From both sides of the fence

I've intended to come back to this journal one more time to post something of a closure. Since this is real life, the actual content of the closure changes but I think the milestone remains fundamentally the same.

Today, I went out and brought some flowers for my mother, as it is her birthday today. I spent a good quarter of an hour choosing the flowers (I went with 2 bunches of purple and white Singapore Orchids), and got it gift-wrapped, and picked out a card to match. She was so tickled pink that she's been telling everybody she speaks to in the hours since.

This is the first time I've done such a thing on my own initiative. It reflects the single biggest change over the course of my life and possibly the idée fixe of this journal, since this journal began with the death of my father, and the resulting change in family dynamics catalysed the struggle that was my troubled relationship with my mother. The past few months have furthermore been the catalyst for a number of drastic changes in my perspective, which pertained to a number of elements of my character that I've been struggling with.

In short, the relationship between my mother is on the mend. There were times when we wanted to call it quits, and the time when strawcat was visiting, to be brief, brought a number of internal pressures to a head. Not to be melodramatic, but those of you who know the full story know that I nearly didn't make it through that time. It was tough. The process of actually actively repairing the damage and dysfunction in the months that followed was a similarly painful one.

More recently I spent six weeks in Horsham (deep country), on clinical placement. Initially I was worried about logistical issues but I come away from that a changed man (sorry about the corn). I discover I'm not a culinary disaster, and I could actually run my own household independently (albeit not finance it...yet). I realised there are other internal issues I had to deal with and I dealt with them. I started to appreciate what home, and family means to the rest of my family, and ultimately, to me. I felt like I was coming home again.

I've dropped a lot of baggage. My supervisor on the thesis told me that I seemed to have way too much on my mind, but I'm a lot freer now. I'm more able to focus, and move forward, and do the things I say I'll do. Of course I still suck at time management but this will improve. It has to. These changes are not only well-timed, but they had to come at this time, since the past 12 weeks herald the most challenging year of my degree, and I now have a very tangible sense of not wanting to waste the opportunities that come with it.

My mother and I still have our differences, and they will always come up. We still argue as it's in my nature to be stroppy sometimes and it's in her nature to nag (shhhhhh!) But even she is happier now, happier to see that I'm happier and despite my disagreeing with her expression of why (becoming a normal person? Pffft!), I'm always going to be doing that anyway, and on one level it hardly matters.

After this, I don't think I will post here anymore. I will start updating orlestat as soon as I fork out 15 bucks to have the name changed, as it will no longer be solely about the novel, but have a lot of other things in it. But since I don't have a credit card and I need one in order to make the payment through PayPal, that's on the backburner. Unless somebody else wants to see what I've been getting up to so much that they'd gift me a name change :P

Besides, I owe some people some art.

...I just remembered I never responded to that free art meme I posted two years ago or something. Who was it who wanted some again?

There are a number of them.

1. As public as my references to it, so too is the initial message: It may or may not be surprising to know that after 3 1/2 years, I'm no longer in a committed relationship with strawcat. The reasons for this are complicated but the important part is to realise that he and I still seek to be on good terms and are working quite well on this count. Naturally there are hiccups and explanations to be had, but I think seeing as those are of a more personal nature, I shall lock that post...and I'm only posting because I feel it the fairest thing to do.
   
   
2. I completed my academic involvement with Advanced Medical Science (i.e. B.Med.Sci) recently...a little late but nonetheless completed. I said that I had submitted my thesis in the middle of shambles, but still had a presentation to go. So I did the presentation with a view to doing a better job and I seem to have mightily impressed. Dennis (head of neuropsych at RMH) came up to me as I was setting up and said to me "I'm here to inform you that I'm your marker for today and that you have ten minutes to do your presentation, and that we don't take kindly to people going over that limit...haha just kidding. The real reason I'm telling you that is because I have to disappear in an hour to do *my* own presentation so you actually have plenty of time, just don't go...too long." This scary reminder was the result of my classmate JP taking well over an hour to present his work due to his doing a double-project (since it was so easy). I had been nervous that I wouldn't know any of my work but it turns out that the predictions of presentation veterans was right: I'd spent a year (presumably) on this topic so I would be able to discuss the intricacies of the analysis and the literature with other experts in the field with little difficulty. It was a very nice feeling, to remember what it is like to know one's work.
   
