In Which Friends Don't Let Friends Sit Up Late Doing Their Theses In The Lounge-room All By Themselves

You may or may not know, Dear Reader (dear Increasingly Hypothetical Reader: now I remember why I enabled those pesky Anonymous Comments in the first place, this lack of feedback is strangely disconcerting, and feels rather like I’m doing that thing where you continue talking to someone who thought you’d finished and has left the room. You know, you’re all “... and that’s why I never eat potato crisps” and you look up for emphasis only to realise that your flatmate is in the bathroom and you’ve been explaining things to your sofa for the last minute and a half. Which is always odd, because it’s somehow much more embarrassing than something which is by definition unwitnessed has any right to be. Anyway, my point is that the lack of comments is vaguely disconcerting, which is hypocritical, since I rarely if ever make the effort to comment on other people’s blogs. Where was I? This is why I shouldn’t blog late at night. Oh yes...) as you may or may not know, Dear Reader, there is still no proper internet at my house. My Fortunate Flatmate Georgia has one of those internet-on-a-stick things, but it seems not to work in my computer, and is pretty slow. The upshot of this is that these ramblings have to be uploaded by USB. Unfortunately, my USB is for some reason unrecognisable to the library computers and also always causes the Georgia-Web to crash, somehow. This being the case, and given that it’s insane to not have a properly functional not-mysteriously-cursed USB in this day and age, I recently bought a bright shiny new one. Which has now completely disappeared.

How does this happen? I know that the disappearance of socks and biros and suchlike is an oft-bewailed mystery, but seriously, what? Where can my USB be? Where is that blue top that I’ve been unable to find for a month and a half? What, in fact, is going on here?

Being as how there’s essentially no hope for a satisfactory solution to this mystery, I suppose we’ll have to settle instead for a slightly eclectic collection of recent occurrences. (Also, did you know that the word “occurrence” is from the Latin “Occurro” meaning to “run up to”? You can figure this out anyway really, that “curro” would mean “run” since “current” is pretty obviously derived from it, I’d reckon. This is sort of satisfying as an image, I think; that occurrences which happen about one are like a guy running up to you on the street and pantingly handing you a message, as if one were a general on the battlefield, or similar. You stand there curiously thumbing open an envelope and out eagerly withdraw a page which reads “You happen to suddenly bump in to an old friend, and go for a cup of coffee, which is lovely, and you wonder how you lost touch” or something, and you think “oh neat, I was wondering how to spend this afternoon.”)

Whoa, not only discursions on “recent occurrences” but also “very long slightly insane tangents in parentheses” and “subclauses lengthier than the overarching sentence from which they depend” apparently. Sorry guys. In my defence, it’s after midnight, and I’m really only up and typing rather than peacefully abed because I’m being moral support. Georgia Who Will Have Honours Really Soon For Sure has her thesis due in about 36 hours, so I’m making a productive and encouraging tapping-and-typing sort of noise while we rock out to Tears For Fears on our laptops in the lounge room. That’s how we roll these last couple of weeks, although naturally we vary the musical selection. Soon, we will watch TV and read books and relax like normal people. In the meanwhile, blog posts are non-compulsory reading but compulsory writing.

This is probably for the best, anyway. The last post I wrote was so lame that I didn’t even bother uploading it (think about the things you’ve read on this blog: if they made the cut and something else didn’t, it must’ve been really pretty seriously lame, and it was), and it’s surely good to get back on the horse, so to speak, in these instances.

It’s been a fairly pleasant 24 hours, really, so I’ve no right to sound so... well, cracked is the only word, isn’t it? On Friday night, I went to the birthday party of Kaveh From My PBL (not everyone’s title is exciting: sometimes you just need a practical descriptor, and this is not a person who needs any more nicknames. I’m aware of at least 4 that he already has, and we’ve only been at uni together for one semester so far). This was delightful event somewhat in the vein of the Red Party, not in the sense that it was a massive charitable event at which awareness was raised and prophylactics distributed, but in that it was at a Venue, not a mere “place” per se, and that you had to lean in towards people to talk because of the efforts of a DJ. Also, the people were again the Med 1 In-Crowd, which I seem to have somehow accidentally sort-of-infiltrated the edge of (one always secretly suspects that people in these cases will suddenly realise and throw you out, like people in a 90s movie set in a High School [why do I keep talking about Teen Movies this month? So odd, I swear they’re not usually this big a part of my lexicon. Only recently, somehow] or something, but this is obviously stupid. Real social groups are permeable, and in real life it’s possible to be a cool attractive popular person who knows who Llando Calrisian is without having to live some kind of lie. I assume. I make no claim to be the former, and I’m not actually sure I’m spelling that name right, so perhaps this is irrelevant to me anyway. I suppose that in this sort of setting, everyone’s likely to be a bit of square, really, aren’t they? I mean, like, deep down, under the body paint? Never mind.)

The party really was nice, I’m not being sarcastic when I say it was delightful; I chatted to several excessively lovely people from my various classes, and their equally pleasant plus-ones where appropriate, as well as chatting to people whose classes I’ve been in for a mere 6 months, and who therefore were perfectly within their rights to make it clear that they didn’t know me from a bar of soap.

In short, being as how such a saccharine time was had by all, there is very little of interest to actually say about the people who were actually part of the event itself, nor about the event, which was, as I believe I’ve noted, nice, except to maybe note as usual that it is an as-yet-unrealised dream to one day learn to mingle at these damn things. It’s so difficult to talk to more than one person at once that when you know fewer than about two thirds of the attendees, you inevitably spend a bunch of time just quietly people-watching (also a lot of fun, let’s face it) and waiting for the conversation to flow back your way. This seems to be something a lot of people manage effortlessly, but we can’t all have these sorts of Socialite Super Powers; some of us are our own Mild Mannered Alter Egos, basically.

The people who just happened to be at the same pub (are you allowed to call places like The Loft “pubs”?) however, were intermittently more remarkable to the uncharitably-minded. One gentleman in particular distinguished himself in this regard. Having danced himself up to where I and some equally unsuspecting girls where standing, he draped an arm across me and exhorted me to dance on the grounds that he was more worthy of our sashaying and company than the guys on our other side because they were Indian. (First note: leaving aside for a second the breathtakingly racist subtext and indeed text of this remark, I’m pretty sure they weren’t all Indian anyway. I know that at least one is Colombian, for a start. My point here is: being brown doesn’t make you Indian, and even being Indian doesn’t make you “Indian” in a stereotyped sense. And being any of these thing doesn’t make you less worth dancing with, holy crap).

At this point this Unspeakable attempted to entertain us with an impression of how it would be to talk to these acquaintances and classmates of ours; “Would you like a curry?” His attempt at an Indian accent would not have been out of place in The Footy Show or something. Or so I imagine, I’ve never actually watched a whole episode, to be honest; I’m not even sure what flavour of football it is that they enjoy. Not soccer, I guess, and this is as close to Football as I really get.

