The Journal of Lee Davis-Thalbourne

So, the last couple of posts have been me discussing how I don't really want to go back to uni, and how I'm really loving my job right now.

I am now firmly convinced that these events are related, although possibly at one remove.

See, for the last year or two, I've been working hard at reducing my debt, and the reason I've been working hard at this is because I had plans to go back to uni, and to do so I'd have to accept a drop in income, which I can't support at my level of debt. For the last year or two, I've also been generally unhappy with life. That goal always seemed to be creeping ever further away, as I started getting more and more debt. This got even worse when I lost my job earlier in the year - all that money, that I could put towards debt, but it all went away as I had to support myself without a job.

But, a few weeks ago, I went and took a look at that goal, of going to university, and I made a decision - that I was no longer going to pursue that goal.

That decision had a whole bunch of knock-on effects.

Firstly, The nature of my new job changed. I took the job, not because I was really interested in working for a bank, but because I knew I could do the job, and it'd help me pay off my debt. The job, in short, was purely a means to an end, one that wasn't really in sight. How could I like a job when I framed it like that? But when I dropped the uni goal, I stopped thinking about the job as a means to an end, and started looking at the job as the end itself. If I wasn't going to uni, what did this job mean? As I worked on the phones, it dawned on me that actually, one thing I really did love was helping people. And that's what this job really helped me do. On nearly every call I took, I could make an actual difference to that person's life, even if it was just a statement of a balance, or just answering a question about an unknown transaction. When I looked around at my job, I came to the realisation that I actually love my job, immensely so.

But I don't think I would have reached that level of thinking if I'd still stuck to my old goal of going back to uni. Me being happy in my job was purely because of a perspective change.

Interesting, that.

It's rather hard to write an essay when you have a song stuck in your head.

That is all.

I finally got my results for my Honours on Monday. I'd've posted them sooner, but to be honest, It wasn't until today I got everything officially figured out. Ah well! This is something to be rectified!

2006	LIN4740	Linguistic Theory	67	C
2006	LIN4660(A)	Minor Thesis Part 1	-	SFR
2006	LIN4720	Special Topic in Linguistics	82	HD
2007	LIN4660(B)	Minor Thesis Part 2	72	D
2007	LINHONS	Final Honours (Linguistics) Mark	73	HIIA

So, what, exactly, does this mean, all up. It means I did rather well, considering! It basically means that I'm almost certainly likely to be able to move into postgraduate work once I'm ready for it (basically, in 2009), and it means that despite difficulties I managed to hand in a reasonable thesis.

Although, I will admit, the marker's comments were quite brutal, which threw me for a day or so, but of course the comments are quite legitimate - and hell, I knew I didn't have a perfect piece of writing when I handed it in. But it seems that everyone thinks that I did well enough to keep going to postgrad work, so I'm more than happy!

Today was my day of bureaucracy-wrangling. Went rather well, but it looks like the next semester's plans are going to have to change.

Firstly, I finally went to Centrelink and handed in all the paraphernalia to get my Health Care card. I came in armed with photocopies, originals, and a wallet full of ID, and managed to get everything in first-time around. Yay me!

Secondly, I went to uni to organise my enrolment for this semester, since I'd left it horribly late and my.monash wouldn't let me do it online. That was interesting. Last year, when I sorted everything out, I was told that I only had one more subject to do after honours. Well, it turns out, he calculated wrong, and it turns out that I have three subjects to do this semester! It turns out that they had calculated for an arts only graduation, and had thrown my psych subjects into the Arts side of my degree. But, it turns out, I need them for my major, and so I have two arts subjects and one science subject to go before I can graduate.

Fortunately, this is doable. Unfortunately, it means I'm back to being a full-time student, and the plan I had to start working more this semester is unlikely to be compatible with the new plan. It's not that I'm overly worried about it, it's more an annoyance than a wailing offence.

Of course, the subjects I'd picked today turned out to be problematic, so I'll have to come in to uni again tomorrow to sort that out. I figured that if I had to do more subjects, I'd do all those subjects that I wanted to do but didn't think I had space in my degree for, but it turns out that my choices are much more limited than I'd thought. Ah well. I will sort it all out!

Essay handed in. Finally.

Only a week late. Surely my supervisor won't worry too much...

So here I am, on a wednesday night, desperately trying to finish my Linguistics presentation for tomorrow, finding myself unable to concentrate. Thus, time for a livejournal update.

I think I'm settling in rather well here. I'm not in opposition with anyone here, and with so many people around, it's hard to be lonely. I kinda miss the freedom of my mum's car, but that's neither here nor there really, since I'm coping with that rather well. Need to learn to eat well, but I think that's more a matter of me refusing to spend the money, and me being slack. Them's the breaks.

Work has been, well, busy as anything. Still need to train my boss up - when I ask him to consult a lecturer about what's urgently required in an urgently required book, I don't generally mean to consult the unit guide again. However, I'm sure I'll train him up eventually.

