Academic essays I would write...

... If only I had the skills, opportunity and dedication required.

(Quite likely essays on these topics already exist. I don't care)

Crass Charmers and Foppish Professors: a study of the portrayal of American and British characters in the popular culture of both nations.

A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, and Tell Jokes: a study of the way that gender norms dictate the observation of, and participation in humor by men and women.

The Internet as a Third Space
(I realize this has almost definitely been written about a thousand times by now, but when I argued about this with my disbelieving professor in my first year of Uni it was a more revolutionary idea, and I am clinging to that.)

What Freedom Means: an analysis of the divergent, historical and current, attitude towards authority in Australia and America.

If my Room is Blue Does that Mean I'm not a Girl? Childhood development and the construction of the gender binary.


Will add more as I think of them!

On dating

I am no good at dating. I even hate the word. I hate how it sounds like any other pastime. Like martial arts or cooking or crochet. The asking out, the picking the place, the predate stress over what to wear and say, how could that be enjoyable?

I also find that its as if the other person involved is just a prop. As if there are many boys milling about and if you just grab one, he'll do. This hasn't been my experience. My friends from high school seem to have this knack for finding suitable boyfriends. I am never quite sure how they do it, but there they are, suddenly a part of things. These boys are all suitably social and groomed. They tend to have non-descript jobs, they like music and a beer. They can fix a shelf. They're good blokes and your dad likes them too. They also seem to genuinely like my friends.

This is not what I do. Generally I do long-term unrequited love. I wouldn't recommend it. You sound like an emo kid if you go on about it, you spend your time daydreaming about what-ifs and at the end you have nothing to show for it except whole albums by Death Cab you can't listen to because they remind you of him. Also sometimes it means you don't get any sex. Perhaps my brain was muddled by too much Jane Austen and Anne of Green Gables* in my formative years but somewhere along the way my brain decided romance had to be epic and tragic or it hardly counted at all. Luckily by my early twenties I had decided that I could both have the epic romance and the friend with benefits, and while this worked out rather well for me it didn't help with the dating.

I realise none of this is revolutionary. Difficult relationships are everywhere, as are difficult almost relationships. The latter, which I have actually experienced, I find even more annoying because you can't smugly answer the "any men in your life?" question without getting a bit TMI and then having to explain that Orthodox Jews will barely shake hands with goy girls (ahem, just as an example). So this is all perhaps an elaborate way to explain away my lack of dating experience. I tend to either sleep with the guy straight off or endure a year of longing.

Perhaps I am using this as an excuse. Is dating always stressful? Would I be feeling exactly the same about it now at 23 even if I was one of those girls who always has a boyfriend? I think my wariness of comes from reading Dolly and Girlfriend when I was 14 and there were always these stories about the boy picking you up and then going out for dinner. As I was almost entirely reliant on my parents for transport dating seemed very much like something that grown ups did.

*Of course, ironically, the whole point of Anne of Green Gables is actually that Anne has to give up on grandiose ideas of romance.

On being bullied

I was bullied when I was in school.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently because of my Teaching course. At Uni we've been talking about how to mitigate against the effects and at my placement I see a little bit of it. I think as a teacher it can take a while to notice bullying, it's pretty insidious especially when perpetrated by girls.

I don't think anyone really loves the person they were in school, regardless of bullying. Time plays strange tricks on your memories too.

I'm not sure how you gauge bullying, what's really bad? Is some bullying OK? Or if not OK, inevitable?

I can say easily that it was not physical, it also wasn't racist or homophobic or sexist. It was primarily by girls and it was for 'reasons' that are completely unimportant now. Also, I was lucky. I have really loving, caring, concerned parents so home was always a nice place. Although school was where the bullying took place it also had a library and if I had a book I was happy. Teachers generally thought I was smart. These are all things that my lecturers would say gave me resilience.

So my point is, it wasn't terrible. Well that's a silly thing to say, at the time I very much experienced it as a terrible thing. Children aren't great on perspective and being bullied is never really going to be anything but terrible. What I mean was it wasn't that bad, it could have been far worse.

There are a lot of things that happen to you at school, at home during those years which probably irrefutably change you. As completely nerdy as it is to acknowledge this, if Mr. Martin hadn't noticed me walking past the classroom when he was holding the first debating meeting of the year (a meeting I had said I was going to attend, but forgotten about) and told me to come in my life would, I feel fairly confident in saying, be very different. It's kind of terrifying to think of.

