Hello!
As soon as my mind broke away from university and Canberra into the abyss of the holidays, I remembered my blog. Whilst I've been keeping a journal, blogs are fun too. So now I wait for the midnight bus outta here to start work tomorrow morning at 10am and I have perfect opportunity to write something small.
Currently I'm mega tired. I awoke at 5.10 this morning in Cunnamulla, south-west Queensland, and travelling with a group of kids arrived back to Canberra at 6pm tonight. We had gone for a trip to a remote Aboriginal community in far-north Queensland. It was fascinating. I needed something to get me out of this haze/bubble of university and college life where you easily lose perspective about the big issues at hand. But heading back to the desert changed all this and it all feels new again.
So my first semester of university is done. It feels good, though introductory subjects are very broad and not the most stimulating. I had romantically envisioned that university means attractive young things sitting on grass in the afternoon sun in summer clothes discussing the intricacies of particular literature, the flaws in particular theories. Whilst this has not yet happened, I do hope it will soon.
Also being away has given me a big fun list of things to do whilst I'm at home. Apart from work, in the eternal quest to earn youth allowance, I want to teach myself more guitar, finish some songs, run, bushwalks, firetwirl, do drives, catch up with some high school pals. I hope I can do this in the two weeks that I have.
At the end of last semester I was beginning to feel a bit more settled into college, though that did take a while. Funny, it's easy to feel comfortable and chummy with people when you're travelling, but being still and getting to know people is more challenging. Many of the first years have come straight from school too, something which I hardly feel I can relate to now. So now that I feel more atop of the social aspects of Canberra life, I hope to be more involved in things I'm interested up here. Having done this trip it would be great to be more active in indigenous affairs, and also the uni green commitee and maybe the college choir? The problem is that there are so many things that are interesting and that I want to be involved in that it is easy to over-commit. I don't want to get to that stage!
Driving south we felt the order and enclosure of the land increase. In gulf country the plains spread out unfenced for hundreds of kilometres. It is left to its own devices with no imposing forces at bay. Cattle roam free, over the road, horses, emus, pigs, you name it. As that land melted the farms that appeared seemed so precious, a bit silly. Getting a different perspective on reality is something that cannot be underestimated.
Hurrah!
Time to catch the bus.
See you next time. G.