This Saturday I go to the Commonwealth games with fireflyfaery. Yes, I know that a bunch of people here probably think it's a waste of money, but my parents paid for the tickets, and they're pretty good anyway. And apparently table tennis is really exciting to watch!

The Urban Dead Wiki is starting to annoy me. I think I'm almost hitting the end of my productive lifespan there, alas.

I still love fireflyfaery. Love her so much, it hurts sometimes.

Now, with those out of the way...

I had an odd thought on the Sluggy.net forums, regarding polyamorous marriages. It was noted that a good deal of the problem is dealing with contracts with more than two people involved. Thinking a little, it occured to me that we already have a solution to this problem - Corporations.

A corporation effectively acts as a person that many people can contract to. So, if the issue is legal contractual issues, why not turn marriage from a contract to a corporate entity? All potential members of the marriage sit together and write up the charter, including exit clauses, obligations, possible entrance clauses, etc. When everyone is satisfied with the charter, it gets taken to a lawyer, where the marriage entity is registered, and a public version of the charter becomes available. Since the exit clauses are set out explicitly from the start, those "divorcing" the marriage know exactly what they're entitled to, and so does everyone else. Further, such marriages may be able to allow other spouses into the marriage. Monogamous relationships follow the same rules, and all marriages become dissolved should less than two people exist within the marriage. Writing up the rules of your own relationship means monogamous couples and polygamous groups both get the benefit of having all of the relevant people's views and assumptions made explicit before they're contractually obliged to follow them. It also means open relationships can have full grounding in the law, as that can be written up as a part of the marriage charter.

I expect there's some issues with this implementation, but I think it might be a useful model should polyamorous marriages get off the ground.

My results came through:

Subject	Grade
CSE2302 (Operating Systems)	66	C
LIN3490 (Literacies, Communication and Cyberspace)	77	D
LIN3510 (Structure of English)	63	C
PHL2330 (Issues in Political Philosophy)	71	D

(For those who on my friends list that aren't used to Australian grading, the Cs and Ds are good - they stand for Credit and Distinction. From lowest to highest, it goes Fail (F), Near-Pass (NP), Pass (P), Credit (C), Distinction (D), High Distinction (HD).)

Hooray! Those LIN code subjects are the ones I wanted to do really well on, because I need them to do Honours in Linguistics. The 63 is a tad unfortunate (but was probably due to the fact that I thought my third assignment only had 2 pages, when in fact there was another one sneakily hidden behind the second page!), but is all good, because I already had over a 70 average, and my average here for my LIN subjects is a 70! Which means I rock, and am expecting a letter from the Arts Faculty any day now.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I found a brilliant web-script that I'm loving more every time I use it. It takes a table, delimited by some character, and then converts it into a HTML or MediaWiki table automagically! Why is this cool? Because I can use Excel to make a nice data table (or any sort of simple table), and then copy and paste it directly into the script, and with only a little tweaking of settings, it'll give me a picture-perfect table! Yay! This is the script I'm talking about. A very nice time saver indeed.

Well, where shall I begin? It has been a while...

Unicon
Went well. Enjoyed myself just about every session, had some brilliant players. Definitely should run more comedy games, especially with people who don't take them seriously. I have ideas for other games, but they can wait, for the moment.

Work
One more Assignment to go - My Literacy Research Essay. I'm doing a student-defined subject, Attitudes towards chatspeak in forumspeak communities. The Forumspeak community I'm using for this assignment as a case study is Sluggy.net. The data is collected, I just need to spend time going through it and writing the damn thing.

Procrastination
I've outdone myself this time in the Procrastination stakes. A while back I considered the possibilities of Wiki roleplaying, and I came up with a neat idea - imagine if the world you're roleplaying in has the same rules as a wiki - that you could change or create anything, even stuff that wasn't yours, and that everyone else could do it to.

Well, the website is now live. Deiludum is now avaliable for general perusal. I had intended to spend a bit more time building a more solid starting point for people, but I'm much better at building on other people's ideas than coming up with idea all on my lonesome. Come one, come all. The more procrastination the better, I always say...

Paid Work
As much as I think German is funky, I'm not fond of having to edit it, especially considering I don't know the language. The paper was in English - pretty much all the references were in German...

Exams
All done by week 2. Was hoping for a bit more study time, but I'm sure I can work on this...

That's about all that's fitting into my head at the moment. Until next time...

I think I may actually get through this. Philosophy Essay was a breeze, with some help from damostaranth, I managed to get near to top marks on my second chance at my prac 2, and I'm almost finished my Structure of English Essay. Still got a bit to do, but I think I'm managing to push through it.

Oh! That reminds me - Is there a grammar nazi in the house? I need help on English Verb forms, and more importantly, I need some info on accurately differentiating between simple past and present perfect...

There are issues currently in my life, this I don't deny. But, I try hard not to angst. Regardless, there are issues that are better dealt with by telling everyone about them, so I made a deal with myself. The good and the bad will share equal space in this journal. Bad to the left of me, the Good to the right.

( Placed behind cut due to it likely being rather large and ungainly. Do feel free to click through though... )