Hot and tired.
If you ask the stores around here, it's winter now. Or at least late fall. Therefore, they have quarter-acres of space heaters on their floors, and not a single fan. Ours broke three nights ago; there is no natural air circulation in our room. Did I mention we've had a heat wave recently?
We are not happy campers.
(Actually, it's much cooler outside, so camping would be much better.)
Despite this, it has been a relatively productive week, with both of us making measurable headway on our research. On Friday, D attended a one-day conference organized and attended by postgrad students here at the University of Sydney. The conference was entitled "The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal," and the papers came from all over Australia (although they were mostly from Sydney) and from a range of disciplines.1 D gave her casting paper that she tried out at the department seminar last week, and she got to meet a bunch of postgrad students. The coolest paper of the day award goes to the girl who wrote a fabulous paper on the Dewey Decimal System.2
Chad came to hear D's paper at 4pm, and the conference adjourned at 5:30pm to a pub up the street in Newtown, one of the hipper districts of Sydney on the other side of Sydney Uni from where we live. In the back of the pub is a huge Thai restaurant in the garden, so we all hung out there for many hours, debating politics/economics/aesthetics/academia, drinking, eating huge bowls of Thai food. Good times, even if there were roaches and rats running around in the plants behind us.3
Then, earlier tonight, we had signed up for a one-night hands-on cooking class at the world-class Sydney Fish Market near where we live. The class was on bisques and chowders, and it included dinner and wine. We started with a demonstration, then adjourned to another room where we all got to make prawn bisque and clam chowder in groups of five, then eat what we had made.4
It wasn't life-changing or revelatory or anything, but it was a pretty good time, and we learned a few things, even if the dishes were pretty familiar to us. And we got dinner out of the deal!
We keep trying to explore some new places, hang out with people, try some new things. This stretch of our time here, though, is mostly about being in a groove, making slow but steady progress on our dissertation work. Hopefully, in the next few weeks we'll be able to report some landmarks.5 If we keep at it now, there should be some more time to play later in the year... at least, that's what we keep telling ourselves. Even in our "slow mode," I think we see and do more in Sydney than most life-long Sydney-siders do!
;)
- D
-----
NOTES
1English, religion, art history, music, performance studies, history, political science...
2No kidding! She argued that the system itself refused to accept that there might be books that couldn't be classified in it, as evidenced by the structure of the "generalities" class. She's working on a whole dissertation about the social and structural experience of libraries... I've got to find that when it's a book!
3They stayed off the tables, so... (It was outside, what do you expect?)
4D even chopped the onion, when she usually makes Chad do it for her so she doesn't cry.
5D did have an "aha!" moment this week when the big picture of her project got jostled a bit and suddenly clicked into place. It's nice to know why what you're doing has value beyond your degree.
Back to the GAA page!