Then he singled out the guy in our class (to whom I’ve never actually been introduced, so his name is a mystery to me, but I see him every day, so I definitely recognise him as having more right to any potential friend-loyalty than some random in a pub, let alone a weirdly inappropriate racist one) and laughed at him for having a turban and a beard. Pretty sure that that hasn’t been acceptable since well before I was born. I went to junior school in Penrith, so if anyone was going to be aware of the things bogans think is acceptable humour, it’s me, and not even 5 year old westies in the late 1980s thought it was cool to point and laugh because someone wore a turban or headscarf. This classmate, I was earnestly assured, would rather offer me a pappadum than dance.

At this point I removed the arm (successful at last, having been attempting since about the 2nd sentence he’d said) and enquired whether the race-themed pickup lines ever worked, and explained that if they ever were, that time was not now. I would’ve pointed out to him the error of his ways at some officious length, but it was too loud to do that without leaning in close to him, and that’s clearly a trap. (Maybe this was, in fact, his plan, who can say?)

The thing is, he seemed genuinely surprised. Why would this be? Could this sort have thing have ever worked? Surely not; he wasn’t that old, surely at no point in his entire adult life has that sort of thing been cool. Sure, the dude was probably massively drunk, but even that wouldn’t make most people think that the way to get chicks is to racially stereotype the people they hang out with. Do you think that this has maybe worked for him in the past? Or is it like a Sasha Baron Cohen movie: all it takes is a couple of drinks and the thin veneer of reasonable-person-ness comes off people, exposing the horrifying unacceptable core, like an M&M dropped into a glass of solvent?

Aaargh. There is no way that wondering about this can help, at this time of night, but I sure hope that that was some random in the pub, not someone from our actual class, because it would probably confuse him I went up to him some day and told him off, since he probably doesn’t remember, and also because I pretty much despair if this is the sort of dude whom the interview process doesn’t cull. Also, I don’t need to accidentally sound like I’m backstabbing someone in from uni on my blog, not again. In this case I’d much rather front-stab anyway.

In happier news, I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie today! It was pretty awesome, although as usual I got to the end grateful to have read the books, since the exposition left a little to be desired. A poignant closing shot of a phoenix (not in flames) is ever so much more poignant when it’s been introduced earlier in the movie. Even having seen the others and read all the books all those times, I still went “what’s with the redhead eagle?” for a second or two. Also, I can’t believe it took me until today to twig that the phoenix is named Fawkes for the purpose of awesomeness. Guy Fawkes you guy! Omg, duh. Think of all the times I’ve read that and not gone “fantastic naming, go team!”; so many wasted opportunities. Still: plan to make up for lost time now, and also totally plan to reread the last book, since I can’t really remember what happens in it anymore, which is great, since I know I enjoyed it last time, so this is a chance to enjoy the book properly all over again. I guess when I read it I was in the throes of that global Potter Fever Pandemic that struck the geeks of the world all at once, so I was probably too excited to pay attention properly.

Funny, really, those events were somehow sort of meta-great. Queuing to buy a book is a whole bunch more fun when you’re doing it with an enormous number of people who share your interests, even if you don’t know them. And the fact that all of the geeks of your particular enthusiastic flavour and fandom all over the world are doing the exact same thing adds a really lovely air of community to it, somehow. Maybe this is how we ought to look at Swine Flu? Not as an insidious world-wide killer but more as some kind of feverishly sniffly harbinger of global togetherness? How touching.

In Which “Hobbies” are a Ridiculous Construct and an At-best Awkward Conversational Gambit

It’s a funny thing that so much of our time is spent asking and being asked inane questions. Maybe this is especially the case in Medicine, where you can genuinely spend a day taking histories and asking patients questions like “Oh really? That must have been stressful for you, but what brought you to hospital this time? Not last year, last week.” But it’s definitely also a thing when you get asked to describe yourself for things, especially online things, like profiles for Facebook, or even the website of “biosketches” for people in our course. I’d imagine things like dating websites and stuff would be infinitely worse, but fortunately my experience in that field is limited at best.

All these “tell us about yourself!!1!one!” things seem to have in common the direst question of all: “Do you have any hobbies?”. Tell me, Cherished Reader, do you, in fact, have any hobbies? Really? Any that you would ever actually call “hobbies” unprovoked? I mean, sure, you might say; “I really enjoy photography/music/watching TV/reading discursive blog posts/sewing foolish gifts/swimming in the wintry sea/whatever.” Or you might say; “I spend a lot of time listening to music/making short films about Iceland/doing the crossword/cycling/baking elaborately shaped cakes/talking about people behind their backs/writing soulful songs on my guitar/something.” But are these really hobbies? I bet they aren’t. Hobbies are things like model train landscaping, or stamp-collecting (sorry, “philately”), or maybe whittling or something. They’re not something real people really do.

What does one even do when it comes to stamp collecting? I know that you can get, like, starter packs from the Post Office, but quite frankly it seems like cheating, as well as being unspeakably dull and a strangely unsatisfying and inauspicious way to start. Also, nowadays people can make custom stamps with their kids on them for Christmas or anything, and quite frankly that sucks any conceivable joy out of it for me. Back when there was the Penny Black and maybe 14 other kinds of stamp anywhere in the world, collecting the whole set was achievable, now not so much. Plus, Australian stamps seem like they’re mostly all the same, just a collection of thousands upon thousands of copies of those same 4 wildflower pictures. I mean, maybe if you inherited an old collection o something, that’d be cool, but I still wouldn’t know what to do with it, except sell it to someone who would.

Mainly I don’t think anyone under the age of maybe 60 would describe the things they enjoy doing as “hobbies” because it trivialises those activities. It makes it sound like it’s either an unimportant fad or an unhealthy obsession. Also, dividing things you do into “work” and “hobbies” makes it seem like everything you do has to be one of the two. So the quite-fun-really chores like buying the groceries or doing that thing where you clean your entire house in a day and get all satisfied stop being things you can just enjoy and start being either “hobbies” (which is tragic) or “chores” (which everyone knows are un-fun). Essentially what I’m saying here is that dividing your life up like this cannot possibly be anything but pathological.

Also, what kind of hobbies could possibly meaningfully define us? “Listening to music” isn’t a hobby unless you sit there, alone, for hours and hours, doing nothing but listen, and even then, quite frankly, it’s more of a “thing to do” or a “cry for help”. Otherwise, you just like music. You know, just like everyone else except the tone deaf and the terminally be-migraned. If your hobby was “vivisecting serial killers” or “collecting spleens” or “tearing apart people who ask me inane questions with my bare hands or vicious rhetoric” (or even “alluding absentmindedly to quotes from bad movies no-one else ever saw”) then yes, people might want to be warned in advance, so that they could run away or make documentaries about you, as their own hobbies/inclinations directed. But really, when can this sort of thing ever help?

