Well it HAS been a while.

So it has been a jolly long time since I posted to my blog. The last time I did was for a competition rather than actually being to post to my blog properly, so it's kind of like getting a rose from your boyfriend on Valentine's Day, only to find out that he actually was given it by another girl and he wouldn't have gotten you anything had your father not paid him out for not getting you anything. Sounds like too-specific a situation? Well it totally happened to me when I was 17. Whatever, I'm not bitter.

ANYWAY! Much has been going on, not the least of which is that I have set up not one, but TWO other blogs. One is a super-sensible resumé-type space for me to link to all my various career-related exploits, and the other is a blog set up for my community radio show. My co-host and I call ourselves the Tangent Surfers, because that's kind of what we do. Anyway, there are a whole bunch of old shows posted there and the playlists of what tunes we spun and all that jazz.

Another exciting thing is that I have just started my final year of undergrad study at Uni, so this chapter of my life seems to be coming very swiftly to a close. Hopefully by the end of the year I will be Supreme Ruler of the World, but failing that I'll be able to speak French a little less shitter (I doubt the same could be said of my English), c'est possible... peut-être? As part of my final year I need to do some interning, and I was lucky enough to get a position with ABC Pool, which has led on to some very welcome paid work huzzah!

Apart from that it is study, study, study, work, work work. Hopefully I will get a chance to go back to my most favourite Bikram yoga place in Darlinghurst. Incidentally, I got to interview the owner of the school, Darren Ma. I wrote an article about it for Uni if you're interested. I love this guy, he's pretty awesome.

I started a tumblr account too but it died in the ass. Many exciting things are coming up in the not-too-distant future so watch this space! (Not *this* space necessarily, but the blog itself more generally... though you can watch that space if you want. This is the Procrasti Nation: it's a free country as long as you're not doing what you're meant to be doing.)

POE'M Competition

So I have to leave for class in about 10 minutes and I am still in my pyjamas but I saw this competition and couldn't help myself. Compose a POE'm for Doe Deere? Absolutely!

I took my inspiration from the very first moment I came across the Doe Deere Blogazine and wanted to express just how much this site has helped to brighten my days. Enjoy!

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I blundered, weak and weary,

through this dreaded essay which had long since earned my scorn,

While I blinked through bleary eyes, suddenly came a surprise

In the welcome form of salutation from the Queen of the Unicorn

"Tis just a dream, this bright delight, the Queen of the Unicorn?"

I scoffed while stifling a yawn.

Distinctly I recall those days, of late nights in scholarly haze,

Caffeinated nightmares picked apart my addled mind

When a bright delight, the unicorn, swept in with the early morn

With gleeful lessons, flights of fancy, what a glorious site to find,

Delightful dresses, shoes and tresses were displayed for all to find

Some daylight for my mind.

Life has now shuffled on, a year older - a year more strong

Yet I cannot forget the whimsy of a blog I found at dawn

One night as a laboured, on a pursuit that I once savoured

the study of ancient history had become a big old yawn,

Where would my mind be without the Queen of the Unicorn?

Nothing more than a stifled yawn.

Why Do I Let Myself Get Angry?

More than ever lately, I have found myself coming in contact with perspectives and things other people say that make me just so angry. I have found this in several situations, but I guess what prompted this is comments that go on YouTube. So many times I have watched videos that have had the most narky comments put on them that make me so angry and depressed at the same time. Often I will go to reply, to try and put people in their place, and half way through I realise that people - certainly over YouTube - don't want to have their points of view challenged.

Why do people go and comment on these things? Why do they come across as so bitchy? There are some possible answers for these questions. Hmm, perhaps they will fuel my honours thesis...

Why do people comment on these things?

I believe most people who comment on videos on YouTube are using the site as a space to shout out in a situation where they normally wouldn't. It's rather cowardly in my opinion, but many people behave the way they do online because they have the ability to remain effectively anonymous. Historically, "avatars" were the physical forms that gods in Mesopotamian took when they came to earth, and interestingly this metaphor seems to extend not just to the idea of a identity that enables you to exist online - but also to the attitude. Certainly many people - like those who troll forums - don't necessarily care about what they are talking about, or care about contributing anything valuable to the debate but rather get excited about stirring up other people... Dionysos anyone?

