The End

Welcome to the very last entry for this journal! I've been mulling it over the last week or so and decided this was the right way to go. I've felt less and less like coming here and writing about the events of my life, it just hasn't seemed necessary. In the past it was a valuable tool helping me make sense of the chaos, something that doesn't seem to be part of my life anymore. I'm not saying my life is perfect right now or that I won't ever make changes to my goals and plans, but I am at the stage where I can make sense of all my moods. I can easily tell when I'm being overwhelmed or anxious about something and I know the right steps to take at that point. In effect, I am now normal and healthy...well about as normal and healthy as I ever could be.

Here's my current situation. I'm continuing my work at Amnesty International, I'll be heading up the arts activism group which will be a continuation of the ARTillery Festival I helped run at the end of last year. I'll be recruiting volunteers to help use the arts to raise awareness about human rights issues. Currently I am the only member of this group, unless Carmen decides she wants to be involved. But once I've advertised it among the Amnesty channels it should be pretty easy to get more volunteers. We're starting off by attending two concerts in February, with Flannelette playing The Hi-Fi Bar on the 11th and ARTillery Festival headliners The Secret Whisper playing The Zoo on the 24th. Will be attempting to do one or two of these sort of events per month with local Brisbane bands and perhaps even international acts too.

Obviously this won't be the only thing we'll be doing through the group, I just don't want to go into full detail right now. I've signed on for three courses at UQ and will be continuing my Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. Everyone says that university is a lot easier when you have an idea about what you want to achieve by the end of it. Well I guess I'll find out as I now have a very clear idea of what I want to do in my life. I've become a member of the Amnesty UQ group and will be meeting with them next week some time. I'll be helping out with the O-Week stall trying to get more volunteers to the group. I'm supposedly also going to be sent over to other universities to try and encourage people to start new Amnesty groups on campus. That'll be interesting.

Oh and I'll still be working at the petrol station. I know it sounds like a lot, but I think I'm ready for it. I proved last year that I could handle working casually as well as the very time consuming work that I was doing at Amnesty. I'm going to be pretty busy, but I really believe I can handle it. I am keeping a close eye on things and the moment I feel like I'm taking too much on I take a step back. I'll be off my meds in about two months from now. Just waiting until my current prescription card runs out and I'm done.

Well that pretty much sums things up. It's been a grea...it's been a journey these past 8 years that I've kept this site going, so that means the entire period of my twenties thus far. Wow, I'm really tempted to go back to start and have a read through. Not right now though. I'll leave this post up for a week and then I'll replace it with a single post explaining what this journal was about and a link to the beginning. I just want to say thank you to anyone that has kept up with this journal over the years and if you've just finished reading through it you're a fucking trooper, ha ha. That's it for me, I might start other writing projects in the future and have them on this site. But for now I'm going to start living without that nagging feeling at the back of my head that I need to write for the first time in nearly a decade. FREEEEEEEDDDDDOOOOOOMMM!!!!

Andy Scott

Woodford Day 03

Apparently I didn't save my draft from before, that's a shame. It's 9:30 at night, I'm on a camping chair outside the Amnesty tent, listening to some jazz from a nearby tent. I've decided to camp in the marquee tonight and see if that's nicer. It also means I can hang out at the stall for longer and try and get some more petitions going.

Had a moment of rage earlier, one of those moment where you briefly lose faith. The tipping point a woman who annoyed by our asking her to sign retorted with 'I didn't come to a festival to sign petitions', I had to leave for a short while after that.

It's hard to comprehend that a festival very closely based on the 1960s flower power counterculture can have such uncaring people. "would you like to support women's rights" "no thank you"... Amazing the amount of women that say "no thanks". But I've also met so many passionate people, some much more disheartened than I and I took the opportunity to try and raise their optimism which in turn did the same for me. I've spent a good few hours today just having conversations with people, some in the know and others that hadn't a clue but wanted to know more.

The amount of young people stopping by has been heartwarming, even all the really young kids. I didn't even know what a petition was at their age. We're up to 526 petitions over two days which is the most I've ever seen in my 5 month stay at Amnesty.

My aim is to get that number to 1,500. We had one amazing woman that took a stack of cards and went into the street and started going up to heaps of people and leading them to our tent. We're not allowed to do that, but I wasn't about to stop her. We decided that's exactly what we're going to do on the last day, so even (worst case scenario) we're kicked out, it's the last day and shouldn't matter.

