Writing my way out of a paper bag

I just had a really intense nightmare where I ate people alive, like some kind of sentient zombie, except I didn't want to eat them, I was possessed. It was that kind of dream that keeps going even when you wake up once or twice in the middle of it.

I don't know how I feel about dream analysis as a viable idea, but that is certainly a confusing look into my psyche. Although, I did see Zombieland just before it, maybe that's why. Films don't usually make me have nightmares, though! =/

I will delete this entry later - tomorrow, or next month - because I hate my free-wheeling thought entries, my stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Especially right now, this mood I'm in, everything I put down sounds like those stupid, self-important poems that I wrote as a teenager.

I wish evening would come quicker. It's seven o'clock and still not really sunset. What is the point of having the day go on longer when it's too hot to do anything with the extra sunlight? I want to vacuum, but my skin is slippery just sitting here.

So, a philosophical quandary: is it better to receive an impersonal gift - soap, perfume, something that says, I don't really know what you would like at all - or no gift at all? One is sentimental, polite: we are related, I feel obliged, I am a good social citizen, I want our relationship to remain amicable. But the other is honest: we are not that close, I don't know what to get you, I don't know who you are.

I re-read the first several chapters of Brave New World today, because I enjoy having traumatic flash-backs to highschool English in between bouts of writing a mock letter to my abusive ex for my therapist and dying slowly in a double-brick disguised-as-apartment sauna. Those people take drugs not to feel properly. Their whole lives, they are conditioned not to feel the intense emotions that come with existence. It reminds me that I want to feel the sting of jealousy, of anger. I don't want to dissociate, depersonalise, be far-away. I want to stand out in the rain and feel it on my skin and the wind at my back, whispering to me 'maybe you could fly'.

I want to feel things under my fingers, I want to stretch out into every inch of myself, I want to see everything, not be trapped in my head, I want to be present.

I get there sometimes. Just not right now, I

I repotted my snapdragon plant and it went all limp and leaned sideways at an unlikely angle. I thought I had killed it, in record time, too. I repotted it and watered it some more (and looked up on Google if perhaps I was over-watering it). And then today, I came out and it had opened up some buds into flowers! So I guess it cannot be doing so badly.

I am slightly unsettled by how much this pleases me - I do not wish to turn out like my mother, who, although being a wonderful person in many other ways, needs an entire acre of soil to appease her love of plants. I have a propensity for taking things to the extreme, so I might end up being compelled to landscape a park.

Speaking of my mother, she is visiting today! I am excited to see which of the horde she has brought with her this time! I think it is just my sister, but maybe the foster children will wail until she brings them too. The cutest thing was when the little boy refused to say good-bye to me when I came back to Bathurst, as if that might stop me from going home. =)

So, I went to the dentist to have a filling done.

Dentist was drilling, and it began to hurt, so I signaled him and he gave me the shot, which was no big deal. My mouth kind of went a bit numb for about 2 minutes, but that's it. I was still in pain from the drill the whole time afterward. When I came out, Grant said that when he had his teeth done, the shot made him drool and he couldn't feel anything, where as I felt absolutely no numbness and all the pain that I had felt before. When I left, I was very tense, all my muscles locked up, and shaking badly. I cried a bit in the car. I guess I'm lucky I didn't have a full on panic attack in the dentist.

Even better, I have to go back in 5 weeks to get my temp. filling put in permenantly. I think I'm going to insist on more/stronger shots or gas. =(

I have revised my position on analysis of English texts in highschool. While I still maintain that language, spelling, grammar and semantics should have a greater place in the curriculum than they current occupy, I have realised that all my railing against analysis of texts is not about the analysis itself as a goal or activity, but the way it is taught.

Analysis of text, as baeraad pointed out in his unflattering comments on a certain novel, gives people a framework in which to explore the human condition. And I like that. I like the idea that people might think about the texts they are reading and find in them meaning above language, spelling, grammar and semantics. That they might find new ways of looking at the world or broaden their understanding of it.

However, in Australia, what happens in high school is that teachers lead you through the entire book and focus on what they think is important. The problem with that is, what these teachers think is important might not be what the student finds important! Texts are subjective! People are subjective! Guide, surely, but do not prescribe.