Of course there are people who comment because they think they are adding something valuable. On YouTube this seems to be people who are trying to correct or analyse the views of others. My perspective? Don't bother. You are reasoning with people who are marinating in a sense of self-importance when they do this. A comment on a video about Bikram Yoga - a practice that I thoroughly enjoy - declared "beware of this capitalist McYoga". This person didn't want their point of view changed, they just wanted to shout out and feel important.

Why Do They Come Across As So Bitchy?

Well I think it is because of the inability of the medium to convey the massive range of communication that humans are capable of. The ability to convey feelings and attitudes is a skill that takes years to cultivate - unless of course you have a freakish talent for it initially - but for the rest of us, the ability to really communicate via text is a honed skill. YouTube's commenting facility is open to everyone - including those who don't care about the semiotics of language or even know what it is - and those people would be finding it very hard to convey meaning though a medium that is devoid of body language, facial expressions, and vocal tones. Hence the introduction of smileys and abbreviations like "jks", "lol" etc to try and encourage people to understand the intention of the phrase. This then leads on to the second point, which is that intention only goes so far. If the person reading it doesn't want to care then they interpret what they want to hear. The only difference between online interaction and offline interaction in this instance is that in the offline world it is hard to ignore and get away with misinterpreting signals as overt as a frown or a smiling laugh. Online, you can just ignore it and by the time people have replied to explain what they really meant the damage is already done and the original point of the comment is sacrificed in place of arguing about what it was that the person meant to say.

So that is my rant. I preferred to do it here rather than on YouTube where you only have 300 words to make you point and make it well, and correct people who aren't interested in being corrected, and where it would inevitably spill over into a back and forth about what he/she./it wanted to say in the first place. We're all gods on the internet, which means that no one is.

If you can say "un-Australian" with a straight face you are it.

I feel so thoroughly upset by the way that Islam and the Islamic people are being discussed and portrayed. I want to wrote something about it, to say something it about it, or to smack the people who hold horrendously small-minded and bigoted views but each time I look for someone who shares this kind of perspective I find nothing.

Initial searches revealed the website "Jihad Watch" which claims that it

"is dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology plays in the modern world, and to correcting popular misconceptions about the role of jihad and religion in modern-day conflicts. We hope to alert people of good will to the true nature of the present global conflict."

By which they mean:

"non-Muslims in the West, as well as in India, China, Russia, and the world over, are facing a concerted effort by Islamic jihadists, the motives and goals of whom are largely ignored by the Western media, to destroy their societies and bring them forcibly into the Islamic world -- and to commit violence to that end even while their overall goal remains out of reach."

...and thus my soul sank.

Studying journalism, as I am, starts out with a sort of soft-focus view of your future. For me it was a romantic, Superman-style news room where reporters would report the good and the bad and it was really damn easy to see the difference (normally because the bag guys would have eight mechanical limbs and the good guy wore a suit to work and could fly...). The reality? It's a minefield where you cannot make any possible subjective statement for fear of being drawn and quartered by your peers. Actually let me rephrase... you can make a subjective statement. In fact the media does it all the time. The difference is that it needs to be the kind of subjective statement that your subjective audience will hear and to their ears it would sound objective.

Where Islam came into the story was during the whole "ban the burqa" debacle in Australia. To summarise the argument, senator Cory Bernardi and back-bencher MP Fred Nile (reverend... pfft) both publicly announced that the burqa is "un-Australian", is demeaning to women, and is a security threat and should therefore be banned nationwide. In response, people like myself argued that "un-Australian" is bullshit and is just another way of saying "the things I don't want to understand because it makes my head hurt"; that legislating women out of clothing choices because of the possible ways that they could be interpreted is more sexist than what they think the burqa means in Islamic society; and finally the assumption that the burqa provides terrorists a disguise is racial profiling and reinforces the false notion that Muslims are criminals. Add that to a "media ethics" class and there was a lot to say.

