Who knew readings could be interesting?

So I don’t know if you know what I want to do when I grow up. Have I told you? I want to work for the AFL, in conjunction with beyond blue, to try and eradicate (or at least really really reduce) the homophobic attitudes that are prevalent in our society, especially in sporting circles. I know that sounds like a pretty big call given that these values seem pretty well entrenched but today I found something that gave me hope. I was reading prescribed article about Yoga and AFL players when I stumbled across this paragraph that validates my dream as having legitimate potential.

“Tim is encouraged by the response

of the players and has seen a change in

the perception of yoga in his community,

since an article appeared in the local

newspaper about the Geelong players

practising yoga. “Most yoga classes are

80 per cent women,” he says. “But after

the article appeared, mothers brought

their sons along to class, or their

partners. Some men came off their own

bat. One woman had been trying for

years to get her partner to yoga, but after

putting the article on the fridge, he finally

came and got lots out of it.” Sometimes,

it takes a sporting role model to help                                                                   

change long held prejudices; but once

this kind of gender barrier is down, men

too, can find that yoga has a lot to offer”

So no guy is going near yoga with a ten foot pole (exaggeration, yes I know) and then a bunch of footballers say how great it is and there is a noticeable shift in the perception of men doing yoga in the community. HOW COOL IS THAT?
It is a terrifying thought that one group can have so much influence, but to use that influence for the betterment of society would be so cool!

Also, I thought you'd appreciate the funny and so thankfully outdated meme.
RICHMOND ARE IN FINALS THIS YEAR!!

not 1000 pieces, actually 1008.

Last night Mum and  I sat down to to do a spot of puzzling before bed, when we looked up it was 1am.
With a harmonica assisting us with sultry tones (well, the sound of me breathing heavily into it, or, at best, an out of tune rendition of the last post) we unintentionally delved into the mesmerizing world of puzzling.
Today we gathered the expert patience of Jocelyn and together we crowded around the puzzle for three hours finishing all but the perplexing greenery at the bottom.
We discovered an added challenge to the puzzle, the carpet! like bobby pins, earrings, mums scarves and small children, puzzle pieces have a knack for completely disappearing the second they hit the carpet. this made for some amusing retrieval operations!
I took some photos of our exploits as proof that puzzling can be an entertaining and social way to spend the afternoon.

procrastiblogging

Here is a contrast to my last blog post:
I am currently supposed to be doing a group assignment, which is being the absolute end of me so I thought I would procrastinate and also get my head into writing mode by writing a blog post about things that annoy me, because right now I cant think of anything that doesn't.

1, sneezing. No, dont get me wrong I love sneezing (and for all of you who are going to say its because a sneeze is 1/6 of an orgasm, you are wrong. I looked it up.) but what I hate is when your nose gets all stingy and you start crying and all you want to do is sneeze but instead it just fizzles out. I hate that!

2, the internet, or lack there of. If something is going to make us completely dependent on it then the least it can do is be completely dependable.

3, nightmares. they take ages to shake off so you spend the whole day worried that you are going to be abducted.

4, turtlenecks. the perks of looking cute definitely do not outweigh the irritation of having material choking you to death.

5, petrol. that shit is expensive.

6, boys. there is a perception that anyone who does not have a boyfriend must be in want of one and anyone who is happily single is about to get one. maybe its possible to be happily single NOT as a precursor to being swept off your feet.

7, part time work. seriously, who has to make a promotional video to get a job? if I make a video my potential employees will see that I am not nearly cool enough to work at bounce.

8, Baby pandas. are you kidding? no-one could ever hate baby pandas.

9, Richmond. They are letting me down again. This year we were supposed to make finals. and yes, we can beat the bad teams but we have shown no evidence of beating the good teams and there are enough teams with a real chance for the 8 that we need to step up our game if we want some september games.

10. group assignments. I have a hard enough time writing assignments for me. Now I have to write an assignment that is going to have other peoples name on it as well, which means it needs to be perfect. perfect is impossible. why would I attempt the impossible? So now I think that I cant do it and instead of just writing bullshit so we dont all fail I am sitting here bitching about other things that annoy me.


OK, time to do some work.

