This is the Post Random Stuffs deserves

Ok, third time lucky. Sorry it took so long, it's so easy not to do stuff in college...


Anyway, here it is. I don't really know how to approach it so I'll just write down everything I think of as it comes to me.

First of all, the people.
The people here are so awesome. There are so many people who hang out with a bunch of different groups and so it is incredibly easy just to go downstairs, find someone you know and just be like "sup."
Each floor generally is super tight and the floor I'm on is full of awesome students. Most of the other first years are all girls, with only like 2 other guys besides me, so I feel like one of those men with heaps of female friends who's like always there making funny jokes around them and being the guy they all love and shit like that. Think of Tommy Lee Jones in Man of the House. Apparently our floor has a reputation of being bit of a party floor, since they're always going out and clubbing and shit.
There's also a bunch of older exchange student guys on my floor, and they are pretty much Fenner Hall's resident pretty boys. They're pretty attractive (and foreign) and they know that fact, so they're always acting goofy and playful and doing shit like walking everywhere in their undies, flirting with every female they see, watching scary movies on full volume, shit like that. They're funny guys but don't really mean much to me.
The floor Senior  resident (basically just like the "organiser" of the floor or whatever, just a student who looks out for other students) is a pretty cool blokey guy from Darwin. He's what you'd describe as a "top bloke" and shit like that, but he's pretty lazy. He sorta does his duties because he has to, not because he really really wants to, and keeps shit brief and all that.

And my friends. Definitely my friends.
Like, so many friends.
There's no way I could write about them all so I'll just talk about the friends groups.

Firstly, of course, there's the "active" group of friends. Active doesn't really mean like going out every singl day  or being sporty or whatever, it's just more like they always seem to be doing something. You go downstairs and there's a few of them there, just either talking at the tables or having dinner or playing pool or whatever. They're the ones who go out partying the most and have the most out-of-Fenner friends. It's not really a "friend group" though and just more a bunch of friends who enjoy being sociable with each other. I guess I'm a part of it but I don't see them as much as they see each other.

Then, there's my friends group. They're probably the closest equivalent to you guys back in Sydney, but not really. It's not so much their interests are the same as you guys' and all that, but more just they operate as a group similarly to you guys. A lot of them come from the same floor, so they see each other basically every day and are probably one of the tightest floors (the Girl is in this friend group, but I'll talk about her below.) Almost every night there'll be most of them down stairs having dinner together and when you see one there'll be like 2 or 3 others with them. Hah, they're like.. all really funny. There's a lot of Asians in the group, and I'm pretty sure white people make a minority. We just talk and make jokes and tease each other and shit, basically what you'd expect a friend group to do.

And that's just a few very loose examples of "friend groups." That doesn't include all the people who are just my friends who I talk to all the time. Like the gay guy who is always looking for men to hook up with, or the other, really flamboyant gay guy who is really popular and is always trying to get drunk, or all the second-year and third-year students who hang out together but you can hold an awesome convo with and who all know you're name. This place is like "Friends on Demand." If you don't feel like seeing anyone, you just stick in your dorm all day, but when you want to socialise all you have to do is go downstairs or to one of the other floors and there'll always be people you can talk to.

Apparently a lot of girls here find me attractive too (or at least were asking about me), so I guess that's a bonus.


Ok, secondly, the places.
I guess I should talk about ANU. To be honest, it's probably the thing I think least about. It's my least important concern.
The campus is really nice. It's very green with a lot of nice walkways and stuff and it has a "Europe Lite" feel to it. It's also really big, and as a result I've probably only seen like 15% of the total. THere is just so many different deparments and colleges that you could go there for years and have no need to even cross the river that flows through it. I barely do.
I spend most of my time around the main coutyard area (since that's where most of my courses are) and the place feels like a town within Canberra. There's a Union building which is like a mini shopping/convenience centre, which just includes shit like a food court, cafes, restauratns, newsagent, etc. There's like a bank and dry cleaners and bookshops all on campus, and basically everything you'd ever need for uni can be found somewhere in ANU (mostly just the courtyard.) Of course, that means everything is expensive as fuck and most people don't shop there, but if you really need a new notebook or something you can just quickly go and buy one.
I see Jules around campus often enough as well. Usually it's only short 2 minute conversations about uni and living and all that, and usually it's just me and him talking while everyone else goes about their business, so sometimes I like to pretend that I have schizophrenia and that only I can see him, and that he's a figment of my imagation who helps me point out where to go, even if I didn't know where to go previously (yeah, basically I'm super unorganised and still not fully enrolled in all of my shit and I still have to get stuff like HECS and a Tax File number and  a job all that boring crap sorted out, so like for me to fully settle in will probably have taken like a month once I'm done.)

There's also heaps of societies and shit you can join, a lot of which seem pretty cool. I joined the UN and International Relations societies, and was thinking about joining a caving club but when they showed me the pictures of going through caves I NOPE'd the fuck outta there and did 360 degrees and walked away. I'm thinking of joining the gym and the akaido clubs (a type of martial art) because you really do have a fuckton of time to yourself and I don't just wanna waste it all online (and getting fit in the process should be cool.) There's a movie club too which basically just has every big movie that comes out in a year, and you join for $60 and can watch them whenever they're playing. So yeah value for money.
Also, there's this really awesome network on the Fenner internet called DC, where basically once you upload 10 gigs of files to it, you can download however much movies, tv shows, music, etc. you want super quickly from anyone who's uploaded it. So it's like - hundreds of hours of stuff to watch that download in instant. I still have to sort mine out but once it's done I can finally watch all of those shows you guys (and everyone here) keeps telling me to.
(Oh yeah the internet here is like, lighting fucking fast. A 10-minute Youtube vid in 720p downloads in - I kid you not - like 15 fucking seconds. There's like zero waiting involved. When I go back to Sydney for the holidays I'm going to miss my awesome download speeds.)

