Against Pollution

In the summer of 2008-2009 my family travelled around the South island of New Zealand. It was my first trip overseas, and despite NZ being considered our closest neighboring country in terms of distance and culture, I was enthralled by everything I discovered that was ‘different’ there. There were little things, like different shaped coins, no Mcflurry’s at McDonalds and no fines if you were caught without a bus ticket. There were medium sized things, like the fabulous wood and metal jungle gym playgrounds in every town, the kind that disappeared in favour of unexciting plastic ones a good ten years ago in Melbourne. But the most obviously different thing was the natural environment.

The South Island is Lord of the Rings country; majestic, ancient and unyielding. What I considered as mountains in Australia dwarfed in comparison with the steep, snow-topped alps that cropped up like giant guardians of the land that our car wound and dipped through. The terrain was so present, so demanding of attention that it seemed to become everything. It was as though vision had surpassed all my other senses, which stood to the side to augment the experience of drinking, and almost drowning in, the beauty of the landscape. Ridiculous as it may sound, sometime in the second week I found myself staring down at my dinner plate, and instead of seeing peas, pumpkin and mashed potato, I saw a birdseye view of snow capped mountains, earthy rocks and green forest. That was when I felt I understood the phrase imprinted on the mind. My external environment had found its way into my inner world. The mountains and rivers and cliff-faces seemed as much inside of me as outside.

On the way home from Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne, I was startled at how flat and ordinary my environment had suddenly become. Deprived of the commanding beauty of the South Island, my insides felt instantly parched. A strange melancholy crept over me that first night back. I felt as though something that I had grasped hold of was fading quickly from sight. The sense of openness that had bloomed inside of me while overseas disappeared like water down a drain. New Zealand became photos I printed at Kmart, a few funny and a few semi-disastrous anecdotes, archived safely in the back of my mind as a place I’d like to go again someday.

Tonight I was driving across the valley from Yarra Glen to Coldstream when I glanced to my right across the vineyards and caught my breath at the technicoloured display in the sky. The purples, pinks and oranges of dusk lit up the bluish-grey clouds, and the modest Yarra Valley mountains rose to meet them. I glanced several times from the view to the road and back, trying to assimilate the radiance of the sky with the dullness of the world below. It reminded me of the way I’d felt when first struck by the beauty of New Zealand, and I started musing over the idea of vision.

I’ve been watching True Blood lately and in episode 5 of season one (yes, I’m aware I’m behind), Lafayette offers Jason the chance to “see the world with new eyes” by taking a drop of Vampire Blood. He says “V will open up your mind to everything you’ve been missing around you… let it take you deep. Follow it. Soak it in. See the world with new eyes.”

Vampire Blood might not be on the market around the Yarra Valley, but lately I’ve been talking with people about the idea of looking at the world through different sets of ‘glasses’. In my cynical, ‘disbelief’ glasses, life is meaningless, and the pain I’ve been experiencing lately makes no sense, has no greater purpose. Yet I had a couple of days a few weeks ago when I put on my ‘belief” glasses, or my ‘greater purpose or meaning’ glasses.  I can only say that I really did see the world through a new lens. My life; memories, feelings, thoughts and experiences, which had been scattered like bits of a torn-up map, seemed to piece themselves at least precariously together. In those few days, everything that had been floating disjointedly in my mind converged into some kind of coherent whole. I couldn’t see that ‘whole’ in it’s entirety, but it was there, surely and inescapably, reflecting back at me like the mountains on the island. I felt a sense of oneness and of sureness. I saw a partial explanation rather than no explanation at all. Instead of feeling like a helpless bunch of atoms trapped in the time-space continuum, I felt the loose threads of my tapestry moving on towards some kind of completion.

