Travel Plans

Spring is here!!!! Finally!

At least, I have decided that spring is here, though I doubt few people would disagree with me today seeing as it's sunny and 18. It felt pretty darned good to get out in the sun, get out of the cold, and get out of my winter coat! Flowers are blooming, leaves are sprouting, birds are singing, bugs are buzzing, and after a long, long haul I am officially declaring winter over!

There may be a few naysayers out there going on about how it's still really cold at night and there's only like one new leaf on one tree (three and counting from my observations!), but they are clearly wrong and I am clearly right. There has been a shift, I can feel it in my bones. Spring is here and that is final.

And with the new season comes a new heap of travel plans for me. The next year and a half is potentially going to be jam packed with globe trotting. So far, I there are my potential plans:

September '08: Brisbane to visit Mary
October '08: silent meditation weekend retreat in the country
January '09: Hobart/Tasmania (I intend to actually learn how to drive over here in time for this vacation so that I can hire a car and drive around Tassie)
April '09: Vietnam for the next IASSCS conference (I've been back and forth about this one, but I'm realizing that I only have to have the abstract in by October, and by the time the conference starts I'll have some initial data to report on)
June '09: Canada, and since it's such a long flight, there may be a stop over somewhere in Asia along the way. Maybe Japan, maybe Singapore...
December '09/January '10: somewhere in Asia with friends (possibilities include India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malyasia, Indonesia, Singapore...I may have added a few possibilities on there in hopes of persuading said friends)

These trips may not all actually happen, but most of them probably will. It's really just a matter of if I get accepted to the IASSCS conference, and if I save up enough money for the second Asia trip, which I have over a year to do.

Now for something completely unrelated. As many of you know, I'm a dog person (not at the exclusion of being a cat person, these things are not mutually exclusive!) and I tend to favour big dogs, since that's what I've always had.

But I'm living with a mini fox terrier named Bella, who is 16, deaf, and has cancer, and is just so adorable that I'm suddenly finding myself thinking that small dogs can be valid pet choices too, and not just for people who live in small houses!

She's a very cat like dog, in personality and in size, which I think is great because it's like having two pets for the price of one.

When I first came and saw the place where I'm living now, I was sitting on the couch and Bella jumped up on it and stood on my lap, looked up at me, and pretended to bite my nose. All of a sudden there was this itty bitty mouth of canines coming at my nose, and then *lick*, I got a kiss instead.

Of course, when she does it now, she mostly just tries to bites my nose...

Thoughts on Turning 26

Last year was a milestone birthday in that I turned 25. I had a fun time celebrating my birthday, but there was no milestone change in my life that year. My life continued on the path that it was on, so all in all it was an exciting, though ordinary year.

"But wait!" You say. "You went to New York and South Korea and moved to Australia and started your PhD! How is that an ordinary year?"

The reality of my life is that I tend to travel in these huge spurts over a relativey short time span. So within the course of a year I may travel to 5 different countries, and then the next year hardly leave the city I'm living in. Also, this is my third time moving away from home, and there was still a lot of uncertainty about what I'd do after finishing my PhD when I left home. As for starting my PhD, there was about 2 years of planning that went ahead of that, not to mention that I knew from the moment I applied to university that I wouldn't be stopping at an undergrad degree.

So while my 25th year was an exciting and particularly enjoyable year, it didn't really feel like a milestone year to me.

26 feels different. 26 feels like a milestone year.

For the first time in my life I feel like a bona fide adult. I pay my own rent, I pay my own utilities, I cook my own food, I do my own laundry (though I've been doing that for a decade). I am self reliant, I am making big decisions about my life based on my own wants and desires and what feels right to me. I'm not dependent on anyone and no one's dependent on me. I'm starting to make a name for myself in my field. I'm also incredibly content to not be in a relationship, which is turning out to be a wonderful feeling.

I feel that I am in control of my own life now. I make the decisions that I feel are best for me, and I live with the consequences of those decisions. I've gained a great deal of self awareness in my time here and have been learning to let go of the things that would make me angry or upset or hurt in the past. I feel like a new person; a new person who is healthier and happier and more in control of her life.

Even though it means I'm closer to 30 than 20 and that I'm now half my Dad's age, it feels great to be 26!

Less Itchy Feet

In the six months since I left home I have experienced a shift within myself. Prior to coming to Australia, I hadn't had any big desire to come here. I always felt that if the opportunity to go to Australia presented itself I would take it up, but I wasn't going to go to any special efforts to make a trip to Australia happen. When I found out about ARCSHS I knew that's where I needed to go and off to Australia I went.

