Tag: who is ‘joan’

Play time

While cooking my week’s worth of food this evening, I listened to a programme on BBC’s Radio 4 about the games that kids play. It reminded me of the things I used to do to while away play lunch, lunch time, and after school. What games did you play?

Prep
I can’t remember a single game I played in Prep.

Grade 1
I think roleplay games were pretty big. I remember playing ‘mothers and fathers’. Back in grade 1, everyone wanted to play a mother or father. For some reason, as we got older (grades 2 and 3), we tended to want to play the baby.

I definitely remember playing tiggy, which I felt to be a terrifying game. Being chased made my heart beat in fear, not just exertion. Then there was the feeling of resignation when I got tigged (or ‘tagged’). It would always take me a long time to tig someone else because back then I was a slow runner.

As a variation on tiggy, I remember being swept up in about a week of ‘bum tiggy’. Some kid decided that tiggy would be improved if the aim was to whack people on their backsides. This indignity, combined with my general fear of tiggy, caused me to rebel and I sat on a bench to thwart anyone who would want to tig my bottom.

One of my favourite games in Grade 1 was ‘statues’. The music goes on, everyone dances, the music stops, then you freeze. Someone goes around and if he or she detects you moving, you’re out.

I loved statues. There wasn’t the panic of tiggy, and I liked dancing.

I think I also played with the monkey bars. I remember falling off the top level of the monkey bars and hitting the bark-covered ground head first.

Grade 2
Two words: clapping games. The girls went a bit crazy with clapping games that year. You know the ones I mean, right? You recite ditties and clapped hands with a partner (and sometimes, even two partners, if you could form a ring of clapping people). The more complicated the clapping sequence, the more prestigious. I remember being taught some of these. I think I caught on pretty quickly.

Grade 2 was also the first wave of marble mania. ‘Marble season’, as it was called, seemed to come every year or second year. I found marbles to be quite a distressing game. I hated losing my marbles, so I engaged only in the collecting and trading activities of marble season.

I think there was a skipping season in Grade 2 (and this reoccurred in Grade 5). We favoured the big skipping ropes, one girl at each end and people timing their entry and exit into the looping vortex. Actually, boys played with us too. Skipping seems to have enough of a physical activity component so that boys enjoy it too.

Grade 3
Grade 3 was my favourite year of school and play. We had a teacher, Miss Kingman, who would bring our games into the classroom, and would take the classroom to our games. I spent a lot of time in Grade 3 making sand cakes. There was a sand pit at the end of the primary school and we would make three tier sand cakes (no castles). After play lunch or lunch break, Miss Kingman would take the whole class down to the sand pit to see what people had made.

When marble season came back again in Grade 3, I was making ‘marble traps’, which were hidden tunnels designed to capture marbles. I would come back to my trap at the end of the lunch session to see if there were any marbles. There never were.

The other thing we played was ‘Space Jump‘, which is actually a sophisticated improv game that adults play. For those who don’t know it, the game master sets a topic. The first person comes on to role play that topic. Then the game master shouts ‘Space Jump!’ and the next person comes it, picks up on the first person’s position and pose and completely changes the topic. The first person has to fit right into the second person’s scenario. Then another ‘Space Jump!’ is shouted, and a third person goes in. This is repeated for the fourth person.

After the fourth person, the whole thing unravels. After ‘Space Jump!’, the fourth person leaves, and everyone goes back to the third scenario. This is repeated until only the original person in the original scenario is left.

Thinking back, as kids, I think we were amazingly inventive and brave. Everyone played, no one was self conscious. We played in class, we played outside class. It was my all time favourite game.

Grade 4
As I remember, Grade 4 was dominated by two games: 40-40 and elastics. 40-40 is a variation of hide and seek, where the aim is to return to base before someone spotted you and yelled ’40-40, I see Joan!’ I really liked this game. It wasn’t scary like tiggy.

Elastics were more fun than skipping. I remember being quite good at it. I also remember mum making me my own equipment with with elastic from her sewing kit. Thanks mum!

