March 2012
1 post
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slap dash
Syar and I send each other regular bursts of static re: travelling, third culture kids, heimweh, anywhere but here - the thing I keep talking, living, breathing, working towards, the spirit of whatever this blog is devoted to capturing. This post on wanderlust is equal parts interesting and infuriating - it’s beautifully written but bless your parochial socks, ladies, and ease up on the...
February 2012
2 posts
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remembering
And you wait, are awaiting the one thing that will infinitely increase your life; the powerful, the uncommon, the awakening of stones, depths turned towards you. Dimly there gleam in the bookcase the volumes in gold and brown; and you think of lands journeyed through, of pictures, of the apparel of women lost again. And you know all at once: That was it. You arise, and before you stands a bygone...
December 2011
1 post
you have freshly dyed hair and a pocketful of bills, so Tonight You Are Dancing. this is what friday nights are for, right? it’s for work parties, empty tabs, sleazy ex-colleagues who won’t take the hint, soundtracked by thudding mainstream doof
oof.
alcohol softens noise and increases the urge to pee - they should name a drink after this, call it the seal-breaker, joke about ethnic...
November 2011
1 post
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October 2011
1 post
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the heart of the matter
I.
write more, you said with a look in your eyes: earnest and sweet, and maybe you mean it
my friends are great poets, they’ve mastered the trick of braiding words into curious shapes
an artichoke a cello a ladle
words to peel apart and drag your teeth across until you reach the heart of the matter or smooth your hand along the curve and draw forth a different sort of tune —...
May 2011
3 posts
1 tag
study break
Visited the Grove for the first time in months. I thought I’d gotten the stoned spooning and matching rainbow thermals out of my system (‘growing up’) but when I crossed the threshold it felt like coming home.
Everyone is moving in and out of sharehouses, shacking up and streamlining and saving for their South American Dream. “You should move in here!” I would if...
I had a bad run of a few months and then a string of pretty okay weeks, but this week has been the one where I finally get my shit together. Nothing’s really changed but my ability to keep it all together, it’s like balancing plates without the constant fear that they’ll all come crashing down.
Working hard and keeping sane. Especially Friday: spent the entire day talking to...
"I could be the Tin Tin of Darlinghurst"
today I walked around kings cross and took pictures of buildings and the backs of peoples’ heads, and wondered why I felt so tense, was it the ‘vibe’ of the area, I don’t know
emailed notes to self:
“Outside bars: old men rolling their own cigarettes. They scratch their stubble, watch you. Sounds of construction, trucks bringing in deliveries, staff constantly...
April 2011
1 post
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the only thing
give me HOCKEY or give me — give me WEST COAST or give me — give me ZEN or, or, or
Barely two months into honours and I cracked. No: there’s more to it than that. Tried to cope. Kept smiling. Stripped commitments to the bone but still felt kicked in the head.
Rode the bus out of town just so I could watch the landscape peel away from the windows and not think. Listened to...
March 2011
3 posts
diving bell
“I procrastinate worse than anybody. Writing is so hard. I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.
…Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who...
1 tag
annotated bibliography
syar asked to see the notebook I use to work out my thought processes. here are some fragments.
the past few months I’ve been fighting my writing and, by extension, my self.
words are hard to shape if you’re trying to control them. I tried to keep quiet, look busy, limit the amount of white noise I projected. it doesn’t work. I lost passion and drowned in cool, locked myself...
February 2011
3 posts
1 tag
this is the trick
so let’s talk about the internet, kind of
or: rupturing the memory-making process (draft 0 of my walking narrative project) or: i am drunk on negative sleep so here’s what i can do to remember this or: I AM SO FUCKING RUSTY AT ‘WRITING’ MY GOD
- realising your main form of communication/interaction is now emails&chat thanks to never answering your phone/not...
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oh my ovaries
that time I had a weekend of babies and I was all GODDAMN. goddamn.
2011 is for burning out and making mistakes and punching your life into shape. but sometimes you slow down (from exhaustion) and think about what you want for now, and in the future, and sometimes you have to admit to yourself: ‘all I want is a good home, and a wife. and a children, and some food to feed them every...
