Pastoral in the Past

not much has happened in recent days. i watched Serenity and Spanglish last night, the latter of which was a very pleasant surprise. the script was fantastic, and spectacularly acted. the story was simple and genuine, and managed to become ridiculously romantic without allowing itself to depart from reality.

that aside, the reason i'm posting at all is that i've just uploaded some photos taken at the farm.



here we (harry, sarah, jen and i) are pulling corrugated iron bits out of the ground. there is a mysterious black line across jen and harry, presumably portending their imminent deaths/ the badness of my scanner.











after our half hour of backbreaking labour, we went swimming in the river. it seems kind of rustically charming and whimsical, doesn't it. it was, at the time. i later couldn't sleep for all the peculiar bites on my arms...









which ensured that i was awake while the sun came up. a thick mist had collected in the paddock below, stretched out like a cobweb.
i watched the sun emerge from behind the mountains and sweep it away, all the while listening to Kid A. then i listened to The Waifs' Up All Night. kind of incredibly appropriate.






oh! and i forgot to mention that my cousins and jen and i have started playing music together. harry came over on saturday and we just jammed... he played the clarinet, jen and i played the violin. it was great fun, and we actually sounded nice. hurray ^^

goodnight!

Music is My Spiegel House

i saw Joanna Newsom perform at the spiegel tent last night. it was such an intimate atmosphere that i almost felt strange staring up at her, though this quickly subsided as she began to play bridges and balloons. this being the song that i first fell in awe of.
from time to time i've mentioned being able to feel a certain out-of-myselfness. last night as she was playing, it hit me without my even trying. she cannot be hyped enough.
and she is so extremely adorable.!

so, i woke up reasonably late today, with not much time to leave the house. it's good in a way, because it has meant that my proportion of excitement during waking hours has been greatly increased.
at 1:30 i met up with Millie and Krista, who i haven't seen since at least year 9. we watched a free exhibition-related bollywood-esque movie at the NSW (with an intermission!), before walking down to the botanic gardens to watch the eels. it's actually really exciting to have gotten back into contact with them both, they being as remarkably cool as they are. they like Cansei de Ser Sexy. so i listened to it. it is the best.

* intermission *

tonight i watched Saw III. i'm ridiculous. it's because Judd has put all these movies on my computer, you see. sigh. i'm still ridiculous.

and right now i'm listening to Beach House again. i keep listening to it, and i keep not liking it. i am usually not so persistent, but i continue to feel that perhaps somehow during all my previous listens i have been in the wrong mood. i can usually save any music that i don't really like by imagining the kind of scene in a movie it would be set to - so i'm currently picturing a wooden carriage at sunset, on its way out of a small european coastal town that has been overtaken by robots. also, the dark-haired clean-shaven bohemian of a protagonist is having an identity crisis, because he has discovered that his great grandfather was a robot. i don't know how it ends, because the music doesn't really go anywhere from there. but now that i've taken the time, i'm beginning to find it nice.

hm! goodnight!

Regret

“to accept oneself as fate, not to desire oneself ‘different’… this is great rationality itself.”

I used to say that I was without regret, for every mistake has led me to where I am. However, it’s the regret and guilt that I live with that has shaped me into what I am. In year four I accidentally fractured a neighbour’s window when some friends from up the street and I held skateboard races in their backyard. At first we didn’t tell anyone. I had nightmares about being arrested for days. One morning I was watching Grease and my mum asked me if I knew anything about a window being broken. So, I confessed. To this day, whenever I feel like a criminal, that scene in Grease where everyone is parked on the cliff comes to mind. Recently, everything awful that happened between Rachael and I has been playing over again and again in my head. Hundreds of times a day.

I don’t know if there is room for rationality, at this stage. Maybe this is how one becomes what one is. But then, it seems ridiculous to fill in more clearly the picture by tearing at what is already there.

Anyway, I’m sounding unstable. Don’t be alarmed by this “I am my regret” thing. It’s not quite so dramatic as that – rather, how certain things happened the way they did is something that has been on my mind. And although these actions are fixed in the past, whatever we manage drag into the present becomes it. Whether we choose to appreciate the now or not, we cannot exist outside of it. Maybe that is obvious.

Oh yeah, I watched Little Miss Sunshine tonight. It was kind of good and kind of meh, but I might have been expecting too much. And I watched Saw II. Which was completely horrible, but made me want to script an atrociously cliché detective movie of my own. Maybe without people diving into pits of syringes. Mostly because I don’t think the budget will allow it.

