Most Tranquil

Series of Ramblings about my day and otherness

2011-11-10T00:38:00.002+13:00

it's six minutes to midnight. i'm smelling the burnt smell of cookie batter that fell into the oven, and listening to Celtic Woman's Caledonia - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v28is4jFWeo.
the chocolate chunk cookies are looking deliciously crunchy and chewy and chocolatey and all those things that they ought to be, cooling on the bench while I type.
the dishes are waiting on the bench. no-one did them. there haven't been enough people around to do them, since a couple of my brothers left - one to go flatting, and another to rather suddenly elope with and marry a beautiful girl over in the States (read the story here).

Finished my last exam today. I was scared of it, anxious for a couple of days, which was all the time I'd given myself to study. Studied with a fellow student, Grace, and talked about being a christian, and churches. Maybe she'll come along to Campus Church, like I asked her too? ...this morning I got up at around 6:30, with great intentions to stay awake and study for an hour before walking (40 mins) to uni and studying 'til 2:30, which was when the darn exam was. but I kinda have a way of sleeping in between trying to read my Bible, and falling asleep and waking up and falling asleep after my alarm wakes me. and it's all not very disciplined, though it is the most delicious, luxuriant feeling to sleep past the alarm in the mornings.

So I studied at uni, finally. And worried, and bit my fingernails. ...boyfriend alex has told me times without number to stop biting my nails. I have a feeling he doesn't care much what my nails look like, but he knows that deep, deep down I care. So he's just the lovingest and always tells me reprovingly to stop, and to promise him to stop! but I can never promise truthfully, because I know that when the temptation comes... or when I get nervous about an exam or essay... good intentions will melt and nail-ends will become ragged.

For all that worry and so-short nails, the exam was good. It was stimulating. It was about the 60s, and the Civil Rights Movement, and Feminism, and Gay Rights and Abortion. and I was happy and productive, filling ten sheets of paper carefully, hurting my fingers and wrist with the pressure. Thankfully I had three hours in which to write answers to two questions, so a happy amount of time. Because these questions were my questions and I felt them and believed what I wrote. and that felt very good. our souls get tired and strained when they feel out of place and unneeded at university. we analyze and remember and structure but we get tired, tired. because there is more to life, but exams and tests and essays trick us for moments into believing otherwise.

Because you will be happy if you make them, I wanted to share this excellent recipe that I found while searching for a chocolate chunk cookie recipe. They were the first I found and they are good.

2 cups flour
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
170g butter melted and allowed to cool a little
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 large egg & 1 egg yolk
2 tsp vanilla essence
1 1/2 cups dark and white chocolate chunks/whatever you happen to have around

Do the normal thing. Preheat the oven to 165C. Sift the flour & soda. Beat the sugar into the butter & mix in the eggs & vanilla. Then mix the flour into the wet & add the chocolate. Remember to add the extra half cup of chocolate: I didn't, and now I have half a cup of chopped dark chocolate sitting on the bench. The mixture will be kinda cakey-wet, so leave it for like 2-5 mins until it forms up. Then form it into balls & stick 'em on a greased tray. Bake them for 15-20 mins, whatever floats your boat.

Eat them with blue milk and be quite happy. Share them around with your family/friends and be happier still.

New happiness

2011-11-03T00:40:00.000+13:00

Many new and exciting things have happened since I last wrote.

Several months ago I started to like clothes. I never had particularly cared about them before.
And shoes!
As a result, my wardrobe is full of 'thrifted' or bargain clothing - dresses and tops and jeans, a dizzying number of belts, and shoes. They are all arrayed as they never had been before. Clothing that had never been loved and never would be was unmercifully separated from cherished pieces and pushed into big boxes. Necklaces and belts now dangle spectacularly over the shoes arrayed on the top of a new dresser in my wardrobe (thanks Esther for the upgrade!).
I generally leave one half of the wardrobe open so that I can glance over at the prettiness and feel happy.

I suppose this is all rather strange goings on; it's exciting for me because it's all so new. Clothes are so new, and exciting! Going to opshops has become a heart-thumping adventure, that can be so thrilling (carrying home a truly satisfying piece) or tragic (if the store is shut before I get there).

There are so many things that one could wear!

Something I've noted about all this happy clothes-hunting: It would be so very easy to let clothes take over my heart's affections, to put it in a Victorian-esque way. To turn into someone who cares for friends and clothes and nothing else. (Scary thought indeed). Jesus needs to be most loved - a constant process of loving him first - and then I can love whatever else I will. And those loves will be ~~clothes~~ family, and lesser important things like clothes.

Here are some beautiful sites I've come across:

Ruche: http://shopruche.com/
A Beautiful Mess: http://abeautifulmess.typepad.com/
Saturated Canary: http://saturatedcanary.blogspot.com/p/fashion-pinup.html
etc. etc. etc.

...when I'm meant to be studying (or sleeping, as in now).

And what all this means is that I want to start sewing. And I want to do exciting, crazy things; more exciting and more crazy than usual. And I want to be 'myself' - a cliched phrase because it's so awfully true.
And.. there's so much more I could say, but I should sleep. Soon I will be finished Uni, and I'll be able to write on here more I hope. :)

'Connecting' Assignment

2011-09-24T22:33:00.002+12:00

Hello everyone!

I thought I'd share with you a piece of writing I did today. This was actually uni work - an assignment for CHCH101, the new course offered at Canterbury University which teaches students about service in their community. For our assignment we're allowed to use whatever format we like to convey ideas - I chose prose/poetry this time. The question was...

How can service and learning be connected?

There is a man, old in his mind and frail in his body
Crosses his legs when he sits, and reads
You can find him hidden, corners, dust
In a room full of voices he cannot speak
Few sit next to that man, preferring laughter
Sometimes he’s visible
But sometimes he has never existed
Youth cannot long tolerate age

There is a young man, bones, bones
Thin, long hair unwashed
His person and his soul uncared for
I’ve seen him
Corridors, and once in the café
Then hidden in a room full of enthusiasm
Of arrogance, trivialities, laughter
“Yeah I’m pretty happy, getting an A for Bio”
He is not seen
A moth in the daytime
I wanted to cheer him; encourage him
But how?
He must have pride; I must not show that I pity him

There is a woman
Tiny, dwarfed, deformed
Imprisoned in her wheelchair
Yet her eyes are full of light
She smiles, and others smile with her
Can it be possible that she is happy?

Sometimes we are faced with disasters
This city of cards, knocked over
Our pride, the gladness of our heritage
Only bricks, no structure
A terrible cry, the death of the helpless
But now I think
Through this disaster
We have seen our need
For food and clothes, a dry place – yes
But too long we have not felt
Our ache; we have not seen
The struggle of the invisible
Who have faced the shattering of our city
But whose lives are a long-term disaster
Whose difficulty could be eased
If they were recognised
If they were cared for

I is tired, but I is alive.

2011-09-22T00:32:00.000+12:00

I'm tired.

Seems like everything that this world consists of is tension: relentless deadlines; stress that I'm not getting work in on time; late nights drifting cloudily into early mornings; a nagging feeling that God is being left behind, that I'm just using Him and not relating - help me with this essay God, please help me; next year and what shall I do? A job; I must work; household quarrels, pain is never old; my body muttering and complaining: too much sugar, not enough exercise, too much gluten; has my writing finished? will I ever be able to pick it up again?; worried that I am losing my youngest brother, am not spending the time I want to spend with him and he is getting so old!; drawing, how it absorbed me before university and now no pursuit is alive - what I thought was my identity, gone and now i'm smart, such an intelligent university student, am I what I wanted to be?; everything, everything too cliche; listening to people - wishing there was more time to be tired.

But there is newness.

A new bible - blue, wreathed, ESV - a 'good christian girl's bible', so beautiful, perhaps I will learn to love it, though never as much as I did the falling-apart, cheap black one I used so long; flowers, birthday brightness and a red rose; an unexpected A+, the uncertain but glad knowledge that God is love and all is purposed; magical, evil light on waves at New Brighton Pier; the realization that really, the earth from the vantage point of a plane makes so much more sense; a new handbag with convenient pockets.

duel

2011-07-23T20:59:00.000+12:00

a wall and bookshelf give minimal protection from frustration and self-love.
The muted voices continue on. A female voice penetrates at intervals, interested more in expressing than in aiding. Strange that, though the tones convey nothing new, they seem always to have the power to stifle, eroding peace and the semblance of tranquility.

there is nothing more to be said. One finds that he has said all, the other that words are lacking. Inevitably, the door slams; glass ringing, the sound heard down the corridor, throughout the building. Minutes later, footsteps approach the room; the antagonist realized he had not finished with complaints or vocabulary.

Apologies Are in Order

2011-07-15T00:00:00.000+12:00

It has been a long while since I last wrote.
My apologies. To those of you who perhaps came back a couple of times to check if I'd written anything - and then realised I hadn't and gave up on me: I'm sorry.

To FR, in particular, I'm sorry. It must be hard to be a Faithful Reader if the writer isn't faithful. I'll work on being semi-regular.

Till next time!

- Lydie

wish

2010-12-04T21:03:00.001+13:00

what I know and desire
exists if I allow it to breathe
but to strangle myself
end the life I wish for
to do this I must first convince myself
it is for the best, the greater good
and my hands
could have the power
wrestle with
the force of these feelings
victory

I keep thinking it is possible
and still believe it is

and tonight
emotion I thought had little life
wrenched tears from these eyes
surprised me
I, wiping away salt

determined, aching

my friends

2010-11-19T01:09:00.002+13:00

you walk casually, your body moving in a slight swagger. It is as though time had never been imprinted on your mind, your body relaxed, moving to the pattern of your steps. Your face releases tension, forehead unbuttoning as you involantarily smile at something I've said. Those understanding eyes meet mine and your lips curve in a grin you don't want to repress. I like you this way, and I sigh, the pleasure becoming a temporary pain that tattoos my facial muscles and makes my gut a dead weight.
I love that you love what is good, and I worry about your penchant for what is borderline.

...

you're wearing a red jacket today. Some number on the front, something about children again. You care so much that I can see your care, like a set of weights too heavy for you, pressing on your mind and closing in on the edges of your vision. Those eyes of yours betray some deep hurt behind them. Something so corrosive that it is gnawing away at you and you can't altogether cover it up. It shows in the way you tilt your head, your chin held high, and the way your mouth turns down, tucked tightly into your face. That pain is so clear to me and all I want to do is to make you feel better. I want you to tell me what is dragging you down, blackness, and I would listen. I want that God would build an inferno inside of you, so that your mind and body would radiate the swelling joy that he gives.

...

you are always thinking. Your eyes, so alert tonight and darting, always flitting from one face to the next, and sometimes staring into space as your mind thinks loudly behind the back of your eyes. I think about the soft, feminine curve of your jaw line, your full lips and caressing hair. You are so pretty and perhaps you think you never will be, never enough. That temperament of yours can be misleading. Your thoughts run deep and sometimes full, branching, but you are nervous of them. They are so tightly bound up in you that if they were uttered they would be too fragile to last. And you are so eager. Your body sways forward when you are excited, your face enthused and your eyes widen as you talk to us. You think about me and care, and I am amazed at the love I see in your gifts to me. I am always surprised when you want to talk and listen to me.

...

you. you are so passionate. I feel that I could never reach the bottom of your soul and your mind that is so deeply interested in yourself and the world that you have created for yourself. You are engrossed, but sometimes you pause to peer out into the world outside of yourself. Those are the times when you become depressed because you see what we see more often and you must fit what you see into your own life or else be false to yourself. You deserve happiness and you find it in ways that surprise you sometimes.

...

and you. When I see you in my mind it is your smile and your hair that I envision. Your hair, brown-black, curly and unbrushed and long, ripples down your back. Your smile is almost apologetic. Sometimes it seems that your whole face is relieved to be smiling, the slight tension in the muscles in your face smooth as your mouth widens and your eyes crinkle. You are so determined to be you, some of the time. Other times you are so happy to be being you so effortlessly - those are the times my mind takes a step back, looks at who you are and loves you completely. I am so happy to see these changes in you. I have always liked your daring, your courageousness in carelessness. But I can see the way your mind is being fine tuned, and the way you are beginning to think is halting the usual progression of your thoughts. You care enough about the truth to respect it with your attention, as much as you can now. Truth holds you back from doing and saying what you might have done and said before. That inspires me.

I am in love with you all.

university

2010-10-27T15:28:00.002+13:00

dry aching surrounds my eye balls
too much light and these hours fall
tension of what will be so soon
work that will not be completed

if I explored my artificial world
money, money, money
me, a student here
gray matter grasping concepts
and paying to learn

I strongly believe
that I am poor, a poor student
and can never remember that
because I live here I am rich
how else could I learn
these pointless concepts

delusion.
we somehow think
it is better to be force-fed
these formulas, ideas, stories
than to live and read from others
to write and
there are more ways to learn to think
than learning
like wounds self inflicted
always embedded now
can we learn to think
beyond the perimeters of what we have payed for?

reason

2010-10-21T11:52:00.002+13:00

These thoughts have attacked me.
My spine curving in defense against
impossibility
dead ends and the incapability
of vision to see
instead,
blurry shadows and
something like duty
that gives no pleasure
instead
my feet have lost the ground
emotions slipping
and still
when all I could want
was a loss of reason
and raw feeling to overcome
the patience of rationality,
miniscule hooks of truth
cling to darkened thought.

to be continued..

2010-10-18T23:12:00.000+13:00

he looked as though he had stood in front of his bathroom mirror, with a comb and hair wax. And it was as though he had, with excruciating care, drawn the comb over his face in an exact imitation of the incomprehensible phenomenon, Justin Bieber.

the chair creaked as he stretched in it, the long limbs unfolding, canvas shoes scraping the carpet. His eyes screwed shut, black fringed.
His perfectly toned, muscular arms stretched out to grip the computer desk in front of him. Grasping hands taut and the strong bones radiating from the wrist, veins pulsing.

he sighed, creased forehead smoothing as he expelled air and relaxed his hands. He turned to the student on the computer over from him, eyes quickly charging with interest.

clear, opaque

2010-10-06T22:47:00.005+13:00

Something is closing my throat, I am breathing shallowly.
This external case can show you, when you see with your mind, that this spirit is restless.
And if it was billowing with wind outside, in that studded dark
my external shell could transform
become translucent dust
then I would soar with them, light-pierced, so free
wherever the impatient wind decided

I would not perform as I feel my mind forcing this cast to do
how could I?
Those entrapments gone and it is
merely a free spirit
a once imprisoned mind
tossing in the careless whim of embracing air

....

I desire to experience this throbbing
this weakness
in that part of me that resists my mind's attempt to conciliate
truth I fully believe
with this beautiful pain; wounds self-inflicted
twisting deeper into the raw, undiscovered territory
of this conflicted mind

This is pain that I could not have had courage
to wish for myself
but perhaps
it is true that those desires that torture
take the soul in half willing captivity
create struggle
freeing truth against wishful desire
we will be changed
made more beautiful
our desires
more our own than before
we are one with him.

p.s. this one's for you, God.