The people I shared that experience with advised me to ‘follow it’. And while I attempted to, my ‘trip’ seemed to gradually taper off.  I’m not sure at what point I ditched my ‘belief’ glasses, perhaps it was in a moment when I doubted the accuracy of my vision, or when I caught sight of the other people wearing the same glasses and decided that they didn’t suit me after all. But everything I’d seen so vividly and fully became only a few days later a memory, a postcard from another place and time. So today I started thinking: how do we trust the accuracy of our vision? How does a trip over seas, or a few days with a different set of glasses lose its veracity so soon?

I don’t have any answers, but something that came back to me was these verses from two songs by The Mountain Goats:

“Love love is gonna lead you by the hand
Into a white and soundless place
Now we see this
As in a mirror dimly
Then we shall see each other
Face to face”

- The Mountain Goats, Love Love Love.

“When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are”

The Mountain Goats, Against Pollution.

Both the songs rip off parts of the Bible, and I have to say those are the parts that I like. Before my ‘belief’ glasses fell off, I was sure I could see at least “in a mirror dimly” rather than not at all. I could see some kind of greater meaning and purpose in my life. Then I started to wonder if I just wanted to see something, grasp at some larger meaning that probably wasn’t there at all.

Yet isn’t my experience of seeing with my ‘belief’ glasses the same as my experience in New Zealand? Just because NZ has been reduced to 3x5inch matte photographs now doesn’t mean the experience of actually being there doesn’t exist in a greater reality. So maybe it’s the same with belief, with seeing the existence of a bigger picture beyond our current experience. You may have to fly there, or put on your glasses to see it, but perhaps it is waiting for you, if you’re willing to follow it.

New Zealand

'in a mirror dimly'

Photoshop and fun

Ava Gardner collage I had some fun making for Bron’s 17th Birthday. Bless photoshop.

So. Here’s an excerpt from a blog I wrote a month ago but decided not to post:

“Only two more semester now. Approximately 30 more hours of sitting, self-loathing, in tute’s full of wankers telling me exactly how not to write like a cliche, until everyone is writing in the same unique way.

When will the end come? Months of finding myself in Readings or Borders, compelled every time to march straight to the new journals and anthologies, opening them to the contents page in order to scan it for names that I recognise. Yes, I know that name. Had a tute with him last semester. She was at that seminar last month. That guy won that competition recently.

Then it’s  over to the classics stand, eyes scrutinizing the spines with their famous names. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster. Time to inject myself with some more 20^th century fiction. Stuff myself with it till I’m suffocating with words, sentences, clauses, possessive nouns, cliches and idioms.

I write less and less. I sit down once a week at the most, with laptop or pen and paper. It makes no difference; the weight of the entire literary world bears down on my shoulders, heavier and heavier each time. Instinctively, the pen freezes. The words are wrong. They are all wrong. I haven’t used enough of the five senses. My adjectives are overdone, the sentiments that should be there haven’t come out right. I am not clear, not precise. I didn’t put the reader there. They were not with me. They were not there. That metaphor was over used, that entire sentence over worked. Fuck. I say it silently under my breath several times. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

So. Self-indulgent, yes. But my little *creative writing crisis* reached it’s frenzied  summit about a month ago, when I realised that I had actually started to hate the one thing that I’ve always loved.  Nothing about it was fun anymore. It was all academic. All about failure, criticism, insecurity, bogus academia, prestige (or lack of it), some ridiculous idea of what it means to be “a writer”.

Worst of all I couldn’t tell whether it was outside forces (Melbourne Uni, Creative Writing tutorials etc) that were doing this to me, or whether in fact I was doing it to myself. Putting myself in this world, this literary, academic world has truly taken all the joy out of writing for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Melbourne Uni. Subjects like Sex and Gender have fundamentally changed the way I see the world. Today I walked home contemplating the ideas that I had this time four or five years ago, thinking about the person I was then, and I found that I couldn’t recognize myself. I pitied that person, that person trapped in a confining belief system that was destroying them. By some kind of grace I’ve been allowed to go to Uni and do a degree that has literally opened me up from the inside out.  Why let anything destroy that?

