Short Story Sunday:
The Very Quiet Young Ladies Guide to Multiple Personalities.
Part 1.
This has been my THIRD ATTEMPT to write this story down. And I still can't finish it. I haven't even got up to the depressing bits, its all setup and no action. I'll see if I can't finish it tomorrow because I really really want to finish this story.
I grew up in a small town, just a bit north-west from Brisbane, it had the highest recorded rate of Schizophrenia in the world before I left to move to Sydney eight years ago. Now it is just average and several medical journals and scientists are at a loss to explain it. I've read the papers they wrote trying to work it out, some are inspiring in the way they tracked down genetic histories and environmental details to form a semi-coherant theory. But they're wrong and its sad that they're wasting their efforts as they have been doing for so long now.
If they knew the real answer they'd probably be either terrified or elated. I've been careful ever since I left, I've probably spoken to about sixty maybe seventy people in the last eight years, I've probably ruined a few lives, but not like I used to. At least now I can understand my little gift and be smarter about it.
I guess it started when I was about two, I was a late bloomer, I didn't start talking till I was older than was average. But once I did my parents started to act really strange, their friends and family members also noticed this change in them and just assumed it was a lack of sleep caused by my little sister being born at around this time. Her birthday is actually a week before mine is, every year we'd have two birthday weekends in a row. I loved that time, no matter who I was.
But as more people started to show up to visit her and talk to me more people started to act a little bit differently and I also began to act differently to how a typical two year old would.
After a visit to a doctor I started to act very smart, I'd was careful with everything, I planned out my actions and put them into the simple words I knew so everyone would know and then I'd abandon them and whoever I was talking to(my unemployable auntie Ruth I think) suddenly started to plan out the next few days and eventually her life. She's now in real estate, has two degrees, a husband and three kids I've never met. I haven't heard anything about another cluster so I'm pretty sure they don't have what I've got. They've never met me either, Ruth cut off all ties with my mum and dad after she cleaned up her act. Maybe she was scared that what her little niece giveth her little niece might taketh away as well. Maybe she worked it out somehow with that more focused personality of hers and decided it was worth losing her sister, brother-in-law and two nieces in order to stay the way she is.
After she left, the one and only time she ever babysat, I spent six weeks barely able to move, just sitting around the house, with no energy and no enthusiasm. It was as if all my life had been drained out of me and I couldn't even fathom wanting to do anything except eat, sleep and piss myself. I even stopped talking until my neighbours three year old son came over to play. I could... feel something different about him, I don't know what it was but I started to scream when he hugged me to say hello. And I felt like me again for the first time in months, I was too young to realise what feeling like me was actually like, but I knew I was somehow in the right place.
After that I started talking again and the feeling went away, my parents thought that it was just a phase I was going through, changing personalities and generally being random like a kid is meant to be, they obviously became paranoid every now and then and then they'd be calm and relaxed. I didn't realise what I was doing but I learnt how to calm them down by talking to nice people in my kindy and then talking to my parents whenever they were angry.
My neighbours son never went back to the bubbly baby boy after that visit, not until my first day of school when he came home talking
By the time I was six the town had pretty much lost its mind, I was going to school everyday and talking to people and their kids all the time, I was often quite precocious and sometimes shy but always able to get a word out for the people who wanted to talk to me which obviously led me to want to talk to others. Because I kept wanting to please people, no matter how much I changed there is always that innate human desire to belong, to be accepted and its what every kid wants.
High school was a mess, it was another town over and as soon as my age group got there the system fell apart again. The worst thing was that by this point in my life I was starting to understand that I might have been the cause, but another part of me just couldn't believe it. This confusing world I grew up in was all I'd ever known, to me it wasn't confusing at all. I'd talk to someone then they'd change their personality to match mine and I'd change mine to match theirs. I assumed this was the case with everyone. My parents divorced around this time and my sister went away leaving just me and my mum to carry on until I left as well.
Mum ended up being a lesbian and moving to a commune that wouldn't let me come in no matter how many emails I sent them, I haven't talked to her since I left town. Dad went to Western Australia to work on a mine. They send me Christmas cards and birthday cards but they don't phone. No-one ever phones.
Mum used to be a nice quiet woman, she worked in a bakery and was a music teacher part time, Dad used to be an accountant and hated the outdoors. This was before I started talking.