   Now I've started working at the hospital (I'm petrified) so I don't envisage having any time to keep this journal let alone keep up with everybody else here. I haven't read your stuff for over two months, and I don't anticipate doing that in future either. This is one of the main reasons for saying that this journal will largely shut down. The other is that I'm picking up some good ol' regular (and not so regular) gainful employment as well as investing time in other entrepreneurial efforts as well as a real life. So yeah.
   
   
3. In a way I guess I'm bidding goodbye to this thing called the furry fandom too, lol. Not that I was ever involved much in it but I'd decided after lengthy deliberation that I really do prefer to enjoy something personal on a personal level.
   
   In a way that almost makes me one of those people who goes "I may draw furry but I am not a furry, omg." Whatever, though: point is I still am interested in the subject matter but for the past couple of years I've been struggling to enjoy the notion of community involvement. All things considered, I can't do it. Metaculture is cool in a novelty kind of way but it's also counterproductive to my agenda.

( The future )

That's it from me. Don't expect more than about one post a month, maybe less. If you want to contact me, you may send enquiries to dongstyleltd@gmail.com, otherwise...goodbye!

Alright, it's been a bit epic and sleepless, and from the last time I posted (more than a month ago), I haven't been sleeping much. Kitty came and went (too much to talk about here, maybe later). I'm nursing a sprained wrist (landed on it too hard switching into a freeze), and a split pinky toe (which bled profusely after I slammed it into the doorframe in a sleep-deprived state). I've also probably put on a bit of flab thanks to the sleep deprivation.

But my thesis has been submitted electronically...all I need to do is print out the other two copies, have it bound and submit those on Monday. While I'm pleased it's done, I would have liked to have been less pressed, but there really is not much I can do about that. I'd have liked, for example, to put in more diagrams explaining my tracing process but one has to consider just how relevant that is to the entire thesis, so perhaps it was just as well I didn't.

After about nine months' gestation, it's like having a 12000 word, 78-page baby. I had a bit of hassle submitting on time- the date couldn't be extended as the marking had to start after, and so I did the entire 3000 word discussion section in a 24 hour non-stop marathon. When it came time to check the references, I discovered (I hadn't been counting) that I had twice as many references as I intended: 121 to be precise. And Endnote wasn't working so good for me so I typed each and every one of them in...manually.

Now that's done, I need to think about the presentation. But not before I goof off for a bit...by, for example, writing a rap on Pokémon in the style of Kanye West (whether I'll post that here may be up to you!)

Otherwise, I still don't know in what capacity I will be continuing to post in this account. I'm going to change my priorities, address some longstanding issues. Some of them are already being addressed, which gives me much room for hope.

Goodnight.

This is the first time I've even looked at my journal in about five weeks. And better yet, my motivation for doing so was to track down a reference to a journal that I know I made in October last year, because it is relevant to my thesis.

So you can probably guess. I'm in the thick of thesis-writing. Over the past month or so I spent just about all my waking hours at the lab overcoming some unexpected (and hugely significant) technical issues with my 'experiment' (mule work, rather), and then going through the actual set, which I finished last Friday (because I was struggling to make a deadline so my supervisor, Chris, could throw in the data into the spreadsheet so we could analyse it before he left for Crete for a psych conference...but he managed to get the wrong spreadsheet meaning we couldn't do it so now we'll end up doing the analysis over Skype of all things...while he presumably, in his own words, "sits on the beach just beyond the luxury hotel.") So now I'm supposed to write, and send a draft of bits of it to him and then...

Right. Then there's the fact that strawcat is coming to town next week! omg, it's so close now! I'm so looking forward to it! My mother is stressing my brains out with her own issues!

Eh.

Now, I apologise for also not keeping up with all the friends here but...well, to be brutally honest I must admit that I found my time away from teh LJ very refreshing. This is not to say that I couldn't care less about all of you, but rather that I really do need to find the space to reorganise my life. I said I would but I didn't mainly because I was attempting to do so while remaining active. Was that a great idea or what!

