'm often composing future journal entries in my head, like this:

Returning to Hobart, I step off the ship and am overwhelmed by an ugliness that I somehow was blind to before. I notice the unbearable mess of telegraph wires, of street signs cluttering the field of view like litter, of cars everywhere, glinting, grunting, belching. I cannot believe there is so much traffic. The thought strikes me that there are people living in this city that have no-one looking out for them, and it fills me with a sense of intense emptiness, like the city is a husk, full of nothing but the sour-smelling shadows between the high-rises. The humidity leaves my skin sticky and I can't get away from the feeling of being dirty and opressed. The light is filtered through dust and the sky has a brown tinge. The stench of people and cars clogs my nose. I cannot see the horizon. There are so many plants - nowhere is devoid of them: weeds poke up through cracks in the pavement, ivy tendrils hook into brickwork like parasites, the air crawls with insects - life seems like a plague that has infested the landscape, spreading its seeds like a virus, polluting what should be pristine and open.

and this:

The only person who will understand what it was like when the ship pulled away from the wharf is the person for whom take-off is the most profound, intense part of any plane trip. If they understand the choking exhilaration of feeling the craft shake with the forces that will take them, unfathomably, into the vast blue void and into unknown territory; if they cannot look at the turn of an aileron without being struck dumb in some silent exultation of the technology that works this stomach-leadening magic; if the sense of everything familiar and normal and mundane drops away with the plummetting scenery - then they will understand what I mean when I say the departure from the wharf was as profound and paradigm-altering as a takeoff, spread over much longer and with infinitely more intertia and finality.

and this:

I left the ship and stepped into scenery which, until then, had had no more depth than a photograph. My feet touched the ground gingerly, testing it. And then when I looked up from my familiar, scuffed boots across the ice, my system arced with sudden adrenaline. Here were my own feet - my own body - on the ice, and in front of me was nothing but ice, and behind me was two weeks of empty, frigid, ink-black ocean, and overhead a cold, thin sky. For the first time I felt the desolation, powerfully, like a punch to the chest. Antarctica surrounded me like a taut muscle, like a god with me in its fist, ready to crush me at a whim. It was exhilerating.

The closer I get to departure, the more, imperceptibly, I am detatching myself from my home. I feel I am already starting to see things through Antarctic eyes.

Of course this is not true. I have no idea what is in store for me, and whatever does happen will be completely different from what I imagine. That is why I continue to post my fanciful, over-imaginative daydreams.