A successful day, a new concept..

Today was like a blue moon, a day so rare in my life they are practically mythical.. a day for getting things done. It seems once I decided on one thing and stopped the wheel of perpetual deliberation that has been spinning out of control, I got busy with that to-do list and just got on with things for once. Its refreshing.

So refreshing, in fact, that I started to get a little creative, and decided that rather than getting that essay done.. I could try out something new.

And so here we are, trying something a little bit refreshing in this blog - Minute Movies. This is my directorial debut, taking Paint to a whole new level, for the first ( and possibly the last) film lasting under a minute, on The Adventures of YellowBetty and I...

... tell me what you think :)

Notebookery

The moon was a great big biscuit, hanging out in a purple sky and I was two eyes, two legs and one persistent, pumping heart, streaming through the evening air with Yellow Betty. Purple jeans, yellow headphones, blue backpack, green shoes and defiant grin. The universe conspired and its truths were revealed to me.

I learnt everything I know from movies. And books. And trains. I know a lot of things. But I only know these things that I know. Come to think of it, there is so much I don’t know. Here are some things I know.

Drinking chocolate milk makes your hair brown, coke makes you gay, but eating crusts never curled anyone’s hair.

The number of men carrying flowers on trains increases exponentially on the eve of mother’s day.

Trees liked to be climbed, it’s like getting tickled. They weep when you cut them because they can’t run away. So they rain down leaves instead.

The best way to see the world is through a kalidescope, it tells no lies.

Everywhere we look there are white lines. Close your eyes, open your mind, your heart will follow.

We are tiny. Absolutely miniscule. The universe is huge. Like huuuggggeee. But some days I feel almost as huge.

God is just one way of accepting your powerlessness. It doesn’t work. I’m sorry.

I would be suicidal if I believed in heaven.

The reasons life is worth living are manifested in brief but ecstatic moments of sheer happiness.
You have to trawl through a lot of average and below average and downright horrid days, but it’s always worth it. Always.

The music of my heart sings a song no one’s ever heard in its entirety. I firmly believe that if anyone ever does, I will spontaneously combust. I hope to disprove this hypothesis.

This world will probably turn me into a bitter old spinster before I’ve ever been young and happily spouting love and sonnets like a teenage teapot.

My hands are at ease in my pockets with their lint, pen lids and sand. They get cold on their own.

My love of clashing colours is probably just my intellectual rationale for bad fashion. Deal with it.

The theory of all things has been overtheorised. My brain has a theory, it’s called post-post-post theory.

I avoid contradictions like the plaque. But they are never far away. They haunt me. They want my soul.

Birds. Their offences against me are various, but I hate them because they can fly away, flutter high in the air with no destination at all.

I have no idea where a single amazing idea begins. It’s more amazing to see where it ends up.

I want love to win. I want to change the world. I want peace and I think we can all agree here.

If I can’t break the mould, I can at least jab at the edges. And learn to blast down walls.

These are my whispers against the roar of the world; they are the facts of life... or they are the random scribbling in my notebook... I can’t exactly remember which.

While I was walking, I dreamt of 100 other places to be

I wander the streets of Rome at night. Running my hand along the wall, walking blindly through its maze like streets. From the Pantheon to St Pauls Cathedral, a million different answers to the simple question why? The Vatican states its power, I weave in and out of the large stone pillars, turn my back on it and follow the river out of Rome, in search of vineyards, gladiators and truth.

In the early morning light I clamber along the large, smooth rocks. Battered by years of storms, wind and the waves of the Indian Ocean, they dot the cost from point to point and create pools of life to be explored. It’s so quiet and calm that anything seems possible, miles away from cities and towns, a hiker steadily moving forward.

A great big expanse of land lies before me, its dusty and red and spans north for days and days. My car and I zoom along, quick as possible into the north, where the trees are sparse and the sky is wide.

Up stair after stair after stair, around and around in a tight coil, up an old, rickety ladder, through a tiny hole and here I am, finally at the highest point of the old Dutch country church. From the turret of its castle like tower I can see the Amstel river winding its way along, at home in its banks.

Oh to be on the road. To be swaggering about the countryside, backpack and boots, sky and road, endless open road. To follow a whim and freely move, wherever, whenever, whyever I please. To carry only the necessities, some cash and hope. A great big burning hope, a hope fed by the open road and its elusive possibilities. The lonely traveller is not nearly as lonely as a lone soul in a big city. A sense of purpose guides his feet, he’s seeing the world. He finds faith like a religious person, in life itself. He dabbles in the intoxicating illusion of moving forward, passes life by rather than watching it pass him by, leaves and returns the same, but changed.

