I’ve just finished my GPS report. It’s a dinky little one, only 1744 words, it took me about four hours to write and format. But even in such a small report, I had three Word-defined sections. It was still damned annoying how Word kept changing the way I formatted the page numbering. “Stop it! What’d you do that for?! No, I said BREAK that link!” I was so relieved when I finally hit “Print to PDF”. I like PDF because once it’s there, no one, not even Mr Schizo Word can change it.

Of course, I had to print to PDF about five times because every time I checked it in Acrobat Reader, Word had somehow sneaked in a change between the time I checked the last page number and the time I moved the mouse ten centimetres to the ‘Print’ button.

The vision in one of her eyes is signficantly better than the other. When she got glasses for the first time, she kept looking around and marvelling that “Everything is in 3D!”

When she was twelve, she had neurosurgery to restore full movement in her right arm. In the three days that she was in hospital, she could not get past Level 1 in Mario Brothers on the NES.

She used to collect liquid egg timers. They’re way cool.

She owns so many clothes that she has a summer wardrobe and winter wardrobe. It’s an absolute pain to change them over. She is usually lazy and slow at it so in the first months of autumn and even into winter, she can still be found wearing t-shirts and skirts.

She owns shares in Pacific Hydro because they are way cool. She tried to apply for work there once or twice but being a minority shareholder does not guarantee you a job interview.

If she were to hate a cuisine, it would be Japanese. How do you justify charging that much money for cold, primarily vegetarian, raw food?

The fruit she ate today – banana for breakfast, two small apples for morning tea, a banana for lunch, half a custard apple after dinner, a mandarin and an orange while watching TV.

Last year, she spent $1823.45 on dancing.

In Prep, she received an award for being able to tie her shoelaces… even though she wore velcro-fastened sneakers.

Her family have four fish – Silver, Spot, Goldie and Frankie.

She has never watched a scary movie in her life because she is sure they will give her nightmares.

She once won a public speaking competition by speaking about public speaking.

Apparently, people don’t like to do it. Speak in public, that is. She loves it, it makes her feel powerful, adored and funny. (Sssh, don’t say anything to shatter her delusions…)

She used to be hyper-competitive until she met other competitive people, realised how uncool they were and is now placid and easy-going. So now she is way cool.

I am trying to ease myself out of leadership in the Dance Sport club. I think the hindrance is not so much other people’s reliance on me, but my own self-stickybeakedness. Oh, there’s one for the glossary!

It must be done, for the sake of my sanity.

I went for a twenty minute jog today. It wasn’t as painful as I expected (I got to use my dinky new MP3 player, 128 MB, very pathetic 🙂 The catalyst for this spurt of physical activity is that I’m going ‘skiing’ (read: falling over then resigning myself to tobogganing and snowman making) soon and Damjan has told us all that we need to get fit. I’m not as fit as I used to be. I still can do an hour of high impact aerobics but that’s a bit different to running and cycling for ten kilometres, right?

Back in my day, I was able to beat nearly all the girls at that damned beep test/shuttle run in Phys Ed at high school. God, I hated the *beep* test. I loved PE, even the sit ups and rope climbing but the beep test ruined my whole PE year. It wasn’t so much the running; it was the turning around every time you hit a line. My joints hurted *whimper*

I saw Damjan’s taekwondo grading and that scared the bejabbers out of me. He was doing sprints and push ups and sit ups voluntarily. For fun. Oh, the pain! But there’s no denying he is much fitter than me and will probably get his money’s worth when we go skiing. So, I’m trying to get fit again…

In unrelated news, we’ve had a hiccup in organising our dinner dance for Dance Sport. It’s the big formal ball we have in September. We realised we didn’t include the costs of drinks and have to negotiate a new dinner package with the caterers. Bah, who needs alcohol to have fun. Maybe we can serve apple cider and milkshakes all night. I would be ecstatic! Mmm… milkshake.

