Who's Who?

It really is fascinating reading the statistics log for this blog, and seeing why and from where people come here.

Many of you are RL friends who've been given my blog address, or friends from one of the sites (BtN, NaNoWriMo, Notebook) who've clicked on the link in my profile on one of those websites. Others are friends from one or the other, and who've googled 'Archaeochrisell' to get here. I’m also seeing a few hits from old classmates who’ve clicked on the link on the Eastern Hills SHS reunion page. Hi guys! And then there’s the folks who’ve arrived here by googling or blogsearching a set of keywords, either related to me (someone blogsearched ‘archaeology’ + ‘Christine’ + the name of my university – nice work!) or unrelated (the Prosh post got quite a few hits for that reason).

Anyway, everyone’s welcome, and if you’re a regular visitor (or just passing through) and want to let me know you’re here, I’d love it if you’d post a comment to this post to say ‘hi’. You don’t have to of course, but it’d be nice for me! 

Wants

Right now, I have a pretty clear idea of what I want from life in the coming years. I want to finish my degree, spend 1.5-2.5 years teaching in the south west of WA, then to go to London and teach there for an unspecified number of years. Then I want to come back to WA and teach in the south west again. Somewhere in all that I want to meet someone, fall in love and get married, and once I’m back in the south west I want to have kids, up to about 4 of them, who will go to the local primary then to a private high school.

That’s just a rough outline of what would be the absolute best pathway for me, as seen from right now (and as with all such things, is subject to change without notice).

But it leaves out something that I want, something that’s unlikely to the point of impossibility. That’s why it’s left out, of course, but I can’t help yearning for it. It is: to change the number of children to 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 . . . no more than 10, but more than 4.

Four is a good number – you can still fit them in an ordinary house or ordinary large car, they tend from what I’ve seen to have good dynamics, and the expenses won’t blow the budget. But I can’t help, deep down, really wanting a much larger family than the sensible ‘4’.

I want to be able to afford for my children the things I see as important: the ability to say ‘yes’ to sport / music / arts lessons if they ask for them, the ability to dress them normally and send them to good schools, the ability to take them on good holidays. And barring occasional rare cases, you just can’t do that with a big family on an ordinary couple’s salaries. And on the flipside, I don’t want to wind up with a family of kids who slave away at the family business after school or who can’t enjoy ordinary extracurricular stuff because they’ve got too many siblings. That’s very wrong in my books.

So . . . it’s a secret yearning, tucked quietly away where it can’t do any harm, and never to be satisfied. But it’s there nonetheless.

Second exam this afternoon

I have Learning & Assessment Processes this afternoon, and I can't say I'm looking forward to it. It's the most dull, dry, buzzword-bingo-ish, fussy and useless of the subjects. I understand why they teach us theory, but most of it isn't useful theory. Hands-on practical stuff, please!

Fortunately it's also one of my two best subjects and it's an open-book exam, so it shouldn't be too painful. But . . . you only have to write two essays, and you have an hour for each one. Ouch!

I forgot . . .

. . . the exam went well, too. Lol.

I'm finding myself in a very peaceful mood at the moment, almost serene. It's pleasant, if a little mysterious! I've been puzzling out some of the reasons, and here are some of the things I've discovered.

1: Every day I'm getting a little closer to being completely at peace with Aspergers. It's been 9 months since it finally hit me that I wasn't the only neurotypical in my family, but was actually a marginally better-adjusted Aspie. Since then I’ve gone through periods of rebellion and self-suppression (when I was determined that Aspergers wouldn’t stop me from learning to be completely normal) but finally I’m starting to realise that what I really need to do is to be ME, Aspergers and all. Yes I’m a bit quirky and weird, yes I value accuracy out of all proportion, yes there are parts of me that may never grow up. But that’s who I am, and it’s really nothing shameful. I can be myself, be happy, and function in the world all at once.

