NaBloPoMo One Week Strong! :) I don’t want to be one of those annoying people who celebrate tiny “anniversaries” especially when what I’m celebrating is seven days worth of posting on my personal blog, but I’m really enjoying NaBloPoMo, so stop being a party pooper, party pooper.
I’ve been blogging for ages. Those of you that read often and also comment often have probably known me since 05, when I was 17 and first started. Mid last year, I stopped. And then this year I got into new platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. So much has happened since 05, especially to my writing.
It’s too premature to say this maybe, but going to university to take a creative arts degree with a focus on creative writing subjects is something I am so grateful I chose to do. I don’t want to call it “the best decision” of my life (premature) but how can something that has taught me so much and made me grow so much be far from being the best?
This year especially, with pretty much two-thirds of my coursework was focused on writing. I took Writing Fiction and Writing Poetry for English and Advanced Screenwriting and Screen Criticism for Cinema. All workshop subjects, all with heavy writing workloads. I started regularly reading other people’s work and commenting on them. During term I had a regular schedule that dictated how often I had to produce work and what kind of work. It was enforced and not growing from personal discipline, which is my ultimate goal, but I did it and I liked it and I did more “serious” writing than I ever have in my life, I think.
And then towards the end of the year, a longtime blog friend turned friend friend, Jon rounded up a bunch of us and talked about collaboratively writing a blog about television. It’s called Cold Openings, and it’s still in its infancy (also I’ve been putting my sub-par material on there for now – whoops) but I’ve started to realize what a great avenue it could be to sharpen my writing and extend the things I learnt from Screen Criticism, which I haven’t doing as much as I have with my poetry this semester.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is being a funny writer. I know and read so many funny writers online, it can get to the point where I get a bit scared to strike out and see if I’m any good at being a funny writer too? Or, let me rephrase that, whether I can write funny too. Sometimes in an effort to catch up, I tend to slip into cheater mode and plagiarize other people’s jokes and styles. That’s something I want to work on not doing, or at least not doing so lazily.
This has been a very long-winded way of saying that I’m glad I decided to do NBPM this year not least because I think it’s come at a fruitful, potential-filled time of my writing, and I’m glad that I’m doing it with fellow enthusiastic bloggers and awesome people. I probably wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t too! So thanks you guys! You’re great and I’m glad that we’re all in this together!
/sap
One of my projects at work is transcribing the film River’s Edge so that we can perhaps look at the script and adapt a play out of the story. My boss had planned to do this earlier in the year but it fell through. Still, I managed to watch the movie when the idea of turning the film into a play was buzzing about. It has Keanu Reeves, whose character is like a more serious and brooding Ted from Bill and Ted. It also has Crispin Glover who speaks in the strangest way in this film and it is great. It’s like a mix of Southern twang and Valley-speak? I can’t properly describe it.
The movie is about how this high school kid John kills his girlfriend Jamie and then shows off about it by bringing his friends down to the river’s edge where the body is to gawp at the corpse. Despite this none of his friends say or do anything about it even though most of them, specifically Matt (Keanu) and Clarissa (Ione Skye) are really against the whole thing. Layne (Crispin) is the ringleader of the whole gang and he’s adamant that they protect John and cover up the murder. Even when John (who’s kind of emotionally vacant) kind of washes his hands of the whole thing, Layne is the one who goes and dumps the body in the river to hide it. There’s also this sort of sub-story of Matt’s little brother Tim who is the first person you see in the whole movie, and also the first witness because he sees John sit by Jamie’s body while he was chucking his sister’s doll in the river. What does Tim do after that? He follows John to the liquor store, shoplifts a beer when John gets carded and doesn’t have ID, and gets in the car with John – who he just saw with a dead body – to go to the house of this crazy drug dealer, Feck whose only companion is a blow-up doll Ellie. Tim is really destructive and seems to idealize people like John and Layne and shares this warped sense of loyalty and friendship similar to the latter. He’s the most interesting character of the bunch, but he’s a 12 year old brat whose voice still hasn’t broken, so I automatically hate him (and he can’t even make up for it by being related to my best friend and/or being awesome at High School Musical 3 the video game).
