Sydney Life

Apologies for the lack of entries! Things became rather busy. Let me explain.

I took four subjects last semester because I want to finish my undergraduate degree this year (so I can do any of a few things that I have planned, including - fix up some health problems, travel to London, move to Melbourne, get a full time job, etc.) As a consequence of this decision, I was busy. Very busy. I chose subjects that required a lot of reading and even more thought - third year English subjects especially, and pre-Honours subjects. If you are looking to do honours make sure you find out what is required from the faculty or department that you are studying under. You probably need to complete the requirements for a major and a bit more, and possibly take some specific subjects that teach you about research or other things necessary for an honours degree.

After thinking about whether I wanted to do honours in English or Art History last holidays I decided on Art HIstory first, because it seemed that I was not eligible for English honours unless I did a bunch of subjects that I had very little interest in - I am much more interested in contemporary literature and creative writing rather than Old English or Dickens, not that I am a philistine or anything - and so I was telling people that for a while. Then it occured to me that English honours was rather prestigious and I would be jealous of people who did it so I decided to look in to it.

So I did. And as it turns out, the best way to do this is just find the honours co-ordinator and see him and he will tell you that you have already done one of the pre-requisite courses and can just do one more and the two special entry units and you would be OK. Which is what happened. And so I decided to do the requirements for both Art History and English honours, and possibly (probably) combine them.

You can do a combined honours degree by liasing with the honours co-ordinators from the different schools. They then organise how you are assessed by sharing the assessments between the courses. It sounds complicated but, for me, worthwhile, because I want to do something that covers film and literature.

The point of all of this is that to do this I had to do four heavy subjects last semester which culminated in 15,000 words of essays to write at the end of the semester and after that, clearly, I had to celebrate my birthday, which I did, in style, twice, and then suddenly I realised I was on holidays. And that I was healthy.

I have been ill for a long time - ongoing immune thing. I am an ACCESS student at university which means that I was ill during HSC and got extra UAI points, which is fair. But this year, I moved out of home, and embraced a new lifestyle and am...mysteriously...very healthy. For a long time. On very little medication. Possibly in remission. And entirely liberated by it all.

Thus, these holidays have been busy. Apart from the fact that I am trying to be creative and write things for the publications that the uni is putting out (Hermes, Arna, and the prizes) which I have done previously I also want to get to the Biennale, I want to catch up with friends, I need to work (tutoring, but also some accounting/filing kind of work and writing for The Brag magazine). And of course, last weekend I disappeared to Melbourne for shopping and AMAZING eating. The story of it all is at my flickr account [http://flickr.com/photos/meeli/sets/72157606028303477/] and I highly recommend it to everyone if you want a cheap getaway from Sydney. Flights are only about $80 if you don't bring luggage, which is fantastic! The transport is great, cheap, convenient, and did I mention shopping?

The other benefit of being healthy is I can now do things like try to get fit and play sport. Of course, being me, I have chosen an unusual (to say the least) sport - Roller Derby. Derby is an all-girls contact sport on rollerskates on a flat track. It involves racing, high speed skating, falling, tacking, pushing, shoving, helmets, mouthgards, fishnet stockings and attitude. I train twice a week and that combined with dancing (tap and jazz on Tuesday nights) is helping me get fit, sleep well and feel productive. I haven't played sport in ages (years!) so I find this all very exciting. When we start playing derby bouts (that's what the games are called) in November, I expect to see you all there, as my cheer squad!

Anyway. In other news I am looking forward to seeing the new Batman film and also reading Blindness, by Jose Saramago (thanks to my housemate who kindly lent it to me) which is scary but great, and Doom Patrol, a series of comics, which is hilarious and weird. My comic obsession was boosted by a trip to Supanova - a pop culture convention (but mainly comics, Sci Fi and Cosplay) a few weeks ago. Still waiting desperately for last semester's results, and for the Art History department to fix up some forms so I can enrol in a subject and get my timetable fixed (doing Arts Advanced, I have to enrol in some subjects manually because I don't have the pre-requisite junior units, and this is annoying and often takes a while or gets stuffed up, so I wil probably just go in to uni to fix it some time this week. Blah!).