Paradise

When I walk I like to walk with my dog. He's dorky and doesn't do much except eat and dribble but he's good fun to walk with because he's like a child and like Bernard Black says, 'Children are always looking surprised. Everything's new to them!' So when Soda is gambolling about in some flowers it reminds me that flowers are actually beautiful and so on. 


I guess there's something romantic in being young and disobedient even for an anxious old soul like me. I realised this when I was running home at 1AM this morning still kind of tipsy and thanking my lucky stars that there were no other suspicious looking characters on the train. I put pearls and flowers in my hair because it made me feel like a mermaid princess but they fell out into the gravel on my dirt road with no streetlights. 


Watching Lady Gaga's Monster Ball tonight and she's always full to bursting with all these profound anecdotes that she speaks so softly and articulately it just makes me want to be her because she seems to live in a world where walking down the street isn't just walking down the street, it's an outer body experience with strangenesses and charms that ooze inspiration or something like it. 


I like the way my friends know to expect songs from me when I've been hanging around different crowds and when I walk furiously in headphones and when cider's on tap at the bar and I've got an envelope of Christmas money that should be lasting me until I get a job for the summer. 


I guess that mainly the words I write on my walls I'll just tear down in the new year like I'll probably cut all my hair off again soon like last summer and I'll drown in my own sweat and tears again but it will all be worth it because well one day I guess we'll all get out of this place

Have yourself a merry little whatever

Here is a list of my favourite Christmas songs just in time for, well, Christmas. 

SAD CHRISTMAS + MY NUMBER ONE CHRISTMAS SONG: JONI MITCHELL, 'RIVER'

The only Christmas I've ever known has included flies conquering the turkey, sweating with the effort of pulling a bonbon with my sister and squinting over the Sahara desert-esque parking lot looking for my car after last minute shopping on Christmas Eve. But if I am ever old and lonely and tired of this Australian life I think that I would move to Europe for the winter and live in a little house with a fireplace and on Christmas Eve I'd sit in an armchair and listen to River and cry over romantic failures and read poetry and be over-dramatic about everything. This song encompasses a lot of what is sad about Christmas because in our natural human way of balancing ourselves out, what is, for some, a time of great joy and happiness is, for others, a time of heightened sadness and reminders of regrets. I mean this song is still beautiful when the sun sets in this blistering part of the world but I just think it belongs on a frozen lake somewhere in Canada at Christmastime. 

WISTFUL CHRISTMAS: TIM MINCHIN, 'WHITE WINE IN THE SUN' 

IT'S-CHRISTMAS-BUT-THINGS-ARE-STILL-SHIT CHRISTMAS: KATE MILLER-HEIDKE, 'THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS'

COMEDY CHRISTMAS: THE BEDROOM PHILOSOPHER, 'PRESENTS' 

TRADITIONAL CHRISTMAS: JUDY GARLAND, 'HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS'

WHAM! CHRISTMAS: WHAM! 'LAST CHRISTMAS'

While I'm flogging some great Christmas tunes here is a preview of my friend's Christmas album entitled A VERY KELLEHER CHRISTMAS. I think it's genius. 

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank every single one of you (and you Mum) for reading this blog and in turn supporting me so much - whenever someone approaches me and tells me they read something off my blog that they liked or whatever it's like being hugged by a puppy. Merry Christmas and I hope to continue to provide mildly amusing prose for you to peruse in the new year. Much love and take care and don't hurt your teeth on the coins in the Christmas pudding. 

x

I will see you in my dreams

My aunty's wedding was last night, and I don't know if it's because I'm hypersensitive or just a  WOMAN but it was like everything was shot in soft focus and the blushing bride would smile and the whole room would sigh collectively like those old movies where getting married was like the bees knees. It's quite funny really because I can't think of a bride more unconventional than my Aunty Em, who once drove down a freeway with a monster Christmas tree lying longways across the back seats of the car with both windows down, extending about a metre out each side and spend most of her formative years researching human rights in Moscow, Russia. 


Weddings are a prime example of tradition and the absurdity of such. My family and I were laughing about the mainly English/Australian tradition of the women guests of a wedding sleeping with a slice of the wedding cake underneath their pillow on the wedding night. I think it has something to do with the cake somehow transmitting dreams of these single girls' own weddings and future spouses. Needless to say I meant to sleep with it underneath my pillow - in a little bag all covered in cake grease - but left it forlorn on my bedside table sitting atop the piles of my diaries which are filled with enough secrets and insanities to keep me single forever. Rather than finding this sad, however, I kind of think it's funny, just like I think most things to do with my dismal attempts at emotional stability are quite funny and stories about crying into haystacks at parties quite hilarious in hindsight. Really. And rather than dream of my future husband last night, I dreamt of colours and sounds and stages and Motion Picture Soundtrack by Radiohead and Air by Snakadaktal. 


