Theres a lemon behind that rock

This week's video post: What are you doing?

self worth

For this topic I refer you to a poem by Diane Wakoski called "I have had to learn to live with my face". I do encourage you to read it all. The whole thing is appropriate, but due to the length, here is an excerpt that summarises how I feel about self worth.

I look at pictures of myself as a child.
I looked lumpy, unformed, like a piece of dough,
and it has been my task as a human being
to carve out a mind, carve out a face,
carve a shape with arms and legs, to put a voice inside,
and to make a person from a presence.

A cruel, cruel thing

Things I learnt about love from South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami:

1. The way that you love someone can either save or destroy them.
2. The way that someone loves you can either save or destroy you.
3. Love is not quantifiable, but it is absolute.
4. Sex is a part of love, but it does not define love.
5. Someone will always get hurt.
6. You can love someone your whole life.
7. Love is physiological.
8. You can't help who you love.
9. Love is sometimes like a physical force, it sweeps you away and you can't stop your feet from leaving the ground.
10. Love can make you abandon all logic.

Zine Review: Four Crushes

now you know

An idea I have had in my mind lately is 'make your life into art' and this week's topic made me think of it. It's easy enough to take the good that we feel and make it into something, but what about the bad that we feel, how can we make that into "art"? The main thing that we have to do is to be open, be open about ourselves to the world, for our own sakes. So when we find ourselves with a topic like this, it is personal, and not necessarily beautiful or triumphant. All we can say is the sad truths. That we hate ourselves but we don't know how to change. That we are stupid, and pathetic, and afraid. That we have no skills, or confidence, or eloquence. That we are lazy, and lonely, and lacking.

But there are some days where we feel good. We walk down the street with a sense of purpose. We are independent and carefree. We are good-looking and smart. We are kind and loving. We are moral and good. These are the days we try to replicate.

On the other days, we either try to wriggle out from underneath our dissatisfaction, or burrow deep inside it.

This week's topic

Self-worth.

zine review #1

As Stacey mentioned earlier this week, we have decided to start doing videos. That's because we are shamelessly copying this guy Joseph. I've heard he goes alright*. Anyway I apologise for how low the sound is - TURN UP YO SPEAKERS - and the out of sync-ness of my video, but I really can't be bothered fixing it because I'm really hungry, plus in this version you can see the drawings best. At the end when I giggle I am saying "Stacey's got nice boobies"**.



The guy who drew this zine is actually in a pretty cool band called Psuche. I guess the video isn't a review as much as it is me showing you a zine I think is cool. Which is alright really.

*an Australian expression that here means "is a favourable chap"
**a phrase that here means "possesses agreeable breasts"***
***I was actually saying "Sticky is the best"

Video Posts

Hello lovely readers,

Susie and I have decided to start doing video posts on a different thing each week. This week Susie came up with zine reviews. If you have any suggestions, let us know. In the meantime, here is a short blooper video of me when I was trying to record something earlier. Such a dork.

Blurred Vision

sorrow

by Edna St Vincent Millay

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
  
Beats upon my heart.

People twist and scream in pain,
--
Dawn will find them still again;

This has neither wax nor wane,

Neither stop nor start.

People dress and go to town;
  
I sit in my chair.

All my thoughts are slow and brown:

Standing up or sitting down

Little matters, or what gown
  
Or what shoes I wear.

by the National



by me

tomorrow I will keep busy
and will not think of him.
sending emails can be so serious,
paying bills always grim.

The ache

I was trying to explain to someone
that there is this ache
and sometimes this ache
feels euphoric
and sometimes it
makes you want to die.

