I probably should have brought a jacket. Two years to the day since I moved to Melbourne and I'm still making inappropriate clothing choices.

Inappropriate choices have certainly gone a long way in shaping the swirls and fragments of my life. To be honest, my life at 29 is nothing like I thought it would be. As a willful, stubborn, and probably a little self righteous teenager I wrote myself a letter to open on my 29th birthday. Funny, at 15 I must have thought that I had a better idea of the world than my future self would.* Perhaps "a little self-righteous" isn't quite the right turn of phrase. When I opened the letter earlier this year, I realised that 15 year old me really wasn't particularly strong on predicting the future. Life in my 30th year is nothing like I thought it would be. The other night on Survivor, the contestants were cable gliding over the top of the Nicaraguan jungle. Cut away to contestant description of how exciting everything is, and I could hear one of them say "I just never thought I'd be doing anything like this in my life, this is incredible". My own reaction wouldn't have been the same. Nicaraguan jungles feature somewhere on my bucket list, and I don't think I'd be too surprised to find myself in one. The things that end up surprising me are the small differences.

I knew that I would move to Melbourne from the very first time I visited here 10 years ago, so that's not really a surprise to me. My lifestyle surprises me. My career constantly surprises me. For the girl who told her high school maths teacher that she wouldn't have to remember any of the work after the exam, since there was no way she was going to be an engineer, to not only become an engineer, but also be considered and expert in her field, and be flown around the country to talk to people about her (mathematically based) research is quite a different direction to have taken. I zoomed past the age that I thought I would probably have kids at with nothing more than a slight whooshing sound, which really wasn't noticeable over the trance music, and I'm still not any closer to owning a house than I was at 15. I'm not married, I live in a share house, I own a full set of camping gear, and I swim in rivers more often than the ocean. I'm about to drive a very cheap car from Brisbane to Darwin to raise money for cancer research. I drink and smoke more than I ever thought I would, I party harder than I even knew was possible at 15.

I started this blog post on Novemeber 18, 2011, and a week later I voted as a Victorian for the first time. I had planned to make Melbourne a launch pad for my journeys to the rest of the world, but to be honest, I think I might actually stay here a while.

everyone loves a good dress-up

A week ago I managed to clean my room for the first time since I broke my wrist. Unfortunately having trouble lifting and folding things (due to a loss of functionality in one limb) makes it very difficult to keep things in order. Also unfortunately, the advent of Halloween and Eastment St Derby and the consequent costume creation, dress-up and drinking, means that my room is back in pretty much the same state as it was after not putting anything away for 4 weeks. Except this time some of the clothes on the floor are covered in fake blood as well.

It's almost 5 weeks now since the tram tracks on Swanston Street gripped the front tyre of my bike, flinging me helplessly onto the road, landing with my skirt over my head, a few more injuries than I had started the day with and holes in my brand new pair of tights. Not one to be put off by something as minor as a broken wrist and a knee the size of a rockmelon when there was music to dance to, I got Zoe to tie up my bike, and we walked the rest of the way to Parklife. To be honest actually breaking my wrist wasn't really the bad part, neither were the next 5 hours spent in the emergency room. A reasonable prescription of morphine and two amazing friends to keep me company definitely ensured hilarity. The surgery was less fun. And the two weeks of having a supersized and useless arm were even less fun. Things that are particularly difficult to do with only one arm include: Opening bottles (or jars, or anything that you have to unscrew), using a pepper grinder, typing, carrying anything, driving a car, washing your hair, washing the arm that you can actually still use and putting on socks. The cast wasn't even one of those ones that you could write on.

Luckily, the extra pain I went through earlier when they turned me cyborg by screwing bits and pieces of metal into my bones, meant that the cast came off after only 2 weeks, instead of the usual 6. It also means I have an awesome scar. One that looks a lot like I've tried to slit my wrists. Not great for giving out the impression that you're 100% mentally stable, but SUPER AWESOME for a halloween costume...

... especially when you have amazing friends who can make a copy of the real scar, and put it on your other arm, AND lend you corpse-like make-up.

So the upside to having broken a third bone this year is that I got a pretty cool Halloween costume out of it. The downside is that after being knocked over onto my wrist by crazy drunk dancing women at Eastment Street, it still hurts to type.

Thanks to Mr. Murphy and Underground Cinema for the photo. You can see the rest of the photos from the evening here

Accident prone?

*warning there may be minor whinging present in this blog post*

"And she's ready to go in for the tackle, eyes eagerly on the opponents feet. He's got his head down. Wait - he's just run straight into her. She's actually rebounded backwards off of his head! It looks like he's headbutted her right in the boob. Well, now, that's something you don't usually see in a game of soccer"

That's what a fraction of the commentary would have sounded like from our Sunday afternoon mixed league indoor soccer game, if it was the kind of game that generated an audience. I was the she. I'm not entirely sure what my opponent was thinking at the time, perhaps in identifying me as a member of the fairer sex he thought I might stand aside, and let him pass. My thought was definitely that he'd try to go around, rather than through me.

