elfinblaze

- I'd just like to point out to the Australian government that Vietnam is now more progressive than Australia as far as gay rights are concerned. But I know it would be too much to hope that my government would feel ashamed by this news. The fuckers would probably feel proud instead.

- Sometimes it sounds like the wind howls outside my house. More often than not it's a race happening on the car race track two suburbs away! Whose brilliant idea was it to stage car races in the middle of suburbia?

- Played Elder Sign with my sister recently. First time playing, and she almost single-handedly saved the game. Meanwhile, guess who had their brains sucked out through their ear with a straw? Still favouring the dying, over here.

- This is one of the best covers of The Last Unicorn that I have ever heard. Love it!

First entry for the year because I just had a cockroach fall on me, and now the bug spray is making me sneeze.

This just gets better and better...

Repeating what I posted on tumblr:

For those of you who know I'm in Sydney, I'm okay. I'm at home, far from the city centre.

My sister's office building is in lockdown even though she works two blocks away from the current siege. Her fiancé, who actually works in the affected building (on another floor), has been safely evacuated and has already gone home.

If you want to stay up to date, I recommend the ABC News website.

If anyone wants to know what I've been up to and I haven't been updating LJ, you can always check this tag in my tumblr. Less reblogging scrapbook, and more me rambling.

Not that I blog much over there either, but.

I haven't even transferred pictures from last weekend's Christmas party to my computer yet. I should probably get around to doing that.

Instead I've been marathoning Arrow (I'm caught up now!), and reading. I actually managed to finish a book! For the first time in months!

I have such a reader's block this year; I just can't get into anything I start. I've only read, like, four books this year. I don't know why that is, but it's annoying me.

More Christmas shopping to do this weekend. I have no idea what to buy though.

I can't believe it's only two weeks till Christmas! Argh!

Things I have to do today:
- Vacuuming
- Ironing
- Clean the pool
- Find birthday present for sister

Things I WANT to do today:
- Bum around online
- Go roller-skating

The only thing that doesn't suck about being an adult is that I can buy and eat chocolate whenever I damn well want to.

Wow. Today is not a good anxiety day.

I've been in tears all morning and had to be talked down from the heights of catastrophe by my sister, because I was having a meltdown about calling some legal department over clarification of some poor wording.

It went something like this:

1. Read information required for job interview next week.
2. Find I need to bring ABC to job interview.
3. Realize I don't have ABC handy.
4. Realise I can't get ABC in a hurry either, because weekend.
5. Contemplate sacrifices and hoop-jumping required to gain ABC as soon as possible.
6. Contemplate calling off interview because, is it worth it?
7. Send panicked e-mail off to sister.
8. Look up Australian law surrounding ABC.
9. Realise I'm in the right, but still seeing requirements for ABC on form in front of me.
10. Contemplate calling company for clarification.
11. Freak out over having to make yet another phone call.
12. Contemplate getting number for company's legal department to discuss required information, because I just looked up the law!
13. Repeat point 11.
14. Wipe sweat off hands, due to all of the above, because unable to hold phone with damp hands.

And finally 15. Get message from sister telling me I've misinterpreted the whole form in the first place and that I'm not actually the intended audience for it.

16. Realise it's not even midday, and I haven't even done anything yet.

Yes, I've been taking my pills, but they just mean I have fewer of these days, not none at all.

I can tell myself to breathe, to go for a calming walk, but that really doesn't help when I'm panicking about having to do something now, and hyping myself up to do something terrifying now, and I can't put it off until after a walk because then all the hyping up will have worn out and I'll have to start all over again.

Skills that will not help with my job interview: getting myself into mental cycles I cannot get myself out of again.

Fuck my brain!

- Chris Colfer's next book, The Land of Stories #3: A Grimm Warning, came out today. More for me to read! I only hope it doesn't end on a heartbreaking cliffhanger like the last one did.

- I was going to go buy it today, but after the stabbing yesterday I didn't want to be near the traumatised shopping centre today. (My sister was in Parramatta when it happened, although she wasn't in the shopping centre, so she brought the news home with her.)

- I just saw the word "Horcrux" used as an insult. How fantastic! As in, "He's such a closed-minded Horcrux." Must remember that.

- Does anyone else have books that you stop reading halfway through, multiple times? It happens to me every time I try to read Wuthering Heights or Sophie's World, which I've started twice only to abandon them halfway through both times!

- If I could pick a song to play at my own funeral, it would be I Am A Thousand Winds, by Hayley Westenra, which is the English version of 千の風になって (sen no kaze ni natte) (that link goes to Masafumi Aikawa's version). The Japanese piece is based on the English poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye.

- Someone made Rudd v Abbott into a card game. Oh. My. God.

- New Volcanoes Discovered in Australia
"Though it's been more than 5000 years since the last volcanic eruption in Australia, it's important that we understand where, when and how these volcanoes erupted. The province is still active, so there may be future eruptions."