There are some hobbies which sort of categorise you, so, say, “cross stitch” makes you either a little old lady or one of those hip modern chicks who’re part of that new wave of craft, and who go to ‘crafternoons’, but so what? How does that enrich anyone’s understanding of you? Unless you’re really defined by your knitting or whatever, it hardly seems likely to be relevant to anything much, and if you are that defined by it, chances are it’ll be pretty obvious. The fact that you’d be knitting while you were asked these stupid questions’d be a hint, to start with.

This impatience of mine is probably linked to all those years I spent being a directionless Arts-studying vocational no-hoper. People would always (fairly rudely, when you think about it) ask “But what are you going to do with your life? For a real job, I mean?” and when I said “Oh, I don’t know, something?” you’d be amazed how helpful they would be. “Well, what do you like doing?” they would say in that sincere voice which plans to help you sort out your life. It was only with really saintly self-control that I used to resist getting fairly seriously ironic at this point, because “listening to music and hangin’ out and also being really well-paid” is not a job description. I always, always wanted to say “Gosh! What an interesting and insightful question! I never thought to think about what I like doing. I guess I do really enjoy working with pipes, and unblocking toilets and driving my own ute. Maybe… maybe, do you think that possibly I should become a plumber?! Thank you! Oh my God, you’ve changed my life with your incisive and insightful thoughts!”

Tchah. No-one “likes doing” these things in advance. You learn the parts of your career and get to like them. Sure, everyone likes shopping and having fun and hanging out and chocolate or whatever, but there are very few jobs where people will pay you to do things you like, and even then, people judge those jobs. Most folks enjoy dancing and making new friends and having sex, but no-one seems to translate that into wanting to be a stripper or a prostitute. Really, it seems almost perverse, when you think about it.

I realise that these people were only trying to help and being nice. I know that they had only my best interests at heart, but really. There’s something so very paternalistic about that sort of thing (the “what do you like doing” thing, not the “wanting to be a call-girl when you grow up”{which now I think about it, some people must do, even just as a matter of sheer statistical inevitability, holy crap!} thing) that I makes it very hard to accept in the spirit in which it was offered.

Anyway, that’s enough of this from me for the meanwhile, I’m sure you have some minatures you have to get back to painting or something: reading these very very long blog posts can’t be all you do with your time. Don’t you have a hobby or something?

In Which Romantic Comedies are a Distressing Microcosm

So, the other evening, My Dear Old Friend Cat and I went and saw that current Sandra Bullock romantic comedy, “The Proposal” which, I grant you, was in a sense our first error {also, this post carries a definite Spoiler Alert: if you feel that in watching this movie you will be otherwise able to suspend disbelief and be surprised by it, as long as it isn’t “spoiled” for you, don’t read on until you’ve gotten that done}. First up, though, a caveat emptor, I know these movies are trashy, and it’s clearly foolish to read too much into them, and also knowing this, I sort of love them for what they are. In the same way that one might know that a McDonalds Sundae is bad for one, and unfulfilling, and very probably made of pig fat or something, but still occasionally you just… you just really want one. Ultimately, I know that I was sort of asking for it, seeing a movie like this, but I swear that sometimes it’s ok.

[Um, this is the point in the post where I’ve reread this before posting, and have cut the next three paragraphs on the grounds of being an excessively in-depth critique of a movie which no-one else is ever going to see anyway. If you feel that your life would be improved by the reading of these paragraphs, let me know.]

I know we all know how it goes and all: they hate each other, blah blah blah, they fall in love, but here’s the thing: the whole point of the movie is to fill in the “blah blah blah” blanks. Going “you know how this works, guys, let’s just take it as read, shall we?” is totally cheating. We can get the beginning and the end from the poster.

This is all kind of by-the-by, though, really. This is just my failure to properly suspend critical thinking. (Which is the feeling I so often get in PopMed lectures, more on which another day). The thing that was really quite odd, and which seemed like maybe it was indicative of more wide-ranging weirdness was this: in one scene, the Heroine Opens Up and confesses and number of slightly embarrassing personal things to the Hero, and one of them is that she hasn’t had sex in a year and a half. The Hero, ‘naturally’, is amused and a little disgusted. “Eighteen whole months?” he cries (well, queries) “Are you serious?”. Um what? This is supposed to be an intensely private woman who’s been on her own for a very long time. Here’s a thought: 18 months is hardly long enough for this sort of lull.

Leaving aside the character problems again, (even ‘what kind of jerk reacts that way to confidences?’) this seems to be very much a broader issue. People are really weirded out by the idea that other people are not shagging basically any time that they’re not with us. Whenever it comes up in movies, people are horrified to learn of each others’ spells of celibacy - spanning sometimes almost whole months! It’s really almost like it’s grosser than some kind of pustulent sore or something. Now, I don’t want to bring my baggage to the fore, here, and I’m not trying to say that people who have sex with people whom they neither know nor much like are a bunch of skanks, or anything, but…. (I have no way to satisfactorily finish that sentence). But really, c’mon!

How is it that we could find it grotesque to not sleep with someone, anyone? I consider myself very lucky to know a wide range of interesting and attractive people. I have literally hundreds of lovely friends and acquaintances. But there is not a single one with whom I currently have the slightest intention of sleeping. No offence. I mean, I’m sure there are one or two whom I could grow to lust after, but seriously, am I expected to just shag one to “keep my hand in”? Because, uh, I’m not planning on it.

What’s the worst that could plausibly happen if I (or anyone) should fail to sleep with randoms so as not to let there be a long lag time? Oh that’s right, terrifyingly, people might judge me, people using a measure to which I absolutely do not subscribe or buy into the validity of. I would be considered maybe a bit prudish and if worst came to worst, maybe someone would speculate that I was “frigid” for some awful reason, and that no-one could ever want to sleep with me. That is seriously the very worst case scenario (and also it’s clealy bollocks).

Conversely, if I shag randoms to keep my numbers up, the worst case scenario involves bits of me falling off, itchily. This worst-case is exactly as likely as the other one, which is to say, still not very, but it seems pretty clearly worse to me.

Far more likely in the ‘chaste’ option is that after a non-specified while, a period of time I can certainly deal with, I meet someone I like enough to want to sleep with, and everything works out for the best in this best of all possible worlds. This is eventually basically a certainty: there’s nothing repulsive about me, and I’m at least passably lovable, and lots of people are pretty cool, so I’m bound to reach a negotiated mutual-liking-type compromise at some point. Conversely, I am certain to feel trashy and regretful if I sleep with someone I don’t much fancy just to zero the meter.