So it's now Wednesday, and I'm propped up on a bean-bag diagnosed with a fractured rib. I'm tired and grumpy because I wake up every time I move in my sleep, but most of all it just hurts. Anyway, it got me to thinking. After surviving 28 and a half years without any broken bones, I've now broken 2 in the last 6 months. I'm beginning to believe that my personal trainer was right when she said I was the most accident prone person she knew. In the last year I have sprained my foot, broken my big toe, had a recurring shoulder injury, received numerous bruises, and now fractured a rib. What on earth is going on? Is this a sign that I've suddenly gotten old?

So after spending the first couple of months of the year explaining that I broke my toe in an awkward trapeze dismount, I'm now going to have to go about explaining that someone headbutted my boob and broke my ribs during an indoor soccer match. I hope the mileage I get from that story is worth the pain.

expose of a date (it was going to be an expose of "dating", but I didn't really get that far before I got sick of it)

Recently I came to the conclusion that there was no one I know that I would actually like to be in a relationship with. And since I've been thinking that I might like to be in a relationship, the logical conclusion was that I would have to meet new people. Any avid reader of this blog would realise that the circles I move in are already intertwined enough without me complicating things further by dating friends of friends, which left me with two potential options. 1. Attempt to meet random strangers out and about; and 2. Internet dating.

I've had some minor success with option 1 in the past, although recently, despite the most random of meetings (I mean, who meets someone while hungover in a camping store?), there seems to have been a little too much overlap with the current social Venn diagram. So having gone with option 1 for the last 10 years or so, I thought maybe it would be best to give option 2 a try.

Every woman I spoke to about the proposal was enthused. Some had considered trying it themselves and were eager for my feedback, some had tried it already, the already coupled-up said they thought it sounded like fun, and the general response was along the lines of "go girl!". The men I told reacted slightly differently. Some were amused, some had tried it already and my housemate downright laughed at me (although he did add the very flattering comment that he thought I already got more than my fair share of attention from the opposite sex and perhaps I didn't need any more).

The profile creation was not to be undertaken lightly. Trying to distill the essence of why you are awesome into a by-line, a photo and a slightly more detailed description is no mean feat. It took me hours just to come up with the by-line.

The first week or so was fun, a bit like playing some kind of computer game. People send you "kisses", the real world equivalent of making eyes at you across the dance floor. You then have the choice of sending a kiss back (flirting back a little), or not (turning away abruptly). If you return the kiss, then they can send you an email, which would be the equivalent of asking to buy you a drink in the hope of starting up a conversation.

I set up one hard and fast rule for myself - anyone who in any way referred to finding "that someone special" was immediately ruled out. No room for cliches in my dating circle. Unsurprisingly that narrowed the pool remarkably. To be honest, after all the stories I'd heard about people finding love (or at least some kind of pleasant interaction) over the internet, I was surprised at what a bunch of duds were showing up on my computer screen. Perhaps I was being too harsh, but in 2 weeks of searching I found only 5 that attracted my interest.

Anyway fast forward past the "kisses", past the emailing back and forth, and finally to phone call proceeding the date. The boy had been surprisingly sweet via text communication, perhaps the kind of sweet that suggested he wasn't entirely relaxed with the situation. I've never been offered the phrase "have a lovely day" so much outside of the USA retail sector. As soon as the phone call got going though, I found the first flaw. He was a slow-talker. This was a bad sign.

There's something to be said here for the additional depth of human perception when it comes to the standard human communication methods. Online this guy seemed fairly intelligent, interesting and not too bad at conversation, but as soon as I heard him talking there was an immediate feeling that something wasn't the way I wanted it.

Anyway, attempting not to judge a book by its audio tape, I went along with the date as planned. In essence, it was horrible. When someone repeats more than once that as a child they used to spend most of their time having horse-poo and rotten egg fights, you do start to question their priorities in life. So after 10 minutes I found myself thinking up excuses to leave. I figured I would give it an hour, it could possibly get better, but in reality I was already wishing I was across the road playing lawn bowls with my mates. Concerning when you take into account my lack of enthusiasm for lawn bowls.

So that was the end of internet dating for yours truly. I did however learn an interesting lesson, there are some things conveyed when you actually meet a person that are very well hidden in internet communication. Perhaps we shouldn't be so hasty to discount actual interaction from our lives.

It's all about the journey

'Everyone's on a journey these days' writes John Elder in the Sunday Age this week, as he discusses the prevalence of the term in modern lingo. Several well known thinkers weigh into the discussion with their own perceptions of the use of the word - from a comparison with "aspirational voters and their ambitions", to a way to make sense of enduring hardship.

