ugly green suitcases

I don't know what it is about the holidays and the end of another year that makes us look back, other than the fact that it is the end of a relatively long period of time, but looking back I really do have to admit that I've gladly shed people that I no longer need in my life, and being by myself this year has given me much time to mull over the sometimes overrated but still significant themes of life and love, and ways to find it, and whether or not we truly need it, or if it even exists. I don't know how I feel about going into another year being just as clueless as I was at the start of this one.

I've gained some sun spots, several inches on my hips, and some truly wonderful relationships with inspirational personalities I know will last til my headstone, or theirs. Blasting Angus & Julia at full volume until the photo frames start to wobble has led to friendships consisting of woolen teapots and discussions about clay imprints of the female anatomy that make it, well, female.

My life with the ones I love (you'll know if you're on that list if you check my speed dial allocations) can simply be described by these memorable words of Joey Tribbiani's:

It is a love based on giving and receiving as well as having and sharing. And the love that they give and have is shared and received. And through this having and giving and sharing and receiving, we too can share and love and have... and receive.

Thank you for making 2010 what it was. I'm not sure if you reached for the bucket as many times as I did, but let's hope 2011 brings more beer battered chips, Audrey Hepburn black silk dresses and caramel lattes into our lives!

nothing says “bienvendios” quite like a buttered floor

today i am pretending that my blog is actually a tumblr, which allows me to post up stolen pictures from elsewhere on the world wide web without knowing where they originated. here is a stunning bedroom layout i came across when Song of Style's Aimee had a mini rave about ikea furniture.


i have also, in the recent months, become more tolerant towards children (in particular the baby type) and have overcome my gag factor in the drool department, as long as it only comes in contact with a tissue or their bib and not my skin, clothing, hair or anything else i cannot dispose of. i still, however, cannot contain my disgust at fecal matter which i have had the pleasure of seeing not only in motion, but in a variety of colours i didn't know existed.


in the coming week i will embrace my inner julia and say goodbye to lazy days until december 25th (but hello to cha ching!)

and to my one and only - i love you! you make the beach and everything else gritty in my life bearable.

knock knock - i'm here

ask and you shall receive does not apply to those who dealt with your endless toothpaste diarrhoea and stringy dribble, and complaints about sand from the pit in your eyes, and your school bag being too big and your hat being too uncomfortable, and going from barbie to bratz to barbie. i am so far from being in the position to judge how offspring fail to appreciate their parents that i am football fields away from being close enough to catch a pass. (so far away that i could get myself a pretzel without having my lack of presence noticed). but honestly, it's time to wake up or have something smack you across your undeserving face and realise that having others provide what makes your life yours is unbelievably hypocritical and beyond ironic. because you are so adamant that you represent what you stand for so well, when in fact the shoes on your feet and the ones who taught you to tie the laces don't even cross your mind anymore.

peek a boo

cityrail should think about investing in signage discouraging horny behaviour upon frigid girls, particularly on a crowded service. it's sickening, nauseating even, and that's not just because i'm a bitter party of one.

when you're in year 1 and you're told to write a narrative, you have to cover all your 5 W's: who, what, when, where, why. but they always seem to leave out how, mainly because it doesn't start with W, but more recently it's occurred to me that it's the one we have to figure out on our own, regardless of the situation.

somebody keeps misspelling my name on the sportsgirl roster, apparently it's "vivvien" and it's starting to look somewhat appealing and exotic.