I left to go to the big city in part because I was tired of living in a small town and in part because I started to realise that I was the epicenter of all the chaos in my district. I worked it out the day I was a Lesbian, then a slut then an introverted assexual. That was also the day I was first introduced to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and found that I shifted at least five times over the course of a week without really realising it.
Most of the kids I grew up with were used to it, like I was, but they only shifted maybe once a week at most. And those that did shift a lot were friends with me(or at least were friends with the me at the time), kids I didn't talk to didn't shift at all. I think I read about the results of the overall study in a paper written by the guy administering it, he looked so ready to solve the mystery of the schizophrenia cluster that I couldn't help but giggle like the schoolgirl I was. As far as I've been able to tell he gave up about four years ago after I left and the area started to calm down.
Leaving was hard, because I wasn't really ready to let go of my friends and what little I had of my family left, but then I was an ENFP and I just left without waiting to screw up. I got to the city with almost no money, no plan and a pledge to not talk to anyone that lasted about five minutes because, well E does stand for Extrovert. I finally settled on an ISTP type who was also straight, but that didn't really mean much to me because I had no intentions of falling in love or even dating. I just wanted to find a place to hide and spend the rest of my life in the quiet.
For what its worth, the Myers Briggs test is a good guideline for personality types, but it isn't complete, I've used the Kinsey methodology on myself a few times(it takes a hell of a long time compared to a basic MB test) as well as numerous other methodologies, pretty much all of them suck on their own but taken together I've found I can generally work out just who I am at any one point.
I use the MB slang more than any other because it is the easiest to write shorthand for the most part. I've kept some notes every now and then on what I am at one point or another(especially when I'm a INTP obviously) and how I think I'm acting as a result of that, but eventually the variations in each personality type and how they are affected by my personal history... well they don't really stay all that consistent. It is almost like they're rebelling against the host, like a transplanted organ or limb. And when they get to far away from me, I go out and find someone to talk to.
Just a quick hello and thank you and I'm suddenly a new person.
I managed to get a job in the city, I'm a fact checker for a publisher, they dump a six hundred page manuscript on my desk and I go through every page looking up facts and figures, checking the sums making sure they aren't fake so that our reputation is as preserved as my bosses wifes face after her little trip to Thailand a few years back. Everyone here thinks I'm mute but not deaf. I managed to fake a note saying I had a throat infection, then got a doctor to believe it was actually an infection on my vocal cords and my paperwork was wrong, then I got a note saying I was mute and thus disabled permanently and unable to talk. I was going to try and fake damage to the Broca area of my brain, but that might involve a CAT-scan at some point if my insurance company or some researcher looking for a PhD topic decided to follow up on me and having someone scan my brain scares me, no matter who I am. Because I know I'm different and I don't know what they might find up there.
I learnt Sign Language after I realised I needed to be able to talk to some people and use a tablet with speaking software to talk. I came up with the infection idea when I was an ENTP, pretty much every time I need a good idea I find the last person I gave ENTP to and swap. I also learnt that I can't swap with a person twice in a week. That probably saved my parents from being locked up back when I was just a girl.
Its probably a bad thing, but I do keep a kind of list of people I've swapped with, mostly just where I met them, if they work there or something. Usually they're gone by the time I go back to look for them, moved on to bigger and better things or moved back home to take up the NEET lifestyle that I occasionally trip into. Always reminds me of my auntie that feeling. I'm friends with my cousins on Facebook but they don't post much, just pictures of cats.
So that was my life up until this year. Just staying as close to quiet as I could. Working at my job and paying my bills. Things were good, I'd find an ESFP for New Years and then party through the night barely caring about what I could do if I yelled even once and then by the end of the night yelling at the top of my voice as the countdown came on.
It was Russian Roulette and I'd stick with whatever I got until I couldn't stand it anymore.
Then this year happend and I ended up an ISFP, got a girlfriend, screwed up and then met Jeremy. Thats when things kind of fell apart. I guess thats why I'm writing all this down for the first time. Because right now I'm trying really hard to stop myself crying and I'm an ISTJ, so I need to write this down before I burst.
I have some more(646 words more), but it doesn't have an ending written yet, so it is probably better to just wait this one out and see if I can finish up tomorrow. I could have probably pushed on but then I wouldn't have time to write what I did today and today was interesting, so I wanted to get that up and done.