- I love my dreams! My latest awesome dream involved me and a friend pinning carpets to walls, using them as portals, and gathering clues there to defeat the White Witch and her pet crow who were oppressing that other world. Of course I woke up before I got to be a hero, but it was still awesome. Carpets for portals!

- I bought the Godzilla (1999 - 2004) box set! I'd forgotten how much cheestastic fun these movies were. Bring on the popcorn!

- My phone has a little heart that pops up in the battery space when it runs low on battery. I find that beyond adorable. Can't help but read it as, "I love you. Feed me?" I'm pretty sure a low battery isn't supposed to make you want to cuddle your phone.

- I have a tag called faith in humanity if you ever need some. These are the stories that always make me smile. Unfortunately I have too few of them in my own blog.

- Apparently the World Vision fiasco in the USA was the last straw for many young Christians. I've seen one or two blog posts confirming exactly that. This is what the future looks like. (For the record, this is World Vision Australia's policy.)

- I'm going to keep plugging this: Peter Montgomery's global LGBT roundups, because they are impressive in scope. A few years ago I would have passed over anything that had the word "religion" in the URL, but these days I'm a little wiser, so I can recognise that good work comes from all corners, and these weekly posts are very informative.

- Waleed Aly is one of my favourite commentators in mainstream media, and this column on changes to the Racial Discrimination Act is no exception. I am in awe of this man and his ability to hit the nail on the head.
To "intimidate" is "to cause fear of physical harm" according to the draft Act. Now our ordinary reasonable white person is being asked to tell, say, black people whether or not they are "reasonably likely" to be fearful of physical harm. Black people – reasonable ones – might actually be fearful, but ultimately a hypothetical white person will decide that for them.

I can see the arguments now: "I'm a reasonable Australian and I'm not intimidated," the implication being if you're intimidated you're being unreasonable. And by definition, one can't reason with an unreasonable person, so their concerns can only to be ignored until they start being reasonable again. Or at least until they stop unreasonably complaining about being intimidated.

Can you be in an abusing relationship with your government? Because that's what this sounds like.

- Oh god. Michael Jackson's "Black or White" is considered a musical flashback on one Sydney radio station. I remember when this song came out. Now I feel old.

- Last week I watched a news piece on feral camel culling. Only in Australia.

- I'm banning myself from buying any more books. Because my "currently reading" pile is nine books high, and I'm avoiding even looking at my "yet to read" pile.

- Why 'Arrow' Is The Best Superhero Show On Television
Arrow's major villains matter, is the point: they challenge Oliver both as a person and a hero, and don't leave without a major impact on the characters viewers have come to feel for.
(Full of spoilers)

- When We Lose Antibiotics, Here's Everything Else We'll Lose Too
If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we're not far off — here's what we would lose.

- Deliverance: The True Story of a Gay Exorcism
It's impossible to know how many young gay people have undergone exorcism in the thousands of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches across the country—not all of which, to be sure, condone the practice. However, youth workers say they regularly deal with the aftermath of these rituals. And not just in the parts of the country where Evangelical Christianity is traditionally strong.

And in case anyone on my FList thinks , "only in America," a few years ago my sister - who is bisexual - got involved with a C3 Church here in Australia, and they wanted to perform an exorcism on her. She left. They came to our door, demanding to see her. Quote: "I can see the Devil in her eyes!" My mother had to block the door and tell them to bugger off.

It happens more than you might think in more places than you might think.

- Guess what I did yesterday? I flew to Mars where I conquered my fear of talking to sales staff. Okay, the first part is a lie, but the second part is true. I asked for assistance in a shop (only the second time I've ever done that), and returned something (first time I've ever done that), both in one day! I'm so proud of myself. And I was only a little nervous, but not sweaty-palms/heart-racing terrified. ^_^

- Then I had an argument with a self-check-out machine.
Machine: "Unknown item in packing area."
Me: "No there isn't! You just don't recognise your own bags!"
Stupid machine.

- Other than that, I spent hours this weekend playing 3rd World Farmer, which is supposed to be an educational game, but it plays like a simplified version of The Sims to me. At one point I had 5 generations living in one house. The oldest farmer was 140 years old. ¬_¬ Keep giving them medicine and they never die. At that point I'd saved up $100,000 and just got bored and ended it. But it was still a fun game.

- Board Games for Halloween. Some of those sound hilarious. Or for something more subtle, if you just want a general sense of doom there's this list.

- Also happening on Thursday: For better or for worse, MPs to say I do ... or I don't
Based on the success of a vote on a motion in support of marriage equality in May last year, there is some confidence the NSW bill will pass comfortably through the upper house.But that will mean nothing if the Legislative Assembly kills it off. Just how its members – all of whom have been afforded a free vote – will jump remains unclear.