I know that I can write. I can write fiction when I want to, but I can also write damn good essays. I can think critically and put those thoughts down on paper with clarity. Feeling unworthy because I throw a few too many adjectives in now and then is ludicrous.

When I was fourteen or fifteen my brother and I spent our school holidays making up stories together. One he started he called the “Island Series” was about a community of families that lived on this little imaginary farming island. We drew maps and pictures of all the characters and the way that they all related to each-other (cousins, best friends, lovers, etc). Then we’d each pick a character and start writing from their perspective. We’d make up plots and each take on the parts of different characters. We planned for these things to be novels, and I think they often got to about ten or fifteen thousand words or so before we got tired of them and started something else.

Writing those stories was one of my absolute favorite things to do on winter school holidays. Getting lost in an imaginary world which I could create and explore through writing had to be about the greatest way I could think to spend my time. From primary school til late high school writing these long, novel-esque narratives about familys and relationships and adventures was all I did.

At uni that all went away. Instead of writing more, I wrote less. Each semester I’ve painstakingly churned out 3,000 words for assessment, something I wouldn’t have thought twice about as a kid. Sure, perhaps the quality was considerably better. After all,  I had to think about language and sentence structure and originality in a way I never had before. At first, although it was hugely challenging, it was invigorating. I learned about different styles of writing, different avenues I could take. But somewhere in the last three years the love of creating things with language fell by the wayside, got lost in the angst of making sure I was writing the “right” way.

One of my saviors in the last few weeks was reading Mr Paul’s self-published book “Trippa”. Sure, it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t always get the grammar right. But it was fun. Clever, honest, page-turning. It reminded me of how much fun writing is. It was enough to make me realise that there’s a fundamental joy in writing that I want back.  Like, if I could somehow shed this infected skin of academia and all the insecurities that have slowly grown all over it,  if I could get back to that pure, raw excitement and love of writing I had when Chris and I wrote the Island stories, then something great could happen. I could do this, for real. Take the stuff I’ve learned and mix it in with the fun. Leave all the other stuff behind.

I’ve decided that I won’t be doing honours next year. And in all likelihood it won’t be in creative writing if I ever do. For now, all that pressure has to go. I’m not going to worry about publishing, about any of that shit. But over the semester break I’m going to spend some rainy days drawing up character profiles and dreaming up fantastical plots. And maybe then the words will start coming back.

outside, something was happening to her tricycle!

Well, I’ve passed nearly seven weeks weeks of study-less winter, with a meagre income and sporadic employment. I have to say, it’s been an interesting time of self-reflection. I found that if I have a competent ability to commit to a task and complete it, and that I can go crazy within 48 hours of being house-bound.

I’m going to take a moment to revel in my “J-ness”, and since I set out a list of things I planned to accomplish at the beginning of my break, I’ll now share with the internet world the fruits of my labour.

The first two weeks of break were spent with early grey tea, a blanket and a weekly cheap-tuesday trip to Video Ezy. Some of the films that I ticked off my list included (in alphabetical order and with my out of five star rating)

American Beauty * * *

All about Eve * * *

Being John Malcovitch * *

The Breakfast Club * * * *

The Birds * * * * *

Children of men * * *

Crash * * *

Edward Scissorhands * * *

Fight Club * * * * *

Lost in Translation * * *

Notes on a scandal * * * *

Terminator * * *

Terminator II * * * *

After reaching saturation point, I turned to books as my source of entertainment, and completed:

A Passage To India by E.M Forster, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and am currently halfway through Monkey Grip by Helen Garner. I’ve also invested in Goodreads, which I highly recommend since it gave me hours of boredom-free pleasure: adding books, writing reviews and perusing other people’s bookshelves.

As for writing, I feel happy with the fact that I spent several days writing without being under duress. I also sent a couple of things to competitions and publishers which was a big psychological leap.

But it was other creative endeavours that turned out to be my saviour from insanity. Jumping up in the deacoupaging league, I collaged a coffee table!

