I went to a lecture today for the unit I’m going to be tutoring. They are almost all in their first semester of their first year. It was even their first lecture. They are seventeen or something. I’m hoping this means malleable, enthusiastic students - perhaps even ones that are willing to read the course materials. However, it may just mean a never-ending Tim Tam packet of dumb.

Caught up with James and that affable fella we all know as Glen (who, through provision of wheels, helped my furnish myself with a new office chair so large that it and I cannot be in my apartment at the same time (much like Glen and his car magazines)). We had drinks and played pool, which I’m getting slowly better at.

Just now I noticed an ad that has lots of young girls stuffing their bras - it’s for breast cancer awareness. If you look at the ad very closely you will see a neat deco pink & purple hair salon that is just down the road from me. I think it might be closed now though.

I just discovered Imageready >:-)

I’m sitting in the office at work, on a Saturday no less. I came in to try and set up my computer again. During the holidays some sweatervest-wearing 40-year-old numbnuts came in and erased everything on my hard drive, including all my old emails, tutorial presentations and handouts. I tore all my hair out when I realised and I’m now bald much before my time. Then, of course, they forgot to give me a password, and set the security settings so high that the numbnuts who was sent to help couldn’t even create a new account for me. At which point I nearly throttled the second numbnuts, but decided not to on account of I didn’t have a realistic case to plead temporary insanity. Arriving today, in the hope of finding everything in order once again, I was greeted by a friendly note. Addressed to me but sitting on entirely someone else’s desk. It said: ‘Mark - all postgrads will be on active directory from Friday and you can log on then’. No explanation of what ‘active directory’ is of course, and just as it was fated to be, I cannot log on. AAargh!!

Let me list my further frustrations with the admin around here, just for the record:
$200 dollar office equipment rebate - didn’t tell me when the deadline was so I missed out.
$1600 conference trip to New Zealand - declared (after the application was handed in) that first year students were ineligible.
Library books - largely absent from the library due to never being bought.
Library staff - look at me funny.
etc.

Meanwhile, the girl on the next desk forgot to log off her eMac when she left in December, so I’m using that today. I wonder if anyone would notice if I swapped it with my PC? Oh, and in other news, I looked for chairs in K-Mart but their chair section is being renovated so I improvised a new chair using a packet of cable ties, one third of the old chair, a milk crate and a Sunbeam electric grill. I’m not poor, I just don’t know where any shops are.

I have just lost the right to say that I’m not a procrastinator. In fact, I believe I’m incurable. Look at this kitchen chair I have at my desk. I picked it up off the side of the road in Stanmore some time last year - it had been thrown out because it was wobbly. I tried to fix it up with duct tape, but over the year it became progressively wobblier until a big bit fell off it and it became super-wobbly. Did I then replace the chair like any sane individual would? No. I just put the bit of wood by the door so I could fend off intruders with it and kept sitting on the chair. It was hard to balance on, but using it was easier than going to K-Mart for a new one.

This week I came back and tried sitting on my chair again. I decided that it would last another six months until I move, so I wouldn’t bother replacing it just yet. Then, this morning as I sat checking my email, the damn piece of crap just disintegrated beneath me, sending me crashing to the floor like an idiot. A procrastinating, idiot in fact. I count six pieces of dismembered chair scattered around me. And I, of course, sit on the largest remaining piece typing a weblog post about it and writing some emails - still not getting up and chucking the stupid thing to the curb, or going off to K-Mart so that I have something other than an extremely wobbly upended chair carcass to sit on.

All hail King Mark the Procrastinator, ruler of the bounteous land of Nevergetyershittogether.

PS: The Avengers fucking rocks. Am I the first or the last person to have realised that?

Look, I put a pen cap on a pencil! Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you mad? ‘You can’t do that, it’s a bloody pencil!!’ they scream. ‘It doesn’t need a cap!!’