My point is that a lot of things change us and it's impossible to measure the subtle how and whys of it all. Regardless, I think being bullied changed me, particularly how I interacted with others. I'm pretty sure (and this is where your memory can trip you up) I was never anything but shy, so it's unlikely I was ever going to be incredibly outgoing.

Being bullied divides the world up into enemies and friends, and the first camp is much bigger and cooler. Enemies aren't just the bullies themselves, it's also the people who give tacit approval, like I said, there's a lot of them. When I meet people there is still a part of my brain which wonders "where do you fit into the hierarchy?" and "can I trust you?". This makes me sound horribly calculating but it's the truth. I think the really scary part is that a lot of bullies pretend to be your friends, to begin with.

The more I write this stuff down the more I think these are issues that a lot of people have, regardless of bullying. It does always surprise me how few people were bullied. Perhaps as a way of overcoming my general distrust I often assume that people who I like must have been bullied. Because you must have been, right? Because otherwise you're in the enemy camp.

The other thing is, if you acknowledge (as I find it impossible not to) that bullying made you who you are then how can you be so negative about it. Part of me thinks of young, defenseless, naive me and, well, I even annoy me. How could I have continued in life like that? Perhaps they were doing me a favor. I'm not sure how much of this is concerning self hatred and how much is amusing "oh shucks, wasn't I a loser?" backward glancing.

Anyway, the main point of this is:

• OMG I'm perfectly fine now, fuck you bullies! There are people who think I'm cool, not many, but some! (If I wanted to rub it in I would mention our comparative life trajectories, how is Coles, Susan?)
• Also: It's totally the fault of the above mentioned that I get nervous going to parties where I hardly know anyone.
• Plus, let's also blame the school yard bullies for all those perfectly nice people I'm not friends with because I pre-screened them out.
• I also blame my parents. Obviously.
  

THE END.

Warning: shmoop and marshmellows

This is probably affected by the fact I just watched a really sad episode of Scrubs. You know the one where Dr. Cox's brother in law dies but you don't realise until the very end? Also, how good is Scrubs? Really good that's how good.

Ummm, so, I had something to say at one point. J.D. is distracting me... Well, I'm really enjoying being back in Melbourne after the brief sojourn home for endless rewatchings of The West Wing, real tea and the chance to get embarrassingly drunk in front of my nearest and dearest and also massively come onto a guy who isn't interested in me. Oh the woe. But we will not segue into the "nobody loves me" ballad because I am here to provide the happy fun times.

So basically I have the best housemates every. Big call I know but I really do love them. I did warn for the shmoop. I just really like living with them. It's probably some kind of delayed sibling thing. I don't know, having not lived with siblings. I just like the talking all the time and the stops for tea and cake. Yesterday night we were all in the living room studying and every once in a while someone would read something out they thought was funny/interesting.

On the topic of study and enjoying the pretend quasi-real life of an arts student I really need to write a damn essay or four. For serious, I have just taken endless notes, downloaded articles, checked out books all I have to do now is, you know, write it. I am crippled by self doubt and, well, laziness and therefore the greater desire to play Sims and constantly refresh facebook. I really should be trying much harder at uni because my marks aren't that great and I will probably want to do honours.

Tune in next time for: reflections for studying the holocaust (or fun times with analysing accounts of mass human brutality).

Synchronicity

It is actually quite tempting to not post until tomorrow so that it's exactly a month since my last entry. It is this kind of thinking that had me rather unquestioningly supporting Hillary for prez (come on the synchronicity: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton). It's also why I like even numbers more than odd, they are much more ordered and neat. When I was about 10 (maybe... I have no idea really) I had a book called Awaiting Developments which I loved deeply. It was actually a really odd book about a girl who had a fascination with counting things out, she'd always count her footsteps etc. and it would have to be a certain amount. I am not quite that far gone, luckily. The actual plot was about an old house with a garden being turned into a block of flats. I still remember there was a line in it about her brother being able to spit a watermelon pip at the fence of their garden from the kitchen window and that maybe this said more about her brother than the distance to the fence. This really isn't an important line so I have no idea why I can still remember it. I always assumed that the whole craving patterns and order thing was normal, just as I've always assumed everyone really wants to be a writer... Though I hear some people don't (although I don't really believe them, you get to show people a whole new world, one of your creation. You could justifiably strut about the house wearing a shawl and glasses with a cup of earl grey clasped in your hands and a wistful expression: this would be work!). Perhaps some people like the number... 17 or something ridiculous. People is this world have some crazy ideas. Of course humans are not simple so despite the craving of order my room is invariably messy. This is because I am lazy, mostly. Also, I really enjoy putting on a good dvd/podcast and putting it all in order. I am indeed an Odd Girl.