Also, where does it end? Once you zero a count like that, it starts ticking again straight away! The constant pressure must be awful, and surely you’d go slowly mad, trying to stay ahead of your own mounting (hah) paranoia tickticktickisamonthtoolongtickticktick, tickticktickmorethanaweekmaybethere’ssomethingreallywrongwithyoutickticktick, tickticktickit’sbeenthreedaysnow,maybeyou’lljustgrowoveristhatevenpossibleticktickticktick…

Um, essentially what I’m doing here is not advocating chastity as the one true path to happiness and calling anyone who sleeps with people a crazy skank, but I really do kind of resent this thing in movies. It is perfectly valid not to be currently sleeping with anyone. Now I think about it, you even get it in otherwise high quality TV shows like Firefly (actually, now I think about it, the line in question is in Serenity, the sequel to the show, which was a movie, but it’s still totally canon, so it counts as both, so there). Kaylee is all “it’s been nigh on a year since I’ve had anything twixt my nethers ‘tweren’t run on batteries!”. Well, I mean, yes. You live on a spaceship and you have sexual tension with one of the few people you even meet, basically, in an ongoing way. Even leaving aside the of-course-you-haven’t-slept-with-anyone-it’s-deep-flipping-space point, you’re on task anyway . Having sexual tension should totally give you points for effort. Not many, maybe, but some.

So, I was going to write this whole post at this point about sexual tension and crushes and stuff, but this post is already pretty long, so it’s time for bed instead. Especially since there’s enough stuff there for a lengthy post all on its own, so it’d be better not following a post which scares away all the readers by starring Sandra Bullock in the opening paragraphs.

In Which in-class Blogging is Idly Experimented With

Mnemonic means “a mental trick for remembering something”. Pneumonic, in so far as it’s a word at all, means “characterised by pneumonia”. What I’m saying here is that the first syllable of mnemonic is pronounced “Neh”, not “new”, unless you’re an idiot. If you’ve said it wrong in the past, I’m not judging you, but now, now you know.

Ok, now we’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the business of the day!

So it turns out that it’s actually really difficult to write decent blog posts at the same time as paying a feasible amount of attention in lectures. Who knew? I certainly remember writing some pretty cool stuff (for a given value of “pretty cool”, obviously, maybe even for a given value of “writing”, who can say?) back in the day in my Psych lectures, but I’m almost sure that was because those lectures were considerably more interesting than Pharmacology. Not only were they easy to pay enough attention to, since even a lower amount of concentration ticking over in the background was enough, but it’s amazing how much easier it is to work with material (I say “material” and it makes me sound like I think I’m Jerry Seinfeld. I swear I don’t; I have much too high an opinion of myself) like “the value of having a theory of God is that he can mind your lemons for you” than stuff like “arachidonic acid mediates airway hyperresponsiveness in asthma”.

I’ve reread that paragraph three times now, and so right am I that that sentence is utterly uninspiring that it’s completely ground my writing to a halt. I didn’t even know that was possible except by iron self discipline or fatigue.

This Friday I have been invited to a thing (a birthday party, in point of fact) at The Loft in Darling Harbour, which I’m given to understand is basically like Cargo Bar only a bit classier. For those hypothetical readers among you who enjoy reading my famed “social anxiety” posts, I think we can safely promise a treat in store regarding such an adventure. This is hardly the social milieu in which I am at my best, so introspection ahoy! Ooh, there’s an antidote to the pharmacology-based lack of subject matter: in what social milieu do I believe myself (with whatever degree of reference to reality and accuracy) to function at peak performance, so to speak?

I guess it could be online, and certainly I have the advantage here of being able to be read at any pace you fancy (or not at all, if preferred) rather than at compulsory high speeds, but that seems pretty tragic, and I don’t think it can be right. Also, I suck majorly at “chat”, although maybe everyone does? That might explain it; it does seem sort of counterintuitive in a way, and makes pauses seem strangely unnatural. Maybe hanging around at house parties where I know the people involved, or am only expected to deal with small numbers of new people at once, leaving me spare operating capacity to do things like remember to talk slowly.

Actually, now I think about it, I do better when operating at a tangent to the task at hand. When the only task is “make conversation”, I get distracted, but if we’re supposed to be doing something, like walk along, or decide what the mechanism of wheeze is, or something, then I can happily procrastinate from that by chatting about inconsequential things for hours. Clearly, I’ve missed my calling in life and should be one of those dead-weight panel members on ‘Spicks & Specks’ or similar. How awesome would that be?

Anyway, the point of the Friday thing is that I hope that the lovely people I hung out with at the last party this guy threw will be there again. I assume so, but since at least one of them hasn’t got a Facebook account in any meaningful sense (you know that thing where you suddenly delete everyone you know or similar after freaking out like John Cusack in the backstory for “Grosse Point Blank”, except without necessarily becoming a hired assassin at all), it’s hard to know. I could probably check if Mame is going {that’s right, if I refer to you by name, you either get coded, like this, or referred to by full title, like my Insightful and Culturally Studied Flatmate Georgia. That way no one has to feel too google-able, and I maintain my moral high ground in re. the anonymity thing. Once I crack, I’m sure to start addressing imaginary readers by name (which is to say, people whom I image to be readers, not people who don’t exist except in my mind), which is not only alienating for other readers but also fairly seriously insane. Although I do sort of fancy unexpectedly addressing the Anonymous types by name/title in the middle of something else} –whoa, long parenthetical break, where was I?- either by asking her or checking Facebook. But since I have neither her nor the Internet available at present, my opportunities to do this are somewhat curtailed. Which is good, because I’ll go anyway, and somehow asking someone if they’re going to a party seems dreadfully Teen Movie. Although obviously would not be asking in spirit of I-think-his-name-was-Joey in ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’, which to be honest is the only instance of that that I can think of just at present.

Man, see? Even considering attending an event like this gets me into some kind of sub-clause- and allusion-choked lather of social fluttering. And I haven’t even started yet to consider the question of what one wears to a place like this. Will probably just do what I usually do when am unsure and pretend that there’s a theme and dress to that. Certainly I was happy with how it worked out when I went 1960s-chic to that dinner party that time. It’s great, because even if you haven’t got the dress right for the venue/occasion at hand, you can be damn sure you’ve nailed what you were actually aiming for. This is the secret of hipness, I believe. Certainly nothing else satisfactorily explains what one frequently sees worn in Newtown, especially recently. I think there may even be a quote to this effect in ‘Ghost World’, now I think about it. [Note: ‘Ghost World’ is a movie with Thora Birch and Scarlet Johanssen back when she was young, and Steve Buscemi in it. ‘Ghost Town’ is an unsatisfying and unsatisfactory movie featuring Ricky Gervais, who should stick to standup, Greg Kinnear, who always seems to end up like this, and Téa Leoni, who has the air of just vaguely hoping that no-one will even mention to her that she was in such a movie. ‘Ghost’ is different again, and features a threesome between Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze and a potter’s wheel, and another, tamer, one later with Whoopi Goldberg in loco potter’s wheel. Confuse these films at your peril.]