The Big English Exam final question is an essay where you must "Discuss [an issue relating to the text you have studied]". There are three options, but they all fit into that framework. In theory, students have honed their skills at analysing texts through their own frameworks, and they display these skills in an essay. In reality, they are regurgitating the rote points fed to them by their teachers.

Why don't we do something else, instead? Why don't we write "This text expresses many important issues (themes). Pick one that you are interesting and use this text and others to discuss" OR (for advertisements and articles) "How does this text persuade you to support their point of view?", instead of focusing on 'techniques'. The techniques the author uses will be discovered organically, rather than through the teacher repeating them at the student until they sink in.

I guess what it comes down to is: SUPPORT CRITICAL LITERACY NOT MEMORISATION!

So, Paranormal Activity.

I admit that the following review may be tarnished by the fact I watched this movie with the most idiotic cinema full of people in existence. From the guy who went "AH!" at every tiny noise, to the one that threw a piece of candy at the person in front of him and hit me instead, to the person whose phone rang at the suspenseful climax, this audience was by far the worst I've endured. Worse than Twilight - I mean, I expected that audience to be full of screaming teenage girls, but they behaved with more class than Paranormal's did.

You know how the basic point of a horror movie is to slowly slide up the suspense bar until the final climatic scene? Well, this movie had a problem with that. Everytime it cut back to daylight scenes, that sliding tension had to start from zero again. Not to mention that the daytime scenes accomplished absolutely nothing towards plot. I'm sure someone somewhere justifies them for characterisation purposes, but they actually made me like the characters less. About half the daylight things were exposition for events we had already seen recorded on the camera at night!

I think what this movie needed was less daylight exposition and more allusion. They could have alluded to what happened during the day rather than making me sit through it in mind-numbing tedium, waiting for the night scenes to make the movie interesting again.

I realise I may seem bitter. This is because there were elements of a good movie in this mess! The 'experiments' could have been elaborated into something truly scary. The possession was very effective. In fact, most of the nighttime was excellent! It was just let down by the daylight. (Serenity has the only scary daylight scene I can think of, when they reach Miranda - it was genuinely stressful for me to watch that scene. Actually, the suspense in Serenity - the scene after the bank robbery, crossing Reaver space, the final battle - beats anything portrayed in this film all together).

In the end, I wish I'd gone to see Zombieland like Grant suggested.

Roleplay:
A big part of writing is being able to get into your character's heads and making them real people. Being able to do that without the complications of picking the perfect word, maintaining the rhythm of the story, worrying about whether the plot is still making sense, keeping track of all the characters... most of that becomes the Storyteller's problem, and I'm free to focus on really getting to know my character.

The System:
World of Darkness has modifiers that take away your dice when you're distracted, tired, disoriented and all the rest of those pesky emotions that stop you from being completely awesome every moment of every day. I've come to realise that another, less obvious trait of a Mary/Gary Sue, rather than being awesome at everything, and that s/he is awesome all the time. Even (particularly?) under immense pressure, even if s/he is distracted/tired/other pesky emotion.

Done right, situational modifiers make a character believable, even one who could easily be a Mary/Gary Stu. Ziva, the awesome ninja from NCIS, has three fighting scenes I always remember - once, she dual-wields pistols and takes out two guys who bust in through two different entry points; another, she head-shots a guy who has taken a young girl hostage... and in the last one, she is almost shot in the heart by serial killer and falters her return shot. Now, two of those times, she was awesome. But she was awesome partly because there were no situational modifiers - the first time, she was prepared for the bust-in and the second time there was perfect environmental conditions, the hostage wasn't freaking out, and the shooter was as sane as a serial killer could be (not erratic). It made sense that with her large assassin dice pool, that she could do that. But in the last instance, she was tired, stressed, shocked and undercover, which rightly knocked the dice pool right down.

What I'm trying to say is, the System stops me from making my characters all awesome, all the time - because sometimes the stuff going on around you messes you up, no matter how good you are. Also, sometimes you just roll shit.

My Storyteller:
I used to write stories that lasted for 10 pages, because I went in too early and didn't have a Long Term Plan. And when I finally did have a Plan, I wouldn't deviate, at all. You can't do that in WoD, when you're GMing. You have to have your Plan and be flexible. You have to know where you're going, but you also have to give your players (or my own characters, in this metaphor) some leeway.

