Yep. Visit the Flickr image for notes.

OMG I just had the best idea! Cold Rock, but for yoghurt. Like the Yoghurt Shop, but with mix-ins!

The main part of why this is such a good idea is that it can be DIYed at home, unlike the ice cream version which just turns into sludge unless you have an actual cold rock (or a frozen chopping board).

I need to get some Violet Crumble and chocolate sauce!

Anyway, I am on holiday. I am having a nice holiday. (Perhaps especially because) this is the first time in a long time that I have been on a holiday with a job on both sides of it! I just finished up a term’s contract at a very lovely school with very lovely students who I was sad to leave. I am afraid that I have been a bit spoilt by it! Next week, I am starting at another school where I’ve got a contract for the rest of the year. If it is as nice as my last school, I will be a very happy girl! But either way, it’s a load off my mind to have work lined up.

Josh and I are off to Clare tomorrow for a minibreak. We are going to start off exploring historic mines and gaols, and will finish up sipping wine by an open fire, and it will be cosy and nice :)

Sorry, I have no news.

On the weekend, Josh and I made a vegetable patch! We made it out of wood that we got from hard rubbish, using screws that were already in the wood and some which I’d bought to make the laundry shelves. It was a free project! Except for what we paid in time and sweat, which was heaps. Anyway.

On Monday, I bought pea straw and manure and potting mix and built up the bed. Then on Tuesday, I transplanted all of the veggies that I had in pots. Then yesterday I went to Heyne’s and bought a bunch of seedlings and seeds and planted them all!

These are the vegetables that are now growing in our veggie patch:
-carrots
-zucchini
-lettuce
-basil
-parsley
-tomatoes
-chives
-chillis
-pumpkin
-corn
-spinach
-strawberries
-snow peas

Previously, there were three trees planted in this space. Everyone was like “don’t cut down the precious trees!”. But trees cannot feed me :)

Last night, I found that a volunteer position I had applied for had been re-advertised. It seems like I can’t even give it away :(

I think I’ve been keeping up morale for a really long time, but all I can really think about is that all my money is disappearing, it’s really unlikely that I’ll ever own a house, it’s so long since I did anything I was good at that I’m not really sure if I’m good at anything or ever was, and everybody else is able to get a job so clearly the problem is me. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be in this position at 26, I wouldn’t have believed you.

I’m so ashamed that I got to be such a stuff up, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Edit: Oh, never mind. I got a job.

In order to hold myself accountable, here is what I would like to get done today (roughly in this order):

- shower
- buy some grout
- buy a hammer
- browse Kmart for some cheap clothes that don’t look cheap
- perhaps browse Kmart for a doormat
- buy a new goldfish
- mop the kitchen and bathroom
- clean up the big stack of papers on my shelf
- clean up generally
- do exercise
- go to my parents’ place to borrow a reasonably-sized suitcase*
- work out an appropriate art-and-degrees configuration and put some picture hooks in the walls in the study and lounge room*
- go to the doctor for a minor procedure this afternoon (that hopefully won’t leave my arm looking bruised for a fortnight?)
- apply for at least one, preferably two advertised jobs (probably SA Health medical administration ones)
- try to work out what Act I am actually employed under as a Relief Teacher so I know if I can apply for internal government positions or not?
- send some letters to various TAFEs telling them I want to be in their availability pool

*if time permits

Pretty much this is the same as my to-do list for yesterday, except all I achieved yesterday was:
- play Tropico 3
- read
- nap
- look at pictures of funny bags on the internet

I tell you what, I can work out how to think about most things if given enough time, but weight loss defeats me. Because fundamentally, yes, being overweight is probably not good for your health or quality of life. But believing that you have something terribly wrong with you (never just physically, when it comes to fat people) is also quite bad for your health and quality of life!!

I agree wholeheartedly with this New Republic article about the US government’s Let’s Move campaign. Maybe there are fat kids out there who have rock-hard self-esteem and can hear, “You’re getting fat, we need to change your lifestyle,” and respond “Oh, that is good advice. Thank you for wanting to help, please tell me more!”. The majority of fat kids, and even not-particularly-fat kids, will hear that and translate it to, “I am fat, being fat is bad, therefore I am bad.” I don’t really know what the right way is to deal with kids in this context. I do know that I was firmly convinced that I was disgustingly fat by the time I was 7 or 8 years old, and still convinced at 11, and still convinced at 15. And I was… quite indoorsy, and hated sports, but neither was I at any health risk, and certainly never close to obese at that time. For me, being encouraged to lose weight as a child did little more than to seal “fat” into my identity – it was something I was not able to change, because it was something I had always been. While it’s good for kids to avoid getting overweight, it’s important to bear in mind that culturally, this is not a physical problem to overcome with some healthy food and sport, but a judgement on that child’s success and value as a person.

