Growing old(er)

I like writing. Many, if not all of you, will know this. Writing is, perhaps, my favourite past time, though of late it has seemed almost chore-ish. I put this down to being in a writing class at school, and being expected to meet many creative deadlines to produce a final portfolio for assessment. This is both a stimulating and stifling environment, one that I both thrive and drown in. This, however, is not what I wish to bore you all with this evening. What I wish to bore you with is one of the pieces that I completed for the previously mentioned final portfolio.

The piece in question is one that I am particularly proud of - even though I forgot that I wrote it and re-discovered it on my hard-drive a couple of weeks before the submission was due.

Now, I'm not going to post the whole thing (though it is available upon request), but the piece follows an old man exploring parallels between a human's aging and a footpath's aging. It concludes with the following lines:

New life through the gaps of broken memories – the details he was missing. The details that seem so insignificant with time, but so significant with youth.

The final sentence is what I will be focusing on.

Speaking as a teenager - I think many teenagers dramatise their lives (relative to adults). And I think this is perfectly acceptable. I'm young, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Though I have been around for eighteen years these days, there is still so much for me to discover - other cultures, natural wonders, Australian adult life, human interactions...

Everything is exciting. Everything is new. Everything is significant.

The girl that gave you a smile on the bus.
The boy that hugged you for just that second longer.
The whisper of breeze on a silent summer night.
The claustrophobia of a heavy fog.
The rhythmic tick of a cooling engine after your first road trip.
The sense of anticipation during a plane's safety announcement.

The details that seem so significant with youth.

I think as one experiences these things more and more often as they grown older, they begin to attach much less meaning to them.

She was just being friendly.
He was just being comforting.
I really want to be in bed.
Damn. This is going to make me late for work.
Finally, I can stretch my legs.
God, I'm so sick of this, can't we just get there already.

The details that seem so insignificant with time.

I'm afraid I must admit that many experiences which once meant so much to me, I have begun to just take for granted, I'm not going to be specific (I'm sure many of you can think of some). In some ways, I think this is a good thing. I don't stress every little thing. I am beginning to appreciate the differences between taking something at face value, and analysing beneath the surface - and when to apply each of these measures to ensure the best outcome.

But on the same token, I also think its a bad thing. Life is much less exciting if you think you already know everything. The latter of the examples were bland, hurried, and careless. The former of the examples were anticipatory, romantic, and genuine.

I know which I prefer.

In my humble internet blogging opinion - a lone voice in a sea of opinionated writers - there is a mindset that should be achieved in regards to my current rambling. Life is not all romantic and genuine - the human condition doesn't allow for that, and I accept that. But if life isn't romantic and genuine in some senses - it becomes bland, monotonous, and careless.

Accept those moments that seem romantic and genuine at face value.

Those moments that don't seem entirely genuine or romantic have the potential to be. See past the face value, analyse beneath the surface, and discover a hidden story.

One can always take for granted the footpath that runs along their nature strip - that harms no one.

But that path has a story, just below the surface, just as each and everyone one of us has a past just below the surface.


Christopher.

"Starting today - I'm not gonna worry about tomorrow..."

Starting Today - Natalie Imbruglia

To be or not to be?

I recently attended a school drama performance. While waiting for the play to begin, attendees were put into a holding room to wait. This room, generally serving as the drama class-room, featured a rather enjoyable noticeboard on one of the walls. There was a quote on said board that caught my attention, I can't for the life of me remember who said it, or any of the exact wording, but it bought about the question: How do actors act when they aren't acting?

This question intrigued me, as many intriguing questions do, and has been something mulling around in my head ever since.

Having spent time in a drama class, and having known many people who have continued with "drama", there are a few personality traits that seem to stem from these types of people. Most are very humanities oriented, choosing to focus on the grey areas instead of the black and white in the science/maths departments. Most have incredible amounts of energy and, at times, can be hard to keep up with. Many of them are thinkers and observers, as well. They generally have a higher grasp on how other people act with each other. Almost all are very confident and comfortable with themselves. This is a generalisation, but it seems to be how "actors" act off stage. They obviously act as "themselves". But who are they?

Actors, when preparing for a role, have to put vast amounts of thought in to many different aspects of a character. Physical aspects, such as their walk, their mannerisms and the way they talk have to be construed, constructed, and practiced to the point where the actor can throw away their personality in exchange for a new one. They have to file away their personality so as to let the character come alive and be believed. Actors must know the stories, the past of their characters. The characters dreams, quirks and interests all have to be explored.

The role of an actor is to essentially abandon who they are so as to become someone else.