Watching the film again, and at such a slow pace because I have to pay attention to the lines being spoken then pause it to type it down (those of you who have read my blog for a really long time in its former incarnations may remember that I used to take on transcribing jobs for a market research company so I’d have to listen to focus groups of moms or men or young ladies talk about toilet cleaner, baby formula, vitamins or lotion and then type down everything they say) has been a really weird experience. When I first watched the movie I liked it, thought it was interesting, but I thought it was just on this side of decent. Nothing super special. But now really delving into it, listening to what’s being said and looking more closely at how the characters communicate it really reveals the small ironies I didn’t catch the first time. For example, Matt -
Ok, before we go anywhere can I just say that throughout this whole movie pretty much, this guy wears a spray painted denim jacket with the sleeves torn off OVER a leather jacket. Yeah. Let that sink in. Two jackets. Denim over leather. Spray painted. The 80’s, you guys.
Anyway, Matt has a sister Kim, who Tim tortures constantly, most recently by throwing her doll Missy into the river. Matt’s a pretty caring big brother to Kim (and horrible to Tim, who kind of deserves it but is also still a kid) and he’s the only one who helps her with Missy’s “funeral”. She tells him she “can’t get the damn thing [a makeshift cross] to stand up” and he tells her “Don’t cuss” and his very next line, in reaction to Layne driving up to the house, is “Shit.” And then later he fights with his mom’s boyfriend Jim (Kim, Tim and Jim, are you keeping track? His mom’s name is Shim. Ha, no it’s not) and they’re hurling all sorts of abuse at each other and Kim overhears. Then there’s the scene where Layne and John are driving back from Layne having just dumped Jamie’s body and John grudgingly buying him a six pack for the favour. They’re driving back to John’s house and Layne goes off at him about how he just doesn’t care, and how people like him are why the country is going down the tubes. Not because he casually murdered someone and has shown no hint of remorse, but because he has “no sense of pride, no sense of loyalty, no sense of nothing”. The movie really hinges on the theme of apathy, and how a group of kids can be confronted with human horror and just ignore it. Layne is a real interesting case because he sees the body and he immediately concocts this plan to protect John, who doesn’t even care. He keeps going on about friendship, but throughout the movie you don’t really see that these kids care that much for one another, certainly not take a bullet for each other type of close or anything. And as Clarissa points out, Jamie was their friend too, for just as long as John was. So what about her? And why is Layne so adamant to risk his neck to protect John when he himself is apathetic of his future and seemingly unaware of the deep consequences of his actions?
I think about my group of best friends, and I think what if. What if we were in that movie, and one of us killed someone (in the way John did – deliberately and with his bare hands/and or a chosen instrument) and told the rest of us. How would that pan out? What would we do?
I have no idea what we would do because I’m really not very good at hypothetical situations and I couldn’t even comprehend any of my best friends ever strangling someone to death for “shooting off [their] mouth about [their] dead mother”. Also, oh snap, because of the dead mother angle, I would be John in this scenario. John is another interesting character because his intentions are so opaque. He lives with this woman named “Aunto”, which I’m not sure is a derivative of Aunt or someone’s nickname. He has this gentle giant side to him especially when he was serving Aunto her dinner and promising to read to her. But then when he talks to Feck (who is also mentally off) and they discuss killing (Feck keeps repeating that he killed a girl too, once and that he loved her and that is somehow connected to him shooting her in the head) John casually says things like “I strangled mine” and answering Feck’s question of “Did you love her?” with “Meh, she was okay.”
The more I think about it, the more I think I underestimated the acting in this movie. The actor who plays John – Daniel Roebuck* – gave a really subtle performance that took me a bit of time to appreciate. Keanu Reeves however, is exempt from any or all of my epiphanies about this movie. Did you know that Keanu Reeves is immortal? And even with all that time to hone his acting skills, he’s still Captain Stiff McBoard.
