LadyKiadri's Xanga

Important! You can now subscribe via email to my new weblog!

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:22:57 GMT

Hi Xangans!

      As you are no doubt aware, this weblog will no longer be updated. Instead everything is moving (or will be moved - eventually - ) over to my brand spanking new website at http://www.marisa.com.au . Time will tell if I eventually muck that one up as well. For now it is there and I am broadcasting whatever it is that I used to broadcast to the world INCLUDING the Perth Diary articles.

    Yes, you can still read the Perth Diary articles on the new website. However, since most of you read the articles via the email subscription option previously, I now have an option for you to subscribe via email to the feed on my website.

   Click here and enter your email address and you will subscribe automatically to the marisa.com.au RSS feed. It will be a seperate email in your inbox and it will not come with all the other xanga weblogs you subscribed to.

   So in short:

             Yes, I am still writing the Perth Diary articles.
              No, they will not be on this weblog anymore.
             Yes, you can still read them via email by clicking here, or via the new website.
             Yes, if you have feed readers I have other options for reading the RSS feed at the website.

    Hope to see some of you on the email list and the site soon,

        Cheers, Marisa.

IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:05:25 GMT

To all my subscribers, fans and both the occasional and regular readers and the friends who never took in the fact that I had this site or column till right this very minute:

I am still here so if you haven't heard from me in awhile via Xanga, don't worry.
Perth Diary is still going strong - however I won't be putting up the articles on my Xanga site any longer. If you do like it you can still read it at the Sunday Leader and if you want to be notified when they go up, keep reading.
I have started a business and as a result have moved all my writing endeavours to one website at www.marisa.com.au . You can find everything here, except for backdated columns of Perth Diary which for the moment are still available on the Xanga site. I am not sure if they will get moved over or not considering the fact that I have been doing this for three years now.
Eventually I will shut the Xanga site down or lock it or whatever. I prefer having my own website.
For those who still want to keep up with the column or with me with or without Xanga, just mosey along to www.marisa.com.au where you will find a button in the top right hand corner to press in order to subscribe via an RSS feed. If this doesn't work out, let me know and I will set up a mailing list or something.
Those of you who read my stuff via facebook - if you want to add me, just search for my whole name - the feed that powers my notes in facebook will probably switch from being the Xanga one to being the marisa.com.au one in about a month's time. You probably won't even notice that it has switched over.
Best thing about my website? You can read all of the other writing stuff I do and get some tips and even hire me to write or edit for you.
But to Xanga, thank you because despite all the issues with servers, privacy, spam and site configuration, I have been on Xanga since 1998. All those little fiddly bits of HTML, JAVA and CSS, I practiced it all on my Xanga site. That's just over ten years - heck, you know I bet I am one of the few who has stuck around that long - you should give me a lifetime membership. When I started out on Xanga, it was free, and extremely easy. My needs have finally outgrown the site's capabilities though. I can't put a lot of stuff on here, I can't get it to look how I want it to and having a Xanga address on a business card just looks weird. But I am appreciative of those four mad people in NYC running around to set Xanga up and keep it going so thank you. I may lock it but I won't delete the site - it works for me as an archive of most of my thoughts since 1998. And I might need to go digging for gold amongst all those entries.
And thank you to all the people I met via Xanga whether you are still on here or not. I had fun doing random things, discussing philosophy and getting pulled into rants and photography contests and sending christmas cards. I won't be active via Xanga but I am more than happy to continue talking to you via my site and yours so if you want to, please check out www.marisa.com.au and drop me a note.

Cheers, Marisa.

Perth Diary: Position Wanted

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:54:55 GMT

       My resume, or C.V. as some like to term it, used to be four to five pages long. Most employers only give the first page a casual once over before moving onto the next application or so I am told. So now, my resume is two pages long and instead of paragraphs and indents, I have categories and points. I also now have dozens of different versions of cover letters all named something like "marisacoverletter.docx" or "coverlettermarisa.docx" so I can differentiate between the two without letting the prospective employers that I email them to know that I am applying for several different jobs at once.

     That is what I am doing right now. Applying for work. I have graduated and therefore that seems the next logical step - find a career. I am not concerned about a career - I am more concerned about whether I will have money to pay the rent and the bills. Any job will do.

     There are lots of ways to find a job. One way is to register for the DOLE - this means that the government gives you an allowance based on your needs for rent and so on as long as you search and apply for work. To ensure that you keep your side of the bargain, they register you with employment agencies and if you are lucky, you will get an agency that will attempt to find you work that you are interested and keen to do. Until you report back every week or fortnight to the department on how many jobs you applied for and when, you do not get any cash.

