Ignorant Xenophobic Racists

Stupid College Kids Aping Black Culture

There were lots of great things about my overnight trip to the nation’s capital, but there was very one particular stand out blemish to the small road trip.

I don’t go clubbing a lot or very often but generally when I have, I thoroughly enjoy it.  I’m well aware that I dance like at total geek/dork, but there’s nothing like ‘losing yourself’ in the music.

My experience however of clubbing in our nation’s capital left me feeling extraordinary disappointed at how seemingly backwards we are in Australia.  A group of us were walking through the heart of Canberra’s ‘night life’ on the Friday night and although we had a couple of drinks we were by no means rowdy, we were simply jovial and keeping to ourselves.  At some point during the night the fact that a couple of us (2 out of 5)  were ‘Asian’ dawned on a few observant Canberrans and they simply couldn’t resist the temptation to throw a few unprovoked racist comments.

The comment that was particularly funny but at the time most enraged me, was one that was directed at ‘Dave’ – a friend of Carmen’s who is as ‘white’ as you can get. In amongst the ‘banter’ the best comeback the other guy could come up with was “look at you! you’re asian” to which I had to interject and query his intelligence and vision and although I’m not proud of calling some random guy a “blind xenophobic f*-wit” it was immensley satisfying particularly when he looked completely puzzled… ?maybe I should have said xenophobic in English for him.

Racism, especially that directed toward “Indians” has been rather topical of late in Australia and even though this was not the first time I’d experienced racial prejudice, until now I had dimissed and denied how ‘racist’ we are as a nation. Admitedly Australia is better than most countries in accepting other cultures, but we still have a long way to go…. which leads me on to something completely different which I will post about perhaps in my travels and that is how “we” as a nation seemingly strives for mediocrity (proudly) when in fact we should be striving to not lead but to set examples to the world.

40 Days to Go!

40 Days to Go!

I’m not usually the type of person that’s a big fan of countdowns, but this term and this year has been different. Ever since the beginning of the year I’ve been mentally counting down the days until I leave Australia. Although I will be returning to Australia after 6 months (a change from my plans to be away indefinitely…longish story) .

Tonight, I finally made myself sit down and try and get some of my travel stuff together. You might wonder with still so much time, why bother? Well… if I don’t I’ll leave it to the very last minute and I know I’m going to let details slip with my tardiness.  It was a good thing I actually got started too, because after 2 hours of grabbing things off my laptop, pc and USB stick, I’ve finally managed to get all my plane tickets into one folder.

I haven’t even started with tour itineraries, accomodation bookings, visa applications and other weird official documents.

I’ve digressed a little… whilst doing all my planning I’ve had to create a mini ‘to-do’ list with a few dates and seeing as I did it in excel… the rows on the side conveniently indicated to me that there were only 40 days left.  Things have started to dawn on me and in a big way. I received (finally) from work my letter of approval for 6months leave. Even better it also came with a letter indicating a small pay rise according to my years of experience.

Out of Ideas

We’re halfway through the term and life is definitely going by fairly quickly and my trip planning is well underway.  I’m pretty tired and the three vaccinations that I had recently put on a toll on my body I didn’t expect. Nonetheless life goes on.  I’ve been really flat lately and I’ve lost a lot of my motivation and a long with a few dents in my own self-belief I’ve developed a new woeful sense of apathy.  Hopefully my apathy won’t last long as I’m generally too passionate a person to allow things to past me by.  I’ve actually been writing a lot of prose and poetry again which shall I feel the need will post them. Most need some form of editing.

Lemon Squash

Lemon Squash

It looks like my plans to make lemon squash has paid off, figuratively anyway. Earlier this week, I received a call from our HR Manager at Head Office to say that they had approved my request for 6months leave to travel.

I’ve pretty much decided what I want to do, but it’s still nice to have the security blanket.  I’m also glad that I did screw up and that things have panned out the way they have the last few weeks, because it has actually meant that I have had to  seriously consider what I want to do.

So, officially from Sunday there will be 2months or 8 weeks left.

Now’s The Time to Say Bye-bye!