I liked Melbourne right away. Adjusting to life here was really easy; I found a great place to live, got my own furniture, and settled back into academic life in no time. I still wanted to travel all over the world and could frequenty be found making plans for trips I'd like to take. When I thought about what I'd do after I finished my PhD, I envisioned myself travelling in Africa, maybe even teaching at one of the many American universities around the continent.

But slowly that started to change. When I thought more about what I want to do career wise, I started realizing I'm more interested in doing research than being a teaching professor and I started to think about my PhD research in terms of what sort of post-doctorial research it could lead me to. I started to prioritize focusing on my own research above anything else. I stopped thinking about coming up with something to submit to international conferences because I recognized that my energy is better spent focusing on making my research strong now, so that when I have done my data collected and start my analysis I can have something interesting and important to say at those conferences.

When I think about the future now, and what I want from life now, I have a different picture than I did when I left home. I still want to travel, but I also want to make a place for myself that I can call home. And I want that place to be in Melbourne.

Calgary will always be my home town, but it hasn't been my "home" for the past 10 years. Living in Calgary, I felt trapped, like I couldn't be myself, like I couldn't reach my full potential. Over the years this feeling became more intense. Every time I left Calgary I felt a sense of relief, and every time I returned I felt claustophobic.

I've moved away twice before, both times with different experiences (in Ottawa I really felt "at home" and like if I wanted to, I could make a life for myself there, whereas in Amsterdam I had some amazing experiences, but I learned I could never feel "at home" living there, or likely anywhere in Europe). And both times coming back to my life in Calgary, when I had changed and grown as a person so much while I was gone, and the life I had left was waiting for me pretty much right where I left off, it was really rough. I found it extremely difficult to deal with and wasn't ever really successfully able to reconcile the changes I'd undergone with the life I was living in Calgary.

When I finished my undergrad degree I felt that I didn't have anything tying me to my life in Calgary anymore (my family and friends are still my family and friends no matter where I live) and started looking to make a life for myself elsewhere. I wasn't successful in that at that time, but it was during that time I found out about ARCSHS and, like I said, I knew that was where I needed to go. In the meantime, I took a job that I loathed so that I could earn money to be able to make the life I was dreaming about a reality. And it was really hard for me to stay with that job for as long as I did, but after a fair bit of manuveuring I was able to make it a bareable situation.

When I left this time, I knew that I'd never live in Calgary again. My reaction to Calgary when I came back from my trip to Peru last year was enough for me to know that this time when I got out I was staying out for good! Calgary is just not a place where I am able to feel happy, free, and at peace with myself and my life. I am not going to get into the reasons for why I feel that way here. But while I know I can't ever come back to Calgary to stay, it is a place I am happy to come back to visit, and will be doing just that in June 2009. Being in Calgary is much easier for me to manage when I know I don't have stay.

So why do I want to make a life for myself in Melbourne and not somewhere else in Canada like Ottawa? A lot of my reasons are quite strongly personal and not best expressed in this forum, but there are a great deal of practical reasons as well. The career path that I'm on now is quite different from where I was when I was living in Ottawa, and there isn't the same kind of space for the one I'm on now there. There's a different culture here, a different academic setting, and it's one I'm finding fits much more comfortably on me than what I've seen in Canada and Europe. I can visualize a potential career path for myself in Australia that just doesn't translate into anything that interests or excites me as much in Canada.

Things are different here. I am different here. I feel free in a way that I've never felt before, free to live my life on my own terms. It's an exciting and really envigorating feeling to have. Why I had to come so far away to feel this way is complicated at best, but the reality of it is that I've come a long way from home and gotten in touch with a very wonderful part of myself that has been neglected for just way too long. My feelings may change as I go along with this particular journey that I'm on now, but somehow I think that I'll always feel like my real home is in Melbourne.

Winter to Spring...any time now

Time has been flying by, and all of a sudden it's August. While my friends and family on the other side of the equator are enjoying the last month of summer, I'm anxiously waiting for my second winter to come to an end. July is the height of winter in Melbourne; August promises to be better. The days are slowly starting to get longer, and the temperature is not dropping quite so low at night anymore. Today, in fact, it's actually really gorgeous out.

