First Year Diaries

Chapter Forty: A Year (~jinghan)

"Apparently it's the year 12 vce english exam today. God, what did you expect this year would be like this time last year?" my friend asks me.

And thoughts and feelings strike me like a tsunami.

I remember - no - I feel the nervousness in the weeks before the exam, but then I feel the calm and acceptance I felt as I lined up outside the exam hall.

I recall thinking that I knew everything of the world, that I knew myself, that I was sure of the future.

I challenge you. Think back a year. What comes to your mind? Have you discovered more potential in yourself than you thought you had?

I feel like I have just walked another mile after thinking that I was tired... but suddenly I no longer feeling tired at all.

"Apparently it's the year 12 vce english exam today. God, what did you expect this year would be like this time last year?" I type into my phone and send to a friend.

Cake Three: Chocolate Cake (~jinghan)

This week's cake is the good old dependable chocolate cake. Also, you should consider creaming butter and sugar together by hand as an alternative to working out at the gym.

Recipe from Jules Stranbridge’s novel Sugar and Spice, published in 2009 by Little Black Dress, an imprint of Headline Publishing Group.

Ingredients:

• 175g butter
• 175g caster sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 5 heaped tablespoons of best quality cocoa powder
• 175ml milk
• 225g plain flour and 1.5 teaspoons bicarbobate of soda sieved together
• 125g good quality 75 per cent minimum plain chocolate broke into chunks

Method:

Line a 18cm tin and heat oven to 180 Celcius (160 Celcius for fan-forced). Bream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs. In a separate bowl, mix the cocoa and half of the milk to create a smooth paste. Add the rest of the milk to form a runny liquid. Stir in half the flour then half cocoa mixture. Repeat. Sprinkle chocolate chunks on to the top of the cake. Bake in the oven for 1.5 hours.

Jinghan Says: in the book the author names this "the best chocolate cake ever" mine did not turn out that mind-bogglingly good. A bit dry and not rich enough, I was going to say... but I just noticed that the ingredients say 5 table spoons of cocoa powder, and I'm starting to think that my sister may have only put in 5 teaspoons... (tisk!) looks like I'll have to have another go at this one some time in the future.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Detox (~jinghan)

This morning I went to bed at 2am, got up at 12pm, waffled around on facebook chat until 4pm, tried to do some work, but had to stick to my plans to go swimming at 5pm, which followed onto going out to dinner with my family, and didn't get home till 9pm at which point it was too late in the day to start any work. And Now I'm here (at 11pm) with the bitter after-taste of having accomplished nothing in a whole day.

It's a story that's starting to become uncomfortably familiar. An maybe not unique to me at this point in the semester.

Just a few weeks ago I was trying find ways to chill because I was stressing out about uni work too much. And now, I seem to have fallen off the other side of the scale, in a lazy but anxious stupor, that is just as unproductive as stress. The internet social world is like junk food, once you've eaten one meal, you're no longer afraid to have another, and before you know it you just keep automatically going back to it. At the same time, the thought of getting off your arse and doing something physical, or in the case of the internet: doing some real hard-core studying, becomes increasingly lacking in motivation. And that's where you find me at the moment. I'm sitting here at my desk whinging about how studying for uni has lost all it's lustre, that my subjects are becoming heavy and dull. But really it's just me getting sucked in by the big fat lazy, and my subjects only see heavy because I've stopped putting in the effort of keeping up, and so I'm just being dragged along behind.

With one more week of uni, and two more weeks until my first exam, I've decided it's time to detox. I'm going to ban myself from facebook and messenger  until friday, and make myself do some real hard-core studying. I'm going to go to bed at a healthy 10pm, and get up at a healthy 7:30am. I'm going to do healthy physical things in my free time, so that I have all my attention primed for getting some healthy solid study down in the rest of my time. I'm going to scrub my diary, and put in some healthy daily study goals. Because I am sick of this feeling of having accomplished nothing at the end of the day. And I certainly don't want this feeling to be still around the night before my first exam. Two weeks of my life, to sit down, be healthy*, ace my exams, and feel good about myself.

Oh dear. It's 11pm. I'll work on it.

*exception made for cake.

Cake Two: Victorian Sandwich (~jinghan)

Note from the Author: I've put up a profile of my last cake under the date 12th October (I didn't know you know you can post a post in the past, but now I do.) So if you want that recipe too, check it out.

Continue reading "Cake Two: Victorian Sandwich (~jinghan)" →

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Four Seasons in One Day (~jinghan)

Yesterday it was raining when I woke up. It was raining when I had breakfast. It was raining when I had lunch. It was raining when I had dinner. It was still raining when I went to bed.

The weather has been unfairly deceptive, for two weeks I had switched to spring-clothing, a skirt and everything! Flowers adorned every plant in the university, and the air was heavy with fragrances and pollen. And suddenly it's winter again. There's even snow forecasted for up in the mountains (in October!)

This morning I woke up and it was raining. Five minutes later, when I went downstairs to have breakfast, it was blindingly sunny outside, with bright morning light bouncing off the glossy wet leaves of all the plants in the backyard.

