claudine

I like to have basic emergency procedures, and as I'm about to travel I sent my 'in case of emergency' document to my parents and housemates. Some have replied saying that I was very organised, but I don't think it takes much effort. I keep an electronic document that gets updated when there is a relevant change in circumstances (e.g. change of home or employment) and keep a printed copy in the front of my diary and my luggage when travelling. It is, in fact, not much more than a copy of the personal details form that gets pre-printed in many diaries, but keeping it electronically means I don't have to copy it out into a new diary every year.

Adjust as appropriate:

* my phone number (in case I've got separated from my diary or luggage)

* home phone number (to contact housemates)

* parents/spouse/next-of-kin phone numbers

* employer phone number

* phone number of home parish + religion/denomination and any relevant details (e.g. 'last rites')

* allergies

* blood group

* spectacle prescription

* Medicare number

* private health insurance membership

* organ donor register number, or organ donation instructions

* date document was updated

For me, this all fits on one A5 sheet of paper.

The first issue of 'Chainletter' [0], the newsletter of the Founders and Survivors project, has been published at http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/node/19

[0] No, I did not come up with that name.

I've tried importing my old Livejournal entries into Dreamwidth. They've stopped after mid-2005 due to an 'invalid text encoding' error. I've used so many different Livejournal posting clients I can't guess what has gone wrong. Anyway, the old posts will stay at claudine_c.

This is an update on my ongoing vocation question to help members of my various (sometimes overlapping) social circles to keep up with where I am; I think I need help keeping up with myself too!

[This is also an attempt at getting back into blogging or online journaling, and I've got a new place for that, at Dreamwidth, which is built on a fork of the Livejournal code. My Dreamwidth posts should be cross-posted to Livejournal though.]

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Here I am on Dreamwidth! More (real) content to come.

In contrast to Two Brothers, I didn't know anything about Boy gets girl before I saw it (except that I had a ticket for it on Saturday afternoon). This play by Rebecca Gilman is about a relationship that goes wrong. I'm not sure how much I should reveal, but a clue is provided by the publicity photo, which shows a woman in her bedroom, wearing a nightdress, holding a hammer. I thought the play started slowly and I was afraid it was going to be a boring soap opera, but it took an interesting turn about a third of the way through. The quality of the acting, especially the American accents, was variable, but the central character was played quite convincingly. (The posters in the foyer listed the names of the cast but didn't match them up with their characters, which is unusual. I didn't recognise any actors and I categorically refuse to pay $8 for a "program" that consists mostly of advertising.)



I am "minding" Liz's Melbourne Theatre Company subscription in addition to her house. When I got here I wrote the dates and names of plays in my diary and put tickets in my tickler file, but I may not think of an upcoming performance again until the week before. There are a few more surprises in store for me this year.

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I didn't do any work yesterday. I had planned to work on my statistics assignment, due in ten days, but I allowed myself the morning to sleep in and catch up with newspapers and weblogs. Then I was hungry, so I went out for lunch and also stocked up on groceries. When I got home I felt so tired that all I could do was take a nap. Afterwards I decided I just wasn't in a statistics zone and allowed myself the rest of the day for catching up on (non-study) reading.



I don't, in fact, give myself enough of these full days off. I often find my days at the office so draining (while also interesting) that I can't concentrate on study in the evening, so I dedicate my non-office days to study. I had this notion that I would make Sundays true days of rest, but habits of procrastination and stress mean that I felt I couldn't take Sundays off. I can only think of perhaps two real days I have taken off since I moved house in April (apart from the days I spent moving things).



Obviously scheduling Sundays off hasn't worked. What is happening now is that I feel obliged to do a few hours of brain-work every day until my body gives up, as it did yesterday. Perhaps I just shouldn't feel guilty about resting when I need to, and try to remind myself to take some time off before I get too tired.



I don't want to be a workaholic. Life is too short for that.

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Affluenza is an American PBS television program and associated book that examines the urge to over-consumption in modern society. It is also the title of the forthcoming book by Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute. I'm sure that the new book deals with similar issues and comes to similar conclusions, in an Australian context, as the American original. I just think it would have been useful for Hamilton and his co-author to use a different title (even if it had the catchy "affluenza" somewhere in the title) to prevent confusion and show that they didn't make up the word themselves.

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Sometimes I let email pile up unread for a day or two. This morning I was going through the pile and found I'd won a two-for-one pass to The Agronomist, a film about Haitian activist Jean Dominique. The pass was for the weekend but I needed to collect it from the postgraduate association yesterday (they're not open on weekends). The email was BCC'd to all winners so it wasn't picked up by my "This is addressed to you! Read it now!" colour-coding filter. Maybe I should colour-code all mail that comes from the university. That will prevent me from missing library reminders too, though that hasn't been a big problem yet.



I will probably try to see this film anyway, but it would have been nice to be able to bring a friend.

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Via tcpip

1. Total number of books owned: When I was about seven, I was featured in a newspaper because I had a hundred books and my mother was proudly bewailing the fact that I'd forget to eat because I was so busy reading. I lost count of how many books I own long ago. Is about a thousand close enough? The majority of books I read are not owned, but borrowed from libraries or friends or shared through Bookcrossing.

2. Last book bought: The last book I bought was the Dictionary of epidemiology, fourth edition, edited by John Last and others. The last book that I bought and read from cover to cover would be Jon Krakauer's Into the wild.

3. Last book read: I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple hibiscus and have just started Randy Shilts's And the band played on.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me: This changes every few months. Currently:

• Paul Farmer, Infections and inequalities, a collection of essays on how closely poverty is associated with preventable infectious diseases in the majority world. Farmer is an anthropologist and physician working in Haiti. I'll never be like him, but when I'm getting bogged down in the minutiae of study, it's people like Farmer who remind me that I started this public health course because I see it as a tool for justice.
  
• Tracy Kidder, Mountains beyond mountains. Journalist follows Farmer around in Haiti, Cuba and Boston. You can tell from Farmer's writings that he's a Harvard brainiac. Kidder's biography shows some of the personality and colour to Farmer's life and tries to show how he became the man he is.
  
• Henry Handel Richardson, The getting of wisdom. I wasn't an orphan from country Victoria sent to boarding school, but there were many other aspects of young Laura's story that resonated with me. Laura is a bright child who doesn't fit in at her posh school, but by the end of her time there she begins to see a wider and more hopeful world outside. I think I read somewhere that Richardson either attended or based the book on the school that I was sent to eighty years later, which is a bit creepy.
  
• George Orwell, Collected Essays. Why this, and not one of the novels? Sometimes, when life seems so busy that I feel I can't commit to a book-length narrative, I like to dip into collections or anthologies. This collection is a condensation of Orwell's four-volume collected essays, journalism and letters. It contains such classics as "Why I write" and "Politics and the English language", to which I keep returning, as well as a variety of essays and reviews on diverse topics.
  
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The cost of discipleship. This book dissects the Gospel of Matthew, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, and tries to show what it might mean to live the kind of life that Jesus describes in these sayings. I've often felt that Matthew's is the most demanding of the Gospels, and the one that offers the greatest inspiration for a life that is good and just. I bought this book in the early days of the War on Terror, and Bonhoeffer's words along with the example of his own life helped stop me from completely giving up all hope for humanity.
  

5. Tag 5 more LJ'ers to fill this out in their journals:
agonis, cafemusique, mmcirvin, nilasae, timchuma.