A couple of weeks ago my housemate, Kirsty, and I spent a weekend up in Daylesford to take a mini-break from the various pressures of our lives/winter. Not that Daylesford is warmer than Melbourne - it is significantly colder. But it was a good weekend of retail and massage therapy. I have to say, I'm falling in love with the Victorian countryside. I love living in Melbourne and I love escaping to the country every now and then. Because of the train system (and my concession card) it's both easy and affordable to take a day trip, or even a weekend trip, out to the country without having to use Kirsty as a chauffeur.

On the academic front a looming supervisor meeting had me waking up in the middle of the night in terror. They want me to do my panel presentation in early November and had asked that I come to our next meeting with some reflections on my research questions and on the literature I have been reading. As I started to review the research questions I had come up with earlier in light of what had been piquing my interest in my latest research, I discovered a problem: my research questions had nothing to do with what I was interested in now and they weren't igniting any old interest either.

After a lot of pacing, a couple sleepless nights, and several pages of rewrites, I had a vague idea of some research questions that would bridge the gap.

I went into my meeting and laid it out for my supervisors: I had lost interest in the whole internet part of what I intended to research. Much to my surprise, this was met with a great deal of excitement. Positive excitement. They didn't think it was the end of this internet business for me, but saw that I had reached the proverbial "fork in the road". Apparently the fact that I had reached this cross roads at this particular stage of my PhD is a really good sign that I'm aware of where my thinking is and am in touch with my thought process. Or something. Like I said, I had 2 sleepless nights before the meeting.

After discussing where my interests were heading, what different options there were if I was to drop the internet bit, and what was expected of me as a PhD candidate, we came up with an idea that married my new interest to my old one that I suspect I am quite happy with. My task for my next meeting is to reflect more on what it is I want to research, do some clarifying around that, and go over my notes from when I was focusing my literature review on the internet to see if I can find where my passion for that topic got left off and if I can pick it up again. I'm feeling confident about it all.

So my plan for this weekend was to catch up on sleep and finish up some uni work that's been eatting up all my time. But somehow neither of those things has happened. I'm sleeping alright, but with regards to sleeping in, my body apparently had other plans. So I resorted to spending the mornings with a good book. Hopefully my ability to sleep through the night will continue on through the week, since I can't just lie in bed all morning with a non-uni book on weekdays.

Well, we have a house inspection coming up this week. Kirsty's going to see if they can come tomorrow since she'll be home sick. I'm not on the lease at this point, an issue that will be resolved this month, which means that I don't have to be here for the inspection. Which is great because most of the things that needs fixing I don't particularly care about, but Kirsty does. I'm a strong believer in that if you want something done right, you do it yourself. At any rate, I'm hiding in my room from my share of the housework, which tends to be the smaller share, so I should probably get on that.

Academic Life I

Having been away for about 6 months and working on my PhD for a good 5 months or so, it's come to my attention that I haven't really wrote anything about that process on here.

I came to ARCSHS with an idea to do research on young people and new communications technologies, looking at romantic and sexual development. It was an idea that I had put into a breif research proposal about a year before I arrived and hadn't looked at much since. So when I started, I had a lot of ground to cover and not a clue about where to start.

After a bit of mucking around in literature about technologies and some consultations with my supervisors I started to focus in more and more on literature around the internet and what's happening with people on it. After awhile I came to realize that I had narrowed in too much and the research questions I was considering from the literature where too small. So I changed my focus and started to bring sexuality into the mix. This helped me to clarify what it was that I wanted to look at. I started reading more about youth and romance and sexuality and became really interested in subcultures, and in particular binge drinking.

Again I took a step back and went back to reading about sexuality. I also started to ready some theory articles. The last few weeks I have been emerged in a particular article that has to do with agency and obesity. I've been working through the article, sentance by sentance, applying it to my own thinking and research interests. The theoretical framework of this particular article provides some really interesting parallels to where my own thinking has been, but it's a very complex and dense read so working through it and figuring out how the various nuances can be worked into my own project is a very consuming task that takes up a lot of time and mental energy.

In a similar vein, there's some really interesting work being done on sexual ethics education and young people here in Australia, in Sydney. I got a chance to hear a presentation on some of the results of this research and chat with the main researcher. So there is an opportunity there for me to link my own research up with some of what she's doing, which is really exciting but adds on a whole other level that I will need to work through and have only just begun to get into.

I met with my supervisors today to discuss the theory article I've been stuck into and they were really happy with how I'd progressed with it and thought it through on my own. Now they want me to start thinking about writing up my proposal and preparing for my panel presentation.

