Saturday 17 March 2001

Well, here I am. I've been procrastinating about getting the whole site 'live' for some time, and commencing the Outgoings section proper (I've been working on the other stuff for a little while) but the time has come, the walrus said ... And St Patrick's Day seemed a most appropriate moment to begin, given my love for Ireland and all things Irish.

Now, what the hell do I do? Unlike most online journallers, I have never kept a diary, journal, or personal record of any kind. Oh, I tried. On receiving gifts of girlie diaries of the Holly Hobby variety as a pre-teen, I attempted to keep a diary, but soon got bogged down in the repetitive, extraordinarily boring (and frequently too painful to report) minutiae of a child's life. In my angsty teens and twenties I tried again, but ditto.

So I have no experience whatsoever at this journalling lark. I love to write though; I adore writing long rambling emails and letters and rants to friends. I have a feeling that this section will be pretty much that - a miscellaneous ramble. Rantings and ramblings, observations, thought-processes, musings on past/present/future - more of an open letter to self. Hence the title 'Outgoings'. It could well be called OutPOURINGS but that's more than a trifle melodramatic, methinks.

So call it a work in progress. I'd call it an exercise in order to refine my writing, focus my thoughts and perhaps come to the occasional odd (most likely very odd) personal revelation ... but I fear that sounds remarkably pretentious. At the very least, disciplinary exercise; to attempt to cut down on use of parentheses and adjectives!

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So today is St Patrick's Day. Australians seem to have got right into St P's Day in the last few years. It's not a Hallmark holiday by any means, more an occasion to celebrate the country's Irish heritage (all the convicts and fenians, yay) and have a bit of craic, ie lots of Guinness, diddly music and dancing. Even though there is a heavy emphasis on what I think of as 'the paddy Irish' (you know, the stereotyped view of the Irish courtesy of BallyK, Glenroe, and winsome films) anything that promotes the Irish pub culture and general outlook on life is fine with me. Australians tend to be more than a little blinkered when it comes to the past, and the input/impact of all the many cultures into the history of the nation, so a little acknowledgement is a good thing. Its about bloody time we had a Dreaming Day though ...

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I am so glad it is the weekend. The past week was just so strange – I tried to explain to a colleague how it had passed incredibly fast yet achingly slow at the same time. She looked at me kinda funny. But that was the only way I could explain it. I’ve been busy, lots of stuff to do, but the majority (well, ok, entirety) has been boring tedious zero-creativity stuff. That’s the kind of work I find most stressful; I can cope with crises and terrifying deadlines and people running around like Henny Penny ("the sky is falling! the sky is falling!") but I simply cannot bear having nil creative or at least some degree of intellectual input.