     Another method of finding work is to use a job board. Job boards are online websites that post job ads. In some cases, if you sign up and fill in an online resume with your details of experience and so on, employers can search for you as well as you search for positions. A well known international one is MonsterJobs. One that works in Australia and New Zealand is called Seek.com.au. Another two are MyCareer and CareerOne. These websites often let you apply online directly when you see an ad for a position you like - you just need to attach your resume and cover letter and send it. You can also set up automatic searches so that whenever new positions are posted, they get emailed through to your inbox if they meet your specifications. This means that Seek automatically emails a detailed list of all the new jobs available in the publishing field anywhere in Australia as soon as they are posted.

     Job boards such as Seek are usually what most people tend to turn to first. A lot of graduate handbooks and career advice will tell you though that most of the positions available are not often advertised publicly. People tend to either recommend people they know to fill a position or they promote someone within the organisation. So if you are not career minded, you might have to be to get promoted from proofreader to editorial assistant within the same organisation or company.

     You could still try the newspaper. Occasionally the newspapers will come out with supplements that detail positions within a certain field. If it is National Science Week for instance, then suddenly there might be a pullout with all the science related work available. Or perhaps it is the end of the financial year, so perhaps it is a major time for hiring within business fields and so on. Most national papers have a designated day such as Wednesday or Thursday during the week and Saturday on which the jobs are listed in the newspaper. Before Seek became popular, you could never buy a newspaper on Wednesday or Saturday morning unless you woke up at five. I remember walking down the streets of Northbridge just after midnight on Friday night and watching the guy on the corner run out of all the Saturday morning papers that had been dropped off only a few minutes before. People used to grab them to look for work. Maybe with the recession we will see a return to that - maybe the servers on Seek will be overloaded and crash instead.

     I suppose it helps when you have a degree that narrows your field a bit. My flatmate's degree in Molecular Biology leads to research scientist and analyst positions only but those sort of positions can be in any kind of field from conservation to mining to medicine. However, my flatmate only needs to type in "researcher" or "analyst" and bingo! Meanwhile, I scratch my head and go "What does one do with a B.A. (Hons) in Geography and English Literature" - I am not quite sure what that means in terms of a job description. I am not just a "scientist" and I am not just an "liberal arts graduate" - I am kind of a mix of both and I can't put both into a search engine and expect it to come up trumps.

     That's the point of an Arts degree - you can go into any field. This then however makes it hard for you to decide: a) what can I do and b) what, out of what I can do with this, do I actually want to do? I could go into management in any field. I could do secretarial work, in any field. I could go into research, academia, journalism. I could go into public relations, audio visual management, communications, conservation, history, government work. I could do another year of study and become a teacher. However, none of this makes it any easier to decide and so far career guidance has provided me with naught.

     Though I guess I have kind of decided - I decided on publishing. For the last two years I have subscribed - at a heinous student rate - to a little publication called of all things "The Weekly Book Newsletter". This is what is known as a trade journal. A trade journal is something akin to required reading for people in that trade. So if you were a banker on Wall Street you would read the Financial Times or be a bit sneakier and get Google to email you stock market updates. Here's a tip from me - the best stock to invest in if you can is the the stock of things people will always need. YKK manufactures zips and fashion is such a huge market, there is always a need for zips and buttons. 3M invented sellotape, removable tape, removable hooks and the Post-It Note - everyone everywhere uses these not just as office supplies but as branding. Quite often you will get Post-It Notes with messages on the top half handed out to you at concerts and festivals and conferences advertising some company or the other. These two are the cockroaches of the financial world - their species will survive fiscal holocausts like global recessions.

     Enough of that. The Weekly Book Newsletter not only lists all the news of what's happening in the Australian publishing industry but it also lists the jobs. Which is why, if you are like me, you consider the newsletter a worthy investment. Jobs advertised in here don't get advertised on Seek or any job board. The idea is that people within the book industry would know of the newsletter and therefore apply for the jobs therefore the advertisers can be assured of the people having had some experience within the book industry or at least being keen enough to find out about the newsletter in the first place. I only found out about it after emailing random people in the industry with my resume two years ago while looking for an internship. So, defining at least one field or industry you would like to work in and then reading the trade journal is worth it.

        Another method is to target the companies themselves. Hunting down the website of a company you want to work for - such as in my case - Penguin or Allen and Unwin for example - is worth it. Sometimes you can apply for jobs directly via their website. Sometimes they will direct you to another website such as Seek and most of them usually have a page listing what sort of vacancies they have at the moment. All websites will have contact information. This helps - who would you address your cover letter to otherwise? It helped to know that Allen & Unwin don't seem to have a Human Resources Manager listed on their website but they do have a C.E.O. Mr. Robert Gorman. At least, I knew who I was talking to when I wrote my application. I also knew where their office was and since they are a really nice company, they even listed their environmental policy online. That's the first publishing company I have seen do that. As a Geography and English Literature major, is it any wonder that I want to work for them?

