30day challenge: 2.

Day 2: The meaning behind your blog name.

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Philosphorescence… Bit of a mouthful, eh. It’s mashup of Philosophy and Phosphorescence, to state the obvious.

 

Words are good. I like words. I like using them incorrectly, out of context; getting my wrong on. I like making new words too. Even the word portmanteau is a kickarse word. Words shouldn’t make boxes. When I wondered what to call this blog it was only fitting to mangle the English language to suit myself.

 

This is my little corner of the interwebs where I come to download the chaos in my mind and apply the light of philosophical navel-gazing to it, in the hope it may occasionally produce a lingering afterglow of understanding. A phosphorescent picture just seemed to suit that idea.

 

Or rant. Just rant. Just a place to paste up the darkness from my mind to get it out of there, give it legs, let it walk its own path instead of clogging up my brain.

 

 

I like the name of my other blog better – life on mirth, the white cousin to this dark brother, in look as well as content. My little yin and yang. Life on mirth was born from a desire to try and see what life can actually be like when you make the conscious decision to hang out on the happy side of the fence as much as you can. A life on earth in mirth. Meltopia.

30day challenge: 1.

Day 1: A recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself.

 

So, I shall start the 30 day challenge, taken up recently by so many of my wonderful twitter peeps, on a day that is not the first of the month, or even the first of a week, but a nondescript day being the 6th of the month, on a Wednesday. Because, just like any exercise challenge, don’t put off starting tomorrow what you can start today; excuses are for the weak. And what is this, but an exercising of the mind?

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Dailybooth has the most recent photo of me. I used to have so many photos to choose from, but as I get older I tend to shy away from the camera; I don’t seem to be as photogenic as I was 5 years ago. Sad ‘tis.

 

 

I quite like this photo. It’s a good representation of where I’m at right at this moment in time. Bloodshot eyes, freckled face, but cheeky smile nonetheless. A defiant grin emerging out of the darkness. A floating head in the void. Warped and who cares.

 

1. I was actually baptised Mormon. Yes, I didn’t find this out until quite recently, but I was properly baptised into an organised religion. Thankfully my parents quickly switched to atheism and brought me up as such. I’m so glad I got to make up my own mind when I was old enough. Every child should have that privilege. A friend of mine married a Catholic and had to agree to bring up any of their future progeny as Catholics before they were allowed to marry. That doesn’t seem very fair to me. It smacks of number-swelling if you ask me.

 

2. I did 5 years on a music scholarship through high school. I played the flute in primary school, well enough to be accepted into a scholarship program, although I switched to clarinet purely because it’s what Woody Allen played. It didn’t take. No music career for me. But I’m so grateful I did it, because I have such an eclectic taste in music now, from Baroque through to electronica, minus Justin Bieber and Lady Gag.

 

3. I can raise my eyebrows independent of each other, roll my tongue to the left, right and in a circle, wiggle my ears and flare my nostrils. I hold steadfast to the idea that it’s all a sign of high intelligence.

 

4. I was once engaged to the man that took my cherry. I was with him for 11 years in total – 8 before he proposed, 3 afterwards. He chickened out. I made up for lost time after that.

 

5. My heritage is Maori/Scottish/Spanish. I have one single red hair from my Scottish side. I swear – one single red hair. The earliest ancestor I know of is Manuel Jose and he has his own website. My maternal side is so big when we have a reunion it makes the news in New Zealand. I’m related to NZ royalty (the All Blacks, that is). Oh, and let’s not go into the fact that Manuel was a polygamist…

 

6. My tribe is Ngati Porou (te iwi ngati porou). When I found out about this I can’t tell you how much power it gave me. To know that I had a tribe, and a canoe, and a mountain, and a river, and land, and a coat of arms was just so empowering. I truly believe that any person will hold their head up high when they find out their roots.

 

7. I can remember numbers from my childhood, like phone numbers of friends when I was in primary school, but don’t ask me what I had for lunch yesterday because I will struggle to remember.

 

8. I first drank alcohol when I was 15. Got so paralytic my friend had to slap me. Ended up peeing on her neighbour’s lawn and jumping in her pool fully clothed. Well, I’m sure that’s pretty normal by today’s standards…

 

9. I’ve dabbled in drugs but I’ll never inject or snort. I have to draw the line somewhere.

 

10. I truly believe I have two guardian angels looking after me – one male, one female. I don’t know their names, but I know without a doubt that they are there, and I love them profusely for all that they have done for me. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for them. I don’t care if that makes me sound like a loony, they’re real, and they’ve been by my bedside many times when I’ve been bawling my eyes out, providing hugs and caresses at my darkest times. I love them a lot. I also hope they forgive me.