But anyway, I don’t really have a concluding point for this post (I totally typed essay, ha!). I think River’s Edge is a good movie, and I’m looking forward to seeing it on the stage, as well as finish watching it a second time. I’ll leave you with what I think is a super ace screencap from the film I took and titled : Crispin’s Bishface.
You can also a bit of The Twin Jackets over there. Yeesh.
* Guy played Leslie Arntz in Lost. I HATED THAT GUY. I was so glad when he got blown up by dynamite.
So today I’ve been swinging back and forth between two “activities”.
The first is recalling this part of Glee:
Except instead of All By Myself, I’m listening to Inside of Love by Nada Surf and mooning (I forgot that there are two meanings to that word) away in bed.
And then when I get sick of that, I’m watching How I Met Your Mother (I’m almost done with the first season), relating a little too much to Ted but also not because ugh, that guy. So annoying! I’m in it for Marshall (Jason Segel!) and this dude:
In other news, two of my play reviews from the Melbourne Fringe Festival got published in the university newspaper, Rabelais and I finally got a copy.
I'm watching youuuuuuu
You can sort of make out my name above the Attract/Repel photo. I also wrote a longer review of the Yuri Wells show for my drama essay, which was due today and which due to my HIMYM-ing, I only got around to writing and typing up at 10.30, in the office where I am hired to do work that is not my coursework I could have done a month ago! Anyway, it’s handed in and that was my last piece of work for my second year. Everyone I know is updating their Facebook statuses as such and quite a few of my friends are finished with uni for good, so that air of finality seems to have spilled over into everything I do and everything that happens. That is only heightened by the fact that home is so close now (26 days). I can’t believe how close. I’m excited, but in a relieved, tired kind of way? Not that it’s not a good excited! I’m just not jumping up and down. Ouch, my aching replacement hip, etc, etc.
I re-did the standing sandwich board (can it still be called a sandwich board when it is not sandwiching anything?) for Student Theatre and used all sorts of coloured paper. I was supposed to take a picture but I forgot to do it before I clocked out. I’m paranoid some punk ass kids are going to steal it or deface it because it’s so great. If that doesn’t happen (my right pinkie isn’t aching, so it probably isn’t going to happen) I’ll take a picture and show it off tomorrow. I love how most of my job is basically kindergarten level arts and crafts, but I get to use the scissors without supervision, and also sometimes Photoshop! It is the best. This is part of why I think I’d love to be a teacher of small children, and then I remember that I would have to work with small children.
Another thing that’s been happening today is that my glasses are bugging me. The frame isn’t sitting right and is digging into the top of my right ear. I don’t know what it is but I keep having to take them off and sort of bending them and still no dice. I’m going to see the very helpful optometrist on campus tomorrow and get him to fix it, which reminds me today I had my first proper lunch in forever because my pay came in! I went to Charlie’s and got myself a falafel. Now, I’m going to admit something, I didn’t ever really know what went into a falafel. I assumed it involved meat, like a kebab? And when I went to order it, I said chicken falafel, like a dork? Sometimes I just order food I don’t know about and make a fool of myself. And my tastebuds aren’t very perceptive either (I’m not a very prejudiced eater) so even after eating it I wasn’t sure what I had ingested other than my tummy liked it. Now I see it has no meat in it at all (thanks Yahoo answers)! Oh vegetables. If we grind and fry you enough, it’s amazing how much you can sort of pass for meat.
When I type harmonica I think about a) Monica Geller and b) Angie Harmon (I’m not even entirely sure who that is!)
There’s a lot of things I can’t do. Let’s just get that out of the way right here and now. In fact, some people may say that the ratio of things I can’t do to the things I can do is highly skewed to the end of the spectrum that exposes my incompetence. I can’t be sure I got that right, I’m neither good at metaphors (metaphors?) or (nor?) statistical math (statistical math?). ANYWAY. Even though I realize that there are things I can’t do, I also realize that some of those things are still things I want to do and can learn to do.
