Sometimes I wish that more Australians celebrated Halloween. You don’t get much more than the one kid out of nine hundred students in a high school wearing a black cape and a ghost mask, or about one kid every five years knocking on your door asking for candy, or the odd Halloween party – if people can be bothered. It’s not celebrated nationally, and I haven’t minded that the rest of the world celebrates it without us, but today, I felt a bit bored and thought it would be pretty exciting if one of my friends decided to have a Halloween party.
I don’t know what I’d dress up as – for dressing in revealing clothing seems to be common for girls, but I’d rather get more creative with my costume. The closest I’ve come to dressing up as anything is on muck-up day in the last year of high school. We had people dress up as Powerpuff girls, Tetris pieces, that guy from Saw, some cavemen, and numerous other things I don’t really remember. I dressed up as a ragdoll. I’ll admit I could have been more creative with that, because I was planning to create a dress covered entirely in random buttons, but I didn’t have time. The school gave us short notice.
If we celebrated Halloween I’d be thinking about my costume a couple of months in advance. Now that I think about it, I can’t really think of anything I’d want to be – at least, not anything scary. I could try dress up as a Doctor Who character, which would then verge on cosplaying. Otherwise, I’d hire a costume of a character I like or just something hilarious. But because I wouldn’t bothered with any of those, Halloween would just be an excuse for me to go to work in my pyjamas. It’s weird not celebrating Halloween, because many people showcase their wonderful costumes on the internet – on YouTube, on blogs, on Twitter, and so on – and I just can’t imagine what it would be like if it was more of a tradition here.
In other news, my dad is polishing our corkboard floor. Our house is really rather old. Not so old that it’s falling apart, but it’s nothing majestic. It’s what I call home. It’s comfortable, it’s lovely, it’s got enough room. My dad’s been using this lacquer-like polish so he’s basically had to sand the floor and paint this glossy fun stick stuff on it. We’ve had to move a lot of the furniture, and empty some bookshelves, but the fun part – wait for it – is that he’s doing sections at a time and marking boundaries with masking tape so sometimes we have to jump over certain sections of floor. A few people mentioned to me on Twitter that it reminded them of the game The Floor is Lava. I remember playing this with my brother as we climbed on the furniture and desperately tried to search for patches of rug that were safe to stand on as we were avoiding the floor.
My corkboard floor used to scare me because of the design; it’s got black spots on it basically, obviously like cork – and some of the black spots were bigger than others, or weirdly shaped, and I used to think they were insects from a distance.
I remember doing really idiotic things with my brother when we were a lot younger. We named one of our antics “Po Blood and Bone”. I had a Teletubby toy, Po specifically, and we got really sick of the Teletubbies so we buried Po in the dirt outside, in one of the holes our mum used to plant trees in.
Many other times we made “forts” out of chairs and blankets and turned out the lights and pretended we were camping out. I liked this the most.
My brother made up this game where we stood on the carpet while standing on old supermarket catalogues or flyers, one under each foot, and we had to wiggle around from side to side and move around like we were skating on the carpet. Because of the paper, it made the movements very slippery. The first person to fall obviously lost.
One of my absolute favourite games was “Roly Poly Pudding”, based on a Beatrix Potter story. A cat was rolled up by rats in a sheet of dough (to be cooked and eaten), and struggled to get out. This prompted us to make up a game where one person rolled the other person in a large quilt/doona/blanket (arms inside!) and tied up the blanket with string or another blanket, to basically make sure that it was impossible to escape. The person inside the roll would have to attempt to escape the blanket, whether by wriggling out, or standing up and wriggling the blanket off. That is, if you could stand up in the first place.
If I had a Halloween party, I swear to cow I’d make everyone play that game.
When I think of the things that annoy me to the point of no return, the list is endless. I have realised that I have days that I am less irritated than usual, but today was one of those days that really did bother me.
I have a long list of things to do that I honestly should finish by the end of the weekend but I don’t think I can do it all. I like having good time management and I like to think that I still have that characteristic, but I have a habit of not getting my priorities straight.
