I gave my seminar today to riotous applause. Or more like, not, but actually it went well - words were coming out of my mouth and they not only made sense but they were trying, of their own accord, to make people care about something important. Wow. I might have to put my ‘drunken free association and pointless overanalysing of details’ approach to thesis-writing on hold, if I can ever forgive myself for writing something people liked.

There were no drinks afterward.

Right now I am very hungry. It’s raining. The bogan chick next door has stopped playing Craig David at full volume. And just a second ago I threw a coat hanger at the wardobe-rail and it hanged itself, making me feel like just the coolest person in this gloomy town. Time for tea.

[Oh, and by the way: I was reading this site on bad baby names. Check out the section on unfortunate name combinations: Mike Hock. Heheheheh.]

I stumbled across this competition while looking for porno pictures from the fifties (it must have been a slow day at work) and since then I’ve found it a good way to waste time.  If you win, you have to share the prize with me.

Today I went along to the lecture to save me from having to read the course materials. Midway through, someone started snoring at the back of the theatre. They slowly got louder and louder until everyone was looking around to see who it was. Then some people left, either because they were falling asleep as well or they were tired of being snored at. Or they had somewhere to go. The lecturer kept talking all the way through - he later claimed not to have heard anything.

If it was me, I would rather my moblie phone had gone off. Hey, there’s an idea for a ringtone - snoring sounds! *honkphewblurt* *snortboogerspit* Ooh, I have a call :)

[The IKEA treatment has gone as far as it’s going to go, maybe further. I would do some lovely powder blue pinstripes but then I would have to spew every time I looked at my own site - and that means I would have no puke left for yours. Zing!]

A slight redesign just because I felt like it. Ah :) Isn’t it just so IKEA?

Now, I think that’s enough good taste for one day. Here’s a shout out to everyone who tuned into the TV miniseries of Sarah Water’s Fingersmith on the ABC the other night. Softcore porn indeed. But I wish she hadn’t bothered with such a tedious plot.

Okay, I SO apologise for that.  Look at the envelope instead!  Mmmm, envelope….

A-browsing through the stats programs I was, and I saw that visitors had dropped to 10% of what they were in February.  I was totally distressed until I saw that some fiddling I had done with the domains meant my hits were going into a different log and there were 2121 uniques I hadn’t seen.  I don’t just look through these logs to find the funny things people have found me while searching for, I actually care about how ‘popular’ I am.  Each comment makes my day a little brighter.  It’s like a smile from someone in the corridor.  So thanks.

Smiles would be useful today since I didn’t really do anything, or go anywhere further than the charity clothing bin to drop in some old shirts that I don’t wear any more or, for that matter, talk to anyone apart from the lady in the Turkish shop where I stopped to get some lunch.  The usual Saturday.  Sounds awful, doesn’t it?  Well it was just kind of average.  At least yesterday worked out for me, and I got some work done today.

I have to give a seminar next week and there will be drinks afterward somewhere in the city.  I will try to tear my heart out with a pencil, but if that doesn’t work I guess I’ll go along.

Just like usual.

Today was an eventful day: someone was shot while riding a bike at Merri Creek where my mum took me fishing when I was four, the traffic helicopter guy missed work because he was squashed by his weightlifting weights and some athletes at the Commonwealth games went missing to become refugees. (I wonder if they were planning it while they were in training? And what about the athletes that didn’t make the team? Can we have some more games next year?)

Ha - get a load of Charlie Brown in the bottom corner. I should go back and buy him.

Developing a fondness for those honey and almond things from the Turkish shop. Seker pare. Another thing I can’t pronounce properly, just point to and mumble.

Got my computer back from the shop. Found myself speaking like an asian so the guy would understand me. (He put in a new Asus board, reformatted and saved all my stuff - very happy.)

Wrote comments on some essays, same deal - using simple, clumsy grammar in the hope that they would understand it better. Sometimes I thought an essay had been written by a second language student but it was actually by a native Australian. Chinese kids tend not to reach great heights of prosaic clarity but the Aussies can sure plumb the depths when they want to.

Tomorrow I will tell them: We learn about these things for a reason. Knowing them, we have a responsibility to go out into the world and make good decisions; to learn from other people but also teach them what we know and show leadership in difficult situations. Even if we only do this in our own small way. Do I sound like an adult or what?

My computer (aka Teh Box of Rock) is in the shop, so I hope you’ll forgive me for not reading your site every day. Actually I’m quite distraught about it - not only because she housed my TV and music and the latest draft of my thesis, but because she is such a good computer. A near-bottomless pit of ram and processor power, armed to the teeth with pirate software. Darn it. She will probably need a new P4 chip, so I’ll have to forget that ivory backscratcher for the moment.

Last time I try to clean the heatsink with one of those cotton-wool ear cleaner things.

I have this written on a piece of paper on my desk: ‘I changed it from 15 to 9′. I wrote it in the middle of the night, not realising that it didn’t make a lick of sense. I wonder what it means.

I had a conversation with the girl at the desk next to me about the significance of the S&M phenomenon (something of which my knowledge is almost exclusively theoretical, I hasten add) and she showed me her ‘Introducing the Marquis de Sade’ book, from that series where they explain the work of intellectuals with lots of cartoons. It had a big picture of someone’s private parts in it. Ah, collegiate awkwardness.

I finally opened up the teaching evaluations from last year. Here are some of the good things people said:
“Communicated clearly. Open to different interpretations or suggestions by students.”
“Easygoing; easy to talk to, friendly.”
“Open-minded and encourageous”

I like the word ‘encourageous’. I am the most encourageous of people! The admin officer smiled at me when I handed the envelope back, like he knew it had taken me a week and a half to find the nerve to open them.

If the needle is wise, be the thread.
Maxi Jazz

Parents give us to ourselves.  They hand down the world we will live in and the way we will live in it.  They teach us how to hold on to our hearts.

My parents were two very different people and the things they taught me were very different.  It didn’t fit together; it still doesn’t fit together.

But everyone has it like that.  We all have two parents and not one - it’s human nature.  We’re in the middle of it from the start.  There’s a fork in every road.  We can only grow by betraying someone.

And when we each hand down what we hand down, it will be cracked and broken.  Our partners will give theirs as well, with all the fissures attendant.  And our children will probably not notice the poor condition of either with all the fuss over there being two of them.  Like we must have.  (Looking at children, we understand that neither of our parents had something whole to give, nor any of their parents and so backward - trouble within trouble for ever.)

Heritage isn’t a square thing, it’s an argument.  There are always many voices trying to be heard.  Our thread is doubled in thickness with each generation and, to keep the balance, presumably the oldest and weakest strands fall out along the way.  (Imagine that thread: any number of meters long.  Each fibre may only last a little of the way but as one they stretch the distance perfectly.)