2: For the first time since I was fifteen, I’m not clucky (that’s a family word meaning “longing for a baby”). I don’t cry at adverts with kids in them! I’m also not feeling particularly lonely or lovelorn, which is unusual for me when I’m single. I don’t know why I’m feeling this way, but I think the drop in cluckiness is partly due to Jemima. Not that she takes the place of a baby, but having to account for her in everything has made me realise that there are so many things I want to do in my life, and they’re all extremely hard do with a kitten to account for – and she lets me leave her at home alone all day! I may be ready for babies in other ways, but I’ve realised that I can also enjoy my freedom while I’ve still got it. There’s a lot to life that can’t happen if you’re locked down into white-picket-fence mode.

I’ve also identified the fact that the one common thing in all the bad relationships I’ve had has been that the guys have been obsessed with the power relationship between us. ‘B’ and ‘N’ wanted me to be powerful and wonderful, and put me on a pedestal; and ‘C’ and ‘D’ wanted to be powerful and played mind games to keep me off-balance and weak (‘C’ far, far worse than ‘D’, of course). The best relationship I’ve had, that with ‘E’, had no power balance issues, but fell down due to his religious problems with his mother (Jewish mama’s boy . . .). So somehow I’m attracting guys or being attracted to guys who prefer relationships with uneven power balances. I don’t want that, so I need to look out for it in the future.

3: I’ve come to better understand depression, and I’ve realised that I have two types. The first, which I’m calling ‘situational’, is when I get swamped by unhappiness due to things that are happening now or which happened in the past. That sort is easily treatable with counselling, to work through the issues and put them behind me. The second sort, however, doesn’t have anything to do with situations, although it feeds on them. It’s the real, clinical depression, that deep-seated sad soreness that never quite goes away, and can flare up at any time. Understanding this makes it easier to deal with – I no longer beat myself up for feeling awful over nothing. I’m allowed! I can also look for signs of the real depression and deal with it before it finds a situation to feed on, which helps.

4: I’ve also been through a bit of a watershed recently, in that I’ve realised that some of my ‘fringe friends’ (ie the friends that are part of the same group I’m a part of, but aren’t my direct friends) aren’t really nice people at all, and I’ve given up all intention of seeing them. Finding out that I had unpleasant ‘friends’ has freed me up to make some nice, real friends! Funny, how one can forget that friends don’t have to be narky and argumentative and critical . . . lol. I’m really enjoying the friendships I’ve started at uni.

So overall I feel calm and pleasant and capable. It’s good!

Ha. I think.

So, I'm sitting in my exam today, having just finished the first question. One of the invigilators (neutral supervisors that make sure you don't cheat, escort people to the toilets, collect papers etc) was coming along my row silently collecting peoples' attendance cards and checking their IDs.

When she got to mine, she looked at my student card, went "Christine! Good luck" and moved on. I looked at her, looked at her name badge, looked back at her, and suddenly realised that she was my Dad's ex-girlfriend, Karen.

Those of you who know a bit of my history will know who - and what - I mean when I say 'Karen'. For those who don’t: the woman was a loony. I used to call her manic-depressive, and although she might not have been, medically speaking, it was certainly the way she behaved. She was also an alcoholic manipulative bitch, and she put my family through hell in the year after Mum left. She would make Dad come and stay with her (with my brother and I in tow, I was 13 and Steven was 10/11) and then fight with him and kick us all out in the middle of the night. Or she would break into our house when we weren’t there, and we’d come home to find her smoking on our verandah or getting drunk on our living room floor.

Dad needs to be needed, and Karen needed him big time – they got involved after she rolled her car while under the influence, with her son as a passenger (her son was a schoolmate of Steven’s), and was told that she had to find someone to take her son for a few nights because she was being temporarily relieved of custody of him. Dad was the person she called, and from that point on things just got worse. Dad wasn’t able to balance up his responsibility to Steven and I with his need for Karen, and neglected us quite a bit (not to the point where we went hungry or didn’t have new clothes or anything, but he would leave us alone in the middle of the night to go visit her, even when we were sick, and he was constantly dragging us to and from her house, regardless of homework or tests or whatever). Eventually he decided that we had to go live with Mum, because he couldn’t handle having custody of us while Karen was so needy. You can imagine how that felt.

About 6 months after I went to live with Mum, Karen decided that all of her problems in the on-again-off-again relationship with Dad were Mum’s fault. Mum, by this time, was married to James and had a baby on the way, and barely had any contact with Dad at all. Go figure. Anyway, she started phoning us up late at night and early in the morning to harangue us. We tried whistling down the phone to get her to stop, and eventually took out a restraining order (which, when she breached it, the police refused to prosecute . . . *sigh*).

