The rest of my life.

Folks, I’ve finally done it. At the age of 15, I’ve managed to work out exactly what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. As we all know, life always turns out exactly the way people plan, and holds no surprises.

I’m sure there’ll be no harm in my typing out my life-long ‘TO-DO’ list here, since there’s no chance that any of it could possibly go wrong.

4th August, 2009: Type up a blog detailing my life-plan.
15th August, 2009: Make VCE Subject selections for Year 11.
October 2009: Be accepted into all selected classes.
November 2009: Pass all end-of year exams with flying colours.
December 2009: Receive academic honours for semester achievements.
February 2010: Discover that all teachers for the year are really cool and give easy grades.
March 2010: Find that the work load is really easy to cope with.
June 2010: Get fantastic grades for mid-year exams.
Novemeber 2010: Get incredible grades for end of year exams.
December 2010: Receive academic honours for semester achievements.
February 2011: Discover that the work load has decreased for Senior Year.
March 2011: Join various groups and comitees and enjoy flourishing social and academic lives.
October 2011: Sit for my final VCE exams.
October 2011: Find that I received an ENTER score of 99.95, among the top 1% of the entire student population.
November 2011: Be offered various scholarships from universities.
Novemeber 2011: Sit for the UMAT. (Undergraduate Medical Admission Test)
Decemebr 2011: Discover I did brilliantly on the UMAT.
December 2011: Be called in for an interview by the medical department at Monash University.
December 2011: Wow the team at Monash with my brillance.
December 2011: Be offered a position in the medicine course, beating out hundreds of local, interstate and international candidates, approximately 500 of whom had a VCE enter score of greater than 99.

2012 – 2017: Do really well in the medicine course. Handle the work load with minimal stress. Have plenty of time for social interaction and leisure activities. Achieve Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (with Honours).

2018: Become a Junior Doctor and enter the medical work force. Complete 12 month internship.
2019: Spend a year working in the public health system as a Resident. Find an intersting, high paying job with reasonable work hours.
2020: Complete postgraduate training. Receive full medical registration.
2021: Become a registrar at a vocational training program.
2024: Achieve a fellowship in Clinical Neurology.
2025: Receive Medicare provider number.
2026: Open successful private practice and help hundreds and hundreds of people. Daily.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. By the year 2026, at the age of 32, I will have successfully completed my education in the medical field, and will have risen in ranks enough to open my own private practice. Business will be booming, and I will live the remainder of my life secure; both financially, and in the konwledge that I’ve made a positive impact to the world by helping people.

Call me an optimist?

Goodnight, potatoes. I’ve got some thinking to do.

We All Fall Down.

“Mosquito repellents don’t repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito’s sensors so they don’t know you’re there.”

Yet another tidbit of insight, courtesy of the eternal wisdom of the internet.
Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t understood the fact correctly, but I find it fascinating that we can dull the senses of another creature to make ourselves effectively invisible to it. It reminded me of the Perception Filters from the “Sound of Drums” episode of Doctor Who (nerdy reference, let it pass).

Anyway, surprise surprise, I’ve neglected this blog for yet another month. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things and start posting good sized blogs on a regular basis, as opposed to these sporadic attempts at summarizing large chunks of my life into online essays. On the plus side, I do have a genuine excuse for being so lazy with the updates. I’ve been really busy.

1. On the 22nd of June I started my week of work experience at my old primary school. It was brilliant. My timetable had me rotating around a lot of different teachers and year levels, so apart from the two or three teachers who used me to do administrative jobs like photocopying and filing that they didn’t want to do themselves, it was really fantastic. A few of the teachers remembered me, and strangely enough, one Grade 6 student claimed to remember me as well. The highlight of the week was spending one morning with the Prep class, where I taught an adorable little boy to recognise the letter ‘a’.

2. The work experience week lead directly into my school holidays. The first week was wonderfully relaxing. I went to a few birthday parties, tried to plan a sleepover but completely failed, and on one occassion had a few friends over from ten in the morning till seven in the afternoon.

3. During that week, my parents refurnished me and my brother’s bedrooms. We live in a relatively small house, and our rooms were quite congested. Mum decided to throw out the odd bits of furniture cramped against my walls and replaced it with one giant desk with enough shelves and storage space to hold every single one of my earthly posessions. I’m loving it. Dad then bought me an office chair to go with it, and spent more on it than anyone in their right mind would have.

4. All of this refurnishing was the first step of our family’s moving process. We’ve been renting this house for four years, but recently our ladnlord informed us that he would like to come back and live here again. We have till September to find another house and move out. We’ve been searching for houses for a very, very long time now and my parents are starting to worry since we’re having trouble finding decent houses in the area within our price range.

5. The second week of my school holidays was devoted entirely to ‘Urinetown: the Musical’; the school production we’ve been rehearsing since March. The cast members were required at school from 10AM – 4PM for four days, and on the fifth day we were expected to stay at school for twelve hours in order to rehearse each song with the full band. The week was surprisingly fun, and we managed to work out all the little glitches in the show.