I often think of my life and discoveries as a journey, and the whole article got me to wondering why. Going through the many levels of education that I've encountered, I had a general sense of waiting for the world to start, for my life to start. Things always seemed to be happening while I was waiting for something else to really kick in. Some time in my mid-20s (and still enrolled as a full time student), I realised that there wasn't going to be any grand starting moment, where someone handed me a key and I opened the door to the rest of my life. Life was now, and I had better start actually paying attention to it. That life that I'd been thinking of as being fixed in a place in the future had actually been going on all around me, while I was patiently waiting to grow up. There was no actual destination, life was unfolding around me as I thought about it.

To me, the key features of a journey are the things that happen along the way. A journey in my mind has no need of a final end point, it continues on for as long as you let it. It's not a trip, or a visit or an outing - it's a journey, alluding that the path is greater than the destination. When we journey through the first three dimensions, it is easy to stand still in one place and assume a destination has been reached, but it would be sad to think that nothing had happened along the way. So now, as we all journey through the fourth dimension, do we ever reach a place where we might stand still in time? This constant movement is for me the essence of life. My greatest fear is standing still while the current washes around me, and watching the world go past. The journey is in fact all there is. It's no wonder that we're suddenly so pre-occupied with the word. Travel, movement, change, new thoughts, new ideas, new activities, they're all a part of the journey.

If we're constantly traveling, how can we ignore the journey? One of life's great lessons is to stop and smell the roses, to appreciate the moments as you find them, rather than dismissing them in favour of the next - living in the moment. Perhaps that is the key to it after all, if we think about the journey, where we have come from, to where we are, and pay attention to all of its parts we allow ourselves to appreciate the importance and beauty of each moment.

So despite journey being the new word of the decade, I'm sticking with it. I'm along for the ride and I'm not getting off - this journey has no destination, and I think that's what makes it the most exciting.

Deadlines seem to you to be of relative, rather than absolute, importance

The title of this post was one of many questions in myers briggs type personality test I saw recently. Ironically, without hesitation I answered yes. To the frustration of many people in my life, I'm not exactly what you'd call punctual. That would be one of the many reasons that I'm writing a "wrap-up of 2009, start again 2010" type blog post 2 weeks into the new year.

For three years in a row I made the same New Years resolutions without managing to ever keep one of them. The first was to lose 5kg (actually I think that had been a standing resolution since I was about 15, when I didn't actually need to lose 5kg). The second was to learn to speak Italian (which I did attempt one of the years). The third was to finish my PhD. So after 3 years of consistently failing, in 2009 I thought it was time to mix things up again. I abandoned all other resolutions, and summed it all up with one statement. "to not to do anything that I don't want someone* to find out about". As it went, there were only 2 incidents where I slipped up, and since they're things I don't want someone to find out about, I won't mention what they were here. Overall, I think 2 slip-ups in 365 days, counts as a success.

So 2010, and the semi-pointless task of thinking up new resolutions is back. Given my penchant for repeating resolutions it's not surprising that I've decided to maintain the same resolution this year. I think once I manage to keep it for 3 years in a row, I might just call it my life motto, although that being the case, it's going to need to be phrased a little better.

*excluding speed cameras and law enforcement officers

hands up if you have not had sex with someone sitting at this table...

Some years ago I was privileged enough to find myself hosting a radio show on Radio Adelaide under the guise of uncovering interesting things about Adelaide that not many people knew. Our first show was devoted to something that everyone already knows, and at the time seemed to be reverberating through our existence - the two and half degrees of separation between everyone living in Adelaide. We didn't research particularly well - there was no facebook back then to easily get statistics on who knew who - we figured on it being a fairly well established fact and discussed what it meant to us and our lives.

Six or seven years on, Adelaide being highly interconnected had stopped being a revelation and had become the status quo. It wasn't exactly surprising to find people who knew people who knew you, it was more expected than not. Feeling somewhat claustrophobic within the tangle of interconnections, and finding the start of an exciting new world just 8 hours drive away, I realised it was time to move on. Time to break free of the circles I'd grown up in and move to the bigger playground, where hopefully the swings would be more exciting, the monkey bars high enough that my feet didn't scrape the ground and where there'd be a whole bunch of new kids who didn't all know each other already.

The prospect was exciting and a little frightening - I knew a bunch of people , in a whole lot of different circles, but nothing as intertwined as the Venn Diagram I was leaving behind me. The thought of being able to go out and know no one at the party was invigorating. So I came and I met people, I socialised, I had a whole lot of fun. I met people through different avenues, at different parties, under different circumstances.

Slowly though, the circles started to tighten. People I thought were in entirely different circles were suddenly old friends, people who didn't know each other before I arrived became the best of friends, and I found myself struggling to describe who these new people were to the old circles back home. It's not a bad thing at all, just an interesting realisation, the world is a small place, you create your own circles, like attracts like, and you're drawn to the same people who are drawn to each other.

So here I am a year later, and I think I might have been spending too much time on the one piece of play equipment. Sitting around outside with a big group of people at the Black Cat on Brunswick St a friend of mine looked around and said "Hands up if you haven't had sex with someone sitting at this table". One person put their hand up. Welcome back to Adelaide circa 1999.