'Diary' entry- week 1 of honours

Random photo: what a bunch of drunk wankers got up to in our neighbourhood on Australia Day.

So far, so good. It's not over yet- I have my first meeting with my supervisor tomorrow. That's not to say he's not around all the time, but he hasn't really checked up on me. I suppose I'll see whether I'm on the right track or not.

Socially, it's slow but I'm getting there. The people I work with are all nice, but I'm still cripplingly shy and I never know what to say, meaning I sometimes say nothing at all. Luckily my room-mates (the PhD students I share an office with) seem to be reasonably gregarious in addition to being nice, so I do feel quite at home there. Gregarious people compensate for my social inadequacies- it's much more awkward when you have two shy people who don't have a clue what to say! Whether I come across as feeling at home in the place is another question altogether.

As for the sodding air-conditioning, it's not getting any better. Every morning I arrive quite significantly warm, if not hot, from having done a lot of fast walking and climbed some stairs, so I'm warm enough for the first half an hour or so and then have to drag out the jacket, gloves and scarf. I'm getting reasonably good at typing in gloves!

On Monday night some noisy Americans in our complex kept us awake (they're new- it's better when they're here than living across the road because then we can actually get them to shut up!), followed by our upstairs neighbour's infamous air-conditioning, hence my early morning whinge on Tuesday. I spent nearly all of Tuesday struggling to stay awake and managed pretty much zero social interaction. In short, I felt like shit. Tuesday night we slept with the door shut- there were another bunch of noisy Americans having a party somewhere else- drunk and hooting- but they shut up soon enough for me to get a good night's sleep. I felt 100% better when I woke up on Wednesday than I did the day before, and managed to have a much more productive day. The neighbourhood is only going to get worse for a while, what with the annual influx of first-years and college students... and more Americans.

On Wednesday afternoon the predicted storms did eventuate, and when I noticed it was raining quite heavily and Gam emailed me to say that the storm hadn't hit St Lucia yet I thought I'd head home. I hadn't realised quite how heavy the rain was, nor how long it must have been going on (my office has no windows so I went to the lunch room to check the weather situation), so when I stepped out I was confronted by a thick layer of water covering the rather steep hill on which my building is situated. It was almost as if there was a pool of water on the hill- there can't have been, of course, but the volume of rain made it a couple of centimetres deep spread evenly over the hill slope. When I got down the hill to the traffic lights across from the Herston busway the road was flooded- not so much that cars couldn't get through, but knee-deep in the gutter area right where pedestrians were supposed to cross! I crossed by walking to the centre of the intersection and jumping across the deepest flooded bit on the other side, meaning that the deepest water I encountered only just came up to my ankles. Exciting stuff... I used to love jumping in puddles as a kid, only then I would have been wearing gumboots rather than brand new shoes. Hmmm.

Random photo: pelican on the Brisbane river

As far as the actual work I've been doing, most of it has consisted of reading as much of the literature as I can (somewhere between 40 and 50 journal articles) and taking notes from the important bits, and attempting to write an outline for my literature review. The form the literature review will take is the only thing I'm unsure of at the moment, so it will be good to clarify that with my supervisor tomorrow. It feels weird starting work on it so early, as my record for 'starting early' on an assignment currently stands at 2 weeks. Usually I give myself one week. But this is twice as big as I'm used to, and about ten times as important, and also I really need to finish it early so I can start on my actual project, even though that's supposed to happen in semester 2... there's a chance I'll need to learn how to use the statistics programme SPSS (my degree only involved the eternally shitty Minitab, and only during one lame-arse stats course at that... really I don't have a solid background in stats at all, so I'll need any extra time I can get to bring my skills up to scratch). Besides, as much as I love reading journal articles (and I do!), the most interesting bit of this year is going to be seeing what information I can glean during the course of my project. It'll also be the toughest part, which is why I can't slack off in producing this lit-review.

So far, amazingly, I've managed to avoid procrastinating much at work. But it's early days... I hope I can confine my compulsive procrastination to my hours at home.

Oh, and least-sexy thing I have ever read about breasts? I read it in one of the journal articles yesterday: the breast is really a modified sweat gland. Mmmm... that's the opposite of arousing. As Marcy Runkle on Californication would put it- that shrivels my labia...