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It must be nice to pick up a copy of the local paper, read it, and believe 100% of what is written. Maybe I’m just too cynical.

I read an article today about the Victorian state government buying 10,000 hectares of grassland, with an additional 50,000 hectares being considered. The land is being purchased “to compensate for rare grasslands lost with the expansion of Melbourne’s urban boundary”.

So land that the government sold off years ago for a song, now is being purchased back by the government at top dollar no doubt. When everyone is told that there is a “shortage of land”, clearly having the government buy it from the developers is just going to create a greater shortage, right? Either that or the government are trying to encourage a shortage – dare I say, to prop up the housing prices?

If your intentions are just to keep house prices high, it makes sense I suppose. Encourage population growth, limit new land developments, and force people to cram into the cities – it will force land prices to stay high.

Our good friend Obama plans similar things. Fifty cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore, once industrial boom towns, are now abandoned by business with no future employment in sight, and as a result most residents have followed suit. The neighborhoods are now filled with abandoned homes, and some low income families.

Decaying houses are bulldozed, and with the removal of existing residents, entire neighborhoods will be levelled, returning the land to nature. There’s not much information on how the displaced families are compensated for losing their house in this process!

I just can’t see information like this without ulterior motives staring me right in the face. The way I see it:

• Either there is a huge surplus in land (which it’s alleged that there isn’t) so it is ok to reclaim the land for nature, or
• Property values are far too high, and a shortage needs to be created to prop up these values.

I’m all for “greening the earth”, just not when it is an underhanded attempt to keep a bubble inflated.

So I never really set any goals for myself, but this changes today.

As a cyclist, I’m pretty much “all legs”. Big quadriceps and gastrocnemius (thighs and calves), but not much else!

From everything I’ve read, I’m probably too active to become “massive”, and I don’t ever really want to look like that anyway. My plans are just to build my upper body strength, and my core strength for when I am riding. When I jumped on my downhill bike last week I really noticed how weak I was in my upper body nowadays – it really takes a lot more strength to throw that bike around.

So the plan? I want to be able to do 20 chin ups in a row. At the moment I can do about three. In the past I’ve just “done chin ups”, with no real direction. Now I have my number, and I’m on my way there. To build core strength I’m going to continue on with my yoga. While I’d like to do it every day I realise that I need to be realistic about it, so the plan is to do it at least three times a week, for around 30 minutes each session. I like the idea of not having to use any equipment to do these exercises, hence the chin ups and yoga.

Talking to a few different people about goal setting – it is almost unheard of. Obviously athletes and very driven business people set goals all the time, but everyday people like you and I never really seem to set themselves goals for day-to-day life. We just keep plodding along with no real direction.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how long it will take me to reach my goals now. It might be ages, but at least I know where I’m heading!

I posted an entry called “Is this living?” not so long ago. In the entry I mentioned a motocross rider that was more afraid of working a boring 9-5 job than dying doing something that really made him feel alive.

On the weekend I had to go to work as my team was moving some servers. It was a full weekend’s work and on the whole I thoroughly enjoyed it – I enjoy the physical work for a change. Unfortunately though, one of the team members invited to “help” was just an absolute waste of space. All he did was get in the way and essentially cable things incorrectly, which I would then have to come back and do properly later anyway. Long story short he cost us time and money by being there and we would have been ten times better off if he just stayed at home.

This is a man that only wears clothes in shades of brown or grey, smells like a stale closet, and by the sounds of it the most exciting thing he has ever done was catch the bus to work when his car had broken down.

The whole weekend he’d try and strike up a conversation with anyone, but it was just never about anything important. It was always about his cats, or how he liked earl grey tea or something. About two hours into the second day of working with him I realised that he is a man with pretty much nothing else in his life than dinner and TV at home, driving to and from work, and working itself. What a sad life!

While I don’t want to come across as arrogant, I suppose it gives me a bit of a boost – my life is just so much more exciting.

It’s just further confirmed my plans for life. I just can’t do the “same old same old” that a lot of people tend to sink into. It seems to be a typical theme for Gen Y’s to need to live their life with plenty of change to the Baby Boomers in this respect, and maybe it is just our impatient nature, but to be honest I don’t really care. Life’s too short to just do the same thing over and over and over. I need to mix it up a LOT!

Sex is a taboo topic, right? But what makes a topic taboo in the first place?

Growing up as an average Aussie kid, I’d say I was in the same situation as most. While it’s not as though I would get in trouble about talking about sex, it would just be plain awkward, and obviously you don’t want to actually talk to your parents about it. That then extends to friends and other people you come across, and as you grow up you end up talking to maybe a close group of a couple of friends about it. Throughout your childhood you are “protected” from it and it is always just implied that it’s not something that should be spoken about. Going to a Catholic school probably didn’t help this either!

But why? I know us Gen Y’s are meant to be a really “out there” generation, but are we really? Everyone has sex in some way shape or form, and it’s human nature, so why is it such an issue?

Humans are sexual beings, and looking at ancient times it is obvious that they used to embrace that, rather than hide it in their closet. Sex was considered to be an important part of humanity’s existence on planet earth. Greek paintings show young men and women naked and having sex, the Romans had their festivals, releasing their inhibitions and abandoning their shyness, while the Egyptian women wore at most a transparent cloth, their slaves only wearing beads! The Egyptian men usually wore a short kilt.

It’s such an interesting thing, sex. Talking to friends about it can be eye opening, shocking, or just plain hilarious, so once again, why the taboo?

I don’t consider myself a sexual deviant in any way (though I’m probably a deviant in other respects), but it does trouble me as to why things such as sex are so off limits. At the end of the day we are all on this earth to procreate, and not do much else. We spend so much time worrying about our money, our image and so on, but never the core aspects of our life.

Freedom in life is something that is becoming increasingly important to me. Part of this freedom is the ability to be able to talk about anything to anyone. I rarely hold back when talking to most people, and it’s still obvious how certain comments can shock some people, even what that is not the intention – I’m just making conversation.

Embrace life, and embrace sex. Both of them are here to be enjoyed, not cause grief.

I was talking to some of my colleagues yesterday about all of the things in the world that just don’t seem right. One of them has always had a very strong opinion about drugs and what makes them either legal or illegal. As usual I harped on about diet and how we are all doing it wrong (tongue in cheek), and another brought up how he knows a guy that doesn’t use deodorant because of the aluminium in it – his father had Alzheimer’s and he is worried about getting it too.

We kind of joked around about the guy that doesn’t use deodorant, but this morning my mate tells me that he was watching something on tantric you-know-what last night, and the guy narrating the video suggested that everyone should stay away from products that contain or are stored in aluminium. Apparently it can affect the “performance” of males greatly, while also being something that women should avoid.

After doing some quick research, it looks as though the aluminium thing is something I should really look into. Cooking in aluminium, especially with acidic foods is a real and genuine thing to avoid, and it has been well and truly linked to Alzheimer’s and breast cancer in women.

Soft drink, that disgusting fizzy stuff that I’m so addicted to must eat the hell out of those cans – that can’t be safe either.

Oh well, it’s just more motivation for me to get onto the good food. Raw fruit and veg, all the way.