Under strict orders

Natalie from Definatlie has given us strict orders to keep on with this loving thyself theme. And seeing as my week of self-esteem posts died a sudden and terrible death ( illness and the week from hell) I'm snapping too Cap'n and listing away!

What I love about myself:

I love my strength of character. Even when I'm misery and convinced everything is awful and always will be, there is a tiny spark that knows I'll get through this because I always do.

I love my compassion, while sometimes it makes me hide away from the cruelty of the world, it's the constant drive in me to be a better person.

I love my hands, they are graceful and white and expressive.

I love my foolishness. I have the gift of play, I can tease and giggle and get up to mischief without being self-conscious ( sometimes)

I love my mind, it is fast and flexible and meaty. It will take me somewhere beyond the everyday if I just trust my instincts.

I love my cocoon that I have built around my beloved and me. It is a safe, warm space of love and trust. I love that I know how fragile it can be and how every day I am thankful for it.

I love my smile, it is wide and genuine. It is offered freely and often to strangers, friends and even people who MAY not deserve it.

I love my sheer joy and semi-inability at baking. It brings me such pleasure and I'm really not that good at it.

I love that I can dance. Like really dance. Like I'm the annoying person at beginners dance class who gets it in five seconds and becomes the teachers pet. But I love how it makes me feel and I love that at least I am instinctively fabulous at something.

I really like my butt!

And my kissable lips and grey eyes and red hair and pale, vampire like skin!

Ooo, I think deep down I might really like me.

I'm Bitchin'

Seriously why is this post so freaking hard? I'm playing along with Sally from GeorgieLove and making a week of posts about the marvelousness of me!

So this is day 3.... and this is post 1.... it's going well.

What makes it so hard to give yourself props? Yet when I go to write something about myself I have to temper it, i.e.- I'm pretty awesome, I'm kinda cool, I sorta rock! Why is it so hard to write the bald statements? I am awesome, I am cool, I definitely rock. I'm bitchin! 

Con-un-drum.

Who actually likes themselves? In a 'I don't spend my precious and finite time beating myself up internally every single day for not being smart enough, pretty enough, cool enough, enough enough' kind of way. Oh, none of us? Well, then this must be normal.

Normal is for losers.

I don't want to be normal if that means having to feel crap about myself any longer. Dammit.

I want normal to be no anxiety about what I'm wearing, what size I am, if I'm funny and witty in conversation. I want to stop thinking about how much better life could be if only I was thinner, spoke french, was outgoing and had Megan Fox-like charms.*

I want to stop and breathe and appreciate what I have in my life instead of chasing my tail wanting something, anything! 

So today I'm starting an adventure! Wanna come? I'll bring cookies

 

I'm gonna find me a beautiful pea green ( sea green?) boat and set off to find my self-esteem. 

Here's what I'm taking:

Me- 28, red of hair, size 16-18 of build, shy of temperament, intellectual of brain, kind of nature, loving of mischief, deep streak of sarcasm, good taste in shoes, ability to love loyally, excellent baking skills, no ability to stop eating the chocolate and a smile as wide as the sea.

Lots of honey and a little bit of money.

No map or compass.

Why? Cos I'm bitchin'. 

*Disclaimer- While Miss Fox is possibly one of the finest looking women alive I will admit to being quite concerned that she may not notice if she walked into a wall. But she is awesome and power to you, sister.

Mumsy's coming to town

Ah, the Mothership is arriving tomorrow! Its silly to be excited when I saw her a couple of months ago but really if a late twenties gal can't be excited about her Mumsy then there is something wrong with the world. 

See for my last two years of High School it was just Mumsy and me. My beloved Papa had just died and my big brother moved to Melbourne, so it was just us. We spent the first 6 months after Dad died sitting on the couch watching old episodes of Star Trek and holding hands. 

Now I live three hours away from her and shamefully don't visit enough ( cos I'm naughty) But also she got married again and got a life! Retired from work and now spends all her time traveling with her husband the bushranger! Shocking! Mothers with lives! 

She's coming down tomorrow to play for a couple of days. OOoooo, lovely. Also, she likes to buy me things. 

Mothers rock, its true.

Oh, just wake me when it's August

July is turning out to be quite complex. For starters, I still didn't have the hang of June and now its quite chilly outside and I once again have only my THREE QUARTER SLEEVED COAT to keep me warm. ( How, how, how did I not notice this in the shop?) 

Then there is the small problem of my Master's, which everyone assumes I have under control but really I'm agreeing with them so I don't look stupid. You know when you just nod because your brain has stopped taking things in and then once its finally caught up you realise you don't know what that actually was but ITS TOO LATE NOW, you can't go back and ask them to explain. What WILL they think of you? That is my life!

 

Then I had to tell people about my brilliant idea of a Children's Lit reading group that is combined with knitting and they all want to join so I'm going ahead and organising it. Found a lovely place and got some ideas for discussion topics and hum, am I forgetting something...something vaguely important? Oh yes that's right, I CAN'T ACTUALLY KNIT.

Only one thing for it, slurp some gin and back to bed until August. Failing that plan I may have to break out the EMERGENCY AUSTEN adaptations. Mmmm, Captain Wentworth, such reassuring thighs.

Head adjustment = Hair adjustment

Firstly, Hair stalking. Not good but in my defense it was really mostly unintentional hair stalking. More a confluence of events resulting in hair stalking.

