Enclosed, Please Find Silence

Spent most of my easter break in Canberra with the family. It was a lovely trip. For some reason everybody seemed to really really like me this time, and I barely had a moment's breathing space for all the various Bonding Activities my parents and siblings wanted to share with me. So yeah, it was a blast. Mum spent a lot of time teaching me some of her jewellery-making skills, and I ended up making a beautiful Russian serpentine pendant of which I am immensely proud. And G took me for a couple of riding lessons on her horse Theo - did I mention my parents bought my sister a horse? Something about heading off teen depression, which seems to have worked remarkably well so far, although god knows my family cannot afford to own a horse. I used to be horse-crazy as a kid, and took riding lessons constantly until we moved to the city. G's horse obsession outstrips my own at the height of its fervour, and Theo is a beautiful thoroughbred trained as a proper dressage horse. In other words, riding him is nothing like riding the school horses I learned on, and G has had to undergo rigorous private lessons with a professional trainer to learn how to communicate with him. They've worked. She's riding amazingly well.

I, on the other hand, am not. I suppose it's to be expected, given that I've been out of the saddle for something like eight years. I think it's for the best though, because G had the time of her life bossing me around and coaching me and correcting my seat. It's about time she starts feeling like she's better than me at something, instead of constantly feeling second-best. And I had a great time too - Theo is an absolute dream, really steady and good-natured and eager to please.

In other news, mum recently sat down to a good hard thinking session about my financial situation and current lack of gainful employment, and reached the conclusion that the only way forward is for me to, um, take up doll-making and sell my creations. She's even started planning my website. I can't say this is the most ridiculous idea my mum has ever come up with, but it's definitely a contender.

Since I am a dutiful daughter, and also since I really do enjoy sewing, I started work on a practice ragdoll anyway. Finished her last night. Here she is, in all her glory:



The hair isn't actually an assertion of my personal style - it was the only colour wool I had at hand. I'm totally loving the effect, though. Very punk-rock, I like to think. ;)

The instructions I was using were hopeless, with the result that she's covered in mistakes where I couldn't decipher what the pattern wanted me to do and had to improvise. I think I've figured out my own method now, though, and should be able to do a much better job in future. It's a great use of scrap fabric, and a whole lot of fun.

My kitchen is full of caterpillars.

For fuck's sake.

So, Alex and I have achieved Moving Out Together.

I'm irrationally fond of the new place. It's in the same suburb as my last residence, lovely and spacious, with a spare bedroom that we've turned into a study and a much larger and better laid-out bathroom than the old apartment. It's also completely within our budget, and close to the train station. Those were pretty much my main house-hunting criteria.

We knew it was a bit shabby when we took it. The kitchen floor was damaged, odd bits and pieces needed repairing, and the whole place clearly wanted a good cleaning. Of course, there was no way we could have realised just how urgent that cleaning was until we saw the place once the last tenants' stuff was cleared out and they weren't breathing down our necks as we inspected so that we felt too awkward to do things like check out the oven or poke around the bathroom. And what we never reckoned on was the cockroach infestation.

I used to think I knew what the word 'infestation' meant. I know openly confess that until I moved in here, I had no understanding whatsoever of what an infestation really is.

The real estate agents had no idea of the hellish mess we were signing up to start paying them for. They organised to have a cleaner wipe everything down and steam-clean the carpets, and when the cleaner found a gang of cockroaches throwing a party in the kitchen, they sent in the pest guy. We met him right after he finished gasing the place, and he looked utterly shell-shocked. Said it was the worst infestation he'd dealt with in ages, and was reportedly fishing roaches out of his pockets for hours after he left. The cleaner then went through again to vacuum up the dead roaches, and I have it from the realtor that there were piles of corpses about an inch thick in some of the corners.

To their absolute credit, the estate agency have pulled out all stops to help us get this place fit for human habitation. The taps, the lights and the front door lock all turned out to be broken, and they've gotten those fixed so quickly I barely had time to register the problem. The electrical safety switch was apparently rigged to kill the next person to touch it, but that's been fixed too so no fatalities there. The pest guy will be back soon to eliminate the second wave of roaches, and we're waiting on the owners' permission to have the kitchen floor and the blinds replaced, and for the plumber to investigate the extensive water damage to the wall outside the bathroom. As I understand it, repairs have slowed because the previous tenants' bond has been completely eaten up, and the rest is down to the owners to decide what they'll pay for.

The rest is down to me and Alex, and I'm very proud of the progress we've made so far. The kitchen is out of order, but we've got the fridge in the laundry and the microwave in the loungeroom and all the crockery in the dresser by the front door. We now have internet, which is faster and more reliable than anything I've used before. We've managed to get most of the boot-prints off the ceiling - don't ask me, I don't want to talk about it. And I am relatively confident that the roach population no longer outnumbers the population of Sydney (although the survivors seem to be thoroughly enjoying their newly uncontested access to the piles of filth in the kitchen that I haven't managed to completely purge yet).