Grade 5
Besides the return of skipping season, I think Grade 5 was the first time we started playing ‘two square’ and ‘four square’. Two square is like playing tennis but with your hand as the tennis racquet. There were two options: you could play ‘on the full’ (the you had to hit the ball straight to your opponent’s square like in tennis) or with a bounce (like table tennis, you hit the ball into your own side before it bounces into your opponents).

Four square is similar with the added nomenclature of rankings: king, queen, jack and dunce, where the aim is to move from dunce up to king.

Damjan just reminded me of a game he calls ‘downball’. At our school, we played ‘deadshot’. For us, the difference was that downball used a larger ball like a basketball and deadshot used a tennis ball. We bounced the tennis ball on the ground, then a wall, before someone caught it. I can’t remember who was meant to catch it. Did it go in a sequence of people? (i.e. did I have to catch it on my ‘turn’?)

Regardless, I remember being surprised that I wasn’t bad at this game. It seems that in Grade 5, my physical prowess improved a lot. I could suddenly keep up running with my class mates, I did the 3 km fun run quite easily, and I could catch a ball.

Grade 6
I noticed that as we grew older, we played fewer and fewer active games and spent more time sitting around chatting during play time. I think Grade 6 was the start of this trend. Certainly, in high school, we only sometimes played two square, four square and dead shot, and spent more time gossiping. Later, breaks were spent working and being in the debating club. Others played Magic, chess, did choir… I’m not sure what the non-nerds did.

Being Chinese

From my photo, you can tell that I am ethnically Chinese. Being Chinese is not something I think about too much. I moved from Taiwan to Australia when I was three years old. I don’t usually affiliate myself with the Chinese culture except that I love the cuisine and I’ve had done some years of Chinese language classes.

I could write a lot about why this is, how I’ve met lots of non-Chinese people who are fascinated with China and how this perplexes me.

But.

I won’t.

Not now, anyway. I feel something similar to shame on this topic, which I need to analyse before I can explain myself.

I do, however, have three Chinese-related thoughts I’d like to share now, on the cusp of the Beijing Olympics.

Firstly, as I’ve explained to a few people recently, the only time I’ve been harassed in my ‘dangerous‘ neighbourhood was when two black kids, a little girl and a little boy, started shouting ‘Ching chong! Ching chong!’ at me as I walked home. To which I could shouted back, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying!’

Secondly, I was struck by a lightning bolt of understanding a few months ago. I like accents. I like hearing English spoken by people from South Africa, France, Germany, America… Yet, I cringe a little when I hear Chinese spoken with an accent. I couldn’t figure out why I have this double standard. My mum once said to me I spoke Chinese with an Australian accent — and this was not a good thing.

Finally, I figured it out. Chinese is a tonal language. Each syllable can be said in four ways, so even small variations in pitch changes the meaning of a word. Speaking Chinese with accent sounds ‘wāi wāi’ （歪歪）, which means ‘wonky’.

Vietnamese has five tones and Cantonese has six tones!

My final Chinese thought — I have just watched a Chinese man, Ming Yun, pitch for a cash investment on the TV show, Dragon’s Den. Inside me, I really wanted him to do well. For some reason, even though I am not very Chinese and I don’t know many very Chinese people, I identify with them more strongly than I think I should. When I read about Chinese people who can’t afford to buy the right spectacles, I feel like crying. When I see a Chinese baby, I smile. A few months ago, I watched a film in which a father and mother in China were used and neglected by their children, who wanted to live Western lives in the city. It was very distressing and, of course, made me cry.

I think it’s because I can imagine Chinese people as my parents, my brother, my grandparents, my aunts and my uncles. Therefore, I am very vulnerable to tears when I hear about the suffering of a Chinese person.

Textbook Joan

You might remember a while back when I was suffering neck pain.

On my second visit to a spinal specialist, he waved my MRI scans at me.

‘I knew it!’ he grinned. ‘Textbook case! Adjacent segment degeneration!’

‘I’m a textbook case?’