- Lydie

blood

2010-09-19T00:18:00.002+12:00

happiness is blood
coursing
splitting off into
every artery
and
every vein.

Infiltrating the body
seeping
from any source
my wistful mind
and scanning eyes
can cipher.

And what I find
this, my happiness
my body
always full
compounding emotion
over-fills
happiness turned physical,
rippling.

It throbs
lungs, temporarily frozen
the throat
seeming to close
as
ideas thickly come.

Fullness of joy
remembers
parts of the mind
not used
perform death duty
to suffocate elation
in
realisation of intolerable truth.

And the mind reels
happiness ebbing
faster than it came
overtaking shadows
of
the reality of life
reminder
that life is not ideal.

Strange
the mind still
disobedient to what is real
desiring, never satisfied
incapable of
being satiated
with
'life is not ideal'
loving
what brings
most stinging pain.

- Lydie

suffer the little children

2010-09-08T23:57:00.003+12:00

she could see the machine. Its face was blurry, its body white-coated, moving slowly and methodically among gleaming silver instruments. Gloved fingers reached for an item from the tray by the bed, carefully picking from the metal shapes and pulling out curved scissors.

the woman's body was half-covered with the white sheet, the lower half exposed, legs pushed apart. Her fingers closed over the loose ends of the sheets, unwittingly gripping them, knuckles straining taut. Her whole body knew what had to come from what her mind had done, but the mind itself was suspended in the surreality of the situation. It was impossible that she was chained to her body, when she could feel no connection with it now. The only tie between spirit and flesh was the mind controlling the body's actions - but now, she could no longer sense her body responding.

and, that part of her mind which forced her body to remain tied to the bed, waiting for sharp metal to pierce the child inside her - it had nothing to do with the rest of her mind that was now so distanced from that other, mechanicalised part, that it seemed a separate entity. It was paralysed, she wasn't even trying to sense what she was feeling. But beyond the paralysis was agony, sharp and bitter, that ripped her mind to pieces and had no pity.

There were three people in the room. Only three, because the nurse had chickened out, mentally unfit for the procedure. The woman lay on the bed, and the white machine-surgeon, his mind alive but his morality de-sensitized, was preparing to kill.
And God was there, watching. He was All-powerful, and He felt the woman's numb agony more bitterly than the woman could, as he saw the surgeon carry out the procedure.

...

What do you think? Why do you think God allows suffering?

her song

2010-08-29T23:36:00.004+12:00

She was music.

Notes discordant engaged in their unending struggle against dulcet chords.
When you listened closely, the variations in theme, mood and flow were distinct at times, merged at others.

Sometimes the melody would swell out, filling you with possessive music, disabling you of other feeling until the pregnancy of sound had subsided. No regret for the finality because the satisfaction was complete.

But you could feel this change.
The gathering power of some disturbance was making itself known before it had arrived - no courtesy here, only inspiring vague apprehension.

The music played on, pleasant monotony now that those happier notes had spent themselves. Underlying notes were being gathered in now, tossed into the repetition and whirled, while the notes quickened, breathless.

The sky sometimes is violet coloured while the sun shines obscenely, waiting to be blackened by an impatient storm. This repetition was only that fascinated expectancy before the climax of tortured notes.

It came. Deliberately ordered but seemingly out of control in its ferocity, harsh, untamed chords that blacked the memory of any former beauty in the music.

And she could hear, through the thick beat of this music, the laughter of people who would not understand.
And she left, the music ebbing and dying as she walked through the rain.

God was playing her song.

this God who serves us

2010-08-25T23:59:00.002+12:00

You know me.
Past the shadow of
what appears to be substantial,
everything that I think forms
who I am
But I am not,
and You know.

Your eyes,
lasers
burning through
the overlapping, too often
irrational desires
That pull me,
trying to tear away
the imprint of Your law
That small, essential part
of Your mind

Because
You bound me
I, reluctant
no longer a slave to this sin
and still
my heart yearning after
the old bondage

And last night
I found I understood You
more than before
Pleasurable knowledge
and
I loved You
when I remembered
this sudden shaft of iridescent light
could only have come from You

And I try to believe You
asking myself why
and
seeing the dark struggle
of my own soul
besieged by sin
if -
You let me stop believing in You

Too dark,
this picture
You force me to grasp Your light
this freedom,
with my weak mind
I can only see You as liberty
because
I must compare it to
hellish sin

But,
too often
I see You as slavery
[and You are]
my sin encrusted soul
making a trap
and feeling the pleasure of
covering darkness

Show me what You are
Your beauty and purity
blind me
purge
the lingering shadows
lurking darkness of
this evil mind
to die
because I had seen
the perfection of Your glory
would perhaps
be too beautiful a death

Collapse my mind
engrave awe
so that I do not sin
God, harness my soul
so that I can never leave You

Claim me, God
because I struggle to claim You.

Eyes

2010-08-20T01:25:00.003+12:00

Sometimes
people most loved
hang themselves

The pressure is too great
realisation that what is loved
is sensual, ephemeral.

Mere fleeting expression
on a pretty face
a mask
and
no one sees deeper than
the smile implanted in soulless skin

and
they are all blind
how can they see
the emotion of a fragile heart?

Happy people cannot help themselves
their happiness show cased in the shop window of
their souls

but
the laughter of a part
of myself
is disposable
and
a deeper part would feel its absence
its elimination would effect
no substantial change
not yet

Truth
of deeper - centered thought
power not shared
a cynicism smiles can hide
no one seeing
through a mist of obscured emotions
harmful

And if they did?
mere conjecture on implausibility
but...
thoughts as common property?
And how can you hide
your mask destroyed by all-seeing eyes?

Those eyes that can see down
through each layer of thought
scanning the bottom of
your shallow abyss

eyes
no longer able
to be shocked
truth harmless
through leveling commonality.

- Lydie

procrastination

2010-08-17T16:20:00.005+12:00

The drop falls - slipping down the black tiles, trembling at the edge of them, gathering added strength from the stream of water feeding into it - then the fall, evening sunlight glancing off the curve. It shudders as it pierces the air, pirroetting with the golden dust. Fallen, only to join the black spreading moisture on the wooden panelling. A brief brilliance in the scene.
The sun, hazy in the washed expanse, leaning over and dipping the world in black contrasts and stinging light - too powerful to have a gentle beauty, this warrior sun.

- Lydie

elimination

2010-08-09T23:37:00.004+12:00

it wasn't true.

The thought ran, sometimes halting to wait for the preoccupied mind, but always returning there, illuminating the darker recesses and piercing the illusions that the mind, possessive, had clung to.
And the infrastructure of the mind had to be restructured, not reformed. Perhaps a part of the essential foundation eliminated, and some new idea pushed in by a desire unwilling but a mind fascinated.

And she, the mind, was realising that this was the growth of herself, as old and new ideas struggled and did battle.
That growing maturity is both death and life, metamorphosis that painfully casts off the shell of old thinking and feels the knife thrust and raw cold of reality.

Less true now, the thoughts of last year, but in ways hard to comprehend now, true for the time.
The vision now was clearer, the mist evaporating because of experience that had revealed greater depth, height and distance.

- Lydie

ideas

2010-08-03T00:01:00.002+12:00

her eyes were black holes, sweeping over the lines and curves and pulling them effortlessly into her mind, where her brain clasped them, greedily teasing out the concepts.

her ears heard nothing, though the moss-coloured computer chair creaked with leaning weight, the computer hummed and the mouse clicked, plasticy under her grasping hand.

the thoughts new-dyed her mind, spreading, overtaking, no layers of thought now, only one new multi-faceted concept at a time that her brain struggled with, fascinated, then understood, partially.

Looking back to experience, but she couldn't understand these ideas. Couldn't, because she'd never been under the weight, strong pressure that falls heavily on the mind and can't be removed - the weight that forces them to write, not for freedom because freedom doesn't come that way, but to be able to articulate the heaviness, and therefore relieve it a little.

Her brain expanded with new thoughts, clouded in mystery, ideas she half-understood. Not yet.

- Lydie

p.s. this one's for you, microchiroptera. I read some of your older posts then wrote this.

Conform

2010-08-02T00:32:00.003+12:00

Perhaps it started when she was dressing for church; trying to decide what to wear, what would look best on, what the people there would think she looked most attractive in. In the end she took off the skirt and zipped up jeans; it was too hard to look the part from what she had.
Then they drove there, so familiar the road to church now, the same trees, same houses, same car, same intent, same purpose.
Everything was the same, every week. The consistency and regularity of just going to church pressed on her mind; she felt vague feelings of frustration.

Driving into the church carpark increased her feelings of the rigidity of custom. It was like the car was driving into a slot in a machine; perfectly on time, driving into the same carpark, on the same side of the building. There could be no break in the seamless pattern.
She couldn't put into conscious thought what she felt, but her mind was unresisting to the pressure of her feeling, so she decided to take a walk - back behind the church before attending the prayer meeting.

And first she walked into the church, wondering that her body would take her, obey one part of her informed mind, while the other part of her mind resisted - and left the food they'd brought for the church lunch on the table.
She made a little, polite conversation with the people who, one part of her mind knew, deserved more than the other part of her mind wanted to give - then she walked out of the building.

The air was soft, no pinioning edges or sharp spear thrusts of resilient cold, but the wind was up and the rushing air chilled her. She wrapped her arms around her chest, fighting. The trees ahead of her, behind the silent school buildings, had branches that were clear black sillhoettes against the pale blue and white sky. They'd been cutting the trees down; unproductive and space-consuming. She'd mourned them Sundays ago, the soil plundered of roots; the skyline full of holes.
She started to think; only a little, because it was early still, and thinking is usually reserved for a mind that has passed through the action of daytime and has leisure to consider.

She understood only a little of why she felt this way about church. She loved church, with the greater part of her mind. She would have felt that she'd done badly to have missed going.
But conformity struck her as being not just unfashionable, but imprisoning.

- Lydie

p.s. the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect my own, [or] they reflect only a part of my views.

scenario

2010-07-30T00:08:00.005+12:00

It was just a single spirit, struggling with itself and its surroundings.
You could see, if you paid any attention to the signs of its struggle - the mouth, opening to laugh with the ends tight, tense, forced.
The face in customary smiling creases but with a slight rigidity; the eye narrowed in the face's laughter but was also strained and careful, watchful.

The time for laughing was over and the face relaxed, the tightness ebbing too fast for the expression of emotion to be real. Yet the spirit was unsure whether to immediately discard the unfelt expression or to keep some of the laughter in the face. The smile was forced to stay in behind the eyes, tense and still creased - in order to convince the others that she too, like them, had found the leader amusing.

The noise of the room fell heavily on the ears; clattering of pots, thudding, clinking of cups and glasses, shrill laughter, unintelligible spoken words in string-like formations, dragging over her dull mind. The closeness of the circular group and of all the bodies in a closed setting made the spirit feel uneasy and slightly trapped.

- Lydie

...

2010-07-20T00:43:00.004+12:00

I wasn't going to write today - that is, last night. I was suddenly struck though, with the utter evil of abortion [even what I've perceived of it comes nothing close to the depth of it] and of how weak and feeble those of us who know the truth are in combatting it.

Abortion is the greatest injustice against humanity the world has ever known.
It is greater than all the wars that have been fought.
It is destroying and damaging more people than slavery does. [And by the way, there are more slaves now, in 2010, than there ever were when slavery was abolished].

It is World War III, yet it is profoundly worse than any other war history has known. The truth is that wars are usually fought when two sides are of nearly equal strengths; abortion involves the systematic, silent extermination of billions of people who can not fight back; the only people who can fight for them too often whisper the truth instead of screaming it.

I realised tonight a tiny portion of the huge responsibility I have under God to speak against this agony of abortion. I'm the President of a local pro-life club, and as is the case with too many things I commit to, I easily fall into the belief that this is just a worthy cause.
When I remember that there are fifty babies dying every day, I have to slowly get out of my secure feelings about abortion as just a cause.
Because people, our brothers and sisters, are dying. We know the truth, and we must speak up.

Why be Patriotic? [warning, train of thought follows]

2010-07-19T00:02:00.007+12:00

It is currently so incredibly early that my brain has stopped functioning normally.
That is, it is not functioning the way *it normally does*. Note the subtle differentiation..
The background to this post is a status I recently put up on Facebook - [with whom, by the way, I have a strong, though complicated relationship] - which ran: "50 babies were illegally murdered in New Zealand today. That's why I'm not patriotic."
At church last night [by nine minutes] I pretty much lost a debate with someone who disagreed with with me over whether I was justified to free myself of patriotism because of a country's perpetrated evil.
...
Patriots. What immediately springs to mind are those stalwart American men of the Civil War period, polishing up an ancient gun and kissing their families goodbye as they bravely leave to go and fight corageously for their kindred and country.

The movie "The Patriot", starring Mel Gibson is an extreme display of that kind of patriotism.
When people leave to go and fight [without enforced conscription] - that's surely one of the most patriotic things a body can do. When they accept that thier single, brutally ended, almost unregarded, unnecessary [often] death can potentially save their families from being taken/destroyed, and their country from being overrun by the enemy, there is little more that they can do to prove their utmost belief in, and love for their country.
*note: I don't understand how people can do that, or how they have done it. Most people aren't instilled with such a great love for their country that they'd die for it any day of the week if it were necessary - perhaps it is mainly war that calls out/creates patriotism.

These people fight because they have people they love who they desire to protect, but also because they love their country and [many?] of its values.

So, question. What happens when you LOSE your respect for your country's values? What do you do when your country allows a collapse of basic morals? What about when the country fails to uphold these values/morals? By 'the country' I mean the leaders who set a standard, of which the people follow/exceed.
If you have a stronger sense of right and wrong, do you continue to be patriotic to a country that you can't assimilate yourself with?

But there are difficulties.

Surely you *are* patriotic if you are so dissulusioned with the way society is working. Thus went the argument.

I reckon you're a patriot if you want to do something about the way society works, to change it for the better. You quit being patriotic if you decide the country's so bad it can't be fixed/you don't want to fix it [because you dislike it so much], then you've effectively damned the country [and possibly, yourself].

What do you think makes a patriot? Do you consider yourself to be patriotic/a patriot, and if so, why?

Conformity: Fashion

2010-07-15T23:16:00.003+12:00

Conformity.
When I think of it, I usually get a picture in my mind of 'the girls at uni' - streams of them, walking briskly through the crowded thoroughfares between the gray, looming university buildings. Oh, they have differences in their fashion taste. Some of them tend towards the more alternative hippy, recycled look. Others don't seem to care a hoot for their appearance. They're the ones with past-the-shoulder, stringy, unwashed hair, no make-up [and seriously, they could do with some], old hoodies, faded jeans and scuffy street shoes.

Then there's the whole mix of girls who seem to 'have it together'. They're the ones with smooth, straightened and prettily coloured hair/bleached curly hair. If they wear their hair up, it's virtually always in a tiny, messy bun at the crown of the head, with whisps falling all over the place most attractively. All of these girls wear tights [typically black] with short dresses that only fall to mid-thigh; they wear bows in their hair, long cardigans/jackets, bling [long necklaces and bracelets] and little ballet shoes. Usually they'll have a 'satchel'-type bag slung over one shoulder.

