Huh, my parents.

Sorry I’m updating a little late today, I’ve been fighting bronchitis for over a week now, and today I was losing. It keeps seeming like it’s going away, and then one day I’ll wake up and feel like I have a dog sitting on my chest. Then I move Rosie, and I still feel like I have a lump of lead sitting in my lungs. So today was one of those days. Actually went back to the doctor, and he put me on a whole new kind of antibiotic. And wants me to give him a sputum sample. Goddamn. I felt so sorry for the poor pathology collection chick. I was like, “Uhhhh, I’ll do it at home.”

But anyway! My parents! I’ve blogged a lot about them before, I think. Specifically in the entry where I explained why we’re moving back to Sydney. So with a bit of luck, I’ll be able to keep this one short and then get back to feeling like a big ol’ butt again.

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Okay! Well, I sat down and really thought about this one. I really didn’t know where to start. I mean, there have always been crushes and “so and so has the hots for you know who” and that sort of business. But where do you draw the line and say, “This is a schoolgirl crush and this is love.” To some, well, to many, I’m sure that’s a really easy question to answer, I mean, love is LOVE, right? You can’t fake that, you can’t fool it.

But if there’s one thing you should learn about me, if nothing else, is that I am passionate. Not about anything in particular, just in general. And that doesn’t mean I just LOVE everything either, it means I hate and love with equal ferocity. Obviously I try not to hate too many things, but if I get started on something, you’re not going to hear the end of it for a while. This is also why I’m absolutely useless in arguements. When something starts getting heated, I get wild off the emotion and I can’t talk, I can’t reason, I can’t stand up for myself. I just scream or cry as appropriate. Sometimes both.

Anyway, enough of this philosophical claptrap. This is all beside the point. I just wanted you to know that this one is difficult for me, because I feel like I’ve loved people and things and places my entire life, and I don’t know what the first one possibly could have been.

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That went well, I think!

Soooo, this’ll probably be a pretty short entry, cause I haven’t had a lot of nicknames in my time. But it’s got me here, and it’s got me writing, and that’s the main thing, even if it’s a short entry.

So, nicknames. Like I said, I haven’t had many. I guess ’cause I’ve got one of those names that nicknames itself quite easily? Like, why come up with something like, uh, “Meatfist” when you can just call me, “Jess”, right? So most of my life, it’s just been Jess. I guess there was a bit of Jessie in there as well, when I was a bit younger, cause that’s cute, right?

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Hello!

While I was stumbling around the internet today, I came across a person’s blog who was doing an interesting thing. An interesting thing that he apparently stole from someone else, which in turn, I am now stealing from him! It’s called “The 30 day blog challenge”! Credit where credit is due, I am totally stealing this from misstaylorcast.com, a site I came across on my daily StumbleUpon wanderings. I am stealing it, it is not my idea or my property – I just thought it was awesome, and am doing it for all the reasons she mentioned as well, such as getting over writer’s block.

Here’s what I’ll be writing about for the next 30 days. A lot of this stuff you might know about me already, dear readers, but even if you do, it might be an interesting new take on an old story or give you a new perspective on something you never thought to ask about in greater detail. Anyway, here’s the list:

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Let’s blog and roll, ladies and gentlemans!

So I decided I should make an annoucement. Well, not really an announcement so much as an explanation. Or aaaa… dinosaur, I don’t know.

Point is a lot of you have noticed I mentioned Sydney in my posts etc. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal, I imagine I’d be heading back to Sydney at some point, all my family and friends are over there! But I dunno, you’ve all got weird intuition powers or something, so I’ll just come right out and say it.

I’m moving back to Sydney.

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Hi!

It’s a hot evening, approximately the 23rd of February, and I am coming down with flu-like symptoms. I have been annoying myself by not writing anything like I said I would, so I decided that I would jot down some stuff in the order that it came to my flu-riddled skull.

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I’ve resolved, from this point on, to do a lot more writing. I’d like to finally make something of it, maybe earn some money doing it. I’m thinking about going back to uni to do a creative writing course. Wherever it goes from here, I’d just like to do more. It makes me happy, I’m fairly okay at it, and it’s the one talent I have that really makes me feel like I have a creative or imaginative bone in my body.

Point is, the easiest and cheapest avenue for me to start is to blog more often.