I’m going to preface this by saying that, this is NOT going to be an ‘EMO’ post, so Amanda you don’t need to worry too much.

The title is actually in reference to a song that we sing with the children at the end of each group and is very fitting for this particular post.

The words are sung to ‘Here we go ’round the Mulberry Bush’

Now’s the time to say bye-bye, say bye-bye, say bye-bye.

Now’s the time to say bye-bye, ’cause that’s the end of <enter the name of the organisation I work for>.

With all the things that happened during the middle of last week, I’ve had to spend some time on the weekend to dissect my feelings.  The events were not as severe in magnitude as a few years back, plus I’ve learnt a lot about myself since then. I’ve surprised myself this time as I’ve coped pretty well with the break-up.

Moving on to the point of this post, in parallel to events a few years back I’ve also decided to resign from my job.

As many of you may know, I absolutely LOVE my job, I find immense joy, satisfaction and I dare say happiness in what I do.  Although, I love what I do I’ve also in recent times started to feel the monotony of work.  There could be a number of factors for this, including the fact that since the middle of last year I’ve only worked for the one organisation Monday to Fridays. Where as for the previous 2.5 years I had been working part-time across two jobs.  Whatever the reason maybe the fact remains that I’m yearning for a change.

As a result of a pretty big stuff-up on my part, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and I have made a decision to resign.  Trawling through my ‘My Documents’ folders I’d started to realise that I’ve resigned from various places of employment 4 times in the last three years and by the end of all of this it will be a veteran number of 6 resignations.

You would have thought that by the time you’ve reached 4 resignations in such a short-time, that quitting would be ‘water-off a duck’s back‘ but given that I’m an overly sensitive soul, resigning has been incredibly difficult. In many parallels to the break-ups that have hurt the most, I’ve resigned from each work place, still really enjoying, liking and even loving my job. (Woolworths being the only exception).

It seems that I’m in quite an enviable position in terms of my love for the work that I do. Many people have asked, why? I can write a long list of reasons as to why, but…

…on Friday afternoon when I realised I needed to resign and when I finalised my letter on Sunday night, I felt a sense of relief, sure I’m extraordinarily sad about it, but I also felt excitement and for some reason it just felt like the right thing to do.

So in the next few weeks, I’ll be tweaking, editing and finalising this chapter of my life whilst at the same time, drafting and plotting the next.

Let’s hope the next chapter is as great as this last one has been!

Disorganised

Its happened again

I asked for too much

She was there and drew me away

She commanded a place in my heart

I was confused but let her in

Now as it ends the space is not empty

But filled with happiness

This isn’t too painful.

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(No need to worry about me, I just thought I’d channel my feelings into some crappy prose, I haven’t written a lot of poetry at all in the last few years plus I needed an emotional outlet.)

Finding a Host

Okay… so life hasn’t gone exactly to plan the last week, but I’ve had no choice but to focus my attention on ‘mini-projects’ that I’ve needed to finish for a very long time.  (Time to rebuild that self-esteem of mine.)

I’ve finally got this blog hosted properly and the transition has been relatively pain free… and has me brimming with confidence. The process has involved learning about ‘name servers‘,  ’Domain Name Systems (DNS)‘ and learning how best to transfer files over from one ‘host’ to another.  I’ve heard lots of horror stories about disappearing posts, lost customised designs, etc that for it all to have worked almost first go for me is actually very exciting!

I’m  now looking at options for ways to share my photographs and now that I’ve got a relatively reliable host, I’ve got some ideas but many are totally beyond my own hobbyist-IT skills.

So, welcome officially to Polysyllabic Nerd! Though there are no real layout differences, there are lots of functional changes that makes me very happy.

Thirsty Merc

Thirsty Merc

I probably shouldn’t listen to music that only exacerbates my feelings of grief, but there’s something about Thirsty Merc’s music that is rather comforting. None of their hits have ever made it to number one, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t think the music is fantastic.  Quite the contrary in fact their lyrics are easy to relate to and there are some very local Sydney and Australian references which again can be rather soothing to the soul.

Life has thrown me some lemons and it’s now time to make some lemon squash. yum yum.

