hah. oh hey.

jalapeno ferret

hi. i don't have to go to class anymore. i have a lot of papers to write.


also, ahem:

for the record, existential crisis concerning the previous post has been had. i am pulling myself back from the edge! i love it when i can take note of a change in myself exactly as it happens. yeeha.

blogs are weird.

It's going to be an interesting year

Before I left home, my dad insisted that I read up on Congressman Ron Paul's weblog (thanks, Dad!). Paul, a Libertarian, is vying for presidential candidacy on the Republican ticket. Three months ago, after reading what he has to say--after hearing the way he thinks (logically! honestly! imagine!), I thought no way will he ever make real waves before he's silenced in some way or another. However, Congressman Paul is sure as hell proving me wrong. The Republicans are awfully uncomfortable with him hanging around, and it would be comical if it weren't so sickening what lengths the Fox news allegiance and co. will do to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2007/160507rigsdebate.htm

the entire debates are available here:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,272672,00.html

oh yeah and recent news says that members of the GOP actually want to ban Paul from further debates. I'll be honest, I don't agree with a lot of what he says (not so keen on his views about abortion), but at this point i think he's just the person to shake things up in the right way.

[disclaimer: i usually ignore politics so i apologise for any grave lapses of reason in terms of my supporting this guy.]


Just so long as I'm being all "hey go look at this", i've been poking around this site again after years of neglect: http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/

it's weird... last week i wrote a paper arguing as a hard-liner materialist about human consciousness. i handed the paper in feeling that i had really made a good point against Merlin Donald's semi-dualistic view of the mind. talking about it with someone a few hours later, it hit me that, "oh. wait. that's not necessarily what i really think about the mind at all!" I'll explain: I don't know what's the truth about consciousness/minds/souls/spirits/freedom. no one does! and yet, science relentlessly scorns "spooky" or "paranormal" properties, just as religion and much of philosophy react in abject horror to the idea that materialism might mean we are utterly mortal and without free will. I don't profess to know who's right, but I think it is beyond shameful--ESPECIALLY for the so-called scientists (neurologists/cognitivists/psychologists/biologists/etc)--that ideas and opinions are smothered for fear of their upending the way the world has been thought of up to this point (god forbid they have to toss out their personal crusades and admit they are wrong!). I'm aware that for all neurobiology can say up to this point, that every belief i have and everything i choose are bound to causal events that my experience of consciousness cannot access--and therefore when i die, that's it. When that's proven, fine, but we don't have the tools. So basically, I'm revisiting this website with intent to write about the possiblity that physics can prove that human minds continue on from the physical realm after death. I've already been given "that look" by my teacher for suggesting i might be looking into arguing for dualism, and got something along the lines of "don't write about the paranormal". I've found out this semester that it's really contentious to make claims about our lack of free will; apparently, it's even more dangerous to go the other way. Sweet.

Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it.

sleep?

oh no i have 2 hours to sleep before i have to get up and pack for tasmania. also i just ate two zucchini (no lemon involved). also i mostly give up on blogging, and i'll be back in a week maybe.

damn me. daaaaamn me!

here's an unrelated photo of a fennec fox:

One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, FEED DINGOES

The past week kind of goes way beyond what I could write about it here. I went to Fraser Island with 8 friends in a giant 4WD that we christened Roxanne. The quick rundown is this:

We traveled for hours by plane/bus/shuttle to get to the hostel that organizes and runs our trip to the island. We purchase alcohol from a bottle shop and play kings until we gradually fade off into bed. I sleep in a room with Sammy, and wake up feeling pretty much refreshed. We figure out our accomodation for the next night and then troupe towards the beach at Hervey Bay for a much needed breakfast stop. After pancakes or omlette or idle chatter, it's the beach for the day. We spend our time weathering blinding sunshine and cool squalls as the tide ebbs out, watching the rain fade in and out of the distance



Back at the hostel, we shower and head to a bottle shop, where we purchase a total of 11 casks of boxed wine for our upcoming 3 days camping on the Island. (aside: in oz, boxed wine is referred to exclusively as "goon") Our takeout chinese food takes an hour longer than we expect for delivery. We finish out the night with another resoundingly ridiculous game of kings, and turn in early in anticipation of our 6am wakeup. The morning finds us delerious and hungry with nothing to comfort us (especially not the goon we're about to carry around for three days). We get briefings, we get our vehicles, we get our equiptment, we get our food. We are off to board the ferry.