So I've had a word document open for ages with "Smart Kids" because I apparently was going to impart my thoughts on this topic. I think the general point was that smart kids are bloody annoying. I was never a really a smart kid. I am a pretty slow learner and in kindergarten I still couldn't remember the alphabet (and was terrified that this would be discovered). In Prep I had a disastrously bad teacher called Mrs. Tomao who had a mass of curly hair and a very red face. Unsurprisingly we used to call her Mrs. Tomato. I remember making a lot of things out of cardboard boxes. Apparently she forgot to teach us anything because she was going through a divorce. And even with an overly intensive Grade 1 (with the terrifying Mrs. Forster) I wasn't really into reading. In fact in grade 2 my father was summoned to school to be told I really wasn't reading at the level I should have been. Of course after this I became crezily into books. But even then I never thought reading meant I was that clever, the way that kids acted about it made me think it was a bad thing and when adults said it was a good thing I didn't really believe them. So no I wasn't a Smart Kid, I was much more a Luna than a Hermione. It wasn't til later high school that my reading meant that I knew things. In primary school it just taught me how to go off into an other world. Generally not a completely different world (no dragons) just a little bit different. My memories of Monday mornings before school a filled with dad telling me to quit day dreaming.

So tell me about you. Favourite number? Wannabe writer? Luna or Hermione? (Or who knows, Neville!).

You know what I mean.

So It's been a few weeks since I last bored you with my thoughts. Not as much time has passed as I had thought though. I have been putting the time to good use by watching a lot of Angel, working and sweating on trams. But you already know this don't you? There has been some friends staying and beer in the sun but you know that too. You don't know that I've been watching the freckles on my feet darken with mixed feelings. But perhaps you know me well enough that I don't need to tell you this. Perhaps you also know that I have concocted various daydreams in which I run into cute!tutor. Mostly the concern in these daydreams is what I am wearing when this happens as well as the secondary quandary of whether I should sleep with him on our first (no doubt) passion-filled encounter. I'm not entirely joking about this (you probably know that too). Sadly no encounters have occurred despite making a deal with the romance gods that I didn't mind if I was wearing my daggiest clothes, as long as I saw him it would be ok. Don't look so worried, I'm not really that obsessed. I just need something to think about and it seems more practical than lusting after vampires (but you know Angel really doesn't do it for me, it's all about Lindsey and perhaps Spike). As an aside: how great is it that a fairly small character from Angel has a Wikipedia page (of course perhaps this says a lot about people who write Wikipedia articles) and I'm not linking to Spike because you really are a hopeless case if you don't know what I'm talking about there. I have also been thinking about grown up things: the correctness of Australia Day, the Decline of the American Republic and how exactly tennis works. All warrant further investigation. On the first topic it seems that Australia really isn't anything to be proud of. Although telling people that can lead to interesting results. Tell me are you proud to be an Australian? (cnnn newsticker: blogger asks question in vain attempt to generate comments from her two person readership). Would you wear an Australia flag tshirt? I wouldn't and I think it's probably a complete misdirection of middle class guilt as well as a wish to look like a cool lefty and not a bogan. Ok I am going to move because my back is hurting and I have to pretend to be a normal person an not an internerd to my housemates. For posterities sake I will say that life remains fleeting and random and unfair and last week was a reminder of that. Do you know why it all happens? (Patrick Verona will never be the same again).

This is a piece I had in my end of semester creative writing folio which went surprisingly well. It remains a mystery to me why. However as you know, I am not above double usage so here you go. It is clearly non fiction although certainly not entirely the truth (a piece of truthiness, you might say). It had a ridiculously wanky title which I can't bring myself to reproduce here.