Sad songs: A Playlist

I won't lie, I think this is the best playlist I've ever compiled. I made it one night when I felt sad, and it's not that listening to sad songs makes me feel sadder, it just makes me feel so good because it suits my mood exactly. And anyway, I like sad songs, because they are often the most beautiful. The same could be said about other things. So this is it:

1) Inside and Out by Feist
2) Evening Kitchen by Band of Horses
3) Skinny Love by Bon Iver
4) Lua by Bright Eyes
5) A Lack of Colour by Death Cab For Cutie
6) Samskeyti by Sigur Ros
7) Nothing Gets Crossed Out by Bright Eyes
8) Lover's Spit by Broken Social Scene
9) Hate by Cat Power
10) Transatlanticism by Death Cab For Cutie
11) Ash Wednesday by Elvis Perkins
12) Jealous Guy by Elliott Smith
13) Such Great Heights by Iron and Wine
14) I See A Darkness by Johnny Cash
15) Life Being What It Is by Kaki King
16) Misread by Kings of Convenience
17) In Corolla by The Mountains Goats
18) Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want by The Smiths
19) Waitin' Around To Die by Townes Van Zandt
20) Sorrow by The National
21) Two Headed Boy Pt. 2 by Neutral Milk Hotel
22) Everyone Feels Like You by Owen
23) Get Lonely by The Mountain Goats
24) Knives Out by Radiohead
25) New Slang by The Shins
26) Vaka by Sigur Ros
27) Bed Abuse by Owen
28) Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now by The Smiths
29) The Seer's Tower by Sufjan Stevens

Fact not fiction

I find myself
thinking about you
in grocery lines
in lectures
at work
at mealtimes
on buses
on buses.
I will be
biting my nails
and gritting my teeth
and checking my phone
and sighing,
heavily.

Final thoughts on love

Love can make you feel like such a dick.

passing remark

In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don’t like much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.

My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, “Then why did you choose me?”

Mildly I lower my brown eyes—
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.



William Stafford

Annie Hall

I love Diane Keaton in this movie.

My old life

100% babes

hold me now

The more that I think about love, the more that it starts to lose all meaning. Kind of like when you repeat a word over and over. The only thing that I know for sure about love is that I feel it. It's silly, but when I try to talk about love I often refer back to films or songs. I feel like they would say it better than I could. When you start a relationship and you begin to feel these 'love' feelings, I think it is best not to tell the other person until you simply can't hold in the words when you look at them. That should be the rule. I am not always so positive about love. It can be very confusing, and horrible, and hurtful. But I open myself up to love always, because I think that it is worth it. I often think that I am pretty lucky to have experienced love and not had my heart completely broken. The truth is, love is everything, in every sense of the word. I don’t care if that’s cheesy.

fictional and far away

Sometimes I recall that bit in Love Actually where Thomas Sangster and Liam Neeson decide they're ready to get the shit kicked out of them by love. Sometimes I think that I’m ready. But I am either not brave enough or haven't decided anyone's worthwhile yet.

I feel slightly existential about this frankly, in a mauvaise foi kinda way. True of all our emotions, we just convince ourselves of what we are experiencing. As our good existential buddy Hamlet said, “there is no good or bad, only thinking makes it so”. For example, I’m not really sure if I love my family, but because they are my family and that’s what I am meant to feel for them, I tell myself that I do. It is just as easy to be jealous of someone and to dislike them as it is to admire and like them.

Anyway I wrote the following in a very obvious attempt to distance myself from the topic.

Love was sitting high up in the trees as I walked home, the sun shining through leaves encouraging my sentimentality, knocking leaves down to me as I strolled. The street was otherwise empty and I could smell jasmine quite strongly walking past the grand houses in my neighbourhood. Love rolled its eyes at me enjoying the spring, probably willing me to be more pragmatic or something. Love nudged the birds and the trees in the ribs and made them all laugh at me for my hopeless romanticism. Love knows I spend too much time walking down pretty-looking-jasmine-smelling streets to get a job or travel or find a husband or save a life or change the world or do all those things that seem truly possible when the sun shines haphazardly through leaves. Love laughs at me with Nature, and Nature quite openly hates me and my disregard for it. They gang up on me in my daily life, make me trip on my baggy pyjama pants, make it rain just after I put my washing out on the line and make the cats scratch me.

I have actually never been in love, which I think is evident, and I don't want to write about it any further I'm afraid.