I wander the streets of my suburb dreaming I am in 100 different faraway places, and wondering all the while, what’s so wrong with being here?

de-stress, re-address

I’m frreee to do what I want, any old time... except right now, coz I have 1001 other things to do, and this is how that song, really should have gone..

I need to chill out for a second or I’m going to implode. I feel cramped, blocked, deaf, confused, bewildered, like a rabbit in the headlights or a guinea pig high on pot. I feel like if I was asked which was up and which was down, I’d say, “Martha ofcourse.” The little Brain Function Operator inside my head has sat down on his little stool and buried his head in his overworked hands. He’s down to the bone, empty, alone, over it, in need of a really good cheeseburger. And maybe some fries.

Whilst on the train between young female passenger A reading Twilight and young female passenger B reading Twilight, I found myself fretting once again about the state of that essay I handed in 2 days ago that was worth 45% and will probably earn me about half of that, if not less. It was more or less utter shite, it annoys me because I feel I let myself down and it wasn’t through lack of trying. It’s such a great weight in my head that I have trouble lifting my arms to do anything other than support my throbbing head.

It was full steam ahead into total meltdown, and my poor little Brain Function Operator let go of the steering wheel, turned off the engine and called the trade union. No one should have to work 24-7.

It’s completely ridiculous how caught up I get about an essay, which doesn’t even register on the radar in the scheme of things. Yesterday, it turned me into a giant ball of stress. In a few weeks when I get it back, I’ll be angry at myself, and maybe even my lecturer because it couldn’t possibly be my fault. When I get my grade at the end of the semester, I may sigh and mourn that I didn’t try harder. In four months time, chances are I won’t even remember it at all.

Neither God nor the moon cares how much of a total cock up that essay was, so how did I come to put so much importance on something that has next to no bearing on my life at all? That essay doesn’t feed me, clothe me or shelter me. It doesn’t keep me sane, in fact it does very much the opposite, and it never tried to make me happy. Writing it was like pulling teeth, tearing hair out strand by strand, physically abusing my Brain Function Operator until he couldn’t take it anymore. I got so pissed off that I couldn’t think clearly, and the sole reason for that was because I was stressing about 10 pieces of paper and some sad, contrived words.

It was time to repair the engine.

Step 1: Consume chocolate.

I don’t know what people did in the days before this fine, sugary goodness became available to the masses in such great quantities as it is today. I think we should force feed chocolate to angry people until they smile. I think we should pay the people who produce it more than we pay the companies who sell it too, but for today, I’m just thankful for its existence.

Step 2: Hit the Beach.

In the scheme of the great blue vast ocean, I am nothing. I stand on the windy beach, waste deep in the waves and let its power slap against me. The wind chills me to the core and the water offers an icy warm retreat on this fine autumn day. The salt seeps into the very core of me, stinging, healing. I spread my arms wide above my head and let the waves pull me wherever they should like. If they ate me up today all that would be left of me was a scooter standing in the carpark, 10 pages of crappy essay and this blog. I wouldn’t be sad.

Step 3: Lie in the sun.

I remember now what’s important. Breathing. It kind of takes precedence over everything else. Smiling, laughing, learning, loving, being... writing good essays doesn’t feature.

The rush of air into my brain wakes my Brain Function Operator. “Finnnallly!” he says, as he flicks the switch. It’s all systems go again.

With a hop, skip and a jump I dance my way down the beach, because it’s important and that essay was not.

Dear brain – control yourself!

Today we are going on a journey, into the deepest darkest realms of my mind, where strange green cats eat laptop shaped lollipops and birds flap past singing... well perhaps that would be too much information...

Beneath my short reddish hair, far beyond my cranium, disguised by my smiling, friendly exterior and deceptive green eyes, a large, grey, spongy matter resides, commonly referred to as the devil. I mean my brain. For the most part it functions tolerably well, between it, my spinal cord and my legs, I have come quite far in this life. On occasion the stringy neurons within it spark witty comments and intelligent ideas. Most of the time however I just thank god that nobody else has ever heard what’s going on within its preposterous grey walls.

