When we lost faith in everyone, especially middle-aged people

With an increase of spare time, a restlessness often follows close behind and I've found myself flicking through piles of old sketchbooks, finding spare pages and filling them with similar old mind vomit to what I, at least try to edit before publishing, on this here blog. 

I like cut-out bits from magazines but I hate ruining the magazine, kind of like my big sister who used to love stickers when she was little but would hate the idea of 'wasting' the best ones - you know those sheets of stickers you can get at the newsagents; she would save the prettiest or the biggest ones for as long as possible until she found the perfect place to stick it. And then once it's stuck it's kind of a letdown, don't you think? Maybe. 


Speaking about being a little kid we were talking about our childhoods with my family last night, and it seems irrational fears were common at least with my big sister and I. I used to be afraid of the clicking sound the tape player would make once the storybook tape was finished. My sister was afraid of a framed photograph of two children walking into the woods that used to hang in our room. We lived a life of comforting, secure routine. Little worrisome me, who woke up at the same time every morning even on weekends, the fussiest and slowest eater, chores always done and nails always clipped and never ever did a drop of 'fizzy drink' grace my delicate mouth lest my tongue be burnt by the fizziness (that's what I thought anyway). 


Sometimes I wonder if I missed out on something, particularly when I recall that 'dessert' in our household was one slice of wholemeal bread with a thin smearing of margarine, halfway through 'Sale of the Century' which I watched every night religiously despite never being able to answer any of the questions. 


But as my mother pointed out, without that specific, albeit kind of weird, upbringing, I wouldn't be who I am today. Similarly worrisome. Similarly obsessed with routine. Similarly reluctant to consume fizzy drinks. But with such a heightened thirst for change, I believe seven year old me would have passed out, knowing the way I feel today.  

Never said

You can have a little angel pinned to your chest, and you can have people willing to drop everything to be of assistance, you can have deep breathing exercises, you can have practice rooms and roomy toilets and all the right forms a drink bottle and as many birds in your hair as you want. But the truth is, it's really just you, alone. Exam number 1 down and it feels, well, cautiously good!


In other news I watched Donnie Darko again last night in bed; a half-hearted attempt to get into the Halloween spirit while still staying at home and not talking to anyone and avoiding all dairy products. It really freaked me right out and I still don't even really get it but I think that's the point. Regardless, it is very pretty. Observe.

Just nice

Where school was once somewhere we would just go without question, it's now a place that's quiet for me and my year level, scattered all around, unsure in our casual dress and lost under forests-worth of essays. This strange space between the end of school and the end of year 12 is an awkward limbo and as usual, internal feelings of discomfort are expressed through my now blue-ended hair, something which, like tenacious but vague anxieties, we carry around every hour, every day.

Lately I feel like wry smiles aren't as becoming as I once thought. Sometimes honest conversation with the video shop lady as I sheepishly re-rent season six of 'Friends' for the 173,938th time is just the humble thing I need to shake off the haze of these tiresome exams. Same as the local library lady; a jaded old woman with an affixed frown and perfect perm and a wardrobe seeming to be exclusively sourced from Miller's, grumpily surveying me in my caffienated fury and co-ordinated Disney Princess stationary, profusely apologising for forgetting my card, her cringing as I drop precious books at her feet. These are little realities that I miss, like the dirty feeling of the ticket machine's buttons at the train station, or pulling that little lever on the mailbox to post a letter too thick to fit into the slot, or testing out lipsticks in the pharmacy on the back of your hand. Just little details that are kind of nice, in all their pettiness. Mundane, really, but still - just nice.

A conversation at Revolver

An open letter to Ke$ha

Dear Ke$ha,


Before you do the equivalent of scrunching up a tangible letter and throwing it in the recycling bin to this e-letter, let it be known that I do like you. I like you quite a lot, actually, and have been known to defend my liking of you in front of my friends who notice that between Kate Bush and Killing Heidi, your clever dollar sign replacement of an 'S' stands defiantly and proudly in my iTunes library. You even make it onto my specific iPhone playlist where only the creme de la creme of my thousands of songs are held in high regard. But I digress. 


