Things I Love Thursday – May 12

Here’s a curveball. I think the thing I love most this week is my job. Not just because today we got a ping pong table in our office, though that was BRILLIANT. And maybe it’s premature nostalgia, because in a couple of weeks I’ll be on a plane again and my temporary role will be up. But last Saturday we had a relaunch to celebrate being open again after the building was wrecked in the Brisbane floods (the water views come at a price), and I finally got to see The Edge full of young people performing and creating and learning and I got it.

See, the tricky thing about The Edge is that it’s hard to explain. My job is to communicate about it and I don’t know if I’ve ever given the same description twice. It’s new, just over a year old. It represents a hefty investment for the Queensland Government and the State Library of Queensland. It’s an incredible building with rich facilities: an auditorium with a sprung floor for dancers; a recording studio; a bunch of Macs loaded up with the software you can never afford to buy yourself. All the space young people need to dream big, and the resources and mentors to help them work toward realising their visions. It’s accessible and inspiring and free, but people don’t seem to know about it, or what it might be able to do for them. So to have the building open and full of people seeing it in full flight on Saturday, I think will go a long way towards building word of mouth that will drive kids in to check it out.

Every generation underestimates, or perhaps resents, the generation that follows it; I know I had to ditch a lot of notions I had about “kids these days” on Saturday. Sitting in the auditorium waiting for a dance workshop to start, I expected apathy, detachment and derision as were de rigueur in my high school days. But these kids were full of support for their contemporaries and there was no shame in participating, in risking looking silly. They learned new dance moves and then the whooped and cheered for the dancers' performance. (As did I. These kids from Fresh Elements are bloody amazing). So, um, way to go, young people. I’m going to miss my job and the rad people I work with; but I feel good knowing when I visit The Edge months and years from now, more and more kids will have found it and made the most of it.

Other things I’ve loved this week:

The beautiful Emily visiting from the UK and commanding quite a crowd of old school chums... Oranges... Freddo Frogs... Ping pong breaks at work! Doing my first shoulder stand at yoga... Crossing things off lists... The Jamie XX/Childish Gambino remix of “Rolling In The Deep”... Reading online advice columns... Wilco... The scary thrill of whizzing down hills on my bike in the dark... Watching girly TV with my very blokey housemate... Riding home without headphones tonight, and hearing someone playing trumpet across the river, notes floating across the water surreal and regal in the dusk. Oh, and I wired the LEDs in this lightning bolt:

OK, one last work-related thing. I have had so much fun writing bits and pieces of copy for the Future City project, which is part of the Ideas Festival. Basically it’s a role-playing game where six people will have to survive in the cultural precinct for a couple of days in the scenario that there’s been a climate apocalypse, civilisation as we know it is destroyed and zombies are marauding around Brisbane. Tomorrow’s the last day you can apply to play one of the characters so if you’re even the tiniest bit curious you should click here and read more. Go on.

What’s made you smile this week?