Lately, I’ve been having a hard time telling it who is boss. It likes to take hold of catchy song lyrics and replay them over and over and over again until I’m about ready to clobber it over the head in search of the off switch, before realising, its head is my head, and that would hurt.

Unfortunately it’s not just song lyrics that get stuck on repeat, but words. Words that sound weird, roll off the tongue lazily or that I just can’t remember for the life of me what they mean... This morning as the words I was trying to power-absorb from the 100 pages that I didn’t read for my tutorial so I’d be able to survive the 45 minutes to follow with a not-quite-blank look on my face flew meaninglessly past my eyes, “quasi-incestuous” jumped off the page at me.

I’m sorry what?!

QUASI-INCESTUOUS the page yelled at me. Fair enough, I thought, closed the book and tried to tune in to what was being said, but my brain simply wouldn’t let the word go. Quaasssiii-incestuous it hummed. Quasi-incestuuuuoouuussss, it droned. Quasi.Quasi. Quasi. Incest.u.ous it sung. Quasi-incestuous, it questioned, quasi-incestuous, it affirmed.

That horrible word, denoting all manner of dodgy relationships, simply would not leave my brain. I left the tutorial and still it skipped about my brain, engineering no thought-lines, simply sitting there.

Excuse me brain, couldn’t you pick something else to go over and over and over?

Quasi-incestuous is all it had to say for itself. And then a snippet of conservation sneaks into my brain, Hippopotamus. Excuse me? Hippopotamus sounds like bottommoss. Hip-hip-hipppooo-pot-ur-maus goes my brain.

I don’t know much about Freud and I never met the guy, personally I’m sure I wouldn’t like him or his libido, and I don’t want anything to do with his couch. (I have a couch phobia, but that is not ultimately the subject of this blog.) And I certainly would not want to hear what he has to say about my brain. I’m not repressing anything, in fact I’m quite certain there are no hippopotamuses inside me trying to get out and yet it seems to be capable of some extraordinarily odd fantasies. It relishes in inappropriate thoughts and pretty much goes... wherever it likes.

Picture this, its 2.14pm. The room is stuffy and quiet, dominated by the sound of the deliberate clunk of the clock. It’s not even a tick tock, it just goes clunk, very matter-of-fact. Joan of Arc is sitting in the corner of the room cleaning her sword. She readjusts her helmet, leans against the wall and sighs, like nothing has ever been as dull as this class. The professor responds to know-it-alls statement and hms and hars her way through a monologue... when suddenly Joan of Arc, leaps upon the table, strides from end to end yelling in French before dropping to her knees and looking to the ceiling, searching fitfully for god. Then with an abrupt and violent swing, she thrusts her sword through the professors heart.

Have you ever had a thought that made you physically stop and go, God I hope nobody heard that! You cast your eyes warily about you, checking people’s faces to see if they heard it. In the moments that ensue, you open the little door above your temple, clamper delicately outside of yourself and look back at the fool that appears to be you. You stride up to said fool, tap it on the nose and demand it get a grip on itself.

It doesn’t answer of course, only sings that same old song it’s been singing over and over all day ...

“I think I’m going to need some therapy, oh babe I hope you got a PhD....”

I maintain I am not responsible for what goes on in my head. Blame the neurons, the grey matter, the devil itself resides there, Freud would love him.

A story of not doing: Dusty countryside, cups of tea, Thoreau and poo.

A day begins with purpose. The sun rises; it knows what it’s doing. My alarm clock sounds the call; it knows what it’s doing. My pillows disappear off the edge of the bed; they know it’s time to get up. My to-do list rests heavily on my desk, whistling while it waits. If I get up early, I’ll have the whole day to tackle it.

I roll out of bed and Baloo, the loveable lab, has his nose at the flywire and expectation in his eyes. Are we gonna, are we gonna are we gonna go walk now? Walk now? He seems to be demanding, “Walk Boo?” I ask, and watch him begin to jump excitedly. Outside in the park the birds are busy about their lives, aside from the odd dog-walker; it’s just Baloo, me and their squawks. Out of the park and onto the street towards home is about when Baloo decides it’s time for his morning poop. He seems most inspired by a busy street corner and even though he tries to hide behind a bush, its clear what he’s up to. Meanwhile I’m busy deciding whether I should pretend I don’t have a plastic bag to pick it up, so I don’t have to feel its warm mushiness between my hand and the plastic so early in the day. Scanning around there doesn’t appear to be anyone watching, and it’s not on the footpath, so who’ll care if it stays there... but the threatening glare of the lady in her dressing gown watering her garden inspires me to be a good citizen, and so the day begins with carrying poo.

