There have been few milestones lately, but this morning will be one, as I'm teaching my first tutorial sections for undergrad students. After the fact, I'll post my thoughts about the experience that are not going to get me fired or yelled at for unethical conduct.

I've partially packed my suitcase and in this process I've realized that I really need to re-work my wardrobe so that more of my shirts actually fit me properly. I'm trying to figure out how to best pack my rollerblades, and doing things like backing up my hard drive before flying out because the life of a PhD student is fraught with data-related ( Read more... )

Rap music often leaves me wanting a degree of closure, because a lot of the rap songs I've been listening to lately tend to accuse me, the listener, of "fronting", while being composed of allusions to the rapper's superior skill at rapping to my own (touche) and ranting threats. While a solid formula, it leaves me wanting more ( Read more... )

I think that my time in Australia, if not my life in general, has been riddled with crises of confidence of different sorts. At 15, I was anxious about whether I'd make it socially, which was something I didn't have the utmost confidence in during those fragile adolescent years. At 21, it was my health and the toll that cancer and its treatments ( Read more... )

Some friends of mine have recently made mention of a variation of "some bad and painful thing not quite on the level of a tragedy happened, consequently I must drink the pain away." This leads me to a question:

Does that ever actually work?

Far be it from me to assume that what goes for me goes for everyone, but if I start drinking in a morose mood ( Read more... )

A few months ago, I had a chat with a friend that I had done my Master's degree with. An aspiring theatre critic, she announced that she had taken to writing poetry and sent me a few to look at. Rather than pursue the tack of being an icoloclastic critic of everything, I enjoyed the read. I told her that I used to dabble in writing poetry, but that ( Read more... )

My housemate Jenny invited me to spend Christmas with her family rather than alone at the apartment, which was a nice thing to do and one that I'm grateful for, all the more since I enjoyed it, by and large, and expect to enjoy the next few days in the Gippsland countryside. Tomorrow we are off to the beach, and, naturally, I am excited ( Read more... )

I think the real reason I post in this so little is that I'm better at figuring things out for myself now.

For the first time in a while, I've started really feeling self-confident, and while the self-deprecating humour isn't going away, I really feel like I'm firing on all cylinders again. I feel near to invincible. (Surviving my housing crisis and the like helped that along ( Read more... )

I've finally gotten my act together and made an appointment with a relevant specialist to get my cancer follow-up testing routine back underway Down Under, and that appointment is tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully it's not going to cost me a whole bundle of money (that I don't really have), because the insurance plan I'm on has those coverage ( Read more... )