Like I said, I like you a lot, Ke$ha, and I think that the fact I continue to employ the extra energy required to press 'shift' '4' to spell your name correctly is evidence of this. You haven't been around for long; first appearing on my own YouTube when I unfortunately stumbled across Katy Perry's 'I Kissed A Girl' and you were one of the girls in the video. I am willing to forgive you for this mishap because hey gurlfrannn, I totally understand what it's like in da BIZ. You gotta make your way somehow, and if you have to lounge around on a bed with several other beautiful women in lingerie with kittens and doonas and shit in a song that's degrading to your own gender then hey - you gotta do what you gotta do, right? Right. 


I will admit that my approval of your work has taken time - however I will also admit you did not have the most unbiased of listening ears at your service. Let me explain. 


'Tik Tok' did not win me over, K, I will be honest. But what did win me over was 'Your Love Is My Drug', and while I do believe this song is one of your better ones, I think it might have had something to do with the fierce beginning of a relationship that was occurring at the time that prompted me to proclaim 'THIS SONG, IT IS ME. IT IS ME, AND NO OTHER SONG WILL EVER UNDERSTAND ME THE WAY THIS SONG UNDERSTANDS MY PRECISE SITUATION AT THIS MOMENT.' 


Situations change but songs, they do not. (Unless you're like me and write a really nice song about liking a boy only to keep everything about the song exactly the same except change the tone from cute to bitch-sarcastic as soon as he stops calling. Hilarious). As soon as this relationship ended I quite clearly remember telling you, specifically, to fuck off at a party when it was played. With a nice boy, this song was stellar. Alone and drunk and struggling with a sweaty mop of hair and a runny face of makeup, not so much.


But Ke$ha, even in times of trouble, you have been there to pick me up with your electronic spoken word ridiculousless. When the descant of Bon Iver or the gravel of Counting Crows or the soaring of Joni Mitchell would lay my body into bed so deep down I thought I would sink into the ground and die there, 'Hungover' had the stupid, stupid lyric that both sympathised with and saved me:


in the dark i can fight it i fake til i'm numb but in the bright light i taste you on my tongue


Then things were better and healthy jealous and there was 'Blind' (i'm sick and tired of the mess you made but you're never gonna catch me cry). Then there were parties in the summertime and there was 'We R Who We R' (in which the word 'sexyfied' was first coined and heartily appreciated, albeit privately, by me). More boys, more disappointment, oh Ke$ha, 'The Harold Song' was very much a saving grace (i would give it all to not be sleeping alone.) And somehow, in ecstatic hysteria, I would eventually love 'Your Love Is My Drug' again for what it was, and what it is now. 


You are simple, and easy, and nothing is a metaphor and I feel thirteen when I listen to you. I feel my thirteen year old emotional capacity, which was unfairly large for one so inept at self-expression; that is, secret crushes from afar, and mumbled conversation, sketchbooks of horses and lions and fairies and other things that I would punish myself for not leaving in primary school and pages upon pages of pitiful poetry and songs and wishing for nothing more than to experience the things discussed in songs like yours so that I could fucking write something decent about it. While that seems aggressive the thing is, without music such as yours I couldn't relive that feeling of tweenage-dom because other than you, I listen to quite a limited selection of your precise genre of electro-pop-rap-thing. 


I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think you're great, and I don't give a shit what anyone else says. Well, that is - apart from maybe the lyric wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy. It might've been worth redrafting that one. 


Kind regards, 


Eilish Gilligan

Dancing on the grave of my romantic failures

Wonderful things about The Vasco Era:


even without the sun in my eyes/you were always quite hard to find


they'll say i was a hypocrite i know what they'll say/why was a naturopath smoking rolled up cigarettes
he put on some 3d glasses to try and forget/but he just caught the avatar blues/and then they broke my skin and i'm on my own now/light up my head, and build a bridge back home now


yeah i have suffered from delusions of significance but sister i am no longer there/go looking for the sickness that was in me, cause that's all you will find back there baby
in a silhouette, i find heart crane's head, on the clouds above, above the west gate bridge again


i tried dancing on through old age and on into death with a tattoo of marlon brando across my chest
i tried transcending criticism but songs sound better in your head than when you're done with them
but rock n roll is the only thing that makes me feel good/heyyyyyyyyyyheyyyhey


i drowned my future in a river and then i drowned my past/stopped being anxious for a while but then a while did pass/it's evil to live backwards never look for rain in a blue sky


i want you to remember me for all of my life/after that baby i really don't mind

Such small hands

It's raining and I'm covered in bruises and blackheads and Donnie Darko is not downloading fast enough for me to indulge my sorrows in. Here is a picture of how my face is arranged, 90% of the time: 