Night night

women: you can't beat them

last friday i saw a girl rock out on the saxophone, climb on top of her amp and rock out some more. on the saxophone. oh i am so into the saxophone. she belongs to a band called bridezilla (and maybe my heart).
since then i have slipped into a familiar holiday pattern. i watch movies, i read, i go to other people's houses in the evenings and we laugh in a carefree manner.
i go walking in the afternoons. i sit behind a tree that seems barely more than bark and watch people play soccer in the park below. yesterday the air was so thick that their shapes were reduced to whatever their movements reminded me of. it was nice, also, to feel that if the whole world gazed back at me it would have to squint. and maybe mistake me for a deckchair or a crocodile.

i go running at midnight. the city is still so lit that it feels like a perpetual 8 o’clock, except there are no tracksuited couples and tiny dogs. i love it. i’m going to become a doctor and acquire a ridiculous surname so that i can publish children’s books about my adventures:

city lights smirk at the work of the sun,
through a cloudless mirk, like a cancerous lung
(still, running at night time is excellent fun)


now, for something out of my day to day pattern... today i enrolled.
in semester one i will be taking:
EDUF1018 Education, Teachers and Teaching
ENGL1015 Inventing Modernity
CLCV1001 Classical Mythology
PHIL1011 Reality, Ethics and Beauty

and in semester two:
EDUF1019 Human Development and Education
ENGL1007 Language, Texts and Time
CLSS1002 Greece and Rome in Performance
PHIL1010 Society, Knowledge and Reason

fantastic. also, the university is as sexy as they get, and i talked to a friendly co-english/drama-future-teacher by the name of Anne. so i'm feeling optimistic. also, the next few days are full of excitement.

goodnight

i was going to write a proper post.

1. The Dresden Dolls – Yes, Virginia
2. Thom Yorke – The Eraser
3. Regina Spektor – Begin to Hope
4. Emily Haines – Knives Don’t Have Your Back
5. Joanna Newsom – Ys
6. Final Fantasy – He Poos Clouds
7. The Knife – Silent Shout
8. TV on the Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain
9. Cat Power – The Greatest
10. Beirut – Gulag Orkestar

instead, my 10 favourite albums from last year.

* some may notice that i removed X&Y from the list. this is not because rishi might hit me, but because it was released in 2005.

Serpentine

so i've been accepted into Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Education (Secondary: Humanities and Social Sciences) at Sydney University. friends and a gigantic library and cheap live music and societies and politics and lots more learning awaits.
i am mostly overjoyed. but it all seems to have come so easily. i was talking to Helen once (or twice, and probably will again) about there being almost two paths that we could see our lives spiralling down. to dramatise the situation, there is the path of least resistance, where we become teachers and return to the community what we can, having at the same time a nice life full of a responsible love and some children. then, there is forever the possibility of how much more could be sacrificed of that life in order to make that much more of a difference. do i really have the conviction.? for me it's not necessarily about teaching, because i think it's one of the most honourable things a person can do, but about the way i can see my life becoming so very structured, simply because everything is most easily set up to work that way.
the path of least resistance. is what makes the river crooked, makes it serpentine, according to my favourite punk-folkstress.
i have settled deep into a deteministic take on things, which makes the thought less of a plagueing one. yet is, of course, a cop out. it has no practical application. it cannot, without the entire situation becoming paradoxical. trying to visualise the process used to make my small capacity for logic whirr - so much so that I’ve resigned to a kind of faith that everything will work out how it must. it’s the closest I get to god.
I believe in god, by the way. Not the kind that listens, only the kind that lives in people.
Though I have recently been unnerved by the realisation that my meditation-induced feeling of connectedness can be easily reproduced through the consumption of various poisons. Some will respond: “of course”. i will politely instruct them to shut up.
Anyway. I think I’m doing the right thing. In year ten I skipped a day of school and stared at a leech until I decided on a purpose. It is to help people, in the best way that I can. I hope that I can.
Of course, my third plan is to wander the world applying a differently scented lipgloss for every new emotion i encounter, to then spend the years of my dotage using each to evoke the glorious days of my youth. or maybe marry amanda palmer. i guess i could combine the two.

For some actual news… i went to Kristina's 18th last night and had a very good time. we argued about becoming a republic, and gave Kris a tiny tree, among other things. also, i've seen Jared every day this week, which has been really nice. even though (or perhaps especially as) it involved aforementioned poisons. my dad's friend Judd is in town. he makes his own furniture. he sings beautiful old songs, and teaches me new chords. he has installed cubase SX and Reason 3 on our computer, and has tonight taught me how to use them. obviously i'll now become an incredible songstress. obviously.
i'm yet to discover what it is that separates music from that thing that makes your heart feel like it’s there. Someday.

Sleep tight, hearties

today was nice. i spent a few hours with jared and then moseyed on to clare's, where we sat in the sun and talked about how good it is to finally be on holidays. apart from that, a few things are worth mentioning:

1. a computer beat me at chess. i have always found that kind of thing demoralising in the extreme... but at least computers aren't sexist, so if they want to establish a new wold order, i'll yield. like the woman that i am.

2. i saw a woman cry on the bus. two hours later i smiled at the memory of jen (or should i say MC Disease) singing "i'm fieak", and a man across from me smiled in response to my glee. we grinned at each other for a couple of minutes, before he stepped out of the train at town hall and we waved goodbye forever. sometimes it's ok to connect with strangers. without it i sometimes forget that another entire life and history of individual experience exists within each, and begin instead to think of them as being no more real than the zora people, playing background to my amazing adventures.

3. i played twilight princess. i died three times, but it has won my heart.

night night