Or something like it is happening right here, right now.
But life.
Which is great, because LIFE!
But also just life.
I’m not complaining only that I’m not expecting much from my posts this month.
Anything is better than it was and for now, as my first post for NaBlo, this’ll have to do.
Go well, my friends.
Be your best.
You got this.
*group hug*
This evening, instead of writing a post I played with words in a different way.
I think I enjoyed it more than my husband as my letters were kinder to me – and I managed to score 304.
What’s your favourite game?
I’m tired, but in a good way. In a way that life is ticking on and I’m busy with work, life and hobbies.
So this is an excuse post. The type of post you post when you’re not typing a post and blabbing on about nothing so you can say you posted a post.
I don’t even know if that makes sense.
What I do know is, this’ll do for Day 16 of Nano Poblano. Unfortunately, tomorrow is looking pretty jam-packed, so who knows what excuse post I’m going to write tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Trying to post every day in November. Go team!
It’s Day 25 of Nano Poblano (Ra’s version of NaBloPoMo) and I’ve drawn a blank. Fortunately Ra kindly left a prompt page for such occasions. Although they are list-prompts, I aimed to find one that inspired a non-list post.
I did drama at school and frequently joined school productions. I always felt safer playing someone else.
My school at one time, participated in a local drama competition. It was a big thing, and boy, did we rehearse. We rehearsed so much that one day, when one of the cast members was off sick, our drama teacher asked if anyone else could say the lines. We all raised our hands. We all knew the entire script. We recited it in unison, our teacher’s mouth dropped open before she said, ‘alright then!’
I wonder sometimes, if I’d still remember. If someone read me a line, I would remember the next?
I still remember some poetry. I gave up drama for more ‘sensible’ career choices but decided to memorise a few poems. The most impressive, was this one:
From UlyssesAlfred Lord Tennyson…Come, my friends,‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.Push off, and sitting well in order smiteThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holdsTo sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf all the western stars, until I die.It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’We are not now that strength which in old daysMoved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;One equal temper of heroic hearts,Made weak by time and fate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
This is an excerpt, but I learnt the whole poem off by heart. Poetry played a huge part in my life at the time I decided to commit this to memory. The film, Dead Poets’ Society aided this – the main character reciting these very lines.
*Sigh*
O Captain! My Captain.
Also from my poetry days, and possibly from my badly rhymed poetry days, I became very adept with rhyme. If I had to rhyme ‘board’ for a poem, I could run through the alphabet (including nonsensical words) until I found something that might work. Aord, board, cord, dord, eord, ford, gord, hoard, iord, jord, kord, lord…
I studied piano as a child. It could not be said I was good, but I was diligent. Being as slow at reading sheet music as I was with the written word, I survived by memorising it. I called it hand-memory. Through dogged repetition, I remembered where my hands had to be to play the relevant notes. Of course, any mistakes would break the memory, I’d lose my place in the music and I’d panic beyond recovery. I still remember many of them, but I don’t practise much these day and my hands forget.
I’d describe the study of language here in Australia as lazy. My school experience isn’t perhaps the best example, but without commitment, the best you’ll come away with is the ability to count to ten in French, Japanese and German with ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and ‘my name is …’ thrown into the equation. I still remember most of this.
What have you memorised?
Day 25 of Nano Poblano! That is, Ra’s version of NaBloPoMo.
We’re posting everyday in the month of November!
When I say ‘we’ I mean these awesome folk.
I was always good at Playing the Game.
That’s what my mother called it. The art of moving among people, saying what needed to be said without being angry or offensive. I internalised emotions. I diffused situations with humour. I remained silent if necessary.
I recognised this at an early age. I noticed some classmates lacked it. My own brother lacked it. Although he was older than me, there were times I came to his defence. Ever the diplomat, me.
One of my favourite of Aesop ‘s fables was The Oak and the Reeds. It’s not as well known as some of them, but it resonated with me. The tale of the old tree than grew with the reeds beside the river. The tree was proud of its strength and size but a great gust of wind tore up the oak from the ground.
The tree wept.
“I don’t understand it. How can something as frail and slender as a reed escape the anger of the wind, while a strong tree has been torn up by its roots?”
The reeds explain the moral of the story.
And this is how I played the game. I stuck to my opinions when they truly mattered and let everything else go. I decided who I respected and who I didn’t – and as to the latter – if I didn’t respect you, why would I about care what you said or thought?
I was so lucky to believe this. To believe this so strongly I left school without enemies and a small group of friends who stood with me.