I returned from my trip to Vietnam desperate for new hair ( it was all ratty and icky) and for a new hairdresser. Lili just had a new haircut and seriously, could there be a better advertisement for a salon? Long story short, went to the same salon, accidently got the same hairdresser and came out with this...

(Yes that's me, all innocent and cute!)

Which is a leetle (well, rather) close to Lili's hair! But, but, but. See it wasn't intentional and really a black bob looks so much sleeker and better than mine! Mine kinda looks as if Grug gave birth to my head!

That's Grug

That's me feeling naughty with Grug Hair!

But see I needed a new 'do. I'm going through one of those adjustment periods in life when its all whizzy brain syndrome (WBS) and crazy highs and even crazier lows. When you feel like you just grew up 10 years in about four minutes. 

It all started with the Lecturing, damn that job heroin, it gave me such a boost of confidence and such a feeling of certainty that now I'm re-examining all the other facets of my life and wondering why do I keep doing them if they don't make me happy?

My trip to Vietnam was a massive example. You may have noticed no specific posts here about said trip...That's cos it was a bit awful. A really expensive object lesson. So why did I go?

I have had a best friend for about the last 7 years who is amazing and cool and very much an awesome Frankie type chic. But for about the last year and a half every time I see her I leave feeling so crap about myself, so very unimportant and uncool and just bland. To try and change this feeling I tried to change myself, become cooler and more carefree, book crazy trips to Vietnam ( we were supposed to go with her and boyfriend) and generally be more like the person I thought she would like to hang out with.

As I write this I cringe because seriously, when does changing to fit with others work out? Cos I'm not cool at all. I like reading more than anything else. My Masters is the most exciting thing in my life. I don't music unless its classical. I really don't like staying out after midnight. Sunday night is date night with ABC television. I hate fancy restaurants and I can't stand Music festivals. 

So I'm standing on a balcony ( having an illicit cig) in Vietnam. The day has been 39 degrees and I get pretty sick in the heat. All I want to do is go home. I'm sooking cos all I can think is 'Why the hell am I even here?' And right then I make the decision to never, ever, ever again do something that I don't want to do ( within reason, cos you know, I still gotta go to work and the dentist)

Its so funny, I thought I loved to travel. But that was through England and France. Both of which had meaning for me. The books I read as a child, the films I've watched, the history, those are the places I get meaning from. So when I got back from Vietnam I found myself wanting to find that girl again. The girl who was so happy because she had been to libraries in Cambridge and seen first editions of Blake's poems. 

Here she is and strange, what a similar haircut to the one I have now.

xx

P.S- But sorry Lili for hair stalking, if you weren't so damn stylish and lovely! Don't they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Please feel flattered! 

Home again, jiggity jig

Hello Internet World,

Oh, I missed you and you look so pretty, is that new? Swoon.

Ah, home from Vietnam. Home from the 38 degree heat and the 70% humidity. Home from the non-stopping noise and the crazy traffic. Home from the beautiful, most intense, fantastic, horrible trip I have ever taken.

Home.

I may have loudly exclaimed on landing in Melbourne that I WAS NEVER LEAVING AGAIN! Which is a pretty bold statement as the V&A Museum is on the other side of the world and I have a real thing for that Museum. 

But for now I am so glad to be in my leetle house with a sympathy kitty and some hoodie boots. I think I'll stick around and appreciate the loveliness here for a while...at least until the jet lag wears off. 

Am wearing the tanty-pants!

Ooo, I am one angry kitten. All hissing and very ineffective claws. And why you ask? Because of this.

This is the cover for Nick Cave's latest book, The Death of Bunny Munro and its a charmer! That is the disembodied crotch of a female ( adult I hope) and oh, has it got under my skin. I work at a bookshop which will buy an absolute truckload of these ( cos they're oh-so-cool) and I will have to sell them whilst biting back a feminist diatribe about the appropriateness of using this image to sell a book.

I really hoped we were moving away form objectifying women's bodies, naive I know. But I though, yeah, the book industry is a progressive one, we just don't see misogynistic imagery like this anymore.

And here it is, on the cover of a book that will sell truckloads regardless of the image on its front.

So, I've been trying to pinpoint the exact problems with this cover and I've defined it down to these.

1- That it is the image of a disembodied vagina. Passive and confronting. It taps into the distillation of the female body to a series of penetrable parts.

And if that is all a woman is, why would she get any equal rights or be treated with respect or expect that she might treated as more than an object.

2- That an image of the female genitalia is both shocking and taboo. Cave, obviously, has been associated with the kind of rock'n'roll subversity that this image hopes to tap into. The crotch shot is meant to titillate and confront the Australian literati. 

Oh well, women's sexual self esteem will have to wait until white, middle-class men have finished using the vagina as an image that is both dirty and forbidden!

3- Text Publishing have just championed Bill Henson over the allegations that his work is pornographic and now use this image to sell a book. Sure, Text, this is art too!

It screams to me "Oh we need a stunt to distract people from how crap this book actually is!"

( I know as soon as I publish these I will come up with better ways of expressing the problems but this is the jist.)

Oo, I love a good rant! I joined in the discussion on the Meanjin website too, here's the link if you're interested.

And now, Tanty-pants are removed. I promise my next post will be entirely frivolous. Am now going to find cookies.