There's one thing I'm even prouder of than the progress detailed above. I don't know how many people on my flist are familiar with my morbid fear of cockroaches, so let me put it this way: they used to terrify me so badly that my poor long-suffering Alex and my lovely best friend R had developed an efficient system of signals whereby they could alert one another to any cockroach sightings, and spring into action to divert my attention and surreptitiously remove the intruder before I spotted it and spent the next hour having a hysterical breakdown. But now, having come up against such vast numbers of them in a deadly battle for tenancy of this apartment and emerged relatively victorious, I seem to have completely overcome my fear. I mean, I'm not planning on throwing any dinner parties in their honour (not that I have much choice in the matter until the pest guy comes again), but I have developed a truly heroic ability to dispose of the little arseholes when they decide to disrespect my zero-tolerance policy for roaches indoors. I started out with baby steps, using the vacuum to suck them up from a safe distance, and I've steadily progressed to stamping on them and even squashing them with tissues when they're too high for my foot to reach. One even attacked me in bed the other night, and I still managed to sleep soundly once I'd taught the jerk some respect.

Anyway, the place isn't perfect, but it's livable and I'm starting to feel really happy and comfortable here. I exhausted myself so badly during the move that I caught some kind of plague which turned into an ear infection which caused me to miss the whole of this past week of uni due to being in a staggering amount of pain and literally too weak to support my own weight for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Antibiotics are slowly getting rid of the infection and I'm feeling much better but still utterly exhausted and feeble. Oh, and I have a total of 5000 words of essays to write, pronto, and a whole week's worth of Ancient Greek to catch up on, and rapidly approaching final exams, so any remaining filth is going to have to wait until I am no longer at risk of missing all my important class deadlines.

Oh well. At least I can sleep soundly knowing that said filth will still be waiting patiently for me when I finish Dying Of University.

PS. Smack bang in the middle of all this, Alex and I had our one-year anniversary. It was low-key (by necessity, but also by desire) and absolutely lovely.

This afternoon, my Nana called to wish me a happy twenty-first birthday, to discuss appropriate gifts, and to help me arrange my party.

The facts of the matter - that I am currently nineteen, that my birthday is in December, and that since she and Grandad live in a tiny town a few hours away from my place and a few hours more from my parents' and refuse to travel further than a few hundred metres away from their house except for one of their bi-hourly appointments with whatever specialist doctors they can convince to let them through the door, she is very unlikely to be a key player in the organisation of any parties for me - had apparently not registered with Nana. I almost feel bad for telling her the truth. She'd gotten herself mightily excited about it all.

Also this afternoon, a parcel of kumquats arrived from Gran (Gran being my maternal grandmother; Nana is parternal). This is the second parcel of kumquats she's sent me in the past couple of months, and this time they don't seem to have gone mouldy in the post. I'm glad they've survived the trip this time, because Gran has developed something of a habit of sending me unsolicited bits and bobs that almost never survive the trip. She certainly can't afford the postage - she lives in a tiny old house in Queensland with her husband Alf, a distinctly unlikeable octogenarian whose company even she can't stand. She has lived there for a few years, since she spent all her retirement money to move as far away from our family as possible in order to teach my mum a lesson.

For the record, none of us has ever managed to figure out exactly what the lesson was. But Gran really doesn't have enough money to be paying for so many of her hand-me-downs and garden produce to get broken in the mail.

My Ancient Greek lecturer is a reserved, somewhat forbidding retired British lawyer with a tendency to answer student questions as though we are all plaintiffs in a high-stakes case he is defending.

My Ancient Greek lecturer has taken to starting each week off with a feel-good inspirational pep-talk emphasizing how much faith he has in each and every one of us.

THAT is how dire the Ancient Greek workload has become.

[TRIGGER WARNING: sexual assault; victim blaming]

So the other day, a story popped up in my news feed about a man sexually assaulting a female flight attendant on a plane to JFK. It caught my attention because it's being built up as this jaw-droppingly ludicrous incident. Here's why:

Emphasis mine.

Much stress is laid on the ridiculous 'blood sugar' excuse Chumak offered. We are supposed to be flabbergasted at such a bizarre and stupid claim. And hey, as far as that goes, I'm on the same page with the Gothamist. The idea that blood sugar could ever be considered an acceptable reason for sexually assaulting someone is contemptible.

Still, the ridicule heaped on that line kind of grates, because I imagine many of the people laughing have the idea that ridiculous excuses for committing sexual assault are rare. It's so blatantly obvious to them that blood sugar can't possibly be held to cause sexual assault. People aren't used to hearing a justification for an act of sexual violence that doesn't let them see the attacker's point to at least some extent, and so the Chumak story is a novelty.