       The same applies to government jobs. Go to the website for any government department at a local, state or federal (national) level and you can find a) a list of positions available b) a link to the government jobs board website c) instructions on how to apply d) cadetships, internships and graduate training programs and e) volunteer work. The cadetships, volunteer work, graduate training and internships all generally lead to fulltime work within the department. You can tailor your search so that you can apply only to the Department of Arts or the Department of Fisheries or perhaps even to just your local museum or city council office.

        I have managed over the course of the Christmas break to apply for around about 87 jobs. I think I lost count though. I have not heard back from any of them though the deadline for applying for some of them is in early February so it might take sometime for any replies to come in. Because that is the nature of employment. It takes time. That's why you don't get employed straight out of school, that's why you sometimes have to move interstate or overseas, that's why the government has the DOLE set in place to ensure you don't become homeless for defaulting on your rent while you're looking for work.

     So do I have a plan? I do. It involves saving money, buying stamps and mailing a lot of writing and job applications off, getting a part-time job and doing a lot of freelance editing and writing work if I can get it. What I like about my plan is that it is flexible - I have only one goal to meet - that of paying my bills. It also makes a lot of logical sense - not just my logic but other people's logic as well so hopefully it will save me from a lot of well intended nagging.

    Hopefully, it will also give me some time to whittle my resume down to one page that can knock someone's socks off.

- Marisa Wikramanayake

Perth Diary: Standing Up, Speaking Out.

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:10:31 GMT

I don't believe in heroes. I don't. I do, however, believe in people.

Those of us connected to Sri Lanka know what has happened over the last few weeks. It has been hard for me to figure out what to say about it all. Over the last few weeks we have seen people in government denounce media organisations, a newspaper journalist assassinated, a television station attacked with claymore mines and machine guns and various members of the media resorting to going into hiding.

We've also seen supposed change in an area we have all wanted to see change in for a long time - for some of us like me, all the twenty five years of our lives in fact. In the case of the civil war, we are seeing change but in the end what will that change bring? If it is successful in ending a twenty five year old war, what will happen afterwards?

It's not enough to want the war to end, to want a peaceful society, to want a better situation. If the war were to stop tomorrow, what would we do then? Would it bring the peace we want? The answer is no. If we want something permanent, then stopping the war is only the first step. We then need to put in place laws, regulations and enforce them. We, as a nation and people, need, absolutely need, to decide as a whole what exactly we want and then we need to figure out how to get it (in a nonviolent way hopefully).

But we do lack that as a nation. We can't get our act together, we let our governments and politicians and our political system constantly bully us. We wait and expect change (or cynically not expect it) but we never do anything to guarantee that we will get it. We never try. And because we never try, it never works out - a self fulfilling prophecy if you will. We never open our mouths.

Of course it would be scary to open our mouths and say something. The last few weeks have shown us quite clearly what the penalty for saying something could be. But death occurs to everyone and is a guaranteed event in all our lives. Why not therefore spend your life defending something you believe in?

I am not encouraging you to do something stupid. Clearly, some thought is required. What is it that you want? What is it that you care so much about that you will fight to protect it? Is it an idea? A person? Your family? Your friends? Yourself even?

When you look at the people who stand up and say something no matter what happens to them, what drives them to do it even though they are scared (and they are, trust me) is a belief in something or a desire to protect something important to them. That is their motivation. I wish to dispel the notion that it is something special or exclusive as a trait - we all have this ability.

So when you think of people you admire for standing up and speaking out, do not label them as heroes, grieve and then forget that you too are capable of something similar. By all means, admire them. By all means, please do grieve, however long that process takes.

What I am concerned with is what happens after the grieving process. Don't sit down and say "That person is a hero therefore we could never do what they did" or even "We need another person like ____". What you really need is the wake up call that tells you can do exactly what they did, once you figured out what it is you cared enough about that you wanted to defend it so badly.

This is why I say I don't believe in heroes. We don't need the heroes and we don't need to elevate people to that status - it makes it way too easy for us to excuse ourselves from defending our rights, our ideas, our people.

What we do need is ourselves - doing the same thing that people we have admired so much are doing. Standing up, speaking out.

I don't believe in heroes. I believe in people because they have the capacity to be so much better than they allow themselves to be.

I, very likely, don't even know you - whoever you are, reading this - but I believe you are capable of fighting for what you want.

Be your own hero. As someone else once said, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

- Marisa Wikramanayake

Perth Diary: Wordplay

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:18:41 GMT

         My family has an inside joke that I am absolutely horrible at the Sinhala language. This has no doubt got a lot to do with the fact that I always got bad grades in the subject at school. I studied in the Sinhala medium for awhile, so while I understood a lot, my horrible grasp of the language meant I could not communicate sufficiently during exams. Concepts would swirl around in my head and I could not find the right words to translate them fast enough. Reading text was easy - my interest in looking for patterns and logical analysis usually meant I had a good idea of what the question asked and I often knew the answer but I never knew how to say it.