I see Fat Acceptance as a really good thing. We tell people constantly that they are bad for being fat. If you’ve had the message drummed into you for years that you’re lazy, ineffective, helpless, unmotivated, dumb, worthless etc – if you can hardly bear to own up to your body or even think too hard about it – then feeling empowered to change anything about yourself is a huge challenge! I got to be properly obese in my early 20s (probably for various reasons, but it’s telling that I already felt as fat at seventy kilos as I did at ninety – i.e. I had already written myself off so why not get KFC), and (although there was most certainly constant overlap) it wasn’t a case of “I lost weight and felt better about myself”, it was a case of realising that I was able to lose weight, and worth it, before I could make that move.

So perhaps talking to kids and teenagers about their weight as a problem is inherently damaging. I have a feeling the (rather small?) Health at Every Size movement is a good thing. On the Let’s Move website, quotes like “Children need 60 minutes of active and vigorous play every day to grow up to a healthy weight” could be modified fairly easily to “Children need 60 minutes of active and vigorous play every day to grow up healthily”. Perhaps it really isn’t too hard to focus on nutrition and fitness and leave weight and fat out of it. Certainly I think it’s quite immoral to view being fat as somehow “worse” than being slender. This is not a humanistic viewpoint!

Which is where my internal conflict really lies, because I chose to lose a lot of weight, and I would never choose to put it back on. It seems like wanting to lose it in the first place must be an admission that there was something wrong with being overweight. And, I have gained a few kilos over the last year and despite all my rhetoric, it still does feel like almost a moral failure. While, on the other hand, I am not a better person after losing weight and I was not a bad person for being fat. I am yet to figure out how I can have it both ways. All that really changed was what I looked like, and therefore how other people viewed me. So maybe it is all about image, and conforming in order to be liked. Yet for about a year, people would congratulate me whenever they saw me. I don’t know how to reconcile it.

But I do think that it’d be nice if, when people saw a fat person, they said, “Oh, her calorie intake has exceeded her calorie output!” instead of, “Oh, she looks quite slothful and slovenly, let us scorn her!”.

Yesterday, Josh finally finished moving all his stuff into my our unit. Sadly, I was in a terrible mood all day, so there was very little savouring of the shift to living in sin my well and truly becoming ineligible for Centrelink if I ever was significant changes in life. I was moping because I am mopey; my self-esteem is always on a knife’s edge these days so it doesn’t take very much. While ferreting around in my parents’ shed yesterday (which produced a free rusty bike and a free giant aquarium!) I noticed my dad’s old filing cabinet had a few quotes about work stuck on it, including: “A man’s work is his dilemma: his job is his bondage, but it also gives him a fair share of his identity and keeps him from being a bystander in somebody else’s world.” – Melvin Maddock. I am feeling less and less like a real person and getting to feel quite lonely in my unemployed, purposeless little world. It’s not at all about the money (it’s sad seeing my savings going down, but I won’t starve anytime soon), it’s about achieving something day-to-day and being worth something.

Anyway. In honour of the completed move, here is a photo of me and Josh’s fridge.

Josh always has Chairman Kaga (scanned from a newspaper) on his fridge, but the printout was all old and ugly, so we got the original scan from his sister, and I photoshopped his face to make it not have newsprint on it, and then I printed it out and contacted it onto a magnet backing. It is now PREMIUM Chairman Kaga!

While bored, I also made magnetic poetry with some printable magnetic paper.

This is Josh’s favourite:

My exercise planner! TBH, I am getting a bit fed up with exercise, because I’ve been doing it daily, in fact religiously, and have eaten reasonably, yet have only gained weight :( But the planner helps get me moving despite this.

I have got 7 free 2010 calendars so far and I am keeping them all. The over-representation of the Liberal party by no means implies a political leaning in that direction, I just didn’t get any from any other parties :( The house a few numbers down from me sold for $3 million last month; I don’t think Labor actually bothers advertising in this suburb.

Finally, the anti-depression pony. It came in a water-colours set that Lisa gave me for my birthday, so I duly painted it one day after school last year. Quoth Josh, “This is going straight on the fridge!”. It’s held on by the “Depression: You’re not Alone” magnet because you read the magnet, then you look down and see the rainbow pony, and you know that this is true. There’s a pony.

I called DECS today to check why I haven’t got my authority to teach letter yet. During our phone call was the first time anyone had looked at my 2010 application, which was submitted in November. And no, they say it can’t be processed yet. There are… 6 days until the start of term? So I guess there goes any contract I might have actually got.

It might be time to just stop saying I’m a teacher when I’m asked “What do you do?” and start admitting “I’m unemployed, I don’t do anything”.