Category: Observations

I appear to have developed something of a hat obsession.

I blame phil for this.

Well it’s not entirely Phil’s fault. It’s more to do with my hair falling out and reducing the amount of brain insulation I have.

Earlier this winter I began to really feel the cold on my head, and decided that I needed a hat, and after some umming and arrring (no, not the pirate kind) I decided that what I really needed was a beret. I liked the style, and from previous experience I knew that it looked good on me. The only problem lay in actually acquiring one. For weeks we looked around all the expected haunts and came up empty. Nobody in Brisbane seemed to have berets or know anywhere that did have them.

A couple of weeks after I had pretty much given up finding my beret in Brisbane Simone had to go to Melbourne for an interview and so I went along for the weekend.

While I was down there I caught up with my friend Phil, and I found a hat shop. I bought my beret, and Phil almost bought a fedora for himself, and then we spent the rest of tha day on and off talking about how cool hats were.

The unfortunate things is that having spent so much time looking in hat shops I have now found a whole world of hats that I want. I want a panama for summer. I want a fedora for my suit in winter. I want that other funky little hat in DJs for social occasions. It really does begin to seem silly, but then again I suppose most obsessions are.

Lately I have been finding that I don’t find the TV ads that are coming out of government departments nearly as annoying, stupid, or clueless as they always used to seem to me.

I have decided that there are two possible explanations for this:

1. That the advertising companies are becoming smarter at pitching appropriate adds at appropriate audiences, and that the government departments are also getting smarter in allowing the advertising companies greater freedom to do this, or
2. That I am getting old, and have lost the “Don’t trust anyone over 20”, “I know everything” and “Adults and the Authorities don’t know anything” survival attitudes essential for successfully navigating adolescence.

Given that I am still highly suspicious regarding both advertising companies and government departments, it kind of only leaves one (rather uncomfortable) option.

This morning I went through my normal routine, packing my bag with my clinical clothes in it, jumping on my bike, and headed off to the hospital.

Once there I discovered the problem.

One of the upsides (or downsides) of living together as a couple of professionals is that there are a lot of plain black socks floating around our house. They usually live in appropriately matched pairs in our respective sock drawers, but occasionally they try and cohabit (my socks ending up in Simone’s drawer is the most common variation), and this morning I ran afoul of a new variant I had not run into previously:

My socks are generally the standard style low calf black mens’ socks, while Simone has a variety of styles, and what I found when I went to get changed at the hospital was that the pair of socks I had grabbed from my draw contained one of my normal socks, and one of Simone’s high calf length socks. I had little choice but to wear the mismatched socks, but it felt awfully weird with one calf being squeezed all day, and the other not. Also the long sock caused my trousers to ride up slightly on the long sock side, which also felt quite peculiar.

I have been noticing that almost all the residents* I see around the hospital I am currently at seem to be female. It’s starting to wierd me out a bit. Perhaps it’s just a sampling error, and I’m simply spending my rotations on teams that just happen to currently have female residents assigned to them, or maybe there is a higher proportion of female residents working at the PA, with the excess males (given that there are still more males than females graduating from medical schools in Queensland, if only just) working at some of the other Brisbane hospitals. Whatever the reason, I may have to pay more attention and see if there is an explaination…

*Note for non Med types: The general ranking of doctors starts with residents (including interns, who are first year residents) who basically do all the medical scut work around the hospital, then moves up to registrars who are usually doctors on a training program for one of the specialties, and

I wanted to start the above note with “Note for Americans and other non Med Types” (as a tribute to the book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimen – if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read it. It’s awfully funny and seems to get positive reviews from everyone who reads it) but it just didn’t fit well enough to use it here. Perhaps at some later date….

The elevators in the hospital I am currently at all have reflective back walls (presumably to make them seem larger (although how effective this is I’m not sure, given that while it creates the illusion of more space in the elevator, it also creates more illusionary people to fill that space)), and I have decided that this not a good thing, as it does far too much to encourage my latent narcisism (for those who are not familiar with Narcisism, it comes from the name of a guy called Narcissus, who was a mythical greek guy who fell in love with his own reflection in a river).

Elevators are generally psychologically discomforting anyway, as there’s always that (apparently widely socially held) urge to stand as far from other people as the confined space will allow, so as to avoid personal space invasion, and to aviod personal eye contact with the other strangers whose personal space you are being forced to invade by the nature of the situation. In this situation the mirrored wall provides a socially comfortable, but psychologically questionable alternative – stand next to the wall and look at yourself instead, which is exactly what I keep on catching myself doing. Perhaps it’s not as bad as I think it is…

I have been watching with a combination or amusement and concern as this blog has gone to the dogs, and descended into smut.

OK. So it isn’t quite that bad, but given that when I started writing this blog I made a point of keeping it family friendly, and populating it with benign general interest stories and G rated anecdotes from my daily life, it has been a little interesting to watch my journalistic integrity wane and the morals relax, so that now I find myself writing about accidentally adult oriented signage and fetishes and perversions, with no doubt bigger and badder things slipping in in the future. Perhaps I need to create an editorial oversight panel or something…. (Simone has already offered her services here, but if I actually did want oversight it should probably be someone a little more separated and impartial)