January 2011
2 posts
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BURNING THE OLD YEAR
so much of any year is flammable
—naomi shihab nye
JANUARY
january was new york, montreal, toronto, chicago, santa cruz, san francisco, portland, seattle. on the way I met backpackers, film students, activists, other australians, hippies, grandmothers, girl scouts, entrepreneurs, google employees, artists, good ol’ kentucky boys and etc
it was a month living out of...
December 2010
1 post
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my blueberry nights
something I choose to remember from this day: ‘serious’ shouldn’t be a concern. what matters is whether it’s meaningful.
November 2010
2 posts
2 tags
we make history, strive off victory
faced with the prospect of working 50 hours a week and dropping a dress size in a fortnight (AGAIN), I really appreciate friends who let you fall asleep on their couch halfway through the meal. many thanks were given on that night & others
let me know, do I still got time to grow? things ain’t always set in stone. with that being, let me know… seems like...
1 tag
how to make a great first impression on new...
- Sleep through your alarm by two hours
- Get off at the wrong bus stop and realise you don’t actually know where the conference is; wander around hoping someone recognises you and is willing to acknowledge you
- (But before that glare at a random passer-by because it is That Kind Of Day)
- (Then walk into the room and realise he’s the guest speaker)
- Look really grumpy and...
October 2010
1 post
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NEW SENSATION
It was a bad day for walking. We bruised toes and tripped over cobblestones, the rain burst pipes and spilled down streets and drowned out conversation. We misheard, mumbled, smiled to cover silence. But the skies cleared as I headed west, there were songs looping in my head, and by the time I reached parkland the air felt light and clean.
At second home we shelled broadbeans and danced to...
September 2010
4 posts
2 tags
playgrounds
1.
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
—frank o’hara
2.
It is not so much that I miss you as the remembering which I suppose is a form of missing except more positive, like the time of the blackout when fear was my first response followed by love of the dark.
—dorothea grossman
3.
...
2 tags
all you need is grove
- lemon water is a good idea
- sleep is a good idea
- avoiding phone calls is a bad idea
- funemployment is an increasingly disenchanting idea
- zinemaking and scrapbooking are reassuring ideas
- poetry is a good idea
- gold panda is a good idea
- the long blondes are a really good idea
- best coast is a really bad idea
- analogue is a good idea
- listing songs in ‘title -...
August 2010
2 posts
1 tag
palindromes are awesome
So this is 22. It’s nice! You know what else is nice? SPRING
Being 21 in another country was interesting. I’ve tried several times to write a Really Serious Post on how it played out and it always boils down to “yeah yeah yeah WOO yeah” or something equally inane
ANYWAY
Here is a picture of a puppy.
This is Mowgli. He’s a little dumb. He lives with my high...
2 tags
the proving trail
“I’m sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it!” “You will hate the next place, too,” I said. “What you are you will carry with you.”
—Louis L’Amour
July 2010
3 posts
2 tags
FOR THE RECORD
Here’s something I didn’t mention: while in Vancouver I kept a separate account for all the incoherent drunken twittertexts I didn’t want to spam all my Sydney friends with—but considering the amount of junk that still made its way into my feed, I kind of wonder why I bothered.
Anyway today has been a tremendous day for several reasons, one of them being the decision to be...
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displacement activity
First world problems: spending the last two months home and unemployed and in between classes and wondering why you have nothing to show for it (LIKE A JOB MAYBE. or a book deal. or life direction.) It’s like aw shit son, suck it up and LOOK YOU BEEN A BUSY BROAD
(cake party! via)
Note to self: Life Is Not So Bad I Guess
1 tag
the only thing worth hugging is a hugmug
TEA: darjeeling + russian caravan + monk pear + vanilla rooibos
also percolating in the language of homelands and architecture and photography. saving tomorrow for long walks and silence.
June 2010
5 posts
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idle thoughts that no one cares about I'M SURE
Before I left for Vancouver a friend advised me to wear a different perfume so that “when you come home and smell it you’ll think of Canada”. Okay, I thought—and if you sense the doubt in my inflection it’s because, well. Countries have a smell of their own that permeate your clothes and hair and skin, and who needs something artificial when you can inhale great...