I also got even more crafty with Orsh and on an unexpected spotlight trip bought the materials to make this little baby!

As promised, gardening, sewing and cooking were also undertaken. I took up two hems, cleared our courtyard (two days of raking) and Stu planted some corriander in pots, which will hopefully be the beginning of a flourishing herb garden (or at least… a semi-productive herb garden).

During the much awaited Sibling holiday, which was every bit as fun as anticipated, I also had some amazing op-shop buys which I have to share! I believe this notched up my vintageness by about 25 percent. Even better, it’s given me an idea on an article I plan to write about Vintage fashion, Nostalgia in Postmodern theory (yes, it sounds uber-wanky, but I figure at the very least my obsession with the retro must have some explanation waiting to be uncovered).

Tomorrow I leave for four days to the nation’s capital, where I’ll be attending a Deep Sea themed party (costume yet to be configured) and going skiing at Threadbo, my first ever trip to the slopes. Following that, Uni commences bright and early 1pm Monday afternoon, with a Film Noir introductory lecture. Joy!

a drop in the stitch

Yesterday, in accordance with my productive intentions for the holidays, I decided to drag out my housemate Leah’s old sewing machine. I was planning to attempt hemming and altering various pieces of ill-fitting clothing I’ve bought at markets and op-shops over the last couple of months. I envisoned myself transforming these drab granny frocks into fabulous vintage pieces with a few raised hemlines, pleats and darts. The first thing to do was to thread the sewing machine, which was different from the one my Nan taught me to use several years ago when lived with us. After flipping the machine around and around again to try and figure out exactly which way the thread should go, Tamsin came downstairs and noticed me googling “how to thread Bernina 730 sewing machine”. With the careless ease that only Tamsin has, she looped my thread through the appropriate metal protrusions in about three seconds and went on her merry way.

With that done, I realised I had no idea how to go about taking up a hem. Overlocking? Invisible thread? Blind-hem stitch? In search of an easy answer I took off down to the Cambwerwell sewing centre on Burke Road. I must have walked past hundreds of times and never given it a second glance, but it was a beacon of light waiting to receive me in yesterdays bleak winter fog. Well, not quite actually. It was clear from the second I walked in that this was a place for serious sewers. The whole shop screamed “hardcore”, from the dozens of digital new-fangled machines blinking and purring at me to the stern middle aged assistant in a cable knit jumper that approached me upon entry.
“Can I help you?” The mandatory greeting.
“Yes, hi. I’m wanting to alter a couple of dresses and take up some hem’s on my old sewing machine and I was just wondering how to – er – go about that.”
A knowing sigh emanated from the man I addressed. Tall, slightly stooped with white hair—he was probably in his late sixties with a lifetime of tailoring and dressmaking experience, and little patience for clueless teenagers who thought stiching up material would be as easy as breathing.
“What kind of machine do you have?”
“It’s uh, a B…
“Bernina?”
“Yes. Bernina 730.” I said with releif.
He laughed. “God. That certainly is an old one.”
“It has about twenty different stich settings, I’m not sure if there’s a blind hemming one.”
Another sigh. “Do you know how to take up a hem?” He looked at me with the patronizing expression I sometimes use on mother’s who insist on buying their children shoes three sizes too big. Do you have any idea what on earth you’re doing? Was the unmistakable subtext.
“Er- well, not exactly, I haven’t sewn in a while.” That was certainly clear enough.
He proceeded to demonstrate with a scrap of material how to go about doing a blind hem.
“It’s all in the fold.” Another tired glance. “You need to have a bit of experience though. It’s not something you can just do in five seconds.”
I nodded. “Ok, well, maybe I can just do an ordinary hem with invisible stiching. Do you have that transparent thread stuff?”
“We do, but it’s not invisible. You can still see it on dark colours. And as you can see, it’s a bit of money.” He held up the product, a reel of thread that looked to me exactly like fishing line, with a price sticker reading $13.99. I balked.
“Maybe I’ll just get coloured thread to match the clothes instead.” I said.
He nodded. “Yes, but you’ll need the material to match the colours up.”
“Oh, I’ve got the colours in my head,” I answered confidently.
The old man laughed again. “You must have a pretty good head.”
I stumbled over some rolls of material and frantically scanned the rows of brightly coloured poly-cotton, quickly realising my head definitely wasn’t good enough to pick the right shade of grey for the tunic I had planned to start with.
“It’s best to get a shade darker than the garment, so it blends in.” A voice offered helpfully from behind me. The woman at the counter, glasses hanging from a yellowing gold chain, peered over at me.
“Thanks.” I snatched at a couple of charcoal reels. Turning to pay, I realised I had no cash and that this place would probably have a ten dollar eftpos minimum. At the counter, I spied some vintage-looking tins about the size of a deck of playing cards.
“These are gorgeous!” I opened one up. “Wow, they’ve got everything inside.” A tiny pair of scissors, a thimble, tape measure, pins, a stich ripper, needles and thread fit neatly inside.
“Oh, they’re just little emergency kits.” The woman commented, “to keep in your handbag.
“Oh. So they’re not for proper sewing.”
She chuckled. “Definitely not. You certainly need something more substantial than that.”
I put the tin down, deciding the twenty dollar investment for an insubstantial emergency kit wasn’t what I was there for. I settled on a five dollar pin-cushion that looked like a tomato to make up the rest of the money.
“Thanks a lot.” I nodded at the man who has assisted me, who was now deep in conversation with another customer discussing the merits of the new Singer machine, and hurried out into the cold street.

