30day challenge: 4.

Day 4: A habit you wish you didn’t have.

---

 

Just the one? Ok I’ll go with the first one to assault my brain. Boys are my weakness.

 

It’s no secret that I tend to favour the younger men, the ‘boys’. There’s just something about their awkwardness that seems to draw me to them time and time again. A buff, youthful body helps too (pauses… recalls images… swoons…).

 

Or maybe it’s just because I like feeling young…

 

No, I’m going to go with my other theory that I have anti-father issues. I don’t think much of authority.

 

I’ve had a strange saunter through my relationships, each one holding a special spot in my heart, the young’uns even more so. Strange that my relationships kicked off with a man 7 years my senior when I was only 17. He was a capricorn though – they regress as they get older.

 

Since then my little flings have all been younger guys, and although I’ve enjoyed it (oh, have I ever…), I think it’s time I grew up and found someone on the same page as me. The boys are never going to go the distance with me.

 

For me that’s still probably going to mean a man a few years younger. At my age that’s not going to be hard!

30day challenge: 3.

Day 3: A picture of you and your friends.

---

 

I bet most people had no problems with this one. For me it’s proving a little tender. I could have gone the non-tender route, plucked some pithy photo from a recent music festival or random night on the booze, but I think I’d be missing the point. And so, I present for your amusement, a tender spot.

 

 

This photo’s about a year old but I just love it. The whole night was magical misted. Every single photo was blessed with awesomeness. It’s like everything aligned to create a perfect moment in time.

 

I’m second from the left in case you don’t know, and the other three were my partners in cheekiness. I say were, because I haven’t seen any of them for quite a while now.

 

The lovely lady on the right is a very talented flautist who moved to Melbourne to continue her career (*shakes fist at Perth’s inadequacy in holding onto talent*).

 

Not long after that I had a pretty major falling out with the girl next to her, the one who brought us all together. I’ve known her since 1999. We still haven’t spoken and I fear it will never be resolved now. It’s probably a subject for another post, but in short, she inferred I was something I was not – one too many times for my liking, and I spat it. One of my failings is that the closer you are to me, the bigger the grudge I’ll hold if you do me wrong. I’ll psychoanalyse that for you another time I think.

 

The cheeky monkey on the left is a total bundle of awesomeness that I don’t get to see anymore, by proxy.

 

Before these three I didn’t really have girl friends. I just seem to resonate better with men. Men are straight up and down, what you see is what you get, no tricksy multi-layering, no double meanings. Then I discovered the awesome peeps above and realised how important it is to have close female friends. Life was good. Every fun moment was spent in their company.

 

People are in your life for as long as they need to be to teach you something and then they go. I haven’t decided whether these three lovely people have taught me all I’m meant to learn yet; who knows, maybe that means we’ll cross paths again in the future. All I know is that it’s left a very bittersweet taste in my mouth.

 

As I get older it’s getting harder to make friends, so losing friends I already have is especially heartbreaking. Every time I break up with someone they take their friends with them. I hate these package deals!

 

So, on the subject of friends, I’m currently in a lull, severely lacking content. That’s why I’m loving twitter so much and actually making the effort to meet all these crazy people in the real world. But to make firm friends takes time, and I feel like I’m a late bloomer.

 

30day challenge: 2.

Day 2: The meaning behind your blog name.

---

 

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?

---

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.