Today

AFTERNOON

Guess what: Winter Clerkship! Yay!

There are only two firms in Adelaide that offer to second and third year students, and I will be working at one of them for three weeks in July. I'm pretty happy.

The one that I'll be with (let's call it Firm T) actually seems like the better firm, in my possibly biased opinion (I didn't even get to the first stage of assessment in the other one *cough*). Well, Firm T had a much more rigourous selection process - before we even saw the face of anyone in the company we had to answer all these questions about our communication style, personal interests, motivation, experience in non-law related fields, etc etc. One of their many application questions was something like, 'what, in your view, sets firm X apart from the others' and I wrote about how their thorough pre-selection questionaire showed what an awesome and detailed job they must do with everything, hahah.

There was then an 'assessment centre' thing which I was nervous about at first, because we were told it would be based around 'business scenario'. Aargh. Turns out the business scenario was not financial (which I feared) but administrative tasks. We had to work out as a group which hypothetical tasks to complete in which order if we were Person Y at a new company, and the action we would take for each one. It was stuff like: call Monica to reassure her of this, email Henry to plan for a presentation, prepare documents for Sally by the end of the day, etc. Plus do an individual writing task picking apart a bad contract.

I got through to the next stage which was a proper interview last Tuesday (with HR and a senior associate) and today I found out that I was one of the four people chosen for the job! I had a smile on my face that I couldn't shake for a while after that.

MORNING

I got to feel like a minda (or, let's say, tourist) this morning when I caught a train to the other side of town. I'm a bus girl, and had actually never been on a train in my own city until this morning. Had I lived in train-serviced suburb I may have been familiar before now with the station's walk-through ticket machines. You know, where you stick your ticket in, then the bars unlock, so you move through and grab your ticket where it pops out the other side? Yep, except apparently here the ticket doesn't do that travel-through-the-machine thing, it just pops in and out the same side. And then falls onto the ground. While you are already through and the gate has re-locked. So then you have to detour back around through the "family" bar-free booth to get your ticket off the ground, because hey, that's a multitrip.

Also: less-than-impressed by the train driver who sporadically mumbled the station we were stopping at. I situated myself near the station map so as to count the stops in between his announcements.

I was visiting a primary school with a deaf education unit, to research their perspective and compare them with another primary school. All went okay at first. I admit that when I asked his role and he mentioned he was an assistant principal, my initial feeling was woah! Big shot! Since when am I the kind of person to interview assistant principals and call them by their first name?

Unlike my interview with the first primary school, this man gave much more of a "linguistics lecturer" than "primary school teacher" vibe, going on about systemic functional grammar and metalanguage and so forth. We were almost done when something went astray. He asked me about the other primary school and I responded with probably more information than I should have (to do with an implied criticism of his centre) and I knew right after I said it that I shouldn't have. He seemed uncomfortable and annoyed, though whether at me or them I'm not sure, and wrapped it up curtly after that. Gah. From a confidentiality perspective it was a bad move, and probably tactless too.

Anyway, I sent him an email of apology that I began compose straight away on my (bus) ride back to town, and he responded kindly. All is all well, I hope. Eek.

LUNCH

I just want to mention the turning point between the bad-vibe morning and the good-news afternoon. I popped into the hostel to heat up some lunch, and had a nice chat with W and B. My visit also coincided with H's. H is a Chinese nurse who was a former cleaner/long term guest. W and I had put aside some mail for her recently, and she was excited to dicover that. H has, and I say this with affection, the most stereotypically squinty Chinese manner. She's around 40 years old and often wears a broad-brimmed hat with a drawstring underneath. When W pulled out a bundle of letters, she just about wet herself with excitement. "Ohhh, sank you W-! Sank you, sank you, sank you so mach!" She bobbled her head with each exclamation. "Ohh! Ohh!"

W started telling her about his grandson, who is only a toddler but big and tall for his age. H was loving it. "Ohh! I sink he is strong boy! He grow up vey big! Ohh!"

Overcome with excitement at seeing us again and retrieving her letters, H clutched my arm. "Wait here!" She ordered, and came back a few minutes later with a giftbag of chocolates for each of us. "You not here when I left! Only A- here! I no see you when I left!" Brightened my morning, H did.

A bamboo stick of thoughts

I think I've had this realisation before.
I cannot multi-task.
"Modern life" or whatever you want to call it, tempts us to multi-task, or maybe the better word would be multi-procrastinate. Normally I am the devil's advocate for anyone who claims the evils of today's society. But with this, I am on board with the naysayers.
Facebook. iPhones. Oh god, my iPhone. Everything 'more interesting' than the current task at hand is only a click away.
It was never impossible to procrastinate. There were always windows to look out of. Doodles to sketch. Daydreams. But now, with electronics and the internet, distractions are so close to the surface, so near. Got a spare second before starting law readings? How about you have a quick look at that new blog you found. Or, you know, read ALL THE ARCHIVES over an obsessive three days. Or that.
My habits haven't let me down in any major way. From an outsider's perspective I think I'd look like I was doing pretty fine. I have a good GPA. I seem to balance the different parts of my life well.
It's silly, to compare the 'success' of me-now to a me-as-kid. Small pond, big pond. But at the moment I miss feeling effortlessly capable.
This is from a passage about deaf children that I recently read for linguistics, that I wanted to skip back and read again and again:

"The normal hearing child has a constantly expanding linguistic experience and is constantly experimenting in his own use of it. He is bathed in language and we can safely trust that some of it will flow into channls of utterance." *

I don't anyone can produce their best at something until they're 'bathed' in it. At the end of listening to my con law lecture I tuned out and clicked onto facebook, because the lecturer had finished with the content and moved on to some kind of quiz about high court judges and historical moments. But, you know, (and I know this sounds stupid) when I was in primary school I dug that kind of stuff. I didn't separate the big picture from the facts I needed to know for the test. It was all knowledge, it was all interesting, and from being bathed in the big picture I ended up nailing the little picture stuff with no difficulty. Maybe I need to take some tips from my 11-year-old self.

It's not that I lack curiosity in general - it's the directing of my interest towards the topic at hand that I need to work on. I need to stop seeing my current uni work as stifling my interest for [insert obsession of the moment] and realise that its something I can engage with in itself.

And I do, sometimes. What begins as superficial 'work' often works its way into me, albeit slowly.

This is not the entry that I sat down to write. I was going to talk about pub crawls, lying in bed with DW, the awesomeness of limewire and new music, the affection I feel for the hostel and its 'characters' after hearing H describe situational mishaps.

Instead, I'll leave you with another passage.

"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of teas and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: 'But this what I see; this is what I see,' and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father of the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay's knee and say to her - but what could one say to her? 'I'm in love with you?' No, that was not true. 'I'm in love with this all', waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children? It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant." **

*M. M. Lewis, Language and Personality in Deaf Children
**Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Sorry for the weird entry.

- khere was already the past.