Back at home, I stuck a few odd pins sitting on my windowsill into the tomato and put it next to my corkboard. The reels of cotton I bought are still in the bottom of my bag somewhere. Who needs shorter hems in winter anyway?

wonderful month ahead

  Ah, holidays!

Now that assessment is over and I can breathe again, I plan to get a bit better at blogging regularly (or for the next six weeks, at least)….

To start off, these are some collages I made out of the 1950s film star albums I got ages ago. This one didn’t work because of the wrong type of glue which made the paper bubble (boo) but with a bit of photoshopping, I thought it was worth posting anyway. 

The next one isn’t quite as pretty (perhaps it is the absence of Grace Kelly?) but so far I haven’t destroyed it with poor lacquering attempts.

My glorious holiday plans   include:

* Making more collages

* Attempting to alter numerous market/op-shop items on the sewing machine (hems, darts, pleats… I can totally do it!) 

 * Learning how to operate my lovely new Nikon SLR Camera (ditto)

* Getting a significant way through the epic movie list I have compiled with the help of Stuart, Jonathan, IMDB and various other recommendations. The list includes all of the films of Alfred Hitchcock and most of the films of David Lynch, plus a significant contribution from the action genre which I seem to have missed out on… much fun to be had! 

* Reading Lolita and The Sound and the Fury (I just finished A passage to India today, which I won’t comment on now because it deserves a whole post to itself…)

* The upcoming sibling holiday, which will include numerous games of Balderdash and probably much reminiscing, plus a trip to Canberra to see boyfriends friends (maybe my friends? hopefully). 

* A whole new level of domestic enquiry…  (just wait and see!)

“why didn’t you tell me about summer reading?”

So, my little brother – (all schoolies’d out for the time being) has begun his attempt at the mammoth of all literature feats; Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Meanwhile, all  I have managed to do since Uni finished is flick through several issues of Frankie, a few old copies of Inpress and the  occasional Kmart Catalogue.

December the 12th means that I have two and a half months of study free summer ahead of me and no reason not to brush up on my literature knowledge.  There are several wonderful bookshops in Melbourne that I have discovered lately:

1. Borders – Yes, the mother of all bookstores, especially now that I have subscribed to the wonderful email discount voucher system (you really should too!) Borders has everything you could want, except for Voiceworks magazine, which is really annoying because I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Anyone know where it sells??

