She sighs and runs a hand through her hair, eyebrows pulled in tight, nose all tucked up, a blank page before her. She’s tugging at her brain, trying to coax the words out. The strands of hair that prance about her eyes know she’s fighting a losing battle against the more interesting hustle and bustle of the cafe. There are grand words inside her that won’t settle into a simple sentence and thus evade her pen altogether. The page is waiting impatiently for the essay that’s due in 24, no 23.5hrs, or perhaps it’s the apology she can’t say face to face, a declaration of love, a sketch pad held by uninspired hands. Her eyes glance briefly to the side then they wander up the wall and eventually come to rest on the lost and forlorn bicycle outside, hanging obscurely from a tree.
Have you ever watched a smile move across a crowd? From the corners of the professor’s mouth a cheeky grin escapes into the room, a lame joke, the students groan and sigh. But the smile is persistent, slowly it forces its way onto each face, one by one, in a way that briefly says “Psst! You know you wanna!” It’s a brief moment between the ruffling of papers and the flicker of the powerpoint in which I suddenly realise I’m in a room full of people. But it doesn’t matter how I try or what the lecturer has to say, it’s the boy in the green cap that commands my attention. I force my eyes back onto the page, across the room and out of the window but soon enough they’ve returned to survey his scruffy black hair. There’s a strange lightness to his expression that attracts my gaze. He doesn’t bother to write anything down, in fact he doesn’t seem to have bothered with paper at all, instead he stares attentively at the lecturer, absorbing every word. I feel like he should be writing, why isn’t he taking notes? I wish he would write, then perhaps I could concentrate. Perhaps he’s day dreaming, humming the tune of his new song in his head, he couldn’t possibly be listening could he?
If someone smells horrible, dirty and unsavoury you lean away from them, choose the seat on the other side of the train, pray they get off at the next station and take their scent with them. Such people don’t endear my heart, a reflex action shouts get-away-from-that-smell and I have very little sympathy for wether it’s their fault or not they smell like fish. But when the train glides to a halt and the doors wrench open, fresh air surges into the carriage bringing new passengers and different smells. A suit and briefcase sits down in front of me and the train seems quickly flooded by his after shave. It’s not the heavy smell of an acne faced boy who went crazy with the rexona, but the smell of class, of clean-shaven-next-to-godliness, the very essence of the metropolitan man. Was it his girlfriend or his mother who picked that for him? Maybe it was his father. Certainly he was raised to tuck in his shirt and clean beneath his fingernails by a dignified man, a connoisseur of fine smells. The woman next to him sniffs and then sneezes; she must be allergic to him. What’s more likely, I decide, is that he recently turned 30, and the first of many expensive gifts from his soon to be wife was this head turning aroma. He smoothes his hair down and reaches into his pocket, producing a purple and pink notebook and I reconsider, perhaps it was his boyfriend...
She’s leaving and I’m tempted to follow her, shadow her quiet, meandering gait. Sit next to her on the bus and strike up idle conversation, comment on the weather, the bus system, her furrowed brow. She thrusts her pen into her pocket and ditches the blank paper into the bin as she storms past. Its pale lines have defied her. The loose strands of hair bob jubilantly.
If it’s possible to fall in love with a passing stranger, I must have done it a million times. They are strangers just passing by and only in my day dreams do I go and sit by them, only in my day dreams do they take me by the hand and lead me away.
I am a connoisseur of faces, smiles, frowns and stories, a convicted people-watcher, chronicler of passing strangers.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
One more day in the life of a pessimist
I started the day soaking wet, spent a lot of the day damp and cold and the rest sticky and uncomfortable. I got a worse mark than I excepted on an assignment, unknowingly wrote my notes across a piece of paper that was torn through the middle, discovered my notebook had been open to where the large words “semen as a national resource” were written for an entire tutorial, cursed the fact that the library was full of strangely eager students again (its week 5 for goodness sake!) got a persistent blister from my new shoes and then got absolutely drenched by father sky all over again.
This is the pattern, you see, of negativity, that my life, my thoughts and ultimately this blog seems to be following. I’m depressed then confused, I’m lost and directionless, I wonder what it all means and poke fun at the emptiness, complain this went wrong and that went wrong and declare this, these revolutionary words, are what I’ll do - one day - when I discover I’m capable of anything and from deep inside me an amazingly talented person emerges. Blahblahblah, blogblogblog, there she goes again, just another day in the life of this committed pessimist.
Except it wasn’t. The day neither dragged nor raced. It rained and I got saturated, drenched at nearly mythic proportions. I smiled, I laughed, I breathed the good air.
