Pressed by my friend Sashin, I watched KONY 2012, a short film and campaign to get Joseph Kony arrested before the end of 2012. By virally spreading information about his crimes of humanity, hopefully there will be enough support from the American Government for ambassadors to visit Uganda to assist the Ugandan military in the capture and arrest of Kony. As leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Kony and his army have abducted and forced thousands of children to fight for them. Kony must simply be stopped. Spreading the word about this is the least you can do, but it’s something small as well. Educate yourself on the situation. No one should have to experience what Kony has done to others. Watch the video, pass on the message.
I’ve got bruises on my left arm from the Grates’ concert last Friday. I also have a strange bruise on my right hand – I think I might have accidentally banged the door or something, but it’s an uncomfortable spot to have a bruise. I’m pretty pale skinned so it looks odd.
The jigsaw puzzle has been driving me insane. I kept getting distracted by it at work. I don’t think it was the best idea to have it at work, but I don’t have much space at home, and when I opened the box at work, it was like the be-all-end-all… that was where the damn thing was staying. The thing is, with me being distracted by it at work, there was no way it was going to stay on my desk forever. It was already taking up half my desk. Even though I had enough space to put my bag, and the keyboard still had enough room, the fact that a half-finished jigsaw puzzle and its pieces and box were right next to me were just excruciatingly painful for my ticking brain. I would constantly look out of the corner of my eye while typing code on the computer, and then spot a loose piece and the place it was supposed to go.
It was very distracting.
Lilian reckons I can code in my sleep, but I think I can only go so far as to do it with my eyes shut.
I had this conversation yesterday with my boss…
“Georgina…”
“Yes…”
“Have you finished?”
“No.”
“Are you stuck?”
“No…”
“…”
“I’m sorry, I’m just so distracted by this puzzle!”
Yesterday in class I was on the 27th floor again, with beautiful sunset views. The weather was lovely that day. Most of the class was the tutor going through HTML, text editors and the like. All stuff I was very familiar with. I really wanted to turn around and face my computer but I didn’t want to be rude. I joined in the discussion anyway, and chipped in a bit when it came to webhost suggestions and text editor suggestions. I apparently came up with the best suggestion in the class, that is, Surpass Hosting.
I finished the tutorial exercises in five, ten minutes… too easy for me. Really too easy. I aim to give myself a challenge with the proposal we have to submit. That’s what I like about subjects like these – you learn, but you have the opportunity to push yourself as well. It’s really for your own benefit though. I know some people suggested to me “make a website” as a proposal, and James even suggested I propose something I already created, and just not tell anyone until later. That would be a splendid idea, but as flexible as this subject is, I really do want to try and learn something new while teaching staff are around to help me and while I’m paying for this education, haha.
After class a boy named Yu came up to me and asked if I was Georgina; he said that he really liked my blog and its layout and found my tutorials useful. I was so thrilled. I didn’t quite know what to say but thanks; not many people have ever said that to me in person.
This morning I came to work about an hour early just so I could work on the puzzle before my shift started. My boss helped me move the puzzle to the kitchen… dun dun dun… and Georgie was no longer distracted. Dylan, who works in the office too, joked, “How much are you paying her to do this per hour?”
I am probably about a quarter of the way through.
I slept at 10:00pm last night. I’m going to sleep at around that time every day now, or where possible. I find myself tired when I get home late these days, but I guess that’s the nature of full time work and full time study.
There are times when nightmares have really, truly happened, and often, the worst nightmare is being caught out. For example, being caught urinating in a public place. Or being walked in on while doing something embarrassing. Having skirts fly up in the breeze. Having pants fall down. Walking into a glass door. Lists could be endless here. It’s not just embarrassing moments, either. I think there are two other kinds of nightmares that can occur, that are often vocally expressed like so: 1) “I’d rather be dead than be caught listening to Justin Bieber”, or 2) “I seriously hope my parents don’t find out about this”.
I’m pretty guilty of the latter. I’m not a goody-two shoes, but I’m not very rebellious either. Like typical rebellious daughters, I don’t do drugs or drink until I get trashed, I don’t drive a car when I don’t even have a licence, I don’t go out late and ignore my parents’ phone calls. Like most daughters, when I’m in a bad mood I yell at my parents, I also hate doing housework sometimes, and my room is a mess.