Unilyf

Have you ever had something that you just want to shout from the rooftops and tell the whole world. you want to run down the street singing it and walzing with random bystanders. Maybe you have just had a date with your dream boy (or girl), maybe you're pregnant, maybe you just finished the rubiks cube for the first time, maybe you have just eaten a life changing steak. well, my course is on that level of wonderful. I dont have a rooftop (Mannix is really high and quite slopy and despite all the shenanigans that go on at that place, rooftop meanderings are not one I'm familiar with.) but it occurs to me that I have a blog. it is my metaphorical rooftop. So for all the people who are living in a cave (because that is the only way you wouldn'tve  heard yet)
I FREAKING LOVE MY DEGREE!!!!

the font cant be any larger, I tried.

I love everything about it.
I love having the half hour commute to class because it gives me time in my own head, which is something mannix doesnt seem to allow.
I love that you can rock up on monday morning and discuss the weekends football until the end of tuesday.
I love that watching youtube videos of sporting injuries is a perfectly legit thing to do in lectures and tutes.
I love that actually no-one cares about ATAR scores
I love that i dont have the shortest attention span in the class
I love that sharing my study secrets (starjumping so I can concentrate properly) is helpul and not met with looks of confusion and derision
I love that in a two hour class at least an hour is running around, and it is serious learning
I love that my assignments are based on relevant issues, such as doping in sports
I love that I get volunteer opportunities with football clubs 
I love that I have 9 contact hours
I love that I don't know exactly where this degree will take me but I know that any job I get from it I will love because I love everything about it.


So if you are wondering how I am, I am good. sometimes life feels like you've been hit over the head with a sack full of hardened manure but if you ride it out, good things can happen too. The idea of going back to study after this summer and enjoying it seemed basically impossible and yet it has been the best thing that has happened to me in a VERY long time*.

Anyway, I am going back to study now because I WANT to do that these days, because my degree is excellent.



*this is a big deal because good things happen to me a lot.**

**#winningatlife

Bar bara black sheep have you any wool?

From the moment the bell on the door jingled I had eyes only for the neatly lined up beautiful glass jars of lollies on the counter. I would pour over the lolly purchase decision, carefully wighing up the best value for money and contemplating, as always to no avail, whether or not I should take a risk and lash out my entire $2 on some dried mango. But it wasnt the temptation of dried mango, the delectable honeycomb or the OCD perfection of those lined up glass jars that kept me coming back, it was the unfailing patience, kindness and friendship of Barb the shopkeeper.
At a time when school didnt feel safe and home was no comfort, Barbs shop was an oasis. While the politics of puberty and bullying at school left me feeling isolated and helpless, Barb was a mature and comforting voice of reason and encouragement.
Barbs full name was Barbara. She told me hated it! At school the boys used to call her Bar Bara Black sheep and taunt her constantly. She understood what it was like to be bullied and also stood as a beacon of hope, a promise that one day my hellish treatment at school would be a mere memory and I would be able to live my life not in fear.
Most days I would sit and talk to her while she chopped vegetables and pottered around. Frequently I would ask questions, eager to learn why she cut her vegetables that way, what her kids were doing with their lives and what the glucose syrup for sale on the shelf was used for.
Glucose syrup, she told me, can be used to make hard boiled lollies. That fascinated me and I was determined to buy the jar of it so we could make them together one day like she promised. At $10, it was wildly out of my price range and I set about saving up so I could one day afford it and see the magic of homemade hard boiled lollies.
One day while I was chattering away and and Barb was baking, something remarkable happened. Barb cracked an egg and inside it was not a double yolk but an entire miniature egg with a shell and all. It was amazing and a miraculous discovery that we shared together with no-one else. Years later she brought up the egg incident to see if I remembered, which of course I did and we traded stories about how no-one ever believes us when we tell them about the eggception.
When Barb shut the shop and started La Cucina I saw her far less frequently than in that year, but upon every meeting for the following 9 years she always met me with the same enthusiasm and interest in how I was, and she never made me feel any less that incredibly special.
What an amazing friend.

try and tell me point and shoot cameras are crappy, I dare you!

what? I still post on this? I know, I am as surprised as you. taking photos has fallen by the wayside this past year, as has cute encounters with primary school kids. That in conjunction with a rise in people telling me to write things I dont want to (namely essays) has led to an immense lack of creativity and blog posts.

