for everything, ever.

the world boasts a shiny covering, like the rain has finished painting the ground one splot at a time. the sky is clear, like my eyesight isn't. the heavens are waiting for their entrance, groaning in anticipation. just behind the velvety blue curtains waiting to be risen. did you even know that this is not the matinee? this is the grand finale. the final scene, the showdown, the resolution. the music is swelling, the popcorn is finished, and we're all waiting for the main actor to come on stage and end everything.

did you even realise that this is the play that is about to be acted out? count the seconds. i dare you. poke fear into your eyes and insert gladness into your heart. there's not much time! and this isn't the time for pretension; it isn't the time to recall dramatic techniques barely remembered from after-school workshops. this is the only decision you will ever make. it's the only chance you have to grab. it's the only cliff you're dangling off. it's the only life-jacket left. it's the only time in history that justifies the use of all the cliches ever written into human memory.

now we see as a dull reflection. you can't even make out the frame of the mirror, can you? let alone its murky contents, the glassy pool. there are too many fingerprints patterning the surface, too many confused and unseeing and cynical hands pressing against the very piece of glass the brains that direct those feeling hands pretend doesn't even exist.

but it's easy to scoff at a metaphorical mirror. as a finely-spun fiction, a politically incorrect fantasy. an embarrassment, a blight, a sign of weakness, a mistaken love. it's less easy to ignore the man who stood in front of the mirror, if for only a half-life's time. the man crudely immortalised with a bearded face and soft eyes and uplifted hands and sandal-ed feet. the only man who never needed to be immortalised because he was immortal to begin with. and i mean to begin with. in the beginning there was. in the beginning there was. it is certain. it is historical. it is knowledge and truth and sugar on top. it is real life, it is intervention. it is the man, the mystery, behind the mirror, stepping out and revealing himself. no longer a dull reflection. the mirror scrubbed clean. the immortal writ mortal.

he's yours.

this morning my family loved each other. in that overt laughing smiling way. i wish it didn't take hundreds of dollars of gifts to make that happen, but nonetheless it was beautiful. christmas presents are an institution in my house. i don't think i can fully explain to you just how much my mother in particular spoils all of us on december twenty-fifth, and since i don't want to bore you with a detailed list of my presents, i won't even try.

the best part? it's a toss-up between eating blueberry pancakes for breakfast and lara crying over my handmade card. another thing i can't explain is how much of a blessing that fourteen-year-old is to me. she is everything. she is stunning. she understands what christmas is truly about and she loves jesus for it.

tomorrow morning i'm going away for a couple of days with my family, and then afterward away for two days with the boy's family. there's packing to do and new cds to listen to and beaches to lie on and books to read and a boyfriend to be missed (until thursday anyway).

merry christmas, kids.

last minute christmas shopping?

etsy is love at first sight. it makes me want to buy everything and also get to sewing and knitting and beading immediately.
defunker is rad tees and unpretentious urban wit.
magic-pony is kitschtastic--and it doesn't get much better than that. all my dreams come true (with a pretty expensive price tag).

a girl can dream, anyway. and a girl can admire the internet's wares in an effort to avoid dusting her room. not me, though. just a girl. you know, someone else who isn't me. at all.

when christmas rolls around
it makes me wonder how it is possible that the years seem to travel faster and faster as i get wrinklier
it makes me wish that we didn't have so much stuff--endless aisles of colourfully-packaged somethingorothers (somethingorothers that will never sell out, aisles that will never be empty)
santa is always scary
and
jesus' name is only whispered through the tinsel and the bags of shopping and the bid for an unoffensive non denominational drunken holiday.
unoffensivetastic. missingthepointtastic.

oh yeah and that's my newest thing

whenever anyone says anything i hear tastic on the end in my head

what do you want for dinner? (dinnertastic)

look it's a thai restaurant (thairestauranttastic)

i'll pick you up from the station (stationtastic)

your phone is possessed (possessedphonetastic)

you get the idea.

normally i censor myself and only say it occasionally because otherwise people will realise that i'm a psycholoserchild but around those who already know that i'm a psychowhatsit and have to put up with me anyway like the boy and la and bel i say it after every single sentence

and they're all like ARRRGGHH I WANT TO KILL YOU

(killmetastic)

i find myself frustrated in a world in which even my family is infected with racism, in a home in which i rebel inwardly and occasionally outwardly at throwaway comments that betray its frightening, unthinking, hideous shadow. it makes me want to vomit.