How the PhD process works is that the first 9-12 months is spent working on a literature review, familiarizing yourself with your area of interest, figuring out what your research questions will be, thinking about what types of methodology you want to use to best answer those questions. Then you write up a research proposal which is presented to the department at a panel discussion. The panel is an opportunity for everyone to hear about your research and ask you questions about it, to give you feedback on your thinking, and while it is an experience that produces a great deal of anxiety, within ARCSHS it is a very colleagial experience and you get a great deal of support and encouragement from the centre.

After your proposal has been accepted by the panel, you are granted candidature. Then you submit your ethics application to get clearance to actually do the research. This takes about 8 weeks to get approval, plus how ever many weeks between the panel and when you submit ethics. Once you have ethics approval, that data collection can begin.

In my case, what I am planning to do is a nation wide online survey of young people. So it will be largely a quantitative project, though my survey will include a number of open ended questions that won't be quantifiable (meaning, I won't do statistical analyses on them but will look for common themes in the responses and explore what is said, and what is not said, in them).

After, and partially during, the data collection phase comes the data analysis and the actual writing up of the PhD. This happens during the 3rd year. Then once everything is written up, analyzed and put together in a satisfactory manner (there's a lot more in that than that) you submit and your PhD is marked.

So there you have it. I'm about 5 months in and am at the point where I have to start considering what I want to say in my actual research proposal. The aim is to have my panel presentation in early November, which I think is a bit of a lofty goal, but it does give me a deadline and a goal to orient my activity around, and I work well within that kind of a parameter. It's exciting and nerve wracking, but here I am, doing what I've wanted to do for so long, in an incredibly supportive environment. What more can you ask for?

Winter Wonderland

Heating's gone
We are freezing
In the house
Frost is forming
Not a beautiful sight
We're bundled up tight
Living in a winter wonderland

Gone away is our heating
Here to stay, nope it's fleating
It comes and it goes
Along with cold toes
Living in a winter wonderland

In the kitchen we can trap the heat in
Then pretend that the house is warm
She'll say: you have all the blanket
I'll say: No man
But you can get some more while you are up

Later on
We'll conspire
As we dream by the fire
To face unafraid
The beds we have made
Living in a winter wonderland

In the kitchen we can trap the heat in
And pretend that we are nice and warm
We'll have lots of fun in the warm room
Until we have to leave to go to bed

When it rains ain't it thrilling
The cold wind gives a chilling
We'll bundle up and pray
The heating guy comes our way
Living in a winter wonderland
Living in a winter wonderland
Living in a winter wonderland

4 months and counting

It appears I have been slacking off on my blogging! My excuse is that I have been busily making progress on my PhD and haven't had anything much to report on. Well, other than the inner revolution of me figuring out what it is exactly I'm researching. It turns out my interest is in youth sexual cultures and how this landscape has changed/is changing because of new electronic/communication media. And it seems my timing is either perfect or off by about 6 months.

Today I was talking to one of my supervisors and he informed me of an academic journal that is looking to do a special edition that would basically be entirely dedicated to topics of interest and relevance to my own research. I would love to write a peer-reviewed article, that would be great! Problem is, I don't have anything to write about other than what other people have written about. Maybe if I get my ass in gear I could write a theory paper (that would require me actually reading some theory though). And while the article deadline is a good ways away, it comes right when I'd be starting to get my data in. There is a possibility of co-authoring a paper with someone else from the centre, namely, my other supervisor, but she's on vacation at the moment. So, we are sitting on that one for the moment.

The other academic thing going on is that there's going to be an IASSCS Conference in Vietnam in April 2009 that has a whole range of topics also of particular interest and relevance to me. I imagine that me and every other researcher at ARCSHS will be submitting an abstract for this conference, so that should be interesting. This is the same organization that hosted the conference I presented at in Lima, Peru last year. I think this time I'll see about doing a poster presentation and focus it on what I am proposing to do with my research. So we'll see how that goes as well.

In non-academic news, we've finally got internet set up at home now. Woohoo! We are both enjoying the convenience of being able to pop online to check something out whenever the mood strikes. This also means that I will be more available on Skype (though the time difference leaves something to be desired). I will also at some point in the nearish future get around to posting some more resent pictures on Flickr. Bear with me!

Well, we're settling into a chilly winter here in Melbourne and I keep getting to hear about the beautiful summer weather in Canada. I guess the fact that it's winter and the temperature is averaging 12-16 degrees is pretty sweet though. I do think that my mind will be completely blown come summer here....when I get to hear about all the snow and sub-zero temperatures back home. I may even come to miss the snow. But I wouldn't hold your breath on that.