I've really never been quite as happy as I am right now and it seems as though I'm looking at the world through one of those colour kaleidoscopes and everything's moving in rainbows and I'm moving through with it, and I'm thankful for everything. For friends and family, for music and art, for sharing deodorant with my bandmates and sharing homemade margaritas with my friends and sharing colds with my family only because it proves our close quarters, I guess. I'm thankful for hair dye and Terminator and tissues and James Blake and dancing and dessert. There's always been so much to be thankful for and I'm ashamed that I've only really realised this now. 


I am also thankful for Lady Gaga and her newest and greatest video, Marry The Night. Below are some crappy screenshots from my favourite part of the video which is a montage of quite fast shots, including a sequence where Gaga is stumbling about trying to carry her keyboard and then her Dad - who I think is her Dad - helps her with it. This tiny little selection of shots touched my heart and reminded me of the zillions of times my own Dad - and Mum too - has helped me not only carry my gear but give me performance advice (sometimes taken, sometimes not, but always appreciated), come to every single gig, always applaud, always listen, always the first to hear new songs and the first to know of my achievements and the first to congratulate and always, always there to comfort me when I cry like a little kid. Just another aspect of my life to be thankful for!

You got me running round in circles

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SHANNAYA PHOTOGRAPHY

So the other night our band Volumetric played our first 'official' gig on a stage in a club and everything. There were even roadies with beards and I got to ask for more foldback for the vocals like a real rockstar! In all seriousness though it was a wonderful night; one of those occasions that seem to be multiplying where I am so overwhelmed by the generosity, kindness and support of those surrounding me, and also my bandmates. It's really wild. 


I guess 'happiness' comes in so many forms, and on so many different levels, that it's hard to choose a happiness that you could consider the best, or greatest, or largest. Somehow it's difficult to compare them, too - the happiness you find when lying on wet grass in the middle of the night singing pop music at the top of your lungs is incomparable to the happiness of achieving career goals. Perhaps one is greater than the other, but would living without either leave you lacking? I guess I think so... 


Anyway the point is I can't ever think of anything to be sad about when I get to play the music I love, with the people I love, to the people I love. And if it can be that simple for the rest of forever I don't need to worry about what will become of me because I'll just let this whole thing become me. Become of me. The end. 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Even on good days I still wish I could draw a picture in chalk and jump into it and become a part of it like in 'Mary Poppins'. I want to dance with penguins and ride carousel horses instead of waiting for buses and trains and attaching music to people and places in my head. I think that I would still choose this ugly place in place of a chalk wonderland though, because it's only here that I'm sure I can love a song more than and surer than many other people I've known, including myself - only here that I can listen to Bon Iver's 'Blood Bank' again and again during transit to the beach and back in some absurd attempt at capturing nostalgia. Even if carsick 18 year olds and the stench of hot jam doughnuts in that godforsaken vehicle will be the memory most vivid when I listen to that song again in the winter. 

Like a rainbow

Time is now a luxury that I'm beginning to experience as study slows down, and auditions draw to a close. Playing the waiting game is never willingly done - at least, not by me - so I've spent the time wandering art galleries, listening to Judy Garland and taking walks in the sunshine. I haven't been able to take huge chunks of time to nurture inspiration lately and somehow I think this has been a good thing - now I can appreciate the true wonders that surround us every day because I never had the time to before. Blahblurpshuppbleekplark. You can catch me doing inspirational speeches at a community centre near you!


I lost my mind a little bit this week getting sick and taking strong medication that messed with my head and my ability to make decisions that are considered wise by most. Again the luxury of time and freedom now allows me to wear whatever I please whenever I like, which is now a blessing, and another part of being a grown up I need to adjust to. A heady mixture of sickness and almost too much freedom had me staring disdainfully at the mirror yesterday when I put on a seriously mediocre outfit, which I then proceeded to tear off and bury deep within the strange centre of my cramped wardrobe. 


