Returtleneck

So upon reaching to the final leg of my now well-established A-B-to-B-to-bed routine, and after indulging in what I will allow myself hubristically (the word characterises itself, as chance would have it) to describe as a very worthy lasagne, I found myself outside of myself. I looked at myself, wearing my black cotton turtleneck jumper (it was "cold" by Brisbane standards), which might in its younger days have been considered pretentious in Brisbane (who knows, perhaps it still is), and I thought to myself, I've looked at this jumper before.

True to instinct, a quick search reveals that I not only saw myself in the selfsame sweater, but blogged about it, back in 2005, coming up on ten and a half years ago. Perhaps it came across in that post; perhaps it didn't, but I was happy with the almost revelatory sense of change ... progress even ... that the out-of-body observation gave me, the distinct and surprising impression of myself as someone so different to the person I had been not so long a year prior, and different again from the person two years prior. I'd gone from a kind of university hanger-on, working at the research equivalent of the frat house in Old School, to probably diagnosably depressed, to being an active and accepted part of a very different culture, community, lifestyle. The sense of change, of velocity, of trajectory (I won't pretend to intention), was invigorating.

So I saw myself from outside myself again tonight, but this time I wasn't surprised by the change. And that made me sad. Don't get me wrong; I haven't been sitting still. I now have an ongoing appointment at what I really believe is one of the world's great universities. For all intents and purposes I'm debtless, own my own domicile, and have no socially unacceptable addictions, habits or predilections. But I'd be hard pressed to tell myself that I've grown or changed substantially within myself over the last couple of years (an argument could be made if not successfully defended for the two preceding years).

I'm conscious, or at least suspicious, that I've felt this kind of dissatisfaction or ennui a few times. Perhaps once it led me to France, perhaps it led me back to Australia, and perhaps it led me to my current job. There has been a something of a cycle of a quadrennial renewal of vocation in my life whose catalyst restlessnesses might well have been more personal than professional.

My probation was a close-run thing; the dean ham-fistedly, and my more immediate supervisors in a much more informed and timely fashion, told me as much, and I was conscious of it even before those indications. Its been 4 years. Its very tempting to take my ennui and translate it once again into a change of employment as a substitute for addressing personal circumstance.

Hopefully I have the courage to address them separately.

Aachen

The dust is deep on this blog, but on my recent work/holiday trip to Aachen and the Jura, respectively, I felt compelled to write, and did. So, here follow, in episodes correspondingly loosely to days, those accounts.

View from hotel room in Aachen

The first week of my trip bears little discussion, really. Most days consisted of catching a cab around daybreak from the hotel out to the university, where we worked through the day writing and talking about the book, with lunches at the uni cafeteria. We generally broke between 7 and 8 for dinner in town somewhere. For the most part the days were uneventful and the dinners nothing to write home about (although one of the restaurants was apparently the birthplace of Reuters).

The Dom in Aachen

The change in Aachen on the Saturday was quite remarkable. Throughout the week, the streets in the evenings and particularly in the mornings had seemed almost deserted, but come Saturday the town was filled with people.

The back of the Aachen town hall

It was a lovely sunny day, and I'm not sure from whence they'd come (visiting from out of town or just emerging from the suburbs), but the town was buzzing with people from all walks. I had a couple of nice walks around town, past the town hall and cathedral, both bristling with a half dozen different architectural styles all mashed together over the centuries.

The front of the Aachen town hall

For the rest of the trip:

• Aachen to Düsseldorf to Heathrow to Geneva
• Les Rousses, Day 1
• Les Rousses, Day 2
• Les Rousses, Day 3
• Les Rousses, Day 4
• Les Rousses, Day 5
• Les Rousses, le départ

The bad and the good

Work has been pretty crazy over the last, well, 7 months or so. I think I can trace it back almost exactly to a point 2 weeks after returning from my Christmas holiday, since which point I've basically been constantly behind what I needed to do. At the moment I'm neglecting my paper reviewing duties, as well as a few hangover things from tidying up last semester's course. I'm fortunate enough to not be coordinating any courses this semester, but that will be more than made up for by my service duties.

Sometimes, though, there are some things that make it worthwhile. On Saturday I went along to serve as a judge at Young ICT Explorers, a competition held at UQ for primary and high school students. The competition, which has been running for a few years now, sees groups of students from grades 4 through to 12 present projects they have been working on over the last year. I served as a judge last year and was really impressed by so many things about the day: the quality of the students' work, their enthusiasm for working with ICT, and the number of students participating (and especially the number of girls participating - ICT needs more girls!). So I was keen to come back and help out again this year.

This year I was judging with Dan Angus, another lecturer from ITEE (actually a joint appointment with the school of journalism), and Mithila, a student in our multimedia and design degree. We had 7 projects to judge, but one didn't show, so we made very good time getting around talking to the students. The first five projects were pretty good, and once provoked, the students were enthusiastic about telling us what they'd enjoyed, what they'd found hard, and why they were proud of their work.

The sixth project was by just one girl, who had made a website providing maths and english exercises for other year 6 students. She had clearly put a lot of work into it, had thought about why it was useful, and had done a bunch of other things such as making a maths game with some quite well thought-mechanics linked to her theme. She was our pick as the best project we saw, and wound up in a tie for first place in her category.

Before the presentation of the awards, I heard she'd been having a cry because she'd had such a good day. Knowing that she was about to get some more good news, I was just so excited, and sure enough she had another cry when she was called up on stage. It was such a good feeling to be able to give her the acknowledgement she deserved for her hard work, and to see how happy it made her.