How do actors actually create these characters though? They have to be based upon something. Writers must draw upon their own knowledge bank and personality to be able to write about something that is completely different. So too, must actors. To convey sadness to the audience the actor must know what sadness is like and how it feels. So if actors constantly abandon "who they are" for completely different characters and base many of their characters on their own experiences it begs a different set of questions...

Who are actors? Are all their characters a mixture of their actor's experience, or are actors merely a mixture of all the different characters they have played?

It could almost be seen in either of those two ways.

I think in a lot of ways it is harder for actors to determine who they actually are, which seems to run contrary to the personality traits they display. Many of the better "actors" that I know have very distinct character traits that stand out and can easily be described. Which raises another question. Are those who are good at acting naturally outgoing and unique? Or do they exaggerate their character traits as perhaps a (conscious or subconscious) reflection of the difficulty they may have in knowing who they are?

So I didn't really go anywhere on this, but hopefully it gave you some food for thought. I am interested to hear people's thoughts on this subject.

"Robert Cohen says, 'all people, and all characters in plays, think about their situation more than about their own personality or character.' This is almost always true about people, and is certainly the way actors should think during a performance. But actors, off the stage, must think about their own personality and character. If you do not know who you are, if your instrument is not limber and under your control for the most part, you will never be a great actor. Master actors cultivate effortless and automatic control of their instruments"

-Anonymous

Broken footprints

This was a short piece that I wrote last year - I feel it goes well with my previous entry.

Beams of light splayed upon the dusty grass. Air, cold embrace upon naked skin, although warming under the mid-morning sun. The footpath was dull with age, swollen black joinery between slabs, straggly weeds in the cracks. Absent minded avoidance, “Step on a crack, break your back”. Sad chords, weathering a river toward the canals of the ear, the sad lyrics: a boat on the river. She walked in time. Rough, red, brick buildings ahead, their off white colour bond roofs bright in the sunlight, background of blue sky. The buildings of a school, soaked in past lives and crossed paths, silently resting in the peace of the weekend. Absent curiosity, longing to relive memories. Stood at the main entrance, remembered the photo taken for the newsletter, stared up at the high black fence. A new addition, the catalyst for unseen changes.

She continued her walk, her hand gently running along the fence, a deep, satisfying sound of hollow metal. Stopped on occasions, her eyes darting along the ground, remembering the footsteps she once laid there, thoughtful. Made it to the oval, once a smooth green carpet, now a beaten and worn rug. A slow walk into the middle, one hand in the back pocket of her jeans, the other brushing fringe into the crook of her ear. Casual. Thought of the sport she used to play there, games with peers, and then thought about the many hundreds who placed their mark exactly where she stood. The memories of the earth. Remembered her junior years, playing in the dirt at the base of the giant eucalypts - saw they weren’t really that giant. The perspective of maturity. Saw a small footprint in the dust, huddling under the protection of roots. Brushed it away, began its journey to all the other broken footprints.

Christopher.

"I learned just enough in school to figure out that everything is not all there is to know"

-Anonymous

Memories of the Earth

I was on my way to school the other day, as I often am. Normally I just take my surroundings for granted, but this particular morning was slightly different.

I was in a bad mood, which isn't as uncommon as some of you might think. I was ignoring my brother and father in the front seat and had my headphones jammed in. Yup. I'm a polite young teenager, no doubt about it.

So, we were driving along, and I was rather fascinated by the dips and curves of the landscape. There was a particular part that drew my attention, and started this train of thought. We were traveling on a road was going up a slight incline, and one one side it fell away steeply. All around this decline, the landscape also declined, so it formed a kind of dip. If you were standing at the bottom of said dip you would be surrounded by inclines. It made me think of those flood way signs, warning people of a tendency to flooding, and how that place would probably be one, and were it to rain really heavily it would fill up with water. This made me start to think of what the landscape would look like if you took away all the houses, everywhere.

How would the landscape have looked to the first fleet or rather the first explorers of the region. Would it have been covered in Eucalypt forests, with kangaroos lying in the shade? When the road was built, how much dirt was removed? How much was the landscape changed?

Which leads me to think about how interesting it would be if the Earth could talk. Think about the block of land that you reside on. The stories it could tell. Did a dinosaur ever step foot into where your room is? Was your kitchen ever hit by a meteor? Did people once roam the patch of dirt you now call your own? Did they live and die there? How much life has it seen? How much death has it seen?

Christopher.

"Embroidery of the stars
Undress my feelings for this earth
Send me your salva to heal my scars
And let this nakedness me my birth"

Astral Romance - Nightwish

Waxy writings..

Ear wax, as many of you will no doubt be familiar with, is yellow. It also doesn't taste very nice.