My ST is the best. And I'm lucky to have him as my boyfriend! =)

And how's this for nerdy: he courted me with a World of Darkness campaign...

English in highschool in Australia is primarily made up of analysing literary works. Now, don't get me wrong, I love literary works. However, learning about film and literary techniques are not going to help a person unless they turn out to want to be a writer or a film maker, and that kind of specialisation is what university is for. In my humble opinion, there should be more of a focus on language, grammar, semantics and sophisticated writing style. Half of my university class cannot conserve tense, use commas or apostrophes correctly, know when to use their/they're/there and other basic, basic language and punctuation conventions. In Year 11 and 12, the final compulsory school years in Australia, the situation was even worse.

People do not take you seriously if you cannot write in a sophisticated manner. The first thing you send to a potential employer is a resume. Universities grade you based on written papers. Formal communication is essential in almost every field.

Additionally, this kind of text analysis doesn't foster a love of literature - most people despise the film or novel they had to study in school. I'm not saying there isn't a place for analysis in the classroom - I just think it need to be more about subjectivity, opinions, construction of own text than is possible given the railroading to the Big End Exam.

While I'm balancing my high horse on a soap box, I also think Politics and Current Events should be a compulsory subject - people need to be more globally, culturally and politically aware than they are right now.

I should keep taking my night medicine. I feel much better.  How great is being alive? =)

Inside:


Book and quiet corner. This corner will be less open. Here teachers can read to children or children can read the books. As well as normal range, picture-only books will be here so children can develop narrative skills. If there are students for whom English is a second language, there will be books in theirs. In whole group experiances, teachers would read a book to the class and then place it in book corner. Children will be taught to respect and care for the books. This corner will have pillows!

Block & maths corner. A whole bunch of wooden blocks and joinable plastic blocks to encourage spatial awareness. Teachers will encourage children to count the blocks used in their tower, name the types of blocks (their faces) and mirror one another's work (symmetry).

Puzzle & science corner. There will be puzzles, funnily, and also magnifying glasses, and games. Teachers will help children complete puzzles and help children with unfamiliar games. The selection of games will be limited to one or two over a week, since games are difficult to manage, since they have to be done in groups and in a structured way.

Drawing and art area. Here, teachers would scaffold children's drawing skills including pencil and scissor grip. Sample experiances include collage work and crayon shading. In whole group experiances teachers would help children collect materials to draw from outside and create imaginative scenes to draw. Children's names and simple words with pictures will be there for them to copy. Links: books can be used as inspiration.

Suprise Table. Messy stuff goes here - painting, inking (for colour making), play dough and clay, and other indoor experiances teachers come up with. This will change every couple of days. Staff will help children explore materials in this area.

Outside:

A gym-equpitment type area.

A big open space with ropes and balls.

Water trough with items inside it, or water buckets for "water painting".

Sandpit.

Staff:

Staff's main role, along with those described above, will be to mediate children. They should help children with anger management strategies and problem-solving during conflict (conflict resolution) rather than solve it for the children. Ask "what can we do about this?" instead of saying "this is what is going to happen" and help the children decide between the solutions.

There will initiatives to help - the 'sharing' timer. If the child wants a turn on a toy, they go and get the timer and set it (an egg timer). The child who has the toy has their go (the egg timer duration) and then the next child's. This + anger management strategies would be taught in group time with staff reminding children how they work when conflict arises. Staff should also have conflict training - they should use the anger management techniques on themselves (let me tell you, kids can get on your nerves). No yelling - it's not socially appropriate for adults to yell either.

They will also find areas where children are having difficulty - for example, not being able to enter a game, not being able to wait your turn and not speaking at preschool were some I came across on prac - and assist.

Group time:

- reading & discussing books
- conflict resolution & social skills

Group times will not only happen once a day. They will be 1/2 hr to 40min long, because I've noticed kids tend to muck up after that time.

The end!

Micah is a compulsive liar, with a secret. That made her life complicated enough without her 'sort-of' boyfriend dying under brutal circumstances. The book opens with Micah telling the reader that she is a liar, but she's trying to quit. She's going to write her story down without lying. She doesn't manage it, of course.