That said, I do not know when I will become active on LJ, or if I will ever be as active as I used to be (on that note I also seem to have ceased being affiliated with the furry fandom within my own mind...or, should I say, the perception of the fandom, as while the interest in anthropomorphic subjects remains, there is little in the way of identity in it for me.) I'm going to have to reorganise all my personal online contacts also, and well, I really don't know when I'm going to do that.

However I did flick through the ol' FL, and here are some salient points:

1. Finny (sorry, heaven's_steed may be a title but I can't address you as that and remain grammatically elegant :P), I hope one month isn't too long :P
   
2. Bella, you probably don't need the reminder, but I'mma say it anyway: this is your decision. While I'm personally glad you made it, just make sure you appreciate that it's your own, and not anybody else's. Because God knows I have trouble doing the same.
3. Kitty, yes, sorry I'm up so late :P It's likely I'll head to the library in the early arvo, too, but I do need to do some further reading @home first.

Hm, what else...oh yeah. Here, have a sketch and an animation. Because no 'omg I'm still alive I have sooo much to tell you...not' post is really complete without them:

( The animation is really smooth. Well...for a mouse-drawn FBF anyway )

Now I shall go to bed. Because it's 530am, it's cold and I'm sitting here in nothing but my skimpy inadequate underwear. Yes, very cold. And the longer I sit here, the deeper the indentations the chair mesh leaves on my rump.

Don't expect updates soon!

Ugh, right, okay.

1. My project is waaaay behind schedule now. Due to a mix of unforseen errors and mood swings I may have to ask for a small extension. Just like quite a few of my friends.
2. strawcat is coming to town! I've been stressing my brains out about this, actually, because if I don't get my project done on time, it cuts into this time...and then more worrying at those various *issues* I run into.
3. Anthropometry seems to have ground to a halt for the moment. Go figure, my brain isn't in the mood for it oh wait, I'm just about to post the first two chapters on orlestat!!!
4. I'm still quite depressive- obviously being stressed makes it harder to get over so this bout is prolonged. Still don't want to start sodium valporate.
5. Aside from this I've also noticed a certain mental malaise. I realised once again that I've let my mental conditioning in general slip, so gave myself a little zen booster, which proved particularly useful. It's unlikely I'll post the full content of my thoughts anytime soon but I know that I've progressed on a number of issues mainly regarding the balance of life as a whole.
6. I played in a concert with the community orchestra a coupla weeks ago. Just thought I'd put that in there too, heh.
7. Bboy news. This will be the bulk of the post:

( The bulk of the post )

There, that's all I wanted to share for the time being. Now I must continue hitting myself with the blunt hatchet that is my literature review. Again.

Everybody's been talking about the approaching "day-long strike on LJ", and so shall I, albeit briefly:

For every action there is a detraction, such are the ways we are led to act by our base, inescapable behaviors.

Surely they won't cancel each other out- do as you might, but are your motives the product of a free will? Maybe you should ask yourself this so that you might convince yourself that you are escaping from the insatiable need to pander to your sense of self-worth.

But only maybe. Do you really need to? Consciousness, it seems, tricks us into believing that it exists, and tricks us into believing there is such thing as a self.

We may consider ourselves fools all, but no more than that. That's all for now.

EDIT: Oh fuck, I posted during the alleged time of the strike, because I got confused by the timezones. How ironic. In the meantime, I think I'd rather endorse such ideas as the one presented here.

Gosh, drama, never ends.

This time, it's not mine. I will not post the details here, but let's just say it's been keeping me busier than usual! Anyway.

Today I finally got my act together and met the rest of the breakdance crew I'm now with. Currently we're named the rather self-explanatory Melbourne University BBoys, though this may change, maybe it might not, especially if we're going to become a UniMelb affiliated club (for this to happen, we need one more Student Union member in our ranks).

( I'm one of them now )

And that's all, folks. I'm gonna douse myself in anti-inflammatory cream, and go to bed. Thankfully I don't think my muscles are complaining much. Much work to be done tomorrow. Bleh.

Oh Christ, I'm a dickhead P-driver.

I will explain the story in painstaking detail, despite the fact you will all probably berate me for recklessness. But I must be clear on this first- I'm telling you this not because I'm proud of what I've done, but I want to harp on a point I frequently make about my sister's car.

See, it's a Citröen Xsara- it was purchased relatively new in 1999. The upsides are that it's very comfortable, feels solid and gives a relatively smooth ride.