A Melbourne weather... my feelings for you can only be described as a love-hate relationship.

An update, on nothing important.

So, yup, there's about a month to go until the exams. This is a little worrying, since I have missed an awful lot of lectures - either by not attending physically, or by not attending mentally. Obviously the best plan of attack for this situation is to sit down with a bag of miscellaneously flavoured Jelly Bellys, whilst listening to Muse and writing a blog about doing so.

Motivation is a little hard to come by when you're not sure that you're heading in the right career direction/living with the right people/making the best decisions in your personal life, etc. Which is a shame, I think I'd be enjoying my course a whole load more if everything outside my course could tie itself together a little more nicely. I guess if it's not one thing, it's another entirely.

ANYWHO.

So, I noticed today that OH MY GOD THE HOTTEST GUY WAS ON THE TRAM I mean, uh, we have to pick our subjects for next year soonish. Huh. What to pick, what to pick. I have a vague idea of what I should be picking if I want to get into dentistry eventually, but I also know that I'm a damn lazy student and I would rather do something I'd enjoy. BUT WHAT DO I ENJOY?!

My Magic 8-Ball says "Try Again." Thanks a bucket-load, piece of trash *mumble mumble*...

Next year I will possibly be moving out of my gran's home where I am currently living, with one of my best friends and her awesome boyfriend, on the opposite side of Melbourne to my current  home. That will be interesting if it happens. Strangely I'm looking forward to that more than the holidays this year. ADVENTURE, dammit! Possibly should get a job for over the holidays, while I'm thinking about it. I wonder what it's like to have... Money...?

In other news, I have already bought my student union membership for next year. Early bird special, $20 off, plus a subscription to The Age for all year for an extra dollar. Yes please! Being a student union member is totally worth it. (Even if only for the Rowden White library. And the discounts. And the shiny sticker on your student card.) It feels like only yesterday I bought my student membership for this year. I'm serious, I remember it in perfect detail. It's kinda freaking me out a little bit. Where'd the time go...

And before I start complaining about life the universe and everything, let's end on something we can all relate to.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: A Good Day (~jinghan)

Note from the Author: My last few posts have all been a bit heavy with the sameness of each uni day, but today it is my pleasure to write to you about something, still ordinary, yet wonderful.

Nothing special happened today. It wasn't an exciting day or an interesting day. But, I've decided, a day doesn't have to have any of those to be a good day. In fact it has been an exceedingly good day, without being interesting at all, so the best narrative I can come up with is simply to list all the little things that made this day good:

• Last night, I got to read before bed, something that I've had less and less opportunities to do since my ascension in the hierarchy of the education system, and since I discovered the joys of the internet social world.
• And if that wasn't good enough, I get a full night's sleep as well.
• I wake up and study for the impending physics test, to be pleasantly surprised by the fact that everything I have studied in the past few days has been retained in my mind.
• It is raining as I walk to the train station, but a nice misty rain that falls without sound and makes everything look more alive. And it raised strange fragrances in the air, and for a second I believed I was in a foreign place.
• I do my physics test, and am again pleasantly surprised to find that it is neither too crafty nor short-for-time (something I can't say for any of my previous physics tests.)
• I have lunch with some friends, food at the right time of the day always makes me happy.
• I go swimming.
• I go to my physics lab (last one for the semester and maybe ever) and the demonstrator, who was rather grumpy at me and my partner last week because we worked slowly and thoroughly and held him up, was in a very good mood today. Or maybe he liked us better because we were working faster this week, and for once we got out before other people.
• I go to read a movie from the Oovie vending machine, and the film that I had wanted to watch last week but wasn't in, is in this week!
• I get to read a really interesting part of my book on the way home and barely notice the stations go past.
• And to top of everything, when I get home there is mail... for me! My friend who has gone to Adelaide this year to study Medicine has written to me, showing me his world in Adelaide, all because of a small comment I made about feeling a bit distanced from people and not having anything to look forward to at this point in the semester. As I read the hand-written letter the truth of that comment disintegrates.

You have those bad days where one bad thing just leads to another, but there you have it, you can have good days too, where one little good thing just brings in a whole catch, and it's only when you sit down at the end of the day with that happy feeling in your heart that you look back and realise how good it all was.

Wishing you all a good day!

Cake One: Sugar And Spice (~jinghan)

I took half a cake in a lunch box to uni on Monday, and hadn't handed out a slice by 12pm so I was feeling a bit desperately generous. By 1pm my desperate generosity had worked and I was running out of cake to give to the people I had promised cake to at lunch time.

This weeks cake is the Sugar and Spice Cake, a gorgeous cake that smells of ginger and cinnamon, and isn't overly sweet, but definitely delicious.