Also, holy damn, I wrote it all in Notepad and somehow didn't have a single spelling mistake or typo! Yay me!
My Day.
I had to get up at about 7am to drive my parents to the airport today. I hate driving my parents pretty much anywhere because they're always so chipper about it and critical of my driving. Also my mum refuses to drive in my car despite the fact that I absolutely love driving my car compared to hers. Her car is too wide for me and an Automatic, I inevitably speed up without trying to in it and switching lanes it harder because of the width I'm always afraid I'm going to crash into the next lane over.
My parents are going to Alice Springs, well, they're there now and enjoying themselves somewhat, meanwhile I was stuck driving that stupid car home and trying to find somewhere at 730am where I could get myself a pie for breakfast. I ended up driving to Woolies near my house, where I used to work years ago, and getting a pie from the Brumbies bakery there. After eating and enjoying the hell out of my pie I went home and went back to sleep until Midday when Matt came home with Patrick and it was my turn to look after him for the afternoon.
The View from the hill.
After about an hour of just relaxing at home Matt decided that slamming every door in the house and then locking the dogs in their cage was a good idea so I put him in my car and we drove down to the back end of Brookfield to check on my dads horses and to also fill up their water trough.
Every time my dad leaves the city he gets me to do this and every time it is a pain, mostly because their paddock is at the very end of Brookfield and as a result is it takes about 40 minutes to get down there, feed them and get home. Which can really kill a chunk of the day if you are busy as I usually am.
Matt actually likes the horses more than I do.
I also wasn't 100% sure which paddock the horses were in, so I had to call them to the water trough I thought they were most likely using, which meant I had to wait a few minutes for them to work out that they were actually wanted and rush down to the gate to see what I was doing. I think they thought I might have carrots for them. They couldn't be more wrong.
I finally worked out with trough to fill up and then turned on the tap to do it when pretty much the worse case scenario played out for me.
A rare crotch shot on my blog.
The stupid tap had a weak seal between it and the hose and the above happened, this was pretty embarrassing for me and Matt seemed to find it funny. Because of course he would.
After that we drove home but stopped along the way at the Brookfield Showgrounds because I thought there was some kind of markets being held. In actuality there was a fund-raising day for the children of Allison Baden-Clay with various stalls selling balloons, food and some other stuff. I parked nearby and Matt and I went in for a little bit. Got ourselves some Sausage sandwiches and listened to this band playing for a while and watched a cricket game going on behind them.
There was this big space between the band and the audience, people would throw money and spare change into it.
We also got some chips and I was sharing them with Matt but not really watching what he was doing. The bugger had eaten a few but had taken a handful more and was keeping them for later, because he knew that I'd eat everything in the pack if it was left to me. He's not stupid Matt, not that bright either, but he has a basic level of cunning that can't be understated.
After we finished eating we left the showgrounds and I went to the graveyard across the road, basically because I'd never been before. I pretty much got depressed as soon as I noticed there were some freshly buried graves there and we left soon afterwards.
Two of these cows were humping just before I took this photo. Its Brookfield. It happens.
When we got home we took the dogs for a walk around to a park nearby, I have three dogs and only two people to move them with, this isn't usually a problem but with a disabled person you start to encounter some problems, such as the fact that Matt won't stop walking, even if the dog is tired and wants to stop(this is why Matt wasn't allowed to walk Abbey our old Dog, she was a very very slow walker). My usual strategy with Matt is to get him to walk Molly. Molly is the fastest of the dogs and also the only that seems to keep up with Matt and is able to abandon her quest to find the right thing to sniff if she's being pulled along.
Matt and Molly.
I took the other two dogs and we were off for about forty minutes of walking from my parents house to Merri-Merri Park through a slight forest with the dogs losing their minds everytime another dog came past us and Matt getting into a slight panic whenever he saw a bigger dog than ours. It wasn't tense but it was a bit frustrating to have to keep taking the dog leash away from him every time we saw another person.
We need to get longer leads, these dogs were trying to pull away from me from the very start.
