HoW tO suRVivE DorMitORy LiViNG

O.K. first of all I'm not even sure if it is possible 'tO suRVivE DorMitORy LiViNG', but there are some important facts you need to know before you try, and definitely some things you should avoid.

I have been blessed with the opportunity (lets just say science experiment) to coexist and live in a dorm; with other people of both sexes. Well all women and one other person of the opposite sex...lets just give him the pseudo name "Black Stallion". Let's all feel sorry for him. Black Stallion has gone now and despite being a good spooner to most - he was loyal to his girlfriend back in Sydney; what a good boy. So I guess Tip Number One is  'make sure you are aware that the dorm is unisex before you move in' ...it can take you by surprise if you are on the toilet and then a man walks in and uses the cubical next to you. You never get use to that. 

Also, it's important to be social, even if you usually aren't. No matter what, you must make an effort to get to know you dorm mates. This is paramount to survival because there are times when you want to talk the ear off someone and it doesn't really matter who...if people kind of know who you are this helps. You can't just walk out of your room after a month and a half and start up a conversation with someone who's never laid eyes on you other than in the shadows. That's just creepy. And people will start to speculate things about you. It's best to be in with the crowd and doing the speculating. Tip Number Two 'make friends, learn to speculate'. 

You must be patient and peaceful with group television viewing. The important thing to remember here is that no one person owns the remote or has the right to choose the programs that everyone watches, but unfortunately there's always some control freak who seems to break this rule continually. My mantra is 'I can just go to my room when I've had enough of this bullshit; screw you guys I'm going to my room'. You will never get to watch what you want anyway, so don't expect to. If you are super cool like me you will go forth to the linen closet and find an old dormant mini TV and hook it up with a $20 Dick Smith set-box and DVD player and learn to hide away in your room for hours watching all your favorites from The English Patient to the TrueBlood series. Tip Number Three 'expect to share or become independent but risk being speculated about'. 

Eating food is an important factor to survival no matter where you find yourself. It is interesting that I should bring this up...because it is the one issue I struggle with the most. Perhaps I shall learn something from my infinite wisdom. Firstly, everything is communal. You rely on others to be clean and tidy; and they're not. You trust that others won't use your milk; but they do. You compete for fridge space, freezer space, cupboard space and 'get the hell out of my space' space. It's a free for all and it's dangerous. Especially if you haven't been able to cook a decent meal in over a month because all you've got to work with is an over-sized splade, a rusty cheese grater and a deformed Tuppaware container. The trick here is to buy frozen meals, pray to God that the 'convection oven' doesn't cark it and pretend that you really just want to lose weight. Tip Number Four 'TV dinners are better than eating raw goanna and drinking squeezed elephant dung' (by a small margin). 

Everyone is equally as pissed off as you are for being away from home and loved ones. It doesn't matter here if you are a nurse, midwife, physio, doctor or a lab technician - you are all here because you need the money, not because you want to be here. Everyone hates having to share the one shower, the two toilets, the one telly, the one washing machine. But it also binds you with a common hatred of all things institutional. Conversations often start with 'have you just finished work?' or 'when are you working next?'. Then you move on to how 'shitty and cold the weather is in Dubbo today', followed by...some good old fashioned 'speculating' about the new people moving into the still warm beds from the two physio's that just left. Tip Number Five 'One for all, and all for one', you can't escape it, and neither can anyone else - so just go with the flow. 

And although you might be lonely and pining for your husband, boyfriend, lover or friend, it is also important to remember to enjoy the quiet times around the dorms when no one else is here to annoy you. Instead of wasting your time blogging, you should be raiding everyone else's food stuffs, using the toilet in peace, watching what you want on TV or just channel surfing mercilessly. So the last Tip of the day is Number Six 'when you find time to yourself, own the MF dorm like a Boss!'. 

       

A nEW iDeNtiTy



Marriage for me is still very surreal.