Though, we are never unbroken.
My insecurities lie in my capabilities. My ability to write, for one. I suffer from anxiety and have developed a habit of surpressing how I feel. Sometimes, I surpress too much.
As an adult looking back, those who ‘broke’ me were adults and/or people I respected.
But.
But the beauty of being an adult is when looking back you realise we are all victims of our lives. We all (mostly) do not intend to sabotage the lives of others but do what we think is best at the time. Then to compound this there are personalities and how two people can take the same experience and interpret it a very different way.
Of course, bullies do intend to sabotage lives, they’ll probably never realise how much. They’ll probably never realise how broken they are themselves.
I was bullied at school but I was always lucky to be a reed.
So, I’ve just come from Ra, and she wrote this. It’s a whole heap of awesome, but this clip triggered these memories.
Day 24 of Nano Poblano! That is, Ra’s version of NaBloPoMo.
We’re posting everyday in the month of November!
When I say ‘we’ I mean these awesome folk.
I started writing poetry before I wrote it down. They were songs without music that I’d made up and they were relevant to me. I didn’t know it was poetry until school gave it a name.
My writing began with poetry – but you woudn’t know it here.
In hindsight, I see now that poetry was the coping mechanism of my youth. It helped me process heartache and conflicts within myself and sometimes within the world. As I began to feel more conrol over my life, poetry writing dwindled.
Lapse
I don’t write poetry much
Anymore.
A lapse in concentration
Or something
More permanent.
Ideas struggle to be polished.
Come like the rain and never go.
And I fear –
Go the like the rain and never come.
I was nineteen. Beside this poem in my scrap book, I wrote ‘Is this even a poem? I don’t even know what it means.’ I wrote two poems after it and nothing since. Well, nothing finished.
Eventually I realised, I was perhaps mourning the loss of something I no longer needed. However, some of my favourite poems I wrote in those last few years. Like this one.
Nothingness
Nothing is
The empty inside a jar,
The answer
To a rhetorical question,
The sound
Of silence in a vacant room,
The light
At the entrance of a tunnel.
Nothing is
The hue opposing white,
The expression
On a blank face,
The difference
Between two things identical,
The impression
That nothing is.
Day 23 of Nano Poblano! That is, Ra’s version of NaBloPoMo.
We’re posting everyday in the month of November!
When I say ‘we’ I mean these awesome folk.
A thought has lingered for a day now.
I suspect I will not be rid of it until I write it down, but at the same time, turning these words over won’t make anything other than compost.
As I try to keep up with the wondrous blog posts coming from Nano Poblano (Ra’s version of NaBloPoMo). I read this one by Janelle Weibz.
Now, I have never heard of the series Gundam, but this bit stuck with me:
I realised, it wasn’t something I wanted to hear. I started questioning everything. Is the only reason I love is because I know hate?
Now to make another television series analogy, remember Stargate SG1? And if you remember this, perhaps you remember The Nox?
They were my vision of humanity’s future. A peace loving, kind, anti-war sort of folk. You know, when the human race is ‘older’, maybe we’ll learn from our mistakes, maybe we’ll be these things.
Janelle also said this:
Perhaps my hope for humanity’s future, is empathy – seeing things from the perspectives of others. Having a broad view.
I don’t know.
I still believe in kindness and I hope I didn’t need to see cruelty to know it.
Day 20 of Nano Poblano! That is, Ra’s version of NaBloPoMo.
We’re posting everyday in the month of November!
When I say ‘we’ I mean these awesome folk.
I am easily amused. Most recently I posted a letter, in that old fashioned way that requires a mailman. On the box, under the word ‘Post’, someone had written ‘apocalypse’. I stood with my letter poised at the mouth of the letter box and laughed out loud.
See. Easily amused.
It was 1997 and I’d just emerged from a mathematics exam. I sat on a bench seat and waited for my parents to pick me up. Ten minutes transpired and I moved into the shade, the mid afternoon sun burned at my skin. On the University lawn, a sprinkler snickered its rotation in the background. Thirty minutes transpired. They were never late.
I grabbed the family mobile out of my bag. Yes, the ‘family’ mobile. It WAS 1997. The battery was dead. I looked up to the phone box and stared in amazement as the lawn sprinklers rotated in and out of the semi enclosed area.
I dashed in with my phone card, dialled my parent’s number and said something along the lines of ‘Everything okay? I’ve got to be quick, the sprinkler is on the phone box, hang on, I’ll be back in a second-‘ dashed out while the phone was showered with water.