Maybe I just follow completely different media to everyone else in the world, but as far as I know, ridiculous excuses for sexual assault are in fact nauseatingly common. I can't remember the last time I read a newspaper report on a sexual assault that didn't at least hint at some absurdly implausible 'reason' for the crime. The choices of Excuses That Don't Hold Water are limitless, but here are a few popular ones you might be familiar with:
- the assailant perceived the victim as promiscuous
- the victim was dressed in a revealing manner
- the victim had had previous sexual content with hir assailant
- the victim had previously been receptive to the advances of hir assailant
- the victim really wanted it
- the assailant thought the victim really wanted it
- the victim and/or the assailant were intoxicated

And so on.

Now, tell me. What is it that makes 'the assailant had low blood sugar' so much more ridiculous than, say, 'the assailant was confused by the conflicting messages of the victim's lack of consent and hir revealing clothing'? Why is the idea of a rapist standing up in court and saying zie had low blood sugar considered utterly laughable, whereas victims being grilled on their sartorial choices, sexual history, alcohol consumption and so on is just routine? If a news article identifying the perpetrator of a sexual assault as having had low blood sugar at the time is such a great joke, why does nobody laugh every time a paper identifies the victim as flirtatious, promiscuous, drunk, or straight-up dishonest? Why is it understandable for a rapist to blame hir decisions on a few too many drinks, but not on hir blood sugar levels?

Because rape culture, that's why. Because our society operates on the assumption that (almost always) male sexual behaviour is controlled by (almost always) female behaviour, that sexual assault is natural and justifiable under certain circumstances. I can't think of a single plausible reason why anybody should lose control of their ability to not sexually assault other people due to low blood sugar. I also cannot think of a single plausible reason why anybody should lose control of their ability to not sexually assault other people due to having caught a glimpse of cleavage. Both excuses are completely ridiculous - but only one of them gets the contempt it deserves when someone tries to use it.

That said, I for one am looking forward to the upcoming rigorous scientific study from Ultra-Science University arguing that women who don't want to be sexually assaulted should start carrying sugary snacks around with them in case they meet a man in a blood sugar crisis.

According to lizas_lines my life is ridiculous. In her words (more or less): "whenever I see a post by you, I know something ridiculous has happened." Looking back, I can sort of see her point. But hey, a wise man once said...something. Fuck, I don't know. Go find your own pithy quote. I'm too sick for this shit.

I've been sick since I got back from Visiting The Family. I am not going to bother recounting that trip because half of it was too miserable for me to be thinking about right before (or technically about half an hour after) bedtime, and the other half was spent mostly in the company of people who make up most of this journal's readership. I have since been more bed-ridden than I've been in pretty much forever. It didn't start out so bad, but I made it worse in the course of, er, running a very important experiment. Conducted for YOUR benefit, so you better be thanking me. After a week of hacking my lungs up and being force-fed soup by the long-suffering Boyfriend, I am now in a position to reveal the results of said experiment.

A handy check-list of things that will NOT help get rid of a cold (TMI):
* Chain-smoking
* Abstaining from food, even if you DO have a really really good excuse (mine - "eh can't be bothered cooking, I'll just have wine and Tiny Teddies instead." Genius.)
* Wine and Tiny Teddies (see above)
* Impromptu porn-watching parties (even if it DID start out as a perfectly innocent come-over-and-we'll-watch-Firefly-and-drink-wine type gathering)
* Drinking games
* Lesbian make-out sessions with people who are also slightly sick. Actually, that one probably isn't lesbian-specific.
* Energetic 1am sex.

Look, it was for SCIENCE, ok? SCIENCE.

Much-needed medical insight aside, the above foray into the world of scientific research was the last interesting thing to happen to me. Since then my movements have been largely confined to the bedroom and the living room, between which venues Boyfriend has had to carefully escort me for fear of (more) dizzy spells and subsequent attempts by the floor to murder me in cold blood. Yesterday I got to leave the house to see Alice and Aaron, which was as wonderful as seeing Alice and Aaron always is, but sadly I can't say we were meeting under the happiest circumstances ever. I got to leave the house again today, but that was to go grocery shopping and I fucking HATE grocery shopping and I only went because now poor Boyfriend is sick from having taken care of me and I don't want him repeating my Tiny Teddies error because there's nothing else in the house.

I also get to leave the house tomorrow, to go to class for the first time since this bug hit properly. I really should have been in bed by now...oops.

(Alice, you and your family are in my thoughts.)

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been very busy with study.

I use the term 'busy' here as short-hand for a complex state of being foreign to many who aren't chronic procrastinators with ADHD. Ordinarily, as I understand it, the word 'busy' is used to communicate a state of continual productive activity. Or something like that. Not so with me.