The surgeon explained that a third of patients who had the same neck surgery that I had when I was 12 years old developed this disease. On the scan, he pointed out the dark spots which showed that extra pressure on one of my discs was wearing the disc away faster than it could regenerate.

‘It’s exactly what I thought at our first appointment’, he said with satisfaction. ‘What I need to do is refer you to physiotherapy to strengthen your neck.’

So for the next two months, I visited Sha, a friendly physio from New Zealand. It was really great, actually. I learned from her exercises that not only reduced the soreness around my neck and shoulders, but also got rid of my headaches.

At my final session, I described to Sha a problem I was having with one of the exercises I was meant to do.

‘In the dumbell upright row, my arm is fine… but I’m having trouble with my right knee. It feels weak and I’m afraid to lock it, which makes it hard to lift the weights. I’ve had problems with this knee for a long time.’

Sha moved my knee caps around and felt them click. ‘They’re very loose,’ she commented.

She made me stand and examined my legs. Soon she started giggling.

‘What?’

‘You’re a textbook case!’ she said. ‘Exactly like in a textbook. See how your knees don’t line up with your feet? You’ve got flat feet. It means that sometimes your knee cap doesn’t track properly…’

‘Textbook,’ I repeated. I had heard this before.

So now I have an extra set of exercises for my second unoriginal problem. The good thing about suffering all these creaks and aches is that now I have real and pressing reasons to go to the gym. The alternative is disablement by torticollis and creaky knees.

Becoming a Full Time Glasses Wearer

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I got my first pair of glasses. Since then, I have been a Casual Glasses Wearer (CGW), only donning specs when at lectures, the movies or while driving.

In truth, though, I should probably wear glasses more often than that. While my left eye is quite good, my right eye is quite bad. In fact, right now, I’m typing with my left eye shut and I can’t even read the laptop screen in front of me.

It’s a good thing I can touch type.

When I’m not wearing glasses, I feel like I’m looking at the world with only my left eye. You really only need one eye to see well but it does feel a bit uncomfortable, like wearing a gauze eye patch over my right eye.

I don’t think of myself as a Full Time Glasses Wearer (FTGW). I’ve never been one. In my mental image of myself, I don’t wear glasses. However, to be a FTGW is not too far a departure from my self-image. I’m very square, not terribly sporty… Perhaps I’m not Asian enough, if you know what I mean.

However, I’ve now come to my senses. I’ve realised that there is nothing actually stopping me from wearing my glasses and feeling comfortable all the time. This is why last week, I decided to become a FTGW.

I wore my glasses for one day, then the next day I was back to my old CGW self. Actually, all that happened was I forgot to wear my glasses. I’ve only remembered my resolution now, a week later. I guess you could say that I’ve fallen off the nerdwagon.

Tomorrow is a new day! If I can climb five storeys every day, I can surely carry the weight of spectacles on the bridge of my nose and the shelves of my ears-tops.

It’s actually been quite difficult to find a photo of me wearing glasses. Here are my frameless pair. I have an uglier pair that I wear more often. You can see a polar bear wearing them here.

These are prescription sunglasses, which are absolutely necessary for driving when the Australian sun is out. They are also very expensive. I’ve lost a pair already.

What I do for a living

I am often asked what my job is. I don’t really enjoy answering this question because I feel like I’m selling something that I myself don’t understand clearly. I’m not even sure why I feel like I need to ‘sell’ my job as an being interesting or worthwhile. Yet, I do this anyway.

I will try to explain my job here and see if I can at least clear up in my own head what I ‘do for a living’.

My job title is ‘sustainability consultant’. Sustainability is a huge field, covering:

  • international development and poverty alleviation
  • renewable energy
  • community and civil engagement
  • corporate responsibility
  • environmental management
  • efficient manufacturing and other processes
  • ‘green’ buildings
  • environmental and welfare economics
  • climate change and carbon management
  • toxicology and land remediation
  • safe product design
  • public outreach

And so on.