‘What? The car broke down?’
I listened and nodded.
‘Wait, the sprinkler’s coming back-‘
Ducked out again.
‘You’ll be another half hour? Okay, I’ll be here. Sorry, gotta go.’
Have you experienced a moment in time that feels like that should be in a film or sitcom?
Click on the link to visit the team of Tiny Peppers. It’s Rarasaur’s version of NaBloPoMo and it’s called Nano Poblano. Or, as I’ve been calling it lately Nano Problano.
We’re blogging every day in the month of November! I think I’m actually getting the hang of this.
Denial is an interesting word with many guises.
It can work in your favour. It can save you pain. It can delay the inevitable and it can block a memory. But it can work against you. The inevitable remains assured and memories can resurface.
While denial can be born from ignorance or stupidity, it is also about self-preservation and I maintain my belief in its optimism. It serves to protect us a little longer from harsh realities or inconveniences until our minds are better ready to deal with them. As we can’t seem to remove this filter (and certainly, some people possess bigger denial-filters than others – and indeed some never reach awareness), we’ll never know if this system is in place for better or worse, but it is optimism nevertheless.
There’s a video somewhere on the internet. It’s grainy CCTV store footage of people shopping and/or browsing and a fire starts. A light-fitting gets too hot and ignites some fabric. Customers continue to shop. More people walk into the store to browse. The whole video is quite surreal.
This brings me to ice skating last evening.
It was my idea. Neither my friend or I had been for ages so I thought we’d have an evenly matched skill level. I was wrong. Apparently she used to roller skate in her childhood so she was better from the outset. She pulled me a long for a few laps and we watched professionals casually spinning and skating backwards with such grace that when their phones received text messages they answered them without losing rhythm while skating. As time went on I began to get some confidence back, I stopped clinging to my friend or the handrail and my toes stopped gripping the inside of my shoes (which my brain obviously felt would help me grip the ice). After a time my friend and I began to skate a little more equally and we started to chat. And laugh, we laughed a lot. And my friend fell over. She laughed herself off her skates. It wasn’t a sliding fall, she flailed forward, over-corrected, flailed backwards with skates spinning cartoon-style and took a solid fall to the ground.
I gave her ten points for execution, but first I asked her if she was okay.
Sure. I’m Fine. I reckon I’ll be sore tomorrow. So we skated a couple more laps and I asked her again. Yeah, I’ll be fine – I’m such a klutz. After a few more laps I asked her if she wanted to go. My elbow is hurting a bit.
We headed back to her place, got some ice onto her arm and got out a board game. We played a couple of rounds with our conversation drifting back to her injury from time to time. I’ll be fine. I can still move my fingers. It’s just a sprain.
As I went to leave, she went to stand. Ow, ow, ow. Wow, it really hurts.
I said it couldn’t be broken because everyone who’d I known to break a bone felt sick and thought they’d faint.
Um. Actually, initially, I thought I might.
Oh.
I drove her to Emergency. She’d broken her elbow.
Click on the link to visit the team of Tiny Peppers. It’s Rarasaur’s version of NaBloPoMo and it’s called Nano Poblano. Or, as I’ve been calling it lately Nano Problano.
We’re blogging every day in the month of November! I think I’m actually getting the hang of this.
Today is Remembrance Day and this year is the one hundredth anniversary of Gallipoli.
It is really important that we remember those we have lost at war. It is really important we remember who fought and returned home. It’s really important that everyone is acknowledged for their part.
I mean no disrespect, but I struggle.
I struggle with the ever increasing media surrounding these events. A nauseating quantity of documentaries, shows and interviews that border on the commercial exploitation of what are, and should be, sombre days.
I found a Victory Medal from the WWII among my grandfather’s things and wondered who was feeling victorious. The ‘We Lost Less Medal’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
My grandparents never attended an ANZAC Day ceremony. We lived by an instinctive, barely spoken mantra:
And we didn’t. But memories surfaced in random moments and my grandfather’s eyes would grow wide and he’d rant about blood and bombs and he’d grab hold of my arm so hard it hurt. I was young – too young to understand mental illness and terms like shell-shock and paranoia.
I knew he scared me sometimes. I knew I loved him more than he scared me. I knew this wasn’t him.
My grandparent’s believed, lest we remember.
It’s something I cannot forget.
A serious post for Day 11 of Nano Poblano.
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Will Wally Wonder 