I thought I would not be affected; nothing would change...but that is not true. I giggle when I accidentally write FOSBERRY after my midwifery notes and then spend 5 mins having to contemplate whether to change it or not, only to decide to, and then find myself re offending 10mins later making my notes look like a dogs breakfast written by a deranged midwife who is clearly having some sort of identity crisis. Who is this C.LEE who claims to now be working in my place? It's like I have a split persona. An imaginary friend. When written too quickly it oft looks like GLEE (which even though I was not a religious follower - I still make the connection in my head and giggle again).

Some days you wake up feeling nostalgic and sentimental and Married...

And then... you feel trapped in a contract of legal obligation; and what that entails I still do not know (Ah.. the fear of the unknown - mans greatest undoing)...

And then of course you just remember that this is still what life has been for over a decade and you obviously feel comfortable with it enough to be content and happy.

The name change takes a bit of getting used to though, let me tell you. Not for the groom however, he just has to learn to share; not always mans greatest trait. This name change is easier for women who wish to discard their old identity, shed their skin, conceal their sketchy childhood, mask the old and embrace the new. I am doing all those things and much more. I am also branding myself with the label 'proper family' - thought about the use of 'normal' instead of 'proper' but the word 'normal' holds many a bad memory of lectures from know-it-all charge nurses and case workers trying to be politically sensitive to the mentally ill - at age 11 however - you just hear Blah Blah from a woman who gets to go home to her perfectly normal nuclear family to sit and eat and chat happily about the little ungrateful and possibly spoilt child who unintelligently blurted out that she "just wants things to be normal" because she has no understanding of the suffering that the chemically imbalanced and misrepresented population have to deal with everyday (what an idiot world we live in); so 'proper family' it now is, as opposed to an 'inproper family' which is much more fitting. The acceptance and adorance of being "one" with the people who I admire and strive to impress the most. Justin says I need to do nothing to impress anymore (out of the blue and wise words of intoxicative love); but the reality is I will gallantly fight, take pains even, upholding to my last breath the lineage of the most wonderful and beautiful peoples this world ought to have ever known.

      

LoOk oF dEsPAiR AnD sAdNeSs

It always hurts deep down in a chasm of empty dark space. A place you have deliberately forgotten and worked long and hard to push down and far inside. A single tear of shame, sadness and worry that holds the key to your existence.

This is what I dredged up when I invited mum around for dinner two nights ago knowing that she would not taste a bite but instead feel betrayed and carted away by two young and diligent police officers just doing their duty. I had felt extreme guilt for this act of bastardry and still it lingers like smoke in my hair. The stench of it can not that easily be washed off with two or even three decent scrubs. It is thick in the back of your throat like a pending and threatening virus that constricts your breathing and makes you feel rotten to the core.
I looked in to her eyes, my eyes just 32 and 11 months older than mine, and no words were needed for her to tell me I was a horrid person to send her back to that place. The place that she hates, despises and has no warranted need for. Only she does. A chemical imbalance, a mental illness, a sickness of the mind - these are all too cruel a label for such a beautiful woman, daughter, mother, friend. But what then do you say, what else can be done to help a person who is cyclically self-destroying herself to the point of becoming null and void.
To love someone so much is a form of torture when you must pull back and watch the train wreck time and time again. It is not fair or just. It is love, and it must be respected for the heartache it can cause. But I believe it will always withstand the worst and will reward ten fold in time.
Hospital wards that are locked must be a very daunting and humiliating place to be when you are so sure that there is nothing wrong with you, but everyone else around you is going mad and conspiring against you. Paranoia is the invisible demon that often lurks behind the confusing euphoric state of bliss. But that is just the way it appears to me. On my insides I just feel depressed and fed up to be having the same nonsensical conversations in their unusually short forms and adhoc interpretations.

Sometimes I wish that mums past could be erased, that she could start all over again, but would it make a difference or would the new chapters of her life eventually draw to the same conclusions. Can we blame the past forever?