As fashions go, it's not too bad-looking. That is, for women with the figure for it, not including the women whose figures ought not to have mini-dresses hanging over them, and certainly ought never be seen dead in thigh-high tights.
But what is interesting is that everyone wears this. The majority.
Why do we all conform this way?

Even looking at myself, I can see that there is [despite the conscious effort to be non-conformist] a strong desire to look like everyone else. Mind you, I don't want to *be* like everyone else, but there's this strong tendency to want to fit in. Be accepted. There's all this fear that if I don't look like other people, they won't accept me.
Of course, this isn't the kind of thing that most people think of consciously - it's one of those embedded awarenesses of what should be, and how a lack of similarity can be remedied.
Anyway - ideas?

- Lydie

Curry...

2010-07-13T22:17:00.002+12:00

My thinkery has gone thunk lately, and I can't think of much to write about. So you'll have to content yourselves with hearing about my curry-making-to-be-exploits.
Tomorrow I have a girlfriend coming over for tea, and I'm cooking. It felt like half-past curry-time, and I've decided on Jamie Oliver's Chicken Tikka Masala recipe.

Since I left the [amazing] Jamie Oliver book which had the recipe in it, at my old house I have to be satisfied with a slightly transmogrified edition, taken from some blog.

This recipe is good. I've used it several times already, ever since I bought the recipe book for my big brother's birthday a while back [so that I could use the book, of course]. It's full of delicious spices like cumin [my favourite spice of all time], coriander, paprika, and mustard seed, and fresh chilis, ginger, coriander and garlic.
One of the best things about this curry is seeing people tuck into great big plates of steaming basmati rice, a clean chopped salad, some thin, buttery flat breads and the curry itself - creamy, spicy and well-simmered, dressed with squeezes of lime juice, swirls of yoghurt, and torn coriander.

That's worth seeing.
So here's the recipe...

Chicken Tikka Masala

2 Tbsp tomato paste
4 cloves garlic
3 inches ginger
2-3 chilis, depending on how hot they are, and how much you want to cry
- or else use 1-2 tsp chili powder
2 tbsp canola oil
1 tbsp mustard seed
1 tbsp paprika
2 tsp ground cumin, roasted
2 tsp ground coriander, roasted
3 tbsp garum masala
200ml yoghurt

grate the ginger first, and slice up the chilis. Then whizz up everything but the yoghurt in a little kitchen whizz; add the yoghurt last. Alternatively, mix up your paste in a mortar and pestle [like artists used to grind paint powder in], stick the goo in a bowl and add the yoghurt.

Marinate your chicken - as much as you think you need for about 4-6 people - in the fridge for at least an hour, but preferably much longer. Like overnight.
Apparently the curry ends up tasting better, although personally I've tried both ways and can taste no difference with the overnight drama.
...
Fry 2-3 onions in some butter with a couple of minced cloves of garlic, until they're golden and brown. Yum.
Then add your chicken mixture. Simmer this lot for a few minutes before adding your cream/water, and a handful of whizzed up almonds/powdered, or cashews.
When the thing is cooked, bring on the lime juice, chopped coriander and swirls of yoghurt. Voila.

Enjoy!

- Lydie

Out of the Silent Planet

2010-07-12T22:34:00.003+12:00

I've known for a while now that it is imperative for me [and everyone else on this planet with a mind for reading] to read Lewis's Space Trilogy.
It goes like this:

Widely-Read Person: "You know C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, of course."
Un-Widely-Read Me: "I know of them, but I haven't read them. Are they good, then?"

W-R P: "'Good'! If you haven't read them yet, you must instantly go to the nearest bookshop and buy the whole set. They're masterpieces. I would lend you my copies but I can't spare them; I'm reading them for the sixtieth time at the moment."

U-W-R M: [shamed, and bewildered] "Oh! I guess I should read them then.."
...
While staying at a friend's house in Auckland, I spied Out of the Silent Planet [I would underline the title/italicize it, but something's wrong with this computer. When I italicize things the words transform into Arabic equivalents].

With some trepidation and curiosity I drew it out, and began to read. To be horribly cliche, I couldn't put it down. It sort of attached itself to my hand even when I was trying to sleep. The pages remained open and [though I wrestled with them] I couldn't close the book. At some point during the early hours of the morning, I fell asleep; in the morning I woke up and commenced reading.

It's a great book. It 'takes you into a whole new world' to use yet another cliche phrase. Lewis's attention to fascinating detail is there, and the way he describes these details is so powerful: it engages your senses.
It takes you into a new world [or to be precise, an old but drastically different world] through the imagery that Lewis uses. He paints with words, and his colours are cool, not warm, and full of light.

Recently I borrowed Perelandra from a friend. I'm excited. I hope it will be as good, or better than OotSP.
...
What do you like about science fiction?

- Lydie

Anti-Depressants

2010-07-02T23:16:00.007+12:00

The writing on here has been a bit erratic recently, as I'm travelling. Great excuse.

...

I was in the kitchen [where every woman ought to be], doing dishes [a woman's primary purpose in life], when my Mum walked in. There was mischief brewing, I could tell.

"I want you to take some medicine while I'm away." She said.

"When you're feeling blue and missing us, you need to take some medicine that I'll give you, okay?"

I realised [with some alarm] that she must be about to give me a package of anti-depressants, or some such medicine.

Instead, she placed a Toblerone...

and a box of Turkish Delight, on the kitchen bench.

..because she knew I LOVE Turkish Delight. I would have asked for it if I'd been Edmund. Thankfully, the box mum gave me looks extremely non-magical; although eating it will undoubtedly heighten my craving for TD, it shouldn't give me the kind of addiction Ed suffered from.
In other words, I won't need to betray my brothers to get more.
My eyes lit up. Love you Mum!

- Lydie

Miss Fanny

2010-06-30T00:58:00.007+12:00

I read the first three chapters of Mansfield Park a couple of days ago.
I was struck by Austen's wit. You can easily read over her amusing satire and take her style for granted, but when you look a bit closer, you realise her writing's full of her biting tongue-in-cheek-ness.

For some reason, this book [which contains perhaps the most boring and, arguably, the most insipid of Austen's heroines] and the heroine Fanny Price, was Austen's favourite, of all her books.
It's hard to know why. Fanny doesn't have a lot going for her. She's not 'tolerably pretty', with good teeth, fine eyes and a biting wit like Lizzy, she isn't an avid gothic-romance reader like Catherine; she doesn't have Anne's tragic romance and intelligence or Emma's penchant for matchmaking.
You could almost read the book and miss Fanny, she's such a shadow.
I like this movie adaption with Frances O'Connor - except for a couple of fast-forward scenes..
She's realistic, at least.
What do you think about this heroine? What makes her a girl worthy to be a heroine? Why would Austen have liked her so much?

- [a tired] Lydie

Today

2010-06-28T23:12:00.002+12:00

Her voice was slightly soft, contemplating. The eyes were a little strained, considering.
"hmm, I'm not sure. What do you think about this blue, with white trimming? My mum has some white lace - bought it cheap when she was making a dress a while ago - that might work under the bodice, and as trimming around the neckline and skirt."
"Yeah, but there's black. That might work really well with blue aye."
"Ooh, should we go with blue and black then?"
...
The girl was sitting on the cork floor, wielding a butcher's knife. Her face was slightly raised, thinking, one hand holding the meat axe, suspended in midair. Large bits of lamb were being assaulted.
"So what should we do for dessert then?"
"What were you thinking?"
"Not sure. We were going to go with the chocolate mousse aye, but I'm not sure we have the ingredients for it."
"We could do something with apples then. Like apple crumble?"
"And ice cream? Yeah, that might work!"
...
It felt like a trap. The iron lid clanging as it fell, the mind inside a dank pit, no escape. Wanting to do the right thing, but not enough to see the right thing to its conclusion. Trying to help, to keep the peace in that situation where two warring minds collide, pierce each other and retreat. An armistice might be called, but at what cost? Peace does not mean resolution. Her mind, usually seeking to eliminate anything difficult and disturbing from itself, could not do battle with the situation, and dark closed in.
...
Thoughts/prayers. ...wow God, Your timing is amazing! - I should have trusted You more, of course... Of course You'd provide. And this is so ideal, You knew all along - but wanted to test my faith? I'm glad You did. I needed it..
...
"It's like a different world." The girl with the long brown hair nodded, understanding.
"All these amazing dresses.."
"I really like this one." She pointed to the dress, sweeping white satin with a beaded bodice and crimson satin detail.
"Or this green one - cream and green go so well together. Anything green, actually."
- - -
The shop lady, black-jacketed with white crochet detail, was trying to sell the girl-with-the-golden-hair the Most Beautiful Wedding Dress In The World. The golden-haired-one looked unsure, yet her eyes revealed the strong temptation to buy the dress in that impossibly beautiful moment. Her hair fell in ripples over the broad, thin shoulders, away down the back of the satin ribbon-laced back.
The two would-be bridesmaids gazed at the dress, and at the golden-haired-one. She was beautiful, queenly, in the beaded bodice, the pleated satin waist, flowing white skirt and lacy petticoat. The circular train fell just so and swept the polished wood of the floor. Her eyes met those eyes in the Extraordinarily Large, gold-framed mirror, as she saw what she Could Be, if she had the dress.
...

- Lydie

Mind

2010-06-26T23:37:00.003+12:00

Not so much silence as stillness. Peace of the uncluttered mind. Strange that calm overtakes the preoccupied body when in those rare moments, the mind forces the hands to sink down, the eyelids close and the mind lie blank, thinking on the end of nothing.
Like a hibernating computer, the brain prepared to re-focus, yet sitting dormant in the sudden quiet.

The woman breathed; in, out. Expelling thoughts, re-focusing. Mind blurring those thoughts like breaths; in, out. So many rejected, a few chosen, used.
Minds awake now, so late at night and nearly morning; thoughts ballooning, larger in the dark of silent rooms, large in the troubled expanse of midnight. Biting psychological nails, spirals of internal laughter thinking back on the day, the stealthy approach of sleep like shadows, infiltrating the mind. Nothing remembered of that state between consciousness and the subconscious in the chill light of morning. Only the weary repetition of clutching anxiety, thoughts still imprisoned in the journey of the mind.

The body was tired. Knuckle joints aching, exhaustion pressing behind the darkened globes of the eyes and the lids falling over them, down, down, black slits in the impassive face. The shoulders drooped, were straightened by the resisting mind, fell. The heater behind the back radiated heat to the cheeks, flushing with pin-points of warmth.

- Lydie

Fridge Words

2010-06-25T23:12:00.002+12:00

Great things are happening on our fridge at the moment. People come up to our fridge, park themselves in front of it, stare at it, then start laughing. This phenomenon began last night, when my friend brought out a bottle of "Writer's Remedy", a glass jar full of the magnetic words you put on fridges. Like, the whole set of them, not one missing.

Sentences have been made, like:
"Investigate wine" and
"Spy on a translucent ghost"
"Use finite emotion to manipulate experience"
"Drown a poet if he wails & howls at people who dance"
"Pickle that electric dead body"
"I am a devil obsessed with the precious" and
"Invisible orchestras suck".

I just know that brilliance will be created on our fridge from now on.

- Lydie

What was lost is now found

2010-06-23T23:29:00.008+12:00

I'm packing up my room at the moment because I'm planning to get out of our house in the next week. No, it's not a teenage rebellion thing actually; my revered parents are going overseas for an outrageously long time to have a fantastic traipse around the globe, and they are leaving me alone, like a sparrow on a rooftop. [Psalm 102:7]. Except that this sparrow intends to have a roof over her head, unlike David's legendary bird.

Packing up anything can scarcely be called 'fun' yet it can't fail to be interesting, when there's so much accumulated history to unpack first.

When you start unpacking the room, in order to sort through everything and stick it in boxes, you get a horrible, confused mess. It literally looks as though a dragon has danced around your room; the ground is covered with every conceivable item known to man, and your brain has lost every particle of organising skill you once possessed.

The difficulty is that a lot of what was stored in odd corners and strange boxes and containers was placed there covertly because you didn't know what to do with the stuff last time you had to deal with it. A room can look properly tidy, yet underneath it's pristine outer layer is hidden all manner of strange odds and ends from your childhood.
For instance, old clothes [yikes, I used to wear that!], random knick knacks that you appreciate and treasure as a child, then have to part with when you're older and wiser, and stacks of pens and old schoolwork and perfume and old socks and [horrible, broken] jewelery and stickers and toys and bizarre tapes and bits of lego and paint tubes and etc.

Strange remnants of life when you were younger. [Yeah, it's okay, I'm not going to reminisce or start to muse on the transience of life].

But two good things happened while I was sifting through the junk. As happens when you're sorting through junk you haven't seen for an age, you find things. I found an earring! A particularly special, bluey-green earring shaped like a starfish, that my respected Grandmother had bought for me. The brilliant thing was, it was the earring that perfectly matched its partner that I had kept in hopes of finding its mate. It was a happy reunion.

The other good thing was that I was looking through a box of old clothes that I'd rejected the last time I was sorting and pulled out two items of clothing. The first was an amazing, vivid, blue-and-green [see a theme running here?] splashed silk scarf. I saw a part of it submerged in the mundane colours of the other clothes, and my heart stopped [poetically, rather than literally]. I pulled it out and it was SO beautiful - why had I ever tried to get rid of it? Naturally, I instantly folded it and tied it around my head like a gypsy.

And the third good thing that happened [ha, you didn't see that coming] was that in the same box of rejected clothes I found a deep blue, flower-sprigged dress [with green leaves, note that recurring theme]! In a most attractive pattern, with a tiny ribbon-fabric bow on the front of the fitted bodice, and flaring slightly to a graceful knee length.

Sorry to any male readers for that description. I know you can't bear to read stuff like that.

Now I just need to go somewhere special in my newly paired starfish earrings, scarf and blue dress!

- thought - Mum and Dad should go away more often ;)

- Lydie

Anonymity FTW

2010-06-23T23:22:00.003+12:00

Aww, check this out!

http://afaithfulreadersblog.blogspot.com/

My all-time favourite anonymous commenter has made a blog for me to read! I asked her if I could see her blog, but wasn't allowed because it had details like her name on it. So now I get to know this mysterious person a little more, yet the mysterious person retains her mystique! Love it.

- Lydie

p.s. - two posts in one day! That's surely a record.

Why

2010-06-22T22:50:00.004+12:00

I was reading about Night today, on Wiki of course. It made me get out of my lovely, idealized world for a little while, forcing my mind to scrape the edges of true horror, humanity's depravity and the black descent of the soul. Eliezer was a fairly normal Jewish Orthodox lad, living in northern Transylvania with his family; their country was annexed in 1940 by Hungary and most of the population were sent to the gas chambers or to slave labour and concentration camps by the Germans.