One such thing is playing the harmonica. I’m not anywhere as musical as I’d like to be. When I was 6, my parents enrolled me in piano class but after a month or so my mom pulled me out because she said I wouldn’t be very good. Well, actually, maybe she pulled me out because we were about to leave for our trip to America and I could be mixing that up with when she pulled me out of swimming class because she said I wouldn’t be very good at it (I really wasn’t) but who cares. The point is that at a very young age, I was musically stunted and could very well have been an amazing musical prodigy but never had the chance. Now I’ve grown too lazy to have to learn all those levels of piano (there’re so many levels! Friends I’ve known since primary school still have piano lessons, what up with that?!) and the harmonica always looked so effortless and breezy to me. Also, you can look both jaunty and upbeat OR brooding and mysteriously dark while playing one. Win win.
So as usual, whenever I have the slightest urge to better myself and push myself into learning something, I take the bold initiative to Google it. Immediately I hit upon harmonica.com. Really, that’s the name of the site! How convenient. I always trust websites whose URLs are so baldly obvious. Check out desk.com, or knitting.com (do not check out underpants.com, which I thought would be silly and possibly tenuously linked to fart jokes but it was not). Not advertising placeholder sites masquerading as helpful how-to sites at all. Anyway, this website actually has articles and stuff on how to play the harmonica. It also has photos of sheet music (instant credibility) and also, strangely enough, sad old men sadly playing their harmonicas.
I thought this was kind of a bummer, but then I thought, “Now, Syar. Don’t jump to conclusions.” My conclusion was that the makers and writers of this website were so eager to promote their site and the harmonica (“An Instrument for Everyone, Everyone Can Play”) that they broke into the homes of unsuspecting elderly man and forced them to wheeze into some harmonicas for what they thought would be an uplifting photo shoot that would yield heartwarming fuzzy brownie points for their site but in fact did the opposite and just made everyone sad. That was my conclusion, but I did not jump to it.
So I kept looking around and lo! I encountered another total bummer. You know how I thought the harmonica would be easy breezy? Well I was dead wrong because what I had missed at the very top of the Harmonica.com website was this little nugget:
“Many thousands of people begin to learn how to play the harmonica every year, but many people give up in frustration.”
WHAT? MANY? How many is many? What are my odds? Frustration?! I did not sign up for frustration.
It was at this point I started getting sleepy (there’s nothing but carbs left in my fridge, Scouts honor, your majesty) and decided I would just stick to being a person that can’t do very much. Maybe one day I’ll look into how hard it would be to master a kazoo.
Disclaimer: Those pictures actually accompany articles about how playing the harmonica can help elderly people who suffer from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or depression, so go figure. I’m a horrible whippersnapper and I hope those old men are content and happy wherever they are.
I’ve been kind of down on myself this whole week, like a mean mean-face meany meany bully and it’s not been the best. Like I would literally stay up at night counting the ways in which I do myself and others wrong. So I figured I’d blog about it, make some use of this negative energy. Or at the very least get it all down somewhere and I can trap it and throw it down a bottomless well, Coraline-style. Out with you, witch, out! Anyway, a list:
1. My eating habits
I got into the habit of not buying proper groceries a month or so a go, just out of sheer broke-ness. And then that grew into laziness (sloth is possibly my biggest sin) and before I knew it, I was eating spaghetti with sauce out of a jar for most lunches and consuming bread by the loaf like some carbo-loading machine. I snack constantly (these biscuits and candy in my sideboard are not doing me any favours, and I should give them away to my floormates or something, but I can’t bring myself to!) I haven’t had a decent piece of fruit or vegetable in a while now and it’s probably the root cause of all the other bad habits I’ve acquired. Don’t worry, moms and faux-moms in the audience, I will be going grocery shopping on Thursday. My pay’s gonna come in and I’ve got a list all made up, filled with so much fruit and veg. I’m also banning all rice and carbs for lunch.