The last I heard from Karen was when I was about 17 and living with Dad for a while (who was by that time also remarried, to someone else). He still had occasional contact with Karen because she owed him a lot of money, and at that point she was still trying to convince me that she really did like me and had never meant any harm and didn’t know why I hated her so much. Blech. Pathetic and evil.

I lost a good 5 minutes of my exam time to simply being bewildered at the sudden manifestation of Karen, at my university, in my exam, in MY SPACE. But thankfully, she seemed almost meek, and when I saw her afterwards on the walkway she didn’t even try to talk to me. Perhaps it’s because Dad got the money back a few years ago with a court order, so she knows she’s really got no avenue into our lives any more; or perhaps she’s actually grown up and moved on.

Either way, it was a weird and surreal experience, and I sincerely hope she’s not in any more of my exams. I don’t want her to get over the surprise of seeing me and decide to talk! Apologies are meaningless at this point, and attempts at justification are both tiresome and sickening. I don’t want to talk to her, and I’m fiercely glad that she didn’t talk to me.

It’s a weird world. And a small city!

Exam tomorrow

I have the first of four exams tomorrow - Social Studies and Science curriculum, 8 short essays over three hours. It's my first exam since November 2001 and I'm fairly nervous about it. I think I'll do okay, but I'm still not happy.

Just writing notes this evening (to take into the exam) has made both my wrist and my elbow very sore, so I'm not looking forward to the exam experience one little bit. I'm going to be very sore tomorrow.

Anyway, wish me luck and I'll try to keep the updates coming over the next week-and-a-bit until exams are over.

Some Photos

This afternoon I went for a bit of a nature ramble around the half-bush village-suburb I live in (it was once a village in the bush outside Perth, now it's been somewhat suburbanised in the centre but it's still scruffy around the edges and it's still cut off from the neighbouring also-former-village-suburbs by tracts of bush).

The spot I went to is one that I visited many times as a child with my family. It's only a short distance on the map from the house where I grew up, but it's separated from that street by a steep gravel track that drops a significant distance (at a guess, 100m) down to the valley floor. The valley contains a winter creek (not running yet, we haven't had enough rain), an old granite quarry, and the remains of a tiny gravel-crushing plant (mostly just concrete and bits of old iron, and a small old reservoir and associated water channel). It’s a beautiful spot, rarely interfered with and with a sweet rustic charm to the interferences (half-rotted fence-posts etc) that are there.


Here's some photos for your enjoyment . . .


The upper paddock of someone's hobby farm, at the end of the road which becomes the track through the valley. You can't see my parents' house, but it's on the crest of the hill in the background. Behind where I was standing is the gravel track leading up to the home of my childhood.


A typical excerpt of the Perth Hills bush landscape: jarrah and marri trees, "blackboys" (aka the politically correct 'grass trees' . . . xanthorrhoea preissi anyway!) and various scrub and undergrowth plants. The track is the underlying red gravel, known technically as laterite pebbles, but coloquially as “rolly-stones” (they roll under your feet, you see). The white bits are chunks of natural quartz.


There aren't many wildflowers around at this time of year (ie the first days of winter) but you can always rely on Hibbertias for that glint of gold, no matter what season it is. The tree trunks around it are fire-blackened; bushfires are a regular occurence in the area. 


A hillside further up the creek - note (if you can see them) the massive granite boulders just emerging from the surface of the hillside. The hills are composed of granite and laterite, and they're high in iron - you can't rely on a compass up here!


I was rather pleased with this picture, artistically speaking, although the dead tree itself is a bit sad as it wasn't all that old when it died.


Here is the same tree reflected in the rainwater that has collected in the old gravel plant reservoir. My brother and I used to bring toy boats with us on walks and sail them here, wading in as far as we could in gumboots (usually when it was fuller!). We called it the "billabong", although it really isn't one. 



Here, also, is a little video (1 minute long) I took while standing next to the "billabong". There isn't much sound - just the roaring of the wind (it was windy) and the sound of small rocks being moved by my feet. But it does give you the 360° bush experience!