2. Brunswick Bound – Sydney road’s awesome bookshop full of art, music and film books and more…

3. The Paperback Bookshop – Bourke St, CBD, between Spring and Exhibition – A good collection of everything….

4. Mary Martin Bookshop / Cafe also on Bourke St: they don’t have everything but alot of popular titles and they are extremely cheap! I knocked a total of 5 Christmas presents of my list in this place alone!

5. Minotaur – I haven’t yet been to but apparantly its the number one destination for all you graphic novel fans out there.

6. Readings Bookshop - Lygon Street, also has a window advertising places to live if you are homeless but can pay rent

If there are any gems that I am missing out on please inform me!!

Anyway, my current list of books for this summer (mainly gleaned from the reading list of the Literature subject I failed in first semester) are as follows:

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte: I found this on my sisters year 11 book list and decided it was there for the taking until next year. So far, so good.

On The Road – Jack Kerouac: Have heard mixed reviews; angry feminists claiming the flight from domesticity demonises women as the domestic oppressors of masculine freedom ( I believe the term ‘momism’ is somehow related). Alternatively, it is Seth Cohen and Marissa Cooper’s favourite book in season 1 of the OC “This could very well be the first stop on the pancake tour of North America”.

The Catcher in the rye – JD Salinger: Ok, I simply HAVE to know what all the fuss is about! And what the hell the title means.

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulker: I started this earlier in the year and now really want to know what happens.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young man – James Joyce: Ditto. We discussed it in the tute which I hadn’t done the reading for, but sounds like a topical book regarding the oppression of the church into people’s personal lives.

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath: I read a piece of ‘creative journalism’ on Plath as well as looking briefly at her in feminist theory and I really want to read this for the sake of having read it if I am honest.

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway: I really love Hemingway’s short stories and I feel like I should pay him the respect of reading at least this one short book…

The Davinci Code – Dan Brown: Ok, don’t laugh! Again I’m about five years behind the stampede. But  it’s something I feel I should have read…

On Green Dolphin Street – Sebastian Faulks: I got this at an awesome secondhand bookshop on Glenferrie Road after reading Birdsong and I haven’t managed to get into it thus far, but Faulks will surely draw me in with time!

Monkey Grip – Helen Garner: Ok, I have had an urge to read this book ALL YEAR and everytime, something better has managed to come along and beckon me away. But I will get to it, at some point.

White Teeth – Zadie Smith: For curiosities sake, really.

I realise this is a highly ambitious list for two and a half months worth of well spent time. Realistically, if I get through four of these I think I’ll be doing well. So, if anyone reading this blog has read any of the above books and can elaborate on my ignorant pre-concieved ideas of them, please do! Did you like them? Are they worth the effort? Any I should eliminate? If not, what else do you suggest? Please share!

all up the seething coast

Eleven days since my last entry. Not because I’ve had nothing to say. My head has been pounding with thoughts, running all through the night til those thoughts manifested themselves in bizarre dreams. In the last week I dreamed that I married my best friend from high school. I dreamed I was pregnant. I dreamed my dad, my mum and I had a screaming match about the aforementioned two events. I dreamed I saw about a hundred versions of my dog Oscar running down the street, but they had blue, grey, white and black coats. I dreamed I forgot to open the shop at Eastland and slept all day. In the end I decided to run away.

Sometimes you get to the end of your rope unexpectedly. On Sunday, I thought I had a good couple of metres to go, but the frayed ends suddenly began to unravel in my hands. I realised I needed to escape. I had to get far away from the frantic pace of the metropolis, from crawling up and down the traffic-ridden highway to work in every stifling, enclosed zoo of consumerism in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. In those regulated climates, it doesn’t matter what the weather is outside because it’s always a mild t-shirt and jeans appropriate 21 degrees. You substitute daylight for fluorescent lights, fresh air for the air-con, real nourishment for the food court, genuine conversation for a mass-produced ‘how’s your day been?’ and in the end you start to rot away. You close your eyes at night and all you can see are a thousand shoe-boxes in numerical order. That’s when you realise you’ve forgotten what it looks like outside.