        For awhile there my grades dropped. Hence the assumption that I was horrible at the language. However, I am someone who was born into a family who almost always spoke English. My first language was English. It wasn't till my sister came along that we started as a family speaking Sinhala more and by then I was three and a half years old. I had started speaking at the age of one and my basic communication patterns had been set, imprinted, dealt with. My sister, however, seemed to catch on and became more bilingually efficient.

       A few years later, I went to school where I was the only person whose first language was not Sinhala or Tamil. The teachers took a lot of pains to teach the basics of English grammar and vocabulary but in the other languages they did not feel a need to do so. The assumption was that the children knew as much they needed to know about these languages because they spoke them at home, at school, everywhere. So I floundered and for a long time understood words but had a very basic vocabulary that I could recall - most of it slang and therefore useless when I was called upon to write an essay in formal Sinhala.

      There was no way I could be expected to pass the Local Ordinary Level and Advanced Level examinations at a time when there was no option to take them in English other than switching schools and taking the London examinations instead. I switched schools and swapped mediums.

      Now years later, I have been away from home for eight years. I have lived in society that requires me to communicate in a variant of English. I have rarely had an opportunity to speak Sinhala. I have more opportunities to speak a language such as Japanese rather than I do French, Sinhala or Dutch.

       So I am amazed that when I do go home, that I can remember words. I can recall my grammar much better and more vocabulary now than I could when I was in school. It isn't absolutely perfect and it probably never will be. I have friends who know three to four languages and I envy them because I don't think you can adequately learn a language in a classroom, you need to be using it and you must have a need to do so before you become fluent. I look at my friends and think that they must be lucky, they must have had such opportunities or perhaps more determination or dedication than I ever had. I wonder if they ever realise how lucky they are.

       I do wish I had someone who speaks French, someone who speaks Dutch, someone who speaks Japanese and someone who speaks Sinhala more or less on a daily basis fluently. Even if I floundered at the start, I could then practice. I could improve and perhaps then I would no longer require my brain cells to work faster and hesitate before finding the right words to say.

       My desire to learn languages comes from a desire to communicate. Just as my interests are varied simply because I want to be able to strike up a conversation about anything with anyone, I would like to do so in other languages. It's not enough for me anymore to rely on context, logic, pattern recognition and an interest in etymology to read and interpret other languages, I want to dredge words up and use them. I want to be able to play around with them, the way I can with English. My inner child finds this ability to play with words fun and so I want more toys to do it with.

        In the meantime, I am still the butt of the family's jokes. In English, of course.

- Marisa Wikramanayake

Perth Diary: Red Ink ... Everywhere.

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:31:55 GMT

   I have handed it in. The thesis is done.

There is no sense of relief. A lot of people said I would be relieved but I am not. Nor am I depressed. The moment it was bound and placed in my hands, my brain sighed and then said "Now what?"

"Now what?" A good question. Presumably, I do what everyone else does and get a job or at least start looking for one. As others have said "start thinking about a career".

   A career? Me? Perhaps I could get up early in the morning, spend hours making sure I am wearing the right skirt, the right makeup, the right shoes, catch public transport and go sit at a desk in front of a computer with no natural light, dodge the perverted males coworkers and rush home to sleep early so I could get up early and do it all again the next day. You must be joking.

   I could never fit into an office setting. How could I? I know well enough to not take part in office gossip but I have found that not doing that makes everyone else suspicious of you because they never know where you stand. If you have a good work ethic, then people begin to resent you. I have been in too many situations like that. Besides, I want to work for a company that I want to work for. That means that the company has to be the kind of company that offers paid maternity and paternity leave, has an sustainability plan, contributes to the community and makes sure the workplace is safe enough for me to work in physically, emotionally and mentally. I want to know that the company I work for will have the guts to fire a top level executive if he harasses me at work in any way.

    A while ago, I became a member of the Society of Editors in Western Australia. Quite recently, I have had plenty of people sent my way so that I could help them with editing and proofreading their work. Now I am wondering if that can be utilised in any way.

    There are lots of questions though. One person I am helping has offered to create a promotional video for me if I start up such a business and to recommend me to friends. I have potential clients and marketing already set up which kind of blows me away.

     So what do I do? Do I get a business license - an ABN? Am I a sole trader or a contractor? Do clients employ me or am I offering a service that they can purchase? I am living in rented property so I cannot open a business on the premises but does it count if I have my meetings and editing sessions elsewhere? Do I register a business name or operate under my own? What kind of tangible realistic goals do I put on my business plan? Is making $10,000 in a year a reasonable goal, or should it be more like $40,000?

    What if I don't become an editor/proofreader and become a writer instead? Do I still have to get an ABN once I start sending work off regularly since I am working for myself? Can I still work from home even if I am renting? Do I still need an accountant?