In times of outfit doubt (doubt-fit) (hahaha), my current state of mind is this: JUST WEAR ALL THE COLOURS. All of them! Seriously. There is nothing more fun than exploding out of your front door with patterns and lines and shapes in every colour imaginable and somehow, though you wouldn't think it would, the downright offensiveness of your unthinkable fashion nightmare of an outfit is magnificent, and pretty, and endearing. Something very freeing about wearing all the colours. Take inspiration from places like Madagascar and Mexico, from birds and flowers, from the ambiguity of Gordo's feelings for Lizzie McGuire and from little kids who dress themselves, and remember that, as my mother always says: 'Less is not more. More is more.'

I'm wondering myself

Well hey. I was going to write a super long super interesting blog post here but to tell you the truth, I am sick, and paying for staying up all last night watching rage, and sucked into Iron and Wine so far that this is now highly unlikely. So I'm just writing to let you know that this blog now has an accompanying picture blog so that I can post pix of me looking like this:

the hatRz just make me famou$ss or something 

Hello, boys! Visit a hyper heart at http://ahyperheart.tumblr.com if you like what you see lol!!1!

Walkaways

I have participated in a segment of the infamous "SCHOOLIES" and despite it being comprised of mostly everything that spooks me like a little bunny (men, vomit, vomiting men, vomiting men in wifebeaters) I really enjoyed it, mainly because of the its absolutely absurd inherence, particularly where I'm staying. My friends and I are staying in a commercial hotel by the beach, which is completely booked out with schoolies. 

I described it to my mother as some kind of bizarre school camp, where teachers are replaced with security guards and lights out means dubstep must be turned down and afternoon free time is drinking time and activities time is drinking time and pretty much any other time you can think of not including sleep time is drinking time. In between drinking and sleeping even the rookiest of schoolies observers will note the excessive appearance of the phrase 'woo hoo!' 


The 'woo hoo!' is the mating call and catch cry of the schoolie; that is, when the creatures arise from their dens of an afternoon they will blinking-step onto the balcony, wading through VB cans and wet towels and questionable liquids and rubbing their eyelids, swiftly downing the morning shot of the day and crying 'WOoO HooOO!' 'Woo hoo's certainly increase in number towards the late evening when most schoolies are out and about - my friends and I have a serial 'woo hoo'er staying in the apartment below us; similar to the role of the traditional rooster, this boy is the first to 'woo hoo' upon the arising of the schoolies at around 1PM and the last to feebly proclaim the cry of revelry and freedom at around 6.30-7AM. I tell you now, readers, there is nothing more humorous than to have crawled pathetically into bed on the first night of schoolies, overwhelmed and exhausted with a spinning head, and to just be on the cusp of sleep when a single, 18 year old male voice meekly and weakly filters through your consciousness before you go under: '...wooOoo.....hooOoo....'


Unfortunately I had to leave this madness prematurely because of several auditions scheduled for this week. I don't mind too much however, because I figure the beach didn't disappear all through year 12 when I was locked away in my bedroom clawing at my eyeballs, so surely it will remain patiently and contentedly for my return upon my true release into this crazy scary world. These auditions are a part of something much bigger than everything else in my life - they are representative of what is just everything to me. (Suffice to say I tried to keep 'woohoo'ing to a minimum these past few days to keep my voice in check, however this proved difficult as schoolies spirit is devestatingly infectious). This is my audition game face (I have worn the same outfit for the four auditions I've already had). I want this outfit to scream 'Let me in! Let me in!' without me actually having to scream it and be taken away in a van. 

(I dyed my hair again and it came out kind of weird but in a nice way but now it's hard to match clothes to it.)


I want to get into these music courses more than anything, ever, ever ever in my life. To get in to even one seems like some kind of mad dream - and is something I'm trying (in vain) to distance myself from, just in case things don't work out and a PLAN B (yet to actually be planned) is in order. 


I was walking again yesterday listening to music and thinking how much of me is truly and purely this ridiculous venture. I keep falling back onto it, onto art, onto sounds and noises. If you've ever leant precariously onto a loved one's chest, just to check their heartbeat is there - I've been there and every time, it's as though while the steady rhythm is a comfort, you know one day that it will stop. And yours will stop, too. But music - it doesn't stop, ever, it just keeps on going and has done since the dawn of whenever and will do until everything, everything ends. And by that time it doesn't even matter. So suddenly I'm learning all this stuff about myself and why I am who I am - I'm obsessed with security and safety so I like the ocean, and music, and big fucking mountains because they'll never go away, they'll never really die, and they're strong, not fragile, not breakable, like little human bones and brains and hearts. Or something like that. 

a schoolie in her natural environment