My classes have been pretty stock-standard. I've mostly been attending Spanish classes and international relations lectures, and I've already missed like 25% of the shit I'm supposed to go to. It's really just like learning a language in school, and IR is just like, imagine what you'd think an IR course would be like - and that's pretty much exactly what it is. It's just the histories of different theories and how to apply them and the issues involved that IR covers, etc. etc.
I'm also doing chinese but I've only gone to like two classes because they're way too easy for me (it's literally at Ni Hao), so I've had to contact the course coordinator to see if I can get into a more advanced class. Latin American studies (the course I'm doing) doenst actually start till next Semester, so now I'm basically just an Arts student studying a few languages. I'm the only person I know doing Latin American studies though (I don't know if I already said that) so I always get interested reactions from people when I tell them what I'm doing. I was doing Pyschology but I dropped that because it's esentially useless (not to mention it's the typical pointless arts course that every intellectual college student does) and I took up the second half of my Chinese course over it. Multilingualism is more challenging to me and would be more useful in the long run, anyway.



Ok, Canberra. Canberra gets a lot of undeserved shit from people who don't really know what to say about it. Sure, there's only like one proper place of note where anything happens (Civic), but it still has enough shit to offer and there's always enough to do that you pretty much never feel bored here.
There's a surprisng number of clubs and basically if you wanna do something on the weekend, that's what you do. There's like a few "normal" clubs, a few dance floors, then there's like bars, pubs, fancy establishments, gay clubs, and like the sleazy dance bars people go to because it's fun even though it's full of perverts and shit like that.
Ehh, it's a cool place. I love it here. Sure, it might not really be anything special, but when you're a uni student in what is essentially a uni town full of people you love, then you're going to love wherever you're studying. It feels just like one big Sydney suburb - you know the ones with their own mini CBDs and all that. THat's what Canberra is like.
It is still Canberra however, and so some of the shit it gets is actual deserved.
Take for example my route to uni. Fenner hall is the only accomodation off-campus, so to get to uni every day you either have to walk, bike or get the shuttle bus that runs like every 40 mins. The road leading to uni (and pretty much everything else) however is laid out with housing commissions on either side, and there's been a lot of horror stories about people from Fenner getting harrased by the drug addicts and bogans and shit who just want to start shit. You're pretty much told not to walk home alone down the road at night, and it's best just to catch a taxi with a few friends than risk it. Scary shit.
I'm not really worried though, but you still basically have to keep your wits about you if you're walking down the place at shitty time.


And, lastly I suppose you're wondering about the Girl I was talking about. I guess it probably would seem interesting to someone wanting to know about, but I don't think it was that interesting.
Basically, this is how it went.
On the first few nights staying at the dorm I saw a cute girl hanging around just a group of people. Let's call her K.
Well basically I thought she was cute and everything, and we started talking just about random crap and funny stuff and it seemed like we really hit it off. We would talk alone quite often and there was some chemistry there.
So then a few days in I was talking and it turns out she had a boyfriend. Not going to lie, I was pretty bummed. I tried not to show it but I was disappointed.
However, the next night was some party night where everyone just got drunk (everyone here will find any excuse to drink, lol) and we both got pretty hammered. Eventually we ended up alone, and then we hooked up for like 2 straight ours. Nothing else happened, but at this point we were clearly interested in each other (duhh).
She told me during the day that she's going to dump her boyfriend, and even though I wasn't helping it wasn't to do with me. She wanted to call it off anyway because she felt she had changed from when they started dating.

Then the next night, we were hanging out with our friends, and again we somehow ended up alone and we ended up having sex.
We had sex a few more times after that over the week, but we told each other neither of us were looking for a relationship and that we were both OK with that. During this time she broke up with her boyfriend and we would hook up at times, and would just generally be flirtly-flirty and shit. One night we ended up making out on the dance floor of a foam party, it was pretty cool.
Don't get me wrong, it was a lot of fun and it was nice being able to watch Community on her laptop just lying there in bed, but I realised this wasn't what I was looking for at the moment so I told her I had to call it off. It's hard to explain but I didn't want to keep it going, for my own reasons.
We had sex one more time after that though, but I made me promise myself I would call it off for good, and so the next day I told her that it was finally over. She was totally cool with it, if a little confused, and she told me that if we kept going it would probably lead to us dating. She was an awesome girl and all, but I just couldn't see myself in a relationship with her and so now we understand just to be friends. Of course we're still super friendly and shit, only now we're not having sex on the side.)


Holy shit I'm not even sure if I'm finished it all but I'm going to leave it there. Don't think I have forgotten about you guys, just that I've had heaps of other shit to do and the daunting task of writing this always puts me off. I think I covered a lot but I know I'm still missing like 90% of the information, so if there's anything else you guys wanna know just ask me and I'll tell you.

And it's 2 am and I have to get up early tomorrow, so lol I really am going to need to get sleep.
(Also you were wrong Hogg, I'm still here. Hogg hogg hogg.)