    The other option is to twiddle my thumbs for a month till my grades come back and see if the university decides to offer me a tutoring position or a shot at a PHD. At the moment, both seem rather unlikely.

    Of course, I could still apply for part time or full time work. I will be doing that but I feel it is rather unlikely that I feel find a position that I want to or can stay in for a long period of time. I wasn't born or raised to do that sort of thing unfortunately - even if that was the intention, it went awry somehow.

    The other thing is that not going into an actual career, working for an actual company is going to give a lot of people I know heart attacks. I am in a bit of a quandry here.

     Back to the question. What do I do? Now what? In a month I will graduate. My former classmates all work for companies, corporations and organisations. Not a single one of them has struck out on their own. Will I survive? I don't know. I don't know if I will have a proper answer in a month's time.

     I am young though so what better time to take a risk? Again, I am still not sure. I have no experience in running a company or business venture, I have only a handful of potential contacts but I have the skills, the ability, and the equipment.

     At the moment I am in doubt. This is something I have always done for friends and now I am thinking of making the huge jump towards charging people for it. One day I will jump right in. I just don't know if that day is now or in the future.

    - Marisa Wikramanayake

Perth Diary: Shopping At IKEA

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:49:08 GMT

         It was a simple enough idea: one has no place to put things and therefore one needs furniture. And the cheapest place in Western Australia for furniture is none other than IKEA. So one should therefore go to IKEA.

       For those who are strangers to the IKEA concept, here is a brief overview. IKEA is a Swedish brand that designs and sells furniture much cheaper than most other companies simply because it a) makes furniture that can be diassembled, packed flat during shipping and reassembled where it will be sold and b) because the customer is the one that assembles the furniture.

       So the idea is that you wander into an IKEA store, browse the display and catalogue, try stuff out and measure things and pick what you want. Then you go into a large area full of cardboard boxes, find what you picked out and load it onto a cart. Then you pay for it, load it into the car, take it home, unpack it and assemble it. And you get it cheaper because you aren't paying anyone to deliver it or put it together for you. That's the theory.

        Now I am a fan of IKEA mostly because I have no money to spend on furniture and because I can - unlike certain other people I know - understand how the different parts go together and my initial reaction is something along the lines of "Putting this together will be fun!". I am such a fan that I caught two trains to the store, bought numerous things including a very heavy powder coated steel coat rack and carried everything home on the bus and train by myself. That's my dedication to this brand for you.

      So having gotten there too late to do any kind of browsing and shopping on a Saturday, the flatmate and I decided to turn up when the store reopened on Monday. The thing is that me and my flatmate have this rather annoying habit of adopting everything we feel needs a good home and this can include anything from random friends to cats to shoes to books in boxes that no one else wants at charity sales to beer coasters (my flatmate's obsession) and so on. But with all the books and other things we drag into the already very tiny flat, we now have little or no space to move. So what is our solution? To get more stuff to put our stuff in. In hindsight, probably not very logical.

        So we make a deal of sorts - I need a new wardrobe (the advantage of which is that my flatmate gets my old one) and we both need a new bookcase or two for all our bibliophilic needs. Hence the reason for the IKEA trip. Plus I need to get the flatmate involved somehow because they are the ones with the driving license and the car. After much haggling over the road map (do we turn right after Hale or Brighton?) and over splitting the prices fairly, we do eventually get there and park.

      The IKEA store is huge and I having never been there before get extremely excited. We each grab measuring tape, store maps and pencils - though the flatmate grabs several at every opportunity. Anything free is never safe around my flatmate.

     Flatmate having the better brain for numbers between the two of us is given the job of calculating which bookcase will give us the most space for our books per dollar spent. It is not the level of enthusiasm for this job that the flatmate displays that is scary but rather the speed with which the flatmate's brain is able to calculate and compare the numbers.

    My job is merely to enthuse and be firm. "We are not getting that!", "I want it in black!" and "We can put it in the hallway/lounge/corridor." I do have a couple of other jobs which are to whine about "Why does it cost so much?" and to keep the flatmate out of the way of all the kids that are running around. Flatmate being a big kid at heart cannot stand being near other kids because "They haven't been brought up properly." or variants along that line.

   We eventually pick out a bookcase and a wardrobe. While flatmate and I will go halves on the bookcase, I pay for my wardrobe. Before we move on to picking it up, it occurs to me that it is still roughly lunchtime and I have not had breakfast yet. "Brunch!" my stomach and I declare and we head into IKEA's restaurant.

   We queue, get our food, pay and sit near the windows to look out at the view. There is no view other than that of the brown earth of what will eventually be another car park and the rooftops of surburbia in Innaloo. I hate suburbia but it costs too much to base companies and big stores like these anywhere else. Which is why it means I have to catch one train into the city and another train out of the city in a different direction to get to this place via public transport.

