Summer. Bloody summer. This has been on my mind for a while, so it's going to be long. And it is basically just whinging about the heat for, like, eight hundred words.

( Why I don't like the summertime... )

Whew. I've wanted to say all that for ages.

P.S. Although this didn't really fit in the list of reasons-why-I-hate-summer, I think it deserves its place too.
Summer (or at least December) also means children playing violin and/or recorder versions of Christmas carols very badly in Rundle Mall for less than a pittance. In the worst case scenario, they don't even bother with the carols but just play scales. Over and over. Off-key. It's horrible. I mean, yay for children learning music, that's great... but can't
they learn it someplace else?
Perhaps this is common in all of the places that celebrate Christmas in the same commercialised way as Australia, but I can't imagine that kids usually do that sort of thing in thirty-degrees-Fahrenheit weather, as opposed to thirty-degrees-Celsius. Right?

Hi! The blogger formerly known as thenameless1387 here. As you might've noticed, I've changed the name I blog under.

There's a reason for that. I first called myself thenameless1387 when I was thirteen and miserable. I'm now almost twenty. I've been nameless for seven years, and I think that enough's enough.

So I'm Bec. ChocoholicBec. Nice to meet you all.

:)

The first thing that came to me was the ability to manipulate time, just a little bit. I wouldn't actually be able to go back in time or anything like that (because that doesn't really fit in the bounds of the question), but if I needed more sleep or more time to do a task then I would slow down time for a while outside my body, so every two minutes that I slept (or whatever) was only a minute in the Real World or something like that. Or if work was going really slowly and I didn't have anything to do then I could speed up time, so that I could go home in an half an hour instead of in three hours.

The second idea, and possibly more useful, would be always having exactly the right amount of money for whatever I wanted/needed to buy, in whatever form I chose. Like, oh, there's a house for sale? Look at my account balance and, what do you know, I just happen to have five hundred and fifty three thousand dollars on my debit card. Or, hey, there's a bookstore, and they've got this book I want for $16.95? Take out my wallet, and lookie there, I have a ten dollar note, a five dollar note, a one dollar coin, a fifty cent coin, two twenty cent coins and a five cent coin.

I haven't posted a single entry in six whole months, have I?

Ohh, I am a bad blogger. Ideally I'd update this once a week at least, but - well, life gets in the way, and not much changes from week to week. Not much changed in the past six months, for that matter.

So, what has happened?

1) You know how I was talking about maybe getting to be in a play in the Adelaide Fringe? Well, I was, and we did, and it was fun and we did quite well at it. No official reviews or anything, but word-of-mouth helped us along quite well and we performed to a full house about four out of the seven nights.

2) I got asked to join the top choir of the choral school I'm in. The top choir is for women aged eighteen to thirty-five (in reality, very few eighteen-year-olds get in, and there are possibly a couple of women over age thirty-five, I haven't asked), all of whom have fantastic voices. It's a real honour to have been asked. Yes, I accepted the invitation, and am having a ball.

3) Work is going very well. I am now working fifteen hours a week instead of ten and have a few extra duties.

4) Hotmail crashed on me and lost all my contacts. MSN is still down. I have Skype but can't use it because it's on my laptop (which doesn't have internet because my internet USB thingummy died on me).

5) I still don't have my learner's permit. I don't particularly want to take the test, but I suppose I'll have to at some point.



That's pretty much it. Hope your lives are going well!

Happy birthday to me!

Cue the party poppers!

I have a job! A job! Which pays money! Eeeee!!


That is all.

First things first:

1) Depression is not just “feeling sad”. Current medical consensus, I believe, is that depression that doesn’t have an obvious root cause (a death of someone close, a relationship breakdown) is often a hormone imbalance.
2) Some people don’t need medicine if they develop depression. Some people do. You cannot treat everyone’s depression the same way – that is a recipe for disaster.
3) Depression is not something you can usually “snap out of”. Nor is it somehow magically cured by “looking on the bright side” or “thinking about the positives in your life”. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not – it didn’t for me – but just doing that isn’t going to make you immediately well again.
4) It is a hell of a lot more common than you might think, and yet seems to be very poorly understood by the general public. According to some estimates, around 25% of people will suffer some form of depression at some point, and many people who have suffered one depressive episode will suffer more.

Now we’ve got that out of the way…

Everyone who has depression has it a bit differently. I had dysthymic depression for around four years in total. Dysthymic depression (or dysthymia) is a long-term, relatively uncommon form of depression which fluctuates in intensity but is usually not quite as severe as full-blown depression (MDD, or Major Depressive Disorder).

( Under the cut. It's long. )

But those are only my experiences. I’m willing to bet that all the other sufferers of depression out there had a very different time with it.

Being an Australian, I suppose I'd have to give them a Vegemite sandwich. I hate Vegemite sandwiches, but it's certainly a dinky-di, true blue Aussie food.
I'm willing to bet that the ambassador would hate it just as much.

What's the first major news event that you remember hearing about as a child? Where did you learn about it? How did it impact your world view?


The Port Arthur massacre, 28th April 1996. I was four-and-a-half. I had just been the flower girl in a wedding, about a week before, and that sticks in my mind a lot better. But I was four, and I had an earache and was sort-of watching the television with my babysitter (I was playing on the floor after taking my earache medicine; she was watching the news), when I heard the word, "massacre".
I looked up at my babysitter. "What's 'mass-a-cah' mean?"
My babysitter blinked. Her eyes looked wet. "It means somebody killed a lot of people."
"Oh." I rolled my toy truck across the floor. "Did someone do a mass-a-cah? Why?"
She blinked again. "They think he was sick in the head. He had an illness." She rubbed her eyes. I thought she was sleepy.
I pointed to my ear. "I'm sick too, in the head, and I don't want to kill people."
She shook her head. "No, I mean he was crazy."
I pretended to dump some dirt out of my truck. "But why did he kill them?"
She hiccuped. "I don't know, sweetie. Because he was bad."
I looked up at the television. They were showing the ads. I don't remember the ad I saw, but there was a small child in it. It might have been for laundry detergent, or for pasta sauce, or for anything really. "Was there any kids there?"
She wiped at her eyes again. "Yes. They say two little girls died. One was six, one was three."
"Oh." I pushed my truck away and reached for a doll. "I'm four. And a half."
"Yes, sweetie," she said. "I know."

So, it's been a while since I updated. (Also, friends pages only go back 460 entries. What is up with that?)

It's not like anything has been happening, anyway.

What have you guys been up to?