Snatches of last night are coming back every now and again. Lying heavy on the wet grass with my arm around my friend being nervous about getting nervous. Dreams about teachers with tattoos and gushing sweat through floor length dresses. Bathroom mirror gazing double and absurdly, but sincerely, believing that our dancing bodies were moving in water shore to shore. 


I just feel like a big bag of bones, rattling away habit and having trouble holding on to anything tangible anymore. This life that's changing so suddenly is throwing up memories of the past six years that used to mean so much to me, making me laugh out loud with my still-best friends. Of tentative Valentine's, and heart-wrenching text messages, of tears and gleeful hysteria and kayaking in the pouring rain talking about Twilight and DA BOYZ and keeping safe and sane. 


How much we've changed since then isn't as scary as how much we haven't. We are just so little!

Impossible swan

Kind of like those expensive sandwich toasters with settings that can toast your sandwich infinitesimal amounts of ways, there are also infinitesimal degrees of sadness. I have officially finished high school and in a matter of weeks, all remnants of exams and classes and homework and schoolbags will be erased from my existence, and, for the first time in more than a year, I will be allowed to just 'be'. 

I'm sadder than I thought I was. Thinking about teachers calling me 'quietly intense'  quoting Sylvia Plath in conversation gymnasium acoustics of whole-school assemblies those cardboard recycling bins stealing Blutack spending days upon days with the same people same clothes same classes same books I think I'm losing all the little bits of my head that are glued together with routine. 

I spoke, in the below post, about losing everything at once and feeling as though it's the best thing to possibly happen. I feel very much as though leaving school will be the best thing that's ever happened to me, and to the people in my year level too. But in some ways, this year has been one of the best - and among the worst - things that's ever happened to me, too. Struggling with the very new experience of true 'bittersweet'.

The above picture is what my body is left with after yesterday - a bracelet in my school house colours, a stamp to let me in to the year 12 party and a number to allow me access to 'booze bag no. 19'. What is not pictured are the bruises that are sprinkled all over my body from the various joviality of the day and night previous - celebratory spear tackling and violent cross dressing and truly liberated and cliched dancing in the rain.

I will miss the familiarity of school and I will miss the people I met there. I am sad, but like everything ever - I know it won't last. 

This post doesn't offer any true insight into anything, or even an adequate description of the past few days, but so consumed am I by the end of high school life and subsequent entrance into the 'real world', I can't help but only talk about one thing. I promise I will explain the below artwork, which is actually a sound installation - but this is another story for another day.

Outro

Sometimes everything falls down all at once and that's pretty rare. But what's even rarer is having it all fall down all at once, and lying in the middle of everything you used to have, or could've had, thought you needed to have or wanted to have - you realise that you're better off without it. 

The world I love

There are many, many wonderful things about being alive, and I always like to take note when something wonderful happens in my own life - 'cause sometimes, you need to be reminded.


Stumbling across other people who become forces within our lives is one such wonderful thing. Particularly this year I have met several people who have left their influence on me, not always for good, but certainly more often for good than for bad. For all my bumbling and stunted conversational prowess, I do actually love meeting new people. Never turn down the opportunity to learn something from someone else and never EVER turn down the risk of learning from experience. 


Last night my good friend and bandmate Jess had her 18th birthday party, at which our band played (played = made noise over noise over more noise). The set went fine, the best our young band has played yet, in fact - but my favourite, favourite memory from the night will remain Jess yelling over 'She's Famous Now' by Reel Big Fish, between dancing ferociously, between juggling a beer and my keyboard stand, between holding my shoulders and me falling down the cracks in the verandah/dance space, into my ear: 


'Dude! We're so gonna be famous one day!'


