Remember when a sick day was actually a sick day? You’d stay home in bed all nice and warm and the only exertion would come from changing the channel from one trashy daytime TV show to another and from coughing up half a lung? There were no other expectations upon you?
Now, thanks to the internet, you can still perform your full duty to capitalism without exposing your colleagues to noxious germs!
Even if you are deathly ill with some evil flu that you got from your ballerina sister, it’s still possible to work from home if you have a WiFi connection and a job where the staffing levels have fallen to the point where there aren’t really enough people to cover your responsibilities for a day or two anyway.
But is this really wise?
For example, today I got a receipt from ModCloth in my email confirming that my order had been shipped out. An order that I thought I decided I didn’t have enough money to make, but my pseudoephedrine-addled mind must have clicked purchase on anyway. Would you let a drugged up snot zombie wander around a retail store to make poor budgeting decisions? No? How come it is OK for the same snot zombie to perform tasks that are important for your company?
Putting paid employment and dangerous access to online shopping aside, Internet access also kills the sick day by making one feel laziness guilt. You know, the kind of guilt that you feel when you aren’t DOING anything except being sick. As a result, I have applied for two jobs for the end of the year in the past two days just to feel productive.
Lord only knows what I wrote to them…
by Ashlee on July 12, 2011
in life
Razzle Frazzle is the opposite of Razzle Dazzle. It’s when you look like you got dressed at 4am in the dark and it was really cold, so you just threw on as many layers as possible. Oh wait. That’s what I do.
It’s when you leave work at 9am and realize you’ve been wearing your cardigan inside out for the past four hours and nobody has said anything and you’ve communicated with at least 10 different people. Yep, that happened last week.
It’s when you try to say “Burma,” but end up saying “Myurma” because you can’t decide whether you should be calling it Myanmar or Burma in the present company. Did that one yesterday! At a conference on the Asia-Pacific! Smooth!
It’s when you end up having a microphone mishap at a very public forum filled with people who may employ you some day but who now may primarily remember you as the microphone fail girl at that China forum!
The incidence of Razzle Frazzle has been more frequent since starting my early morning seven day a week job. So perhaps it is correlated with sleep deprivation. But it’s disconcerting. I like to be organised. I’m also too young to be fondly regarded as an eccentric… it just makes me look ditzy. I also need an impressive job! Oh god, I can’t go back to local newspapers, they are the trenches. I had a dream where I was back covering neighborhood fence boundary disputes and it was terrifying.
Oh well, one more semester of sleep deprivation to go, I guess… let’s hope someone in this town is willing to take on a sleepy inside-out cardigan wearing graduate with an interest in the intersection of development policy and media communications so I don’t have to get up stupidly early for too much longer… I’d be great if I didn’t have to be up before dawn every day and if I wasn’t kept awake by terror sweats over returning to the Murdoch local press, I promise!
Murdoch probably wouldn’t even take me back, I never learnt to hack phones at J-school!
I think I’ve always been a person that picks up little bits of accents and speech when I move abroad. I think it is from my speech and drama training as a kid. While I think my parents sent me to those lessons so I would talk properly and be a confident speaker, it quite possibly made me equally susceptible to absorbing other people’s pronunciation and intonation quirks. Helpful when learning a foreign language, not so much for speaking Australian English.
I’ve had a few people question me about the veracity of my Australian citizenship as a result. Like this morning.
An old man at the bakery this morning told me I was definitely American when I was ordering a loaf of wholegrain and a strong coffee to go. I told him I was definitely Australian.
“Well, you sure as hell sound like a yank, love,” he said.
When I tried to explain that I was from Albury, he was even more incredulous.
“If you’re from Albury you should sound properly Australian. How did you get that bloody American accent in Albury?”
I just shrug.
He is genuinely shocked.
He looks me up and down while I wait for my change.
“Do ya watch a lotta telly or somethin’?”
“Only Aunty (slang for the ABC),” I replied. “I do have quite a few American friends though, maybe some of it rubbed off.” (I didn’t tell him that I had lived there for six months last year. It seemed too… obvious?)
“That’d be right,” he says with a huff. “Well, if you have to change your accent to make your friends feel bloody happy then you should tell them to bugger off home to America. It’s a shame, a young girl like you talken’ funny like that.”
It seems I have now written off my chances of the Australian dream or something, all by pronouncing a few extra “r” sounds in words…
Though honestly, I don’t think I sound American at all. My American friends don’t seem to think so either!
by Ashlee on June 6, 2011
in life
Sometimes I all of a sudden remember something amazing or odd that I got to do at some time that I hadn’t thought about for ages.