I really like this book. It has a gigantic, excellent twist. Micah is strange and interesting. Her psyche is intriguing, especially coming from my perspective as a very honest person. Her relationship with Zach is 'complicated' in an adult way, not a highschool-crush one. She's an unreliable narrator and I do love those, when they're done well, which Larbalestier does.

Unfortunately, right at the end of the book, Larbalestier implied that Micah might have fabricated much more than she admitted. Maybe all of it. The lies Micah told (and later exposed) were all to cover up her Secret from the reader, and it was all done very well. Why go and ruin that by saying the essential story was all a lie? I don't know if Larbalestier did it for dramatic effect, or what, but it really puts me off.

I'm not sure why; I think it's that when I read a book, I am already committing my time to something that isn't strictly real. To be told the story isn't real even in of itself is a little irritating. Or maybe I'm just feeling the aggravation and disappointment of people who actually share their lives with a compulsive liar?

That was a little more introspective that I planned it to be.

If the Speech Pathology course was in Bathurst, I would transfer right this second.

I'm trying to work out why - I think it's mostly because, although I love teaching, I don't want to be a teacher. I don't want to have to deal with an overloaded curiculum, spend most of my time on behaviour management, whine whine whine. Also, my lesson plan got marked and returned, and I didn't go too well. I passed, I guess. So apparently I cannot even plan lessons!

But moving to Albury would mean Grant having to get another job, dealing with Guy wanting us to move in with him, a whole new set of uni fees...And Grant would resent me for it. That's what I don't want, most of all.

Also been sleeping too much.

Race weekend is the next couple of days, and there are already cars going around the mountain, sounding like tremendous, angry bugs. Also I was woken up by horns on Wednesday, from a parade in town. Once I got over my complete bewilderment, I was not amused. Campus people have it much worse, it's really distracting over there, and apparently they start at 7am! I am very much not a morning person.

I guess that's why I'm still awake at 2am?

Good afternoon, how are you?

I have been at my family home for a week or so. Among my many adventures there - one of which included waking up to red sunlight shining through my window, because of a terrifying dust storm - was visiting the graveyard.

The oldest grave was a pyre for a young boy who died in 1900. The oldest person buried there was alive when Napoleon was.

My family is still crazy; I taught a bit at Mum's school and no longer actively despair of my future.

Nearly finished writing about my gay ice-demon, making slow progress on my werewolves. They are about to find themselves in a shack smelling like vinegar and then I'm blowing Seth's house up, so that promises to be fun.

Am back at my Bathurst home now. The outside of the house is red-brown. I cleaned the windows, so now they're a kind of streaked red-brown. Race weekend soon, how I despise drunk people and loud music.

Talk to you later.

I know that gun play can't really be abolished in the classroom. Children are going to form schemas for weapons and they are going to play-act to address those. In a perfect world, children would watch age appropriate shows and not play shooting games and when war was on TV, their parents would explain to them why it's happening. But guns are too pervasive, our culture is too pervaded by violence, since the beginning of it.

My question is, why do boys play guns so much more than girls?

Why don't girls feel compelled to act out their schemas as much as boys? Is it biological - the hunter male?

Grant owns GTA4 - he isn't even a 1/4 of the way through the game. He keeps it because "sometimes, he just needs to shoot something". I've played Bioshock and Left4Dead and enjoyed them, and they're shooting-based. But I enjoyed those games because of the story and teamwork aspects more than the actual shooting. In school, I played Power Rangers.

Journals are being very unhelpful in the whole matter. I wouldn't buy actual physical gun toys for my children, or allow them in the classroom. That's blurring the lines between 'pretend play' and kids with guns.

This is not a very well constructed post, because I'm cooking a baked dinner. Sorry about that. =)

So, I wrote an email to my Mathematics course convenor asking her to justify her assignment about discovery learning and asking her to address criticism from various scholars with links to online journals. We'll see how that goes.

Doctor didn't authorise my script, so it was going to cost me $100 until the kind pharmacist pointed it out to me and saved me from that drama.

Through engineering genius, I managed to get out old couch downstairs. Thankfully, furniture removalists brought the new one up to us. It is comfy and large; the cushions do not sink and require propping up with half a dozen pillows. It seems miracles do occur.

