Viva Forever

Firstly:

I finished the fanlisting to “My Fair Lady” (awesome movie!) yesterday as it’s due on the 17th. Rush job! I didn’t mean to, but I just didn’t feel like designing I suppose. Yes I know it’s very pink, but that’s honestly the shade of pink of the DVD cover and at the time, it seemed like a good idea to make it the base colour. I’ve… never done something this saturated before. So yeah… oops. At least it’s done!

Secondly, I finished converting all the old greymatter pages into actual post entries. Yes, manually, and yes it was incredibly tedious but it’s done! Officially this is the 341st post with 2,541 comments so far. It was interesting going through the old posts back in late 2002-2003. I was so… hyper! I used to think I was quite clever for my age, and now I realised that everyone must’ve been humouring me; the posts were mostly random, filled with typos and would spontaneously become INCREDIBLY EXCITABLE!!!!!!! Also, emoticons like “^o^” and “^_^” were everywhere, as was descriptions of actions: *demonstrates*. I can’t figure out whether that’s a good or bad thing. *is puzzled* >:P

The people who used to visit my site had a different style of commenting from many that I get nowadays. Not only was there also more emoticoning and descriptors of actions (like “*whacks Belinda with a frying pan* ^o^”), everyone was also quite hyper! Lots of exclaiming, glomping, hugging, “love you!” etc… it just seemed incredibly fun and boisterous. I bet that’s in no part due to the anime influence on bulk of the visitors of those days. I guess I kinda miss that.

Oh and I used to quite frequently and expressly fangirl over anime/manga/gaming men. While this may be reduced some what, images like this still gets an automatic “teehee :3″ from me. :P I guess it’s not true to say that I spent my teen years not liking guys, it just so happens the guys I were interested in aren’t living.

Oh and one other thing! I used to plug people ALL THE TIME!! Every day was blog day! Maybe I should take that up again. Also, many of the more amusing posts concerned my wacky family. I think I’ll install a plugin that highlights my favourite posts or something. More work needs to be done!

Anyway, I’m on a two week break from Uni, which means I now have two class-free weeks to do some super-cramming to get my notes together, doing all the readings I’m behind on and completing two huge assessment due right back after the break. So I guess, “happy holidays” to me!

Yesterday I had some free time at Uni and I went to our medical clinic and got a free needle injection of Gardasil! Now I’m vaccinated from the four most common strains of HPV thus drastically reducing the chances of me developing cervical cancer. Booyah!

I heard about the vaccine a little while ago and I only realised that it was free in Australia for women between the ages of 12 and 26 when walking by our Uni clinic. Unfortunately there is an age restriction for free injections for economics sakes; each injection costs about $150 and to give those with Medicare a free injection is quite costly. I guess they can only give it to those most at risk. Hooray for universal healthcare!

The only think I’ve heard about it before is the controversy in the US about vaccinating young girls for a reason that makes my blood absolutely BOIL with rage. Many US conservatives object to allowing their teenage girls from being vaccinated because making sex safer will “encourage” sexual promiscuity. The reasoning behind this is vomit-inducing.

These conservative, “concerned parents” cling to their parental rights that they should be allowed to withdraw their daughter from being vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease. Have they considered the parental responsibility of securing the safety of their child? Denying your child a HPV vaccine is not likely to magically stop your 15 year old from fooling around with boys if they are going to do that. Another argument seems to be that kids that are young, when being vaccinated, might inadvertently learn about having sex with boys. Somehow… I doubt that. I have a feeling that a 12 year old isn’t going to think “yay now that I’m vaccinated against human papillomavirus that means I now know what intercourse is and that I should have some!”

I’m sure not all of these conservative parents are so foolish and naive as to think that not vaccinating to their child would definite lead to abstinence. I’m sure some have considered what would happen if their daughter did have sex and contracted HPV and there is an implicit desire to punish “immoral” behaviour. It reeks of “I don’t want my teenage daughter to get vaccinated because if she fools around and gets HPV or cervical cancer, well she deserves it for being such a slut”. Mmm, sounds like wonderful parenting.

But yeah, I’m vaccinated. The needle hurts a bit and made my arm a little sore and weak-feeling for a little while but it got better quickly.

So, the first week of Uni (for me, I only need to go on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays! :D) has come and gone and so far I’m loving it!

Intellectual Property: I had been really excited about taking this course and it has proved to be… AWESOME!! We have this uber-cool lecturer who has an interest in technology herself so what we learn would have a technology spin… YAY! We spent some of the lecture and tutorial watching youtube videos… YOUTUBE! IN A LECTURE! It was surreal. Of course, we watched it in consideration of copyright; one of the videos we watched was involved in this debacle where Universal Music had asked youtube to take down a video of a baby dancing to a Prince song, as the song playing the background was alleged to have amounted to copyright infringement. WTF. Also, our lecturer links to blogs! One of which was Freedom to Differ which looks to be interesting *has it on feed now*. My lecturer has her own blog at lawfont.com! So it’s mostly “boring” law stuff, but still!

Dispute Management and Resolution: This course probably has a huge potential to be boring but we got a really fun lecturer/tutor. At some point, to demonstrate the idea of “framing a question” he showed us a magic trick! Also the end assessment for this course involves “online negotiations” where we’d be marked on how we resolve a fake legal dispute with another person in our class and the log of our communications will be assessed. That sounds way better than writing essays!

Business Organisations: There weren’t any tutorials for this week so I don’t know what it’s going to be like. I’ve had word that this is a boring course but oh well, at least it will be the only one!

All this has reminded me that law can be fun. I absolutely HATED my subjects last semester (and my marks showed) and I was absolutely dreading going back to University this semester. However, things look to be okay for the next couple of months.

In other news, I have to write up resumés (i.e. CVs) and cover letters for summer clerkships… BLEGH!!! I hate advertising myself in such a way. Still it has to be done, however, thanks to last semester’s shitty marks the hopes of getting into big firms has more or less died away. Oh well, I don’t want to work in big firms anyway. :P

Two assignments down, one more to go (due Friday). Ran about 50 steps today to get my essay in under high stress conditions, couldn’t run any more, heart absolutely burned like nothing before. Note to self: exercise plzkthx.

Finished watching Heroes as celebration tonight. GREAT SHOW OR GREATEST SHOW?! (Hint: it’s the latter)

Received volume two and three of “Spider-man Loves Mary Jane” from amazon.com. Speedy service, excellent packaging but it stings that shipping from the US costs more than the two comics combined. Ouch. Won’t be able to read till Friday though.

Lulz from this tempts me to try the Legacy Challenge. Also would have to wait till after Friday.

Too much l33t speak in this entry.

Exhausted!

Semester is basically over for me, no more classes but final assessments are looming. Argh stress. Anyway, I’ve been productive today! Here’s another quickish crochet project I finished:

It’s a cactus pincushion! I made it for my mother when she expressed she wanted a pin cushion as she’s starting a big embroidery project. The first picture is when it’s still not sewn together yet, but I took a picture to show how the unfortunate positioning of the pins that keep the top and bottom together meant that I was in a prime position to get pricked if I was to graze by it as I hold. This happened often. ¬_¬

Anyway, I’m sick of this layout already! I might recycle another layout that I had up before and liked and maybe close a site. See how productive I get when I’m supposed to be doing assessments?

Oh yeah, nearly forgot! The other day I had lunch with Eileen. It was pretty cool, we had pancakes and I basically bombarded her with questions about the US education system. GOD, EVERYTHING COSTS MONEY! I was flabbergasted to hear that college APPLICATIONS costs money! What the? :O