I'm sure there is a perfectly logical scientific explanation for its existence, something to do with immune system or something. I sit here today, shivering, beating off a mild bacterial infection in one of my ears. And my eye. And my throat. And possibly my chest. Anyway, I am sitting here, and my ear is really itchy, and upon inserting a finger to do some scratching, a slight coating of this wonderful substance comes out too *runs to wash hands*. Oh come on, as if you have never done that.

It makes me wonder...not just because I love biology...but also because I love English. Ear wax could be such a wonderful image to play with in writing or speech. So me, being the science, English, and procrastination student that I am, decided to learn more about it.

Yes, so ear wax acts as a cleaning agent for the ear, as well as protection from some bacteria, insects and fungi. A build up of ear wax can reduce hearing ability. The wax cleans the ear, picking up foreign particles that may have entered. Dust, dirt, bacteria etc. It then makes its way out of the ear through the movement of ones jaw. Neat.

Which brings me around to the English side of things. Ear wax could be used as wonderful figure of speech to represent someone not listening, not hearing, not caring.

I told her everything - the way my parents were always yelling, the way I wished I was noticed by my teachers, the way that I felt about her - and now she comes back with this. My thoughts, my feelings meant nothing to her. They were scum, something she had to rid herself of. I was a constant annoying hum, my thoughts left dirt in her ears, trapped by moist orange wax, forming a plug that deafened her to my trust.

Okay, so admittedly it needs a little work and a lot less whining. But you get the idea.

Which I guess brings me to a piece of advice that you may or may not wish to think about when writing. Some of the best metaphor and simile can come from the strangest places. Think about everything as something that can be used to mean something else.

Thoughts wandered through her mind, leisurely, ponderous, like the yellow blobs drifting about the retro lamp next to her."

________

She spoke quickly, a blabbering stream of noise. A scrawl on paper - understood only by its writer.

________

It was as if he was wearing a screen protector, nothing I said could scratch him. And I'll be damned if he wasn't easy on the eyes.

Just little objects taken from my desk - the lava lamp, the screen protector that used to be on my phone, the untidy note that I left myself. They can paint a vivid image, and add depth to many pieces of writing - without being overly wordy.

Try it - you might be pleasantly surprised.

Christopher.

"Language is memory and metaphor"

Storm Jameson (English writer)

Learning be fun!

Today I learnt something.

Actually, just by typing that sentence I learned something. See, I got a red squiggly line underneath learnt, and I'm like "Double yew tee eff??". So, I Googled it, and low and behold, Firefox, being the wonder-browser that it is (okay, so it was the Google tool bar that suggested it), suggested that I search for learnt or learned. It turns out that both are correct. But one is wrong.

Learned = American English = fail.

Learnt = English English = Australia English = win.

There you go.

Now then. As I was saying. Today I learnt something, and that is that my the crumpet setting button on my toaster is, in fact, only suitable for crumpets.

My toaster is a high-tech new-age wizz-bang-pop kinda toaster, only without any of the wizzes, bangs and pops. Now you might be thinking: 'But Chris! All toasters pop!'.

WRONG.

My toaster beeps, then proceeds to raise the bread out of the toaster and have it ready for you. Its kinda like having an electric garage. It even makes the same sound as an electric garage. And add a truck reversing into the electric garage, and you get both the sound of the beeps, and the sound of the toast rising. The toaster beeping is possibly one of the most disconcerting noises first thing in the morning while you are still half asleep. You hear the toaster beep kindly at you to tell you its done and all you can think of is "DEAR GOD A TRUCK IS REVERSING INTO MY KITCHEN!" and you promptly run out of the room screaming.

So as one would expect from a high-tech new-age toaster it has a crumpet setting. Now all of you that eat crumpets know that your toaster never does them perfectly and always burns the bottom part and leaves the top part un-cooked.

Actually, you know what, I have never had a toaster that has done that. The wonderful people at Breville, however, clearly have. So they have designed this feature that cooks one side more than the other, thus you have the perfect crumpet.

Now, I enjoy a slice of bread with ham and cheese on top shoved under the griller. I toast one side generally (under the griller), flip it, then don't bother toasting the other side, but use it as the side I put the ham and cheese on. This, however, is tedious, so of late I have been toasting the bread with the toaster and just melting the cheese with the griller. This is easier, but just doesn't have the right texture, but then I had a thought!

"I could use this useless crumpet feature to toast one side, but leave the other a little less toasted!"

So I did.

Turns out that it turns one side of the toaster UP in heat, and the other side down.

One smoke alarm later I retrieved the toast from the toaster, cursing the wonderful people at Breville, but also wondering at their ingenuity. Never in my life did I consider that I would own a toaster that could completely crisp one side of my bread, but leave the other relatively untouched.


Christopher.

"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY....MY ANUS IS BLEEDING!"

-The Cloud from Rejected Cartoons

Highly specific vibrations.