( You should know by now that I take a long time to get to the point. Just enjoy the ride )

In other news, I did some good work at the lab last week and caught up- now I just need to keep going. I'm finally heading to my first meet with the bboy crew I'm now with, and...yeah. Lots of other stuff going on that I can't mention here too. Busy. As usual.

Later.

Hay guys, just to let you know I'm still 1) alive 2) stressed thanks to reality-check regarding my project (so I'm disorganised, boo), 3) clearing up as much as I can on as many fronts as possible.

I haven't gotten around to uploading my pictures yet as I first need to clear up space on my hard-drive. This means reorganising my files, and while I was in the process of this I found some old, and not-so-old stuff.

You may recall that I draw FBF animations in my notebook when I'm travelling (previously I did these during a class I either was a gun at or had given up all hope on). Some of these haven't been touched for months because I haven't been sitting in class for months, heh. However, on this journal, apart from the very first one that I've called a success (you may also recall "tumbling bunnies"), I know none of my later efforts have been posted. Which is a bit "eh!?" because needless to say they're a vast improvement over the original.

Anyway, here they are. ( I've tweaked the indexing to minimize filesize. Incomplete ones are low quality. )

I can't think of anything else for the moment. I'm really tired and want to go to bed but I should really be tabulating my background reading so I can write my literature review concurrently with data analysis. Fortunately, my disorganisation played in my favor (for once) as I've been working with one of my crucial deadlines set 10 days too far forward. This late in the game, 10 days is plenty valuable.

Oh yeah. If you're waiting on me for a picture, I totally haven't forgotten. Sketching is easy but actually sitting down, cleaning up and coloring is a rarity. I haven't colored a piece since the one I did on New Year's Day. Sorry.

For those of you who were interested in reading about that project I mentioned I was using for NanoWriMo: Orlestat is now live. Check the userinfo for details, but in short, if you want to read the actual draft manuscript, either friend the journal or send Orlestat a message! I'd rather you not leave comments on random posts for tidyness and also just in case the LJ notify fails me at some random point in time.

...why am I telling you guys that? Man I'm tired. I think family drama (read: nnnnnnngh!!!) from the past two days sapped me. But I'm going to get all the rest of my commitments underway tomorrow.

Oh yes, I haven't posted any manuscript- there's little point as nobody's reading that space as of yet. But I have written the basic background information.

Not so bad as popularly claimed.

That said, I'm citing this as I feel the need to add that this is hardly news. Already in the realm of popular media, Mythbusters duo Adam and Jamie already conducted their own tests, which included the ones above (except possibly more involved), in an episode where they specifically set out to bust the myth that goldfish have three-second memories. And their results seemed pretty compelling!

Again, from personal experience, I can vouch for this through observation of behavioral patterns in the goldfish that my sister and I keep. Err, well...that is, used to keep. Even under the care of an avid aquarium keeper, my sister's googly-eyed goldfish died. We presume it (never figured out he or she) starved to death due to the fact it had a fickle appetite and had no stereovision whatsoever. My goldfish, however, has no appetite whatsoever (it just ate), plenty of depth-perception, and a hoover for a mouth. This, with poor health, probably drove the decline of my sister's fish; we literally observed it progressively shrinking until we resorted to isolation and direct hand-feeding.

Anyway. As I was going to say, maybe, as far as the fish are concerned at least, it's important to do away with this myth and raise the awareness that fish presumably do have some form of memory, and we might do well (for whatever reason) to investigate how their cortical structure compares to our own. As far as I can tell even though articles cite this finding in the news multiple times, the myth persists strongly as the knowledge hasn't pervaded the mainstream.

It will be interesting to see how long the notion persists, as we all know that mankind is not good at amending antiquated concepts that have been insinuated into the collective consciousness.

( Some people also have bad memories, it seems )

Also again: Curious.

For some funny reason it only recently occured to me that growing understanding of the role of consciousness in behavior lent much insight into why psychoanalytical models aren't favored in modern psychiatry. Previously I had accepted the fact with the qualifier "we sometimes use psychoanalysis as a descriptive tool" but the penny hadn't dropped.