My hip hop kiddies are so excited about the new routine I’ve choreographed for them. By ‘kiddies’, I mean people between 16 and 25 years old. Not really kid-like in the traditional sense of the word, but hey, everyone I teach is a ‘kiddy’ in my vocabulary.

This new routine is much harder than the other two they’ve learned so far. I’ve upped the ante. Raised the stakes. Set the bar higher. I’ve really had no choice. All the other hip hop teachers were doing cool, intricate routines and my class was getting ‘routine envy’.

I’ve had difficulty balancing what Don has taught me at teacher training and what the other teachers are advocating. Don says, “They’re beginners. You can’t rush them or they’ll feel inadequate. Teach to the lowest level so no one feels ignored.” Makes sense, right? But what happens when all the other classes are speeding ahead and looking funky and the clever people in my class are bored? So I’m doing a hard routine but hopefully teaching it slowly enough that everyone can keep up. I think it’s worked so far (for the one lesson I’ve taught it!) because people seem thrilled.

I’m quite excited about the routine myself. I didn’t think I had it in me to be choreographically innovative. I haven’t yet developed my own hip hop style but luckily, I have a knack of picking out other people’s. My beginners routines were decidedly “Liz” style, lots of body movement and direction changes. Now, I’m doing a “Kathleen” – on the spot, body isolations, fast hand movements. I’d like to do a “Deb” one day but there’s a lot of popping and locking. Hmm, hard!

*pop* *lock* *b-o-d-y r-o-l-l* !

I’ve got fifteen minutes until my friend Gurpreet comes over and we go for our three-monthly coffee. Gurpreet is one my best friends from high school. She’s a dynamo of energy, gushing and girliness. Sometimes it’s tiring being around her but mostly, it’s fun. We don’t get to see each other much anymore, even though we’re at the same uni but we make the time to go out for coffee and cake every couple of months and catch up on life.

She’s quite an odd combination. She’s Indian and acts like a bimbo but it’s all an act. She’s very clever and will deny it, even when you’re standing in front of her in the biomedical lab as she does her honours project, wearing a lab coat. Dumb biomedical researcher? Hmm…!

She is very flirty and has had her share of secret affairs, yet she will obediently marry the man her parents will suggest in the next few years. She comes from a culture of arranged marriages. I’d be kicking and screaming, would even elope rather than endure an arranged marriage but Gurpreet is well-adjusted to the idea.

Oh, and she has hair like Rapunzal! She’s never had a haircut in her life for religious reasons. For me, that’s a fantastic conversation starter.

It’s funny how we find every culture but our own, exotic. Chinese food, *yawn*. Chinese horoscopes, *yawn*. Chinese folktales, *yawn*. Serbian music? Cool!

WINK 😉

My heart wrenches when I see on the news footage of the South Korean contractor in Iraq begging for his life – “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” Poor, poor man. A few days ago, I watched a Current Affair piece (quality journalism, of course) about families under the strain of raising autistic children. I felt so bad that we as a society weren’t supporting them.

Every day in our newspapers and on TV we hear of people fighting, dying, struggling. I’ve become quite blase about it, I suppose. I say, “Oh, that’s terrible,” and forget about it half an hour later. But when I am able to put faces and personal stories to the statistics… It’s not a nice feeling.

When I was in grade four, I remember trying to catalogue all the problems in the world in the expectation that solving the world’s problems would simply be a matter of checking things off my list. I sat down and thought really hard. “Right. So there’s poverty. The Environment. Homelessness. Drugs. Unemployment. War. Hunger. Health.” Then I was satisfied and forgot about it.

As the years went on, I added more issues to my mental list and at some point, I realised that it couldn’t all be solved and that these problems were all tangled up in each other like a mass of vines in the Amazon jungle. We could start at one corner of the tangle and try to unravel it bit by bit but I had been hoping that we could get a flamethrower and burn the whole lot away.

