They Say I'm Crazy but I have a good time... (Life's been good to me so far)

At home I have enough of a hard time balancing school and play, but here it has been a true challenge for me because I want to see and experience as much as I can before I leave.  It's a continual realization for me that I should take advantage of everything back home just as much as I do here.  I mean, there's no reason why I couldn't just go sleep in the back of my car and travel for a few days back home too.  My system of trying to take one weekend to hang out in Melbourne and get all of my work done and then traveling the next weekend has worked pretty well so far.  Life's not about just getting things done, but about doing things.  Actually living.  But now and then we are forced to just get things done, and the faster you do them and the less you procrastinate, the more time you have to do fun things.

I had a paper due for Bioethics today and I had chosen the topic of discussing whether or not the reproductive technologies developed since the 1960s empower women.  It was pretty interesting actually.  I read a bunch of chapters from feminist books that talked about how reproductive technology was developed by male scientists and is just another way for men to express control over women and I  realized that a lot of the stuff they said was true, at least in part, about men trying to control the future of the human species.  Or at least the future of those humans who can afford the technology.  I think it's kind of sad to discuss pre-implantation genetic diagnosis anyways.  People want what's best for their child, but who wants the expectation of being the "best child possible"?  Really.  My lecturer handed out these handouts a couple weeks ago asking us what traits we would choose for our ideal child if we were going to take advantage of in-vitro fertilization and PGD.  All these kids were like "well, I'd have a girl, brown hair, blue eyes..." I'm like dang man, I'd be pretty stoked to have a kid with a couple eyes and a mouth and nose and  legs and arms and maybe a little hair and stuff like that.  Whatever God wants to create.  You don't have to be the perfect child to have a good life, and you don't have to have the perfect child to have a good life as a parent.  Get over it.  No matter what you do, your kid is always going to be messed up.  Otherwise they wouldn't be a person.  Sorry, I just get a little mad about people wanting to control everything, these parents who picture themselves having a little angel child who never does anything wrong because they have been genetically selected to be nice and easygoing.

So I got all my research for my paper done this weekend but I couldn't seem to get what I wanted to say down on paper, so I resorted to the best known cure for paper writing (or basically any malady, in my book): Surfing, of course.  I reckon sleep doesn't really matter that much these days, so I finished organizing all of my research on Monday night until like 1 a.m., then got up at 6 and drove to Phillip Island.  Google Earth told me it would take me 1 hour 48 minutes to get there. As usual, I was really excited and made the trip in a little over an hour.  It makes me feel so efficient when I'm driving away from the city in the morning and the traffic going into the city is backed up forever on the freeway, and then vice versa on the way back in the afternoon.

Well, I got down to Phillip Island and parked on top of this cliff at Surf Beach.  That's a cool name for a town.  The Town is called Surf Beach and the beach is called Woolamai.  I got out of the car to look at the surf down at Surfies Point, a nice right breaking in front of a rock shelf, pretty typical of the area around Melbourne.  There was one guy out, it was about 3-4 ft (7-10 for all you floridians), and the wind was howling northwest and freezing cold.  Outside of the car, I started shivering uncontrollably and I figured it would probably be a good time to don the wetsuit and go take a swim in equally cold water.  I caught a few good waves that lined up all the way across the point, and the wave was a little bit fat but fairly rippable.  When the other guy left I was just sitting out the back by myself in the dark water and the helicopter that looks for sharks flew over.  I pictured myself in a picture in the newspaper: an aerial shot of me on my surfboard as a great white swam right behind me without me even noticing it.  I think my shark-wary mentality from living so close to the shark attack capital of the world has influenced me a little too much.  I just tried not to let myself think about it and kept surfing.  I guess on the bright side, if I got attacked at home I'd have to pay a hospital bill.  If I get attacked here, I probably won't ever have to pay for anything again.  The biggest white shark caught in Australia was apparently brought in just off the tip of Phillip Island, about 4 miles from Surfies point.

Even when I got out of the water toward midday, the wind was freezing cold.  With the tide coming up, I decided to head over to Express Point, the best wave on the island.  It was the most fun surf I've had in a long time but come to find out, access isn't as easy as most spots.  I think there is another way in along the cliff tops, but I parked forever away at Smith's Beach and made a little hike.  Here are the directions, in case you ever want to go there: walk a couple hundred metres down Smith beach, wait for the waves to stop crashing against the rocks at the end of the beach for a few seconds and climb over them, climb down to the next beach, kill your feet on the cobblestones for another 100 metres, climb up some really slippery rocks and down to the next beach, walk another couple hundred metres through really soft sand with rocks hidden in it, climb up onto the top of a little headland at the end, slide on your butt down the slippery mud to the rocks at the edge of the headland (don't slip cause it's a long way down), rock-hop down to about 12 feet above where the powerful waves are crashing against the little rock cliff and spraying you in the face with salt water, and wait for a set to come into the reef.  As soon as the set breaks on the reef, get ready to go.  Just before the whitewater from the last wave of the set crashes into the rocks beneath you, climb down to one of the rocks about 6 feet above the water and as the wave comes, dive in on top of it and paddle really hard to avoid getting swept back against the rocks.  When waves come there will be two rocks sticking out of the water right in front of you.  Paddle between them and try not to get sucked onto them by the current, paddle as fast as you can to make it out before the next set comes, and after another 70 metres of paddling you're there.  On the way back, get washed up on the rocks beside the little cliff and reverse directions to the car park.  By the time you get to the car, you should probably be bleeding from at least 8 places on your feet, have several bruises from getting washed up on the rocks, have numb fingers so you can barely turn the key to open the car, and not be able to feel your arms from all the paddling you've done.