Ok! It’s after 5, so I’m running late, but I’ll catch you on the flipside (which, on second thought, maybe I won’t take up saying after all), cats and kittens!

In Which a Blogger will Never Learn

What with all the excitement (well, it seemed exciting to me, maybe you live a life of constant breathless thrill and scorn such petty enthusiasm) of last week, this blog has come up in conversation a bunch of times this week. Certainly more often than usual. And an impressive number of people have said "hey, you should write a controversial Med-themed blog all the time, it'll be great!". Naturally one must dismiss any unworthy thought that this might be inspired by the fact that there can't possibly be that much blather to write about Med, particularly not that much controversy, and that this could be a STFU ploy. All my friends are lovely and would be unlikely to resort to complicated ploys to shut me up, especially since they could just stop reading if that was the go, so that can't be it. The point, though, is that this is Obviously A Trap. There's just no way that that could end well. As traps go, it's not even that hard to see: it's the social equivalent of a tunnel painted onto a rock face with a sniggering Coyote hiding behind a boulder, or a bowl of bird seed with an anvil suspended over it like the Sword of Damocles.

But! And here's the crux of the matter: the roadrunner always seems to end up ok, and since so many people, so much greater than I, throughout history, have failed to learn from their own (or others') mistakes, who am I to flout tradition? In short: here goes anyway.

This is not, in fact, meant to sound critical, of course, since again the subject under discussion is one rather tangentially related to the course, not based on it, per se. If this were a quality literary opus (or maybe a Jerry Bruckheimer film) I would say that it was "inspired by" the announcements between the lectures this morning, but that sounds a bit highfalutin' for my little ol' blog.

Between the two lectures this morning, we had 2 announcements, both of which were everything that is admirable and laudable and good. (Let's get this perfectly clear, yeah?)The first was an advertisement for the "Women in Medicine" Dinner, and the second of which was about leadership and indigenous health, which had a video beginning with a series of inspirational quotes (was going to make an "inspiration" respiratory pun, but what've you ever done to me to deserve such a thing?). To be strictly honest, I got the general gist of that announcement, but the details of its purpose elude me rather. Partly because I tend not to get involved in these extracurricular things (I should, I know, but I feel like I barely have time to sleep, so there you go. Maybe it's the 3.5 - 4 hours of commute every day? If I lived in Camperdown I swear I'd be a better person), and partly because I'm sick, so I'm not really absorbing information very effectively.

Let's take these announcements one at a time. I know that "Women in Medicine" things must be terribly useful, and that people must really feel that they're relevant to their lives, otherwise, why would they exist? Still, it confuses me. It's basically never occurred to me that in this country, in this day and age, my gender would stop me doing anything I jolly well want. Sure, I might not get into Surgery on account of failing Medicine, or because of not knowing which end of the scalpel goes into the patient, or because of alienating my colleagues and superiors so effectively that no-one will work with me, or whatever, but not because of being a female. Surely not? This is just not a limitation that had ever occurred to me, so I really don't feel like I need any "support" about it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later in my career I'll come to see that this was all foolishly wide-eyed naïveté, but at the moment, I don't need to be inspired.

Maybe this is because of my privileged upbringing, or something. Well, let me rephase: of course this is because of my privileged upbringing. I live in a country, in a community, in an era and in a socioeconomic milieu in which the biases have tended to be in my favour. Check out my white upper-middle-class failure to grasp the issues, yeah? But my mother is a doctor, in a surgical specialty which interests her, and all the women in my family are well educated and clever enough to do what they aspire to do. Maybe it's also to do with having gone to an all-girls' school? In an exclusively-gendered environment, gender is irrelevant.

So all this "you can do it, even though you're a girl!" stuff says "because of the fact that you're a girl, your capability to achieve things is questionable, but try not to think about it, okay?" to me. I'm sure that my Very Insightful Feminist Flatmate Georgia would tell me that I have the wrong end of the stick somewhere in here, but unfortunately she's not here, so you're getting the unvarnished confusion: does anyone seriously expect me to worry that I'm too girly to make it in a career I'll be qualified for?

This is something that my Dad has definitely dealt with. People can certainly discriminate in a sexist fashion against male Obstetrician/Gynaecologists. We get it all the time. In fact, now I think of it, I've actually been on the receiving end(as both receptionist and daughter [Whoa! To clarify; not from him, but from people who ask questions like "What does your Dad do?"]) of more sexism directed at a man than at women. Maybe this explains my possibly-odd attitude. It's amazing the weird places people's minds go when you tell them that men can work with the female pelvic area in a professional capacity. Here's the thing: if it's worrying you, are you maybe sexualising something completely, utterly and indeed compulsorily asexual? If you are, you probably need to work on that before you see any doctor. Because it will certainly be a problem eventually. By all means feel a little more comfortable with a female doctor, whatever, but this thing where people look with suspicion on male Gynaecologists is infuriating.

Of course, I suppose the "women in medicine" issue may be be one of juggling maternity leave and motherhood and so on with careers, which actually is an issue with is gendered. And worth thinking more about, even. But still not relevant to me at this point. It's not like I can decide to "have my family" now and then get on with a career. Being as how I'm single, that would be a challenge, and were I not, it would still be rushing things a bit. So this is something which I (and most of us) will have to play by ear. Which is ok, because it's going to be a while before it starts being at all urgent, and in the meanwhile it's both impossible and counterproductive to try to hurry any of these processes.

Leaving all this gendering business aside, what possible issue could I have taken with an announcement which I didn't even listen to properly about leadership in indigenous health? Well, obviously, there are quite a lot of things, really, since this is what my Dad would call a "wicked problem", but not even I am stupid enough to try to thrash out those issues on a blog. It seems like our country has never yet found an easy compromise between a lack of interest in the indigenous community and paternalism, and the internet is not the place to try to nut that out.

What caught my interest here was one of the quotes, which is in fact from the Declaration of Human Rights. (Yeah, I know, how dare I raise my eyes so high? What sort of terrible person would think critically about such a document? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, my friends? It's terribly important to think critically about these things.)

This quote begins "everyone is born free" and this is the thing: no they aren't. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole point. If everyone were born free, we wouldn't need to declare that they were, just like we don't have to say "everyone breathes air". The whole issue is that there are people born in prisons and concentration camps, or born to slaves with their births recorded in stock books along with the livestock. There are people who never in their life have been even a little bit free. To declare that these people are in some special and mystical way free when they're born is to connive at their incarceration. Sure, it looks nice on a fridge magnet, and sure it makes people like you and I, who actually are free, but who are pettily annoyed by such trivial fetters as the need to earn a living and to hand in assignments and to cope with the morning peak hour on public transport feel a little better, but it is ultimately as hollow as all such phrases. It is no more meaningful than "No Pain No Gain" or "Sisters by Chance, Friends by Choice" or "Magic Happens" or whatever. It gives you a little warm glow to think about it, but it doesn't help.

