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Balance

Posted

March 29, 2013

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Life

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3 Comments

Manly Harbour pool, 193-

Hello. Hi there,

it’s actually me this time, not just an update to do with science or pods or even casts. It’s been a while since I updated with something other than the droning buzz of my weekly forays into science communication, so with the Easter weekend currently happening* I figured I had the time to sit back and reflect on the past couple months.

So what’s been happening? Not a tremendous amount, really. I’ve fallen into a nice rhythm of work and football and not much else in between. The advantage of the former being that I’ve finished up paying out all my debts in a little over four paychecks. It’s a comforting thing, to know that there’s a bundle of money that will be hitting your bank account at regular intervals. And thankfully in my case, the workplace that’s providing the money is a supportive and happy one. Small business for life, yo.

The football has also been a major positive influence. It had been almost eight years since last lacing up the boots; I quit my last club, Kalamunda United, when I started university as it was taking up too much of my time. But getting out on the field and getting the feel of the ball, getting my touch back, smashing my toenails and lacerating my heels with blisters…well, perhaps not those last bits, but the exercise and commitment is great. Plus it’s allowed me to lose the ten-or-so kilograms that I put on while being unemployed. Well, football and also the twelve kilometres I ride every day to get to and from work. And not eating a shit-tonne of snacks during the day while I browse SEEK and feel awful about my life. Yeah, it’s nice to feel healthy.

As for writing and such; I’m still looking to find that balance that will allow me to maybe get up earleir and write, or find a nice comfortable place in the evening and get some words out. I’ve been having a bunch of ideas though, carefully and immediately archived in self-sent emails. I think it’s about time I started using my laptop a bit more, rather than trying to write on my main desktop. It helps to keep me from getting distracted by the shinies that it can do.

Oh, and I shaved my head to raise funds for cancer research. I’ll leave you with a pic of the gang after the shave:

P1000633_1148x862

 

 

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*They pay me for not being at work. This fact is still blowing my mind.

Glassware

Posted

January 27, 2013

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Life

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7 Comments

Chemistry Lab

Despite the new

year having just rung in, it’s already blown the last one out of the water. Yesterday marked the end of my first week working at Microanalysis Australia, my employer.

Hear that? MY MOTHERFUCKING EMPLOYER.

I have a job. After a year of visiting SEEK on a daily basis, flinging over one hundred resumes and cover letters out into the aether, and swinging a 1% interview:application ratio, I’m finally employed. The sense of relief took around a day to settle in, but once it did I was kind of overwhelmed. The Microanalysis crew are a really great bunch, equal parts nerds, good scientists, and nice people. I can’t see myself ever having any personal issues with any of them, which is lucky since there’s only nine employees. I have to say, I much prefer the small business vibe to the large business vibe. There’s a sense of responsibility, an inherent compulsion to do things right because you want to, not because you must.

My adventures in podcast-land continue, as you can tell by my blog essentially turning into a playlist over the past month or so. I’ve been aiming for at least one per week, and I’m happy to have hit that target so far. We’ll see if I can keep up the dedication as I adjust to working full-time. I’ve already let a couple of commitments slide as a result of getting back into a routine, but I’m fairly sure I’ll be able to arrest the avalanche before it happens.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all that’s happening at the moment. A heck of a lot of relief, and excitement towards the future and what it will bring. Huzzah!

photo by: euthman

Nails

Posted

November 19, 2012

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Life

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1 Comment

As I type

this, I am experiencing a strange and relatively new sensation at the end of each of my fingertips. Or rather, I’m experiencing a lack of sensation, a reduction in the pressure I would normally feel on the pads of my fingers. There’s also a funny sound that keeps repeating every time I hit the keys; a much harder tap where before there was only a low thup. The source of these weird new feelings? Nails. An unfamiliar and altogether unexpected crescent of white keratin topping each of my ten fingers in a way that has never before occurred. And quite frankly, I’m a little bit worried by this development.

The reason being that ever since I can remember, I have always chewed the mother-lovin’ crap out of my nails. I recall being told off by teachers for it at school and by my mother at home (the latter still happens). I chewed through movies, bus journeys, books, sports finals. I graduated from the relatively common onychophagia (nail biting) through to the rather more blood-inducing dermatophagia (skin biting) but stopped, blessedly, before reaching the stereotypical crazy person habit of trichotillomania (the urge to pull out hair and, presuming you’re in an episode of CSI, eat it). To see my fingers after too long in the pool or the sea was to look upon an approximate portrait of Beelzebub. Ten bloated limbs pocked with the indents of canines and bleeding from fine cracks in cuticles and nail-beds alike. Really, it was (and is) pretty disgusting.

But I can’t help it! Or at least, I couldn’t. And it’s this sudden growth of what look to be relatively healthy chunks of dead cells that my tendency to overanalyse just can’t let go. Why would I stop chewing now, after a career spanning decades? Why retire from the rending game; the old bite and tear? I’ve tried to look up psychological interpretations of the habit, but it’s all a bit overwhelming. I’m either a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a habitual automaton crafted from one too many childhood incidents. Or both, reckons Yahoo! Answers.

It could also be diet, and this seems a likely culprit. My nails may have inherited some strength from the fact that I’m restricting myself to mostly meat and veg these days, easy on the veg. But that still doesn’t explain the fact that I don’t feel like ripping into them. Or maybe it does? Perhaps I was only ever cleaning up cracked edges, filing down ruined tips so that they might grow more perfectly? Now that would support the OCD accusation. No matter the reason, I can now open pull tabs and scratch places to a depth hitherto unscratched. And for that one, definite advantage, I think I’ll try and keep my nails as long as possible.