   But the food makes up for it. For under ten dollars, I have got a soft drink, two marzipan rolls, a bread roll, an Atlantic salmon salad and chocolate mousse. For the first time in a long time, I eat and I am actually full. Flatmate makes a wry face at my statement of this fact as if knowing who I am, said flatmate does not belive me for one second. I insist it must be the salmon and maybe I should eat salmon more often, flatmate evades discussion of my gastronomical biology by wandering off to get their free refill of soft drink. It's free after all.

    We wander down to the "market hall" where we get a trolley. Flatmate convinces me to stand on it while they push me around. This has two advantages - one is the flatmate gets to set a bad example to all the kids in the store and the second is that I am not in a position to prevent the flatmate from grabbing anything that takes their fancy and put it on the trolley. The instant I realise these two things, there is an impressionable kid staring at us and the flatmate has found a wok that is clearly too big for our stovetop. I inform the flatmate that they are paying for anything else they pick up from then on.

   This doesn't work very well as a deterrent. Before we have even picked up our boxes of furniture, there is a wok, a mortar and pestle, wastepaper basket and a whole slew of hangers (for my wardrobe) on the trolley. We do eventually get there and after much grunting and effort, we get the heavy boxes off the racks and onto the trolley. We get to the checkout and then have to go back to pick up another box we failed to get before. Finally we are allowed to go through and we head for the lift down to the car park.

   The boxes look too long to put in the car. This panicks us both for a second till flatmate gets that determined look on their face and I start to fear for the safety of my furniture. Eventually with all the back seats down we get everything in and get in. Flatmate does not want to go home yet so we drive to Perth and hang out in Borders where we inevitably give in and adopt a few more books to take home.

    The plan was to drive into our garage and unpack the boxes in it so that we could carry the pieces up the stairs to our flat instead of the whole box at once. This idea works well so far as getting everything inside without breaking anything or anyone.

    But then I announce that while the flatmate recuperates from the ordeal, I will put the wardrobe together. This is a disaster. It is clearly simple to do but will take longer than anticipated and though I am willing to slave through the entire night, the flatmate is keen to go to bed at ten. And the flatmate requires absolute silence and darkness in order to sleep.

   Then I realise that it will take me even longer since being a petite Asian woman, some of the pieces are very heavy to move around. Even worse, screws that are supposed to end up being flush with the wood they are being screwed into, will not become flush but stick out. I prophesize that this will be an issue for the drawers and at the end of the night I am right.

   Flatmate comes to help out in the hope that with two of us on the job, it will be finished sooner and then bedtime can occur. It is not to be. There is only one hammer, one screwdriver and one allen key. When one thing needs to be hammered in - other things cannot be screwed in for fear of jolting something. Then I am busy with one end and the cat jumps over the pieces to investigate. At first, I am happy. Look, she loves me, her paws up on the piece I am holding, she is helping by keeping the pieces flush together.

   Then I realise that, no, she thinks it's a game and she has come to swipe at my hand and my red merino wool sweater which keeps moving in a rather suspicious manner. Flatmate immediately jumps at the chance to take on the oh so important job of keeping the cat out of trouble and watching TV.

Eventually we have to turn it upright. The structure knocks against the wall and knocks part of the plaster out. I panic inwardly - this is a heritage listed building! Am I going to be fined? Then I realise I can't panic about the wall at that point, part of it has landed on the flatmate's foot. I am outwardly sympathetic but not inwardly - who does any kind of carpentry or handiwork barefoot? That's just idiotic.

Throughout the night, I hammer my fingers three times while putting nails into the back but I am proud - very oddly - of my handiwork. Look at the back of my wardrobe and my nails are perfectly placed and hammered in. Flatmate wants to roll their eyes at this but can't because I am looking at them so they settle for lying and agreeing with me. Neighbours are not doubt glad that the hammering phase is over and that the fun phase of flatmate swearing at the cat, at the furniture or at life in general is back. I guarantee that there is no swearing from my side - I work silently.

   Eventually I send the flatmate off to watch cat, TV and put the drawers together. While flatmate manages to do this admirably, said flatmate has obviously no clue about how drawer rollers work when actually placing the drawers in the superstructure. The inability to put the drawers in signals the need for sleep.

   So as of right now, my wardrobe has no doors or drawers. The thesis commands my attention. The bookcase has not been put together at all and my clothes are in bags.

   The cat however is enjoying herself. All the pieces leaning up against the wall in the corridor and hallway have become part of her new obstacle course.

    At least IKEA is good for something.

   - Marisa Wikramanayake.

Perth Diary: Children & Choice

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:18:45 GMT

    Last Tuesday, my friend had her first baby. At the age of twenty three, she had a baby boy.

    She was the first friend I made on moving to Australia. Four years ago, she liked to go out to nightclubs and bars and do all the usual things most people my age seem to like doing. She and I always got on well mostly because she never cared that I didn't want to do half the things she did.