Laughing the kind of laugh reserved for nights of enthusiastic teen drinking and dancing to ska-punk I whipped my band uniform-cape from behind my back and just nodded, in part vehement compliance, in part keeping with the beat. 


I don't know where I'm going, or what I'm doing, now, or in a year's time. I just take the days as they come and they come thick, and fast, and mostly I miss the things that really matter to me because of distractions loud, consequences dire, and time short. I feel it escalating and tensions rising and anxieties accumulating - but I remember, with the help of sincerely good people, good music, good humour and a damn good party, how things should be, and should return to, in a matter of some brief, unpredictable weeks. We just bide our time, coming out every so often to blink into the sun, stretch our bodies, and dance.


(For further reference, my band's page can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Volumetric/)

So this is the end of the story

I guess you could say I'm having a crisis. But it's a crisis so common it's almost mundane.

I'm leaving school in precisely a week, and after exams, I will be a free agent (as no one says). I didn't realise how close the end of school was until daylight savings kicked in, and I was sitting in sunlight at 7.30PM in my summer school dress watching 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gotye's Eyes Wide Open running through my head

(we walk the plank/with our eyes wide open)

One more week, of the life we've known for the last twelve years. One more week of teachers caring, of getting knocked around in the corridor, of leaning over double to drink from a bubble tap. Of punching guys in the arm as you walk past, of lunchboxes, of still-too-big uniforms and blazers, of school assemblies, harmfully heavy school bags and of wooden lockers, with no locks because everyone knows everyone at my school. We're like The Brady Bunch - nothing gets stolen, everyone's friends and perhaps some of our teachers are still stuck in the early seventies...

All the anxiety, and stress, and the sadness that I've experienced this year will be 'officially' over in a week's time. Things will be different next year, maybe better - but riding the school bus home this afternoon, overcrowded, sweaty and hot as usual, shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek with my friends, being stupid and rude and loud and teenage-ery, sitting in our usual seats right at the back of the bus, I know for certain how much I'm going to miss this time in my life. It sounds corny, I know. And also hypocritical, when you consider the amount of times I've thrown my hands in the air and said 'I can't WAIT to get out of this fucking place' and complained about year 12 and complained about this and that and the other thing. The truth is, I have found such happiness this year it's only fair that it is essentially balanced out.

I love when a piece of music, or an album, becomes a symbol for a time in your life of great significance. Being fifteen was all Joni Mitchell's Blue and Janis Joplin's Pearl. Breaking up was all Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago and Noah and the Whale's The First Days of Spring. Summer is Hard Candy and August and Everything After by Counting Crows. Childhood was America's Greatest Hits and After the Gold Rush by Neil Young. I predict, therefore, Gotye's Making Mirrors will become the 'leaving school' album, even if just because of the song Eyes Wide Open.

I feel like this is what we're doing and this is what being young is all about. I know what I'm doing - I'm leaving school, I'm going to become a part of the 'real world'. But I don't know anything, anything, of the consequences of my actions. We walk the plank, with our eyes wide open.

WE WALK THE PLANK/WITH OUR EYES WIDE OPEN

Procrasti-NATION

Sleep has become a beast of a creature to tame. I should be asleep right now - instead, I'm thinking about dying my hair blue and starting a punk rock band and getting a rabbit and should I really be spending this idle time writing an essay on King Richard III?

Well, yeah. 

I think ur a contra

Day one without Facebook, well, I must say - I thought I'd be having stronger withdrawals than this. A lot of the time I feel like I use Facebook as a practical tool, more than a recreational past time. That is, I get invites to parties and learn about gigs predominantly through Facebook, and while this is great and easy and whatever, contrary to what the typical fourteen year old girl will tell you it IS POSSIBLE to live without Facebook. Even if I've only been away for a day. 


As a part of the whole 'this Monday I'm going to set myself up 4 LYF!' thing I've got going on here I'm going to make a list of the things I wish to achieve in the short and long terms. 


