Tonight

Tonight, I've come home and decided to sit at the computer and blog about something, anything. Why? Well, it's time to end my self-imposed ban from blogging that I declared on Monday. I'm just going to sit and write here for fiteen, maybe twenty minutes, and whatever ends up written down I will post. This is the kind of exercise I did when I took a writing class at the youth theatre I once attended. We'd be given the task of writing whatever for a really short period of time, not as long as five minutes, if I recall correctly, and the object of the exercise was not to censor yourself. It's quite a difficult thing to do. Even now, every now and again, I'll do a quick series of backspaces to delete a half thought word that I've decided won't do. There, I've just paused and read back what I've written so far. I'm sure that wasn't allowed when I did the exercise before.

I suppose the trouble is that I've been censoring myself all week. This is part of the reason why I had the blog moratorium. Not just for my own blog, but others as well. Until this afternoon I hadn't checked my bloglines subscriptions for days. Is this making any sense? I don't think it does, but I'm trying not to read back what I've written at this point. It's so difficult. My eyes keep straying. I decided not to read any other blogs or post on my own because I can't help getting caught up in the whole social activity of blogging, and this week I had to work on my thesis prospectus--a kind of rehearsal for the confirmation--that I delivered today. It went well. People seem interested. My supervisor said nice things to me. My project is 'meaty'. Heh.

So, everything is all calm again. In fact I'm feeling quite wide awake and I shouldn't. I've spent all week stressing about trying to give a perfect presentation. Lot's of 'Oh my Gods!' and 'I don't have a thesis statement!' and 'What the hell is this about again?'. Days have flown by and all I've been doing is censoring myself. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Apparently the effect of all that stress rendered my presentation as something that had been very thoroughly worked on. Now all I have to do is mark eighty assignments. They're short ones, but still the deadline for that is close. What am I doing sitting here blogging?

Well, the Brisbane Writers' Festival started yesterday and I really didn't think I'd get the chance to go to anything, but then I read my emails and there were some free tickets on offer to the one session that I really wanted to see. So that's where I've just been, at the Brisbane Powerhouse seeing John Tulloch talk about his experience of being on the London Underground when it was bombed on the 7th of July last year. He was turned into a bit of a poster boy of the victims of 7/7 in the UK media, and now he's written a book about it, the bombing and the media use of his image afterwards. I will probably write more about this at some stage. But I've less than five minutes left to write before I promised I would stop, and now tiredness is setting in. I ran into my associate supervisor when I sat down with a friend who I had run into earlier on the ferry and discovered he was also going to the event. Running into A/Supe was fortuitous since I would never have talked to John Tulloch afterwards if she hadn't drawn A and I into a discussion with him. He is appalled at The Australian's review of his book, he believes it misinterprets and misrepresents his work. I am not surprised.

Oh, my eyes are straying back, over what I have written. All those long sentences. Very Virginia. I wanted to relate the story of the ferry travel. We got off at Sydney Street instead of New Farm. We had to run past the joggers who were out for exercise, in order to make the session in time. We were 10 minutes late, and the session didn't start for another 15, leaving plenty of time to order a nice tall flute of sparkling wine.