With that done I fed the dogs and then packed Matt into my car and drove him back to his house for dinner where I met up with Patrick and we went down to the shops to get food for the week. I regret buying Tomatoes at Coles, they were half that price at Woolies down the road. I was pretty pissed off about that for a lot longer than I should have been, especially considering it was only $2 difference overall, but it was the principle of the thing. I settled on this weeks menu and have all the food packed away in his fridge right now. After that Patrick got Matt into the Bath and I made dinner, Spaghetti bolognese, and watched a few minutes of Sunday Night and then a few minutes of Sixty minutes before wanting to shoot myself. Thankfully SBS2 exists so I could watch Japanese men running across a swimming pool for twenty minutes before I headed home.
I got home, put the ointment in the dogs eye like my mum showed me to and then put Matt to bed and went to write this Blog post. My only regret is not finishing my short story.
This is the third time I've tried to write this story. The first was back in 2008 when I came up with the Idea while wandering around New York(in fact, in my notebook the story was set in New York, but I decided in the last two revisions to abandon that because I believe that if a story is set in New York it had better have a really really good reasons to be there and mine didn't).
Exactly where Inspiration struck me for this story(or possibly it was in Chicago, things from that year are blurry).
I started to write it last year and even have the first draft of eight pages of the story from last year but I forgot where I had kept it before I started writing today. I found it halfway through writing what I did today and that kind of slowed me down because I had some good ideas I needed to go back and check on. Originally the main character and her sister were Irish Twins(born one year apart exactly) and their father killed himself and some other stuff. The Myers Briggs stuff I had to look up again, which is so tedious to dig through, the Kinsey stuff was easier because it was just a metric from zero to six.
I didn't even get to the depressing part, which I guess I'll probably write about tomorrow if I find some time to spare.
My Plan for the week:
This week I'm going to reflect on past Library events I've been to. I'm doing this because its part of an assignment and I figured I'd kill two birds with one Stone.
Monday: I'll finish my story at the very least and maybe brainstorm some ideas for next weeks entries.
Tuesday: Kokoda Presentation 2012.
Wednesday: Radical Information Literacy Workshop.
Thursday: 2011 Post Alia Conference rundown.
Friday: SLQ Preservation Labs Tour.
Saturday: Alia Online 2013 Conference.
Sunday: Short Story Sunday: I have no idea what I'm going to write. Maybe I'll come up with something soon.
YouTube Clip of the Day.
A long video, but worth it for fans of the great plastic Brick.
Part 1.
This has been my THIRD ATTEMPT to write this story down. And I still can't finish it. I haven't even got up to the depressing bits, its all setup and no action. I'll see if I can't finish it tomorrow because I really really want to finish this story.
I grew up in a small town, just a bit north-west from Brisbane, it had the highest recorded rate of Schizophrenia in the world before I left to move to Sydney eight years ago. Now it is just average and several medical journals and scientists are at a loss to explain it. I've read the papers they wrote trying to work it out, some are inspiring in the way they tracked down genetic histories and environmental details to form a semi-coherant theory. But they're wrong and its sad that they're wasting their efforts as they have been doing for so long now.
If they knew the real answer they'd probably be either terrified or elated. I've been careful ever since I left, I've probably spoken to about sixty maybe seventy people in the last eight years, I've probably ruined a few lives, but not like I used to. At least now I can understand my little gift and be smarter about it.
I guess it started when I was about two, I was a late bloomer, I didn't start talking till I was older than was average. But once I did my parents started to act really strange, their friends and family members also noticed this change in them and just assumed it was a lack of sleep caused by my little sister being born at around this time. Her birthday is actually a week before mine is, every year we'd have two birthday weekends in a row. I loved that time, no matter who I was.
But as more people started to show up to visit her and talk to me more people started to act a little bit differently and I also began to act differently to how a typical two year old would.
After a visit to a doctor I started to act very smart, I'd was careful with everything, I planned out my actions and put them into the simple words I knew so everyone would know and then I'd abandon them and whoever I was talking to(my unemployable auntie Ruth I think) suddenly started to plan out the next few days and eventually her life. She's now in real estate, has two degrees, a husband and three kids I've never met. I haven't heard anything about another cluster so I'm pretty sure they don't have what I've got. They've never met me either, Ruth cut off all ties with my mum and dad after she cleaned up her act. Maybe she was scared that what her little niece giveth her little niece might taketh away as well. Maybe she worked it out somehow with that more focused personality of hers and decided it was worth losing her sister, brother-in-law and two nieces in order to stay the way she is.