I began web design about ten years ago but didn’t have a personal website until 2003. I had just been learning to work my head around HTML and CSS. When I decided to make a personal website and include a detailed profile of myself, the only digital photograph I had of myself was a photo of me in a ballet costume performing the Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker Suite. Back then, digital cameras were expensive and I had obtained a digital copy of this photograph thanks to my ballet teacher. I didn’t think twice and I put it straight on my website, along with a substantial amount of information about myself.
I was level-headed, I was well-informed, I was careful, but I was also naive, and perhaps gave out too much information. The internet is full of predators, though over the past few years – dare I say – it has become a more interactive platform and people are interacting via Twitter and even advertising themselves to employers via websites like LinkedIn. I wouldn’t go as far to say that it’s safer, but it’s become more of an outlet for people to connect than it was before.
In 2003, I was 12. Ooh, come on. No parent likes their twelve-year-old chatting to other people online. Though I was regularly chatting with Rhiannon (whom some of you might remember from PetShopGirlsReviews.com before she disappeared, or if you remember her before then, she owned petshopgirl.tk) and other people who owned blogs and websites, my mum wasn’t pleased when I told her I was chatting to some random chick on Messenger from Perth, and she doozed up and ranted about how this girl could be some freaky old man who lived just around the corner. I was just thinking, come on, fat chance.
Ages ago, my uncle used to send a crapload of chain mail to my mum. My mum used to refer to this particular one, in which there was some ridiculous story about this girl who started talking to a boy online. One day there was a man following her as she walked home from basketball practice, and as soon as she reached home, she rushed inside and shut the door. Her parents obviously asked her what was wrong, and it turns out the man following her was a douchebag hired by her parents to teach her a lesson about chatting to people online. I hate that story, FTR.
I get too attached to it. Correction: got. What with this SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) issue getting heated up, yakking on to my brother about it…
I see many people are involved. Many people blocked out their websites for the 18th day of January. People tweeted about it everywhere. People posted about it on their blogs. People posted about it on forums. People expressed their opinion virtually everywhere – on the internet. I guess I didn’t really want to put much thought into the issue, thinking that a lot of these internet-related laws or acts usually don’t garner much of a problem in the end. Of course, it crushes the right that people have to free speech, but when I look at it in light of other things, I feel like it’s not going to take a massive toll on my life.
I could be wrong, though.
My brother seemed to only have become interested in the issue today. I hardly talk to him since he’s occupied with studying and activities like taekwondo, and I have work myself, but when we do get to chat, it’s usually about the internet or music or something that is indirectly related to the internet. Today he brought up SOPA, as if it was completely new to him. He does use the internet a lot – just as much as I do – but he doesn’t do much other than play games and watch videos occasionally. That said, I’m not surprised he wasn’t as educated on SOPA as I was.
My parents find me to be very terrible when it comes to “general knowledge” and world news and “current affairs”. Truth be told, I hate current affairs and I find news incredibly dull.
It’s always “three thousand people were killed when a ship ran aground on the east coast of Whatchamacallit. About fifty of them are believed to be Australians”. The latter sentence always ticks me off, because for some reason, when a large number of people have died, the fact is always put forward that so-and-so Australians have died. I begin to wonder if it is like that in other countries. Perhaps not. My brother, on the other hand, gratuitously laughs and repeats lines from newsreaders that follow as such: “Good evening a man has died…” where there is no pause for breath between the greeting and the announcement of a tragic incident.
But when it comes to internet-related things, oh, I like to believe I’m on the ball. Which is why I wasn’t at all surprised when my mum said, “What are you guys talking about?” Neither she or my dad had any idea what SOPA was about, though my dad had a faint grasp of the situation. My dad uses the internet to download music, and my mum sends and receives emails. That’s about it. If the internet were to go down for whatever reason, they wouldn’t feel that affected.