Last night I was listening to music. Which isn't an entirely blog-worthy statement, as I generally listen to music every night. But last night got me thinking about stories and memories attached to certain songs.

Music is a wonderful thing. Scientifically its almost ugly, a series of air vibrations that vary due to rate of vibration. A collection of these highly specific vibrations form the chromatic scale that we all recognise. Romantically, however, music is beautiful. Flowing melodies, talented singing, orchestral wonders and, for those amongst you who enjoy everyday language, bitchin' guitar solos, slamming drum fills, and wicked violin runs.

Music has this ability to bring memories forth from the depths of ones mind and let them be mulled over every time one hears the piece.

The following list is a few of my favourite songs, each with its only little story. Just a little bit of an insight as to what is, perhaps, going through my head when I hear some songs.

• Breathe (2am) - Anna Nalick

This song was sent to me over MSN by a good friend of mine. She is pretty in touch with the kind of music that I like.

By nature I don't like being told what to listen to, so it took me a while to really listen to it. The first time that I listened to the lyrics was on a holiday down in Geelong last year. I was walking along the new boardwalk part of the foreshore walk, trying to find fish in the water below me. I really took to the song after that - and it always reminds me of the girl who sent it to me, and that Geelong holiday.

• Nemo - Nightwish

Nemo was the very first song by Nightwish that I heard. I was at Morgan's place with him, Greg, and Adam in what would become the very first LANdom. I was sitting in front of his big TV, playing Perfect Dark Zero when Adam started playing some Nightwish. Before this point in my life my musical taste consisted of teeny-bopper-pop, and only teeny-bopper-pop. When Nemo started Adam somehow managed to, over a period of a couple of months, shift my favourite artist from Hilary Duff to Nightwish, and my music taste from bubblegum-pop to symphonic metal. Fair effort.

Nemo is the most played song in my media player library. I have lots of memories attached to it - from the story detailed above, to driving to school singing it, to sitting in the Enmore theater with goosebumps as Tuomas played the first few notes...

• Accidentally In Love - Counting Crows

This is a Germany song. It's the Terri and Chris song. Every memory and story attached to Accidentally in Love includes Terri in some manner. Whether it be wondering what she is up to as I blast it in the car, or "dancing" with her at her recent 18th, or remembering the fun we had in Germany, or at music camp, or when we first became friends by letting her put make-up on me during Entertainment Night rehearsal in year eight.

I also remember the time on a train in Germany when I lip synced to it using my MP3 player as a microphone. How could I not remember. There is a video of it floating around somewhere.

• Anywhere But Here - Hilary Duff

This one is simple. Daniel made me two CDs full of all the Hilary Duff songs her downloaded. This was the first song that I listened to on them. I was lying in bed, with my CD player on quietly next to me. Everytime I hear this song it reminds me of that moment, and Daniel.

• Bye Bye Beautiful - Nightwish

BBB is the second song on Nightwish's new album. I didn't use to like it much - it felt a little too heavy for me. But I remember one of the many three way conversations that Adam, Morgan and I have, when Morgan informed the gathering that BBB was, in fact, awesome. So I listened again, more closely, and low and behold...

I.
Love.
This.
Song.

When I'm not being absorbed in the win that is the musical mastery of Nightwish I remember that conversation. I also vividly remember the first of February 2008 - the Nightwish concert. BBB was the opening song. You know how at a concert the music is so unimaginably loud that it consumes all of your senses? That feeling, combined with one of my favourite songs is pretty much like what I would imagine sex with Keira Knightly would be like.

• Dragostea Din Tei (Numa Numa) - O-zone

Many of you may remember this from the cult internet movie a couple of years back. Numa Numa Dance was among the first cult internet clips that I saw, and helped in sparking my fascination at the world of cyberspace. It also contributed to my "random" streak in year nine. It was first shown to me by Scerba, and promptly became one of the references commonly made by the group. The song, Dragostea Din Tei, was downloaded and spread, many unable to resist the Romanian beats. Many members of the ex-group can sing, and dance to this song, despite it being in an entirely foreign language. When I hear this song, I am reminded of so many different things. Singing it at lunchtime, playing it on Daniel's phone at high school, annoying an entire German class with it at every opportunity, and studying the lyrics in a year nine English class.

Numa Numa is the song that I have probably had the most laughs over. And the song with the most memories attached to it.

So thats my top six songs with vivid memories attached to them. The titles all link to their respective YouTube videos, so if any grab you, go and check them out.

What about you guys, what song has the most memories attached to it for you? Write the song in a comment and, if you like, let me know of some of the memories. =)

Christopher.

"Trying to catch your eye - things will never look the same"

Anywhere But Here - Hilary Duff