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.}

The anonymous confessions of a convicted people-watcher and chronicler of passing strangers.

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.

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.....

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...

***

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.)

If you can't find me here, I'm nowhere to be found.

This blogger is now insured, packed, blogged and will be found meandering around Australia and New Zealand for the next month, if her plans aren't otherwise derailed... until next time friends;)