I guess in the past few weeks, being busy with work, I haven’t felt so attached to the internet as I have before. I know, I work with the internet with web design and I have to be connected to the internet, but I still don’t feel that need to check my email every two minutes. My consolidation has done me really well; I have cut down on a lot of online projects and I’ve relaxed in terms of blogging and reading blogs. It’s something I enjoy, but after nine hours at work, sometimes I really do just want to read a book, or watch Futurama, or crash on the couch and just see whatever movie is on television. I have hated many things about the internet – the drama, the idiots, the YouTube commentators, the YouTube “community” (as my boss says, “what community? More like a flash mob”), the Tumblr bitches, Tumblr in general, the whiny bloggers, the paedophiles, the sex advertisements, the thieves, the…
Oh, I could go on. But you know, it’s times like these when I really appreciate a good walk out of the office and Vietnamese food with the gang (I’m just referring to workmates here), a walk to the bus stop with Jebediah ringing in my ears, or just curled up in bed on a Saturday morning finishing a really good book.
Whatever happens with SOPA, well, rest assured that it can go right back up the backsides of anyone who makes the internet an unpleasant place.
Maybe we all do. But a lot of us take photos that aren’t ours to use as avatars, rephrase things, quote Wikipedia, have downloaded an album without paying, have shared music with everyone else – maybe we do get a taste of our own medicine, but who’s going to stop us? It’s the freakin’ internet.
Lilian. My best friend. We haven’t seen each other since – I can’t even remember now. I think the last time I saw her was when I visited her university while I had a five-hour break at university. We talk all the time, but we need to hang out some time too.
James. I haven’t seen him since university ended, which really was quite some time ago. It’s long for us – because usually we get by with seeing each other once a week. I’m seeing him tomorrow though. I’m going to the Explosions in the Sky show, which should be amazing. The show is apparently sold out, so I’m glad we got tickets early. James will be picking me up from home and we’ll be going to a train station with parking, then catching a train to the venue. I’ve read many reviews about Explosions in the Sky being the “best concert” some have been to, and the crowd behaved so well that sometimes people forgot they were there. I won’t truly know until I see for myself. I’m excited but a bit nervous at the same time because I’m not quite sure what to expect. All the shows I’ve been to so far have been very different. I guess different is good – but not knowing what to expect always makes me a bit nervous.
My long hair. I was just looking back on my old videos that I recorded, and my hair was so long. It was layered and I had a side fringe, and now it’s so much shorter and I have a straight fringe. I’m keeping the straight fringe for a while, because I absolutely hate how a side fringe grows out. I really want to grow my hair a lot before I decide to get it layered.
Ballet. I just didn’t have the time to keep teaching so I stopped. I reached what I call the better end… which wasn’t the real end of the journey, but it was an end for me. A qualified student teacher, I’m really happy with how far I went with that. I’ve participated in so many activities from my childhood up until now, and I’ve never really fully mastered any of them except ballet. I loved ballet so much that I chose to continue it even though I stopped my other dance styles, and even though I took a break from ballet, I went back. I remember crying before I went back because I realised how much it meant to me. I miss it now simply because I haven’t had the time to dance even for fun, my pointe shoes don’t fit so well anymore, and I’ve lost a lot of the strength I had in my muscles. I still have a dancer’s legs, but I cramp a bit more easily and I need to regain the strength in my calves.
Sushi. I haven’t had it in a while, and I just miss it so much. Since my appetite has been a bit of a mess since I started taking antidepressants, I’ve only been eating fruit and small meals of pasta and vegetables. I feel like eating really light stuff a lot of the time.
The bloggers that stopped blogging. Gillian, Swetlana, Kat, just to name a few. The blogging world isn’t what it was before. A lot of the people I know stopped blogging or disappeared. Every now and then I remember them and how fun it was having them around. Now I only see them on Twitter, or they’ve just disappeared.
The patience to do pixel art. I honestly don’t know how I had the patience. I did a lot of this back in 2006, and though I wasn’t that good, I eventually improved. But pixel art took so long; it took up so much of my time. A lot of people were so much better than me, their pixels were perfect to every detail. I admired those people very much but I soon moved into designing more textured layouts with brushes… and I was much better at scribbling and drawing and doodling. I deleted the pixels page from my website today without any regrets. I would love to try my hand at pixelling again, but I honestly do think I’ve lost the patience.
My two dogs. I didn’t own them for a long time, but I loved them so much. As a family, we were just far too busy and returned the dogs to the original owner – a family friend – who gave them loving new homes.