I have been feeling rather short on time because my relatives are arriving next Monday from overseas. I guess I’m not going to be able to have much time with them anyway because I’ll be extremely busy with work and study, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’ll be crashing my house. All… ten of them. Okay, I really don’t know now because initially my mum said there were six of them, so I’m just confused. Either way, it reminds me of the time almost ten years ago that we had visitors/guests…
I found my diary that I wrote in at the time. I was only about eleven or so, but I was an angsty little fifth grader, I’m not going to lie. And I don’t know where I picked up bad language but around the time we had those visitors, I had written diary entries in messy glittery dark green pen, riddled with “fuck” and “FUCK” and other expletives. There were six people staying with us that time, I think – or was it eight? – and I was too young to really remember who they were. They weren’t close relatives, they were more like distant aunts and uncles and… I don’t recall.
I had to sleep in my parents’ room or in my brother’s room while they stayed with us. I was very annoyed by this because obviously I just wanted to sleep in my own room and have it all to myself. But no, that was their room for the duration of their stay.
That has happened on numerous occasions we’ve had visitors, and what I hated the most was getting all my belongings and moving them out every night just so I wouldn’t wake them up in the morning.
I remember having left a keyring by my nightlight. It was made of beads and woven together in the shape of a person with coloured string. I remember that one day I found that the string had frayed and I got annoyed, immediately blaming the youngest child of the visiting family. My mum said it was my fault for leaving my belongings. At the time that little keyring was my favourite. I have it buried somewhere now, but I try not to think about what happened.
I was very hostile while they were staying with us. I probably glared at them a lot.
One day the father – I’ll just say he’s a distant uncle, like my dad’s cousin or something (because he probably is) – was just sitting at our spare desk. He made use of a notepad that was sitting there and the coloured pencils and pens we kept in a tray. We rarely used those coloured pencils and pens. He was drawing something and to my surprise he gave it to me.
It was a gorgeous artwork of my full name, outlined in pen and coloured with coloured pencil. My first name was written in this bubble-type writing and my surname in a beautiful script. There was a discreet background of a heart that was coloured pink and yellow. It was honestly lovely, it was beautiful.
At that moment I felt bad for having ever had any hatred towards that family. I smiled, and said, “Thank you.” I still have the piece of notepaper in my shelf. I used it as a bookmark for some time.
I guess, I’ll try my best not to be like that again this time. I’ll try hard not to be annoyed.
Last week I decided to buy some cereal. I went into Woolworths, which is possibly my favourite supermarket – though I don’t discriminate between supermarkets – but I feel more comfortable in that one.
I walked into the cereal aisle, curious to see if there was any cereal on sale. For some reason good (or tasty) cereal tends to be really expensive for just a box that is supposed to last no more than two weeks. Standing in front of the shelves and scooting from left to right, I realised I was spoilt for choice.
From a young age, I have never really cared much about breakfast, and just eaten what was available in the fridge. When I was very young, my mum would make me Weet-Bix – a wholegrain wheat biscuit usually eaten with milk and perhaps some fruit on top. I hated Weet-Bix when I was little. It was tasteless, even with a bit of fruit. I hated the taste of tastelessness. Which isn’t fair to say… but let’s just say, I was a slow eater when I was a child, and by the time I ate half my breakfast, it would have turned into a soggy mess. Weet-Bix is apparently Australia’s favourite breakfast, but not when you like to savour your food. Because it ends up being flaky ass porridge. These Weet-Bix biscuits are pretty small, a little smaller than an iPhone. I used to completely struggle trying to eat two of these.
After many years I think I realised how much I hated that, and instead started eating bread for breakfast. We didn’t have a toaster – it broke after some time and to this day, we haven’t replaced it. We use a toaster oven instead now, which I used in a random video of me eating breakfast. Bread was pretty much it for many years, and in winter, I would have vegetable soup for breakfast.
I’ve never been a cereal girl. If we lived in a cereal world I would not be a cereal girl1… when we had school camps and people had cereal, I actually freaked out, though. Having not had cereal for years, apart from horrendous Weet-Bix, I leaped to the cornflakes to serve myself. You would think I didn’t know cornflakes existed. At the same time, I don’t think I enjoyed cereal all that much. My mum bought a lot of mixed cereals with bran and fruit and rolled oats. I tried them, but I hated them. I tend to hate oats. Wow, I’m picky.
Anyway, I got pretty fussy with breakfast (as if that wasn’t obvious yet) and after catching the bus and walking to school, my stomach hated bread in the morning. It sat in my stomach and made me feel sick. Any movement too early in the morning made me feel very sick, and I deduced that it was the bread that did it.