please don't hurt me

i have found something that gets my heart racing faster sephora. and i would much rather be run down by a car or ten tonne truck (the smiths, anyone?) than come face to face + beak with a crow, or magpie, or any other bird for that matter. i am beyond petrified of birds, the way they flap their wings, and i know that they have to do that otherwise they will drop to the ground like a sack of beans, but what is wrong with just sitting in your nest or having your nest actually be a burrow 10 feet into the ground? but i have to be careful to draw the line between hate and terror. because repeating (or more like chanting) "please don't hurt me" as i ran home this afternoon, clutching clumps of hair and my bunch of keys, instilled within me a fear that i personally think will be my strongest motivation to get my license. (my tactic is to wave the keys around my head in a circular motion so the jingling will scare the bird away, if you're wondering.) you see, a certain crow has taken to perching on the roofs of buildings and branches of trees on my regular route to and from the train station. which was why, in the days of facebook, i never joined the "i hate birds/magpies/crows" group, because their knowledge of my hate would drive them to peck the flesh out of the back of my neck. and yes, they know. just like cats know. there is something so unnerving about having things loiter behind the back of my head or the nape of my neck, which is the part of my anatomy which i most worry about coming in contact with anything at all. and has anybody noticed the growing population of ibises? where are they coming from? have they suddenly become the rabbits of the bird kingdom? or more like the homeless of the bird kingdom, because they're the only ones who balance on rubbish bins with their behinds in the air, but maybe it's something about the feathers of ibises which retain nose-wrinkling smells. and i know musicians i love are really into black crows and what they symbolise, like HELLO down the way, and it features on both of passenger's album covers. but try something else, preferably something that isn't an animal nor an allergy-stimulating plant.

and to all the people who leave urine splattered across the seats of public toilets - are you serious? try comparing YOUR hole to the hole in the toilet bowl, and you will see that there is no reason as to why you should miss. unless you're squatting, in which case i say DON'T.

"meant to be"

what is that? another one of those phrases that manages to pull down any piece of writing or script or lyric to a less than mediocre level, a weak stab at imitating something powerfully great or life-changing. "if it's meant to be, it'll happen." screw your destiny and fate that's written in the stars. and it's pathetic, really, to think that people gloss over their daily lives and turn them into emotions on pedestals, worth complaining about to anyone who has the ears to hear it. things carry worth only measured by relativity - people strive to find comfort and satisfaction, and then wonder why nothing in their life is beyond the bland mugginess of grey porridge.

i accidentally typed in "womenofquestionablemorals.logspot.com" and up came this page about God and repentance and women who literally live by questionable morals.

apparently i'm a fairy

i have come to the conclusion that eating is a much more efficient way of solving the issue of procrastination, as you must remain more or less upright whilst doing so, and once you've eaten enough it has been proven impossible to nap due to the discomfort of hours of food inching its way back into your mouth. and as i sit here with my icecream cone in one hand and typing with the other, i notice that my S and D keys have been used so much they've faded, and none of the others have.

and someone tell me why it still hasn't gotten hot enough to not have to wear pants yet? this is a disappointing year to showcase my new underwear.

transatlanticism

sometimes i feel like i'm living my life looking out at the world through the other side of a bus advertising something ridiculously useless, and my vision is clouded by a dizzying ocean of little holes. and everytime i try and sit back to see the whole picture my world can't stop shaking and i get a headache. and i find it so unsatisfying how sometimes the things you strive so hard to express come out like one steaming pile of cliches.

but, if you let your guard down just that little fraction, you'll begin to understand just how small the box within which you exist really is, whether it be a conscious decision or not. and by stepping that much closer to potential danger, you are miles closer to things that only seem to be a fictional reality. there are things that we read about which we know hold true for some, and when that door is opened to you, all that was simply a mirage becomes a solid possibility. a little bit of us exists outside ourselves, outside our bodies and our minds. an energy that lingers like a perimeter, the part of us that others talk to and the same sorts of people our logic would usually choose to ignore. part of me rests assured that reflections of things thought to be lost, aren't.

N A K E D

um hi, be mine.


urban decay naked palette

this sounds promising:
Launching next month, the Urban Decay Naked Eye Palette (approx $45) features 12 sultry shades, from nude champagne to a gritty gunmetal and includes seven of the brand's best selling colours. I've been a fan of the brand's shadows for years as they're richly pigmented and wear really well without any colour fade. With a built-in mirror and dual-ended pencil, there's everything you need if you get stranded on a desert island*. Or have a hot date last-minute. LOVE.