What this whole debate inspired in me was the desire to finally figure all this out for myself. I thought back upon my personal experiences with Islamic people and I suddenly felt ashamed. I felt ashamed of the way I had let myself be hoodwinked by the anti-Islam sentiment that was going around. I felt saddened that the only contact most people had had with Islam was through the context of international news reportage where all you hear is "jihad", "Muslim extremists",and "taliban fighters".

Comparing that to my own experience, there is a stark contrast. It all started with Aladdin, sure its a kids story but it is set in Arabia, with Islamic characters, they "praise Allah" and it is perhaps one of my most treasured memories. Sure if I analysed it now I could find some pretty nasty anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic sentiments, after all it is Walt Disney we're talking about, but at the time the culture was beautiful, exotic and interesting. Once when I was about 10 we visited Warner Bros. Movie World on the Gold Coast and on the bus trip back to the hotel and I fell asleep on the shoulder of a young woman next to me. Her name was Fatima. I woke up, embarrassed, and looked at her. She just smiled, patted her shoulder and said "sleep". So I did. And finally university has been surprisingly beneficial in helping me get over this racial distancing that I had not been aware that I was doing. I met a group of students, who were Islamic incidentally but it wasn't important, we talked about things, worked on assignments together, and I realised - people are people.

People are just people. Everything that we say about them is made up, is make believe. Basically, it's bullshit. Before you judge a group of people, meet a few of them. If you don't want to meet them, then you are guilty for the way they behave, because you have chosen to not give them a chance to be understood and accepted like all people deserve to be. I think the very definition of the phrase "un-Australian" is to believe that "un-Australian" exists.

The Secret to Success is...

Once, a line in a song by The Whitlams really spoke to me - and it wasn't “by the time she gets to Marrickville we'll be masturbating”, even though that has had increasing significance since coming to Sydney. Rather it is from the song “Make The World Safe”, and refers to life with “plans piling up in the corner”. Certainly the list of things that I have quite seriously planned to do is far more impressive than that which I have actually achieved. Among one of these plans was to learn how to meditate to help me calm down and get real about what is important in life. And just like many other things in this marketing society, there are many quick fixes to get me to calm down and 'be' – from thousand dollar retreats and spa treatments to personal therapists and of course chemical assistance. I have been agnostic and sceptical ever since I was yelled at by a nun for having fun in a Church – God forbid it would seem – so the concept of fate never really enthused me. It still doesn't. But occasionally in this Darwinian world there are coincidences that are seemingly miraculous.

One day I was walking through a shopping centre and had a spare 20 minutes and a spare $10 so I bought a cup of coffee and the premiere issue of Australian Yoga Journal. Stuck to the front with that magnificent magazine adhesive gel stuff was a 35 minutes meditation CD featuring Gillian Ross – a very experienced meditative therapist. Curiosity peaked and then subsided. Indeed the CD was tossed onto the pile of plans along with my 30 day Bikram yoga challenge, ice-skating lessons, a tongue piercing, a tattoo, a holiday to Thailand, flute lessons, piano lessons, gym memberships and an exchange trip to Canada. Apart from the occasional glance at the sound file that I had added to my iTunes, I never thought about it again.

Promptly, my life went a little pear-shaped. Having lived in student accomodation for 2 years I was very ready to move out. So I decided not to renew my contract. Not long after, the rental property that I was approved for was given to another tenant simply because they were friends with the owner. The function centre I worked with who had promised me plenty of work over the holidays was giving me the scant four hour shift every few weeks and my Centrelink had been cut back just in time for my car to need repairs. I really needed to calm down and none of my usual tricks were working, I had no real home, I was living out of bags and money was getting tight.

Another miracle of coincidence occurred when I was asleep. The day after I didn't get another job that I had applied for, nor had I gotten the house I wanted, I got a phone call from an old school mate offering me regular, fun, retail work in a shopping centre in the city. No interview, no questions, just a roster and a promise of a contract in the mail. The plan “get a better job” had suddenly gotten up off the pile of its own accord and made itself happen. The corner of plans is not finite, it seems. That night I flicked past the mediation track.