Recipe from Jules Stranbridge's novel Sugar and Spice, published in 2009 by Little Black Dress, an imprint of Headline Publishing Group

Ingredients

• 225g unsalted butter
• 225g dark muscovado sugar
• 225g self-raising flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 4 medium eggs
• 100ml milk

For icing

• 150g sifted icing sugar
• 2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
• silver balls

Method

Grease and line a 20cm cake tin and preheat oven to 180 Celcius /350 Farenheit (160 Celcius for fan forced). Place all ingredients in food processor and cream together. Transfer mixture to tin, smoothing surface, and bake for 50-55minutes or until skewer inserted into centre comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin. When the cake has cooled blend icing sugar and orange juice together and spread over the top of the cake. Do not worry if it drizzles over the sides as this is how it should look. Scatter silver balls over and leave to set.

Jinghan says: I couldn't find any dark muscovado sugar, being a mere supermarket-shopper, so I went with dark brown sugar and it worked out okay.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Monotony Versus Cake (~jinghan)

I wake up. It is a Wednesday. I know it is a Wednesday because I was doing my physics pre-lab yesterday and I have physics labs on Wednesdays.

It is a Wednesday, and usually I haven't used up all my energy until at least Thursday afternoon, but this morning there's this heavy feeling in my stomach and an added inertia to everything. There's nothing unpredictable about my morning routine, I get out of bed, toilet, clothing, wash, breakfast, teeth... I even eat exactly the same thing that I've had for breakfast all week. A head of me is another day. "Arg, another day," that's what that heavy feeling is: monotony.

At this point in first semester, I hazily recall, I was sure I didn't feel like this. Perhaps it had been the dual nervousness and excitement of a new lifestyle that had fuelled my energy. Or the unpredictability of not knowing which of the people who talk to are passing acquaintances or will be enduring friends. Or the new style of learning that is sometimes very fast and hard but always interesting to talk about. But now, in week nine of the second semester the novelty of all these things has long faded, and I'm left with just a dull and heavy monotony with no apparent end.

I don't know when the decision formed in my head. (Perhaps as early as the previous morning.) But it was as I drank the last of my morning tea that I decided that I would not go to my physics lecture that morning*. I imagined myself sitting in the lecture hall sitting next to the people I saw every day and drawling out notes that only half made sense and I could not bare the thought. Don't get me wrong, they're really nice people, and its an interesting subject. But hard and fast without the novelty and pseudo-passion of first semester has become, well... just hard and fast. And stuck in the middle of week nine, the beginning of term too long ago, the end of term to far away, I just needed a break from hard and fast.

I sit down and quietly work though a chapter of the text book, it takes  more than an hour that the lecture would have been to cover the same material, but the semi-personal tone of the text book author coupled with colourful pictures and worked examples is much more reticent of the comfortable high-school pace of study. And I'm feeling pretty happy with myself by the time I finish the work, only to remember that I still need to drag myself into uni for my physics labs.

Driven by the need to do something physically productive, anything other than study really, I have fallen into the habit of walking from Melbourne Central Train Station up to the University, rather than the usual 10 minute tram ride. The weather had been a bright hot over-enthusiastic spring when I had left the house, but as I walk up Swanston Street dark clouds have rolled across the sky and ominous grumbles of far of thunder seem to be in crescendo. A few drops of rain fall on the hot sidewalk. I ignore them. And then, without warning, the sky collapses into a downpour of warm sweet spring rain.

The people on the streets of Melbourne all around me make mad dashes for cover, and umbrellas sprout in their hands. I'm umbrella-less having not planned for rain, and the inertia of the monotony has me trapped in the same even-paced walk, but I can't help smiling as I watch the people rush about around me, and the warm water gush over shop fronts. The rain drops are cools against my forehead, and in that moment nothing else matters.

The rain oscillates between a thick drizzle and a heavy downpour. Umbrella-less pedestrians are left just as indecisive about what action to take. By the time I'm half way to uni I've stowed my jumper, hoping to save it as something dry to put on when I get to uni, and I'm laughing and running along in the warm rain with all the other people. (They're not all laughing, but definitely running.) I'm ducking into doorways, and skitting across the road, hopping on a tram, hopping off a tram only to find the rain heavy again. I'm still laughing as I duck into another tram just as the doors are closing, rain dripping from the tips of my hair. The windows are misted over and miserably wet people stare at me out of the corners of their eyes. But they can't drown my smile.

It was a small respite, but a good one, from the monotony that uni seems to have sunken into at this late stage in the year. I'm clinging onto all the little things to keep it all afloat above the slurry and muck of assignments, worksheets and lectopia recordings. All the big things to look forward to are still to far away (end of exams, Christmas, Summer, beaches, friends and three months of sweet lazy mornings) so what I can I do but build myself small artificial things to look after, and rejoice at little unexpected things like spring rain.

I've decided that in these last few weeks of uni I'm going to bake a cake every week. There's something physically productive about picking out a recipe, hunting down the ingredients, and getting all the buttery-sweet mess everywhere. And of course having something that smells and tastes beautiful at the end of it all. And there's nothing quite like taking the weight of half a cake in a box to uni on a Monday to share with friends. It's a pleasant and rewarding weight that counterbalances the heaviness of all that study.

This week's cake: Sugar and Spice Cake (with ginger and cinnamon)

*mind you, other than clashes, and sickness, I've missed next to no lectures all semester. So it's not a very me thing to do.