1 tag
curb your capslock enthusiasm
so my brain is not the information powerhouse it claims to be. to everyone I’ve flaked on accidentally triple-booked nights: I’M SORRY. those omega-3 capsules really don’t live up to their claims, and really I shouldn’t be relying on them so much, would you still be my friend if I became a SUBSTANCE ABUSER, would you Stage An Intervention if I started rubbing my nose...
1 tag
renovations
what with being in sydney for a week and running the reunion gauntlet and resisting attempts at reintegration, astute readers may make the perfectly reasonable assumption that this blog has done its duty and I’m laying it to rest. INCORRECT! consider this a fallow interlude as I cultivate the seeds of my next exciting adventure (j-j-j-JAKARTA hello)
in the meantime expect periodic outbursts...
May 2010
6 posts
1 tag
list of things I will miss about canada (work in...
- not being Australia - Montreal - better beer - the Skytrain (& really straightforward street layouts: “I’ll meet you on the corner of Pender and Thurlow” rather than “take a left then a right then past that bush you’ll see a circumcised dog: that’s how you know you’ve gone too far”) - standing on the beach with mountains at your back - west...
1 tag
oh dhany
“I understand you’ve had a rip-roaring time in Canuck Land, but I also understand that this time is coming to an unwanted end, so I hope you won’t have too difficult a time saying all the goodbyes that you really don’t want to distribute (who are we kidding, it’s going to be hell). I hope your hugs at the airport are warm and material and inconsiderate of the...
1 tag
“A third culture kid is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her...”
– What is a TCK?
Forgive me for quoting correspondence, but when you find someone like Antiguit who suggests “hanging out in Jakarta roadside food stalls next January and writing bitter songs on the ukulele about the moral disconnect prevalent in Indonesian government” — well. You...
2 tags
drunk on sunshine and happy
WOWEE so this is a typical day in Birds Nest, Vancouver:
1. Wake up, decide not to go to the nudist beach, clean out house and celebrate with a super awesome lunch. On the trip back from BC Liquor I run into the dude from the engaged couple we invited off the street into K’s birthday party two weeks ago, so OF COURSE I invite him over to hang with us sometime this weekend (underground...
1 tag
squamish and the birds nest
this one’s for the people back home. and it’s also for me. because I say things like ‘I’m happy here’ and I get a few raised eyebrows because my everyday crotchety grandma routine gives lie to this statement, but you’d be tired too if every day is an adventure. and it is! here’s the proof. if the past fortnight’s been any indication, living in the...
1 tag
A serious day
Woke up in the morning feeling like J Didion: nervous, wrist against forehead, prone to deliberate gestures and elliptical pop culture references. Because I had just moved into my friends’ house and because I was the first one awake and uncertain how the hierarchy of morning rituals unfold, I made a pot of tea and left it to stew while I opened my email inbox, closed it, opened it again. Two...
April 2010
5 posts
1 tag
west coast dream
…is coming to an end.
- yoga - camping - nudes @ wreck beach - bike riding around stanley park - underground cafe - find chocolate stout somewhere in this city
only one month left in vancouver. moved out of my place and into the birds nest with a group of pot-smoking hippies so we can take our clothes off and commune with trees. (this is a joke.) serious face: gotta take each day like...
1 tag
in between the last post and this
t-shirt making, the mysterious ticking noise, sleep marathons and frisbee, baked fruit with marshmallow et al, beer for breakfast, five orange shirts, hiking (!!) off beaten trails, beer at the peak, beer at the pub, dancing to the covers band playing mgmt, more beer, realising the lead singer eyesexing your filthy sweaty post-hike self is actually the guy your friend was chasing that time you...
2 tags
hit the road, jack
“The United States—how can you live in that country?” the man had asked. Agnes had shrugged. “A lot of my stuff is there,” she’d said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.
—Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
Imagine this:...
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March 2010
7 posts
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nursery slang
You know the deep-seated thrill that comes with actually doing work related to your field of interest? The only way I could feel better right now is if I were getting paid to do it, and if my mother were here to pat me on the head in her condescending little way.
My Korean students think I am a strange creature because I chew basil stalks and use foreign words, but then I introduce them to things...