*LOST is currently taking up the majority of my time and energy.
thank god for ASOS. see you in october, my dear!

oedipus

the library is so peaceful, watching people absorbed in some of the most useless things ever to be taught. of course, many people would argue that these things we spend ridiculous amounts of time, energy and money on aren't useless at all - not to the economy, or the wellbeing of society, or the environment in fifty seven years. but really, are you fucking kidding? so what if we learn to understand how a lawn mower eats your weeds, or we finally manage to grasp the concept of some shitty law concerning kinetic whatever movement? people gain recognition for their ability to persevere through the most soul-deadening years of their lives, learning things they don't want to learn. and if they do find joy in such nonsense, they despise anyone who tells them that it's all a SUNK COST and more or less pages and hours of something i'd get more joy out of sprinkling hundreds and thousands onto triangular slices of buttered bread for the rest of my existence. at least it's colourful. and the best part of all, is that it's all self-inflicted. because if you don't know where you want to be, you can't get there, but where do you go in the meantime? spend day after day deciding what's better than spending day after day deciding something you know nothing of? spending your time somewhere that may not even share the same postcode with anything you wish to achieve, ever? i watch time go by and i think wow, what a waste - but even if i spent this time doing something worthwhile, the moment would pass and the clock would still tick if you remembered to keep track of its battery life. and if you could capture a moment you thought to be perfect like a firefly in a jar (i still don't understand why people do this) you would appreciate its beauty until, like everything else, it becomes obsolete and nothing more than a memory touched upon once in ten, maybe twenty years.

cos you're there for me too

Monica: Okay Phoebs, you know what you're doing right?
Phoebe: Yeah.
Monica: Okay Joey's gonna catch the ball and you and I are gonna block.
Phoebe: What's block?
Monica: Phoebe, I thought you said you knew what you're doing.
Phoebe: I thought you meant in life.

if only we were all as confident in ourselves as Phoebe Buffay, aka Princess Consuela Banana Hammock

Mike: Do you even know what a banana hammock is?
Phoebe: It's a funny word.
Mike: It's a Speedo.

put dirtballs in your pocket

I love Regina Ilyinichna Spektor.

Well maybe you should just drink a lot less coffee
and never ever watch the ten o'clock news
Maybe you should kiss someone nice
or lick a rock, or both

READING TIME WITH PICKLE

and speaking of coffee ..

LORELAI: [Sighs] I can't sleep. I can't turn my mind off. It keeps running and thinking and making lists.
LUKE: Maybe if you drank a little less coffee, you'd make a little less lists.
LORELAI: Oh, I can't stop drinking the coffee. If I stop drinking coffee, I stop doing the standing and the walking and the words-putting-into-sentence doing.

this is cold, hard, 2D proof that i need to live in the present and not in the stars hollow of 2004.

clarity

september 3rd, vault lounge: one of our favourite girls turns the big 21 - the lovely dani and her plastic-fantastic ken, and bathroom bonanza minus chuchu train!




two girls who make my life worth living, and a bag which almost tipped all my possessions under the train at wynyard station.

why do i go to uni?

you know your hair's getting long when you can tuck it into your jeans ..

currently exercising what i'm best at, ie. doing everything but facing the task at hand, or rather, on the desk in front of me, the task being to cram my freshly-washed head full of bits and pieces that will be washed away once i hear boy and bear play again, this time at the oxford art factory in october! no, probably once i drop my pen at 11am tomorrow.

nonetheless, life is a decent shade of beige, i'm above average in terms of excitement about new employment commencing sooner than i can say "i hate retail" and i cannot wait to go paint-sample-garage-sale-random-furniture-thrifting-crazy with my favourite millar!

"what a wanker"

i couldn't have put it better myself.


a cup and a half of love for possibly two of the most talented people to walk the earth, ever. barefoot.

a snippet of julia, behind the braids and never-diminishing cheekbones:

The home on the 13th floor is rob and janie’s- friends of our mum and dad’s— they are now friends of ours also… the house is filled with canvases with beautiful designs in wax…. rob is an artist who has just started using wax as a new element in his art… angus cut some of his hair for rob to use underneath the wax… i wanted to get in on the action so cut some of my hair off also— he made two paintings while we were there— so our dna is preserved beneath the wax paintings somewhere down in battery park.. the room that angus stays in is right down the end of the hall… that is where rob’s home studio is with all his guitars… that is where we sat in the early hours of the morning recording ‘santa monica dream’—- angus had been out on the town… enjoying the festivities of manhattan… i had been, all day in that little room down the end trying to get sounds that i liked for this new song i had written that morning… it sounded okay…. the guitar sounded lovely- an old dobro of rob’s that was tuned down— it all sounded okay… just okay though…

is the rob in the kitchen making pizza the rob of rob and janie? possibly.

and because i can't figure out how to download videos off youtube, this has kept me in a constant bop for the last 72 hours!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26AV4sAZWpE

do walnuts grow on trees?

it's so painfully tiring, answering questions to which answers don't exist, and stringing words into sentences when there is absolutely nothing you wish to say. i find it more boring to be in the company of those i've adored in the past, than to be on my own, at my own pace, not required to react or conjure up a jumble of excited phrases and facial expressions in response to something that means about as much to me as a bag of sesame seeds do. and the best (or worst) part is that there doesn't even seem to the slightest hint of recognition that nothing is genuine anymore, like i've wallpapered over my old self with patterns of wildflowers and elephants and jellybeans, and people walk in and out of the room, failing all the while to notice what used to lie only millimetres below.

and on top of that, why are people so quick to attribute anything out of the ordinary (and what is ordinary, anyhow?) to something being wrong? what's wrong with not being one's usual self, and moreover, what even constitutes as normal? there isn't a single person who can sift through all your moods and phases and moments to be able to decide what is, and isn't, your ordinary self. if i were to go all hardcore physics on you (to the extent my limited brain capacity allows) i'd say that everyone is simply in constant reaction to forces being placed upon them, willingly and knowingly or not, and when there is nothing external for you to respond to, is that your usual self? when nothing is wrong, everyone hopes that there is, so there is something to fix. but then things are much easier to handle when you tell yourself that #1 you don't give a ring toss and #2 that even if you did, it would neither mean nor change a thing. but you run the risk of giving up other things too, like the ability to feel excited or even vaguely amused. and can you really ever tell yourself anything? no, because you refuse to ever listen. you think you know better (than your other self, might i add) and when you find yourself in over your ignorant, self-absorbed head, you wish you'd listened - to yourself.

and it's all so bothersome, having people all around you searching for the meaning of life just to have something to search for, because they can't deal with the prospect of there being no meaning, and then they're the ones to look at you in horror, like not only have you grown horns, but a trunk and a tail and whiskers too, when you suggest that maybe (and let's face it, probably) there is no meaning, and we're all just products of an empty box of condoms.

oy, humbug

isn't it funny to think that when you tell a story you go "and then this person said -" or you say something like "so i was driving and there were all these cars being losers" and to those losers, you are also just a car, not a person driving a car, not a daughter or a cousin or a grandfather, but a car.

i wish i could be a dog and wear a shiny collar and lean out the window and have my tongue being blown across the side of my face by the wind, on the way to a holiday house with my family where i could frolick in the sand and pick up tennis balls with my mouth and not be concerned with the fluro fluff coming in contact with my saliva. and i could pee in public with one leg up, but it'd be okay because i'd have three other legs to keep me balanced. if i were a dog, i wonder what my name would be.

galawala

i don't appreciate that which is explicit, or a rational reason for explaining something which cannot be properly explained through logic. i think that it is impossible to place a price on a feeling, or have an instrument that has the ability to accurately measure emotion, because you can never fully know something in its entirety about another, even if you know them really well, or you think you know them really well, or they tell you and you trust them because you know (or think you know) them really well. so when someone says "i love you" or something along those lines, and the other person wants to know "why?" in my opinion, any answer they give is as incompetent and shallow as those dishes you use to serve pasta in. who decides the different levels of happiness on the smile-o-meter? what factors determine your current emotional status? i have this image in my head of a creepy clown whose smile gets bigger and bigger the happier and happier you get. eiw

what makes you fall in love with someone? and more importantly, how can you be sure that what you feel belongs under that particular flashing neon sign? love is different for everyone - to me, it's a four letter word. it's overused, yet never used enough. those four letters, arranged in that sequence, look like love to me, even if i didn't know the meaning of love. i don't. over time, it's been sculpted and melted and ripped apart and put back together again, with bolts and UHU glue and thread and plastic waterproof bandaids. i believe in what things used to be, in how things used to be done, in the ways people used to think and their capacity to feel things that don't exist anymore, because people aren't made that way anymore. it's like the more they try to improve us, like ipod classics and nanos and videos and shuffles, the more they are taking away from what we could be. things don't have to get better - they just can't get worse.