My soul stretches out here,

Over these undulating hills;

A second skin

I fit here.

Today while administering the SENA test, I found a reason I want to be a teacher, and the reason that I don't:

The girl I assessed was quiet and sweet, helped me pack up, was polite and attentive. When she got answers wrong, I knew how I could help her do better.

The boy Cara assessed ran around the playground, annoyed other children and teacher pairs and told her that the "other side" and "the devil" told him the answers to questions.

Also:
"Teachers often report feeling frustrated by demands, unappreciated, overworked, not respected as professionals, undervaled and undersupported... helpless and trapped in their job". (Foreman, 2008). I know that's true of other jobs, but I feel sick even thinking about my pre-school prac, although I am constantly told that Primary will be better. The class we visited today, the teacher wasn't managing very well. I don't know, I would have done things differently. Having children greet visitors as aliens and witches isn't appropriate for students in Year 2, I don't think. Maybe I'm too harsh. Maybe it's their creativity.

If Speech pathology was at Bathurst and not Albury, I would transfer, but we can't afford to move to Albury. Maybe when Grant's car loan is payed off, we could get another loan to move... But I"d be even further away from my family and we would have to take flights to Sydney. And I'm almost half way through this degree - even though I know that's a sunk cost and shouldn't be counted.

Less whiny posts coming soon, maybe.

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~grussell/epistemicviciousness.pdf

That is a link to an essay about belief and Martial Art. It's not really required reading, as I'll be quoting from it every time I need to, but university has instilled in me a compulsion to acknowledge the source. =)

About 6 months ago, I got it into my head that because the dance studios in Bathurst weren't returning my calls and because singing lessons here are ridiculously expensive, I could join a dojo. I wanted to get fit and to learn Kata (which is basically a set of flowing movements that are supposed to consolidate your learning of moves. I'd gotten up to green belt before, when I was younger, before my family moved rurally, so I thought I'd give it another go.

Anyway, for the first few weeks I went and it was pretty good. Of course, most of the other white belts (lowest rank) were kids and newcomers. Because I have a good memory, I could remember the combinations of punches and kicks and whatever, and 2 or 3 of the kids on the line and at least one of the guys, who was my age, began to look at me when they got lost in the sequence (I don't think this is because I was so awesome; it's probably because I'd talked to them all before class). So, that was okay. I was absolutely fine with having one little kid either side of me, watching me because the sensei was going too fast.

Then I began to get suspicious. The sensei had his favourite and inferior students in the higher belt colours. Because I wasn't in proper dress code (they were ordering new uniforms and I was waiting until they new version came in until I sank $50 dollars into them), I had to stand at the back of my line, which meant that all the smaller kids in front of me were standing around looking awkward instead of doing martial art like their mothers were paying considerable money to have them do. No one disagreed with the sensei when he blatantly mis-judged a game they were playing.

Then, in Kata class, I disobeyed the NO TALKING rule to help those same 2 little kids remember their kata steps. Up until then, they'd just been standing around on the blue mats, not being able to remember what steps they had to do and in what order, with no higher coloured belt there to help them. I practised, thinking that this part of the lesson would only go for 10minutes or so: but when it began to stretch into half an hour, I asked the kids if they wanted my help. I went through the steps slowly with them and corrected which hand they should be punching with - until the sensei came up to me. I wouldn't say he yelled at me; but he wasn't polite. I decided that I wouldn't be going back to a dojo that ignored two little kids and then was massively impolite to someone who was only trying to help them when no one else would.

It turns out they were using a very dodgy payment scheme anyway - when I rang up to cancel my membership, they told me I was obliged to pay $1000 as a severance fee (lump sum) or pay out until the end of the year ($1200 in fortnightly payments), despite my having signed no such contract. They were quite rude to me on the phone when I asked them about that - I was even beginning to doubt that maybe I had signed a contract (I signed an insurance policy), except that Grant went down there and posed as a potential customer and they didn't ask him to sign any contract (just the insurance policy). He then pretended to forget his banking details and came home to console me. =/

In the end, they told me I didn't have to pay when I threatened to take them to court. There are multiple lessons to be learned there, I think, and even though I didn't really have any monetary loss, it's been bothering me ever since. Maybe now that I've written it out, I can finally stop feeling sick when I think about it.