It’s been over a year since I last posted an entry. Over a YEAR. That’s terrible. Considering how much effort Tim put into designing this, and how much I guilted him about not finishing it, it got sort of forgotten pretty quickly. Well, not forgotten, snubbed.

Anyway, let’s see if we can recap this year.

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On the outside, it’s easy to misconstrue “Draw Muhammad Day” as a noble cause, a peaceful protest of sorts. It’s easy to believe that you’re doing the right thing by scribbling down a picture of the prophet Muhammad, posting it on the internet, and flipping the bird at any Muslims who might happen to find your actions insulting, and that they should lighten the-fuck-up because “free speech lol”.

Unfortunately, this is incorrect. What we have here is a classic case of very popular internet forum mindset – specifically, confusing the right to free speech with the right to act like a toolbag.

It’s trolling.

I’m serious – what else can you call it when a bunch of non-Muslims who live comfortable Western lives, and whose freedom of speech is not threatened in any way, deliberately and enthusiastically engage in an activity that they know will be offensive to others? Offensive to people who have never personally done anything to offend them?

It’s trolling of the highest order; textbook in execution, industrial in scale, and dripping with extra lashings of the misguided self-righteousness that only the greatest breed of troll – the unwitting – can summon.

Is it that simple? Yes, it is. But let’s examine it in more detail.

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So as most of you know, I do a weekly Refried comic for games.on.net. My editor found this week’s comic delightful (Pure gold, mate) and in fact liked it so much that he showed it to his manager – which turned out to be a bad move. She decided that it was possibly so contentious that it had to go all the way up the chain to the CEO of Internode to make a decision on – and he said no. Given that its subject matter is a South Australian politician and Internode is an Adelaide-based ISP, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to go upsetting the establishment.

But, under the terms of my contract and as a private citizen of an entirely different state, there’s nothing stopping me from publishing it myself, and a lot of people have been asking for it, so here you go.

We’re coming home soon!

Finally, after eight long months, our time here is finally coming to an end. And now, as is my wont, instad of focussing on coming home, I’ve started worrying about all the things I never got around to doing. And all the things that I want to do before I leave. Y’know, the ones I probably won’t do because of Christmas, and the fact that I’m sick AGAIN.

Like seeing Maddie. Man, I meant to call her and email her so many times, and I put it off and put it off. And seeing Greg! What was that all about, huh! At least he came to my surprise party, which was, you could say, a huge surprise. And Kate. Oh, Katie. Kate left for Africa about the time that I arrived, and came back about a week or two ago. So I haven’t had a lot of time to see her either. And Nidhi! She’s not even in the country, I believe, which is sad.

I am a bad person.

Tim threw me a surprise party the other day, which was the best thing ever. He was all “We’re gonna go out to dinner for your birthday!” And I’m all “Yay!” So he blindfolds me, and Sarah drives us to the place (our car was unavailable, long story). It took about forty-five minutes, and I got completely lost. I had a good idea where we were for a lot of the time, but then she started taking some turns that were totally weird and I lost track of where we were. Anyway, we got there, and they were leading me toward the place, and they take off my blindfold and we’re BACK HOME. Man, I was so weirded out! I thought it was a big joke, that Tim was going to be all “Just kidding, I forgot to bring something, NOW we leave” but then we went inside and all my friends were waiting for me!

It was the best thing.

In hind sight, I’d been pretty dumb about the whole thing. There were a lot of clues I could’ve picked up on that I didn’t until it was too late. Such as the fact that nobody had asked me if or when I was having a party, and the fact that Mum had started cleaning the house for grandma’s annual visit more than a week in advance. But oh well! Maybe I was just sub-conciously willing to go along with it. In any case, I have the most wonderful friends, and the most wonderful Tim.

Speaking of cleaning, the other day Tim and I were cleaning out the back room of all my stuff accumulated over the last 23 years. We found some pretty cool stuff, and gave a lot of things to charity, so we felt really good about it all at the end of the day. We finally organised all our boxes to ship home, which cost substantially more than last time, but we have like, twice the boxes to ship home now. One less computer though!

In fact, neither of the computers we shipped over are getting shipped back. Weird.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is, we found a lot of neat stuff, including some old journals and draft books from school. I would like to share some of the entries with you, ’cause they are weird and awesome. Debari, you love my stories, right? You are gonna LOVE these.

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