 

11. The reason I love boobies so much is that I had a scare with my own and it made me realise how precious they are. Boobs are the best invention ever. I love mine to death even though they’re hardly worth writing home about, but I think of the alternative of not having them at all, and it makes me appreciate them every single day. Plus, boobies are so pretty I could look at boobies all day. Anyone’s boobies. Especially Jessica Alba’s and Monica Belluci’s. Bewwwwbs! #boobs.

 

12. I struggle with the black dog more than I like to admit. He’s a bad dog. I’m getting better at it though.

 

13. My power animal would definitely be the gecko. I love them. I don’t know why. Perhaps because they are cute as a button when they chase my most hated critter, the mosquito.

 

14. I’m a terrible extrovert. I can’t help it. I share too much of myself when I really should just keep cards close to my chest. It just seems like such a waste. We’re all humans on this planet trying to work out what’s going on. Why keep it to yourself? If you can resonate with someone by sharing something about yourself, why hesitate?

 

15. I can’t stand to see people in distress. I have to leave the room when prank calls are playing on the radio, I can’t watch practical jokes in action, I can’t lie to someone as a joke. However, animal cruelty will always cut me up more than human cruelty. To see defenceless animal taken advantage of makes me red with rage. Don’t even get me started on it.

 

Phew. The end. Well, only 29 days of this to go eh. Will you join the ride?

the philosophy of grammar nazis

There’s nothing like seeing someone do something similar to what I have done in the past to teach me important lessons in life.

 

Example – I used to rant a lot online but now I try to temper it, because I've seen others be negative ALL the time, day after day, and I realise now how much it wears down the shiny on everyone who reads it. It becomes obvious it’s purely for attention and pity. They don’t want anyone to fix anything about their life, they don’t even want to try and fix it themselves, they just want everyone to feel their pain. They exist in their pain. It’s truly tiresome.

 

Yet, because I’ve been there myself, I can empathise, and hope that one day they too will see how damaging it becomes.

 

And so, tonight, in a perfect example of contradiction, I find myself outraged at the trivial things other people become outraged about. Like grammar and punctuation.

 

I can high-horse it with the best of them when it comes to misuse of the possessive apostrophe, the incorrect your/you’re, or there/their/they’re, and the very cringe worthy “should/could/would OF”, but I have now been shown the error of my ways. I will henceforth loosen my stance, having seen how ridiculous it makes a person look to be so petty.

 

Tonight’s lesson is brought to you by the ellipsis, commonly represented by a series of three dots […]. Until tonight, I had never known anyone to be upset by people perhaps using only two dots, or four, or more than four, instead of the standard (and apparently required at all times) three.

 

My first reaction was to try and understand why, out of all the horrible evil wrongs that occur in the world every minute of every day, someone would choose to be annoyed enough by this to mention it in a public forum.

 

I despair at the things people channel their energy towards when there are so many more worthwhile causes requiring our outrage and our help to fix.

 

People should be allowed to paint their sentences with whatever colours they wish. If they want to use more dots for effect, so be it! Less? Fine! Go for it. Who are we to constrict another’s sentence construction? If the great writers of the world all followed the rules to the letter our literature would all be dull beige today. e.e cummings would be raked over the coals, for sure.

 

So, out of my petty outrage at someone’s petty outrage, I’ve managed to learn another lesson: live and let live, write and let write. Let. It. Go.

 

Language is our putty to sculpt with as we wish, into whatever we wish, however we wish. Go forth and sculpt unencumbered.

the philosophy of hurt

I can feel a crisis coming on, another soul-scrape on the approach. I don’t like it.

 

It’s always triggered by being treated less than human; by another person stonewalling me, making me second-guess what’s going on, making my brain go into overdrive trying to work out if I’m being played like a first class fiddle.

 

It’s the same situation over and over – when I’m made to realise I once again pinned my happiness on another. I can’t do that. None of us can. People let you down. It’s as certain as death and taxes. They may not mean to, but eventually it happens; whether they fuck you over, or die on you, they let you down.

 

I have to learn to rely on myself. Only I can make me happy. Why do I still let external situations affect me? All they do is place me right back in the same spot – the bottom of the hole, where I once again have to work like buggery to climb my way out of it.

 

I am sick to death of crying into my sleeves.

 

If only there was a way to remove the person from the acts they do to you, life would be so much simpler. There would be no more hurt, no more retaliation, none of this “you hurt me so much I’m going to hurt you back”.