{{{{and now, since i'm sick of talking in the present tense, i'm switching it up.}}}}

Zach saved our lives pretty much via his skillz at the manual-shift 4wd. We travel to Fraser on a 45-minute ferry ride, and trundle off the barge onto the sandy roadways with newly depressed tires and hopes into the sky. I won't forget that first moment when we saw the paths leading into the island; it looked like someone had turned a small steep wooden themepark rollercoaster into something that was supposed to be a road. Thankfully, it proved to be amongst the more challenging parts of maneuvering (right up there with the beach washouts and really, really deep sand to get stuck in). That first day of travel was filled with-- us, seated 4 against 4 in the back of the station-wagon-like boot of Roxanne, yelling and laughing and wincing over the ridiculous terrain of the rough road and the ridiculous lack of suspension in Roxanne's chassis (I mean, we named her Roxanne for a reason). After an apprehensive and amusing hour, we found ourselves on the shores of Lake Mackenzie. I swear to god i can still taste how the water of the lake tasted, warm and rainy as I splashed and exalted in the endless blue filtered by black carbon and white silicon. As we left, we watched a perfect rainbow creep towards us across the lake up to the beach until we were soaked by a downpour.


The ride was pretty bumpy, and we were seriously packed in, with backpacks supplementally hanging down from the storage compartment flaps above and whacking us in the face. It didn't work to capture it wish flash...





(there we go. trial and error is key.)


After Mackenzie, we happened upon this absurdly steep path up a sand dune, and ran around on the top for a while. The view of the ocean from the highest part of the dune (essentially a mountain) was beautiful. The dune stretched on forever.


Our drive on that first day on the Island ended on the highway of 75 Mile Beach. I sat in the back of the back...and that was alright with me


Roxanne's headlights lit us up at the campsite while we cooked hot dogs, chicken dogs, and grilled cheeeeeez

and the beach at night, letting the allegedly very dangerous ocean hit our feet. after an hour of watching the clouds drift in like black sentinels beneath a glowing starry sky, there wasn't much that could spook us, really.



i woke up all achy in our pitch-black tent, damp and sandy and needing to pee. i had no idea that it wasn't even 6am yet, but once i saw the sky there was no way i was crawling back into the cavelike tent. those of you who have seen me in the morning will understand best how beautiful it must have been in order to keep me from sleep.



after everyone got up and drank naaasty instant coffee, we were driving again. we stopped to see the wreck of the ship Maheno, which has been sitting on the beach since it washed ashore in 1935. It was incredible-- juxtaposed against the shiny bright beach and sky, all guts and iron bones jutting defiantly from the silty sand.


this photo was an accident:


this next was taken from the top of an outcrop called Indian Head, a tall rock that is part of the reason that the island was able to form; volcanic rock outcrops caught sand drifting down from the northern coasts of Australia. over the course of about 1,000,000 years, parabolic dunes overlapped each other down and down to the south. This particular very narrow cliff that the following picture was taken from was dizzyingly high, dropping off sharply to crashing waves on either side



(maybe this will help to show how goddam beautiful/expansive this beach was)


(a video in which kangaroo meat is discussed, sammy imitates some girl, and rachael spills her wine (surprise surprise) )

i give corinne credit...

...for posting a bunch of pictures on facebook and then MORE on blogger. or the other way around. anyway, here's this for you non-facebook types: http://cornell.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2092629&l=535c2&id=412083

it's annoying cause the resolution is bad, but ah well.

Saints and Demons

I went to my first footy game... opening night, Melbourne Demons ( yeah D's!!) vs. St. Kilda Saints. And, I wore a dress, got to sit in fancy box seating, had an amazing time. Grazie mille agli Signori Donazzan!! ('spesh matthew!)

Melbournians worship their footy; the MCG is the largest stadium in the world:





and some more fotos:







(brand release party at Mofo: )



(surfing, saturday night, healesville animal sanctuary, pig-dog, killer graffiti)











(the black-breasted buzzard is one of two avian species known to have an innate releasing mechanism for tool use; "see emu egg + see rock = pick up rock in mouth and slam down on emu egg to break open" sweeeeeet.)


p.s. if you read my blog, give a shout. checking my blog and discovering comments is like interweb-communication-christmas!

Garden View

Hey again, blog. I have to write an essay today, so naturally I am procrastinating.

My day:

This morning saw me up at 8, running across the gardens half-asleep, to arrive 7 minutes late at my new job at a place called Garden View Cafe on Nicholson Street. 8-1 was a blur of stuff that I know will come to be second nature by about next week: sandwich-making, barista-ing, cashing on the fancy touch-screen register, squeezing through the narrow galley, trying to field orders/suggestions/jokes from my quirky coworkers. Since I am the third Rachael to be in employment there, I must now learn to respond to the calls "Upstate!" and "hey, America!" and "Grrrraahtz-ee-oh-playyy-nayy". The owner and most of the employees are Italian, so they act like a big family and yell at each other a lot. It's pretty funny. I didn't exactly get trained, so I screwed up some really interesting things, like dissembling an entire platter of carefully crafted fruit slices on it's way out for catering. Oops. In my defense, I had no food until 1pm, and not much memory of the end of my night at the bar. Needless to say, when i stumbled onto the street at 1:00 with a veggie focaccia and 70 bucks cash in tow, I was not about to trek to campus for my lecture. (OH NO. hell, i've just remembered that i washed my clothes and left all that money in them. must go investigate the state of the washing machine........... sure enough, a fifty plastered to the door. Looks alright though... yay for my brain. )


last night:

my new Australian friend Matt, who is in my cognitive psych class, took me out with him and introduced me his girlfriend and their group of friends. Success! The friends are awesome, and i had a great time. And... they HAZED me. In Australia, chugging is strictly called "skulling" (no idea why), and when someone throws a coin into your beer, you must skull immediately. Enter blackout-klepto Rachael. Today on my floor there is an ashtray with green sharpie all over it, and a plastic beer cup, presumably from the bar. For the record, I do mostly remember drawing all over that ashtray. And on my camera, i found about 15 blurry off-center pictures of my eye, really close up. Whyyyyy. (p.s. Dear Mom, Don't worry... I swear this doesn't usually happen!) But see, look, i saved one:




