Day 1 of my now-busy life

First day of prac today!
It began rather early (3am), as I was paranoid I'd sleep in and miss the bus.. so kept being jolted out of sleep in a panic, checking the time, then dozing off once again.. Finally it was 6:30, so I got up. I got to the bus stop 15min early - mostly because I was ready and couldn't think of anything else to do!
Caught the bus.
Caught the next bus.
We drove into town, and I was looking out for the BP station which 131-500 told me the bus stopped at. All of a sudden the street I was meant to walk down went flying past! Thankfully the driver was nice enough to let me off when I realised.. Still don't know what happened to the BP.

Anyway, arrived half an hour early, but discovered a gorgeous bit of wilderness opposite the service HQ, so I hung there gazing at the trees & spying on the little wrens hopping about, till it was time to go in.

Finally, the time came and I stepped through the door. Next thing I knew I was out again! Helped run a couple of mobile playgroups - painting and cutting and glueing and puzzling and chatting and watching and playing games and hearing stories.

Then back for lunch, a tour of the premises, some reading, and some data entry.

It all went pretty quickly really. I think I'm going to enjoy it :) The staff are great and they seem to do a lot of great stuff there!

Ooh and I was waiting for the bus after finishing when who should pull up but a lovely friend from class to offer me a lift home! sah-weet.

And tonight: zumba with mandible, roast by embutt, and icecreams :D

Goodnight!

On Wagging.

Some thoughts* :

To get the full pleasure from wagging a class, it must be one which you generally feel you should attend, and thus generally do attend, so that when you don't you have a heady, soaring sense of freedom (wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!) - and a slightly wicked joy at your own naughtiness.

It helps if you pick a class which is going to be terribly boring, because afterwards you haven't missed anything whatsoever and you can snigger inwardly at the poor suckers that went along (when later your suspicions of its dullness and utter uselessness are confirmed).

If you happen to be pretending to be sick or fiendishly busy and sacrificial by taking your 2nd cousin-twice-removed-who-is-at-death's-door to the hospital, don't go on facebook. Or wander up to uni to get the paper or a coffee when your class/es are still on.

Last but not least, if you're going to wag, make the most of it! Sleep in! Run, jump and be merry! Climb a tree! Eat cake! Find a hammock and read a book in it! Nap! Sing a song! etc..

*not that I would ever wag a class, you realise...

Funny and/or incomprehensible journal article titles!

• Long-Wave Sensitivity in Deep-Sea Stomiid Dragonfish with Far-Red Bioluminescence: Evidence for a Dietary Origin of the Chlorophyll-Derived Retinal Photosensitizer of Malacosteus niger

• Modeling Underwater Visual and Filter Feeding by Planktivorous Shearwaters in Unusual Sea Conditions

• Labile Nature of the Visual Recovery Promoted by Reverse Occlusion in Monocularly Deprived Kittens

• Increased Sensitivity after Repeated Stimulation of Residual Spatial Channels in Blindsight

• A Private Ultraviolet Channel in Visual Communication

• Further Evidence That Whorfian Effects Are Stronger in the Right Visual Field than the Left

• Visual Latencies in Cytochrome Oxidase Bands of Macaque Area V2
  

• Visual and Semiochemical Disruption of Host Finding in the Southern Pine Beetle
  

• Perceiving Conductors' Expressive Gestures from Different Visual Perspectives. An Exploratory Continuous Response Study

• Oculoparalytic Illusion: Visual-Field Dependent Spatial Mislocalizations by Humans Partially Paralyzed with Curare

• Visual Performance in Behaving Cats After Prenatal Unilateral Enucleation

*These are all totally legit scientific articles

Psych Trivia (ie not-particularly-useful information!)

Stuff I thought you'd like to know...

Bodily features:
Seahorse (hippocampus - a part of the brain which is involved with memory)
Wings (pinna - your outer ears)
Snails (cochlea - inner ear)
Extra 'eyelashes' (cilia - found on your lungs and right up your nasal passage and in your cochlea)

Funny names:
Zajonc
Shams
Schacter
Chomsky
Crick
Gazzaniga
Lazarus
Plutchik
Poggendorf
Stroop (this is really cool, actually. The guy discovered that reading becomes so automatic for us that if you put words in different colours and ask people to say the colour instead of the word, they find it quite hard to do quickly. Especially if it is something like "GREEN" in the colour red. This phenomenon is called The Stroop Effect)

Random, other
aqueous humour - literally, 'watery fluid' - but it has to sound scientific, of course!
"Nodes of Ranvier" - sounds like it's straight out of a fantasy story!
Pacinian corpuscle - in your skin, senses vibration
Angular gyrus - brain area related to language & reading

and, did you know that all the colours we perceive are translated from information encoded from just 3 different coloured (well, 3 wavelengths) cones in our eyeballs!

That'll do I think.

Yeah, one of those cliched posts about student life!?

so we all know students are strange. but we also know they are entirely predictable.
[This is one of those time where the psychology people would say 'ah ha! see - there are two opposing statements - you must conduct a foolproof research study to discover which statement is actually true!'
And the anthropology people would say 'ah that's interesting, let's find out more about what these particular student people do, they sound interesting..'
The linguists might say 'it's interesting that she does not capitalise the first word of her piece, and how she begins her second sentence with a ... let's find out more about how people of her social group speak and write and put together a summary of their grammar and a lexicon.'
The historians might say 'what context is she writing from? do you think she has a bias? How valid is this account?'
The literary types might add 'and can you see how she expresses this? How does it compare with so & so's approach...']

Let's go with the anthropologists.

so.. these particular students have been known to:

-go to classes not their own, to pick up some 'free education'* [it's funny being mistaken for 'real' participants - I ask "what's the question again?" an outsider "ah, so I see you haven't started the essay either!" er, no, and I don't plan to..]

-go to class to avoid doing assignments (it's true!).

-some don't start essays until the wee hours of the night before, while others begin weeks in advance.

-the latter tend to be jealous of the former's laidback attitude, while the former envy the discipline and studiousness of the latter.

-if you go to bed early in a student house, odds are the others will all be staying up watching movies, studying, playing music, cooking, or just hanging rowdily.

-if you go to bed late, the odds are that the others will be waking early and setting off avalanches in the kitchen.

-you are likely to experience all sorts of interesting smells in bathroom and kitchen, and have opportunity to chart the progress of various moulds and mildews in both the above areas.

-you will always have company to whinge about lecturers, tutors, and assignments with. Except for those last hateful days or weeks or term when someone (or some many) have infuriatingly beaten you to the assessment finish line.

-you will become very familiar with the library, info commons, student hubs, and cafes - particularly around those fateful 'end times'. There will be the purposeful hum of activity (it smells like nervous sweat, overheated computers and coffee beans).

-you will never need to go far to find someone to procrastinate with/to, especially if you have wireless and a laptop (damn you facebook, blogger, myspace, MLIA etc!!)


This is the extent of my observation so far. I'll let you know if anything more comes up.

ps. And just for the record, although I would prefer to avoid cliche, it's difficult for a very good reason: it's usually cliched because it's true!


*this has even been known to happen with students who don't go to their own classes!