6. I spent my final day of vacation at a friend’s sweet sixteenth. It was a heores and villains themed party, and I went dressed as Sarah Jane (another Doctor who reference, forgive me). We played a few party games, but for the most part we just hung out and had a good time. It was lots of fun.

7. Rather than joining all my classmates for school on Monday, us Urinetown cast members had the first two days of school off for rehearsals. We spent Monday throwing together our costumes, fine-tuning make-up, etc. We came back to school at six in the afternoon for a full run through of the show, for the first time with all our costumes and the tech crew working the lights. It took some time to smooth out the technical difficulties, and we didn’t leave until eleven at night.

8. Tuesday, again, was devoted entirely to Urinetown. We had our matinee performance for the Year Sevens during the day, which was honestly quite discouraging. They didn’t laugh at many jokes, and were a generally unresponsive audience. To be fair, though, twelve year olds are hardly the target demographic with regard to this musical and they did seem to enjoy the parts they understood. After talking over everything we needed to improve based on the matinee performance, we went home for a quick break and came back to school again and performed our opening show. It went really, really well. The feedback was great, and the energy onstage was fantastic.

9. I decided to go to school on Wednesday, since there were a lot of friends I wanted to catch up with. Well, that, and my timetable for Wednesday lets me off at 12.45 so I wouldn’t have to spend TOO much time at school. Of course, Wednesday happened to be the 15th of July, also known as the day Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince came to theatres near you. A few friends and I ran down to the cinemas after school, and made it just in time to see the 1.15 showing of the movie. The movie in itself was good and a huge step up from the last one, but being the Harry Potter geek that I am, it was a bit dissapointing and didn’t really feel like Harry Potter. After the movie, I headed back to school for our second night performing Urinetown. Again, all went really well.

10. I skipped school on Thursday, and only left the house in the afternoon for our third performance. The audience was fracking brilliant. They were LOUD, which is just what we were after. I endured a full day of school on Friday, ignoring comments about the enormous bags under my eyes and went back to school again in the afternoon, now fully used to go-to-school-at-8AM-and-leave-at-11PM routine. On Friday night, the audience was packed, as expected. We made more mistakes than we’d ever made before, with people forgetting lines and the band making mistakes that cut off entire bits of dialogue and threw the actors off completely, but we covered up the mistakes so well that the audience didn’t notice a thing.

11. Saturday night, the cast all agreed to meet up at school early since it was our closing night and we wanted to spend more time together. After our director walked around filming our stupid (read: hilarious) comments and conversations,we went out and performed. The audience was packed again, and the show ran without a hitch. We were all visibly tired and starting to lose our voices, but it was great and the audience loved it. After the show was finished, us castmembers completely surprised everyone else by holding an improptu presentation where we thanked our director, musical director, choreographer, costumers, tech crew and all else involved by giving them presents and a spotlight. We then performed one of our favourite songs one last time, more for our own benefit than for the audience.

12. After packing everything away, returning costumes, removing makeup and tearing apart the set by stealing whatever props we wanted, we all headed down to the after-party at one of the cast’s houses. It was a little strange. The cast of this show are, for the most part, kids from around the school who would probably never, ever, get together under normal circumstances. We’re all from different year levels, and usually run in completely different circles. The show forced us together though, but I’m glad it did since they’re all great people.

13. Anyway, it’s now 2PM on Sunday, and I’mtyping all this up as I eat a chocolate muffin for breakfast. I’ve had a good night’s sleep for the first time in a fortnight, refuse to step out of the house for any reason and intend to spend what’s left of this wonderful day catching up on a month’s work of homework I’ve used Urinetown as an excuse to ignore.

I’m finding it really weird that Urinetown is over, though. I devoted five months of my life to the show and I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. I have all this spare time on my hands. It doesn’t help that the cast members will probably never get together again, since a lot of them will be off to university and TAFE soon enough.

As our director said, though, the show will live on; both in our hearts and in DVD format.

That’s all from me. Goodnight, bubs.

First day of school.

Yes, I did a quick google image search to spice up this blog. Don’t judge me.

The first day of school came around again. It was actually really awesome seeing friends again after that two month break.
The mind-numbingly dull “Hellowelcometoseniorschooldon’tscrewitup” speech aside, it was a great day. Mainly because we were allowed to leave at 12.45, but catching up with everyone was an important factor as well.

This morning, I realised that I’ve definitely grown very comfortable in this school over the last few years. There wasn’t even a hint of that back-to-school dread I used to experience. I can walk through the campus and recognise most of the faces I see. The teachers stop to have a chat. The younger kids look up at us with that delicious hint of fear in their eyes.

School definitely gets better as you get older.

On a different note: I’m done blogging daily. I think I made it to 101 consecutive blog posts and frankly, I got fed up with it. The ‘whenever I feel like’ approach suits me a lot better.

75. The Office

I spent the day watching the entire second season of The Office with my brother.
The US version, that is.
It’s flippin’ brilliant.

74. Eveready Super Heavy Duty.

Today was my school’s Presentation Night.
There’s music and announcements and awards are presented.
I won two awards for being a school leader.