Elie survived the utter brutality of the camp Auschwitch; the U.S. Third Army freed the prisoners in April 1945. But he wasn't free. Liberation can not restore five years of soul-killing horror. Although he had strongly believed in God through his Jewish Orthodoxy before the annexation, and continued to be a devout believer through part of his time in the camp, he soon could not reconcile the hideous suffering he saw with his former belief in God. He watched as babies were used as target practice by soldiers, as hundreds of prisoners were tossed into fire pits and more were starved and beaten.

Elie's story reminds me of 1984. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a fairly ordinairy guy with a sense of right and wrong. After intense psychological and physical pain, he sells his soul by betraying Julia, the girl he loves.

The question that is bugging me is: Wouldn't I do the same? If I went through the horror that Elie suffered, or was tortured like Winston - would my love and faith for God die? Or would I be like Foxe's martyrs, and trust to death? A belief is only worth something if you're willing to die for it - and not just die for it, but suffer hideously for it. Because if it's worth more than what's in the world, then it must be worth more than anything the world can do to your body.

I don't want weak faith. Anything could happen to me. Like Elie, my life could be annexed by horror and I'd have to do one of two things, believe or despair.

Do you have a belief worth dying for?

The Nothing Post. This is where you tell me something new and interesting since I can't think of anything to write about.

2010-06-21T22:29:00.002+12:00

Sunday, stream of consciousness.

2010-06-20T23:55:00.005+12:00

Dishwasher humming. Back aching. Mum looking through the bible for a verse she needs. Rustling paper. Plastic-click of keys as she punches them. Thinking about today. Did anything happen? Fragments, nothing united. Stares avoided. Wide smiles. Oratory skills of the new preacher. Rain lighted by the car's lights. Kitchen people. Worrying about breaking a cup (again). A sausage roll falling down, catching alight in the oven. Running. Losing a hymn sheet. Finding it. Flushed faces, stray hairs. Waiting in line, coffee-time. Do I look okay? No earrings. That's why I feel incomplete! 10 minutes before we need to leave, dear (should have set the alarm clock). Squirt of hand sanitizer after leaving the rest home. Like loving the people in that room then washing them off. Singing. Do I sound okay? Getting the first note wrong - oh, it's so low. Now it's too high! Laughing hard. Laughter dying. Will my parents open the door? Leaning against the red bricks of the entrance. Waiting. Finally! Explanation time - no, I'll try not to do anything crazy when you've gone. Modeling proper feminine decorum. You can trust me. Quietness. Reflecting - did I really say that? Tomorrow morning I'll be horrified at myself. Cleaning tomorrow. That's right. Packing up. Boxes and tape. Should I make breakfast for my parents? I'll be too tired. I need to box up my room, leave. Where to? Have to rely on God. Have to. And gardening. Must weed the vege patch.

- Lydie

Eggs.

2010-06-19T22:52:00.005+12:00

I've recently become a fan of boiled eggs.
They must be ever-so-slightly soft in the center, be served on in a cute little egg cup and be sprinkled with salt and cracked pepper. And be hot! So important - a slightly clammy, luke-warm egg would simply be unacceptable.
Although I would eat it, for the fact that it was a boiled egg. I would just protest.
What do you think about boiled eggs? Are you averse to them, apathetic, or do you love them strongly?
It seems there are some people (like Theresa) who have come from hating eggs to loving them. It was an almost necessary change; she became gluten free and had to eat something, and then gradually came to appreciate them!

There are many different ways that people eat their eggs. Some are unique and strange...
Some people enjoy eggs that have barely been boiled; they drip. That's awful - the mere idea makes me shudder.
I was greatly disturbed yesterday when one of my boiled eggs was slightly slushy. I had to tip the egg upside down and let that... fluid drip on to my plate. Eww. But, people ought to feel free to eat eggs in their own style. It seems that the eggs' texture is a matter of intense concern to many people, and is entirely a personal preference.

Mm.. toast and boiled egg! Amazing. I hope I dream of them tonight...

- Lydie

p.s. my mum was concerned about my sudden liking for boiled eggs - because they are apparently extremely high in cholestorol. I did a little research, and found that the consumption of two eggs each day has shown no adverse effect on healthy people. In fact, egg yolks contain many essential vitamins and essential minerals. Therefore (based on the premise that I'm a healthy person) I feel fine about eating them! You should too :)

Degas & Ballet

2010-06-18T23:31:00.009+12:00

Degas painted women.
He actually painted women, which is more than can be said for John Waterhouse. He captured their essence, whereas House only caught one small dimension of their character.

Ballet was a big theme; that's where you find pretty women I suppose.

He seemed to be preoccupied with these girls rearranging their costumes. Still, that's what you do when you have thirty seconds to get ready before you're on stage again.
He liked the contrast of the old ballet teacher and the young girls. He includes this man and his knobbly walking stick in a lot of the ballet paintings.
Note the contrapposto attitude of these girls. Degas certainly did idealize women to some extent.

I'm noticing that he picks a colour scheme and runs with it - you'll find the women's bodies complement the backgrounds, because Degas tinted the flesh blue or pink or brown, based on his theme colours.
*Sigh*. I love ballet. I used to take lessons when I was a young lass, but after several years the Doctor said I had to stop - some problem with my feet. Seems to be a commonality with young girls, to take ballet lessons for a few years, dream of being a Real Ballerina one day, and then stop.

- Lydie

The Glorious Qur'an

2010-06-17T23:58:00.004+12:00

I'm reading the Qur'an at the moment.

At our University clubs days earlier this year I was given The Glorious Qur'an. A Muslim society had a little stall at the end of the row of tables, with a bookshelf parked out in front of their table. I spotted the books sitting on the shelf, and inquired if I could take one - they gave me a copy happily. I think I said I'd read it. Sadly, it's not the real deal: it's called "A Simplified Translation of The Qur'an for Young People." Well, that fits me.
What is cool about it is that it has the Arabic Text next to the English Translation - so I can flick my eyes over at the beautiful Arabic words, (which go backwards), as I read.

There's a section called "About Prophet Muhammad" which comes before the text. Interestingly, when a Muslim says or writes the word "Muhammad" referring to the Prophet, it seems to be correct ettiquette to immediately say "peace be upon him" afterwards. Throughout this little section about the Prophet's life, the abbreviation "p.b.u.h." is littered - easier for the typist I suppose.

I might give some updates on the Qur'an and some thoughts I have of it. It would be very interesting to compare the Qur'an to the Bible..

Here's a picture I found - I've decided that the man is just very small.

- Lydie

Squiggles

2010-06-16T23:11:00.006+12:00

My friend Theresa and I made gluten-free squiggles yesterday.

For the uninitiated, squiggles are (by far) the best biscuits In The World. They surpass in every way every other biscuit in existence, simply because they have everything going for them.

They start off with a plain (almost unappetising) vanilla biscuit, with necessarily fluted edges. Over the biscuit is spread a thick, buttery-caramel icing, pale golden in colour. On top of this are bits of hokeypokey, chopped up and pressed into the icing. As though that weren't good enough, the biscuits are dipped into melted milk/dark chocolate, and left to set.

And then, the grand finale: the reason for the name. White chocolate is melted and coloured a caramel colour, then piped in squiggles over the biscuit.

I don't need to explain why Squiggles are the best after that description, as I'm convinced you must all now agree. Although other biscuits have their merits, they ain't got nothin' on the Great Squiggle.

So, we made them. It wasn't really hard: I made the cookies (easy), Theresa came over and we made the icing (and flavoured it with maple! Maple works instead of caramel flavour which we didn't have! Or, if you're a really boring person you could use vanilla), my excellent mother made us hokeypokey which we chopped up and pressed into the icing, then we melted chocolate and dipped the cookies. We had no idea we'd need SO MUCH chocolate - we just kept melting the stuff.

After that, we melted some white chocolate and coloured it blue, yellow and pink, then piped it on the biscuits. They looked so much like the original Squiggles (but better).

And then we took photos!

Mmm!
Finally, a word of advice: If you're in the middle of piles and piles of study that MUST be done, and you desperately need to procrastinate, head over to a friends' house and make biscuits (preferably Squiggles) with them. Eating a certain number of Squiggles each day helps your brain to function properly - just don't eat too many, otherwise your heart might stop functioning properly..

If you want the recipe, ask Theresa, over at www.gisforgluten.blogspot.com :)

What's your favourite biscuit?

- Lydie

I See Old People

2010-06-15T23:39:00.006+12:00

Isn't it strange to think that we'll all be old one day?

I can't imagine it, the present is too immediate. Our society's emphasis on youth, beauty, fashion, sport and the aquisition of money makes me forget that I'll be 75 one day (maybe) when none of those things will impact me.

But one day, we'll have really saggy bits, we'll probably lose at least a part of our eyesight, we might need walking sticks or a frame (horrors!) and, most tragically, our fashion sense will be quite gone.
We'll be way more fragile, and become susceptible to getting infections and diseases, as our bodies wind down and our vital organs lose their vitality.
If we're lucky, our children will let us stay with them and their families - if we're unlucky, we'll end up in a resthome, an ordinairy one or one for dementia patients.
If we get dementia (a not unlikely occurrence) we may spend the rest of our lives talking away to ourselves, or reliving old stories as though they're still relevant, or we may wander up and down purposelessly. Perhaps we may believe that our parents are still alive, or that we don't live at the resthome, but live with our families. If we're still computer savvy, maybe we'll spend a lot of our time on PensionBook.
If we're christians, we'll (hopefully) believe that we don't ever need to spend our lives, as some fit and well old people do, playing golf or going bowling.
Perhaps we'll realise that we can strive to be unselfish even in our old age, and work harder for God in evangelism, youth training, Christian book writing, and mission work. Maybe we can volunteer for work in our churches, and maybe the old women can train up the young women and wives. They could challenge the young people in their congregations to quit wasting their lives in superficialities, sport, fashion and petty relationships, and help them to see their potential for being world-shattering christians. They could be amazing models to young christians of what a Christian should look like after living a self-sacrificing life for Christ.

I would LOVE to be an old person like that! How do you plan to spend your life from 65 onwards?

- Lydie

something new

2010-06-14T23:32:00.002+12:00

I wrote on another blog tonight - called 'Meditations of a Cod', which is a blog devoted to a story that has many authors. No one had written anything since December, and I finally broke the trend! Here's the link, if you're interested... http://meditationsofacod.blogspot.com/

- Lydie :)

p.s. I've finished uni for the semester! I'm so glad. The last exam was today, and my hand is almost recovered. Hope your study and exams go well, y'all.

Outside

2010-06-12T21:08:00.006+12:00

The girl sitting at the green vinyl-covered table was looking out of the window. Beyond the tangled cape gooseberry plant and blueberry bushes were triangular blocks of houses, shapeless outlines against the pale blue sky.
There were fragments of gray-touched white cloud that sat over the feathery outline of a deciduous tree. Each leafless branch was raised upwards, the twigs and branching arms intertwined and overlapping in the distance. Flickers of light from the sky on the black lines.
Then the clouds gathered themselves together in one smooth white arch. Blue deepened as evening approached and the clear blue was shot through with the falling sun that accentuated the tree's branches.

The girl swallowed. There was another world out there that didn't have anything to do with the papers, pens and laptop before her. Sheets of neatly written mind-maps, tiny handwriting. Facts, links and themes all branching from the topics in the middle of the pieces of paper - she was supposed to be forcing that information into her unwilling brain. Even though the sky outside was deepening and the magnolia tree was reaching bony branch-arms into the dining room with tiny buds that were glowing in the evening sun. Impossible. She looked at the screen before her - tiny writing, tiny details that led to one big event.

But it was coming, and she had to study. Had to, otherwise there would be a bad grade that would last in her mind longer than the clouds outside.

- Lydie

The (non) humble Persimmon

2010-06-11T23:42:00.008+12:00

Something went wrong with our internet connection early this morning, and I couldn't post it. So here it is...
...
Persimmons are an odd sort of fruit.
Mum bought some today - seconds, because they're cheaper than the elitist ones without spot or blemish. We ate a couple this evening.. they're reddy-orange in colour and have a shine that makes them look like they've been varnished.

The calix is a green flower where the stem's been cut; it's dried and papery but an interesting contrast to the smooth orange skin. They tasted good. The texture's why I called it 'odd' - when you're eating a piece of persimmon it has all these different textures within the one piece.
A standard apple isn't like that. You get rid of the icky core and you've got evenly textured apple-flesh which you (vampirishly) bite into. The persimmon's a completely different animal.
Upgrading from eating common fruits like apples and kiwifruit to trying to appreciate a persimmon requires serious concentration.
Here's the anatomy of the fruit:
Check out those concentric circles. You can feel those circles when you eat a persimmon. Promise.

This fruit belongs to the Ebony tree family, of the genus Diospyros. Before you fall asleep, that word Diospyros means "the fruit of the gods" in Ancient Greek. The humble persimmon was the fruit that scholastics have argued was the 'lotus' which nearly made Ulysses' crew want to stay on an island (I don't know which one) and eat the fruit for the rest of their lives, in the joyous company of the Lotus-Eaters. I certainly doubt that the Persimmon was the fruit of that mythical tale: the fruit doesn't deserve an adjective beyond 'nice'.

One must be cautious when choosing persimmons to buy: Unripe persimmons contain inedible, astringent tannins, and overripe persimmons taste like sweetened, cooked mush. One should judge carefully: the fruit must be firm yet yield slightly to pressure; if you buy rock-hard ones they mightn't be unripe, but most likely you won't get to eat them at the proper time. Persimmons appear to be temperamental (like women) - one moment they're hard as nails, the next moment they're destined for the compost.

Persimmons are also aesthetically pleasing.

- Lydie

La Belle Femme

2010-06-10T23:59:00.008+12:00

They didn't have photoshop back in the days when John Waterhouse - the great painter of women - was around. He didn't need it. He had an eye for beautiful women (in the painterly, as well as the *ahem* more R18 sense) - if he wanted to paint the ideal of feminine beauty, why, he screwed out the paint and dabbed it here and there - hey presto, a beautiful woman.

Even though I admire (and have fallen partially in love with) a lot of what he painted, I hold a strong and abiding grudge against him. He was the key idealizer of women in the 19th Century.

Because that's what he painted, 99.9% of the time - the only times I remember he painted men was the effeminate Narcissus, staring mesmerized at his reflection in a pond, and the Great Ulysses, tied to the mast of his ship - and even then there were female sirens floating around.

And in every painting he did of women, he painted them as impossibly beautiful objects in an idealized setting. Take this painting, for example.