Obviously, no one person can work in all areas of sustainability. My work particularly covers sustainability related to cities and urban systems — buildings, transport, energy supply, water supply, waste treatment, logistics, schooling… I also foray into job creation, habitat management, equity and access… Very peripherally, I also look at questions of public participation in decision making (e.g. voting), literacy, religious inclusion, and so on.

I generally work in developed countries, or at least the wealthier parts of developing countries (e.g. cities in China and the Middle East).

Most of my work is in large multidisciplinary projects. Typically, about 10 or 15 teams around the company (or from outside the company) are working together to design a new town or rebuild part of an existing city. My team’s job involves:

  • Working with the client and the teams to come up with indicators for sustainability;
  • Setting targets for the various indicators (e.g. There must be at least two jobs for every dwelling);
  • Collecting data from teams about their designs;
  • Integrating the data so that we can analyse the sustainability of the entire project (we often use models to do this quantitatively);
  • Giving results back to teams, highlighting problems with their data and alerting teams to opportunities to work together for better strategies;
  • Producing a report to give to the client

My role is often to manage the finances of the project, go to meetings with the project managers, present to the client, and coordinate the report. I don’t often do the modelling — there are others more capable of that than me.

That’s most of my job. Occasionally, I do projects that aren’t multidisciplinary. That’s when a client comes to our team directly and asks for strategic sustainability advice, like helping them develop a climate change policy.

I like my job. I like it because I get to look at the big picture. I like working in teams and meeting new people.

There are things I don’t like. Between teams, there are sometimes personality clashes and political issues about who does what work. Sometimes, I feel frustrated because I doubt our advice will actually be implemented in real life. At my most frustrated times, I wonder if I’m just a paper pusher, generating work for myself. What’s the point in producing a report that no one ever reads?

Now that I think about it, I guess that even if no one pays attention to a particular report I write, because I’ve learned from doing it, it will help me be more effective in the next project I do. That’s a happy thought, isn’t it!

Differential diagnosis

My stomach hurts.

I’m not sure if it’s because I ate too much today or for dinner. You might remember from this post that I have trouble knowing when to eat and when to stop eating. I did eat more than usual today.

The other possibility is the abdominal exercises I did at the gym this evening. The instructor assigned these to me during yesterday’s induction. The exercises were very hard and I couldn’t finish some of them.

Maybe it’s a combination of exercise and food? Maybe when your tummy gets tight from exercise, you can’t actually fit as much food in…?

So I’m not sure what’s going on.

(Or maybe it’s lupus!)

A walk in the park

The mysterious sign from the previous post in this series is now spelled out in English: bird hide! Maybe it should be a ‘human hide’ because from inside the wooden shelter, people can do covert bird watching.

This is the view from within that bird hide. This large suburban park is dominated by a large man-made lake.

It’s hard to take photos of a lake without being a bit high up. If you’re at the same level, your photo is filled with sky or foreground and a thin, boring strip of brownish lake. I tried to take a more interesting photo by focusing on the lake edge. Although perhaps more interesting, this photo doesn’t show anything of the lake’s size.

It was a beautifully sunny day, though, with white fluffy clouds. Ah, it’s a nice memory while I sit here in my room, rugged up for London’s winter. I didn’t leave the house all day today. I’m like a hibernating bear.

I spotted the rusty pump wheel(?), which was some distance off the path. I wonder what it’s for? I’ve posted a few photos of the wheel. Although I tried, I don’t think I produced a photo that made full use of the interesting subject.

I know much of this is overexposed. I was trying to make it look like a hot dry day. I haven’t had the chance to look at this on a CRT. On my LCD laptop screen, is lightly sepia in tone. I suspect this is too pink on CRT screens.

This version has the same tone as the last one and is probably more ‘correctly’ exposed and therefore more detailed. Sigh. I don’t know. I don’t know if this is an interesting photo.

This photo is even less interesting. The colouring is more correct here. I think some people will like the sky. There’s no creativity in taking a photo of a pretty blue sky.

Anyone got any ideas about how to take a photo of this pump wheel?

This bird is a purple moorhen, very common at this park.

Awful lot of birds crossing the road.