I suppose it's fair enough, really. Even just semantically, a Declaration probably shouldn't say "Everyone ought to be born free and equal". So maybe it's fair enough. (Also, quite frankly, the second bit is clearly wrong too. "Equal" in the sense of being "of equal worth" or some strange sense of "equitable" maybe, but we are not, in fact, all equal as such. We're all different, and some of us are good at some things and some at others. I'll never be very tall-and-thin, and children born with Down’s Syndrome will never be allowed to do brain surgery. This, though, is just natural variation, and it's perfectly ok to placate ourselves, since we cannot change it, and must not try. The Freedom thing is different: we can change that.) Perhaps the Declaration is describing a Utopian future towards which we are meant to be striving?

Hmmm. I guess it's time to wrap this up, but the last rhetorical question is this: isn't it ironic that I'm so naïve about sexism and so over-sceptical about the Declaration of Human Rights? Go figure.

In Which a Holiday is not so much being Wasted as Pleasantly Frittered Away

(Sorry about the doubleposting: although this post and the one below it are being posted almost simulataneously, this on's only going up now because of the upcoming lack of internet. If Canada Day Adventures are what you want to hear about, but you only have time/inclination to read one post, skip this one. Otherwise, read on!)

Maybe it’s tragic that in the mere week of winter holiday vouchsafed us (oh yes; “vouchsafed”) I look unlikely to achieve any great feats of leisure or of scholarly application. People I know are going to the ski fields (with dubious success, granted), and to Brisbane, Canada, camping, and conferences of more than one mysterious variety. I’m rather enjoying this not-doing-anything-much deal, though. I go to parties and karaoke and smallish gatherings, and get up at 10 or 11, read non-academic books and drink tea in a park opposite the sea and write enormous blog posts. Am I wasting my holiday? Maybe I am, but I don’t know what I would rather be doing which would leave me more relaxed afterwards. A week is scarcely time to have a proper away-holiday like skiing of worthwhile proportions and then get back and unwind in time for Monday, or so it seems to me. If "a week" comes, in my future life, to be the maximum length for a holiday (God Forbid), then doubtless I’ll have to readjust my casual approach to time, but in the meanwhile, there you go. I’m heading to the Farm with my family this weekend, so that’s something, anyway.

In fact, this leisurely approach to time is something which pretty much characterises my life. I did a project for 2nd year Psych on Procrastination once, years ago, which was utterly unilluminating, mainly because all the studies I read seemed to conclude that it was sort of pointless to procrastinate. “Really?” one thought, “Gosh, thanks for that insight, I could probably write a heaps better paper on this, though, one that concluded anything new at all. And I will, just after I finish this game of Spider Solitaire.”

I procrastinate about everything, even procrastination. We have bottles of M&Ms sorted by colour on the top of our kitchen cupboard because of some exam procrastination which we put off until after the exams, once.

I also routinely put off necessary work when it comes to reading maps. I’ll check a route in the street directory and memorise the first two thirds of the way, putting off the last bit until I get closer, and then get completely lost at that point, because what did I think would happen? That I would miraculously have a really well lit red light at the crucial point, giving me a chance to figure out the end of the journey? I’m not alone in this sort of thing, mind. Whenever we go to a restaurant, my sister always insists on having her order taken last, to allow her the maximum amount of time to put off deciding what she wants to eat.

In fact, my entire undergraduate degree(s) could be considered procrastination. Certainly that was how I meant it. I didn’t study Latin because I thought it would make me a better doctor or a culturally enriched individual, I was consciously putting off having to figure out what to do with my life. Which is a decision I’ve ultimately sort of defaulted on. I’m doing Medicine, so presumably I’ll be a doctor eventually, but that’s hardly been the aim of my youth so much as a career I eventually “oh, all right”-ed into. (Note: I am in fact actually rather enjoying it, and think that being a doctor will be swell and all, I’m just saying that I hope I didn’t beat anyone into the course who could only have been happy as a doctor).

Meanwhile, almost all of my school friends have real jobs, and the majority of them are married and real grownups. My friends are buying houses and considering having children (which are about equivalent in terms of real-grownup points, I figure). This is not something I ever thought I’d have done by now, you understand, but the further all these friends advance into the world of mortgages and 9-to-5 jobs, the wider the gap seems to be between them and my petty concerns about assignments not yet done and outfits to wear to quasi-costumed parties. I was going to write this whole post about this point, but it seems that the strangely enormous feeling that this inspires is hard to articulate. I’m impressed with you people for being so on top of your lives. Also, I make no judgement whatsoever about the order in which people choose to set about their life-goals, or what those goals may be (in my case the first goal should presumably be “set goals”), I’m just noting that a lot of the people I know have picked a different order to mine, and sometimes this seems sort of overwhelming. One forgets for a moment that these things can have no conceivable effect on my ability to get things done later in my life (although I guess someone else might buy the house that I’ll only later come to want, or something. But how would I even know?)

Maybe this ‘gap’ is a function of postgraduate study. Half the guys in my course are married (and half the girls engaged, which is sort of odd, since surely there didn’t ought to be a gender divide in the number of people married and engaged? Not until we pass that legislation, anyway), and most of the people have been “in the real world”, working full time at real jobs for at least a year before coming back to the strangely convent-like cloister of university life. Not precisely a vow of poverty, but the attenuated reality of it, and only meeting a limited pool of people, all taught that the ultimate beliefs of the institution trump any petty practical concerns we might individually have. At least in this respect, my comparative failure to achieve any kind of life milestones is an advantage. I’m not new to being told that paid work is as nothing before the altar of the Exam, or to theoretically being by definition inferior to all the people I come across in an educational context. This seems to be something that the people who’ve been highfalutin’ are marginally more likely to struggle with.

Anyway, long story short: I am pretty content with my nice little life, but I sometimes wonder if it looks really tiny from the outside. Fortunately, it doesn’t much matter if it does. Isn’t that refreshing? Your life choices are valid, Reader, so feel affirmed.

*****

This weekend I am going far away to the Distant and Foreign land of Victoria. Sort of. Well, only just. I’ll be on the other side of the border, but not more than 2km from it, I’d reckon, and for fewer than 48 hours. My mother’s family has a Farm (always capitalised, never effectively capitalised upon) there, which has even less internet than my flat. This means that you will be briefly undisturbed by my ramblings, although since it turns out that I have another post that I’ve failed to upload, there will still be one post per day, amusingly.

The Farm is about as rustic as I get: the only building is a little falling-down cabin made of corrugated iron (or to be strictly accurate, it was until last year, and that’s how it will always live on in my mind. Since the process of falling down was finally completed late last year, a slightly more stable and only marginally less primitive shed-like structure now graces that spot). This shed now has a concrete floor, which is a scandalously posh upgrade on the dirt floor of days of yore. In keeping with this ascetic aesthetic, (yesssssss... I’ve always hoped to have a good excuse to juxtapose those words) there is also no electricity, sod all mobile phone coverage, and no running water. (Yes that is an Oxford Comma, what are you going to do about it?)