2. My sleeping habits
I just woke up from a nap. It’s 8.30pm. This napping has become less a luxury and an almost scary starter-epilepsy because sometimes at like 4 or 5, I just can’t keep my eyes open. It’s ridiculous! And then at night I can’t sleep, although that’s been going on for a while. Then the next day, now that I have no class, I find myself waking up at noon or sleeping through the snooze alarm 3 hours after the initial alarm. Ridiculous! I need more discipline.
3. My lack of exercise
The combination of 1 + 2 obviously lead to = increased, horribly sense of sludge-like lethargy. Which throws into sharper light the sedentary lifestyle I lead. I tried to do sit-ups yesterday, and it was everything I thought it would be in that it was awful and I thought I would die. It doesn’t help that since my life is now just my room and the office, both of which are 5 minutes from each other (there and back!), I am barely moving. I am basically this thing:
Except without the wisdom and without the expected long life-span.
4. My bad eyesight
At this point, this really isn’t my fault. But I think my new, very thick glasses make it harder for me to be on the computer for very long periods of time, which I shouldn’t be doing anyway, so really I should TAKE THE HINT, SYAR and just not be online or on the computer or straining my eyes. But I do, and then I get a headache, and then I have to take off my glasses and because of my bad eyesight, that means I can’t really do anything for a while, so then I lie down and then we’re back at number 2 and really, I feel like sleeping forever (but not dying).
Ugh, what a bummer of a post and what a bummer of a week and what a bummer of a recent life. I am going to go wash my face, throw away these leftover M&M’s and go for a night walk to make myself feel a little bit better. Out, witch, out!
I just woke up from a doozy of a food nap, and still have not decided once and for all to eat rice in the middle of the day. I’m too Asian, dammit! If staying true to my rice roots means more naps in the afternoon then so be it!
Anyway, before I crashed from all that rice, I had spent a bit of time browsing through this website I just found called Luxirare, documenting some very highbrow and swish food experiments (as well as experiments in fashion, but I didn’t have time to go through those posts because I can’t eat clothes!). The first post I read was about the making of truffle oils and truffle honey and truffle salt. It was Trufflepalooza over there. One of the best things about this blog is just how – and I use this term not to signify it being patronizing or snobby – fancy it is. All the photos documenting the food experiments are orchestrated gorgeously and they use the best, shiniest kitchen tools and props. For example, they actually used Bunsen burners and beakers for the truffle post. Most of the pictures look like food experiments in the year 3010 or something. God, I sound so pedestrian describing it, but anyway, check these photos out:
And what was being made with the syringes and cool looking shiny blue orbs? Yogurt parfait!
Those orbs are actually “self-encased bubbles of caviar that held juice inside”.
Other favourite food experiments include Luxirare potato chips:
Luxirare banana, peanut butter and chocolate sandwich with soy wrappers instead of bread, and made for a bento box:
And for that same bento box, these gorgeous looking jello shots, made as mini cheesy alcoholic drinks (like Sex on the Beach, etc). I am so in love with how these look, even though I don’t drink, I am pretty much slurping these up with my eyes:
Pretty, right?
Now, I don’t want to turn this into a lefty, homo-erotic propaganda hour that those racecar lovin’ wideloads* can’t get into, so as a counterbalance, I’d like to share another kind of amazing food experiment I stumbled upon today.
If you didn’t get my above asterisked reference, go and dose yourself up on some 30 Rock and Liz Lemon and then get back here. Ugh, I hate waiting, so I’ll just summarize: In the first episode of the new season of 30 Rock, the show opened with Jack, Liz, Tracy and Jenna eating at Season 4, the hottest Asian fusion restaurant in New York, where they would be eating what everyone else in America was eating: Cheesy Blasters. What are Cheesy Blasters? I’m glad you asked:
Er, I was glad you asked, but now YouTube won’t embed for me so I’ll just have to transcribe the awesome Cheesy Blasters jingle, as sung by Liz Lemon:
You take a hot dog, stuff it with some Jack cheese, fold it in a pizza, *air guitar* you got Cheesy Blasters! And then the kids say “Thanks Meatcat!” and Meatcat flies away on his, um, skateboard. (the video is here)
This guy made one, and it was delicious. Was there ever any doubt it wouldn’t be? Look at it:
It is what America, and everyone who watches TV shows from America, wants.