This is our view at night, the moon is one evening past full and the reflection on the water was amazing. its great what you can do with a tripod!





I have Jocelyn to thank for the impeccable timing of this, but composition and guts is all me. if I had overbalanced in the wrong direction shit would have gotten real very quickly!














                                                This was taken at sunrise in ocean grove












My beautiful assistant Jocelyn soaking up the sun in a sun smart kind of a way.

this one ^ believe it or not, is completely un-enhanced by photoshop. what the camera took is what you get. it was incredible!








Mum and JZs reflection in the sand.

Im going to be a journalist, what of it?

No. not really. But I am getting a story published in our mannix fortmonthly magazine, which is only available to students. So I thought i'd share it with you guys..

Since coming to Mannix my lifestyle has changed dramatically. Not just the regular changes, like three squares meals a day (My gap year was spent in a constant state of grazing), or nocturnal sleeping patterns (I went to bed early last night, it was only 12.30), or actually having to study (or, at least, allotting time for study which will be filled with other important tasks, like musing about Mannix). No, the biggest change I have noticed since coming to Mannix is the way in which I approach clothing.

 At the start of the year, when I was a fresh faced fresher (as opposed the grubby worn in fresher that I now am), I thought really, really hard about the clothes I wore. It was impossible to get to know every single person at the college all at once so the main way people could get an idea of what I was like was to look at me. I would comfortably sit in my room in a singlet and trackies but when it came time to venture to the comm for a spot of ‘getting to know your fellow top easters’ quality TV watching, I would change into ‘real’ clothes, lest someone think I has enough self esteem to wear what  I want.

Pretty soon, I got to know my fellow Top Easters, and the desire to be comfortable began to outweigh the perks of not seeming like a bogan (plus telling people I spent my gap year hanging out in a country pub kind of gave me away anyway). And so the comfort dressing spread to the Comm and all of the far reaches of top east.

It was ok though, because my comfort (code for horribly-mismatched-first-thing-I-threw-on) clothing never left top east, so to the people I didn’t know very well I still appeared to be decent, respectable functioning member of society.

And then came Thursday morning breakfasts. When I have spent the evening (and early morning) playing pool, cavorting with collegians and shredding up the deserted dooleys dance floor, waking up for breakfast and a soul sucking lecture is not my favourite thing to do. The only way to get from the comfort of my own bed to the raison bread loaf before anyone else is to trick myself into going by not actually waking up until I arrive. You know what I mean, its the old thought process ‘if I go really really quickly my body won’t have time to disagree with this hellish hour of the morning and send me back to bed.’ So I roll out of bed and drag on necessary items of clothing as I shuffle my zombie ass down to breakfast. There is always time to change after food and coffee have entered my system.

And there we have it, my first foray into dining room inspired clothing apathy. It was a slippery slope from breakfast onwards and pretty soon all of my meals were eaten in the comfort of my Mannix trackies and a purple jumper (any one of the 8 that I own, it looks like barney the dinosaur threw up in my wardrobe).

It was there at the dinner table, surrounded by respectable placement med kids, that I made a conscious decision to never let my mannix uniform (which I have begun to affectionately think of it as) leave the grounds and spread to Monash, nay all of Melbourne!

And so, despite feeling sometimes like the MCSS has hit me with a truck, rather than just provide a good function, I always put some thought into wearing an actual outfit to uni, even if I do come home straight after and change. I thought this was the right decision on my part until today, when my consistent efforts were rebuked and my resolve was crushed.
Today was a glorious day, all sunshine and blossoms, so I decided to encourage the onset of a sniffily nose and good mood with a spring dress. When I walked into German, my German buddy looked me up and down and instead of complimenting the dress (who am I kidding, that was never on the cards), telling me that I should be cold, or even giving me a polite guten morgen, he launched into a lecture about how I dress too nicely, thus showing him up and making him feel like a slob. Wasn’t I an arts student? He inquired, and since when do arts students make an effort? I ought to show up in trackies like him.

The last place I vowed never to let my mannix uniform go, and that is the place that it will be welcomed with open arms. So I have decided that I will be judged by some for dressing down, and some for dressing up. I will be judged by me for everything, so at the end of the day it makes no difference, and a hoodie is hells more comfy than a high waisted belt.

So watch out Italian tute, trackied up Cecelia is coming your way this Friday.