That was when I started eating miso soup and rice for breakfast instead. I had it every day, even in summer. It was insane. When we ran out of miso soup I gave up on finding some for a good deal, and resorted to something old but something new, something yummy and something poo – Vegemite.
I don’t understand why people hate it. Yes, it is a bit salty (personally, I am not exaggerating when I say a bit) and it looks like tar and in popular culture it is either shit or really freaking awesome. I think I’m in the middle, but I do love it and I see no point in trying to defend my point, so if you hate it, go ahead, I’ll pretty much acknowledge the fact and subsequently ignore it and pretend I never heard it. 0:)
So when I stood in front of all the cereal boxes the other day and looked for the cheap ones with less sugar, guess what I ended up choosing.
Weet-Bix. Weet-Bix will be the death of me.
It was a variant though, with slight honey flavour, and in smaller pieces called Bites. A variant, but Weet-Bix nonetheless. Weet-Bix Bites, huh. I never knew choosing cereal was so difficult.
I realise how irritable I can be sometimes. I am exceptionally moody, and perhaps moody is a word that doesn’t quite cut it.
I discovered my marks for last semester and I was really upset at the “Pass” I got for that stupid database subject I had with that nasty teacher. I guess I was expecting only a Pass with no extra credits, and it is better than a fail, but after putting in so much effort and feeling this extreme bias from this tutor, I’ve had enough. Frankly, she can get fucked, that’s all I’m saying.
I find that the rain also affects my moods. It’s been raining a lot lately and I’m not sure when it’s going to stop… and I keep forgetting when winter ends. It’s still another month away. I’ve been trying to go for a run every day, but since it started raining, I haven’t been able to, so I’ve been doing really silly things like jogging on the spot or back and forth across the kitchen while listening to music. Rain makes me really lazy.
Last night, for some reason, I couldn’t sleep. It’s pretty rare that I can’t sleep at night. Sometimes there might be a lot on my mind, but I usually sleep it off and decide to worry about it the next morning. Sometimes I’m just plain scared.
When I was five years old, I had a terrible nightmare. In the dream, I was in a dark pond scattered with lilypads. I felt like I was playing hide-and-seek just moving and jumping around, making my way to the edge of the pond with bushes. All of a sudden I saw the feet of a monster – it seemed much like a dinosaur’s feet – and a huge, bouncy red ball bounced right near me and nearly knocked me into the water. I was absolutely terrified. I think I was in the middle of a game of ball between some dinosaurs in this pond. The ball kept just missing me every time it bounced and I tried to run away. Suddenly, I woke up, and I couldn’t go back to sleep and I was scared to move, so I called out for my mum. I started crying and I remember that I went with her to her room because I was scared to sleep alone in my room. I don’t have nightmares a lot, and that’s just one of the ones I remember from when I was younger.
I realised that though shadows scare people, they give me some sort of comfort. I found this out in my Music in Shadows project for photography. I’ve been scared of the dark for as long as I can remember. One of my friends finds the darkness comforting, but pitch black creeps me out more than shadows do. Knowing that there is a presence of light, at all, makes me feel a bit better. I guess that’s why I found that it made me feel less scared when James, Mike and I played shadow puppets in the car that time I forgot my keys and we were just waiting outside my house in the dark…
I’ve done yoga before and there are quite a few techniques that helped me fall asleep or keep calm. One of them was just to listen to your breathing. Some people like to listen to the rain or the wind. I had this application on my old phone that played river music or rain sounds to help you sleep, but it kept draining out the battery. I still think that music by Explosions in the Sky helps me sleep.
One method I particularly liked involved counting. I used to grab a beaded necklace (in yoga, we were given wooden beads with some incense) and close my eyes, running beads through my fingers, one at a time. I used to think it was silly dreaming of electric sheep or counting backwards or counting forwards.
My new laptop keyboard arrived the other day. A few days after using my laptop for the first time, I was annoyed that I chose a laptop with a shiny surface. The fingerprints came up really quickly because of the smooth, shiny surface. I was happy to find out that this new laptop keyboard has a matte surface, so I shouldn’t get fingerprints on it as easily. I won’t be replacing it yet though, not until my current keyboard actually needs replacing.
I don’t know if anyone remembers my A Letter to a Domain project, but I moved it to letters.georgie.nu and hope to write more soon.
