Jayeless

I really want to start posting here more often. I think the main difficulty is that I’ve got out of the habit of doing so, more than that I can’t. My daily routine — or, er, weekly routine, since my “daily routine” changes depending on the day of the week — doesn’t involve opening this “Write Post” page to add an entry. I don’t like falling out of the habit of doing this, because it makes the front page crusty (the last post on the front page was posted six weeks ago!¹) and has especially bad effects when you try navigating by tag, like the news tag. Let’s face it: nothing categorised under that is still news, especially when the most recent entry’s from March 12.

It’s not like I couldn’t be posting, either. I find the time to publish articles to my Google Reader page, and I could really link to those exact same articles here. I post stuff to Twitter and some of that stuff, I could write proper entries about and publish here, instead of filing away on Twitter. Since the latest season of Doctor Who started airing, I’ve been reviewing all the episodes as they come out at Dreamwidth, which admittedly is probably a better place than here because it’s more, er, fandommish. And Chrome tells me that “fandommish” does not count as an adjective, but I defy it! Defy it, I say! English is an extensible language, and I can turn nouns into adjectives with the suffix “ish” (and doubling the M) if I want to!!

I have so much I want to write about, too! Here is a short list:

• my AMAZING international studies lecturer: he is absolutely hilarious, and totally random, and generally fantastic, and I would love to write about some of the antics he pulls off in his lectures. Mobile phone polls!
• one of my Spanish tutors: who is also hilarious and random, albeit in a slightly more subdued manner than the international studies lecturer. By the way, the tutor I’m referring to is the same tutor as the one I wrote about in this entry, so that could possibly give you some idea.
• MUSIC. With the 45 minute commute to and from uni I have these days, combined with all the “downtime” at uni I fill with quality time with my iPod, there are so many songs and albums I have thoughts buzzing in my head about that I would love to discuss. I have no idea how such posts would even turn out, but there is so much appeal to “this song is fucking awesome, and these are the reasons why, and these are the parts I especially love, and these are the lines I find most amazing” posts for me.
• politics. This is a given, I suppose. I did start writing a post about Israel’s latest crimes in the Mediterranean Sea, and Twitter’s censorship of the discussion on Twitter, but then a few days passed and it doesn’t seem very topical any more. Blech. Another problem with writing about the news. And then there’s the other problem that I’ve changed some of my political opinions in the last few months and I don’t particularly relish writing posts entitled “Why I Was Wrong: The Afghanistan War” so I’m holding off for now. Sigh. When I start posting more often, I’m sure I’ll regain the confidence to do this, because if I’m posting more often I cannot stop talking about politics the way I can when I’m not talking much in the first place. Again, it’s about habits.
• languages and linguistics stuff: there is so much interesting stuff I learn in linguistics, and I’d love to start posting little things now and again with random linguistics stuff I just found out that I think is really cool. Because so much linguistics stuff IS really, really cool!
• my novel: now this is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t update my blog. Much of the time that I could spend updating my blog, I spend working on my novel. The problem with posting entries about it is that things I write aren’t easy to write about. I don’t want to spoil the entire plot, but if I don’t… what is there to say about it? And triumphant posts like “I wrote a whole scene today” aren’t very interesting. I guess we could broaden this to writing in general, and some of the thoughts that go through my head about novel-writing and world-building… at any rate, because this is a large timesuck for me, I’d like to write about it more.

Added to all of this pondering, was my discovery today that Chyrp is “dead”. Chyrp is the blogging platform I use to publish all of this (just in case you weren’t aware of this). This discovery saddened me, even though I’d known it hadn’t been updated in ages. I didn’t really mind it not being updated in ages, to be honest — I’ve hacked files here and there and I don’t even remember which ones, so it’d be a nightmare trying to restore those hacks! — but knowledge that the project is officially “dead” is a bit disheartening. And I mean sure, this is open source so the project could be dead like a phoenix, destined one day to rise again… but that is not necessarily so.

The fact that Chyrp is “dead” isn’t necessarily a reason to stop using it, either — it’s stable, it works for me, I like it, and I don’t think my Chyrp backups will work in WordPress, so I’d have to start afresh if I switched. That’d mean losing all my posts. And that didn’t exactly revitalise my blogging last time, although admittedly that wasn’t by choice!

But there are also arguments for going back to WordPress — the project is “alive” for one thing, but also I still (after all this time) have a better understanding of how it works, know how to code a silly front page in it (knowledge which has eluded me in Chyrp), know that there are more plugins available for it, and that these plugins are useful, many have features unreplicated by Chyrp or any of its plugins, and are more likely to be actively maintained than plugins for a dead project.

Also, better to switch before a great increase in enthusiasm for blogging than afterwards.

I’m not going to make any decisions right this second (except perhaps working to post more, because that seems fair enough). But that’s what I’m thinking about as regards this blog’s future, and I think it’s fair enough to write about it on that aforementioned blog…

1. Once I post this, that will of course go down to one month ago, because this post will displace the six-week-old post. With such a great length of time as one month, though, I think my point still stands.

This morning I woke up feeling distinctly unwell. I was extremely thirsty, for one thing, and my stomach was hurting, and I also wanted to vomit, and my breath smelt much, much fouler than usual. (I’m not saying I am perfect enough to always have sweet-smelling breath, but this was in its own league.)

So, I stumbled out of bed and vomited and drank water and soon discovered that I had a rather nasty stomach bug. As the day has progressed (it now being 5 hours since I woke up) I’ve only been feeling worse and worse, and it’s really been pissing me off and I hate stomach bugs with all the ferocity I can muster.