Indonesia. (Just a little bit.) It shocks me that I’m writing this, but even though I claim to hate the country in which my parents were born, I sometimes like a fair bit about it. I hated people making sexual comments about me in the street, and I hated the toilets and the smell and the pollution and the traffic, but I miss the food stalls, especially the bakso soup (meatballs) and the noodles, and I miss just glancing in the shops even if I didn’t want to buy anything. I also miss my cousins and the routine of waking up early and… I don’t know how to word the rest.
Work. I know I worked just yesterday, but I miss it.
Sometimes I wish that more Australians celebrated Halloween. You don’t get much more than the one kid out of nine hundred students in a high school wearing a black cape and a ghost mask, or about one kid every five years knocking on your door asking for candy, or the odd Halloween party – if people can be bothered. It’s not celebrated nationally, and I haven’t minded that the rest of the world celebrates it without us, but today, I felt a bit bored and thought it would be pretty exciting if one of my friends decided to have a Halloween party.
I don’t know what I’d dress up as – for dressing in revealing clothing seems to be common for girls, but I’d rather get more creative with my costume. The closest I’ve come to dressing up as anything is on muck-up day in the last year of high school. We had people dress up as Powerpuff girls, Tetris pieces, that guy from Saw, some cavemen, and numerous other things I don’t really remember. I dressed up as a ragdoll. I’ll admit I could have been more creative with that, because I was planning to create a dress covered entirely in random buttons, but I didn’t have time. The school gave us short notice.
If we celebrated Halloween I’d be thinking about my costume a couple of months in advance. Now that I think about it, I can’t really think of anything I’d want to be – at least, not anything scary. I could try dress up as a Doctor Who character, which would then verge on cosplaying. Otherwise, I’d hire a costume of a character I like or just something hilarious. But because I wouldn’t bothered with any of those, Halloween would just be an excuse for me to go to work in my pyjamas. It’s weird not celebrating Halloween, because many people showcase their wonderful costumes on the internet – on YouTube, on blogs, on Twitter, and so on – and I just can’t imagine what it would be like if it was more of a tradition here.
In other news, my dad is polishing our corkboard floor. Our house is really rather old. Not so old that it’s falling apart, but it’s nothing majestic. It’s what I call home. It’s comfortable, it’s lovely, it’s got enough room. My dad’s been using this lacquer-like polish so he’s basically had to sand the floor and paint this glossy fun stick stuff on it. We’ve had to move a lot of the furniture, and empty some bookshelves, but the fun part – wait for it – is that he’s doing sections at a time and marking boundaries with masking tape so sometimes we have to jump over certain sections of floor. A few people mentioned to me on Twitter that it reminded them of the game The Floor is Lava. I remember playing this with my brother as we climbed on the furniture and desperately tried to search for patches of rug that were safe to stand on as we were avoiding the floor.
My corkboard floor used to scare me because of the design; it’s got black spots on it basically, obviously like cork – and some of the black spots were bigger than others, or weirdly shaped, and I used to think they were insects from a distance.
I remember doing really idiotic things with my brother when we were a lot younger. We named one of our antics “Po Blood and Bone”. I had a Teletubby toy, Po specifically, and we got really sick of the Teletubbies so we buried Po in the dirt outside, in one of the holes our mum used to plant trees in.
Many other times we made “forts” out of chairs and blankets and turned out the lights and pretended we were camping out. I liked this the most.
My brother made up this game where we stood on the carpet while standing on old supermarket catalogues or flyers, one under each foot, and we had to wiggle around from side to side and move around like we were skating on the carpet. Because of the paper, it made the movements very slippery. The first person to fall obviously lost.
One of my absolute favourite games was “Roly Poly Pudding”, based on a Beatrix Potter story. A cat was rolled up by rats in a sheet of dough (to be cooked and eaten), and struggled to get out. This prompted us to make up a game where one person rolled the other person in a large quilt/doona/blanket (arms inside!) and tied up the blanket with string or another blanket, to basically make sure that it was impossible to escape. The person inside the roll would have to attempt to escape the blanket, whether by wriggling out, or standing up and wriggling the blanket off. That is, if you could stand up in the first place.
If I had a Halloween party, I swear to cow I’d make everyone play that game.
I apparently came up with the best suggestion in the class, that is, Surpass Hosting. 
Dylan, who works in the office too, joked, “How much are you paying her to do this per hour?” 