Later, when the crawling traffic begins to fall away behind you, and you begin to pass fence posts and cows and hills, you start to feel it. A little more alive, that is. Like perhaps somewhere, there still does exist a space where you can breathe a little more freely, where you can think, or you can choose not to think. Where you can just be, for a little while.

So I went to the beach, because I wanted to remember what it felt like to be free. I let the salty breeze tangle my hair and I didn’t worry about what it looked like. I lay on the damp sand, reading about the Source and the Divine and the Great Mother.

I rolled up my jeans and stuck my feet in the icy waves, feeling the cold ache right to my bones. I thought about the tides and the moon pulling them back and forth and how the earth both changes and remains the same and will always be that way. I hopped across rocks in my sneakers and didn’t worry when I splashed into unexpected rock pools; miniature universes of their own.

I picked up crabs and watched them scuttle across the palm of my hand. Slowly, my imagination began to crawl out of it’s hiding place. I turned to face the wind with arms outstretched and imagined it ripping me off my feet and carrying me away. I smiled at the feeling of sand still stuck between my toes at the end of the day; a souvenir, a clue.

I stood at the cliff’s edge, I looked across the ocean out to the horizon and let myself be enveloped in its endlessness. I contemplated my own insignificance in the grand scheme. I thought about religion and power and organised societyand suddenly they just seemed like words instead of great hulking oppressors. They seemed, for an instant, unreal, laughable; non-existent except to those who choose give validation to them. All at once I realised I could choose not to. I thought about the rules people make for themselves, rules they try to impose on others through creating a God made in their own image. A discourse that has been constructed to control and demean, to destroy souls. I thought about the way nature quietly resists that control. I thought about how it both comforts and threatens humanity. I thought about how mostly, humanity threatens it. Enough thinking.

I drove home along the coast road, listening to The Cranberries and watching the wind tearing and buffeting the bushes outside. I heard it’s faint roar outside and felt safe in the snug warm space of my car.

* * *

“I am piecing a potion to combat your poison.

She is risen. She is risen.

boys I said

She

is

Risen.”

 

sometimes i wish i was more like mariella…

My head is just above the surface. Any second now the water will creep up my neck, lap against my chin, splash into my mouth, and I will begin to choke, splutter, cough… before I am helplessly consumed, I cannot see, and my head dissapears beneath a dark murky lake. The surface will look smooth and undisturbed. But underneath I will be fighting for my life, against the sea monsters that have come to life beneath, and the reeds that swirl up with a force of their own and snag my ankles, dragging me down, down, down…

Ok enough of the fantasy. The essays are coming to get me, you get it. 14,ooo words. 1,500 of them later I can safely say … its a hopeless case. Especially since I spent last night writing a paper to present on the wrong topic on the wrong week. Oops, sorry, idiot, your presenting NEXT week. But good on you for doing this weeks reading too. And writing a paper on it, now you might actually be able to contribute to class discussions. For once. GAH.

I wish I was Rory Gilmore right now. I’d bury myself alive in the library until it was all magically done. It’s just an impossible task, despite my fascination with everything I’m studying. I want to sit back and immerse myself in ‘the good the true and the beautiful’ …. oh … the sublime as well, without having to write a thesis on it.

And I keep finding things to do, like go visit my sister, go to my friends gigs, go on a date or three, go shopping on brunswick street, check facebook, talk on msn, write a blog, get depressed about how I’m not going to splendour in the grass, that i can’t afford to go to the gold coast with Bec, Katie, Doug and James and visit Tom (but I just might anyway), and that I’m in serious danger of being ‘a smoker’ (yeeeck). There is also the lovely distraction of dreaming about what I’m going to do in semester break: learn french, learn the violin, read 1001 books to read before you die, watch every episode of scrubs, run a marathon, paint a mural, go on a mission trip to cambodia….. you get the idea.