'you talk as if you would never say anything like that,' said one of my younger sisters when i asked her why she felt justified in condemning an entire race of people by asserting that the behaviour of a girl she doesn't like very much is characteristic of all people of her nationality.
i looked at her in disbelief.
'because i never would.'
i don't even notice the nationalities of the people around me. i am interested in my friends' lineage because multiculturalism is one of the genuinely beautiful aspects of australian society. but i never think of them as defined by what they look like. strangers around me are people, not faces coloured and proportioned by a particular part of the world or by a particular branch of humanity.
the race riots that broke out last week in the shire numbed me. i pretended, if not that it was happening, that it didn't represent the manifestation of an undeniable undercurrent of abhorrent racism in australian culture. i downplayed it in my mind, shifted it to the dusty archives of my holiday head.
but it's there. it's in my family. it's at my work. it simmers on trains and on school playgrounds, and now it has spilled out, dark and oily, staining beaches and suburbs. one of my friends, who is half greek, had blonde put in her hair in an effort to look more 'aussie.' another friend told me of an indian colleague who experienced persecution. it's crazy because it's about race but it's not about race. it doesn't matter that india and greece and lebanon and israel are completely distinct entities unto themselves. racism is discrimination, but it doesn't discriminate. or think. it just looks and its eyes burn with a hatred boiled up with stereotypes and simplifications and a sense of superiority. its nose is turned up but it doesn't smell the sickly perfume polluting the air. and what does matter is that some people have coffee-coloured skin or different-shaped noses.
so now ethnic people endeavour to look a little less ethnic. and anglo-saxon people try to look less anglo-saxon. what is 'aussie'? i always cringe when someone i know says, for example, that their father is thai, and their mother is 'aussie.' 'oh,' i often enquire, 'is your mum aboriginal?' because if their father is not defined as 'aussie' because he is not white and their mother is defined as 'aussie' because she is, then there, right there, it seeps into everyday conversation. and i know, i know, most people don't mean to say that their thai father is any less australian than their anglo-saxon mother. but in principle such a statement declares that the australian identity is owned by the fair in colour and not shaped by the beautiful multiculturality that is represented in some form by the very offspring of a thai dad and an anglo mum.


racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason. abraham joshua heschel

lying on your bed wrecking each others' hair
sitting at the station letting trains go by
driving along singing along to jeff
you know it.
thinking about you too much is awesome, missing you as soon as the train pulls away or the car door slams is awesome, getting excited to see you is awesome, planning which gigs and movies to go to is awesome. and, you know, you are awesome. even if there were no gigs and no movies, and nothing to do but sit together--it wouldn't upset me in the slightest.


today i spilt money for christmas presents and i got annoyed about carols played over shopping centre sound systems. i had to make all these DECISIONS and it was a NIGHTMARE of EPIC PROPORTIONS. then it took a BAJILLION years to get home and the guy who plunked himself down next to me on the train STUNK.

i can't think of anything else to complain about.
you see
vita è bella.

so it's like a roller coaster. and i'm getting scared like i always do in the slow chug chug chug bit at the beginning when the ride creeps up. before the world becomes an impressionist painting around me with the acceleration, before the downs and ups and upside downs. once we pick up speed i'm loving it. but i always hang on a little bit tighter as the ride begins, when the speed is slow. and sometimes i wonder what i'm doing suspended so high in the air (i've never been that good with heights).

but it's worth it in the end. and i love it in the end.

[thanks to you for lending me the simile.]

look what one of the youth group kids did for me!
oh yeah, i'm hot.

do you believe it
i can spend fourteen hours straight with the boy and he doesn't get sick of me
i mean
i get sick of me in that amount of time

[jump cut]

operation room explosion has reached a critical stage. the results of two full days of dusting and rubbishing last week have been since covered with a layer of dust and rubbish. it's all rather depressing. i'm just not good at this cleaning thing. nor the keeping things clean thing, for that matter.

like, tidy people are too lazy to look for things. right?

[jump cut]

the other day i got a letter from the department of philosophy at sydney uni congratulating me on my performance in philosophy and encouraging me to consider honours. LIKE NO THANKS. another three years of sitting in tutes vacillating between complete incomprehension and severe annoyance at the crazy kids who pretend that they believe that you can never be certain about anything in the history of ever is not my idea of a good time.



word.

hot hair in december
expensive hair in december
guilt in december
pretentious model shots in december
new confidence in december
superficiality in december

the last few weeks have been the best time of my life. no doubt. hands down. i'm floating on beached days and christmas partied nights. i have poetry written for me every night, i eat porridge every morning. i've started cleaning my room, and although it's still an explosion it will get done and i will have the space to draw pretty pictures, bead long necklaces, dance around like a little kid, and write like crazy. i will put up posters of jeff buckley and the cat empire, and pictures of smiles and crinkled eyes and sunlight. i go to bed late and i wake up just before midday. i've started swimming again, just a little, and i've remembered how good it feels to train well. i'm crawling through a pile of novels and christian literature begging to be swallowed whole. i'm playing cds on repeat. i'm beginning to understand why so many songs are about love. i'm lying awake at night unable to sleep, as per usual, but it's no longer because i'm worrying and over-analyzing--it's because i can't get the boy out of my head. and the best thing is that his head is full of me, too. if my life was a cartoon then this episode would be littered with messy little red and pink hearts suspended in midair.

awesome is
lying in bed
til eleven
messaging you
and
wearing my pyjamas
all day
and
feeling proud
of how i trained
this afternoon
and
looking forward
to tomorrow.

one day i will read all the books i want to read and i will spin all the cds i want to spin
and on that day i will clean my room, and chuck out the artworks i did when i was six and the (for some reason still filed) posters of celebrities i shudder to think i used to like
and i will buy a new phone, like one that isn't possessed by a lesser devil
i will dust
and i will paint my nails
and i will call up old friends and discover long-lost relatives, i will sip hot chocolate with them and pretend to be cultured
and then in the afternoon i will watch the thousands of movies i always meant to see, and i will go to the beach, and i will go out dancing, and i will guest star at a few gigs
(a jazz trio here, a rock band there)
i will protest about poverty, i will destroy my bank account by sponsoring a hundred kids
but mostly
i will tell strangers and loved ones and enemies and acquaintances about jesus.

oh and i own a boy now.
(well, sorta.)