Look at her. Nobody looks like that, and certainly no woman dresses in a flowing, pink-sashed dress with bare feet, to pick flowers by herself in an outrageously beautiful fairyland. No one. Note her hair - even though she's outside, not one single hair is out of place in that smooth, raven coiffure. I conclude that she is not at all real - rather, she's an idealized object designed to attract men and make women envious. They could never be a part of that world. Here's another one of the Great Waterhouse's works:

I don't know the history behind this little masterpiece. It probably ran something like this though: A well known lady-thief, infamous for horse stealing, once managed to steal a horse from a poor knight who fell off the horse when he saw her coming up the road. He jumped to his feet and gazed at her wondrous beauty, but when he saw the full extent of her perfect complexion he flung out his arms, had a mini-heart attack, and died on the spot. The moral of the story is: Beauty is Dangerous.

hmm. Perhaps not - maybe it's something dumb like: a rather stunning female happened to be passing by a rather good-looking knight. They, (ahem) kiss. Or something. He remains in his paralytic shock for the rest of his life because she's so be-yew-tiful.
Right, on to the next one..
Now this one's really annoying. It looks like it's been painted precisely for men to see - her shawl accentuating her figure just so, her face up-turned for the (male) viewer. That is no woman. She is as much a model of femininity as a Barbie doll is - although admittedly, a little more life-like. But in the sense that she's all thoughtful and not all there: there's not enough reality and real, emotional femininity going on.

Okay, last one.

This is a moment in time. A woman, beautiful as the day, drinking in the perfume of a perfect pink rose. I sort of like this, because I sympathise with the feeling that associates snuffing in the delicate scent of a rose. But even if I did get into one of these idealistic moods that this woman's stuck in, I would tell myself off/laugh at myself for doing so. I wouldn't allow myself to continue to live in a ridiculously idealistic world - I hope. The same can be said for most of us.

What do you think about these portrayals of idealized femininity? Are they helpful or harmful to men and women?

- Lydie

Sleep

2010-06-10T00:28:00.001+12:00

I would write a proper post on here - but I've spent all my spare time commenting on this blog! So I'll get some sleep instead. This will be the shortest post in this blog's history :)

Goodnight, world.

seeping cold

2010-06-08T23:15:00.003+12:00

It's cold.

The windows, single-glazed, allow heat transfer from inside to outside, and cool the artificially heated rooms. Flowery curtains, draped down past the window ledges, can't stop the air cooling as the round, blaring heaters blast heat then pause, waiting till the room cools again, to continue pumping heated air that merges and cools with colder air.

Outside there is pervasive silence. Not even a drip from the eaves can be heard; the sky is quieted after its explosion of frozen and liquid water that speeded to earth from the skulking masses of gray earlier today. The hail that fell whitely on the neighbour's roof tops, has melted, freezing the tin and trickled down the pipes into the sinking gardens.

The chill of the day bespeaks the reason for my attire. I'm sitting here, in the shadow of the bunk bed, thinking. About lives in transition, and character building through difficulties, of what loneliness is and the need to be true to oneself. Secretly, I'm glad about my warm winter clothes.

They're not pretty to look at. If they were, they would be departing from their function as snug, roomy, thick, protective layers - designed to keep the warmth in and the chill out, not at all meant to be attractive to the eye. I'm wearing my study pants: thick knitted woolen slouch-pants, navy in colour and high-waisted. They're an oddity that I was happy to find at an opshop around the corner; at our first meeting I knew that our relationship would be a deep and abiding one, that they would be my study pants and that they would be excellent protection in the cold winter. I was utterly right; I've worn them a couple of times so far (I only picked them up last week) and they have proved snug and altogether suitable for long bouts of study.

The other important study gear that I'm wearing at the moment is a fine, machine-knitted woolen gray jersey. It used to be a man's jersey (men get it good when it comes to clothing) but is admirable for my purposes. It's hugely big, but it's warm with its baggy stomach-area, and its mammoth sleeves. Over the jersey I'm wearing a large, green jacket that sports a hood lined with some synthetic, fluffy material.

These are the necessary elements of studying in winter. What are your favourite things to wear when it starts to freeze outside?

- Lydie

Fairies and Bugles

2010-06-07T23:17:00.005+12:00

I couldn't think of much to write about today, so here's one of Tennyson's poems. It's called "Blow, Bugle, Blow"...

Before you read it, imagine a dark sky with stars glinting through skeleton-trees, the ruins of a noble castle, crumbling in rough heaps of dusty stone, dark tentacles of ivy, over spreading the ruins, and a black lake, shining in the moon's path..

Also, imagine that another, ancient fairy world lies just beyond this landscape - so close that you can hear its music. *By the way, I'm not entirely sure why the words didn't come up, but the blank space actually isn't blank. The words are in white - if you click and drag on the blank-ness, you'll see the words - almost magically.*

THE splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,	5
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!	10
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,	15
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

- Lydie

How are you?

2010-06-06T23:33:00.005+12:00

It's a conversation starter, primarily. It also doubles for the: "I haven't talked to you for a really long time, and I'm making up for the neglect by getting you to talk about yourself." Another way it is used is when people feel they ought to talk to you, but don't know you and so have very little to talk about. Asking someone how they are not only helps put the trouble of conversation-making on the other person, but gives you conversation options once the person's done trying to explain their state of being. Also, the question is used as another form of "hello", which ought be answered with "good thanks".

When people ask me this question, I often give them a blank stare while I try to collect my thoughts, or I'll look into space, trying to analyse just how I am. People get a little weirded out by this at times.
I reckon the question's covertly difficult, for the following reasons:

a) Even if it were possible to explain to someone just how you were, it's hard to know how much you should tell the inquirer about yourself, and whether or not they actually want to know how you are, or are just being polite.
b) The two-second response time you have to examine your physical/emotional/psychological state seems like too little time to decide just how you are. After all, not many people even think about how they are at many points during the day; and if they do, the definition of how they are quite likely isn't the kind of thing they want to go trying to explain to someone they don't know.
c) It seems that one's actual state of being can be so complicated - even if by just little, un-analysed feelings, that it is too elusive to be put into thoughts, let alone be explained to someone else.
d) It's such an awkward conversation starter, since no one is as interested to hear about you as they are to talk about themselves.

How are you: Do you find it hard to answer?

- Lydie

Ladies and Gentlemen

2010-06-05T23:07:00.009+12:00

I'm writing an essay on the concept of a 'gentleman' at the moment.

Have you ever considered just what a gentleman is? When I think of him, he's standing stiffly erect, trying to keep his top hat from sliding off, unbending in his black starched coat and trousers; he's courteous to everyone, chivalry personified to ladies and always has a freshly ironed, initialed handkerchief to give to damsels in distress.

He doesn't really do much, but spends his days at the local gentleman's club. His money was inherited and because of it he doesn't understand the concept of working to survive.
The two main books I'm using are - *wait for it* - North & South...
...and Pride & Prejudice.

For our last essay in my English course, we were required to find a topic, formulate a question and develop an argument to answer the question.
Here's mine: Compare and Contrast (don't you just love those NCEA winners) the changing views fictional heroines have of the concept of a gentleman (teehee) in the novels Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen, and North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Margaret and Elizabeth certainly changed their views. Margaret believed Mr. Thornton was a tyrannical master who didn't care a hoot for his workers - and was 'not quite a gentleman' - to deciding, in the end, that she wasn't good enough to marry him. Elizabeth, who had more grounds for disapprobation (love the word, stole it straight from her rejection of Darcy) of Mr. Darcy, based on his "arrogance, conceit and selfish disdain for the feelings of others" - to deciding that he'd improved so much, that her opinion of him had reversed itself completely when he asked her again.
Women. They're such impressionistic idealists.

This idea of a 'gentleman' that the two ladies advocate seems to be a mix of culture, eloquence and easy manners. Margaret's belief that Thornton isn't quite the gentleman is based solely on his status as a manufacturer, and the fact that these kinds of tradesmen lack the finer qualities of a gentleman - like courteousness, pleasantry, an informed mind and accomplishments. Her 'cold quietness of demeanor' when she's forced to make conversation with him the first time they meet completely unnerves Thornton, who as a mill owner and magistrate is used to a fair bit of deference.

Elizabeth's ideas are less aery faery - she's repulsed by the fabulously wealthy Darcy because his manners are apalling. While Margaret sees gentlemanliness as primarily conduct dictated by a man's status, Elizabeth (the enlightened one) sees gentlemanliness in men of any station - for instance, her mistaken view of Mr. Wickham's character, and her uncle's gentlemanly character.
Anyway, it's outrageously early, and my thoughts are running out. Ideas, anyone?

- Lydie

idyllicism

2010-06-04T22:38:00.007+12:00

Yesterday afternoon I was biking home from Uni. It was cold, but there was blue in the sky - so good to see after all the rain we've had. May broke new records: we had more rain that month than Canterbury has had in thirty years, gray, oppressive skies and never-ceasing rain, growing puddles and mini-waterfalls pouring into the drains.

When I turned into the big park close to our house and biked along the path, the sun had seeped through the clouds and was laying itself flat against the grass, making it vividly green, stretching out across the wide expanse to the rugby league building. It glowed through the red-brown leaves of the canadian maple trees that spread branches over the path. Across from me, out on the grass a lady was throwing a ball for her golden retriever puppy to catch. The (very) golden retriever glided to the ball and.. um, retrieved it. It was like a movie shot - everything happening so perfectly, and with such ideal beauty.
I had a thought after I passed them: ideal beauty pleases us humans so much. It's so satisfying when we have a day that is 'perfect' or when a story is completed well, with everyone happy, or when we see a picture that is so narrow in its focus and components that the image is 'beautiful'. Women who have the most symetrical faces are the most desired, while women with less symmetry are perhaps more loved. Seeing the pink-and-blue of a sunrise is mesmerizing, while red-and-gold sunsets leave us gaping.
Life is only like that in spots though. It seems that we strive for an ideal lifestyle based on our love of these small times where beauty reigns. But perhaps beauty-worship isn't such a good idea: after all, the kind of beauty we love so much is appreciated because it is rare, and over so quickly. If we were confronted with the physical reality of an idealized world we would soon discard our previous ideas of perfect beauty and want something more fulfilling.

In comparison to those vivid colours of light on grass, my world - cooped up in a room studying - was a slightly depressing gray colour, full of little mistakes and notes and dampness and non-completeness and non-perfection. I decided that the comparison didn't really matter after I'd thought about it a bit more: so long as I could put those bright bits of light and colour into my mind I could remember them whenever I wanted to.

But perhaps I was wrong: maybe we should look at all aspect of our life with eyes that are tuned to see beauty everywhere - in the faces of old men and women in resthomes, in the severe blocks of University buildings and the outlines of trees against gray skies. Maybe we shouldn't see beauty as an ideal. What do you think? How do you see beauty?

- Lydie

G is for Glutened

2010-06-02T23:22:00.008+12:00

I'm a plagiarizer. I stole the title of this post from Theresa's blog. Then tweaked it a little...
...

It's my fault, of course. My mum came into my study-room this evening and showed me a little tin of signature range stock powder, a product similar to this:

She'd come to ask if it was okay to use it in the gravy she was making for tea. I read the ingredients with my gluten-free scanner eyes. Onion flavour, it read, which contained wheat. I decided it would be okay - not too bad, and perhaps a little bit of the gluten wouldn't affect me.
Dinner was amazing - pork chops (wonders will never cease), home-grown potatoes, apple sauce. - Thanks, Mum.
And some particularly delicious gravy.
Later on this evening I was studying for my Political Science test on Friday - and felt the glutened feeling - the tight stomach and aching gut. After a while I realized I was feeling a bit off colour, and attributed it to that infinitesimal amount of wheat.
I was duly impressed that that tiny amount of gluten could do nasty things to me.. It certainly shows the power wheat possesses.

Later on this evening, after I'd given up studying (too many other things on my mind), I walked out to our living room and spied on the table one, solitary ferrero rocher chocolate, alone in its packet of three. Its golden packaging glistened, and I looked at it with a small measure of contentment. As there was only one left, mum and dad must have eaten theirs and left me with that one.
And then it hit me. The wafer. Hidden underneath that melting milk chocolate-and-almond coating, is a dangerously thin layer of gluten-filled wafer. Tarnation! I realized with a feeling of horror that Ferrero Rochers *must* be dead to me forever. Here's a clinical dissection of a Ferrero Rocher:
Later on this evening. Mum came into the living room where I was faithfully writing out the first part of this post. Then she did a lovely, lovely thing. She asked me if I wanted the Ferrero Rocher, and I then had to explain my predicament. Without much ado she took a knife and painstakingly scraped off the chocolate from the dangerous wafer-shell. Then she scraped off the shell from the nutella-coated hazlenut nestled inside. When this was completed, she handed me the finished product (minus the (did I mention 'dangerous'?) wafer), with the chocolate heaped up next to the almost-smooth nutella-covered hazlenut ball.
I love you mum. <3 It was incredibly delicious. I closed my eyes for several seconds, savouring that intense, melting experience, and the crunchy, toasted hazlenut..

- Lydie

Bubbles

2010-06-01T22:56:00.011+12:00

I came across this funny + bizarre picture when searching for bubble images. It was the kind of thing that needed to be shared, regardless of the purpose of this post.
I was waiting for the bus today, after a stressful day at uni, getting a history essay finished off. The bus stop, just across the road from the university buildings was the perfect place to think thoughtful thoughts.
I was tired. I'd stayed up into the wee sma's, working on the essay, and had just dropped it into the 'history' box in the history department. It's always a relief to get rid of essays, but the actual drop-off is quite anti-climatical. After so much agonized thought and late nights and *dratted* references and editings and re-editings etc. there should really be a drum roll when you drop it off.
Nothing happened when my essay fell into the basket. I had to just leave it there and walk out of the building.
I digress. The air was chilly, the trees on the Uni side of the road were networks of spartan branches, their leaves half buried in the mud beneath them. The cars approached, came nearer, whizzed by me and rushed away. The sound was remarkably similar to waves on a beach - I closed my eyes and half-imagined I was at the seaside.
It almost worked, until in the corner of my eye I saw a cyclist laboriously cycling along, with a noise that I quickly imagined sounded a little like a whale. That really stretched my imagination.
There were people around - something not unusual for a bus stop - with their hands in their pockets. Just standing or sitting, waiting for the buses. Their faces were expressionless, a mask for their insular thoughts. Nobody talked, even though we all shared a connection with each other - being uni students and waiting for a bus.
Usually I take it for granted that people don't speak to each other if they don't know each other. It can be a strange concept when you think about it though. Why is it that we feel that speaking naturally to someone we don't know is an incredibly intrusive thing to do? We always have to have a reason for speaking to them when we do go out of our way to do it.

It felt like we were all in silent bubble-lives, everyone living in isolation in their own little lives.
That's something we know is true already, but when you're with a group of silent, preoccupied people you feel the impact of it. The bubles sometimes merge with other bubbles - it feels so lovely when, by providence you meet a friend at uni. Then your bubble-like life stops for a little while until the friend leaves you and you're back in the bubble.
*train of thought ends*
I just love these bubble pictures. Look at this one..

They're so perfect, but they're lonely to live inside.
Thoughts?

- Lydie

Warning! Christianity - read at your peril.

2010-05-31T01:03:00.003+12:00

Church. It's almost old-fashioned - all those musty-smelling school halls with rows of hard, bony school seats, children's artwork tacked carelessly on the walls, dirty little 'facilities' (toilets) and a narrow kitchen to one side of the airy hall.
Amongst all the little one-roomed churches, school-hall churches and house churches, there are the really traditional ones: Anglican buildings that have been around from before the Flood, stained gray blocks of stone with peepings of coloured glass and rose bushes around the entrance. Full of old people.