After she left, the one and only time she ever babysat, I spent six weeks barely able to move, just sitting around the house, with no energy and no enthusiasm. It was as if all my life had been drained out of me and I couldn't even fathom wanting to do anything except eat, sleep and piss myself. I even stopped talking until my neighbours three year old son came over to play. I could... feel something different about him, I don't know what it was but I started to scream when he hugged me to say hello. And I felt like me again for the first time in months, I was too young to realise what feeling like me was actually like, but I knew I was somehow in the right place.
After that I started talking again and the feeling went away, my parents thought that it was just a phase I was going through, changing personalities and generally being random like a kid is meant to be, they obviously became paranoid every now and then and then they'd be calm and relaxed. I didn't realise what I was doing but I learnt how to calm them down by talking to nice people in my kindy and then talking to my parents whenever they were angry.
My neighbours son never went back to the bubbly baby boy after that visit, not until my first day of school when he came home talking
By the time I was six the town had pretty much lost its mind, I was going to school everyday and talking to people and their kids all the time, I was often quite precocious and sometimes shy but always able to get a word out for the people who wanted to talk to me which obviously led me to want to talk to others. Because I kept wanting to please people, no matter how much I changed there is always that innate human desire to belong, to be accepted and its what every kid wants.
High school was a mess, it was another town over and as soon as my age group got there the system fell apart again. The worst thing was that by this point in my life I was starting to understand that I might have been the cause, but another part of me just couldn't believe it. This confusing world I grew up in was all I'd ever known, to me it wasn't confusing at all. I'd talk to someone then they'd change their personality to match mine and I'd change mine to match theirs. I assumed this was the case with everyone. My parents divorced around this time and my sister went away leaving just me and my mum to carry on until I left as well.
Mum ended up being a lesbian and moving to a commune that wouldn't let me come in no matter how many emails I sent them, I haven't talked to her since I left town. Dad went to Western Australia to work on a mine. They send me Christmas cards and birthday cards but they don't phone. No-one ever phones.
Mum used to be a nice quiet woman, she worked in a bakery and was a music teacher part time, Dad used to be an accountant and hated the outdoors. This was before I started talking.
I left to go to the big city in part because I was tired of living in a small town and in part because I started to realise that I was the epicenter of all the chaos in my district. I worked it out the day I was a Lesbian, then a slut then an introverted assexual. That was also the day I was first introduced to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and found that I shifted at least five times over the course of a week without really realising it.
Most of the kids I grew up with were used to it, like I was, but they only shifted maybe once a week at most. And those that did shift a lot were friends with me(or at least were friends with the me at the time), kids I didn't talk to didn't shift at all. I think I read about the results of the overall study in a paper written by the guy administering it, he looked so ready to solve the mystery of the schizophrenia cluster that I couldn't help but giggle like the schoolgirl I was. As far as I've been able to tell he gave up about four years ago after I left and the area started to calm down.
Leaving was hard, because I wasn't really ready to let go of my friends and what little I had of my family left, but then I was an ENFP and I just left without waiting to screw up. I got to the city with almost no money, no plan and a pledge to not talk to anyone that lasted about five minutes because, well E does stand for Extrovert. I finally settled on an ISTP type who was also straight, but that didn't really mean much to me because I had no intentions of falling in love or even dating. I just wanted to find a place to hide and spend the rest of my life in the quiet.
For what its worth, the Myers Briggs test is a good guideline for personality types, but it isn't complete, I've used the Kinsey methodology on myself a few times(it takes a hell of a long time compared to a basic MB test) as well as numerous other methodologies, pretty much all of them suck on their own but taken together I've found I can generally work out just who I am at any one point.
I use the MB slang more than any other because it is the easiest to write shorthand for the most part. I've kept some notes every now and then on what I am at one point or another(especially when I'm a INTP obviously) and how I think I'm acting as a result of that, but eventually the variations in each personality type and how they are affected by my personal history... well they don't really stay all that consistent. It is almost like they're rebelling against the host, like a transplanted organ or limb. And when they get to far away from me, I go out and find someone to talk to.
Just a quick hello and thank you and I'm suddenly a new person.