I used to have a category/tag on my blog, “idiots”. I took it out because I kind of ran out of funny stories to tell about idiots on the train, and in essence, there weren’t many stories at all. Perhaps people have become smarter and have more common sense, or I just pay no attention anymore? If it’s the former, well, today just proved that hypothesis wrong. More specifically, this afternoon. It was just the incidents of this afternoon, but overall it was an eventful day.
I was sitting in the car and my dad was giving me and my brother a lift to the train station. I had been in a rush so I was putting eye cream on my eyes while peering at my blue pocket mirror as we were waiting at a traffic light. I wiped the tip of my nose, and suddenly, blood started pouring out of my nose.
Yay nosebleed.
It was just way uncool. That is the only phrase I can think of to describe what happened. I thought it’d stop after some time but the blood started soaking through the tissues in my hand. Let me just say, thank goodness we have tissues in our car. I had a whole bunch of them in my hand, clasped to my nose, and blood was dripping from my nose. It spilled on the mirror in my lap and dripped on my skirt. At least that was black, so it wouldn’t be obvious if it left a stain.
I was struggling to move the bundle of tissues in my hand so that blood could be absorbed by clean parts of the tissue, so I could actually tell when it stopped bleeding. After a while it finally stopped, but my dad gave me a few minutes at the station to wipe my face and gather nearly the entire contents of the tissue box. I swear, my nose would have been like puddle! if I had no tissues. I must have been nervous or my sinuses and nervous system must have hated the heating in the car.
Greenstone is officially uninstalled from my laptop. Absolutely no more. I am really relieved. Our presentation was alright. The database worked fine, the layout was good, it was all fine and dandy. Our tutor pleaded us to give her feedback about the subject, saying she had a thick skin and could take anything. Haha. I did not use that opportunity to attack her though, mind you.
I had an interview at around lunchtime, which went alright. The lady looked at my resume/CV and apparently the job I applied for was a senior role. She felt that I should take on a smaller role to build up my experience, so I really appreciate that she’s had a look and will help me out. She found a position at a place not far from home, but I wasn’t too keen on it because of transport and such.
Right. So I was talking about idiots. I don’t think anyone is going to believe me at this point, but whatever. I was on the bus back to the train station after my interview. There was a mother sitting up the front with her husband and a baby. The baby was crying. The baby stopped crying every now and then. Unfortunately, this really inconsiderate and unbelievably rude middle-aged man had to keep shouting “shut up” at this poor mother’s baby. I thought he would just give up after a bit, but the baby continued crying and the man continued saying “shut up” and mocked the baby’s cries. To be honest, the man was making my blood boil and I would much rather have listened to the baby crying.
I wanted to snap at the man, ‘you were a baby once so shut your fucking gob’, but it didn’t come out. I could feel my ears heating with rage. After the woman got off the bus, I thought the man would shut up, but he wouldn’t. He continued shouting out, “hurry up” to the bus driver. I wanted to step on his face so badly.
Further down the road I realised I had to get off soon and I walked past this man, sitting in his seat. He said to me, “HURRY UP”. I glared at him for a moment, and said, “why don’t you shut up.”
I continued walking towards the door of the bus and he said, “shut up, bitch.”
I turned around and yelled, “fuck you”. At this point the bus driver yelled at me and said, “oi”. Loudly, bluntly. What, just because you don’t have the guts to speak up to a man who is making your bus a shithole? It is ridiculous how disrespectful people are, how rude they are – I just had to stand up to it. Sure, I might have offended someone, but as Lilian told me, people wouldn’t likely be thinking I’m an ill-mannered child for shouting expletives, but would probably be a little grateful that I stood up to an idiot who was annoying quite possibly everyone on the bus.
After all, if I tried to get my point across without using an expletive, the brainless monkey wouldn’t have had a clue what I was talking about. I fucking hate public transport.
I could try dress up as a Doctor Who character, which would then verge on cosplaying. Otherwise, I’d hire a costume of a character I like or just something hilarious. But because I wouldn’t bothered with any of those, Halloween would just be an excuse for me to go to work in my pyjamas. It’s weird not celebrating Halloween, because many people showcase their wonderful costumes on the internet – on YouTube, on blogs, on Twitter, and so on – and I just can’t imagine what it would be like if it was more of a tradition here. 
We named one of our antics “Po Blood and Bone”. I had a Teletubby toy, Po specifically, and we got really sick of the Teletubbies so we buried Po in the dirt outside, in one of the holes our mum used to plant trees in.
She found a position at a place not far from home, but I wasn’t too keen on it because of transport and such.