Gotye must've finished, a lot of people just started walking past. I should get back to it. Night all.

Andy Scott

Woodford Day 02

Not the worst night of sleep ever, but there was room for improvement, no room for my feet though. Tent is just a smidgen too small, even Carmen had to sleep diagonally in her tent. We bought the same tent as each other. Well technically Carmen copied me. Heh. Took half an hour to an hour to find the Amnesty tent, we're across from a bakery. Ooh the temptations.

I'm not in activist mode just yet, figure I'll let everybody have their breakfast first. And I'm a little tired myself...

Time lapse! I'm now back in bed, the background noise is of five different stages trying to outdo one another. There is nothing nice about camping. It's both boiling and then freezing, I'm itchy and cramped, it smells of wet clothes, there's probably spiders in with me and definitely mosquitoes. Oh and the cold showers...

But the festival makes it worth it because it was majorly enjoyable and I cannot wait to get back to it tomorrow. We ended up with 321 signatures for our Egyptian equality campaign. Almost double what we got for the Harvest Festival. Met so many people too, gonna have met everyone at the festival by the end of this.

Should sleep, must remember to update throughout the day tomorrow. Probably won't. Heh.

Andy Scott

ARTillery Follow-up & Woodford Day 01

So it's been two weeks, what can I say I've been very lazy. I've been taking it fairly easy the last fortnight, destressing after the craziness of organizing ARTillery. I didn't end up being really worried when we were setting up on Thursday and Friday the 8th and 9th. We'd done all the hard work and just had to push everything in the right direction.

Hate to do this but I'm going to cut this short and summarize the help out of it. I'm in a tent at Woodford right now and I want to sleep. The weekend was a great success, we ended up with 160 or so the first night. The place was packed with peoples, very exciting. Teri and I gave speeches, mine informal, hers tugged on my heart strings.

Rained a lot for the rest of the weekend so there were much less peoples. It was supposedly one of the best events Amnesty QLD has ever done, I'm very pleased with that. They said that they want me to stay on board and hope I can do more events in the future.

I certainly will! I've decided to re-enter the academic world. Good thing my enrollment hadn't expired. I'll be doing two subjects this semester and will be working closely with the UQ Amnesty group.

I'll be at Woodford for the next week campaigning for women's rights in Egypt. But it's pretty much a vacation. Man there's a lot of loud people around here... I do have earplugs.

Sorry this was so short, just felt like I should post something but wasn't really in the mood. Well that's it then.

Andy Scott

Fatigue and Adrenalin.

Just one day to go and I was probably a tad optimistic about how ready we were. Doesn't help that work needs me to come in this morning, the guy they're letting go is being let go earlier than planned. Ah wells I'll be done by midday and then can race over to te Amnesty office to help out there.

I've got to finalize the specifics for the musicians today, it can be really difficult to just get an answer to some questions. We had to get a marquee to keep the event at at a certain level of awesomeness, we have a lot riding on that courtyard. Otherwise it's pretty much just a gallery room and it'd be hard to engage people in there.

We're doing volunteer training today as well. Everyone needs to be fluent in the campaigns, but also their roles for the weekend. Then we're gonna head off to West End, the City and the Valley to hand out the remainder of the business cards.

Oh and I'm getting a tattoo today, was getting it Tuesday but that was just a stupid idea. Fortunately they were able to shift it to this afternoon. Hope I'm not too woozy for the remainder of the day. Heh. Man, I need sleep. Can't remember my last day off, I've lost count. I'm also working five days next week for the first time, not going to make that a regular thing, they just really need my help right now.

I'm thinking from this experience whether I really want to get into a management/coordinator position again. I know it'll all be worth it once we open to tomorrow, I don't regret being a part of this. But I miss having spare time, i won't say I miss my life, because this is also a very cool life. I just don't enjoy this level of busyness. Or maybe I do deep down... I'll find out when it's over and if feel bored.

Yeah, I'll probably want to do something else. Ha ha. Urgh. Just blanked out for a few minutes. I shouldn't make it sound like I'm miserable. I get to open a fucking art exhibition tomorrow, who could have seen that coming even six months ago, not I. I'm now very well known in the QLD Amnesty community and have several prospects lined up for 2012. I have it good and I'm doing great things.

That seems a good point to end on, I'll be writing again tomorrow from the exhibition at different intervals and then will upload at the end of the day. Fingers crossed time. Love you all.

Andy Scott