I don’t really “celebrate” Halloween, which is stupid, I know. It’s just I’ve never really had the opportunity. Last year, I got invited to a Halloween party, which I went to. It was Tim Burton themed and I went as Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. It was a cheater’s costume cause I just wore a black dress with white stitching through it, torn tights, straightened my hair and put on some eyeshadow. The only time I remember ever dressing up properly, was when I went through American Second Grade (the one year I went to an American school, in America) and it wasn’t even Halloween! It was a special National Reading Day or something, and we were supposed to dress up as “literary” characters. As an 8 year old, I dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood. I remember spending ages with my mom, looking for red tights.
That’s the thing that’s really holding me back I think. Here, my small social circle don’t really celebrate Halloween? And even when they do, they don’t have the same costume sensibilities as I do (if I have any). I know one thing’s for sure, no one I know in Australia (in RL) is going to be dressing up as an Internet meme, and I wish I did know someone who was going to go out wearing the Three Moon Keyboard Cat shirt or something (which also doubles up as a reference to The Office, so wins all around).
But anyway, whatever. None of this stops me from planning my hypothetical Halloween (just as I typed that, I thought “None of this stops me from eating bucketloads of candy until I get sick, which is what Halloween is really about”, and then I remembered that A just got me a bag of M&M’s today!). So here are the people/things I would dress up as, if I did celebrate Halloween.
1. Daria Morgendorffer
Daria is a bad ass. Dressing up as her would be less about the costume and more about the fact that I would be able to get away with having a sour :| face for the whole of Halloween. Also, economically, buying glasses that look like Daria’s would also mean I’d have Harry Potter glasses for my non-Daria days.
2. Wednesday Addams
Let me share with you what I found on Tumblr today:
Again, BAD ASS.
3. Delirium from Sandman
So, Neil Gaiman is another personal hero of mine, and if you guys don’t know, he wrote this amazing graphic novel (which should really be graphic novelS I guess, and I think it was more a comic book, but sophisticated) called Sandman, about Dream, one of the Endless. Dream presided over dreams, obviously and his other 6 siblings that made up the Endless were Destiny, Death (also bad ass), Despair, Desire, Destruction and Delirium.
Obviously, to properly dress up as Delirium, I’d have to if not shave one side of my head, at the very least dye it a rainbow of colours, primarily orange and pink. I might skip the no-bra-under-a-mesh-shirt look, for decency’s sake but I’d also have a mylar fish balloon, a leather jacket and maybe someone to follow me around with colourful and warped speech bubbles. She’s my avatar on Twitter right now. She’s crazy and I love her.
4. Belle from Beauty and the Beast
Anyone who knows me knows that I am Belle. The town weirdo? The girl who loved books? The one with the weird single dad? A story about falling in love with someone beyond their looks? Having hidden virtues and having them dug out by the patience of someone else? Obviously, I am also Beast. But gross, who wants to be Beast?
by Mike Kupka
Also, I’d rather have her Dorothy dress over that yellow puff of a dress, thanks.
5. Coraline (from the film)
Coraline was the first book I ever read by Neil Gaiman, and I loved it so much. I recently watched the movie, and not only is Coraline a bad ass kid (you get over Dakota Fanning voicing her, I did anyway) the fact that it’s a stop motion film by Henry Selick means its got great costume material. Again, I’d have to dye my hair, but a star sweater, rain boots and funky gloves? Possibly even button eyes? Count me in please!