Today, I suddenly remembered that I was part of a student production team for a radio soap opera, directed by one of the foremost figures in British radio acting and radio drama production, Alan Beck. This all happened when I was on exchange at the University of Westminster when I was 20.
I wasn’t going to take the radio drama class, I was supposed to do another journalism class, but I changed at the last minute because all my classmates from radio features were doing it and by halfway through the term we had already become good friends. I do not regret this choice at all, even though I have never produced radio drama again!
There were about 12 or so of us in our radio class, so we wrote an episode each and then edited the series for continuity. We had to source atmos sounds and everything else. Alan then got professional voice actors in to do the play, and we produced it using a massive mixer in a big old studio at the university that was usually used for recording student bands.
It was an interesting process. You would think that in radio drama, you wouldn’t need to build stages, but that just wasn’t true. We built “stages” in the recording studio by using moveable walls to give the acoustic dynamics of a big room or a small room. That was something that you just couldn’t replicate using digital editing. We also needed props etc for some of the sound effects.
The actors were really cool. They were older than us and had done a lot of cool things, so I think we were a little starstruck! We chatted with them about their training and the work they had done. We even went drinking at the student pub with them after we wrapped up production. One of the actresses, Catherine, told me all about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and how she would be out of the street trying to lure people into a show right up until 10 minutes before she was supposed to start on stage…. I still really want to get there because she made it sound so amazing and described the energy so well!
Our soap was called “Leisure Island” and it was set at a recreation centre (gym and indoor swimming pool complex). The storylines were quite ridiculous and over the top… like a comedy soap style. There was a love interest and sexual tension, of course. Then there was a jokey character, a Scottish bodybuilder, who I think got stuck inside the waterslide in one ep of the soap? I can’t remember the other storylines. There was something to do with one of the exercise classes and some sort of rivalry and hmm. Yeah, I forget. There was a sassy girl and a nice girl. I remember in the episode that I wrote the sassy girl said “whatever floats your boat” to one of the male characters in this really condescending way and it was awesome.
The days where we recorded the soap with the actors and then the week or two after where we hunkered down editing the episodes were pretty fun. We also had to find theme music and everything. I think I learnt a bit about directing and organising a writing project where there are multiple authors and producers, and how to ensure continuity. But mostly, it was just fun.
The soap aired on our multi-award winning student radio station, Smoke Radio, where I spent most of my time at Westminster kicking around (either there or at the Undercroft/Underpants/Undies, the media student bar with tacky leopard print seats).
I don’t have any recordings of it, unfortunately, but I’m sure it would have been pretty hilarious. I think the script let the actors down a bit haha.
Most of all, it seemed very British. We don’t really do radio dramas in Australia, right? But the BBC radio stations still do. It’s a pretty cool form of storytelling and I remember we listened to some great examples in class. There’s more to it than just the Archers. Also, I have read about radio plays being used to deliver community health messages in Africa as part of development programs, so who knows? Maybe I might be exposed to it again some day…
It’s exam time. Cue panic. Cue self-loathing. Cue punishing one’s self for not having done more work earlier in the semester. Cue setting unrealistic expectations for my academic achievement that will probably end with me in a fetal position on the floor cradling a bottle of cheap wine on the day that exam results come out. Yes, I am one of those people for whom getting a distinction feels like getting a fail. HDs get degrees too, people. WHY CAN’T I HAVE IT ALL??? OMG NOBODY WILL HIRE ME IF I DON’T HAVE PERFECT GRADES AND I WILL BE POOR FOREVERRRRR! etc.
So, in an effort to abate my insanity… oh and to also overcome panic at my jeans feeling tight, putting myself outside my spectrum of personal fat acceptance acceptance lately, just adding to the fear and loathing in Las ‘Berra… I’ve been trying to break up my study with a walk every day this week.
While I wouldn’t call Canberra unpleasant to walk around, it’s not particularly exciting either. In the walking distance from my place there are mostly really, really ugly houses built in a hurry in the 1960s, ovals and parks where the grass is brown from Canberra’s incomprehensible mix of summer drought and winter frost and… yeah that’s about it. But I guess I should just be happy I don’t have to waltz around an Indonesian abattoir on my afternoon rambles, right? Though I did see a youff in my neighbourhood the other day whose haircut wasn’t halal at all. I also saw three electrocuted animals outside my very own apartment block thanks to the high voltage power cables right outside my window. I guess it’s just like a really brutal school for stupid possums?