   Four years later, she has a partner, a job and has bought a house. And a few days ago she had her first child. Four years later, I am still studying, still writing, unemployed and renting. Am I jealous? No. I like the way my life is going and she likes the way her life is going. What she and I both want out of life are completely different things at the moment.

   What is odd is that wierd feeling of things not seeming quite right somehow. I am older than her, she's in my age group and she is the first friend I know to have a child. Granted, quite a lot of people I was in the same grade with have already married and have had kids but this is someone I actually know. Where I will actually get to see them and the baby.

   I think what I am trying to say is that it is very disconcerting at first when a) the rest of your friends your age are finishing university or working and just going out and partying every night and b) you don't do all that but you're still pottering around and studying and working towards your own different goals and then suddenly c) one of them gets pregnant, commits to their partner and buys a house together. My best friend in New York is very different from my best friend in Australia and they are both very different from me. Trying to get used to that fact takes a little time even if you accept it quite easily.

    But I think it's also indicative of something greater than just me figuring out that I am not necessarily the only odd one out at the moment. Both of my friends would not have been able to do what they choose to do had they not both been living the greater proportion of their lives in a society that enabled them to make such choices. The choices are there even if they aren't exactly the kind of choices we would like them to be.

    For instance, my Australian friend can now get maternity leave to take care of her child for up to a year without losing her job. Unfortunately it isn't paid maternity leave. Someone said to me that there never is a right time to have a child - there will always be something that isn't quite as good as it should be. With a mortgage, single income only for a year and the global economic state, it doesn't seem like a very good time to have a child. Children are expensive - food, health care, clothing, education. Everything does add up. But she made a choice to have a kid now just like her twenty five year old cousin made a choice to have three kids (My age with three children? That is a bit scary.).

    My American based friend has choice too. She can now choose to live on her own as a single entity in that country and work in that country in careers that not very long ago employed only men. And she does. Living where she does means however that she has a very high cost of living and so she has to work several jobs to pay for things.

    There are too many people in the world for whom chance works more than choice in terms of lifestyle. Maybe we take our choices for granted when we don't stop to think about the decisions we make before we make them. Being born into this world is not something you can choose. Nor can you choose where, when and to whom you are born. You cannot predict kind of start you will get in life at birth - whether you will be rich or poor. Whether you will have the opportunity to make choices. And perhaps we should be mindful of the fact that quite a lot of people don't get to make the same choices that we do. Maybe we can't change that fact for them but perhaps we could make better choices, more responsible ones.

    I haven't planned out my life like some of my friends have - I can't tell you if or when I will have children. But I think I'd like all my friends to teach their children to think about the choices they make and to be a little bit more concious about their impact in the world than their parents and grandparents have been.

   - Marisa Wikramanayake

Perth Diary: Belonging, Exclusion & Voice

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:00:39 GMT

      A few months ago I was trying to find out if I was a feminist or not. Now I know that it depends on the definition you use.

     I never thought of myself growing up as belonging to a particular religious, ethnic or any such other cultural group. I never thought of myself as having a certain view on ethics or philosophy - I didn't think of myself as a Marxist, a feminist, a conservative, a liberal, an existentialist. I didn't grow up with the idea that I had to belong to a particular group or have a particular identifying label for each part of me that said: "This is my political stance. This is my religious stance.". I just didn't grow up with that idea.

    Instead I grew up with the idea of knowing about all these things, knowing what they meant or entailed but just being ... well, me. I vote for policies not politicians or parties, I support players not teams, I am happy to be constantly evolving my philsophical and ethical views. And this was primarily my parents' doing.

I don't know what drove this or whether it just happened unintentionally but my parents taught me and my sister that it was ok to be who we were and to do what we want provided that it didn't harm anyone else. They taught us that doing that was ok even if we were ostracised for somehow being different. And I was excluded from various social groups at school and at college and even within my own circle of family friends and relatives. For just being me. My parents taught me that being able to be who I am, to express myself freely, to have that freedom to do so was something worth fighting for even when people I did care about did not like it. Some of them still don't.

They also attempted to teach me how to hide my differences under the radar should I need to in order to make life a little bit easier for me. That failed miserably - I have never been able to keep my mouth shut and inevitably almost everything that comes out of it is something different to what people seem to expect me to say. Even now they are concerned about what life throws back at me simply because of who I am.

Twenty five years on, I'd like to thank my parents not for my birth but for teaching me how to be strong. My mother for teaching me that I can be independent, strong, intelligent and everything else I would ever want in the world even if I was a woman. That my gender does not have to dictate my future or my choices. My father for encouraging against all better judgement everything that I do that is completely out of the box. Because they do not believe that my gender renders me incapable of achieving anything, I can believe it too.

And it's because of that fact that I have a soapbox to stand on and something to yell rather loudly about till somebody somewhere sits up and takes notice. It's because of that that I can say that I support equal rights across the board for everyone regardless of economic status, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, political and lifestyle choice.

