1. Tim and I are trying to sell our house
2. We leave for a two week holiday in Japan on 22 November
3. I start my new job on 23 September
4. Tim and I are supposed to be getting married on 3 July 2010
5. I should be asleep

I will readily admit that I have severely neglected this blog, but what else is new? I don’t know why I have such trouble getting motivated to write here.

I want to write so much, but after the Dey Alexander course on Friday, I sort of feel bad about waffling on and on, and making strange run-on sentences and non-existent words.

Anyway, I’m literally falling asleep here. I guess more on this at a later date.

Tonight I spent a while cleaning out our pantry. There were a fair few things that needed to be thrown out, and there was a sticky layer of soy sauce on one of the shelves (I’m still wondering how that happened. The bottle is thick glass, no cracks, not knocked over…) that had to be scrubbed at for a few minutes before it finally admitted defeat and released its hold on the laminate. I felt a sense of satisfaction once the job was done, and the shelves do look much more orderly, but I’ve got a headache throbbing behind my temples now and a queasy feeling in my stomach. I’m pretty sure it is all to do with the heat plaguing us at the moment.

Annoyingly, the airconditioner in our living area decided that it would choose today to stop de-humidifying the air. The result of this is somewhat slightly cooler, though still humid air being recylced back out through the airconditioning unit. The thing that really affects me in summer here is not so much the heat, though that is bad enough in itself, but the humidity. It’s the humidity that makes the air soupy and thick. It causes bread to mould up the day after you buy it, unless you put it in the fridge. Actually, it causes a whole lot of things to mould up in a couple of days, even a bag of lemons we had sitting on the bench. They weren’t old by any stretch of the imagination! I, for some reason, thought it might be okay to keep lemons out of the fridge.

Living in Australia in summer makes everything feel ridiculous. What I mean is, everyday things that you do every day. Things like going to work, wearing closed-in shoes, drinking coffee when it’s warm/hot, wearing business clothes… I guess the main thing that’s frustrating is the clothing thing. I feel like wearing a summer dress and haviainas, when instead I have to wear something that won’t look too out-of-place in the office. I live in fear of the airconditioner at work breaking down. When I worked at Suncorp, the airconditioner broke on one of the hottest days that year. Of course, being in a new multi-storey building meant that there was no other way to get fresh air flowing through the floor. The temperature went up to over 40 degrees celsius and still management wouldn’t let people leave. I left anyway. I don’t cope with the heat.

Australia is hot and humid. A vast majority of the country is tropical or subtropical, and even the parts of the country that are classed as having a mediterranean climate (are you KIDDING? ) can still look forward to a few days of 40+ degrees celsius each summer. I know that we were colonised by people from a colder climate, but you would think that after a few generations we’d have learnt to adapt our lifestyles accordingly. I admit that we do live differently to people in the UK, but we seem just to have chosen to do so in the dumbest possible ways. For example: spending hours and hours of our spare time in the sun.

People from other countries seem to see us as fairly easy-going, laidback, lackadaisical characters. I’m not disputing that this is likely true, in relative terms. I think the reason for this stereotype is more because most of the time it’s too frickin hot to really have the energry to be anything but laidback. Taking an interest and caring about things uses energy, and that generates heat, and oh god if I add any more to the heat that’s currently pressing in around me I will spontaneously combust.

Is it still spontaneous if you expect it to happen?

So anyway, hopefully we will get our other airconditioner fixed tomorrow. Right now, I am cocooned in the comfortable and cool embrace of artificially chilled and de-humidified air (our airconditioner in the bedroom works, thankfully). When I step out of this room, it feels like stepping into a bathroom where someone has left the hot water running without the exhaust fan on.

Yuck.

Go here to read all about it. Don’t worry – it’s not a Christian-bashing thing, just an informative article about the pagan origins of what we now call “Christmas”.

It’s especially illogical when the return to sender sticker is not one of those removeable ones, and it takes forever to carefully peel the sticker back to find the name and address underneath.

Get a clue, people!