Some of these birds migrate between Victoria and Japan every year.

I think this is a messmate stringybark because of its messy stringy bark. I’m not sure, though. I learned about messmates on a first year ecology fieldtrip to Sherbrooke Forest. It’s a beautiful cool temperate rainforest of Eucalyptus regnans. Only now, reading the Wikipedia article, do I realise (remember?) that E. regnans is the same as Mountain Ash.

Last time I said I don’t like animals. Some people probably think this is strange for an environmentalist. Instead of animals, I love forests, more specifically, trees. I think I trace my environmentalist roots back to bushwalking with my family in the Grampians. I wish I could go back soon.

This sign reminds me of one I took a photo of at Dove Lake in Tasmania. Let me see if I can find it…

…Here it is!
This photo from Tasmania was taken on 23 January 2005. It was one of the first photos I took with my Olympus E-300 camera. By the end of this month, I will have had my camera for three years.

In those three years, I’ve figured out how to take photos of myself.

The end!

Stimulus-Response

I was telling Megan about playing badminton yesterday.

‘It was in a sports hall. You know, whenever I get into a big enclosed space like that, I feel like dancing. I can’t help it, I just start jigging and spinning.’

Megan laughed. ‘You’re like Pavlov’s dog, Joan.’

An uncomfortable year, 2003

Last night, I read part of my diary from 2003. I’ve been keeping a daily diary since then, plus I have one from 1998 1996 when I was in Year 8.

For about two years, keeping a diary was a bit of a chore. I did it because I thought it might be a good idea. Now I know it’s a good idea and I often look forward to writing it. When I read about a party I went to, how I felt about family and friends, my projects, I can remember it and get the same feelings back. I recall much of the everyday — a pool night with uni friends here, a certain stressful exam there, a humiliating phone call, current obsessions, favourite pop songs. But some major things I’d forgotten. I had forgotten that after we had handed in a project, Kate, Deva and I took the initiative to present it to our client, a university department. At the time it was scary, taking schoolwork into the real world. It’s something I take for granted now. There was a phone interview with people in China for a six-month position in Inner Mongolia. I had forgotten it had even happened. I read about meeting people who are now some of my closest friends. It’s interesting, the little things I noted about them at the time.

Reading my 2003 diary, I realise that I’ve grown up a lot in four years. Mostly, I understand myself better. I learned how to be a better friend. At the time, I was terrible at delegation and teamwork. I often felt bad about myself. I knew how to make money but not how to spend it. I was a gawky dancer, nervous about swing dancing, just starting ballroom, only just starting to feel comfortable with hiphop.

Looking back, I would say 2003 was a painful year of learning and growth. At the time, I wouldn’t have said so. No, I probably thought I was on top of it all.

In four or five years, when I read about 2007, I wonder what I’ll think of it?

Angry at no one and everyone

For much of yesterday, I was tense. It all started with FedEx delivering my long-awaited UK work permit. When I opened up the package, I discovered that I still couldn’t go back to the UK, even with this permit. I had to apply for an additional ‘entry clearance certificate’ from the British High Commission in Canberra. It would take another two+ weeks and A$500.

I spent the rest of the day rebooking air tickets, deferring accommodation, renegotiating my work start date, photocopying letters, passports and degree certificates, getting passport photos printed, filling in and printing out online forms…

Little things that I would normally shrug off made me snap and glare. I was angry at no one and everyone. My poor family!

It was a strange feeling, being that angry and, at the same time, knowing how useless and irrational my anger was. I couldn’t blame anyone for anything. I was just generally frustrated with the world.

This made me think about a man I saw on the Dr Phil show last week. He had spent the last sixteen years of his life, angry at the world. The littlest things would trigger him off, like cars driving too close to him, or waiters taking too long, or people disagreeing with him.

Now, I have a faint idea of what it must be to live like him. It’s not nice, being constantly and pointlessly frustrated. It’s also difficult to let the frustration go. I can imagine that if you are like that for a very long time, you wouldn’t know how to be any different even when you want to be. I wonder if Dr Phil understood that?