Monday, December 10, 2007

tired and emotional

i have not been drinking, no, but i am feeling a little overwhelmed today. we had a good weekend away practising our sheep herding, this is a photo that trent took from the top of the hill at the farm where we work:


possum and i are doing great, really starting to work like a team, fine tuning our skills. all we really need is trialling practice but its hard when all the trials are a long way out in the country and you only get one go at it, so you drive for hours and spend a fortune for 8 minutes of anxiety-inducing trialling. call me crazy, but its not really my idea of a good time. the practice schools are better because i get to hang out with my friends and this weekend we started the Herding School Sock Club, finally inducting jo into the joys of sock-knitting:


thats amanda hiding behind scott who is trying to ignore the fact that he is surrounded by women weilding pointy sticks and bits of string. here are amanda and i in close up.


i am pretty impressed with jo - she is an experienced knitter but socks were new, yet she picked it up in a flash. well done jo :)

and a great time was had on saturday night at georgies. i know nothing about any $2 cassidy's sale? ;-)

but as for the rest of the weekend, well, thats the emotional part. i know i have a lot going on right now with the pensky file and perhaps thats all it is, but i am really not sure that i am cut out for dog-sport world. politics, bitchiness, one-up-manship, tall-poppy syndrome, arrogance, game playing and judgementality, to name a few, are what i noticed most this weekend. this is disappointing, its not what i go for, and it makes me lose sight of how far me and my dog have come and how much we have achieved.

it never ceases to amaze me that the great australian myth of egalitarianism and mateship, which is said to emanate from the 'country', as if rural people are 'real' and the rest of us are 'fake', is complete and utter BS.*

lets just leave the ranting at that.

in other news, there is a postdoc at UWS that i am thinking of applying for, it would start next year. the idea of applying is making me face the harsh fact that i am soon to be no longer a student but rather a grown up person. the horror the horror.....

k xx

* this statement is, of course, qualified by the fact that some of the nicest people i know are from the country. i lived there myself as a teenager. and its not like city people are all great either. i am just constantly disappointed by the human race. as kamahl once said, why are people so unkind?

4 comments:

Jo said...

mateship exists but its not universal. Your mates really are your mates and you know who they are. The others never were, so they and their opinions don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

Bells said...

oh that's such a great look - a couple of country chicks with sticks and string. Beautiful.

Kylie, my dear, yes the world is full of that kind of stuff but it's hard when something you love is rife with such tough stuff. I reckon if you keep knitting while you're at events, you won't notice the darker stuff...

ps Kamahl quote...he he. I love it.

Taphophile said...

Why do I have "Alone on a hill was a lonely sock-herd?" going around in my head! ;)

It's tough when it appears that other people are trying to bring down something that you love. All I can say is you're there for what you love about it - try and ignore the bullshit. It's about the sport, not the (bad) sportsmanship.

TinkingBell said...

I really do think you notice the tall poppy stuff (nearly wrote poopy - would have been just as accurate) more in a small town, simply because it is so small - a city has more people so you and they can slip unnoticed between the cracks - as others have said - ignore it, rise above it and keep knitting!