In other news, I am reading the short stories of Jean Stafford. They’re all about old ladies and young girls and money and manners. I don’t quite get them, though.

Coming to Sydney didn’t feel this hard last time. I guess I wanted to leave, and I had so much to do setting up here that I didn’t have much time to think about it. Now, it feels awful. I wonder how I coped last year and I think, to quite an extent, I didn’t.

Perhaps I’m not as brave as some people. I like living alone, but the feeling of knowing no one and being no one is something I have trouble with. And it’s not just having someone to be around that I need, it’s a few particular people that I miss badly (and it’s only been a day :) ). I’m also afraid that this will go on forever - when I’m done with Sydney it will be time to move on somewhere else to find work, which, if it’s a university position, could be anywhere. Feels like being trapped. I hate that I love what I do.

My connection to everyone back west, my hands, are burning from RSI that won’t go away - they can’t type a fraction of what they should. This is going to be hard, but I want it to be hard.

I really should go and eat something.

I finished my short story. It’s called ‘I Wanted To Write To You But I Guess I Forgot’, and it’s about a person who is visited by the ghost of himself. You can read it as a basic web page or as a Word document. There are probably some spelling mistakes. Like Utrecht with an extra ‘e’.

The basic disclaimer is that, although some bits are just me writing what I did over summer, the story isn’t about me. I have never seen a ghost.

Hah, Ralph.

1) Yesterday I finished my short story about a man who is visited by the ghost of himself. I still have to type it out so it will be a while before it’s posted.

2) I’m headed to Sydney on Saturday and am looking forward to seeing if my apartment hasn’t been burgled and reading the metric ton of letters and parcels waiting at work.

3) Chris finished his third hyperbaric chamber treatment and is back at work on light duties tomorrow. Bends schmends, he doesn’t even have brain damage.

4) If I could say ‘read this book’, I would say Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. Part of me would want to say ‘Morvern Callar, provided you don’t listen to what it says on the back cover,’* but that book isn’t for everyone.

*In my experience, the back cover is often somewhat wrong about the book.

I WILL EAT YOUR UNHAPPINESS!!

“I’ve actually read in The Daily Telegraph where a certain imam from the Lakemba mosque actually said that Australia’s going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time. I didn’t believe him at the time, but you know when you actually look at the birth rates and when you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year - and that’s on a guesstimate. You multiply that by 50 years, that’s five million potential Australians we won’t have here.”

~Danna Vale MP, on why abortion pill RU486 should continue to be banned.

Yesterday Chris and I went on a charter boat to Rottnest Island for a couple of dives. First was Swirl Reef, which was basically a big limestone hill under water, hollow on the inside with holes you could swim through into a great big cave full of fish, and second was Grouper Caves, a bunch of smallish caves and limestone outcrops just north of the main settlement. These were a couple of the best dives I’ve ever been on - clear water, big fish and amazing caves and rock formations. We also got free snags, so it was a kickarse trip.

BUT, anyhow, Chris’s dad just came over and told me he came down with THE BENDS this morning and now he’s up in Fremantle in the hyperbaric chamber being compressed again and slowly decompressed. Jesus. His dad said he woke up and couldn’t stand on his ankle properly. He thought he had sprained it but when he went to see the doctor it turned out to be decompression sickness. That’s where nitrogen bubbles form in your blood vessels, causing joint pain and, potentially, brain damage and death. Luckily with Chris it’s only a mild case - and even though I was his buddy and did the same dives with the same depth and bottom-time I’m not feeling any symptoms.

It wasn’t the charter company’s fault or anything - they are strict on safety but they don’t plan your dives for you. We did a repeat dive that was longer than the allowable time on the tables (even though it was still shorter than the allowable time on Chris’s computer model) so we kinda brought it on ourselves. Plus Chris is in the high-risk zone, being husky in build and a bit unfit.

I’ll give Chris or his parents a ring this evening to find out how he’s doing. He should be fine, but the whole thing is a bit worrying still.