 

It’s such an automated response; we all do it, and we might not even want to. I know I do when I’m too weak to have restraint. I hate that about me. I want to be able to put what the person’s done behind me, and just start rediscovering my own happiness. I don’t want all this focus on the hurt and anger and pain.

the philosophy of anger

This could have turned into a rant of epic proportions, full of evisceration, vituperation, and other long words that demand to be spat out onomatopoeically. Castration. Yes, it could have been filled with the essence of castration. But it won’t be.

 

Instead, I’m just going to write about what I’ve learnt. After all, this is meant to be where I sift through the shit that happens to me on the search for kernels of philosophy (pardon the imagery).

 

An online news blog turned ugly when the blogger decided to get down and dirty regarding the death of a friend. He saw nothing wrong with laughing at jokes made at the dead person’s expense. He tore the people who mourned her to shreds and offered up their remains to his faithful followers to finish off. A blaze of belittlement.

 

It made me recognise what humanity is, by its very absence.

 

The argument was put forth that why should someone who didn’t know the deceased “give a toss” about her death. For all he knew the person didn’t really die, and only pretended to die to see what kind of reaction they could get and now they were just sitting back laughing. That is so void of compassion it sucks the air out of my lungs.

 

I went to bed seething, absolutely seething. Rage really is red.

 

There’s no way to sleep when the body’s in full fight mode, so I tried to calm myself down by recognising what was happening in my body and brain – turning inward in order to turn off.

 

It suddenly struck me how hot the top of my head felt. It was so hot I pictured a flame sitting atop it, just like a candle.

 

That’s when I realised – rage and anger will just burn a person down like a candle until there’s nothing left but a waxy stub and a charred piece of wick.

 

I don’t want to become a wax puddle. Especially not over the uninformed ramblings of a so-called writer.

 

So now all he gets from me is my pity. He’s lost his humanity and god knows how a writer can write anything without that.

defectivity should be a word

So for those of you playing along at home, one man left me because he wanted to become a monk but ended up having fun with pretty things all over the world before hooking up with the wife of a mate and playing mummies and daddies.

 

Current plaything doesn't want to be with me but he does but he doesn’t in a ‘cake and eating it’ situation.

 

Now another ex who left me because he wanted to earn money and climb rocks instead of loving me has hooked up with someone else. To be fair, maybe he’s still earning money, who knows. Right now I don’t give a fuck.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denying anyone long term happiness just because they couldn’t find it with me, what I’m fucking pissed off about is being told “it’s not you it’s me” or “it’s not you it’s because of this”, when clearly it IS me if it keeps happening to me this way. Why don’t these guys just call it how it is? “I’m over playing with you and now I want to play with someone else”.

 

I’ve worked out my next tattoo: the word ‘defective’ stamped on my arse.

 

Over the weekend I went to a funeral of a mate I knew through another ex, so of course he was there along with a few other mates I know through him. One mate said something interesting when speaking about my ex (interesting in that it fucking pissed me off because I hear it over and over again): “you were the best thing for him, the best thing to happen to him”. I nearly decked him. I bit his head off in any case. He was also trying to hit on me so who knows, maybe that was his way of making me feel awesome. It jut made me feel like a piece of shit.

 

Why do I keep finding these boys who hook up with me only to think it’s not what they want, break it off, then realise it was what they wanted after all? Jesus Christ men, get it together. I’m sick of being the trial version.

easter energy

I always forget that every day is the first day of the rest of my life. Today – Easter Sunday, I’m reminded, thanks to this tweet from @rashasman:

 

“Happy easter. For those not caring about the religious side we can take the 'new beginnings' message and run with that.”

 

I love it when the world brings me something right when I need it.

 

This long weekend has been spent in a sallow funk with my usual ‘why me’ whine as I wonder what I have to do in this world to get a break.

 

Today is the right time for my new beginning, painful as childbirth as it is. I need to do something different starting from now, because so far all I’ve managed to do is get bogged in the middle of the mud pond of life without knowing the secret of how to get to the other side. I’m sick of pulling myself through mud. It’s tiring and unproductive.

 

I’m not defective, not that awful to look at, don’t have any debilitating quirks that make people run screaming from me, I’m not mean, stuck up, or hard to handle. I’m open, wear my heart on my sleeve and take everyone as they are. So my new beginning for today is to let go of anything that makes me think otherwise.

 

World, I’ll no longer let you put me in situations where I’m taken for granted. I deserve more, and would rather frolic through this life alone than settle for less.

 

Yesterday I asked the world two questions: “do good men actually exist?” and “what next, world?”. In the middle of the night they were both answered by a chance meeting which gave me hope that something better is out there and sometime soon I’m going to find it. The world told me not to give up and I’m going to obey.