My father had come to visit me; he’d decided at the last possible moment that he would. Over the weekend, when I didn’t have to teach, we took the train up to the mountains, so different to the flat brown noise of Hanoi. Here there are picture postcard mountains reaching towards the sky, topped with thick, creamy clouds. Even here there are rice paddies though, the Hmong (and other hill tribes) carve steps into the sides of the mountain and dig channels to keep the seedlings irrigated. The rice paddies chime bright green against the deeper green of the steeper, unusable mountain tops.

The town of Sapa is losing its rustic charm. There are some pretty almost Swiss style guest houses and there’s the market, filled with vegetables and strange looking powdered substances. However, the thing most visitors to Sapa remember isn’t any of this; it’s the hordes of hill tribe girls who patrol the streets. They are dressed in their traditional clothes, heavily embroidered velvet tunics with lashings of silver jewelry. As we leave our guest house they pounce.

“Hello, what’s your name? Where are you from?” they trill, some venturing to grab an arm. They have learnt that unlike the Vietnamese who happily barter over everything and push past vendors a hundred times a day we westerners are hostages to our inbuilt politeness.
“Hello.” I offer, putting on my best ‘I am not a fool, and also I have places to be’ face. My father, enamored by the authenticity of it all, picks up where I left off.

“We’re from Australia.” he says.

“Oh Australia, the crocodile hunter, g’day mate!” says one of the older looking girls. Her English is unaccented, here learning English is the way to earn money and this is more incentive than my students back in Hanoi have. My father laughs mildly back at her and I push him up the road as the inevitable happens.

“You should buy some jewelry for your daughter.” the girl continues, shoving a collection of bangles, necklaces and earrings into our faces. My father looks imploringly at me.

“I already have enough, thank you.” I say, politely but firmly and I grab my father’s hand and pull him up the road. The girls spot another group of westerners and give up on us.

We wander up the slight incline of the main road, keeping our eyes averted from anyone wielding jewelry. Choosing a café, we are ushered to a table.

“You have to ignore them.” I say.

“It’s worse than in Hanoi, or Halong Bay.” My father replies with a shake of his head. He’s smiling though; in my family we celebrate this kind of thing. My parents met while traveling, they adore culture and they had quietly lobbied for me to take a ‘gap year’ while my friends’ parents pushed their children headlong into further study or work.
***
The next day we have booked to go on a two day walk in the mountains. Our guide shows up wearing the uniform of young men in this part of the world: well pressed, slightly flared dark slacks with a t-shirt and dress shoes. He collects us from the front desk of our guest house and like school children and we obediently follow him out. His name is Tam he tells us as we make our way down a steep and muddy track. We pass people working in the rice paddies, pulling out seemingly random chunks of the vegetation. They are mostly wearing their traditional dress and I wonder cynically if the owners of the guest houses in Sapa rush down early in the morning to make sure no one’s wearing any Nike t-shirts.

The set of huts we come to is obviously a well worn part of the tourist trail. There is a water powered mill, slowly grounding an improbably small amount of rice. There is a small child selling small embroidered bags. The hill tribes look so different to the ethnic Vietnamese. Their skin is darker, their hair more brown less back. This little girl has slightly curling hair and a large smudge of dirt on her cheek. My father buys a bag, the walking tour was very cheap and it’s probably financed from kickbacks. If we were to make a brave stand against the cute little girl holding bags and friendship bracelets it would be unlikely to make any difference. The sternly worded passage in the Lonely Plant guide which urges travelers to only buy from the shops in Sapa has yielded little response.

By the time we reach the homestay where we’ll be staying the night there are flecks of mud up the back of my legs and I have fallen down twice. For dinner we sit at a low table outside with the family who live in the house and Tam. The middle of the table is filled with plates piled with food there are spring rolls, vegetables cut into shapes and a variety of meat dishes with lots of garlic and onion, and of course the ever present potato chips. Halfway through the meal someone produces a drinking bottle filled with rice wine. I am caught between wanting to impress my father with my already well honed ability to handle rice wine and an equally childish desire to remain innocent in his eyes.
***
On the train ride back to Hanoi the carriage jolts along the track and I entertain thoughts of my immediate demise.

“I had a really good time,” my father says. “I was impressed that you kept up, with the hiking.” I realize he’s probably referencing the photo albums full of me at different ages looking morose and unimpressed by various holiday locals, sitting on park benches refusing to go any further.

“Good and yeah, I’m a grown up now.” I say, laughing at him. Of course, the ridiculous happiness I felt at the end of the well planed and executed trip said otherwise.