This last image is from Jason Chan and it’s my desktop background at work right now. It’s very soothing and calming. There’s a lot more illustration and art on Jason’s site, all wonderfully detailed and imaginative. I felt like I was stepping straight into someone else’s head.

Anyway, I’m going to go while I still can. Any minute now my forehead will be down on teh keyboard, forcing me to commit heinous typographical errors (for example “teh”).

Goodnight everyone!! x

Sorry. Cynical side of me peeked out for a moment there. People make and keep acquaintances for the sole purpose of extending their network kind of disgust me a little. How do you ever know what’s real with them? How do they ever maintain a real relationship? Isn’t it a constant question of “what else can I get from you to propel myself forward another millimetre?” 

I’m sure that the people who live their lives this way don’t even realise that’s what they’re doing. How about you stop pondering what other people can do for you, and start to simply enjoy the company of others? How about just being in the moment? How about having friends as friends, and not as rungs of a ladder that you tread on to get yourself further up in the world? 

*******

OMG I love my life. 

I love not feeling the need to constantly justify my actions, living in the moment, allowing myself freedom to feel the emotions that come naturally. I’m still careful not to hurt anyone. 

Everyone should read this book. My interest in the undead springs forth from my initial interest in a) the Black Death, and b) apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels such as “Plague” (originally “Plague 99″) by Jean Ure, and “A Wrinkle in the Skin” by John Christopher. 

My interest has just been piqued by the term ‘pedigree collapse’, when referring to genealogy. Much favoured by European royal families (see the Hapsburg jaw/lip syndrome! Also known as prognathism), and sometimes necessary after the Black Death ravaged the population of Europe so much.

The part of me that loves anthropology loves the Black Death for it’s catalytic effect on the development of Modern English, on the very social fabric apparent at the time, and on the population’s understanding of the world and their place in it. I’d love to go back in time like Kivrin in “Doomsday Book” (Connie Willis) and see the everyday lives of the different social classes. 

I’m tired. Those are good books. Read them. I’m obsessed.

And WordPress, would you stop updating every two weeks? You’re being all Microsofty. Gimme a hefty update in one go… with a few goodies thrown in. Maybe a few complimentary, optional widgets, or a theme or two.

Anyway, back to my previous train of thought… I had an important realisation this afternoon, maybe even an epiphany, or perhaps a lightbulb moment? Whatever the term, I feel kind of happy and stupid about it. Happy because it makes things easier for me, and stupid because I didn’t realise that I was making my life unnecessarily complicated.

My realisation was to do with the complex I have about not having attained my HSC, and not having attended university despite it being my dream of dreams since I started working full-time. The realisation is this: IT DOESN’T MATTER. It really doesn’t matter anymore. The fact that I don’t have a piece of paper to give to the university saying, “this is how smart Cass is, you should let her go into this course”, should make no difference to my motivation in fulfilling my dreams. I already know there are paths that I can follow. I’ve procrastinated and procrastinated, all the while telling myself, “I’ll wait until next year, then it will be easier.” or, “I’ll just continue slowly working my way up the ranks and soon I’ll get somewhere I’ll really be proud of myself for.”

Why? Why keep putting it off? I can justify my actions again and again, and justify not taking the first step because, well, I guess it takes effort. Who gives a fuck? I don’t mean to swear, but really. It’s not the be all and end all of the universe.

There’s so much out there. If this is what I really want to do, then all I need to do is take the first step.

Thanks universe, I love your endless sparkling craziness.

Please click the above link to visit a site where you can sign a petition against the censorship of the internet in Australia. 

From the website:

The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist.

Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites.

There is more information on the site, but basically, they want us all to be net shrooms. As if our internets here isn’t slow enough, they’re going to slow it down even more AND make it more expensive. 

Are they trying to make us into ignorant idiots? Because this is the best way to go about it. You can’t block out the entire world. My analogy is that this new plan is the equivalent of passing a legislation that means that everyone in Australia has to have both their hands cut off, to stop murderers. The fact is, if the murderers want to murder, they’re going to find a way around it. And in the end, it means a lot of inconvenience to everyone else in the country who ISN’T doing anything wrong.