Even better, The Australian has sought to make my day that extra bit more enjoyable, by writing that A DEADLY STOMACH BUG WHICH KILLED NEARLY 1,300 PEOPLE IN QUEBEC AND 8,300 PEOPLE IN BRITAIN HAS MADE ITS WAY TO MELBOURNE AND IS PROBABLY CIRCULATING IN THE COMMUNITY. So, I would like to extend an extra-special thanks to The Australian for publishing this delightful news.

My mum told me to stop reading about this deadly bug and Dad gave me the opposite advice, to do a lot of research into this bug until I was satisfied that I was not at risk. Well my dad gave me BAD ADVICE because I became less and less satisfied as I read more about it. This “deadly bug” is a bacteria which occurs naturally in the stomachs/guts/whatever of 5% of adults, and is usually held in check by the presence of good bacteria which keep it down. So, the less severe form of the “bug” arises when antibiotics kill off a lot of the good bacteria which keep it in check, allowing this bacteria - which is immune to antibiotics - to multiply out of control.

However, my research tells me that the more severe version of the bug, i.e. the “Quebec strain” and i.e. the deadly one, does whatever the hell it wants. It doesn’t need antibiotics to clear the way, it just steamrolls in and possibly kills you. How exciting.

You know what, I think the internet is a curse when it comes to medical conditions. If I hadn’t read this information, I would not even be aware of the possibility that this is not just a regular (highly infuriating) stomach bug. Even though that probably is what it is.

The only bright side out of all of this is that I could not possibly attend my history tutorial on ~the Anzac legend~. Yesterday I had to drag myself out of bed at 7.30, after five hours’ sleep, for my 9am History lecture which (I had forgotten) was on ~the Anzac legend~. I could only wonder despondently to myself why I had bothered to come, after the lecturer began by saying, “So, let’s say that the Australian government has decided to get rid of every public holiday, except for one which, it has been decided, will serve as a day of public celebration of loyalty to the nation. We’re going to keep either Australia Day, January 26, or Anzac Day, April 25. Which do you choose?”

I mean seriously, wtf kind of question is that. Let’s celebrate the invasion of Australia (well, I like to pretend it celebrates the 1808 military coup which briefly instated one of my ancestors as military dictator… but I know it doesn’t, and that’s a pretty crap historical event to celebrate anyway), or else Australia’s militaristic traditions!! Hmmm… let’s not.

Anyway, the lecture wasn’t all bad because I learned some fun stuff about the Australian government’s determination to airbrush the history of Gallipoli, for instance by creating a diplomatic crisis between us and Britain until Britain agreed to censor a historian who tried to write that some Australians tried to escape the fighting. Because really, how DARE Australians try to escape fighting. CANNON FODDER 4 LIFE, people, however short that life may be.

Well this is a disjointed post! I think I’ll leave it there.

When I was a year nine, as some of you may remember, I was incredibly undisciplined in the way I organised my homework-doing time. My favourite (in terms of retelling the story) was the time I started a SOSE assignment at 2am the day it was due, finishing it at 7am. Of course, after experiencing the intensity of spending fourteen hours on a history essay, I laugh in the face of that. Only five hours?! I had it easy!

But anyway, eventually I became disciplined, and by the time I was doing my distance education subjects in VCE¹, I was disciplined enough to do the work, study hard, and get good results. Well… maybe that’s my rose-tinted glasses skewing the situation, since I clearly remember that I studied for my unit 2 history exam in the lunchtime before the exam, and that I fell three weeks behind in history while studying the French Revolution. However, I was really disciplined leading up to exams at the end of last year, mostly², so um yes. There’s my baseline.

I am really loving certain parts of the university lifestyle. Things like reduced hours, late starts, no uniform³, the freedom to miss class whenever I choose without getting into trouble… these things feel so reasonable and natural that I am having difficulty remembering how I coped with the rigid authoritarianism of school. Oh wait, that would be through complaining. Read More »

So, you might remember that two weeks ago I managed to cleverly get myself into a situation in which I needed to stay up all night to spend fourteen hours writing an essay about the French Revolution. You might also recall that I swore to myself that I would never do that again.

Obviously this means that I learned absolutely nothing, and did almost the exact same thing last night. Except the essay was on the Cold War, not the French Revolution (which therefore made it less painful), and I actually got 3.5 hours sleep, because at 6.30 I was too tired to keep going and thought I had time for a few hours of sleep. (I was right, although I finished the essay fifteen minutes before I had to leave the house for linguistics class!)

So, after my linguistics class, I went up to SOPHIS headquarters (that evil place) and began to fill in the cover sheet for my essay. There was a field on it for the date, so I checked my phone, and saw that the date was May 7.

This is when I began to get the sinking feeling that the essay had been due May 6.

I obviously had none of my books for this unit on me, so couldn’t verify the due date. I wrote on the cover sheet that it was due today, because I’d been so sure I had until Friday to hand it in, so perhaps I’d imagined the May 6 part.

Well, no. I just lost 5% for handing it in late. Yay.

Anyway, sure it’s my fault for being disorganised and sure it’s my fault for not checking when the assignment was due and obviously it’s my fault for not doing it before the day it was due, anyway. It’s still extremely annoying though, because I mean… what a pointless thing to lose 5% over. I could easily have done it, say, last weekend, probably produced better-quality work as a result, and not lost points for lateness. BUT NO. Procrastination was too important to me.

I hope I’ve learned something from my experience this time, anyway.