Speaking of which, I'm being extraordinarily lazy, I know, but has anybody seen any recent articles regarding insights into the aetiology of anorexia? I remember reading an article that stated that despite popular belief, the whole culture of razor-thin models and the media, while they have a lot to answer to in this regard, cannot really be regarded as causative agents when it comes to subjects with eating disorders. But, in my usual style, I can't remember which one!

I'm drunk. Let's start with a mouthful!

One manifestation of our prevalent desire to deny and defy the reality of death is in seeking its alleged antithesis: immortality. At least, in this case, temporal immortality, the lack of senescence or even ageing in general. I might be so bold as to suggest the rhetoric of serious scientific investigation into the methods by which one might gain immortality has spread into the mainstream if popular science is a reflection on the matter. Of course, I'm aware that immortality (or rather mortality) has weighed large on the human consciousness for yonks, be it anywhere from ancient legend to a futurist convention, but recent changes in the manner and domains in which this is discussed seem significant.

If I had a dollar for every person I met who told me they wanted to "live to a hundred" or "live forever"...for me, my personal attitude to this is that I think it more sensible (all things considered) to develop a worldview that affords death a place in our reality. But that's me. What I'm going to try and do is make a few preliminary notes on what touches on such a vast topic that the following will be scattered at best. However, I'm at the point where I've had so many conversations about it, and inadvertantly read so much material that some things seem to be becoming rather apparent.

*sigh* This is going to be really half-assed. Ignore if incoherent, as I will be revisiting these topics with more rigor in future.

( I gradually sobered as I wrote this but I also became increasingly exhausted, so same diff. )

I don't really know yet. But I'm very out of time. My mother is herding me to bed, and with good reason.

P.S. Those strikeouts are facetious, not subtle hints at my own worldview :P

While I'm at it, this is one of the only posts I don't have pictures for, so I'll go right ahead and write it.

Last Friday I went to the LA Gun Club, tucked away in the seedy alleyways of the industrial part of Downtown. It was recommended due to their family-friendly policies and generally helpful yet rather casual staff. Having been exposed to, nay, innundated with the quasi-phallic romanticisations of gunplay over various media, my brother and I have been curious as to the actual reality of operating a firearm, something heightened by the fact that it's generally difficult to legally own an actual weapon of any kind in Australia.

However, the urge to blast away was vastly overwhelmed by my acute awareness that I would be handling equipment capable of launching a pointy projectile at several hundret feet a second. And the fact that most guns are manufactured for right-handed people. Actually, I was mostly aware that I had a bunch of preconceptions and I wanted to see how they measured up to the real deal.

( So how did they? )

All up, my brother and I managed to burn through about seventy bucks in the space of an hour, which was slightly alarming, especially as the rates just seemed so cheap (you could rent a shotgun for five bucks). However, I'm glad that given the choice between paintballing and this, I came here because from what I've heard, paintball is something best enjoyed when the entire party consists of people you know, and I've always wanted to bring those fantasies of being Neo (or maybe Trinity, or Ghost: Neo had too many cop-out abilities such as flying and being able to restart hearts to keep it real) back to earth by driving home the realities of handling a gun. I won't say I'm entirely bad at the business, but now I won't go around under the false impression that I go about like playing cops-and-robbers, point my finger at people and yell "Bang bang you're dead!"

Should I mark this as having adult concepts? :P

I did say I was planning to do it, but I wasn't exactly expecting to get my bothersome wisdom teeth pulled until the day after next, but there you go. They've been trouble for nearly two years now, actually, periodically causing gum infections which would bring with it inflammation, pus, sores and generally much pain. Being a highly strung person, I do get a lot of mouth sores (ulcers), so I thought it wasn't much more than par for the course, which led to several months of delays. However I now appreciate that the ongoing problems have taken its toll on my immune system, which might help explain why I've been sick so alarmingly often as of late.

I'm going to blab on about this for a bit because I'm just particularly relieved that I'm finally rid of the damn things.

( Brace yourselves! )

So. Now they're out. I doubt I'll have to remove the final wisdom tooth as it's quite happy where it is.

I feel like I've crossed a major milestone.

He took his damn time, but Gilly made his final 100. Woohoo!

Now let's pray he'll belt out another 50 in the next eleven overs.

Edit: Guess not. Fortunately for Australia, we still won.