Sending New Years Packing

As has become traditional on Present Tense I always take the time to write a blog for the New Year. Even when I am halfway round the world in a hotel room in downtown Vancouver, struggling to think about what the hell I am going to do today.

I'm not bragging or seeking to evoke jealous reactions when I just point out the fact that I am spending New Years in an exciting new location (okay, maybe I am just a little). But that I am overseas is of importance for this year's post.

I begin with an anecdote - perhaps my first from this foreign country. I was on the train from the airport to the city when the girl in front of me turned around and said "You said you're from Australia, right?" (I'd said this when chatting to someone else). "Why yes," I replied - being that I am. She proceeded to ask me what I was doing here, and when she heard that I was going to be here for six months, studying, she looked at my bag surprised and exclaimed: "And that's all the stuff you have!?"

This was an intriguing reaction, and hit on a theme that I've been pondering since a began packing. Packing is hard, especially when you are going into a cold winter, and then going to be staying until summer (Damn! Just realised that I forgot to pack any boardies!) and that you also need to pack books and stuff for uni. And can't be over 27kg (including carry on stuff). Twenty-seven kilograms. That's not very much. If I were to weigh everything that I own, it would come much closer to 1000kg - and that's not including a car (Actually, I don't have a clue how much it would all come to. But I do own a lot of stuff, and stuff is heavy...sooooo the point is, I have a lot of stuff). What I could take overseas is a fraction of what I own. But, it is perhaps a selection of the most essential stuff that I own.

Packing, through these weight restrictions, is one of the rare occasions that forces you to actually stop and think about what you own. It forces you to consider what goods are most important to you - not just for your comfortable survival, but your self worth. It is one of those moments where materialism, perhaps otherwise banished to the back of one's mind, are pushed into the forefront of your mind - rendered visible through your very mobility. Suddenly, in a foreign country, I'm without five pairs of shoes to pick from every morning. I no longer have seven jumpers to choose from, my hairbrush is missing (seriously, I don't have a clue where it is... :P), my car wouldn't fit in my suitcase, and I only have one type of face wash and soap. I have a skeleton of my possessions, and yet, I'm more than happy with my current situation.

Why then, do I feel that I have to have so much stuff? Well, it is, of course,the kind of society that we all live in. I'm not judging you, and I'm not going to tell you to stop - merely just observing this. I'm not going to stop buying stuff, I love buying stuff - I work hard so that eventually I'll be able to afford even more stuff, and maybe even a house to fill with this stuff. And one day I will go on a holiday, and I'll be forced to pack twenty seven kilograms - and I won't be able to fit my home cinema system, or my yacht (I'm going to have a yacht), or my three Hugo Boss suits, or my booze collection. I'll be forced to go back and consider what is most important to me, and that is a humbling situation.

I could not think of a better way to go into the new year. I like to take stock of things, see how my world has changed in the past year, look back on how I've grown, and look back on the things that I now consider important. Last year I was hell bent on discovering my passion for the year. Turns out I still am not sure that I have that. I mean, I'm more and more passionate about study, my friends, ...knives. But, nothing really in particular - so I've failed that resolution, but certainly not the year.

As cliche as it is, this year has taught me to appreciate, more than I ever have before, just how important the people you surround yourself with are. Uni is not just enough for me any more - it suffers when I don't my friends for days. I know people have been saying this shit for years. But I don't know - I've only just come to truly respect and understand what people mean when they say without friends their lives would be meaningless. Perhaps some are still just mindlessly quoting cliché when they say it. But the relationships that I share with those around me are amongst my most prized possessions (NAWWWWWWWWWWWWW).

The great thing about relationships are that they don't eat into your weight limit (I'm sure there are other great things about them too...). You can take as many of them with you as you like. You may have all the riches in the world, but you can only pack twenty seven kilos of them (assuming of course, that you are stingy with your riches and don't pay the extra charges). Those that take the most with them travelling, do not have to be rich in goods, but rich in bros and bro-ettes.

So to answer your question, dear stranger on the train, - no, what is in the suitcase is not all I have.

It's just all that you can see.




Happy New Year to you all, may 2011 be a wonderful and exciting time for you all. Much love.

I'm probably just dreaming

In the past I'd never really put much faith into dreams being able to tell me much at all - I'm not sure what dreams are, or what purpose they show. You can throw a number of scientific papers at me about what they mean, but frankly, I'm not sure I even want to know.

To me, dreams are an intriguing part of the sleep cycle. A unique experience. Its incredibly unlikely that someone - on a planet of a few billion - will ever have the same dreams as you. Contrast this to things that you think consciously - I'm probably not the first person that has thought that it would be entertaining to set Kyle Sandliands beard on fire, or that Anne Hathaway would be a damn fine "sleeping" partner, or even that it would be cool to get a giant wig and put it on the statue of liberty. Chances are pretty high that none of those thoughts, however obscure, are unique to me.

But I doubt that anyone has experienced - in the same vividness that I did - going to your next-door neighbour's house through a hole in the fence only to discover that there is a damn fine lion that wants a piece of you. The lion then proceeds to maul your little finger off, and won't stop until the homosexual planeteer from Captain Planet comes along and yells "heart!"

It was at this point that the lion stopped mauling me, and a doctor came to reattach my poor finger, but they didn't get all the pieces of skin from the lion and so it couldn't be sewn back on properly.

That was an outline of my very first nightmare, and it's bizarrity has stuck with me - which may have had something to do with waking up in a pool of sweat and checking that my fingers were all still attached.