A Wolf at The Table

A Wolf At The Table

In a continuation of my fondness for memoirs/(auto)biographies, I decided to pick up ‘A Wolf at The Table’ which is written by Augusten Burroughs who was also the author of ‘Running With Scissors’ which I read not too long ago. A Wolf at The Table explores Burroughs’ early childhood and particularly his relationship with his father and is essentially a prequel and really like many prequels should have come first.

The read wasn’t as enjoyable as I had hoped mostly because I felt that it was ‘more of the same’ sort of thing. Having read Running with Scissors and read other bits of information about Burroughs it does put things into perspective and you begin to formulate and see how he has become who he is today.  I’m struggling to really say much about the book other than that the Burroughs really resents his father and fairly obviously blames everything on his father.

The book is really not worth reading unless you happen to have countless hours to spend at a Medical Centre awaiting to find out what exactly gave you the nasty rash.

There is always something to take away from any book and from this book my own beliefs about children and parenting are reaffirmed.  Children are precious and parents have a massive role in shaping the lives of children from a very early age. Wondering what happened when they become teenagers is too-little-too-late.

WARchild

WARchild

I’m going to preface this review with something irrelevant and comment on how much I’m loving Summer in Sydney. Ordinarily, I would be travelling this time of the year, but the short-of-the-long-of-it is that I’m not. Not travelling and not working has resulted in time(+++) to read.  I don’t think I’ve had the chance to read so much for a very, very long time and although I’ve tried to read consistently throughout the year, often work related reading has meant reading-for-pleasure be put on the back burner.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve read a book where I’ve simply not being able to put it down and thus I’ve managed to finish this book in a matter of a few sittings which is uncharacteristic for me as I’m a very slow, reflective reader.

WARchild – A boy soldier’s story by Emmanuel Jal is a brilliantly written book which I lack the superlatives to describe.  I’ve returned to my genre of comfort in an autobiography and the book is about Jal’s experience growing up in Sudan.  As the title suggests he becomes a boy soldier in the “Sudan People’s Liberation Army”.  Another fancy name for one of the many politcal groups that existed during the Sudanese civil war.

The book is heart wrenching and often left me in shock as to the horrors that Jal both experienced as well as handed out, in his role as a soldier. Jal is only about seven years old in the early stages of the book and he doesn’t know his birthday and so like many of the other boy soldiers he adopts the 1st January, 1980 as his birthday. From that we get a rough time reference (not that it matters particularly) as I’m obviously not reading this for its historical facts although accuracy is nice too.

The book (and it’s not Jal’s fault) really depressed me as a result of the brutality in which humans can inflict on other humans.  I guess it’s no different to any other war, war in itself is senseless and barbarous. In the very early chapters of the book Jal describes the memories of ‘Arabs’ beating his mother (he witnessed it), soldiers mindlessly beating civilians because they had the power to do so and reality a general state of anarachy in Sudan.

Jal’s father was a leader in the SLPA and had encouraged families to send their children to neighbouring Ethiopia as there was no war there and that the children would be educated, fed and housed.  As it turns out the boat sinks and only about a quarter of the children on the boat survive, which when you consider they not only needed to survive drowning, but hippos, crocs, snakes and wildlife, I’m suprised any survived at all.

When Jal makes it back to shore he realises that he’s been abandoned and so he manages to get on another boat trip to Ethiopia whereby he soon realises all the things that his dad had told were lies. The people all ended up in a refugee camp where there was no fresh water or food and people were dying from starvation and an assortment of diseases.

Without going into tooooo much more of the book there is one chapter in the book that really put things about the situation in Sudan into perspective for me.  Jal is confronted with the decision to turn to cannibalism in order to survive. What happens you will need to find out for yourself.

The book goes on to describe how Jal tries to rid his demons and his hatred and you’ll be glad to know that things do sort of work out for Emmanuel Jal.

I first heard about Emmanuel Jal when I was visiting a client for work. I was listening to Conversations with Richard Fidler on the drive there and heard about his story and his music. The interview can be downloaded here on the ABC Brisbane website.