The days are passing quickly here, mostly because I'm happy and busy. Here are some pictures from over the last week or so:


Ashley Dancing at the Marquee Club


This possum climbed onto my shoulder that night, and it was awesome.


Our Australia Now professor, Michael Cathcart, draws australia on the board a lot. Our tattoos are very good approximations of what it looks like when he does this... and only badasses like us could sport green Michael Cathcart tats.


Pub crawl sunset (this is for sarah, even though i'm not sure if she reads my blog! )


japanese cookie snacks, "yan yans", have things like this written on them in english. other examples include: "fox: beware of lies", "rhinoceros: think big" and "panda: go for more!" i don't get it, but i'm down for pretty much anything that's delicous AND hilarious.

Big stuff coming up: thursday kayaking, saturday surfing, and yep, i am totally writing this essay tonight. temporal lobe epilepsy, memory, neuropathology, right now. yeah!

Video, Baby.

Over the weekend, Sam, Zach, Ryan and I went and saw a length of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. It was amazing. I put a bunch of photos up on facebook, but I didn't feel like figuring out facebook movie stuff, so here are a couple of short videos from the road...


Awkward Wild Koala

(I wish i had done a better job of capturing how close this dude came to falling. It was ridiculous. As we almost hear zach finishing explaining, he was braving the spindly branches cause koalas only like the young leaves (perverts!). Anyway, he was supposed to be asleep at that time of day, so maybe he was all dazed and sleepwalking. I posted a couple of pictures of him on facebook. He is my first real live koala (i think. zoo as a kindergardener? ...maybe?).)



Drive On The Left

(Oh man, this was crazy. And delightful, once i had dramamine in my system. Yay for our car! Yay for us not crashing him!)

The Lion Who Shot Back

this post is going up kind of later than i intended, but i only just finally uploaded pictures after a week. As Tall As Lions played a show in Melbourne last week, and they got a night off beforehand, so we went to the final Melbourne Night Market of the summer, split a bottle of wine, and investigated the overwhelming amount of wares. The pictures don't really do justice to how vast the building that housed the market really was; it was totally packed and chaotic and awesome.









(disclaimer: the more beautiful photos are not mine, they are taken by cliff. thanks, cliff!)

after the market, we went to a couple bars and i, for one, got happily inebriated and had a great time. I went and saw the set the next day with Sammy, but unfortunately we were not allowed to bring cameras into the venue. The set was amazing, ATAL looked and sounded all perfect and luminous, and I was completely satisfied. Interested parties can refer here for audio and a long list of spring tour dates: www.myspace.com/astallaslions


In the days since, I've gone to class and stuff, I went to a new beach, and joined some friends parading around the city on a sweet pub crawl... and other than that things have been generally uneventful. Last night I went and saw a pre-screening of THE HOST, which is this unbelievable korean monster-thriller. Go see it, it's totally worth it for the monster alone.

Cheers, all!

Photo highlights, chronologically ordered

Ok! Some photos at last. Here I go.


When you first arrive in a new country and don't know anyone, the following are the kind of things you might take pictures of. These are all from my first day, walking around in a jet-lagged daze: "oooooh, fern gully tree"......"omg hey does that sign say FLESH PRODUCE?" ....and then my bad-ass keycard for the Nunnery and some australian coins. Yep.




Here is the entrance to the Nunnery, the coolest hostel evar...



... and that was my top bunk, and i kept all my stuff in that alcove near the window... it was very cozy up in that corner, i kind of miss the company





look, sarah, they have my antennae here!!




I love these trees... this one really reminds me of an elephant--look at the trunk!




...and it's really big.


(yes this is blatantly taken on timer don't make fun of me i didn't have any friends yet)


Example of a tram line; this is how we get around in Melbourne without cars. Don't worry, i was very safe taking this picture; the trams don't come very often and i looked both ways.



This is the quad and the Old Arts building at Melbourne... the Uni is way beautiful. and look, it's raining! that's right, drought, goway!



Here is Sam imitating this strange statue that lives on Swanston St...




...and, "The Greatest Picture That I Have Ever Taken":



Palm trees at St. Kilda




Here is what the Nunnery did for us every weekday... the detail on that parrot was amazing for chalk, and the advice was good; ice cream at trampoline is quite yummy.




And at last, my new pad... all it has is a mattress and those flowers. Luckily, i don't require much more than that.