1. Get away from Facebook for a while. 
2. Cut back on coffee (gradually, to decrease the risk of caffeine withdrawl-induced book throwing)
3. Be Positive! TM
4. Be Happy! TM
5. Stop worrying about the future, because what happens, happens. And if you want something badly enough that it consumes you and becomes a part of everything you are and do then it will work out. The way I figure it, it can't not. 
6. Drink whiskey on ice at 9am in the morning and write in bed all day. 
7. Dye my hair blonde, move somewhere far away and become someone completely different. 
8. Hang up on someone, using one of those cool phones that you have to wind to dial. 

It's not easy being green

you fleshed it out and I was consumed

or did consume. Either way, 

a part of me was a part of you,

yet still so apart from you.

Girls like you

A premature-maturity is something I never asked to possess and yet here I am, doing all the superficial old-lady things that are only tokens of how old I feel - you know, drinking tea, reading poetry, knitting, liking cats and Magic 1278, stupid stuff like that. 

Going back through my old diaries makes me realise the limbo I've gotten myself into. Living like, and being largely treated as, an adult for the majority of my childhood has, while encouraging articulation and eloquence and the ability to comment on whether or not Julia Gillard is an embarrassing representative for Australia to the world, created an unfortunate explosion of conflict when normal teenage tendencies take hold. I'm caught between recognising and detesting the headiness of self hatred for what it is - self indulgent, pointless teen angst - and contriving a cocktail of emotional bullshit to write emotional love songs and poetry about, as in, things that no-one actually cares about. That's the teenager in me, I guess. She's pretty ugly sometimes but in saying that, she's worth having around. 

My old diaries hold such gems as The Shawshank Redemption's Brooks' entire letter back to the prison which I transcribed myself and horrific short stories about The Beatles and pages upon pages upon pages of 'Get skinny!' and 'I love him! I hate him! I love him! I hate me! I hate everyone!' and 'Only MUSIC gets me!'

I laugh about it now, which is nice, and is something I actually wrote about when I was thirteen (although my thirteen year old self expected to only be able to laugh about this stuff by the time I was 30 at the earliest). Knowing that all this silliness was transcendental and ephemeral and really just so common and all that has made me get all nostalgic about being so SERIOUS all the time, trying to both suffocate and revive the teenager inside of me. Now that I'm finishing high school and am about to be released into the 'real world' I'm not sure if I can keep that dying little bit of naive teenager alive. Because truth be told, I kind of prefer that side of me, the side of me that doesn't know anything, or follows her instincts, or listens to warnings - the side that trusts blindly and acts and reacts ridiculously. It's the side that can hate me so much, and so specifically ('when you tuck your t-shirt into your jeans you look like a midlife crisis'), but it's also the side that soars upon the impossible heights of happiness, that cries in sad movies and turns my otherwise 'whatever' singing voice into a scream, or a wail, or a bird. 

On a completely unrelated note the above screenshots are all from Atonement because it is pretty and I like pretty things.

Alright, OK, you win

"...and I'm pancaked on the floor, you can't see my face - 'cause it's buried like the moon. Sober mornings come too soon!"

I walk the line

When in doubt, my friends, it is easier to watch Daria, drink coffee, wear as many clothes as possible and glue little felt letters onto some faux-denim than it is to sleep, even at 1.30AM on a Wednesday morning. 


But everything is worth something in some way shape or form. S'all a learning curve, baby.


The above picture of ridiculousness is my entire existence at the moment; I present to you the work in progress of my final year 12 art piece. I will show you when it's done. I think the thing that I like about it the most so far is that it is really really bad, and that bad-ness kind of makes it a little bit nice. 

Don't worry baby

This is a picture of me, just after my run today. 


About a year ago or so a friend asked me to take a picture of myself after going for a run, just being funny. I declined so passionately, in that awful teen-gurl state of mind that tells you that you are ugly, particularly so when you are not wearing make up or nice clothes or on the arm of a nice lookin' bit o' man meat. *


Over the last year or so I have come to realise that looking nice doesn't totally mean looking nice. It has more to do with being nice, or something along those lines. I know that's SUPA CORNY and something your dear old mum would say but I think it's something that needs to be brought to the attention of general society. When I say looking nice doesn't have everything to do with looking nice (I do understand how confusing that is), I don't mean to say that you shouldn't put an effort into your appearance. Yet by 'effort', I mean you should really make a definite effort to decide how to project who you really are to the world. This includes appearance, and mannerisms, and etiquette, and pretty much everything you can call 'you'. 


