Month: July 2005

I was horrified to sit in on two consecutive women in birthing suite who had chosen to listen to Kenny G while they squeezed out their bubs.

I had (obviously wrongly) though that Kenny G music had died a quiet, well earned death years ago, and was now little more than a distant terrible memory in the collective consciousness, a dirty little secret among people who hadn’t gotten around to throwing his albums out of their collections, or a last ditch extreme emergency fall back option for easy listening radio stations.

What a pity that obviously isn’t the case. Six hours of Kenny G on repeat left me about ready to hurl the CD player out the fourth floor window of the birthing suite..

Baby development

Well our intern job ballot for next year has closed, and now it’s just a waiting game to see where we end up getting allocated for jobs on the basis of our preferences, but even before we know exactly where we are going to be going, it is clear that next year will be a parting of ways.

It looks like some of us will be up at Towoomba, others in Brisbane at the PA and Royal, some may end up as far away as Tasmania or West australia, and everyone it seems is going to be far enough from Logan (where it looks like I will be working) to mean that I will not get to see nearly as much of my friends as I would like.

It seems to me very sad that modern life is structured in such as way that every 4 or 5 years I end up having to pack up and leave my life and friends from the preceeding 4/5 year period for a new start, in the name of moving forwards.

I had always thought that comic book store patrons generally fitted the Bart and Milhouse stereotype, being young boys aged 7-15 spending their pocket money and pay from their paper route, but this was dispelled the other day when I popped into a few comic stores in town looking for the Superman Red Son spinoff comic (which I have previously mentioned).

Instead, (to continue the Simpsons analagy) all the people in the stores were more the Karl and Lenny types: twenty or thirty something males fitting the reasonably well dressed administrative job type. They obviously had some personal spending power, and were not only buying the $3.75 paperback comics, they were also buying the $37 graphic novels, because comics were one of their hobbies, and they were happy spending (sometimes serious ammounts of) money on that hobby.

It all made the economics of the comic book industry seem far more sensible too.

Today I finally managed to secure a Medicare card, which is a fairly major achievement seeing as I have been applying on and off for the last 3 years, and the government seems to guard access to medicare and other social security institutions like a rabid dog (the taxation system on the other hand is easily and freely accessible to all. Typical really).

Turns out all I needed to do was marry an australian and tell them that I came to Australia with the primary intention of working (rather than studying, as I had previously (and clearly wrongly) stated).

Turns out that if you came here to study it’s really difficult to get a card, but if you came here to do a course that led into a job (which frankly is completely accurate when you look at how the intern placement system works) then there’s not problem, as long as I can show you’re in Australia to stay (which becomes quite easily when you marry an australian who has a job, a house and a car…..).

Work. Stupid really that beurocracy should hinge so easily on one little word….