Then there are the mega-churches, with tens of thousands of members. The kind of arrangement that the little churches can't comprehend.

I've found (in my many years of experience) that the defining characteristics of a church are not the superficialities of the type of building. When you walk into a church for the first time, several things stand out about it.
The people standing around in little, close groups that can exclude you. Random, friendly people coming up to you out of nowhere, taking an interest in you as a fellow christian. Conversations with people where you seem to get to the heart of what matters in christianity and christian living. Obscenely loud music. Unaccompanied singing, or a piano, with a pianist faithfully thumping away the chords. The cups of tea in awful little brown-glass cups, and biscuits. The feeling you get when you know that the people at the church actually care about each other.

What makes people continue to go to church, even though the repetition of going and the regularity (often) of everything done at church could possibly drive any normal person batty?
Going to church is like having your own mini-revival. What the pastor says in his sermons drives home hard, slicing through your self-contentment and apathy. You have no option but to let your attitudes and opinions bend to God's Word. The songs and hymns condemn you for your own lack of concern for God, and your sinful attitudes - but they also make you long to be the person you should be.
After the service, you mix with other christians. It's refreshing, being around people that you love and who love you. Every week, day in and day out, the reality and stresses of life can erode your 'christianity'. Good christian friends will challenge you, encourage you and help you with difficulties.

One last comment about churches. This is something a friend of mine said to me a year or so ago, and I've always remembered it.. It's unique to be in church. There are very few gatherings where people can come whose sole connection with each other is that they have been saved by God.

I love church. What about you? Do you go to church? If you do, what's your church like?
If you don't - why? Please don't let yourself miss out!

- Lydie

Hey, Ginga

2010-05-29T22:56:00.005+12:00

What's the idea of hugging red-haired people?

Apparently we need it, because we get picked on for our red hair so much.
It seems that there are 'people' who torment red heads, merely because they have red hair. Seems similar to the way Black people were sold as slaves because of their skin. Although the persecution against red heads isn't nearly so great, the same valuing system based on superficialities is being used.

Why is it that red heads are picked out for discrimination then?

We're different. Red hair is in the minority category of hair colours.
What's the stereotype of a red-headed person? A calm person who has a fiery temper (to match the hair) when roused, with green hair, ivory skin and freckles.
My theory is that the only reason red-headed people are discriminated against is because they don't conform to everyone else's standard coloured hair. Red hair stands out amongst the blondes, browns, blacks and grays.
Flaming against conformity, with tongues of vividly red curls streaked with strands of gold.

Hugga-Ginga Day came and went and I wasn't hugged.

- Lydie

North & South and Vampires

2010-05-28T23:50:00.006+12:00

I don't know what I'm going to write about with this topic of Elizabeth Gaskell's mediocrely famous book. I asked my friend, who's staying with us at the moment, what I should write about - and she came back with the three-word answer. After asking her opinion, I could hardly refuse to comply with it.
...
North & South is aptly named. Margaret Hale, the gallant and resourceful heroine, leaves her home in the sunny South to go to the nasty north of England with her mum and dad - to a manufacturing town called Milton. Milton just doesn't cut it for the family: they've lived in subdued luxury all their lives, and now have to eke out their living by Mr. Hale's job of teaching. They live in a little flat which they can't keep clean (because of all the nasty smoke and grime in Milton that seeps into the house).
Early on they meet a lovely chap who helped them find the bungalow in the first place [Enter Mr. Thornton].

This is Thornton looking fairly civilized. He's a manufacturer, a manager of his own cotton mill.
He pretty much instantly falls for Margaret (the good, beautiful and disdainful heroine), who distinctly dislikes and detests him. [As every good girl ought to do when first aquainted with a tall, dark, mysterious man - who also happens to be a mill owner].
She thinks he's awful: he doesn't care about his workers, and he doesn't act enough like a 'gentleman' to please her. Plus, he's a manufacturer - how could he be gentlemanly? Naturally Margaret's thoughts on the subject cause a little trouble to Thornton, who's a bit obsessed, and says so.
Take a look at this disturbing picture: Mr. Thornton (the tall, dark & necessarily handsome hero) with Margaret Hale - Thornton appears to be smirking, while Margaret's giving him a look that clearly says: "I'm not scared of you."

The book and movie are filled with all sorts of exciting things: lots of politics and philosophy and strikes and death and romance and things like that. It all fits together superbly, despite Gaskell's deathly tendency. If you read the book/watch the movie, you'll understand what I mean.
Despite all the silly satire, I really do love the story. It's beautiful. Please read the book, then tell me what you think of it.
Oh, and I have an idea for Hollywood film-makers. Can you see it? The next blockbuster: "North & South and Vampires."

Mr. Thornton would make an excellent vampire..

- Lydie

A Discourse on Dystopia

2010-05-28T00:21:00.009+12:00

Ooh! I just noticed that the side bar (the only thing of real interest) is back in its proper place, and that the title for the ginger crunch story is no longer at the top of the blog! *Excited* - that said, I'll launch in to tonight's (really, this morning's) entry on Dystopian novels.
...
You've heard of them. They're books written at times in history when wars, repressive regimes and depressions are at their most severe; such times produce books that are counter-cultural. They question the structure and mechanics of society by satirizing the consequences of an exaggerated/extreme form of their own society, and of its leaders.
They're so fascinating. The authors have seen and analyzed their societies and have then projected what they believe may happen to the world because of the way societies run. In so many places you can see that things they futuristically wrote have come true - or are coming true..

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World after visiting America in the 1930s; he was shocked at its prevalent materialism, commercialism and utopia engendering nature. Here's Iron Maiden's version:
What I found out today in reading the introduction of my copy of the book, was that Huxley believed that some sort of world control was necessary in order for the world to continue after WW1 and the Great Depression. Which is a puzzle - how could he write a book like Brave New World, yet believe that some sort of Mustafa Mond control would solve the world's problems?
I don't understand that. Perhaps he entirely disliked the idea of one world leadership yet felt that it was necessary.
It's a great book.

BNW's just a start though. If you wanted to get back to the real basics, you'd have to start with We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

This book was written by that guy with the cool Russian name, in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Fascinatingly, he got away with writing this incredibly anti-communist, anti-Stalinist book - and the Party allowed him to satirize and condemn it; it even paid him to write articles that satirized the Party for one of the magazines.
The pleasant Leon Trotsky was behind the loosening of control over the arts - but it only lasted for a little while.
The book's all about a society embalmed in glass - everything was made of glass. It's similar to 1984 - because George Orwell nicked a lot of ideas from We.

1984 is where 'Big Brother is Watching You' came from. Elementary stuff.
It's a lot darker all the way through, compared to Brave New World's lightness and colour, synthetic-ness and extravagance. 1984 is descriptively gray and more despairing and troubled than BNW. It also seems more real.
Then there's Darkness at Noon. I've never read this book, but apparently Orwell got some ideas from it - particularly in regards to the interrogation scenes. It's about a man who used to work for the Soviet Union, finally getting dobbed in himself for some nefarious activity, then being locked up in virtual isolation. He starts to realize the justice of his sentence when he understands that the people he dobbed in himself had suffered exactly the way he had. Orwell used the interrogation scenes for his character Winston Smith - in his own interrogation by O'Brien.

They're all deeply disturbing, as is the usual product of people who are deeply disturbed themselves. Yevgeny was a creative genius trapped in the U.S.S.R while Stalin was in power; Huxley took psychedelic drugs, and Orwell.. well, anyone who could write 1984 and Animal Farm would have to be slightly messed-up in the brain.
Have you read any of these books? If you have, what did you think of them - do you think they were prophetic in any way? If you haven't, would these kinds of books interest you?

- Lydie

7 ways to transform your study life (cliche, much?)

2010-05-26T23:40:00.010+12:00

End-of-semester insanity.

That means I'm slowly suffocating in sheets of paper that have bits of information scrawled on them, have a wrist that is starting to 'go' from all the writing and am somewhat anxious about the unthinkable amount of essays, research, exams and tests that I need to do. It's the time of year when you realise that, after all, your world IS university and the grade that you get back.

It's also the time of year when your brain starts distracting you automatically whenever you even anticipate studying. It instantly offers you attractive alternatives as soon as it catches a whiff of the word 'study' or 'homework' or 'research'. Naturally, most things look attractive next to sitting down at a desk for hours at a time, wrangling with some inexplicable essay.

My brain does this to me all the time. It shares close similarities with other brains in being ingeniously creative whenever the need for sustained study asserts itself.

Like checking one's emails, or playing the piano, or making a cup of tea, or reading a book, or.. checking one's emails, etc.

There are certain things that I have found useful when one needs to study. Here they are:

1) Space. A desk, good lighting, a squeaky computer chair, a heater - a room of one's own.

2) Excellent pens. This point must be strenuously stressed: a good pen that glides over sheets of paper without 'scratching' or running out is essential to study output, elegance of note-taking and general satisfactoriness.

The above pens have a dual-role: they contain miniature spy cameras and also ink: if you have the urge to spy on your parents (if you study at home) or on other, unsuspecting students at uni, give these a go. You can find them here.

3) Water. If you want to utilize your brain to maximum potential (something that doesn't happen often in our house) try glugging down a huge glass of freezing cold water before launching into your ridiculous, confusing study. The results are quite amazing: your brain clears as soon as you drink the water.
Tip: have a glass of water perpetually by you when studying, and remember to gulp some down when your thoughts are become foggy.

4) In this atrociously, unbelievably freezing weather, one must be well armed against the cold, the rain and the puddle-glumness. I find wearing a large, green, nicely lined jacket to be entirely satisfactory in keeping out the cold and keeping in the warmth. I would advise you, O discerning Reader, to do something similar..

5) Sleep is another, vital part of being able to process thoughts the next day... *Lyd looks at time guiltily*

6) Tea. Copious amounts. Warming, soothing, brain-relaxing, calming, de-stressing, caffeinated. Lovely. Bergamot-scented, steaming tea, brewed for three minutes and milk added..

.. And just to reinforce my point, here's a Mary Cassatt painting:

6) Make sure you eat well while studying: Don't go eating nasty, toxic gut-rot junk food. Please don't. It's awful stuff - I know, even though I'm guilty for buying the stuff too..
Eat a good breakfast. Like porridge: steamingly hot, raisin-filled, brown sugar meltingly mixed through, with a little milk..

Tip no. 2: if you cook the porridge with milk instead of water, the result will be smooth and milky and really, really addicting.

7) Finally, pray. That is, if you're a christian - (if you're not, I want to know why: there's absolutely nothing better in this life than being a christian. Porridge just doesn't compare) - seriously, all that stress and miserable anxiety and dampness and coldness gets to you at these insane study times. Pray.
Tell God all about it - he says he cares for us and wants to know. It's a major stress-reliever, since we end up realizing that God's actually in control anyway.

- Lydie :)

Introducing Brave Saint Saturn.

2010-05-25T23:56:00.004+12:00

What a name, right? I don't quite understand it myself.
The music is excellent. It's "astro-rock" - astronaut rock music. It's a Christian band, based in Denver, Colorado and the theme of most of the songs is isolation, loneliness, desperation and ultimately hope in God's salvation. These themes come out strongly through the concept of robots and astronauts sent out into space...
What I like most about it is perhaps the pain-filled anger and the hope that creeps in towards the end of some of these songs - particularly in this song, Daylight..

I could easily be their biggest fan - but only because so few people actually know about them.
Well, perhaps that's overstating my commitment a little..
Interestingly, this band is the little side kick of another band: Five Iron Frenzy, and is led by the lead singer of that band, Reese Roper. According to Wiki, BSS is the band which took on all the songs that didn't quite fit FIF's style. The Great Wiki says: "the music of Brave Saint Saturn... is fundamentally rooted in synthesizer-bathed post-punk and haunting ballads. The band also describes themselves as being the "supersonic-philharmonic", in reference to their blending of rock music, classical instruments, synthesizers, and beat loops."
I only understand part of that.
What do you think about BSS? Were you aware of its existence? If not, what were your initial impressions?

Rain and Kiwifruit

2010-05-24T23:16:00.008+12:00

That title makes me laugh. Sometimes there are these little incidents in my day, and they may have nothing to do with each other, but they just feel blog-worthy. Usually I have to make them blog worthy by describing the scenario in (what I mean to be) a vivid way, so that you can appreciate them for yourself, rather than write me off as a nut-job. (Which I am, and feel free at any time to do so. It could hurt my pride, but don't worry, you'll never kill it off). That said, I'll begin..
...
It was raining today. It does that sometimes: the sky gets all cross and sulky; it covers up all its happy blue mood in a nasty, smoky gray coat, then has a tantrum and throws cold tears everywhere. Sometimes, when it gets really upset, mini-waterfalls start splashing and gurgling in every drain in the city, and pools and puddles grow and get deeper and start spreading out on to the road. Then cyclists can't avoid all the puddles and they get themselves soaked, while cars zoom by, splashing themselves into the grand swimming pool puddles that make walls of water as the tires go through.
That's what happened today.

Slanting rain fell quietly but heavily on the road as the cyclist cycled. Each raindrop that fell on the cyclist exploded noiselessly and absorbed itself into the fabric of the cyclist's coat. The black woolen jacket still kept the cyclist warm, but very gradually and imperceptibly, it got heavier. Thin fabric, most unsuited to wet-weather cycling, encased the cyclist's legs, and quickly the light brown fabric was stained a deep brown with soaked fibers.

Although the cyclist was wearing a sporty red helmet, the cyclist was not wearing a rain-proof coat and hood, and therefore the slanting rain drummed through the helmet and transformed the brave, bouncing hair into strings. The cyclist blinked raindrops from ___ eyes and resolved to wear a rain jacket next time.
...
While writing the above, I felt it was strangely reminiscent of another blog which I used to read. In style, rather than in value. The blogger stopped writing a long time ago, and the unwritten blog became merely a statistic in the ranks of all the other forlorn, unwritten blogs. The writing that happened on the blog was good; it was unique, and powerful in places. More's the pity the blogger stopped writing.
And now, for kiwifruit.

...
Tonight I had a sudden, inexplicable urge to eat kiwifruit. It all started when I walked past the fruit bowl in the hallway..
Hastily, I grabbed one which felt like the perfection-of-ripeness and crept into the kitchen, grabbing a spoon and an oh-so-sharp Swiss knife. It was excellent.

Cutting through the misleadingly nasty, furry, brown, leathery, skin stuff, the vibrant green-streaked, tiny, shiny black seed-embedded fruit with the creamy oval of whiteness in the middle brought me back to my childhood..
When we used to eat kiwifruit for morning tea, and the sharp, burning tang of the kiwifruit left our tongues all raw and prickly-feeling.

One wasn't enough, yet three was almost too much. At around about two-and-a-half kiwifruit your taste buds declare 'no more' and the extra half kiwifruit is almost wasted as you dutifully gulp it down.
I never used to have much of a thing for this national fruit, but now I truly appreciate them.

