Beyond Selidor

Day 14 – Where you live
I missed another day again due to various reasons, but I'm definitely going to catch up today.

As you probably all know, I currently live in Cambridge. On September 26th, I will have lived here for exactly two years. I came here in 2008 to begin my MPhil, and stayed on in 2009 for my PhD. From September 2008 until July this year, I lived in the same room in a student hostel owned by my college. The first year of that - my MPhil year - was excellent, because I got on really well with my 14 housemates, aside from a few minor differences of opinion about how long it was acceptable to leave dishes lying next to the sink. The second year, however, wasn't so great. It wasn't so much that my housemates were bad as that they were kind of absent. Whereas in my MPhil year, we'd often congregate to gossip and chat in the kitchen while eating, and we'd do stuff together socially, last year everyone ate in their rooms and avoided contact as much as possible.

I now share a privately-rented house with four of my friends. I really enjoy it. It's so different to live with people with whom you've chosen to live. We eat together most nights, we watch DVDs and TV together, we go to the pub or the cinema together. It feels much more like home than somewhere I just happen to live.

The location of the house is also fantastic: it's got about five really good take-away shops on the same street, four pubs really close by, a supermarket down the road, a video rental shop over the road, and, most importantly, an off-licence over the road.

Cambridge itself is great, although I am a city girl at heart and couldn't tolerate living here if I weren't a student and didn't have a big group of friends also living here. My ideal location is a block of city flats smack bang in the middle of a block filled with good coffee shops (so, pretty much where I live in Sydney, to be honest). I am quite a fearful and nervous person and find it difficult to feel safe in most houses. I only truly feel safe in (non-ground floor) flats, in areas where there are always people on the street, and in other places I have difficulties sleeping. I do not like living in areas which are only residential, and I think that places which are a mixture of residential, retail and businesses tend to have a more natural, lived-in feel about them. The hilarious thing is that I grew up in Canberra, which is about as artificial and suburban as you can get, and I still have a great deal of affection for the place. I can't see myself moving back there in a hurry, however.

( The other days )

Day 15 – Something you love about yourself
Told you I'd catch up!

This is one of the trickier questions to answer in this meme. It sounds arrogant to say 'I like myself', and of course I am full of the usual self-doubt and introverted pessimism, so it wouldn't be quite true. I am, however, at peace with myself, and have been for a long time.

The one thing about me I really love, however, is my amazing memory. (Oh yes, and I'm modest too!) My memory is really powerful when it comes to long-term things: I remember events from when I was three years old and above with perfect clarity, and once you get to the age of about six or seven, I can remember pretty much everything that happened to me. I remember, word for word, conversations I had with people when we were 14, I remember the Dance Festival routine we did in 2000, I remember the prices of all the products I sold at Bruno's Truffles (a place I worked when I was 15-18), and where each type of bread and pastry was placed in the display cabinets. I remember the topic of catpuccino's and my (and others') talk in English class in Year 10, I remember my gymnastics routines from 15 years ago, I remember the order in which I met every single ASNaC, I remember what every single one of my friends wore to Year 10 formal.

My memory is also good at storing useful information for a short period of time. When I was an undergrad, I frequently had to do exams where several questions were seen (ie, they were given out ahead of the exam) and several were unseen. I would write out the essays for the seen questions and then memorise them, word for word, and then regurgitate them, word perfect, in the exam. For language exams I would memorise all the set texts and what every single word was, grammatically (eg '1st person singular feminine accusative') and then spew all that out in the exam too. I memorised the entire IB biology syllabus in one night through mnemonics.

While this kind of memory ability is very useful, it has its downsides. It's very selective, and almost self-absorbed. I have a terrible short-term memory if it doesn't benefit me directly: I'm dreadful at putting names to faces without constant reinforcement, I'm vague with things like dates (I once famously thought it was Sunday when it was Saturday) and travel plans and still don't remember my UK phone number, although I've had it for over a year. My capacity for remembering large chunks of information means that I often have very little genuine knowledge of a particular subject, and it is telling that I struggle in subjects where I can't rely on this memorisation ability, such as abstract mathematics and speaking foreign languages.

Despite all this, I'm proud of my strange memory, and I wouldn't give it up for anything. My past means a lot to me, and if I couldn't remember it, I think I would lose something essential about myself.

( The other days )