Monday, August 29, 2011

Zones of Comfort

So today I'm riding the elevator up to the seventh floor of the Menzies Building on Monash University's Clayton Campus, and I'm watching the other people - students, teachers, post-grads who're a little of both - getting on and off on different floors. I wonder, nearly absently, whether any of them have been to the seventh floor, or, if like me, they've only been to their one floor. If they are like me, then the majority of their classes on this campus will only have ever been on that one floor, so they've never had a reason to get off at a different floor. I wonder what those other floors are like - are they laid out exactly like mine? do they have the same pokey corridors, bits of  construction, new bathrooms? - and whether or not I can ever be bothered to find out. After all, why would it benefit me if I drifted onto a different floor every now and then just to see what it's like when I've no actual business there. Maybe I'd just look silly. Are we caring about that?

The next thing I wonder, which makes me smile, is that I refer to the seventh floor as 'my' floor, as though it having contained all my classes on this campus gives me some sort of proprietary right to it; of course, when I get on the elevator and ride it up I get off at 'my' floor, just like everyone else gets off of theirs. I hear them say it when they're parting ways with friends or colleagues - or both: 'This is my floor. See you at lunch.', or 'This is me.' It's odd that particular places inspire that kind of level of comfort, public places in particular; if you go their regularly then you feel like you belong to that place and that place belongs to you in some shape or form, simply because you have certain experience with the place in question.

Just food for thought really...

ClearSkies~V

Monday, August 15, 2011

Ahahaha, BUTTONS!

So, I managed to break my ankle (it was raining, I slipped). It's more inconvenient than painful, but it does mean I get to sit in bed all day knitting. I now have an army of tiny adorable duckies!

I present, for your edification and amusement, Dr. TinyDuck!


You can trust him, he's a doctor. Quack.

I've also crafted myself an army of evil pumpkin heads, but I didn't have nearly enough eye-buttons for them. So I got me some more! Now I sit in bed all day sewing button eyes onto things. Totally not pretending I'm someone's Other Mother. Mwahahah.



Ah, Student Politics

Part of my Monday routine involves wasting the hours between arriving on campus and my Exotic Erotic Other class at 2pm. X usually drops me off at the station on his way to work which means I'm usually on campus by around 10am, depending on what time we're out the door. This means I generally have enough time to have a real sort of breakfast on campus - Monash's Clayton Campus is pretty awesome for food availability and variety - wander around the bookshop to see if there's anything I want to add to my collection - Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters, Gaiman's Anansi Boys - and run any other errands I can do on campus - any banking, doctor appointments, optometrists. Most of the time I end up sitting at a table with a fruit smoothie doing my readings or, ever since I got my hands on one of these little netbooks, typing things, doing research, etc etc etc. Lately of course, I've been looking at dress designs - but I'll discuss that more at a later date.

Today's time wasting took place primary in the English School Library, during which I was looking at pretty things before getting kicked out at 12:45pm by some of the members of the faculty who needed the room for a meeting, fair enough really. So I had some lunch and a ginger ale and then, out of sheer boredom and need to fill another hour with a useless activity that - preferably - didn't cost me any money, I wandered up to one of the several tables that were doing their student politic-y things. This one was trying to get as many signatures for a petition to the Australian Government to halt the 'Refugee Malaysia Solution' - for those of you not in the know, the Malaysia Solution, as it's being called apparently, involves, more or less, the government relieving the pressure of overpopulation in their refugee detention centres by sending refugees to a centre in Malaysia; the problem that has been raised with this is that Malaysia is not a signatory of the UNHCR Refugee Convention which deals with issues such as fair treatment and human rights. There's more to it of course, but that's it in a nutshell.

So anyways, I step up to said table, thinking 'eh, what the hell', and of course I ended up at the Socialist Alternative table...the group I'd spent so many years at the ANU avoiding....

Dredging up ever last thing I remembered about what not to say I ended up having a fairly basic conversation with the young woman, who in the process pawned off several bits and pieces of reading material off on me - I might even read some of them before I throw them out; can you tell I'm less than completely politically motivated? 
And so, I ended up back outside class, waiting for the meeting to end and class to start, and typing this up...because I can.

ClearSkies~V

Friday, August 12, 2011

Random Pretty

This is me...on my 2nd(?) birthday!
My Mom (who is holding my pressie) found it a little while ago.
Isn't I cute?