Rain isn’t pessimistic, it’s hopeful. It’s an integral part of the circle of life, it draws fresh sprouts from barren earth, recovers the life from the charred remains of bush, cleans dusty cars in parking lots, brings children out to play, paints rainbows across the sky and makes tiny patches of blue sky seem more bluer and beautiful than ever.
And yet rain makes people angry, grumpy, wet and damp, depressed and dreary.
I like rain. I even love rain. I like the way the sky gets fatter and fatter until it finally bursts torrents of water from its big grey belly. I love watching it get hotter and greyer and hotter until it’s unbearably hot and grey and the clouds finally stop teasing and let the cool water come down. I revel in days when I awake snuggled in my bed, my cold pink nose sticking out just far enough to smell the rain coming down and eagerly anticipate those cold days when the wind whips through the city bringing gushes of leaves, rubbish and eventually, good old rain.
Sure rain can be angry; it treats you like a fish and then expects you to smile at some ridiculous rainbow. It stings your face, freezes your hands and finds a way under even the toughest of coats. Sometimes it might rain and rain for so long or with such intensity that it fills rivers and streets until the cars and houses are washed away. It ruin’s picnics, wet’s dry washing, seeps through shoes, makes roads slippery underfoot and altogether gets in the way of things.
It’s falling just to make you late, it aims only to drench you, it exists purely to make you cold and damp.
And yet I don’t wait for the sun to come out for life to be beautiful again, I love watching the rain.
Perhaps it’s just because, like all committed pessimists, when the storm clouds roll in, when the rain falls heavily, the sun sets or the pounding thunder claps boom, a certain optimist inside me smiles.
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.....
This is the pattern, you see, of negativity, that my life, my thoughts and ultimately this blog seems to be following. I’m depressed then confused, I’m lost and directionless, I wonder what it all means and poke fun at the emptiness, complain this went wrong and that went wrong and declare this, these revolutionary words, are what I’ll do - one day - when I discover I’m capable of anything and from deep inside me an amazingly talented person emerges. Blahblahblah, blogblogblog, there she goes again, just another day in the life of this committed pessimist.
Except it wasn’t. The day neither dragged nor raced. It rained and I got saturated, drenched at nearly mythic proportions. I smiled, I laughed, I breathed the good air.
Rain isn’t pessimistic, it’s hopeful. It’s an integral part of the circle of life, it draws fresh sprouts from barren earth, recovers the life from the charred remains of bush, cleans dusty cars in parking lots, brings children out to play, paints rainbows across the sky and makes tiny patches of blue sky seem more bluer and beautiful than ever.
And yet rain makes people angry, grumpy, wet and damp, depressed and dreary.
I like rain. I even love rain. I like the way the sky gets fatter and fatter until it finally bursts torrents of water from its big grey belly. I love watching it get hotter and greyer and hotter until it’s unbearably hot and grey and the clouds finally stop teasing and let the cool water come down. I revel in days when I awake snuggled in my bed, my cold pink nose sticking out just far enough to smell the rain coming down and eagerly anticipate those cold days when the wind whips through the city bringing gushes of leaves, rubbish and eventually, good old rain.
Sure rain can be angry; it treats you like a fish and then expects you to smile at some ridiculous rainbow. It stings your face, freezes your hands and finds a way under even the toughest of coats. Sometimes it might rain and rain for so long or with such intensity that it fills rivers and streets until the cars and houses are washed away. It ruin’s picnics, wet’s dry washing, seeps through shoes, makes roads slippery underfoot and altogether gets in the way of things.
It’s falling just to make you late, it aims only to drench you, it exists purely to make you cold and damp.
And yet I don’t wait for the sun to come out for life to be beautiful again, I love watching the rain.
Perhaps it’s just because, like all committed pessimists, when the storm clouds roll in, when the rain falls heavily, the sun sets or the pounding thunder claps boom, a certain optimist inside me smiles.
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.....
Monday, March 9, 2009
Why early modern European studies are not good for anything except really long titles that go on and on and are entirely irrelevant to this blog.
This blogger is back... yes that’s right, its uni semester again and as my reading list begins to take the shape of the formidably high Alps, Yellow Betty and I have made a speedy return to the online world for more metaphorical adventures and meandering rants...
February: It came, it saw, I blinked and missed it.
March: seems to have arrived before its time.
This week has brought many questions and very few decisions upon my doorstep, and while I’m sure that’s entirely Saturn’s fault, I’ve tried to avoid blaming the cosmos and concentrate on making grand omg-last-semester-at-uni-what-now life plans. In between tutorials and sandwiches I’ve been thinking a lot, about the horrors that turning 21 will bring, wether Bella should have chosen Jacob or Edward and what on earth I should do next semester. Eventually I got to thinking that thinking wasn’t getting me anywhere, and so I sat down to take a long hard look at myself and in a moment, an epiphany!