- Lydie

thoughts

2010-05-23T23:46:00.005+12:00

You might have noticed that strange things are going on in my blog. There's a post title where it shouldn't be, and everything of actual interest (ie. the side bar) is at the very bottom of the page. I don't quite know how it happened - a problem with the html, obviously, and since I'm not flash at reading html (ha! get the pun..) this blog will look kind of weird for a while. Probably until big brother comes back from the U.S. and fixes it up for me. Love you much, big brother.
That said, I'll get on to the real stuff..
...
I've been thinking, recently. It's a habit I'm picking up from somewhere - possibly Uni.
.. About the fact that we talk to ourselves. We all talk to other people a fair amount during the course of the day: share a word or two when we bump into a friend (for me, literally) somewhere, or drink tea with our families, or go out for a coffee with someone. It comes naturally.
But all of the time we're talking to ourselves as well. We create commentaries on events that are happening, on the state of our lives, on what we think of other people; we sift through ideas in our brain, deciding with ourselves what is true and what is false. Sometimes we even argue with ourselves - like an internal version of this picture..
Gotta love Dr. Suess..
This doesn't stop when we're talking to other people either. Perhaps, for the brief time that we're actually talking, we're not talking to ourselves much - it's hard for our brains to multi-task on two similar jobs. But we're incessantly thinking about what we're going to say next, or we'll notice to ourselves things about the other person - be reading their expressions to decide what to say.
The way we talk to ourselves is fascinating as well. It's like talking to a really, really, close friend who knows you extremely well. This friend gives us feedback - they know the best times to pity us, encourage us or boost our self-esteem. They usually know just the right times to make us feel more cheerful, yet can also give us insights into our own character and motives - sometimes alarmingly.

I'm not saying that this person is someone other than ourselves of course. I just find it really strange that we can talk to ourselves at all. It seems odd that your mind has all these different voices - who all sound like you, yet tell you different things: persuade, encourage, pity you or debate with you. How can we debate or talk with ourselves?
It would seem to indicate that we have several people residing within ourselves. I don't like entertaining that thought too long though, it's disturbing. Besides, it's not true.

Despite the bizarreness of it, it's an incredibly useful thing to have, this self-talking. Thinking, I believe it's called.
How much would we get done, or how would we ever know what to think about something if we didn't have different voices telling us different ways to think about things in order to weigh up evidence? How would we know what we believe unless different voices could persuade and convince us to believe certain things?
- Lydie

Mirrors

2010-05-23T00:19:00.003+12:00

It's strange to see your own reflection.

Of course, everyone has knowledge of their appearance, even if some seem to be unaware of the concept of a mirror. But when you look at yourself looking at yourself in a mirror - it can have an odd effect on you. You're suddenly seeing what other people see when they look at you - all the little things that other people could judge you by: messy, frizzy hair that sticks up in strange places; buttons askew, spots, freckles, under-eye circles, smudged makeup. There is a realization that people actually see the outside of you, rather than feeling with you all the thoughts and ideas that you have, which you see as making up your identity - all they have to go on is externals.

But more than that, you see yourself as a whole person - the external that covers the internal you.
Sometimes you re-adjust your perceptions of yourself, of your character by looking at the image of yourself. You wonder whether the image reflected back at you embodies your character - if it is true to who you are. Then (if you're like me) you decide that a lot of what you look like is due to your character anyway - that what you do and how you think evolves your appearance. It accounts for little frown lines on the top ridge of your nose, and the curving crease-lines at the corner of your eyes. The slightly watchful, determined or dreamy look that comes from drooping or widened eyelids.

Like the girl in the above photo, you often compare yourself with other people, or with an ideal of female/male beauty/good looks. If the balance lies in your favour, you feel confident; if not, you stay dissatisfied.

Thoughts?

- Lydie

Discipline

2010-05-21T23:48:00.002+12:00

I haven't written for two days. I blame it on my crazy uni schedule of essays due every week for four weeks, but of course it's really my own fault. If I'd been organised, as certain helpful people have pointed out to me, I wouldn't have had to stay up into the wee sma's writing furiously, and I certainly wouldn't have nails that are an inch long.

There are all sorts of good things that result from an organised, disciplined life. For instance, if I slept eight hours every night, I would have a beautiful, glowing complexion and would never suffer from zits. Similarly, if I drank eight glasses of sparkling, clear water each day I would be able to concentrate on my studies better, would never have headaches, and my beautiful, glowing complexion would become more radiant each day.

If I planned to fall asleep at 10:00 pm and woke up at 7:30 am as a natural part of my disciplined, orderly life, I'd soon find that everything that needed to be done in the day would be done efficiently and, most importantly, it would be done. A consequence of this self-discipline would be a complete end to getting to Uni classes late, and would almost certainly entail respect from my classmates.

If I kept my room in a perfect state of equilibrium - with the top of the piano utterly cleared except for a neat stack of hymn books, and with every shelf of books cleared of surplus accessories, if every item that was not desk-related was eliminated from my desk, if there were no hazardous cords tangled on the floor, and if the bunk beds were made up - life would be pleasant and ordered; I would know precisely where each book was on my numbered and categorised bookshelf, and I would never, ever have a problem of spare socks.

If I gave up baking while at Uni and allowed other people to use the kitchen, I would be able to focus exclusively on my studies and I would achieve excellent grades. Similarly, if I didn't allow myself to become weighed down with extra activities other than church bible studies and church sermons, my grade levels would be extraordinarily high.

Life would be a beautiful thing to live if I were able to just have a little self-discipline.

The bizarre connection between wedding dresses and maple fudge

2010-05-18T23:33:00.005+12:00

This evening, my friend Emily and I sat around our dining room table, eating warm maple-and-walnut fudge, and looking at wedding dresses.

The reason for the fudge was that she just got engaged, and fudge seemed to be the thing to make to celebrate. The reason for the wedding dress pursuit is quite obvious.

We cracked walnuts, chopped them up and added them to the hot, swirling, maple-syrupy, caramel fudge mixture. There really is something about making this confectionary. Any food preparation is my thing, naturally - unless I'm being forced to cook lumpy, salty mushroom soup, or some other sort of unpleasant concoction.

And any kind of sweet-making has lovely associations: of the good old days when we'd sell toffee apples outside schools and at Kids' Fests - old-school connections.

Yet fudge means more. It is difficult to analyze my special affinity to fudge, but I'll give it a shot. It's really the making of it that makes me all brooding and dreamy - preparing it is visually stimulating I guess. First, you stick all the components in your mums' sturdy iron pot, and set it on low to slowly melt the sugar granules. Then you turn up the heat to gradually caramelize the mixture - and add to it your salt, maple syrup essence, and/or vanilla.

When you're utterly convinced (and you need to be UTTERLY convinced) that the mixture is at the soft-ball stage, you swiftly take your mums' sturdy iron pot off the element and onto a board, and start to beat the mixture with an extremely vintage hand-beater. The kind that all good citizens of our free country know about and use.

Then, when you're sure that the fudge has lost its gloss, and is fairly thick, you rapidly pour it into your (already buttered and lined) vintage fudge tin, where you spread the soft-grained, matte fudge to all the edges. You quickly place it in your fridge, and get down to the serious, complicated work of licking off every bit of fudge you can from all the (many) bits of equipment you've used.

The relationship that fudge and wedding dresses share is this: what better thing to do when looking at wedding dresses (or whenever, and whatever you're doing, actually) than to eat maple-and-walnut fudge, still firming up and slightly warm?

There is only one, minor problem: one's consumption of fudge could lead to problems of not being able to get into the wedding dress.

- Lydie

Ginger. Crunch.

2010-05-18T00:50:00.008+12:00

It's Gingery. And it Crunches. Hence, the name.

The top layer - of caramel colour and disposition, is a glace icing cooked with golden syrup, butter, ginger and icing sugar. It sets firm after you've poured it onto the...

Bottom layer - golden brown when you take it out of the oven, and soft. After it's had that icing spooned, and spread over it - and after you've left it on the bench for a while to harden, it literally crunches. These two components naturally complement each other, the one being soft, and the other.. crunching.

This simple, unassuming iced biscuit is pretty much a slice out of New Zealand's history. It's quintessentially an Edmonds recipe, and Edmonds is more New Zealand than New Zealand. Its sweet, buttery simplicity is straight from the days when all good citizens of our free country ate simple fare and liked it.

Let's take another, long look at the non-beautiful yet taste bud-inspiring goodness:

And here's a revolution in ginger-crunch making: pictures in icing..
Mmmmm. Yes, please. Here's a recipe for this incredibly taste-bud stimulating, warm, melting, spicy, buttery deliciousness. Go on, make it. You'll get an incredibly unhealthy addiction.

-Lydie

Of theme songs, sounds and smells

2010-05-17T00:07:00.005+12:00

Everyone has a theme song of their lives. What's yours?

Here's mine. It's the one that comes out of me whatever I'm doing - whether I'm scrubbing up the dishes, walking across wet fields in the rain, biking around, or just singing it at the top of my voice in our cul de sac - much to the surprise of our neighbours, no doubt.

This song is integrated with this one.. It's so beautiful, and I love that she's singing about her relationship with God, rather than just another human romance.

On a similar, yet different topic. Everyone has sounds that mean something to them - remind them of home, or are somehow comforting. You must have them. What are they?

For me, it's the popping of the toaster, the little sound the kettle makes as you switch it on, the steaming and rumbling of the kettle as it reaches a boil, the soft, sighing sound a pillow makes when you lie your head down on it, the first drops of rain on the stones on the path outside my room, the rustling of hedgehogs in the leaves outside, the satisfying sound pages make when you turn them to get to the next, gripping page of your book. I could go on. I won't.

Similarly; smells.

Everyone has favourite smells. What are yours? I have two main ones: crackling bacon as it's just beginning to smell delicious, and the hungrifying smell that toast makes when it's starting to burn. But there are others.. when I'm cooking curry, the warm spiciness that just seeps through the entire house, or steaming, fragrant tea, or the dry, aromatic smell of basmati rice, or sniffing an open bottle of vanilla essence (believe me, the smell is amazing if the VE's the real stuff - no chemicals), chocolate brownie when it's cooking, sweet, malty aroma of milo, all hot, with a skin forming and marshmallows plunged in and melting. The sharp-sweet, woodsy, tangy, wild smell of a braeburn when you bite into it.. I could continue, on and on. I won't.

Do tell me what your theme song and favourite sounds and smells are though. :)

- Lydie

Pine Cone

2010-05-15T23:57:00.003+12:00

It's 12:00am, and five minutes ago I didn't have anything to write about. I asked my friend Siminy, who's staying over at the moment, what I should write about; the answer: 'write about that pine cone over there.' Sadly, looks can kill.

The pine cone in question, pointed out to me by Siminy, is a large cone, though not fully opened and raw sienna in colour.
At the moment, it is tilted slightly upwards, resting on a yellow UFO-type gourd, and surrounded by other cones, gourds and curly bean-tree pods. Two environmentally-friendly light bulbs shed light indirectly over the entire arrangement, making the deep recesses of each cone darker, and highlighting the curved tips of each segment.

Curvy and golden, the gourds can be seen between the sharp, conical browns of the cones. The arrangement has been placed in a glazed basket with the lines of smooth, thin willow twisted over each other, disappearing around the edges of what I can see of the arrangement. Warm contrasts of ochre and burnt sienna meld with the pine-green vinyl table cloth, the whole arrangement appealing to the certain inner standard of beauty I have.

These pine cones have fulfilled their purpose in life: They started off young and green and ambitious, then slowly grew, their seeds maturing in the hollows of each of their segments - until finally, the seeds became detachable and the wind took them. Little, pointed oval seeds that had translucent sails, twirling down to the ground. After a while the pine tree would detach the old, de-seeded pine cones from the tree and they would fall, thudding onto a prickly blanket of brown needles.

Their life was over. All was achieved, done. But then, a woman came walking through the pine trees with her daughter, and the two exclaimed over the huge pine cones - lying messily over the grass - and picked them up, filled their arms with them. They drove off to their house, and made them into an arrangement with yellow gourds and bean pods.

- Lydie :)

Thanks, Earl Gray

2010-05-15T02:14:00.003+12:00

Ahh, finally I'm writing. It's a quarter-past-two in the morning, and I've just sent off my essay to be checked by my English lecturer (relief) after rearranging for the millionth time the phrasing, spelling and grammar. And so to write - and after that to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub - for in that sleep of sleeps what dreams may come when I have shuffled off this interminable blog post - will give me pause. There's the tiredness that makes calamity of so long a day.
I better stop there - the fact that I'm writing in the wee sma's is problematic enough without misquoted Shakespeare to boot.
...
About every fifteen minutes in our home, someone or other will request for the kettle to be put on, so that we can have a "nice, hot cup of tea". Humble Earl Gray tea bags have played a central part in our family's long and glorious traditions - nothing says home to me like that demand for tea at all hours of the day.

Tea. It's steamy and has a glowing amber colour when you pour it out of the thick-skinned teapot and into the thin-rimmed tea cups. The smell is slightly bitter, but the softened fragrance of the bergomot (the secret ingredient in EG tea) gives it a comforting smell. As soon as all the tea is sitting in the six cups, trim milk (it has to be trim, because blue milk is both fattening and too milky for tea) is poured in, and the two liquids are stirred. The result is pretty, if you think about it hard enough. The tea stains the milk a warm caramel colour, and as the milk is being mixed through with one of our second-hand silver spoons, it tangles itself in patterns with the tea.

Gingernuts. They were obligatory when it came to drinking tea - back in the old days, that is. In the days when we had morning tea together around the school table, an activity that consisted of cups of tea and gingernuts to be dunked.

Another thing that I connect with tea is visitors. We drink tea with special visitors, because a well-brewed cup of Earl Gray is the polite thing to offer guests, and then to drink in our thick-rimmed flower-splattered tea cups. On such occasions, cake plates of the same flower- splattered variety appear on our green vinyl table cloth, along with cake forks, and a little jug of trim milk. Without fail, there will be cake of some sort, or a slice - arranged just so on a pretty white plate. The visitors are duly impressed, but cover their amazement by saying in diluted tones: "What delicious cake. Did you make it, Michele, or did you buy it?" - then Mum has the well-known experience of saying: "Oh, yes, I did." And the visitors are doubly impressed.
Good conversation ensues when the visitors have demolished the cake and drunk several cups of tea each.

- I have a feeling this post was kind of weird. Blame it on me and the early hours.

The Farm, Part 2

2010-05-13T23:46:00.003+12:00

I was going to continue yesterday's story where I left off, and talk about how we fought our battles in the Wild Woods - but suddenly realized that I've forgotten how we did it. I know we did go off and and make forts, but I can't remember just how we defended them, or the politics and rules of the battles. What I do remember, is the times we went to the Rotten Willows...