It wasn’t enough incentive for me to go.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t.

73. Eepah #2

Not up to typing much today, either.

72. Eepah.

I don’t feel like typing today.

32. Wow.

I just spent a few hours mindlessly playing games on kongregate.com. It was ridiculous, and now I’m eager to just go to sleep.

Just thought I ought to make the obligatory blog post before the day ends.

28. In which I cleverly avoid mentioning the election.

I think we all know that today is a very historical day.

That’s right folks, this 28th post marks the four week anniversary of my daily-blogging-social-experiment. Which I find quite remarkable, because I didn’t think I’d stick with it so long.

In order to avoid mentioning the thing that I mentioned that I wouldn’t mention, I’m going to send you to a story written by username tangledweb on deviant art: Click!

Here’s a quick excerpt:

January 2009, Washington DC: The State of the Union Address

“My fellow Americans,”

Barack Obama briefly pauses, hands gripping the sides of a podium bearing the seal of the President of the United States of America.  He thoughtfully considers the expansive audience before him – the United States Congress, invited dignitaries, and dozens of cameras streaming live multimedia to hundreds of millions of viewers spanning the entire globe.  Fully cognizant of this historic moment, the new American leader looks over his shoulder to acknowledge Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  Appearing to stifle a guffaw, Obama’s narrow shoulders begin to shake, eventually giving surrender and rearing his head back with raucous laughter.  He turns back to again face the broader audience, slouches to the side, and grabs the microphone in hand.

“GOTCHA!” Barack grins, pointing to the camera, “Man, I didn’t know how long I’d keep y’all peeps fooled.”  The president poses for the press corps, throws his arms up in the air, hands forming the letter ‘C.’  “I’m straight gangsta, from the Chicago hood.  Cut that ‘Hail to the Chief’ noise off, play something that’s got some bass to it.”

For the record, I didn’t write it. I just happened to come across it, and thought it was brilliant. It’s short, easy to read and fully worth the time.

So because I’m feeling far too lazy to write anything today, I’d much rather you follow the link and read the rest of this hugely entertaining prose.

27. Sarah Palin Prank Call.

I hate that I’m doing this.
I’ve made a concious effort to avoid mentioning American politics in this blog because, frankly, every blog I come across these days shares the theme.
But I’ll have to make an exception today.

I think everyone, regardless of the country they live in, should listen to the prank call if you haven’t already.
Youtube link to it.

If you can’t be bothered clicking, I’ll sum it up here anyway.

I am not old enough to vote. Which isn’t exactly an issue because I live in Australia. I have never been to the States. Admittedly, I don’t pay all that much attention to the political situation in my own country, nevermind America.
But if you’d like to hear my underage, uneducated opinion:
This woman shouldn’t be a vice president of anything.

It was kind of difficult to force myself to listen to the entire conversation.

About a minute into the conversation, the prankster makes a reference to his “special American advisor, Jimmy Hallyday”, a French singer. She didn’t pick up on it.

Two and a half minutes into the conversation, the prankster suggests they go hunting together and mentions that he “loves killing animals.” To her credit, Palin didn’t jump in and confess her long repressed love for killing as well. But the laughter wasn’t exactly virtuous, either.

Three minutes in, and I’m paraphrasing here, the prankster says: “Some people say you’re not experienced in foreign policies, but that’s completely false. That’s what I told my good friend, the Canadian Prime Minister, Stef Carse.” Stef Carse being a Canadian singer. I laughed out loud at this point. I admit, I haven’t a clue who the actual Prime Minister of Canda is because, well, it’s Canda. But it’s the sort of thing I’d expect a Vice Presidential nominee to know.

Three and a half minutes in, the prankster referrs to “one of his good friends, the prime minister of Quebec, Mr Richard Z Sirois”, who is in fact, a comedian. I don’t think I can blame her for not knowing who the Premier of Quebec (sometimes referred to as the Prime Minister) is. It’s just a pity that when the prankster said something about working with Quebec, she replied by saying she enjoyed working with Canadians.

The prankster goes on to menton that his wife is “hot in bed”, which you’d hope would set off warning signals in Palin’s head, but apparently did not.

The prankster finally referrs to the porno titled ‘Nailin’ Pailln’ as an edgy documentary on her life.
She thanked him for saying so.

My favourite part, though, was when he said they had a lot in common be cause he could see Belgium from his house, though again, to her credit, I suppose she fielded the comment better than most people would have.

On the other hand, I think most people would have picked up on the fact that it was a prank before it got that far.

And I suppose you have to consider that fact that she counted on her people to screen the calls and make sure it’s legitimate before sending it through to her, so it’s not entirely her fault that she fell for it.

Still, the lack of security isn’t what I’d call a great defence.

To the best of my knowledge, tomorrow is election day, and we will know the outcome very soon.
Up till now I haven’t really gotten behind either of the candidates because, well, I’m an Australian kid with no particular reason to do so.
I’ve changed my mind.

Vote Obama ‘08.

*For the record, I’m not overly fond of McCain or Obama. It’s just that, from where I’m standing, Obama seems the lesser of two evils.