more often than not, we're looking but not seeing, like that moment where you stare straight through the face sitting before you, and you try but you can't focus, maybe because you don't wish to and maybe because you're unable to bring yourself back from that place beyond the eyelashes and the dimples. it's similar to noticing but not caring, both about what you notice and also the fact that you don't care. everything is a moment, a moment which simply evaporates as if it never existed as a moment - but the fact that it did makes it like no other, before or after. every breath exhaled and every word uttered out loud or somewhere deep inside. and they come and go, day in day out, forgotten and discarded like an old movie ticket or treasured more carefully than the hands of a world class surgeon or pianist.

my head, and this post, and really everything around us - it's all bits and pieces, a mishmash of scribbles and heartbeats and tears, like a pot of leftovers at the end of the week before grocery day.

toothpaste kisses

i get a little chill every time i walk past a busker doing an amazing cover of coldplay's 'the scientist', which is not all that often, but seeing as that is the tune people will be humming (or rocking) to when my casket is being lowered into the ground, or my ashes being swept into the wind (i haven't decided yet - maybe it'll be a meredith grey "i brought my mum to work in a baggy" situation) i find it takes a moment before the goosebumps subside.

the thing people don't mention about crying whilst wearing eye makeup is that not only does it sting, but it's kind of itchy. luckily for me, smudge pot and i are tighter than snugglepot and cuddlepie, and has yet to betray me in my moments of need. oh, how american television makes me bawl like a kid who's had its pacifier taken away (mind you, i never had a pacifier in my day, so i sat in my stroller as patient as ever til the day i grew the teeth to bite my sister and everything she owned).

i need sleep help.

who is john galt?

second post of the day. what can i say? i suffer from diarrhoea of the mouth. crystal clear visual you've got there - my apologies. wow, the number of entries i've posted is teetering dangerously towards a number that used to hold the title of favourite in my years of junior high.

i only have a slight problem with the writing of ayn rand, and that is, that it's so incredibly descriptive and drenched with thought and detail and emotion that once my face is no longer buried within its pages, i find that reality in all its three-dimensional glory is really a much less interesting story where nothing is being told. and that nobody honestly thinks about things with such depth, if at all.

sometimes the things that people do or say have me resisting the urge to run in circles clanging saucepans and various other miscellaneous household items over my head, or better yet, in their face (and by in their face i mean at their face). i think that the day i hit someone in the face, the liberation of my rage will mask the pain that their ugly, annoying face bulging with lies and ulcers will cause my knuckles. much in the same way that alcohol disguises the pain one feels when they're holding fajitas that have been in a 175 degree oven for over an hour.

i don't even hate people. usually. the pot clanging and the face bashing usually arise from feelings of frustration and annoyance and incompetence. and on that note, i don't like uncertainty, or things that are late, or people who are gay (and by that i don't mean homosexual, i mean gay like when i was in the fourth grade and called you a gaylord because there was no better way to describe you and really, you were a gaylord, except when we grew up we used different words to describe people such as yourself, although i don't know why we did because gaylord suits you perfectly). go pick a toddler's nose and eat whatever you find on your finger, please.

overuse of the word face - yeah, yeah i realised, no need to point it out. i'm going to go read a thesaurus now.

Monica: It doesn't make any sense.
Joey: Of course it does. It's smart! I used a thesaurus!
Chandler: On every word?
Joey: Yep.
Monica: All right, what was this sentence, originally?
Joey: Oh. "They're warm, nice people with big hearts."
Chandler: And that became, "They're humid, pre-possessing homosapiens with full-sized aortic pumps?"