/karen/

Rest for the weary

Saturday, 23 August, 2003

It is Saturday and I've noticed I haven't blogged for a whole week. I am half-heartedly catching up on my blog reading but I feel incredibly lazy. If you have a look at Current (left hand side of my blog), you'll see that I've been immersing myself in anime, Philip Pullman and Harry Potter. I've been slowly been working through the Studio Ghibli Collection and enjoying every minute of it. Last night I watched Spirited Away which won Best animated feature film of the year at the 75th Academy Awards which I highly recommend—it is so well done! I especially liked the elements of Japanese and Russian fairy tale scattered throughout (I'm made about fairy tales in case you didn't know). Philip Pullman was an interesting one. I couldn't put His Dark Materials trilogy down. I loved the blend of the urban and the fantastical and his fracturing of the family relationship. But his theology is seriously flawed, he doesn't really understand what sin is, and he has no concept of the true and loving God which makes me sad. Now that I've finished the trilogy, I am rereading Harry Potter starting from Book 1 so that I can savour the experience of Book 5. While I am rereading, I have been continuing to think about magic and literature and the way people's conceptions of magic have been changing. I remember Tony Payne telling me that Kirsten Birkett had remarked, of the Potter books, that their magic was quite “scientific”. Kirsten is apparently writing a book about magic which I am greatly looking forward to. I once wrote an essay about magic and Harry Potter but it contained a theological flaw and many spoilers. This morning the shopping arrived at 8 and woke me up. I spent the morning cleaning my computer for the Sobig.F virus that has been spamming up my inbox. I apologise if my email address has been sending you unwelcome stuff. I certainly didn't mean for it to do so and have now installed an antivirus program so hopefully these things will stop happening (though I am still receiving emails with the virus attached that I automatically delete). We went to Stuart Park for Tim R's birthday lunch. It was cold and, after spending three hours sitting in it, I thought it was silly to keep on living in denial and headed home because the others were off playing sport on the green. We'll be going back tonight to our church hall for the third installment of Tim's birthday: games. I'll be breaking in the mahjong set my father gave me as a belated birthday present. When he came back into the country from Hong Kong and passed through customs, the machine that scans your bag for food products went off because it thought the mahjong pieces looked tasty. I must say they do look rather tasty but mine are plastic, not ivory. My mother's elder brother's wife was apparently a mahjong addict; she lost thousands and thousands of dollars playing it. There are apparently people in Hong Kong who can tell which tile is which simply by feeling its weight so they bluff picking up from the pile when in fact they want to do something else. Crazy. I only got into playing it because of my friend Ynping from school; she felt like having a mahjong day at her house and she taught us all how to play. There are more complicated versions of the game which I don't understand but some of them involve gambling which I don't care for. I'm glad this week is over; it started off very badly for me, what with hormones and situational depression creeping in. On Sunday nights I dread going into work because I've come to hate it so much. This week was quite frustrating; I was trying to build the CAPSTRANS website using Dreamweaver MX's Check In Check Out feature because the web people were also doing stuff to the site. They rang me at 4:30 on Tuesday and asked me to check in everything which I did. They did their upgrades and then rang back and told me I could keep working. Which I did. Only to find that all the changes I had made in the past hour had now disappeared. I'm usually pretty careful about Check In and Check Out; I don't work on more than one file at a time. So I suspect it was their fault though they claimed, “Technically, these things shouldn't happen,” with the implication that it was my fault. Blame aside, I went home feeling quite miserable so, in a way, it was good that my dinner date had to cancel. The website is now live. There's even a picture of me on it. I think I cheered up by Thursday because I had a bit of a rest on Tuesday and Wednesday night (doing everything except the stuff I was supposed to be doing), I didn't have to go back to work for the rest of the week and the other people on the ECU staff team went out of their way to be nice to me. Friday I drove up to Sydney and visited the Christian group at my old high school (St. George Girls' High) along with four others—a guy I knew from the University of New South Wales who now does part-time teaching there, a girl who graduated in the same year as me, a girl who is in the Bible study group I lead at Uni (I only found out she was an ex-St. Georgian the day before and invited her at the last minute!) and a girl I'd never met who graduated from St. George two years before. We met an hour before to discuss what was going to happen and to pray. We got to the drama shed nice and early but we started late because the girls took so long to come. Funny enough, another friend who happened to be doing her prac teaching at St. George also showed up unexpectedly! We introduced ourselves, had an interview with one of our team, did a group activity where we tried to get the girls to consider a particular scenario or aspect of Uni life, think of the challenges and difficulties of the situation and the opportunities of the situation and then decide what is the best thing to do with Bible verses to support it. I gave a very short talk on Romans 8:28-29 about being conformed to the image of Christ which I had to summarise at the end because the bell went but I think they all appreciated it and several girls came up to thank us at the end. There were around 25 girls there and 6 of them were Year 12's (normally only one Year 12 girl comes, I've been told) so all in all it was very encouraging. I drove home afterwards, went to pick up Ben from the Uni and accidentally locked my keys in the car. Thank God for husbands who keep spares in their wallets! I feel like all the most pressing items on my To Do list have now been completed. Good. I'm sick of having stuff that's due soon hanging over my head. Really, I should be working on Issue 08 and I have actually started doing some research into denominations, but Jan's notion of stopping and smelling the roses sounds like a good one at the moment.

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