If I am to explain my own experience of being a Busy Person, I should maybe share something I've come to understand about ADHD, specifically as it applies to organisation. Normal People (TM) often (but not always) possess an innate ability to keep track of multiple tasks at any given time. By that, I don't mean that Normal People (TM) can all perform amazing feats, like single-handedly running five different multi-million dollar corporations while raising twenty-eight children, studying advanced robotics at post-graduate level and volunteering fifteen hours a week at charities in several different cities. I mean more that, for a Normal Person (TM), a morning routine consisting of getting out of bed, showering, eating breakfast, gathering several books, a phone, a wallet and a set of keys, catching a train that leaves at the same time every day and disembarking at the same station, is probably not an enormous stretch on their organisational abilities. Not so for folks like me. It takes real concentration to get all those things done, and on any given day there's a high chance I will have forgotten to do at least one thing on that list. (Clarification: I always remember to shower! I have only forgotten to shower maybe once or twice in my life. I'm not some icky BO-monster who makes children cry by sitting down wind of them, I swear.) So, by the time I actually arrive at my first class, my morning generally already feels as though it's been very busy.

And then I have to do things like go to *multiple classes* within a set time frame, and eat two more meals each day, and complete significant amounts of study to a deadline, and hold down a job, and Have Friends. And that's when things tend to get very chaotic in Lucy Land.

I'm getting side-tracked. The point of this post: study habits. One of the GOOD things about ADHD is that it has this symptom called hyperfocus. Basically, if I DO manage to get the concentration ball rolling on something, nothing can stop it. Brick walls cannot stop it. Fire cannot stop it. And so I'm really good at getting study done in enormous binges. Where I throw myself into a certain task and pour out every thought I've ever had about it onto paper and get through piles and piles of work because there's not enough work in the WORLD to satisfy my zealous obsessiveness.

That doesn't always happen.

In an effort to get stuff done more consistently, I set aside multiple hours in a day when I am supposed to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up and just study, goddamn it. And I'm ok-ish at the first two parts. I ban myself strictly from doing anything fun, because that might distract me from the work I have to do. So I study until my brain turns into a foggy mess, which can take anything from thirty seconds to half an hour. And then I take a break. But I'm not allowed to do anything fun with my break lest I get too absorbed in it and forget to go back to my study, so I find something banal to do, like a mildly entertaining game on my phone, or a book I don't really care about.

This is a big mistake.

There is nothing my brain loves more than a completely banal task to focus on. The moment it is presented with something suitably useless to focus on, it clings tight and flatly refuses to be torn away. And so I keep going until my conscience manages to shout loud enough to make my brain pay attention, which can take anything from half an hour to an entire day. And then I start studying until my brain gives out again...and from there it is lather, rinse, repeat material.

And THAT is why I have not been updating my journal.

So, I have recently embarked on a temporary no-drinking project. Every so often, after I've been over-doing it over a period of time, my body just says "ok, not on, I need a break." From which point I am unable to keep down a single alcoholic drink until it has been given a couple of weeks to recover. That's where I'm at now. In any case, I'm in a fairly antisocial frame of mind lately and going out constantly just doesn't appeal to me. Add to that the fact that I quit smoking a while ago and I'm still struggling with cravings, especially when I'm around smokers (ie. all my friends). Which makes taking time out from my social life an all-around good idea right now.

Today, I was enjoying a nice day of voluntary isolation from society. I had Wuthering Heights, I had tea, I had biscuits - I was set. When my phone rang I seriously considered just not answering it, but apparently I'm not wired that way. Good thing, because it was a lovely friend of mine, hysterically upset because her arsehole boyfriend just split with her. Naturally, considering her situation, what she wanted was to get drunk.

I dragged myself down to the pub in order to perform my All Men Are Bastards duty. Being in a pub and not drinking is an entirely foreign notion to me, but there is no denying that I kicked arse. I can truthfully say that the closest I came to touching anything alcoholic was a faked lesbian kiss with another very drunk girl who was getting sleazed onto by some creepy guys at the next table.

My friend is now on her cheerfully drunk way home in a taxi, and I am back in my room a little wired (I find that large amounts of caffeine make a great supplement for willpower) but entirely sober, very impressed with my henceforth undiscovered ability to leave the house of an evening WITHOUT getting wasted, and looking forward to curling up in my nice warm bed with my book and a mug of chamomile tea.

I am so fantastic.

This morning, boyfriend informed me that all his sex fantasies nowadays conclude with 'look, I can't, I've got a girlfriend.'

Have duly notified boyfriend that, if he ever DOES get propositioned by an attractive lustful air hostess by way of a note delivered with his in-flight meal, he is to accept the offer on pain of my severe disappointment.

That is all.