Claire's Blog...Stuff that came into me hed.
Claire is feeling 
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About me: I'm 23 years old, female, and I live in Sydney (yes, in Australia.)
You can see the rest of my page here, but there's not much at the moment.
Write to me at unwittyname@hotmail.com
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Sunday, August 24, 2003
Wow, it is so windy today! I keep hearing these rumbling sounds and wondering if there's going to be a roof when I look up. There is currently a wind warning for Sydney! It seems there is some kind of swirly cold wind thing. But it's supposed to be fine and sunny tomorrow. It would probably be quite warm right now except for the wind chill factor. Makes me glad I don't live somewhere that hurricanes or cyclones inhabit! Even the sound of this wind makes me want to hide in the cellar.
The b/f has been away all weekend visiting his grandmother, and I have lounged around doing absolutely nothing (Ich faulenze). This is not such a bad thing. It was Mum's birthday on Friday, and the whole weekend has been a house party! Heh, not really. B/f and I had a heated debate about unionism on Friday, which left me wondering if we really have any common values, but then I tend to lurch between feeling as though our relationship is perfect and feeling that it is a total train wreck, so I can never really trust either feeling.
5:42 PM
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
How Would YOU Take Over the World?
I tell you what, I wouldn't have minded doing a bit of that this morning. It took me approximately 35 minutes to travel a distance of less than 1 kilometre, which normally takes a nominal amount of time. Since I take the train to work, I don't usually experience peak hour traffic, and this exceeded all my expectations. The radio announced later that a bus had broken down on the route I was travelling: I don't think the break-down caused the traffic, I think the bus over-heated due to all the sitting around. Later in the day, I also had train-rage: I went up onto the platform to catch an express train. The train was delayed, in the end, for about 25 minutes, but in such a way that it always appeared to be only a few minutes away. I thereby missed two slow trains, either of which would have gotten me there faster. Although I like the bright colours and straightforward message of the new train displays, it's far too easy to be fooled into thinking the train is on time when in fact you've been standing there for bloody ages. The "due" time just stays the same, or flickers up and down in a random fashion. Today, other trains that were due on the same platform kept overtaking my long-awaited train, which was especially infuriating.
11:15 PM
I've been preparing for a presentation in a couple of weeks (yes, I did say that I've been preparing for it now and it's in a couple of weeks) about work-home role strain - the stress that people experience between having a job that wants to own you and a home life that you would like to put more into. I was reading an ACTU report called Fifty Families which is about the effect of unreasonable hours on families, the community, etc. They described the case of a man who was working ridiculous hours for his job. The man had a nervous breakdown, and was awarded workers' compensation (ie. the employer was found to have breached it's duty of care towards him) and the man's boss was still pressuring him to work the unreasonable hours. I think there should be a new category of retardation based on that kind behaviour:
Title: Acute inability to empathise
Criteria: Both of the following:
1. Behaviour towards another that ignores their needs AND would be considered reprehensible by any disinterested observer.
2. Inability to amend said behaviour even in the presence of direct censure.
You get the idea.
5:07 PM
Monday, August 18, 2003
On pain of death...
My desk needs cleaning, and I was heading upstairs with the avowed intention of cleaning the aforementioned desk, before I realised that the computer was free and calling for me. This is permitted, I understand, as long as I use the time to update my blog. It's funny, I used to think that eldest children (like me) made the rules. Apparently not. ;-)
Today, I finally finished a chunk of work that had been on my desk for six weeks. It had 4 different colours of highlighter on it. This made it look more fun than it really was, I can assure you. But now it is off my desk and back in the cupboard where it belongs, ready to fall out and stun a hapless passerby.
The cupboards in the hallway where the aforementioned folder lives go about six shelves high. As I am somewhat abbreviated in stature, I can only reach the top shelf by standing on my tippy-toes and reaching up as far as I can, grasping the bottom of the folder with my outstreched fingers, and pulling the folder out until it tips over and falls downwards into my hand. We used to have one of those cool library stool thingies, but I think it's now disappeared downstairs, and my plans to yoink it back have thus far been thwarted.
9:17 PM
Friday, August 15, 2003
Ooooh, baby, I luuuuurve university internet access. Pages loading this fast is just ludicrous. Downloading PDF files before I can get out my paper to print them, I can't believe it. The other two internet computers in my life (the family one at home and the communal one at work) have serious character flaws: the one at home will not load PDF files when you navigate to them (you have to save them to the computer and open them that way, which is not always possible with e-journals which decide to do all sorts of funky stuff and don't respond in the traditional way to the "save target as" command). The one at work will open PDFs, sort of. It takes several minutes to download an average length journal article. The time wasted waiting for them to download is surpassed only by the time wasted waiting for them to print: I kid you not, 1 page per minute. From the office behemoth laser printer, which prints a hundred sheet mail out in about 2 minutes (admittedly on a good day) and does basically whatever the hell it wants on a bad day.
Speaking of printers, I seem to have found printer nirvana here in the computer lab: you can print as much as you want as long as you supply the paper. Given that every psychology student consumes roughly their weight in journal articles every year, the paper cost may come to be significant, but considering that printing at the library costs 10c per sheet, I think I'll be back here again.
I had a workshop on suicide today. Among other things, we learnt about the Tarasoff case (1969): a man told his therapist that he was planning to kill his ex-girlfriend. The therapist took this seriously and contacted the police. The police then went and interviewed the man, decided he was rational, and let him go. The man broke off contact with his therapist because of the breach of trust, and then went on to kill his ex-girlfriend as promised. The ex-girlfriend's family sued the therapist and won. This is used as a demonstration that a psychologist has a duty to warn the person who may be harmed by a client's threatened action, not just to palm it off on the police.
I think it proves:
1) Police suck at psychological interviewing.
2) American law is stupid.
You be the judge.
5:41 PM
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Erm, yeah, I'll just gloss over the whole "not updating for four and a half months" thing.
I am half way through an icky week: I had work Monday, followed by volunteer work in the evening. On Tuesday, I had work, uni from 6-8pm, and then I dropped in on a church thing on my way home. Today I had only uni in the evening, so I spent the day doing readings and hooning about on the computer. Woo hoo, strikethrough makes a whole 3 text formats I can do!!! ;-) Tomorrow I have work, on Friday I have a uni workshop followed by a church meeting in the evening, and on Saturday I have another uni workshop followed by a church do in the evening. Total time to myself: sweet FA. Bring on Sunday.
This is the 3rd week of semester, and I am ridiculously proud of reading the two first readings for my counselling subject over the weekend...both were long and dry. I'm not really the kind of psychology person who demands that everything be scientifically proven, but by the end of one of the readings I was thinking "this is all baseless speculation!" Gah.
On the bright side: Trogdor! Heh heh heh heh heh.
10:35 PM
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