     It's why I say that there is no point waiting for a superhero to swoop down from the sky to save the situation. Instead if you believe you have a voice and you use it, you will then have a voice. If you don't believe in your own individual power to change a situation for the better, no one else will believe in it for you, nothing will ever get done and you will get neck strain from staring at the sky.

     I believe in there being a choice for everyone. I belive in equal rights for everyone. I believe that because I have the ability to make some noise and protest about what I think is wrong, that I should do it. I believe I should have the freedom to do it. I believe others can do that too.

      Twenty five years on, there is no Superman, no Batman, no Spiderman. There is no one to be the next Mandela, the next Gandhi, the next Martin Luther King. Twenty five years, there is just me and more importantly there is just you. All of you. Each of you. Every single one of you.

    And that's ok, because that's all we need.

- Marisa Wikramanayake

Perth Diary: Black July, Twenty Five Years On

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:08:00 GMT

    This year will see the 25th anniversary of Black July.

    There were some people who didn't realise this till I pointed it out to them. At which point I asked myself if I was the only one who remembered that it had occurred at all. Why do I remember it?

     I remember it because I was born in July in 1983. I remember it because I know what happened and I think it is important to remember such things if only so that we ensure it never happens again.

    And no matter what, that's what most people agree on. They agree that they don't want it to happen again but then there are some who are against any sort of violence, some who are completely jaded and then there are some who have clearly taken sides and make it clear that the only outcome they want at all is one where their side wins.

    Are you scared yet? Because I am.

    Let me tell you what happened. We were all for independence. We got it from the British. Then we proceeded to draw up a constitution that was frankly very unfair and left the Tamils out almost completely. This of course did not sit very well with them and the nex tthing you know, the youth were forming militant groups. Then in the late 70's the constitution was reworked to include Tamils (not entirely but progress was made) but by then there was a group known as the LTTE. Prior to the constitution being amended someone in Parliament had brought forth the point that if the Tamils were not included in the constitution they would lose their culture and therefore it would make more sense for them to have a seperate nation. The man had a point. Someone took him very seriously. The LTTE claimed they wanted their own nation-state within the island. Did I leave anything important out? Let me know if I did.

        The LTTE decided to ambush fifteen soldiers near Jaffna. The bodies were brought to the capital to be buried quietly but word got out about the ambush and some of the Sinhalese formed mobs and went on a mad rampage killing Tamil people. Tamils fled the country. This was Black July 1983.

      Now I understand how this would not make Tamil people feel particularly safe. I can understand why the Sinhalese were enraged. I can also understand how this can make the Tamils want to hate Sinhalese people and any other group. And I can understand how and why they want to be patriotic and protect themselves and their culture and so on. And I can understand how this would apply to any other ethnicity. But supporting any more violence just because you hate an ethnicity or feel a certain way is not going to solve any problems whether you are Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim or any other ethnic group. If you feel this way go ahead support whichever side you want, encourage them to fight, let more people be killed - does that sound like it is solving anything to you? It just perpetuates this war.

       Not all Sinhalese support the Sri Lankan government. Not all Tamils support the LTTE. People from different ethnicities can get along. And it is shameful that thousands have died during this civil war on both sides. It is shameful and stupid.

       By being scared of the other side enough to want to have a nation-state exclusive to people just like you and people like you alone, you are just giving in to a history of paranoia about ethnicities and so on. About people who are somehow different from us. Because they speak different languages, do different things - are you really that scared of that sort of thing? Why?

      And so now we continue in this state of affairs - where one side must be ready to retaliate in case the other attacks. Why do we do this? Haven't enough people died already for no real reason other than an idea some people hold to be dear to them? So many people have managed to live together, get along together, civil war or no civil war. Why must we perpetuate this idiocy of "they did this, so we must do that"? Or the "we must do this so that they cannot do that"?

    In the end, I want to live in a country where I can raise my kids and have them play with the neighbours' kids regardless of any ethnic differences and so on. Because honestly ethnicity, race or religion has never been a big deal to me or most people my age that I have met. We manage to mix well with each other - we don't even think about it and no one seems afraid or judges anyone by such things. Are we paying a price because people older than us believe in perpetuating this conflict? Or because they are too jaded to believe that they can somehow help to change things?

      I am quite happy to coexist with people of different ethnicities. I am anti-war. I am against choosing a side. I am against people dying when the next generation in my limited experience does not seem to have any issue with people of different races, religions or ethnicities. I just want it to stop even though I have no idea or solution to offer in order for that to happen.

      But there are people who cannot forget. And there are people who cannot forgive themselves or others. And there are people who cannot see that there is no collective reason to fight any more.

       I remember Black July with regret that it had to occur at all. I have no answers for you. You have to find them out for yourself.

- Marisa Wikramanayake