In all my time at school, I must have considered career options in every university faculty except medicine. I never wanted to be a doctor, didn’t even bother with the UMAT (although, if it were free I would have done it for fun). I wanted to “help people” (the way that idealistic young’uns want to “help people”… it now sounds as inane as a Miss Universe beauty pageant response) but I didn’t want to deal with human pain.

That’s why I chose to do environmental engineering. Trees don’t cry. Passions don’t run as hot when dealing with plants rather than humans, right? But as an enviro, I could still save the world. My mental justification was that making an environmental difference would last longer than helping individual people (a simplistic and wrong premise, I know).

To some extent, I was correct. I don’t know of anyone who cries over the loss of an ecosystem as they would over a loved one. But passions do run hot. There is plenty of anger and frustration in the environmental movement. But anger I can manage. Pain, I’m not so sure.

I sound like one of those teenage diaries that try to be deep and meaningful. Ugh.

I’ve arrived at uni early (8:30 AM) because I was meant to meet a friend for a group project. She hasn’t showed up and it’s almost 9:30 AM. I reckon it’s because she sent me a text message to cancel/reschedule and I never saw it because I lost my phone. Grr, I could have been sleeping!

So I occupied myself by reading old magazines from the early 1980s. They were on a table marked “Free to a good home!”. Heck, the last thing I need is clutter at home. But the magazines are good for occupying me while I wait. I’m quite bemused that the social issues being discussed in 1984 (pornography, declining university standards, American domination of Australian media) are exactly the same as in 2004. It’s a bit disheartening because it suggests we haven’t progressed very much. On the other hand, it’s also reassuring because I am reminded that people are people are people. Every generation goes through the same issues…and survives. Nothing suggests that we won’t do the same.*

*Past performance is not an indication of future performance. See your financial advisor for personal advice.

I lost my phone. I used to lose things all the time and it made me feel bad. It’s like that Emily Rodda book, if you’ve ever read it. ‘Finders Keepers‘ is about things that would get lost through invisible holes from our world to an adjoining world. Whenver I lost things, it’s all the more annoying/distressing because I can imagine it sitting there in a corner this very instant, calling, “Joan! I’m here! I’m here!”

Anyway, I was sick of losing things so I made a resolution to always look after my posessions. I hadn’t lost anything signficant since I made that resolution in August last year. Now my phone is gone. Worst case scenario: someone pocketed it while I was at Crown Casino on Saturday morning. Those gamblers, desperate enough to steal a phone worth less than AUD$80. Best case scenario: It’s at home and I will find it…or someone picked it up at Crown and handed it to Lost Property. Yes, that would do me nicely.

BOO HOO. BOOOOO HOOOOO.

Jason asked me how I discovered blogging. I said, “That’s actually an interesting story!” and proceeded to tell it. Jason listened carefully then commented, “Joan, that really wasn’t very interesting at all.” I was crushed.

Here’s the story anyway, so suffer.

I get these little obsessions, which usually last just a few weeks. Last week it was Apple computers. A few months ago, it was accordions. I love accordion music. I wanted to learn how to play it and being the good modern day girl that I am, I decided to research it on the internet. So I tapped ‘accordion’ (or possibly ‘accordian’) into Google….and stumbled on the weird, eloquent world of the Accordion Guy. He’s a computer programmer in Canada and I was reading the most fantastic, Hollywood-like blog entry about his fiasco with Goth Girl. It’s the best blog entry I’ve ever read. Accordian Guy’s blog was nominated for the 2004 Bloggies. I clicked the Bloggies link and it lead this wide-eyed voyuerism virgin to a world where anyone could stand on their soapbox and be heard by other people…because amongst the millions of people who use the internet, surely one of them will be interested in your life!

I resisted making a blog for as long as I could because I suspected I would be writing in it every day. I’ve done twelve entries so far. Two weeks is almost up. Who knows, maybe this is just one of those two-week obsessions. I’ll let you know in a few weeks… or if I don’t, then I did.

🙂