Homeless still, and my shifts were yet to begin so I was still skint for at least two weeks, I developed some pretty intense insomnia. Waking two to three times a night after taking hours to fall asleep, sometimes I just would not fall asleep at all. I put on music. I flicked past the meditation track.

Visiting my boyfriend at his dad's place, I had some time to kill before he knocked off work. I finally tried the track. After a series of breathing exercises I felt relaxed, but slightly uncomfortable in my back. While focussing on the rise and fall of my chest I jumped at a noise of my boyfriend returning home. I turned off the track and fell asleep. And stayed asleep.

A few days later I couldn't sleep again. So I pulled out my laptop, put on headphones and listened. I focussed, I breathed, I let go. I cried a little. I heard the alert tone on the computer go 'bing' a second before the battery died. Mid-cry, mid-meditation, I scrambled ungracefully across the room to plug in the charger. The track continued with the frustratingly ironic phrase, “remain absolutely still”. I remained still, but images kept popping into my head. Questions about which rental property would suit my needs. Tomorrow is Australia Day, I thought, will places accept calls on the public holiday? Some of the shifts I have are definitely rostered on possible uni days, what will I do? It didn't take long for my over-active mind to poke holes in my confidence. I'll be one of those people that lives on the grace of other people who know how to get things, I'll live in a hovel, never being happy, never making money. I am going to be pushing a stone up hill my whole life and everyone else is so busy with their stones they can't see that mine has been greased so it is that much harder to grip.

Somehow in the midst of all that, a soothing alto wafted the magic words into my consciousness. “The secret to success is perseverance”, said the words.

The dingy room of my consciousness was greeted with the sliver of hopeful light that comes when a thoughtful person cracks a window. Imbued with the words, however cliched, that came at just the right time I managed to really let go. So what if plans are piling up in the corner? That shows hope for the future, a desire to change and develop. So what if your mind is over-active? Those cogs that turn so furiously are a gift, use them. So what if all the times you have tried this meditation you haven't been able to do it 'properly'? Forget 'properly', it's a fiction.

So I will do it tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. With each day I will grow and develop and become myself. Perhaps one day I will be able to do the entire mediation track without interruption.

*sigh*

There have been so many things recently that I could write about.. and often quite deep things that would be really interesting to research, write and read. Unfortunately I have a love/hate relationship with "getting on with it". So far some essay-like topics that I have wanted to explore have included:

• A postcolonial deconstruction of "Avatar" with reference to cultural heritage, a critique on environmental discourse and the culture of guilt being imposed upon white people of colonial descent
• An essay which discusses the conundrum of whether only white people can be 'racist'
• A little story about a bird which led me to question by own understanding of myself
• A day by day account of my Bikram Yoga 31 Day Challenge
  

And several more that I can't think of. Evidently, I haven't written any of these. Why? I'm not entirely sure. Well, in the case of the Bikram one it is because I haven't the $310 to get it underway but I am fairly sure that even when that happens... I still won't freaking write it. And even now I am losing oomph with this post. So I will leave it there. I know no one really reads this bugger anyway. If I feel motivated I may in fact write something but before I do I will finish of the final boss fight in Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks on my D.S.

My Life Right Now In Bulletpoint

• I have been on a recent health kick, planning to lose around 10kg before heading back to University in March. I am halfway there (living on prayer!)
• I have moved out of and signed out of Sydney University Village, where I have lived in a four-bedroom apartment with several other students for the last 2 years. I am currently running the gauntlet with real estate agents to try and find somewhere that will keep me dry and warm for the next 2 years
• Christmas and New Years celebrations were very fun. I absolutely gorged myself on chocolate, cheese and other delightful foods including a wonderful ham. With regards to the losing weight plan... I am somewhat off-track. I plan to take on some intense yoga practice soon...
• I am currently housesitting for a family in Glebe while they are away. As someone with nowhere to live, the homeliness of this place feels like it haunts me
• I am currently planning to write a huge essay post about Avatar and from the looks of it I am not the only one. Frankly it was hard to not be hit around the head with preachy messages... more on that later

Until next time, be cool and kisses