That isn't something that I could've just consciously thought up - unless I really strained my imagination. The nature of dreams - at least many of the dreams that I have - is that they can take the most bizarre memories and feelings of your life, thrust them all together, and construct some form of narrative with them.

But what I've begun to learn is that my dreams are not just trivial events that can be forgotten upon waking. Many dreams can, in fact, provide a means through which to examine your life in a different manner. I like to think that on some occasions dreams really are your subconscious coming out to play. They play on your deepest fears, your biggest regrets, and your most intimate thoughts. In this sense dreams can - to use a cliché - allow you to think outside the box. They can grant certain perspectives about events, people, and places in your life, perspectives that your conscious mind has perhaps dismissed.

I'm thinking that maybe it is time to start learning from my dreams. Maybe it is time to embrace that which my concious mind has rejected and see circumstances through different lenses.

Because if dreams really are unique, no one else has the chance to act on them.

“You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'”

-George Bernard

Everday words

Words are used all day everyday. Many people ponder words on a daily basis. I could harp on about how I love language in movement, how I have a soft spot for correct grammar, and how I love the feel of a good word as it rolls off the tongue. But no, today I would like to just discuss words that people like, and words that are under appreciated. Recently, many of my friends (okay, really it's just a couple..) have been chatting about words that they like. Invariably these are words are long, they are not used very much, are obscure, or they words with vague definitions.

They are not the regular words of the everyday.

I like the everyday - the everyday fascinates me. There is a beauty in the mundane rituals of daily life, rarely pondered as the world bounds and weaves around us. The mundane is so hard to write about because it flows beneath our conscious, taken-for-granted as we ponder the larger questions.

But the answers to these questions, I would suggest, are perhaps hidden in that which goes noticed on our quest toward enlightenment. We use big, pretty, and smart sounding words to make these larger concepts and questions describable - dichotomous, irreverent, indoctrinated, effervescent, finesse, supposition, aforementioned, entwined. But these words make little sense without the little words between them. The ones that we don't say, "ohh what a pretty word" to, the ones that seem to serve the purpose of merely being connectors to greater things. The highway between Canberra and Sydney. An inconvenient part of the journey.

They are words of utility, ones that work tirelessly to show the beauty in other words. I think that is an admirably quality for anything. But, like the everyday, they go unnoticed as they paint a bigger picture.

There is beauty in these smaller and more regular words, a beauty that can only come from their understatedness.

So next time someone asks you about words that you like, think not about the words that you have sex with once in a while because they are drop dead gorgeous and you want to feel pretty and smug, and like a little bit of a wanker.

Think of the words that support you when times get tough. The ones that are always there for you to fall back on or prop you up. The words that you do not forget, or have to look up definitions for, the words that you know in and out and are an unnoticed joy to use.

These are the words in which true beauty lies.


"When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain"

William Shakespeare

The present tense of Present Tense.

Dearest Readers,

Alas, it has been many a week since this blog has been graced with presence of its writer (excluding new years, of course). I would love to blame being busy with university as the excuse - but I fear this would be inaccurate, for it has never stopped me before. No dear Readers, it is something a little more serious that has been blocking my writing.

And it is, coincidently, a direct result of university. But not because of workload, but rather the way it has been changing how I think.

I won't lie - and many (if not all ;) )of you will already know this - I have something of an ego. I am not afraid to admit that I used to think that some of my entries were slightly unique, exploring things that were not really looked at much. I made that wonderful inexperienced teenage thing of thinking that I knew something about everything.

University has shown me that I know nothing about everything. It has shown me that there are people who spend their entire lives researching things that I have only ever started to allude to in previous entries. There are bodies of work relating to nearly everything I have ever talked about. An entire academic world out there with much more life and academic experience behind it than I could ever have. The incredible naivety of my self was thrown unceremoniously into my direct line of sight. And I am glad it was.

But it has left me in a rather problematic state. I know nothing about everything, thus how can I possibly write with any form of authority, sway, or power? I cannot write about that which I do not know. My words cannot have any power to affect the readers of this humble cyberspace. What is the point of writing about something, if I can never know everything about it. Who am I to engage people on topics that many people are much better qualified to discuss?

And I came to a realisation. And it is this realisation and resolution that mean I am not afraid to talk frankly about way I used to think. This realisation involved re-examining the the entire purpose of this insignificant little corner of cyberspace. The tagline to my blog reads "..Hell-bent on discovering the world." Through this blog I sought to learn about the world, myself, and the people around me through writing about that which I saw, and that which I wanted to see.

I guess I always knew that, of course, the world could never fully be discovered. But it is only now that I realise the implication of the tagline is that, in a subconscious manner, I may have thought that there was an endpoint to this blog, that it is indeed possible to discover the world. Yet the world can never fully be uncovered, and so this blog does not have an endpoint and never will. Which left me realising that this blog is, and always was, a reflection of a very personal world. A world which is unique to myself. My world.

The world is a bigger place than I had ever previously imagined, and not one which can be explored objectively, separate from my own experience. My own experience is intricately linked to my perceptions of the world.

I may not know anything about everything. But I know something about somethings.

These writings - the past writings, the future writings, and the writings of the Present Tense - are about me and the way I see my world.

And so I seek to show you all, dear Readers, my world. And through that, perhaps, I seek to offer you an insight into your world.

With love and the fresh side of a new leaf,
Christopher.


If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

-Anne Morrow Lindbergh