You gotta figure out how to show the world how great you are!


I remember the first time I wore a bird in my hair to a party when I was like fifteen and people kept looking at me like 'Does she actually know that there's a bird in her hair? Is it real? Is it taxidermy? Is she insane? What is life? Huuuh???' and I'd never felt so free. Just a little bird! Now when I wear my birds, it's as if the stupid little things are actually alive. People look at them and they are laughing. Actually laughing! I think that is just so wonderful and so beautiful that I'll take the stares and the comments and whatever you can throw at me, I don't care. If my appearance is amusing or entertaining to others, or is the cause of some stranger's laugh, it is so worth it. 


I've found myself favouring looking 'interesting' rather than 'nice', particularly at gigs. I'm not sure if it's an attention-seeking thing (sometimes, my friends, when you're playing a sports bar in some godforsaken suburb to a large group drunken 50 year old men, you need all the help you can get), or even an insecure thing ('I'm not entirely confident with the quality of my set so if I put a fake cat on my head hopefully you'll be distracted by that and I won't have to talk to you'), but personally I've always wanted to call it a 'desire to please'. When people see someone wearing something utterly ridiculous yet somehow kind of nice, it intrigues them, and makes them think, maybe even makes them laugh. That's the ultimate, don't you think?


Back to the SELF ESTEEM, GURL! You gotta love what you wear and love what you look like and just love bein' you, 'cause bein' you ain't so bad friend! 


This is one of the most hypocritical things I've ever written, and people who know me well will be like 'Uh huh!' But I'm beginning to realise that if you don't love yourself (to an extent, anyway), it's absolutely impossible, and unfair, to expect others to let you into their lives. 


So bringing it all back to the above photo - I know I look silly. I know I am sweaty, and my fringe is too short (an incident with some blunt scissors and I have no one to blame but MYSELF), and YEAR 12/SEVERE CAFFEINE ADDICTION is written all over my face. But hey! Thumbs up! Things aren't so bad. Looking good isn't everything - if you feel good about you, then you're lookin' pretty damn good to me. 


Yeah!


* Before you read this, you should know that I'm in a MOTIVATED MOOD. When this happens, the ends of my verbs suffer dra-grammatically (bein', goin', doin' etc). You have been warned. 

Mystic crystal revalation

I often become a nuisance in conversation because in general I don't really watch movies or TV shows or have a life and mostly I have not seen the movies people cite as being the BEST MOVIES EVERARGH and when people quote from said movies I just don't understand and no one wins. I think before a few weeks ago, when I last went to the movies, I had not been to see a film at the ol' cinemaplex since Pirates of the Caribbean II came out. Also, while I'm admitting shameful deeds regarding the movie experience, I have never consumed a choc-top. I know, I hate me too.

Anyway, so I was in the car with my mum and we were talking about music and I was telling her about that really good part in 'Let The Sunshine In' (see below post!) and she told me what a large part of her life the movie 'HAIR' was, so I was like WELL HEY MAMA I'M GONNA WATCH IT and I did and I just adored it. It is so beautiful, and so honest, and so hilarious, and so, so sad - I literally did go from laughing to crying within the space of two hours. So worth just sitting and just watchin' a movie, and of course now I understand why it's such a classic. Also it provides a wonderful context to the song 'Let The Sunshine In' which made me cry the first time I heard it anyway, not even knowing the storyline - the lyrics of which, by the way, are actually really beautiful (in the Fifth Dimension's version anyway):

"Oh, let it shine, c'mon
Now everybody just sing along
Let the sun shine in
Open up your heart and let it shine on in
When you are lonely, let it shine on
Got to open up your heart and let it shine on in
And when you feel like you've been mistreated
And your friends turn away
Just open your heart, and shine it on in..."

Some tunes for your listening pleasure!

"Well, I wouldn't kick Mick Jagger out of my bed, but uh, I'm not a homosexual, no."

YOU SHOULD WATCH HAIR NOW OK???????