“My hair looks utterly ridiculous.” I said aloud.
There just seems to be something completely unwinnable about the war I’m waging on my daggy ginger hair. I’m more than accustomed to the catchcry ‘ranga’, though I’ve always been more of a strawberry blonde, but age and wisdom seems to have turned my hair a much darker orangish-tinge, and quite frankly, I’m not happy about it. The temptation to drop a dash of blonde in and hope for the best has been teasing me for quite some time, but my (incredibly rational) fear of morphing into just another pretentious peroxide babe twists my stomach into tight knots whenever the idea becomes too advanced.
Neither, I decided, would it be a good idea to dye it an indescribable brownish black, lest my chequered pants and black shirt confuse me for some teenager-emo or worse...
Since it seems I’m doomed to remain a red head, I decided to breathe some life into my short-almost-bob with a ground breaking new style, something with the sexiness of the messy rockstar look but with class, a difference. Trying to pick the correct hair gel/cream/spray from the plethora of products available is something you either need a degree for, or a lot of luck. In the end, “Instant Rockstar”, for that casual ‘i just got out of bed look’. was my chosen hair-revolution. As it turns out, it looks more like you’ve been asleep for longer than Sleeping Beauty and woken up the Wicked Witch of the West, and so I decided Instant Bird’s Nest, was just a little to scene for me. But still, my luck did not improve. I soon discovered that gel makes it greasy, spray kills my brain cells, there’s a reason only boys use soap, bubblegum is a mistake and Beeswax gel seems to favour the floppy-spike look. In fact, it plain and simple sits the best when its completely and utterly dirty.
Running my hand through my hair to make it stick up and then patting it down again to make it lie flat it dawned on me that if I actually knew what I wanted, I’d be able to decide what to do... and here I was thinking I was talking about my hair.
The plan? Let’s just say the prognosis is pending (while I wait for Mercury to piss off.)
***
In the beginning, there was January. Nobody really remembers.February: It came, it saw, I blinked and missed it.
March: seems to have arrived before its time.
This week has brought many questions and very few decisions upon my doorstep, and while I’m sure that’s entirely Saturn’s fault, I’ve tried to avoid blaming the cosmos and concentrate on making grand omg-last-semester-at-uni-what-now life plans. In between tutorials and sandwiches I’ve been thinking a lot, about the horrors that turning 21 will bring, wether Bella should have chosen Jacob or Edward and what on earth I should do next semester. Eventually I got to thinking that thinking wasn’t getting me anywhere, and so I sat down to take a long hard look at myself and in a moment, an epiphany!
“My hair looks utterly ridiculous.” I said aloud.
There just seems to be something completely unwinnable about the war I’m waging on my daggy ginger hair. I’m more than accustomed to the catchcry ‘ranga’, though I’ve always been more of a strawberry blonde, but age and wisdom seems to have turned my hair a much darker orangish-tinge, and quite frankly, I’m not happy about it. The temptation to drop a dash of blonde in and hope for the best has been teasing me for quite some time, but my (incredibly rational) fear of morphing into just another pretentious peroxide babe twists my stomach into tight knots whenever the idea becomes too advanced.
Neither, I decided, would it be a good idea to dye it an indescribable brownish black, lest my chequered pants and black shirt confuse me for some teenager-emo or worse...
Since it seems I’m doomed to remain a red head, I decided to breathe some life into my short-almost-bob with a ground breaking new style, something with the sexiness of the messy rockstar look but with class, a difference. Trying to pick the correct hair gel/cream/spray from the plethora of products available is something you either need a degree for, or a lot of luck. In the end, “Instant Rockstar”, for that casual ‘i just got out of bed look’. was my chosen hair-revolution. As it turns out, it looks more like you’ve been asleep for longer than Sleeping Beauty and woken up the Wicked Witch of the West, and so I decided Instant Bird’s Nest, was just a little to scene for me. But still, my luck did not improve. I soon discovered that gel makes it greasy, spray kills my brain cells, there’s a reason only boys use soap, bubblegum is a mistake and Beeswax gel seems to favour the floppy-spike look. In fact, it plain and simple sits the best when its completely and utterly dirty.
Running my hand through my hair to make it stick up and then patting it down again to make it lie flat it dawned on me that if I actually knew what I wanted, I’d be able to decide what to do... and here I was thinking I was talking about my hair.
The plan? Let’s just say the prognosis is pending (while I wait for Mercury to piss off.)
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