Or at least that's how I got there.  Express is the heaviest wave I've ever surfed and I definitely have a lot to learn about barrel riding in waves like that.  Right in front of where the wave breaks there are a bunch of sharp rocks sticking up out of the water so you don't want to wipe out on the drop in or you'll probably be hurting pretty bad.  Almost as soon as I paddled out, I caught my first wave.  It was basically a free-fall down the face, and as I made my bottom turn I could see the individual rocks beneath my board as they made boils in the water around me.  I caught a couple waves just to practice the steep drop, then I paddled deeper on the reef to try for the barrel.

There were two older locals sitting outside with me, and when they both caught waves I knew my time had come.  A set approached and the perfect wave started bowling up on the reef.  I paddled out to meet the wave as it walled up, and spun to take off.  The 6 or 7 locals sitting on the inside section hooted, and when people hoot at you, you just have to go for it.  I paddled hard, trying not to look at the boils from the rocks only a couple feet underwater in front of me as I felt the wave begin to push me.  I stood up and set my line down the face of the wave, basically free-falling over the ledge, and did a quick bottom turn into the barrel section over one particularly shallow rock.  I pulled into the best barrel of my life for about two seconds before the heaviest wipeout I've had so far in Australia (except for maybe that time I lost my board at Snapper Rocks and had to swim 150 metres for it while being crushed by massive waves).  As I pulled up under the second section of the ledging barrel, the tube pinched at the end and the lip of the wave, probably a foot and a half thick, clipped me in the head.

When I say clipped me in the head, I mean like Jeremy Morrison or somebody putting on one of those big goofy boxing gloves that we used to have at youth group and punching me in the head as hard as he could.  Basically, as it hit my head, my feet flew up in the air inside the barrel and my whole body just did a flip with the wave as it rolled over and tossed me across the reef like a little rag doll.  I got lucky and didn't hit any rocks (I could feel them just beneath me), and when I came up, all of the locals started cheering.  It was a little embarrassing to take a wipeout that bad, but nobody else had gotten in the barrel like that, at least that I had seen, so everybody told me how sick the wipeout was, but they were all stoked that I had gone for the tube.  I guess they were glad for a little entertainment.

After a few more waves, the tide started dropping out and Express got too dangerous to surf, so I washed up on the rocks and took the hike back to the car and drove down to one last surf spot, a little right point at Summerlands, where there is a penguin parade every evening.  The wave was a little wedge like Ponce Inlet, but over really shallow rocks.  As the tide dropped, I had to stop surfing it because it was getting too shallow.  Then I drove back to Melbourne, which took me quite a while due to the fact that it started raining so hard that I couldn't see the road 50 feet in front of me.  When I got back in the evening I had a nice 7-page paper to write, but after surfing it was pretty much a breeze.  I didn't even need red bull to keep me up until 4 am.  That being said, I hope I get a decent grade from my super liberal teacher.

We've been playing inter-halls sports competitions for the past few weeks.  My team from Roberts did decently in Volleyball, but we didn't play so well in the round last week so we're playing for third place on Sunday.  On Monday I went out and played some 6 v 6 soccer for Roberts.  Tons of people came out to play, So I didn't get to play the whole game, but I was happy that I was able to do a pretty solid job playing defense and only one goal was scored while I was in (and that was because somebody obstructed our goal keeper so it shouldn't have counted anyway).

School's been pretty tough, but I did really really well on my English assignment (maybe the best grade in my tutorial?) and I think my bioethics paper is pretty good.  It better be, because it's 35% of my grade.  I have a paper to write for my political science class next week, but this weekend I'm headed up to Doc's house to experience rural Australian life on his farm.  Sounds like a good time.  I have a reputation for eating the most out of everybody here, and apparently Doc's 17-year-old brother has challenged me to an eating competition.  I think he's in a growth spurt or something, to be willing to challenge me like that.  Apparently Doc and I are going to his brother's deb ball on Friday night as well.  I thought that was just a southern thing that we did for the girls back in South Carolina, but apparently it's a big thing here, though not as formal.

I was really sad I missed Rachel's wedding.  Thanks you guys who have told me about it.  I really wish I could have been there and it's great to hear about everything going on back home.

Oh yeah, I should mention that the highlight of the week of school was definitely our cultural night.  Every two weeks or so, one of the stairways provides dessert from a specific country and does a skit about that culture.  My stairway chose to do Scotland, so I led the skit by dressing up as William Wallace, full on with a massive wig and the braveheart blue facepaint, plus an improvised kilt.  I did the freedom speech in the skit and everybody got a kick out of it (probably also out of the improvised kilt almost falling off when we danced around at the end of the skit).