Over toast and tea I switch my computer on, I have an hour before I head out for the day, time to fit in some research but first I’ll just check facebook, read the news headlines, browse One Sentence and contemplate the face reflected in my teacup until it’s time to go.

I hit the road in dads old car with my good friend Ruth, for a brief sojourn into the dusty countryside. We cruise past colour leeched fields, white gums, red earth, scorched bush and dead looking, dusty, dry hills. After an hour or two we arrive at the Benedictine Christian monastery of New Norcia, a place where monolithic stone colonial buildings arise suddenly on each side of the highway and tell the story of Christian missionaries, monks, nuns, boarding schools and many, many chapels. It seems somewhat of a ghost town, where bizarrely castle like buildings dominate the Australian farming landscape. But at the same time it’s a working monastery, a place of contemplation and God. We wander its dusty, leaf strewn pathways learning its stories and the day passes steadily by. Perhaps I think, as we turn our noses direction home again driving back over the hills as the sun sets, taking the productive day with it, I should be a monk.

***

A day begins with purpose. The sun rises as it should, the bird’s sing, my alarm clock demands, my legs follow and my to-do list coughs and splutters in the corner. Breakfast is the search for my tea cup, eating the last of my cereal and strolling to the shops. I approach my desk and find it bathed in the early morning sun, which shows the dust manifested on my papers and book shelf. Industriously I take charge of the shambles of my room and dust, fold and shuffle the mess away.

Eventually I sit down at the computer and open a word document, the search engines and my notes, read the essay question and follow the links to something unrelated. The Pope and his anti-condom mumbo jumbo again, Kevin Rudd and world politics, Miley Cyrus and her innocence....I stumble across an online version of Walking by Henry David Thoreau, which is kind of about the environment, so I gleefully decide its almost relevant to my question on conservation and begin to read

“ In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice -- take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance-which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbours wild men, not tame ones...”

I make another cup of tea, black with sugar for a change, and momentarily mourn the time I’ve wasted, and the mountain of research in front of me. What is it that makes it so much easier to do the non-pressing things first? Its Thoreau’s fault, the monks did it, you’ve had too much damn tea! I think and shake my head at myself. I march purposefully back to my computer, push my essay question away and begin to type furiously... and the day begins with the story of not doing, once again.

“ Live free, child of the mist...”

{Thanks to Ruth for the awesome photography skills}

One moment in time

When you’re not going somewhere, eating something, sleeping, waiting for something, reading something, writing something, making something, talking to someone, scratching something, holding something, using something or otherwise doing something – what are you doing?

Do you cease to exist?

I like to cease to exist at least once a day. When my head is so full of words they fall out of my mouth in a jumble, my smile’s broken and my soul hurts, I stop. I cease to exist.

First I let the world go. I unclench my hands from the worries they carry and let all the parts of me become stone, simultaneously light as a feather and solid as a tree. Coil by coil the pressure unwinds itself from my body, until my skin begins to tingle.

I don’t dream of other worlds, far off places and fantasy universes, for they are nothing but torture. While you are far away, strolling Eden and brimming with love, the universe aligns and everything is beautiful, but eventually you wake up, the day dream ends. The world forces itself upon you and reality reveals an infinite list of what you do not and cannot have, a play by play recording of what you cannot do. The systematic destruction of your fantasy world leaves you at best nostalgic and at worst, empty. And so I don’t follow my thoughts, I let them run free from me, they explode out amongst the trees and I watch them blow far, far away over the rooftops.

The world here is busy. I feel the grass brush against me, the breeze swallows me up, the clouds roll past. Life swirls around me as I swim in an ocean of its delights. I float above myself, apart from myself, all the while within myself. Birds squawk, their wings clap overhead, there is the sound of a football, car engine, sprinkler, dogs barking, light footsteps, meandering conversation and pale laughs. The sun is setting over suburbia, the clouds a magnificent pink, the horizon a distant orange, and I have ceased to exist.

Close your eyes and walk. Take an experiment in living, investigate its core. Breathe. Sit and feel the air against your eyelashes. Feel life move around you. Stand in the middle of a crowded street and let it pass you by.

Now.

It can’t wait. What could matter more?

Be.

{In the interests of transparency it must be noted that the author was attacked by mosquitoes whilst researching this piece.}