6. Dr. Horrible
Specifically, Dr. Horrible in his red lab coat, after he gets accepted into the Evil League of Evil. I would also have his Freeze Ray. Oh, speaking of Joss Whedon characters…
7. Zoe Washburn
She also has a gun (and is from Firefly, for the uninitiated). And I was kind of hesitant to introduce her to this list (because I think she’s VERY pretty, almost TOO pretty), but whatever, we’re speaking hypothetically here. I’d also want to dress up as…
8. Inara Serra
With Mal attached please.
And that’s my list so far. If you have any suggestions as to what else I should be adding on this list, I’d be more than happy to hear your ideas. Admittedly, this list is probably more “My Personal (Mostly) Female Heroes from Pop Culture”, but you gotta start somewhere. What are you guys dressing up as for Halloween?
On Twitter, @jonmuller (who blogs here), @CoFo13 (who blogs here) and I (I blog…oh wait) were discussing possibly doing NaBloPoMo for November. NaBloPoMo is short for National Blog Posting Month, and is a sibling of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and basically you commit to writing one post a day for a month. The three of us are pretty notorious bloggers, as well as pretty notorious bloggers who slack at blogging. CoFo13 probably can’t be blamed for that, I did put him in Blogger Jail, sooo….
Anyway, today we were talking about it some more, really gearing up for it and I said I was so excited, and thought that we should get badges. Jon picked up that gauntlet and said, any badges made need to involve unicorns. So then I re-picked up the gauntlet, and came up with this:
I am so pumped for November you guys!
I saw this on my Tumblr dashboard not 15 minutes ago. And it feels like a seed that’s burrowed into soil.
On September 20th of this year, I wrote this:
A few weeks ago, in my poetry tutorial, my tutor asked us all to first, write down one place anywhere in the world that we would want to live if we could and second, if we couldn’t live there, where else we would choose to live.
I wrote down New York, and then a question mark. I was the last to present, and after hearing all these lovely pairings of Berlin and Argentina, Japan and Ghana and the firm wish of Australia, Australia I lamented my lack of a second place.
Susan, my tutor, with that great kind smile she has (fyi, I’m kind of in love with her) tells me “Well, you always have to say New York twice”. Which was quaint and great, and I wish it were that simple.
Because the truth is I picked New York because it was the only place I could think of and I actually felt guilty writing it down, like I was half-lying. I don’t even think I would want to live there permanently, because I don’t think I want to live anywhere permanently.
Later she asked us to write one thing that still astonishes us about place, any place. I wrote “how the scenery looks when I rush by it – in a car, in a plane, in a train – and how it shifts as I move (I can never fully appreciate anything standing still)”.
That class was such a shocking one, and it shouldn’t have been 9 am on a Tuesday morning in a classroom overlooking a small square in Glenn college. It was soft and quiet and small, but I left the class repeatedly asking myself “Why am I standing still?” This year. I have done nothing but stand still.
And again, just like my last post, this desire to travel, to move to be anywhere but where I am, it is a desire that is constant, an epiphany with a schedule. Maybe it’s because I genuinely started earning a salary in (fancy) Australian dollars this year, but it feels like if finances can be managed (i.e. if I can now afford to pay for my ridiculous coke bottle glasses on my own [700+ AUD, you guys. Talk about dolla dolla bills]) then what else is stopping me? Why not save up? Why not make plans? Why not dream, and make a move? Jazz is in New York, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind a visit. And honestly, I can’t remember anything else me and my friends have held on to as a dream for as long as we’ve held on to that idea of New York. Why not now, or at the very least, why not soon?
I Googled flights to NY from Melbourne just now. I can get a return flight for a week plus trip for about 1600AUD. I think I could do that, save up that much in a year. And even if I didn’t, even if it all falls through, I would’ve spent the year saving up something close to 1600AUD, and last I checked, there are close to hundreds of places I have not been to.
I am done standing still. I want to start moving!
PS: How good am I being? Getting ready for NaBloPoMo this November, for sure!