 

Vocal

Posted

November 5, 2012

Categories

Life
music

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6 Comments

(or, “Things I Miss About Not Owning A Car: Singing”)

I sold my

car a couple of months ago, as a means of propping up my bank balance in the absence of regular income. The lack of mobility hasn’t been too much of a problem thanks to Perth’s propensity for gorgeous Summer-like days even in Winter. Although it must be mentioned that on the two days that Louise and I needed it to be sunny–in order to tidy the garden for our upcoming rental inspection–it has absolutely pissed it down. So getting around on my trusty bicycle hasn’t been so bad, despite an incident a few weeks ago where some joker with a water bottle managed to dump enough H2O on my backpack to successfully corrupt one of my hard-drives. Har-fucking-har.

But there’s one thing that I can’t really do while riding which I used to do basically 100% of the time when I was driving, and that’s sing. I mean, I can do it while riding–and I have–but I’m very aware of the fact that I look and sound like a total nutcase to everyone around me. Thankfully those everybodies are usually whizzing dangerously close past me at roughly double my speed. So there’s not a lot of social pressure from barely-seen commuters behind tinted windows. But it just feels weird. Dangerous, somehow. Certainly not the same safe environment as having windows wound up and an album loaded. Plus, y’know, there’s the danger of having earbuds in while riding*.

I used to sing damn near constantly the entire time I drove; ask Louise, she’ll testify to this. And while the morning shower is still there, offering that lovely reverb muted by steam, it’s barely enough time (what with me being a conscientious water-saver) to bang out a single, let alone the entire back catalogue of an artist like my long-distance trips to family allowed me to do.

Anyway, there’s not much to this post besides lamenting the slow decay of my vocal cords. And trying to get more posts happening that aren’t about my unemployment. I guess if you have any suggestions for kick-ass sing-a-long songs, leave them in the comments? If anyone actually does, I may or may not post my renditions(!) of the best ones.

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*Which, to my shame, I do now anyway. But I’m listening to podcasts! They have gaps in between words that I can use to listen for death approaching behind me.

 

photo by: NightRStar

White noise

Posted

October 11, 2012

Categories

Life
rant

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2 Comments

I ended my

last post with an assurance that if anything major changed in my life, I’d be back to update. For those few that do regularly visit here, it is therefore perhaps a little bit worrisome that I haven’t returned sooner than now. But never mind, you might be thinking, the fact that I am now reading these fresh words would logically mean that the aforementioned major event must have occurred. While I admire your logic, dear reader, I am afraid that I must both verify it and deny it at the same time. In other words: has anything changed since my last post? Well, yes and no.

The yes can’t be denied; Louise and I have, in the last two weeks, moved into a new house, ending a year’s worth of living dependently. That mystical quantity, “a year’s supply of ____“, turns out to be half-a-dozen when applied to houses. While I’m grateful, very, very grateful, for the kindnesses that have been extended to us by friends and family alike in asking us to take up residence within their homes, they weren’t our walls to live within or, in my case, stare at. So the advent of having a space to call our own, albeit per annum payable per fortnight, is a revelation; the importance of which can’t be understated.

So that’s the yes: firm, solid. Like a bass drum kick, it strikes and doesn’t stick around. The no is more like a guitar chord, played through a reverb pedal. It is made up of smaller fragments and repeated again and again, day after day. Uncertainty, frustration, pessimism, stress, pressure, and a rapidly diminishing bank account. The plan was to move cities. The plan fell through, and that was fine: P-town isn’t so bad, after all. And there was hope: a job was offered from work I had previously done with Curtin and an industrial partner. It would just take a little while to get going, as contracts had to be written and intellectual property sorted out.

That was three months ago. Since then my savings have dripped slowly out of my accounts, waiting for that regular injection that will/might come when whatever strings are holding proceedings up are either cut or brought into a fine bow. The worst thing is a lack of any starting date. If I knew a starting date it would be, as Louise put it, just like school holidays, in that you know when you need to go back and thus take every advantage of the time you have off. As it stands I am stuck in a house with no car, dreading the thought of having to talk to anybody because I know their first question will be something along the well-intentioned (and well-tensioned) lines of So Have You Heard Back About The Job Yet? The answer to which has already moved from a thorough explanation of IP issues through to a more uncertain hand waving assertion, and threatens to devolve into a series of grunts and pitching whatever objects are handy at the interrogator.

The temptation is to just write off two-thousand and twelve entirely and go…I dunno, work at a monastery or some such. Discussions about picking up temporary work or a casual contract have been entered into by Louise and I, but the aforementioned pessimism (and a severely irritating lack of Internet access) usually puts paid to that very quickly. There’s the feeling, no matter how self-aware I am of the fact that it is very much a Bullshit Privileged White Person Feeling, that events have been a touch unfair on me. That perhaps, after almost a decade of education, a job might not have been too much to ask for. Anyway, like I said, a BPWPF, and one I try not to rest on for any significant period of time, lest I become completely insufferable rather than merely depressing.

I have switched modes of interaction quite significantly, becoming almost exclusively a consumer. Writing has gone out the window, as has music production, and even the small concession I made while playing games of making video reviews (although that is mainly due to the lack of Internet). I have tried to occupy myself by learning a programming language, and the fundamentals of music theory, but neither have really captured my interest in a way that would allow me to throw myself completely in them. I feel that I am living in a vacuum, and that slowly, surely, that vacuum is sucking my will out through my pores. I’ve heard exercise helps a lot. Maybe that will be my next stop. At the very least it will alleviate the boredom-snacks I’ve been indulging in. There has to be a better word for those: something fancy like can’t-apés or bore d’oeuvres?

Alright, enough. Until next time, keep those glasses half-full for me.

 

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