Anyway, I’d better get back to it.
- To finish my Masters with straight HDs.
-To get a PhD at a fancy school (fully funded, obviously)
-To get five articles published in academic journals
-To get an awesome job that I love that pays well where I was rapidly promoted, yet where I could wear jeans to work on Fridays, if not more regularly. Or maybe where I could wear yoga pants. That would be ok too.
-To replace my good camera that got stolen
-To go to Lebanon and Turkey and places around there at the end of this year to holiday, even though I am currently both broke and in debt. Or to India!
-To work overseas again
-To either become Prime Minister of Australia, or an ambassador to somewhere, or to be someone important multilaterially (not in the enemy of the state kind of way, obviously).
-To write three books that are hugely successful, and then to turn down an offer to write a fourth because I don’t think I could maintain the creative integrity and I just needed some ‘me’ time, especially after working on the film adaptations. I would explain this to Oprah and she would nod understandingly and then give me a free car.
-To never work again, yet still have enough money to go on jaunts to Paris to buy macarons or to Bali to eat nasi campur on a whim or to spend a large part of my day posting feminist rants in the comments sections of mainstream newspaper websites just for kicks.
-To eat a good curry for dinner.
Well, there’s only one of these that I can do today. Better stick the rest on that to do list.
One of the nice things about living back in Australia is that I’m not living out of a backpack. It’s a little exciting to have a full wardrobe of clothes, piles of necklaces to choose from and trinkets all over the place. As much as that makes me sound like a materialistic ditz. But it’s a nice change for a while.
The best seat on the football field in Canberra.
It has been well over seven or so months since I left Jakarta, and already nearly two months since I left DC.
Sometimes, glimpses of my Jakarta life pop into my brain and they seem so surreal that I can barely believe they happened, even though I was there. I’ll be driving down the road here in the dark and all of a sudden in my mind I’ll be remembering riding on the back of an ojek (motorcycle taxi) trying to pull my skirt over my knees while cruising through the dark gangs (little streets) of Kemang in the dark after a night out at some smoky bar. I’ll be swimming laps at the pool and remember the coral at Pulau Weh or Taman National Komodo.
[keep reading…]
So, I’ve been going back and forth from Albury to Canberra to house hunt. The Canberra rental market is a horror nightmare hell, but thankfully I have found a place now to move into next month.
But to add to the nightmare, this weekend on my way back from Canberra I had a rather large motor vehicle malfunction.
I was driving along the Barton Highway out of Canberra, when thud, screetch, insert horrible grating sounds here. One of my tyres had completely blown out. Lucky I was able to steer the car safely to the side of the road and bring it to a screetching stop (last time I had a tyre blow out in the middle of nowhere, I wasn’t so lucky). So I was stranded in a country field. Lucky we have NRMA roadside assist, so I called them…. but it was going to be at least an hour until they found me. And it was really bloody hot, and I didn’t have water. It was so hot that when I stepped out of the car, my thongs/flip flops partially melted on the asphalt! Ouch!
So I waited and waited, feeling sicker from the heat the whole time and knowing that I was getting sunburnt, even while trying to take shelter in the sauna of the car. Finally the NRMA guy came… but then he pointed out to me that I actually had two flats. There must have been something on the road. The other tyre had slowly deflated during the wait. I only had one spare. Crap. So he replaced the exploded one, pumped up the flat, then followed me for the drive to Yass, the next town, pumping up the flat tyre again every 10km so I could get there.
I pulled into the first motel I saw in town in Yass… the wonderfully but quizzically named Thunderbird Hotel. It was a Saturday afternoon. Little did I know that I would be stranded there until Monday morning. I tried everything I could to see if I could get after hours tyre repair in Yass, even trying to hunt down drunk tyre repairers in the local pubs, but to no avail. So I was stuck in Yass for two nights, making it a very pricey inconvenient detour (especially if you include the costs of tyre replacement).
I wandered around Yass a bit taking a couple of photos of the old buildings, but there wasn’t much else going on. Lucky the Target Country was open on a Sunday morning so I could buy some clean underwear and there was a pharmacy where I could buy aloe vera for my terrible sunburn from waiting in the sun for the NRMA. But that was about all there was to do.
And my poor sunburned skin didn’t really want to go out in the sun anyway.
But there are some nice old buildings around Yass. It wouldn’t be a bad place to stop for an hour or two to break up a long trip on the highway. But I wouldn’t recommend a lengthy stay….
