"Joanna! Stop making things awkward!" - Jess

This morning and afternoon were boring. I worked on my assignments and took naps. I was planning on just working on my qualitative research proposal, but I was getting bored of reading about marathon runners and vegetarians. I clearly have a quantitative mind because I started working on my epidemiology essay for contemporary and the portion of my anthro essay where I talk about the prevalence of childhood obesity and why it is an important issue. I can’t wait to take quantitative classes next semester! (Although I’m sure that I will be complaining next semester, too. I have a tendency of hating classes that I think I’ll love and vice versa.)

At 4:30, I went to CIF. Owen talked to me about going to NTE. He called me, and left a message because my phone was on silent, about it last week. Micaiah had read my blog post talking about how I wanted to go to NTE but couldn’t because of money and the need for a job or volunteer work. Owen wanted to let me know that they could help me if money was the only issue. I told him that I probably can’t go because I’ll need to work and/or volunteer, but I don’t know yet.

When I saw Jo, she told me that she’s really sad because she keeps seeing cool things about Janice and she hasn’t been on there. She’s been replaced. Actually, Janice always shows up more, but that’s beside the point. I told her that she had to tell me funny things, but she didn’t sit at my table during CIF.

So the first question to get us talking at our tables was “If you had to lose your senses, which would be the worst one to lose?” We were talking about how we kind of think that sight would be the worst one. My rationale was that I’d rather learn sign language than braille and you can always write out what you need to say. Jess’ thought was, “If I go blind, I can have a dog.” Beth then reminded her that she could have a dog even if she wasn’t blind. Plus, if she was blind, she couldn’t see the cuteness of the dog. I also said that I wouldn’t mind losing taste because I don’t like food anyway. It’s true; there are very few foods that I really get joy out of eating. Losing a sense of taste would probably help me to gain weight, too, because I wouldn’t be as picky. I think we forgot about smell during that conversation. We talked about how touch would be bad because then you might touch something and hurt yourself without knowing it. There’s some disorder where you don’t feel pain, which that reminds me of, but I don’t know what it’s called. I just remember seeing it on TV where this little girl would touch light bulbs and not know that she was hurting herself. She also lived with a broken jaw for a while because her parents couldn’t tell and she wouldn’t complain because it didn’t hurt.

During the talk, Owen asked us what makes a person great on Earth. We talked about the obvious things like fame and money. Then Emily, another one, not the one that I usually talk about, said something about having a family. The following bullet points come from our table’s conversation and then the conversation of all of CIF.

•   “If our baby’s a jumper, it’d be easy to take care of.”- Beth; Jumper being the slang word for sweatshirt/coat of course. Jess said that the other day Beth’s husband thought that James was holding a baby, but it was actually just a jumper. Then Beth was talking about how that would be an easy baby to take care of. Bron said that you could just put it in the washing machine for a bath and Beth said you could just put it in the closet. I think this was a funnier story when it was happening.

• Jess wants 6 kids; Apparently this is a joke that got out of hand. I guess it started a while ago when Bron said something about Jess having 1,2,3,4,5 or 7 kids. Then Jess asked, “What if I have 6 kids?” It then became a running joke that she wanted 6 kids. She was all embarrassed when Beth said something about that when sharing what our table came up with. Well, Jess, now it’s on my blog, so even more people know

•      “You can be Justin Bieber, but it’s hard to say you’re great.”- not sure; I’m not sure who said this because he was at another table on the other side of the room. It was just hilarious, though. I think that he meant that fame isn’t everything, but it was funny. Justin Bieber is not great!

•   Publishing academic papers; Apparently this is an achievement of greatness. “You know you’re at a uni when…” (Especially one of the top unis and not a party school) A Nobel prize was also mentioned. On a semi-related note, I was on the ANU library website Super Search and decided to search my mom’s name. Then I saw the paper that I am on, too. I searched my name and it came up! I felt so special!

Then Owen finished his talk. Part of the passage that he talked about was about forgiveness and the forgiving people not seven times, but seventy-seven times. (Matthew 18:22) It made me smile because 7x70 by Chris August is one of my favourite songs. As I’m writing this, I am listening to my zune. It came on a couple of paragraphs earlier and I thought it was funny. Then I realised that I’m listening to my “I love Jesus” playlist, which only has 63 songs, so it’s not that ironic. Anyway, we ate dinner and then hung out before church.

I saw Bec walking through Manning Clark, so I talked to her for a minute or so. She had just gotten back from Sydney because her undergrad graduation was this weekend.

After talking to Bec, I walked up to Jess talking to David and Emily (the other Emily) and she was telling them about her course. David was interested in it and asked for her number. He tried to put her in his mobile and asked how spelled her name. “G-e-e-s?” No, Jess. Jole overheard and started calling her Geese. It was funny.

“Joanna! Stop making things awkward!”- Jess; Those two are priceless! I was talking to Emily and Jess when Jo came up to us with her coffee. Emily and Jess then decided that they wanted to get coffee or tea too. Then Jo took a sip of her coffee and realised that she forgot to add sugar. I didn’t want to just stand there awkwardly, so we all moved over to the coffee/tea area. Jo was adding sugar and Jess was making fun of the amount of sugar she uses. There was some kind of teasing going on and Jess tried to add milk to her coffee or tea. It ended up splashing everywhere, which resulted in more teasing. Jo’s laugh is very loud and very distinctive. She just kept laughing and Jess asked her to stop by saying, “Joanna! Stop making things awkward!” You know it’s serious when she uses her full first name. Jo can’t stop laughing, though. I really don’t think that’s possible. Then Emily grabbed me and said, “Let’s just walk away…”

Emily, Kristy, Bron, and some others were talking about the recent ACT elections. They asked me if I can vote in the US elections. I said that I would be able to if I had registered letting them know that I was in Australia. They kind of guilt tripped me because they were confused why I wasn’t voting if I could. They thought that voting in the US election was so cool and that they could feel like they were voting through me. Personally, I’m just sick of politics. I took it hard when McCain lost four years ago. Plus I haven’t been following the debates or anything, so I think it’s better to not vote than to vote misinformed.

Then we went to church. Today was the second week in the theme of Joy. Dave was talking about how long different types of joy would last. They all ended at old age/death, besides joy in God of course, and so he had the life expectancy listed under the ending time. He said it was 82, but it might actually be higher in Canberra because it’s so close to Heaven, anyway. It was a joke, because in his chart thing of where people find joy, he listed Canberrans. Everyone laughed. Not many people like Canberra. Anyway, if the life expectancy is higher, it’s because there is good access to quality healthcare. After all, this is the place where people come to die. (That’s a reference to a previous post/quote from Paul.)

After church, I came back home. I was going to print my articles for this week so that I could read them. When I went to the computer lab, it wouldn’t let me log it to the internet. Then someone came in. He asked if the internet was working. He said that he had just come from the library and the internet wasn’t working there and he hoped that it was working in Davey. It wasn’t. (I had just logged in like 30 seconds before he came and thought it was just taking a long time to log in.)

So then I came upstairs. The whole of ANU internet wasn’t working, which included on my laptop. I didn’t know what to do because I needed the internet for everything that I needed to do. I decided to just write up this blog post in hopes that the internet would be back running when I was done. It worked because the internet is back now! Yay! Now I’ll have to go back downstairs to print my articles for next week.