I managed to get a job in the city, I'm a fact checker for a publisher, they dump a six hundred page manuscript on my desk and I go through every page looking up facts and figures, checking the sums making sure they aren't fake so that our reputation is as preserved as my bosses wifes face after her little trip to Thailand a few years back. Everyone here thinks I'm mute but not deaf. I managed to fake a note saying I had a throat infection, then got a doctor to believe it was actually an infection on my vocal cords and my paperwork was wrong, then I got a note saying I was mute and thus disabled permanently and unable to talk. I was going to try and fake damage to the Broca area of my brain, but that might involve a CAT-scan at some point if my insurance company or some researcher looking for a PhD topic decided to follow up on me and having someone scan my brain scares me, no matter who I am. Because I know I'm different and I don't know what they might find up there.
I learnt Sign Language after I realised I needed to be able to talk to some people and use a tablet with speaking software to talk. I came up with the infection idea when I was an ENTP, pretty much every time I need a good idea I find the last person I gave ENTP to and swap. I also learnt that I can't swap with a person twice in a week. That probably saved my parents from being locked up back when I was just a girl.
Its probably a bad thing, but I do keep a kind of list of people I've swapped with, mostly just where I met them, if they work there or something. Usually they're gone by the time I go back to look for them, moved on to bigger and better things or moved back home to take up the NEET lifestyle that I occasionally trip into. Always reminds me of my auntie that feeling. I'm friends with my cousins on Facebook but they don't post much, just pictures of cats.
So that was my life up until this year. Just staying as close to quiet as I could. Working at my job and paying my bills. Things were good, I'd find an ESFP for New Years and then party through the night barely caring about what I could do if I yelled even once and then by the end of the night yelling at the top of my voice as the countdown came on.
It was Russian Roulette and I'd stick with whatever I got until I couldn't stand it anymore.
Then this year happend and I ended up an ISFP, got a girlfriend, screwed up and then met Jeremy. Thats when things kind of fell apart. I guess thats why I'm writing all this down for the first time. Because right now I'm trying really hard to stop myself crying and I'm an ISTJ, so I need to write this down before I burst.
I have some more(646 words more), but it doesn't have an ending written yet, so it is probably better to just wait this one out and see if I can finish up tomorrow. I could have probably pushed on but then I wouldn't have time to write what I did today and today was interesting, so I wanted to get that up and done.
Also, holy damn, I wrote it all in Notepad and somehow didn't have a single spelling mistake or typo! Yay me!
My Day.
I had to get up at about 7am to drive my parents to the airport today. I hate driving my parents pretty much anywhere because they're always so chipper about it and critical of my driving. Also my mum refuses to drive in my car despite the fact that I absolutely love driving my car compared to hers. Her car is too wide for me and an Automatic, I inevitably speed up without trying to in it and switching lanes it harder because of the width I'm always afraid I'm going to crash into the next lane over.
My parents are going to Alice Springs, well, they're there now and enjoying themselves somewhat, meanwhile I was stuck driving that stupid car home and trying to find somewhere at 730am where I could get myself a pie for breakfast. I ended up driving to Woolies near my house, where I used to work years ago, and getting a pie from the Brumbies bakery there. After eating and enjoying the hell out of my pie I went home and went back to sleep until Midday when Matt came home with Patrick and it was my turn to look after him for the afternoon.
The View from the hill.
After about an hour of just relaxing at home Matt decided that slamming every door in the house and then locking the dogs in their cage was a good idea so I put him in my car and we drove down to the back end of Brookfield to check on my dads horses and to also fill up their water trough.
Every time my dad leaves the city he gets me to do this and every time it is a pain, mostly because their paddock is at the very end of Brookfield and as a result is it takes about 40 minutes to get down there, feed them and get home. Which can really kill a chunk of the day if you are busy as I usually am.
Matt actually likes the horses more than I do.
I also wasn't 100% sure which paddock the horses were in, so I had to call them to the water trough I thought they were most likely using, which meant I had to wait a few minutes for them to work out that they were actually wanted and rush down to the gate to see what I was doing. I think they thought I might have carrots for them. They couldn't be more wrong.
I finally worked out with trough to fill up and then turned on the tap to do it when pretty much the worse case scenario played out for me.
A rare crotch shot on my blog.
The stupid tap had a weak seal between it and the hose and the above happened, this was pretty embarrassing for me and Matt seemed to find it funny. Because of course he would.