I love that place (the Farm, not Oxford, although I’m sure both are lovely). Everything is cooked over an open fire, and the chimney smokes outrageously, so by the time you come home you and all your clothes smell like they’ve been smoked too, as if one were some kind of giant side of bacon or kipper or cup of lapsang souchong. As a direct result of this, I have always found the smell of woodsmoke to be really wonderfully soothing and pleasing. I always feel my mood immeasurably improved if I’m walking along a residential street in the gathering dark of a winter evening and smell someone’s fireplace. Does everyone do this?

Also, it’s one of those universal truths that in any student flat (well, any student flat I’ve ever lived in) one of the electrical things is functioning below its ideal level at all times. At present, for instance, our toaster has gone completely insane, and as an added bonus, our DVD player does pictures and background music and sound effects beautifully, but not speech at all. Which is weird, really, not to say extremely mysterious. Anyway, the nice thing about the Farm is that nothing’s supposed to work, nothing electrical anyway. It’s awfully refreshing.

In Which a Voice should have been Familiar.

Prologue: try to imagine that this was posted yesterday, and that I was not foiled by the lack of internet. If you are successful in doing this the tenses and "yesterday"s will be accurate.

Yesterday was Canada Day, which I must honestly say has never been at all relevant to me before this year. Yesterday, however, I was invited to a Canada Day Party, which was awesome, and which was attended by an interestingly diverse group of Med students. Understandably, I was mildly anxious at this, since as far as I knew, someone there was filled with Anonymous Ire for me. Fortunately for me, my self-absorbed neurosis proved as usual to be entirely unfounded (partly because it’s probably not important to anyone but me, and partly because the Usual Suspects were presumably packing for their trip to Brisbane for the AMSA conference where they are even now painted green or something).

In fact, it was pretty awesome, as I said. The party itself was great, and then wound down is the most highly approved fashion where a small number of you, dwindling to three, amble aimlessly down King St, pause at Istanbul, and then go and drink tea and red wine in someone’s flat. Yea, I say unto thee, humble blog reader; this experience is how you know you’ve been to Sydney Uni; it is the True Core of the Student Experience.

It was at about this point, however, that the evening got to be unusually novel and interesting. Having already discussed with these people that we coincidentally shared a bunch of musical taste, in a nebulous sort of way, (everyone likes The Smiths, surely, and Fountains of Wayne and Camera Obscura are definitely really neat),we got to talking about the experience of liking really obscure bands (yeah, I know, it’s so White of us). I volunteered that I’d always really liked The Crustaceans (weirdly, I can’t find any mention of them on my blog, but rest assured that “I’m Happy if You’re Happy” and that Bright Eyes album “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” were basically the only CDs we listened to in the Lilyfield flat, for basically all of 2005 and a bunch of 2006). And it’s true, what’s not to like about songs about wishing to be a guitar, and how it never rains in Sydney (which is a song which gets stuck in my head every time it rains in Sydney, so I call shenanigans), and going to the library and the beach, and talking about the Doppler Effect in ambulances? Quite frankly, along with Fountains of Wayne and Camera Obscura and Ben Folds, these would have to be some of my absolute favourite songs ever, with good interesting lyrics, both narrative and allusive, which is everything that songs should be. (“Everything that they should be” in the standard sense, not in the sense that that’s all there is to music. That would be wrong. Melody and what have you are also doubtless important, it’s just that I don’t know anything about those aspects of music, whereas I know where I stand with words. In this case I know that I stand in the middle of a hopelessly overlong parenthetical tangent, which is a place I’m very used to being, as I’m sure you’d deduced).

Anyway, this is all by the by, and merely background colour to the fact that at this point we had a fantastically and hilariously awkward moment when it transpired that I’d been raving like an idiot fan at the person who was actually the lead singer of the damn Crustaceans. I cannot emphasise enough how weird this sort of moment was. Felt rather like Carrie Fisher in that double-date restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally.

Part of what amuses me so much about this is that so many people aspire to meet the bands that they like, and I’ve never felt the least inclination to do so. You know, they have those radio competitions: “...And you could win tickets to the sold out Lily Allen concert, and then get to go backstage and meet her! How exciting and awesome! etc. etc...” No. How weirdly awkward and stilted such a conversation would be. You’d either gush and sound like an idiot or not gush enough and sound like a tool. You would know that they felt themselves to be contractually obliged to talk to you, but also know that they’d much rather not. And why should they? All you know about them is that you like their music which for all you know was written by another band member or something, and all they know about you is that you like their music, which would be the case for basically everyone they meet. How could this fail to be just weird and disillusioning?

In fact, the best thing that’s ever said of these meetings is that the “Star” was gracious and kind to the fan and humoured them, treating them like real people. This is another one of those things which I tend to more or less assume as a basic minimum for interaction with real people, but so strangely unequal would such a meeting be that it becomes an exciting Quality.

Conversely, the only weirdly awkward thing here (apart from the bit where everyone else says “are you kidding me?” and you have no idea why, obviously) is that there is no way I’m going to resist blogging about something like this, and the odds are good that one of the people who was there will read it. Which is fine, although maybe just a little odd of me: now it’s my turn to use the internet to be slightly creepy.

Heh, it’s just occurred to me that the situation I discussed yesterday is reversed here. When you listen to a band, you are the anonymous critic listening to the semiautobiographical stylings of someone who doesn’t know that you (personally) are listening. How tidy and balanced! The day before yesterday, I was the (sort of) public figure airing my thoughts while others anonymously critiqued. There you are, it’s all tied in nicely in a meta sort of way.

In Which the Anonymity of the Internet is Fleetingly Considered

I was briefly determined to update this blog every weekday this week, but yesterday it looked like I wasn’t going to have a chance. Fortunately (in this respect) for me, when I happened to have 10 minutes of internet yesterday afternoon I found that someone had written a comment on Sunday’s post, such that I was able to make quota at the same time as trying to clarify that taking this blog seriously is essentially pointless. Isn’t that nice? For those of you curious about this, the whole kerfuffle is to be found in the comments (and text, I suppose, to be fair) of the blog post 3 below this, “In Which Expectations are Not so much Great as Mildly Unhinged”.

I have been told by a startling number of people (‘startling’ because holy crap, seriously? There are that many of you with nothing better to do than read this bollocks?) that ‘what I ought to do is stand my ground and fight it out because it’s my blog and it’s important to think critically about everything - even and especially things which are done more or less selflessly for the greater good -, and what exactly is the value of “awareness” per se anyway?’ Which is awfully nice and supportive and so on, but not strictly relevant since I wasn’t trying to do any of those things at all. I promise all of you friends who have my best interests at heart that if I’d ever actually meant to take a strong position in a blog post, I’d defend it staunchly, not back down in this craven-looking manner. Let those who doubt this find and take issue with that post about gay marriage or whatever it was last year and then you’ll see a position defended.

