Bad work on blogging :( Don’t really have any material sorry. Still working easy comfort-zoney week-by-week job. I haven’t been exactly proactive in searching for something more purposeful. Not feeling particularly empowered.

I’ve been doing a bit of tutoring. If anyone’s looking for a tutor in Italian, Spanish, ESL, or general essay-writing et cetera let me know?

My head isn’t in a particularly great place at the moment. Problems I don’t know how to fix. Nothing okay to blog about.

Tim gets philosophical:

11:46:53 AM Tim: lack of blog updates
11:46:55 AM Tim: by anyone!
11:46:58 AM Claire: i know right
11:47:38 AM Tim: well whats the point in blog
11:47:42 AM Tim: without blogging?!

Oh yeah. In happier times, I contributed to the curry review this weekend. After my curry, my number came up so I also had to do a quadruple chili shot. If you combine that with my sextuple from a few months ago… only the eponymous Chow himself has done more shots! HxC.

In other procrastination, I found this article about weight loss fairly insightful. I like having lost weight but the feeling of having bought in, of having given in to the demands of critics, having implicitly agreed that I wasn’t good enough before… totally. “You look really good!” (there was a period in which I heard this from every single person I ran into) basically means “you used to look kind of shit”. In relation to increased male attention, I’m torn between “hey, thanks for noticing me!” and indignance on the part of former-me, who was the same person. I’ve found the transition in identity fairly smooth, but sometimes it feels like selling out if I think about it too hard? Like saying “high five, you were right!” to every person who ever said I was Bad for being Fat.

I have always thought of myself as a bit of a loner. All my life, I’ve favoured having limited, close friends over having larger groups and I’ve always thought of myself as wanting to be left alone a lot. It’s interesting that over the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate how important human connections really are to me. The times in my life in which I’ve been least happy are the times I’ve felt least connected to others. The late years of primary school, for example, were a particularly lousy time for me and in retrospect, yes: poor-qualty friendships. Ditto year eleven, which saw a major shift in my friendship group. And then my first few years of uni; I met many people, but (with a couple of exceptions) all of it was so fleeting, and I was one unhappy kid. Contrast this with times that I look back on as “good” and it’s exactly the times I felt like I had a solid friend-bank.

So this is a change in self-definition that has been a while coming, but I suppose it’s better late than never. The last few years have been a time of upheaval for me and at times I’m left thinking, “Oh, is that what I’m like?”. It’s confusing, but it’s interesting. It turns out that if you remove the crippling anxiety, I actually crave human interaction, and not just with a select couple of people; I want group dynamics and variety too.

Sometimes, this is a problem. Last time I went out with my high school friends, I spent the night uncomfortable because I wanted to be one person and they want me to be someone else. My groove doesn’t fit any more, as compared with three years ago when seeing those girls after a while apart was like a cool drink in the desert. They’re still my best friends but… the dynamic is gone, and I suppose it remains to be seen whether they’ll let it get redefined. It’s that the less scared I am, the further I push my comfort zone, the less these limited interactions satisfy me; I’m not the girl I was when I was nineteen and I don’t want to be; that girl was miserable. Maybe I like new people because they let me be a new person.

Which is not to imply that I am saturated by change just yet – I skipped last week’s curry because none of my BFFs were going and I was scared no one would talk to me, which was stupid like burning. But I guess the difference is that I regretted it, and on a “that would have been a decent dinner!” level, rather than on a feeling-guilty kind of level, which is a rather key point (I am so freaking over guilt, which is an entry for another night).

The culmination is that, just lately, I’ve been feeling like I really need to see people in a way that I can’t remember ever needing it. Yes, I’ll always be this shy kind of oversensitive introvert who is a little bit worried that everybody hates her, but it’s nearly just background noise these days, it’s not big. For the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling like when I’m left alone, something’s not quite right and I should do something to change it. Like an itch. It’s strange. I think it’s healthy? But it’s strange!

Just a little orientation!

My first blog ran from September 2000 to December 2006 (I think) and I got rid of it mainly because of the feeling that six years of teen and early-20s angst just wasn’t a very proper thing to leave lying about. And, everything was getting a little stale and heavy and not very fun and possibly compromising. It was a pretty damned good decision, I think, and I have never regretted it! But sadly I do miss blogging, and I have tried to fill the void with LiveJournal, with MySpace and with Facebook, but none of them have quite hit the spot (while all remain fine services within their scopes). So. Fresh start ahoy!

I think many people reading this were readers of my old blog, but for the sake of the new generation: I’m Claire; I’m 24; I live in Adelaide, Australia. I’m languagey (English / Italian / Spanish), having lived in Italy and majored in Spanish, and I am currently working on Japanese (sort of). I have been in uni for a kabillion years and I like to write, and the adjectives used most often to describe me are smart and shy. And possibly cynical.

So. The significant events since I stopped the old blog are that I got an MA in Applied Linguistics last year, and I’m now doing a Grad Diploma in Education with specialisations in Spanish and ESL. I’m hoping to go overseas and teach English, somewhere, either in July or at the end of the year. We shall see. Otherwise I suppose I’ll be attempting to show up in a high school near you in 2009! (Given the anticipated googling skills of my hypothetical future students, this blog is going to stay fairly sterile granny-safe, for the record.)

Stuff I still like just as much as I ever did: my dog, travel, trying not to be so cynical, languages, writing, sugar.

Other stuff I’m probably more interested in than I used to be: craft, live music, exercise, tofu, outings, clothes, pop-punk, Gerard Way.

I think that covers it!

It just feels like time, you know? The 15-month itch. I think I’ve beaten the WP code into submission at last, so expect some entries longer than three lines any day now!

P.S. Do you like my bird? I drew it with a mouse, can you tell!? :)

P.P.S. I know the layout is broken in IE; I know the reason, but I do not know how to fix it! (The reason is that IE is whack). Sorry!

Bear with me, I am trying to remember CSS.

I’ll be blogging here shortly!