After that we drove home but stopped along the way at the Brookfield Showgrounds because I thought there was some kind of markets being held. In actuality there was a fund-raising day for the children of Allison Baden-Clay with various stalls selling balloons, food and some other stuff. I parked nearby and Matt and I went in for a little bit. Got ourselves some Sausage sandwiches and listened to this band playing for a while and watched a cricket game going on behind them.
There was this big space between the band and the audience, people would throw money and spare change into it.
We also got some chips and I was sharing them with Matt but not really watching what he was doing. The bugger had eaten a few but had taken a handful more and was keeping them for later, because he knew that I'd eat everything in the pack if it was left to me. He's not stupid Matt, not that bright either, but he has a basic level of cunning that can't be understated.
After we finished eating we left the showgrounds and I went to the graveyard across the road, basically because I'd never been before. I pretty much got depressed as soon as I noticed there were some freshly buried graves there and we left soon afterwards.
Two of these cows were humping just before I took this photo. Its Brookfield. It happens.
When we got home we took the dogs for a walk around to a park nearby, I have three dogs and only two people to move them with, this isn't usually a problem but with a disabled person you start to encounter some problems, such as the fact that Matt won't stop walking, even if the dog is tired and wants to stop(this is why Matt wasn't allowed to walk Abbey our old Dog, she was a very very slow walker). My usual strategy with Matt is to get him to walk Molly. Molly is the fastest of the dogs and also the only that seems to keep up with Matt and is able to abandon her quest to find the right thing to sniff if she's being pulled along.
Matt and Molly.
I took the other two dogs and we were off for about forty minutes of walking from my parents house to Merri-Merri Park through a slight forest with the dogs losing their minds everytime another dog came past us and Matt getting into a slight panic whenever he saw a bigger dog than ours. It wasn't tense but it was a bit frustrating to have to keep taking the dog leash away from him every time we saw another person.
We need to get longer leads, these dogs were trying to pull away from me from the very start.
With that done I fed the dogs and then packed Matt into my car and drove him back to his house for dinner where I met up with Patrick and we went down to the shops to get food for the week. I regret buying Tomatoes at Coles, they were half that price at Woolies down the road. I was pretty pissed off about that for a lot longer than I should have been, especially considering it was only $2 difference overall, but it was the principle of the thing. I settled on this weeks menu and have all the food packed away in his fridge right now. After that Patrick got Matt into the Bath and I made dinner, Spaghetti bolognese, and watched a few minutes of Sunday Night and then a few minutes of Sixty minutes before wanting to shoot myself. Thankfully SBS2 exists so I could watch Japanese men running across a swimming pool for twenty minutes before I headed home.
I got home, put the ointment in the dogs eye like my mum showed me to and then put Matt to bed and went to write this Blog post. My only regret is not finishing my short story.
This is the third time I've tried to write this story. The first was back in 2008 when I came up with the Idea while wandering around New York(in fact, in my notebook the story was set in New York, but I decided in the last two revisions to abandon that because I believe that if a story is set in New York it had better have a really really good reasons to be there and mine didn't).
Exactly where Inspiration struck me for this story(or possibly it was in Chicago, things from that year are blurry).
I started to write it last year and even have the first draft of eight pages of the story from last year but I forgot where I had kept it before I started writing today. I found it halfway through writing what I did today and that kind of slowed me down because I had some good ideas I needed to go back and check on. Originally the main character and her sister were Irish Twins(born one year apart exactly) and their father killed himself and some other stuff. The Myers Briggs stuff I had to look up again, which is so tedious to dig through, the Kinsey stuff was easier because it was just a metric from zero to six.
I didn't even get to the depressing part, which I guess I'll probably write about tomorrow if I find some time to spare.
My Plan for the week:
This week I'm going to reflect on past Library events I've been to. I'm doing this because its part of an assignment and I figured I'd kill two birds with one Stone.
Monday: I'll finish my story at the very least and maybe brainstorm some ideas for next weeks entries.
Tuesday: Kokoda Presentation 2012.
Wednesday: Radical Information Literacy Workshop.
Thursday: 2011 Post Alia Conference rundown.
Friday: SLQ Preservation Labs Tour.
Saturday: Alia Online 2013 Conference.
Sunday: Short Story Sunday: I have no idea what I'm going to write. Maybe I'll come up with something soon.
YouTube Clip of the Day.
A long video, but worth it for fans of the great plastic Brick.
Click to view