Anyway, what’s intriguing here is the function of internet anonymity in this thrilling drama. I realise that since about - ooh, 1998? - this has been the most hackneyed and clichéd subject imaginable, but there you go. In what can only be described as a disturbing turn of phrase, one of these anonymous comments kindly hopes that I have “learned my lesson about public blogging” and promises that “we’ll be watching” which weirds me out to more or less the degree which must have been intended. The only solutions to this sort of thing are to either take it like a man and deal with it maturely or to become so irrelevant and tangential that the hypothetical watchers tire of the whole thing. Since this is how I write anyway, and since the more adult path has never yet come to be the one I’ve preferred, I’m going with option 2, which means that a clichéd and hackneyed post about the anonymity of the internet and its effect on “kids these days” can only be to the good.

Mounting paranoia aside, it’s a strange thing, anonymity; the Dutch Courage of the internet. Drunk on our theoretical inability to be “traced” or held accountable, we say things in ways which we never normally would. Whole theories of human interaction have been built around this. Most famous, of course, is Godwin’s Law, with which I trust you are all familiar (although if people are reading this week in a spirit of keeping an eye on such my outrageous political ideas then maybe the demographic is shifted unusually). Godwin’s Law, then, states that as the length of a conversation or argument on the internet (and the effect of this anonymity and us not bothering to keep our behaviour to our normal levels of reasonableness is that conversations inevitably tend towards argumentativeness) increases, the likelihood of someone being compared to Hitler or the Nazis approaches infinity. Or words to that effect.

Why is this? Are we, in our face-to-face interactions, just constantly keeping our fury in check? Surely not. I pretty much like everyone I hang out with, most of the time. Sure, everyone has occasional grumpy moments, but for the sake of our friendships, we keep things more or less under control, usually. This still holds for internet interactions where we our identities are unhidden. So Facebook isn’t the seething swarm of flamewars that any ordinary internet forum of that size would be. This allows us to deduce that the internet is not necessary-and-sufficient for us to behave like jerks (I’m talking generally, here, not calling anyone who reads my blog a jerk, because obviously anyone with such good taste would have to be charming). It looks like anonymity is the sine qua non of this sort of behaviour.

But surely if given the chance to do small and spiteful things anonymously in real life to the people whom we don’t much like, most of us would not do so? It would be so easy to play small malicious pranks on people in an untraceable fashion, but since Year 7, that sort of behaviour is certainly not de rigeur.

So what is it about this magical combination of anonymity and the internet? Presumably it’s the fact that we’re another step removed from our actions. We don’t actually see the effects of our words, which seem so ephemeral and harmless, and which allow us a luxurious degree of plausible deniability if we feel guilty and take ourselves to task. We can tell ourselves that we never thought that kid next door would actually kill herself, we just wanted to punish her a little bit. (Also, whoa, let’s not even get involved in thinking about the wackiness of that case. Those crazy Americans.) (Heh, Microsoft has underlined the phrase “those crazy Americans” as being wrong. Nice one Microsoft, leave your ideological baggage out of this, verb or no verb. Also, not honestly sure that that was actually in America but checking when I don’t have internet access is much too hard).

In the case of this blog, however, it’s different again, since the anonymity is one sided. My identity is open, I use my real name and link (foolishly, it has become clear) to this blog on my Facebook account. I did wonder about the wisdom of this when I put that link up, all that time ago, but at the time I’d barely blogged in years. When I first started the blog (by accident, hence the name) I only wanted to be able to use it to keep in touch with my school friends, since that was back in the era before Social Networking was a thing. I’ve never taken down that link mainly on the grounds that (a) I can’t be bothered, and it’s never seemed like it might matter, since who could possibly be interested other than people who like me anyway? and (b) vanity is my besetting sin.

Conversely, since I (again foolishly) decided to allow Anonymous commenting on my blog, this means that the people I’m dealing with are coming from a comparatively “safer” place of anonymity (note: I’m going to leave that facility enabled for a few days so that everything can get worked out, but then I’m turning that function off so hard, so if you wish to add your 2 cents without getting a blogger account, time is money at this point); this is rather like standing in a spotlight in a darkened room and having people throw things at you from the shadows.

It would be undiplomatic to enter into the question of whether it is “cowardly” to deliberately remain anonymous in such a situation, but it has traditionally been considered so, with what justification I cannot say, having never really felt it incumbent on myself to do much anonymously at all. Clearly, the original commenter would probably be exempt from any such criticism anyway, since we will charitably assume that it simply failed to occur to them that their input would be anonymous, robbing their opinion of a great deal of otherwise well-earned weight. Let us pass serenely over the people who actually signed “Anonymous” after this was pointed out, and let us especially avoid addressing the issue of how much the inequity is exacerbated by addressing me by name in their post.

What particularly intrigues me is that there are presently 3 comments which would appear to be from Med students on the blog, only one of which, at a stretch, might be likely to have been written by any of the Med students to whom I have mentioned having a blog. I realise that I mentioned the obscene word count in a Facebook status, but I’m surprised that this would prompt anyone to seek it out and read it. This is especially relevant since the first comment reads like it was written by someone involved in the event-organising, but the only Facebook-friend I have who I’m aware of having been at all involved doesn’t strike me as being likely to take stupid things like my blogging, or herself, quite as seriously as it would appear to have been taken (also, I’m almost sure that I’d already talked to her about the idea of handing out condoms at such an event being amusing, as, indeed, it can surely only have been meant to be). Especially the point that I should “try not to offend people” interests me, since writing a barely-relevant comment in amongst a thousand words of self-deprecating blather on a blog no-one involved could be supposed to be likely to read hardly seems to me like going out of my way to slap people in the face (although, obviously, yes, it’s a public blog and the material on it ought to be tailored to that understanding).

More to the point; 3 comments, all purporting to be from different people? This means that either three or more Med people (Med people reasonably heavily engaged with the clique which organised the event, so not the 2 which would have seemed reasonably likely) read my blog but have never mentioned it to me, which seems unlikely, or that one such person read it (which still seems unlikely, but which it seems to me that we must inevitably deduce was the case) and then forwarded it to the others. Which leaves us with people whom I barely know reading it, and which also brings us back again to the topic of last week - the oddness of being the subject of discussion and consideration in one's absence. What a strange impression this blog would give if this was all one knew of me apart from having seen me from a distance in lectures!

Whoa, this post is apparently now 1,770 words long. Obviously it is time to bring this rambling to an end, and the more so since I am sceptical as to anyone’s having read this far anyway. Have a nice day, cats and kittens, and if anything I’ve said has offended you today, but could b read in two ways (eg, one sarcastic, one merely alliterative, like the original post), let’s take it as read that I meant it in the inoffensive sense.