Along down the road from the friends' house were the sheds, where the cows and sheep were kept sometimes, all full of stones and mud and dung. The garage was there, too, with old machinery bits and knives and tools hanging up behind the creaky sliding doors. Beyond the sheds was the guest house, where people stayed sometimes when they wanted to come and see the country, and a real farm. It was just a cottage, really, surrounded by hedges and pine trees and sheep and eucalyptuses, and it was little and snug-looking, with a chimney that smoked. Inside it had an old-fashioned kitchen, and a fireplace, a tiny bookshelf of books with bibles and hymn books and Jane Austen, and in all the rooms were springy mattresses. And that was all there was in that house.

Further down the road was a big old hay shed, which had a tractor sitting in it gathering cobwebs. After the children had gone down the windy, stony road they came at last to the Rotten Willows. Between the wires of the fence, the children climbed into the thick grass-and-buttercups paddock which led on to the willows. Beyond the little bit of grass and gorse and buttercups was the wood. It was called the 'Rotten Willows' because there were so many willows in that paddock, and many of them had fallen over, and funguses were spreading on them. Between the big, old willows, some erect and some horizontal, was tall green grass. In some parts of the wood, the trees had fallen over and there were huge craters of earth that had been made, because the trees had uprooted a lot of that soil when they fell over.

Those trees were pretty in the evening sunlight. Falling sunshine sifted through the thin, green leaves of the willows, making them glow and touching the branches' outlines with tracings of gold.
Finally, after trudging through the mud (because the paddock was marshy), slipping on the damp grass, and dodging fallen trees, the children arrived at the hut. It was a beautiful hut, and very different from the forts they had made in the Wild Woods. In those woods, the children had cut down branches and found sticks and gathered armfuls of pine needles to make their forts strong. This hut was made from a tree that had partly fallen over, but left a big part of the trunk in the ground. The most exciting part was that the trunk was completely hollow, and three people could sit inside if they squeezed. The only real problem, the eldest of the eight children decided, was that there was no roof to this hut, and the elements could do their worst. So the older children of the eight agreed, after serious discussion, that they would each go off to fallen trees and find as many strong, large-pieced bits of bark as they could find, and use it to make a roof for the hut.

That was precisely what they did. The younger children discovered that the long green grass would be a nice thing to sit on if it was picked and spread inside the hut, so they went to the greenest, tallest patches of grass that they could find, and started to pick. It didn't take long for the big children to make the roof - they climbed up the tree and made a network of sticks which they wove the pieces of bark into. Those big children were clever, and brave.
As they worked, they directed the younger ones to keep bringing grass, and some of them would spread it out in the hut so that it covered the lumps and bumps and became soft and comfortable to sit on.
When they had all finished they looked at what they had done. It was a beautiful hut, just perfect for sitting in on a hot day.
Then they went home: they crossed the paddock, crept under the fence, walked down the windy road past the tractor and sheds and garage, and climbed up the hill to have dinner in the big old farmhouse.

the Farm

2010-05-12T23:11:00.004+12:00

Once upon a time there were four children. They all had red hair, except the littlest, Nathan, whose hair was coaly black. And they all loved adventures. In their backyard was the biggest willow tree in the world, and Andrew and Simon, the eldest of the four, climbed up it because they were big and brave and they could do things like that. When they got nearly to the top they could see lots of streets and trees and if they climbed right to the very, very top, they could see the police station and the Port Hills. The youngest two thought their elder brothers were very old and brave, and never climbed to the top of the tree but instead they swung on the rope swing that was tied to one of the branches of the tree.

Those four children loved their willow tree, but what they loved even more was going out to the country, and having wars and battles with their four friends who lived on a farm there. It was a long, long way to the farm, and the children were usually whiny at least some of the time when they were driving there with their parents. Their parents' were called Mum and Dad: Dad drove places in his car and was a teacher and Mum cooked nice food in the kitchen and taught the children how to read and do maths.
There were things that they could do to pass the time while Dad was driving. Everyone's favourite game was 'I Spy', and nobody was grumpy when they were playing that game. The most exciting part of the whole trip was five minutes before they arrived, when everyone tried to spot their friends' house-on-the-hill first.
Simon usually won, because he was smart.

As soon as the four children got to the farm, they unpacked the car and took all the big bags to the different rooms in their friends' house. That farmhouse was really big, and it had a huge, narrow hallway with a bookshelf of all sorts of books for old people, and the carpet was all different colours in diamond shapes. Lydia, one of those four children, would try to step only on the insides of the triangles, not on the edges, when she was walking on that carpet. It looked funny when she did it, but Lydia was like that.

As soon as they had unpacked all the things in the car, and had had a glass of juice and a piece of cake in the big kitchen, the eight children started to plan the wars that they would have. Their parents were talking about grown-up stuff in the lounge with the fire on, so the children went outside. First of all, they took the weapons that they would need from the box outside the house, then they walked all the way down the long, curvy driveway which had hedges all the way along it, and across the sheep paddock at the bottom of the road, and into the Wild Woods.

When they were in the Wild Woods, they could see all the pine needles and pine cones and hills and mushrooms, and it was musty and damp-smelling in those woods. Then they divided into sides. Andrew was always the captain of one army, and Matthew (the oldest boy of the four friends) was the captain of the other army. Andrew's army was always the bad army, and Matthew's army was always the good army. But it didn't matter who was bad and who was good, really, because the reason you have wars is so you can fight in them.
...
to be continued? Up to you.

- Lydie

Lonely Dragon

2010-05-11T22:30:00.002+12:00

There's something isolating about being at University. My friend Emily and I were talking about this recently - studying for a degree can entail a kind of loneliness that is similar to solitary confinement.

Biking to, and walking into uni every day is still a strange, semi-isolating experience for me. If I've arrived in time for the lecture, there will be students everywhere, walking down the little paths around the place, talking and laughing with their friends, sitting around drinking coffee, chatting and lounging like they've never heard of the word 'assignment', some of them who you know will be worth millions of dollars some day - faces intent, purposeful, their minds headed in one direction: success. It's strange to be on your own, heading in your own direction - yet not completely feeling that you belong.

There's the fashion aspect. It's unsettling to be surrounded by so many carelessly well-dressed people who wear expensive clothes yet appear to have given their 'look' absolutely no thought. As though they were born into their clothes and accessories, and from that point they've never given it a moment's thought. Their 'style' has morphed from fashion trends and their own taste into something natural - yet unfamiliar. I look down at my own clothes - the ones I gave a moment's thought to before exiting the house that morning: way out of fashion jeans, blue yet fading slightly at the knees, and turned up at the ends - a pro-life top with a "Love Lets Live" message, and a silver cross. I'm sporting a black jacket that hangs loosely over one arm, and am wearing a falling-apart backpack. Although I wouldn't want to be a mirror image of some of these girls, I feel distanced by my set-apartness.

Being at uni means a lot of solitude for most people. I theorize. It's like that for me. I'd say (although I'm a bit of an eccentric) I'm not the only one who feels this creeping loneliness from time to time, merely because of all the solitude that is somehow enforced on us by the nature of what we do.
You do need solitude to think, yet at some point an extended period of solitude can turn into loneliness.. For me, I can be feeling fine with being by myself, studying away on something - then my thoughts turn away from what I'm studying/observations of things - and an awareness of how isolated and alone I am grows on me.

Emily said she'd been having a think about this, and had come up with a theory: that a lot of this loneliness and isolation that we feel is actually based on the selfishness which is ingrained into our student life, and even continued when we are at home. It's a selfishness that builds up when we spend most of our time alone pursuing our own goals - because there is really only one person we need to be concerned and preoccupied with: ourselves. This makes us feel miserable, and that in turn can give us these feelings of loneliness.

Anyway, I'll finish this ridiculously long rant with a quote from Shakespeare's play Coriolanus. Apparently the word 'lonely' was first found here - along with a few other unimportant texts: "Though I go alone, like a lonely dragon..." Act IV Scene 1.
What are your thoughts on loneliness?

- Lydie

Les Mis (erables)

2010-05-10T23:08:00.008+12:00

It's an epic book. I'm using that word 'epic' in an almost - literal sense: the book's gargantuan! It has 1,232 pages (or thereabouts, my copy does anyway), and Hugo doesn't scruple to go off on tangents about Waterloo, King Louis the sixteenth (I think it's the sixteenth), Napoleon, the poor, Paris, sewers and convents. To name only a couple of his fascinating, but long-winded commentaries on social issues and politics.

If you want to grow in forbearance, then this is the book for you.

On the other hand, there are moments when Hugo really achieves great things in his writing. His story line is unique - Jean Valjean is a hero in the stricter sense of the world: his heroism comes from his conversion?/transformation at the beginning, where a higher power triumphs over him, and during the rest of the book he does battle with the remnants of his old life. Through this internal battle, he becomes a more visible hero in regard to saving other people.
I just love him. I'm sure he'd have to be no. 1 or 2 in my list of heroes - the list I haven't made. I'm unsure whether the priest, Bienvenu - that man of excellence who helps Valjean initially should have first place or not. He's the epitome of righteousness - and he makes the book a must-read.

Eponine's the heroine of the story I'd say, over Cosette who I can like but not sympathise much with. Here's Cosette with Marius..

.. and here's a picture from a musical of Les Mis - it's of the 1830 revolt, with the men at the barricade.

And on a bizarre note, here's a crazy picture of Javert (the law-abiding, villainous police officer) and Jean Valjean.. I don't think it was supposed to be weird, but it is. Note the odd expressions and wig..

If you want a good, satisfying, never-ending book to read, Les Mis is the answer. Getting to the end is a big achievement, but it's worth it. Honest.

- Lydie

Stars, and things

2010-05-09T18:12:00.003+12:00

This evening mum pointed out to me the scene outside, from where she was sitting by our lounge window. The trees were rigid charcoal outlines, branches curved upwards, and the fence was the dividing point between black earth and darkening sky. The base-line of the sky was a soft apricot colour which blurred into gray-blue. Extending up over the fence was a network of branches belonging to our baby walnut tree, and through them the first star glinted, luminous - situated halfway between the division of sky-colours.

We looked at the view, mum sitting on the couch, me leaning over the back of it, sinking in some of that completeness of a well-made scene. Then Mum called Dad to come and look.
It's interesting, the way we humans are made to appreciate beauty. Seeing something that seems perfect in intricate beauty satisfies us, as well as challenging our perceptions of beauty.

Because these things of beauty - like the open, pink lily standing erect in the vase across from where I'm typing - are beautiful because they are made up of many complicated parts that are united in making one, beautiful picture.
And while we appreciate, and our souls give a sort of inward sigh of pleasure at seeing something beautiful - (doesn't that sound corny, now?) - we see the different parts that make up the whole.

Just like a bunch of flowers (while I'm on the flower theme). ...Like the bunch that's beside my laptop right now, a present Mum got for Mother's Day, has beauty in each individual flower and in the entire display. I feel like I'm stating the obvious but I'll continue anyway- the florist knew that bright pink gerbras and soft, creamy ranunculuses would not go together, and so she chose the green, white and purple colour scheme. Similarly, I know God, like the florist, has excellent taste in creating both flowers with all their parts, and people, so complicated but (sometimes) nice to look upon, and landscapes/views.
Right. That's me for tonight (whoops, early morning!)

- Lydie

p.s. You anonymous people really are mysterious! Love it!

The Apple

2010-05-08T00:20:00.003+12:00

I had no idea of what to write, so I decided to pick an object to write about. The first thing that came to mind was apples (oddly enough). As in, the random-generator part of my brain chose from the millions of things I could have talked about, and somehow alighted on the subject of the Great Apple.

Apples are great. They actually are. In fact, this relatively humble and common fruit plays a big part of our lives. An apple has many purposes; let me list them.

They are the perfect size to slot into the empty space of our lunchboxes, being a rounded, yet oblong shape.
In Autumn, apple picking is a delightful occupation. I remember back in the good old days when Mum would take the four kids along to the local apple orchard - we would bring along stacks of plastic bags and fill them full of the crisp, juicy things. The trees would have lost almost all their leaves by this time, be piling up and caressing the thin tree trunks. There would be apples on the ground, too, that we would try to avoid: some slushy, some bird-pecked, some seemingly perfect, crimson against the brown leaves.
Taking that first bite into the reddest, bloomiest part of the huge apples was the quintessential part of Autumn-season.

When we got home, the back of the car would have big, knobbly bundles of apples - about thirty bags full, which we'd put in a storage unit we had in the yard, and distribute to our friends.
Oh the joy of cooking with apples.
Apples are so unassuming - they are not luxurious like grapes are, they don't have sophisticated, complex personalities like pomegranates, they aren't ethnically superior like dates and figs, and they aren't posh and grown-up like melons.
No. Apples speak of childhood and melting apple pies with spicy cinnamon and dripping cream, of freezing weather in Christchurch, blue skies, auburn leaves, sparkling apple cider, thick duvets and good books.

Apples really do have a lot going for them. The initial bite is the most important, as every experienced Apple-Lover knows. In that first crunch you realise for better or for worse, what you have gotten yourself into by picking that particular apple. It is the first vampirish bite that reveals the nature of the apple: the thickness of the skin, the tangyness, whether the cells of the apple are pushed firmly together, or if the apple is a bit mushy. The sweetness: whether the apple is redeemingly sweet, and whether or not the tangyness complements the sweetness.
These are important things to reckon with when selecting apples to buy: One ought to have a feel for which apples are suitable and which are unworthy.
Braeburns (as every good Appelite knows full well) are among the best of the lot in the apple world. The tangyness reigns supreme while the sweetness aids in rounding the flavour.

So, are you a fellow lover of apples? Did I convince you? Did this post bring back memories..?

Light

2010-05-06T22:07:00.009+12:00

Radiant. Dazzling. Bright. Sparkling. Twinkling. Gleaming. Illumination. Phosphorescent. Lambent. Lucent. Lustrous. Scintillant. Shining.

I like words that attempt to capture the elusiveness of light. They are all picture words that describe some part of light's character, and they make a slide show of pictures in your mind when you read through them. The painfully dazzling light of the sun as it falls in the evening, a rose petal, translucent, veins dimly seen, light accentuating its outer rim. Or women's hair: the sheen light makes by highlighting each strand, making the colours glow vividly. Swirling water, half-and-half shadow and sharp light. Points of light that twinkle in people's eyes.

I love light. In paintings I've done I've tried to catch the shimmer of light on a leaf or a rose; light creates life in art. It is maddeningly difficult to do though, and I end up worshipping Monet for the way he made light sparkle, giving light a life of its own in his paintings.

Here are some pictures that light gives meaning to..

...Sigh.

- Lydie

Streams of Consciousness

2010-05-05T22:41:00.005+12:00

The truth: I don't know what to write. I'm sitting here, curled up on the top bunk of the bed in my room. It's 1:01 in the morning and I know I've killed the deadline by an hour, but I also know it doesn't matter, so long as I can get something typed on here. So my brain's skimming through possible concepts and blog-unworthy ideas: the possibilities of writing about isolation at uni, the way women view themselves externally, the cobwebby mysteries of Bronte, fashion and why women put themselves through it, whether a woman's beauty is a man's perception or an extrinsic reality, the idiocy of abortion, loneliness, and baking.

Beware: Stream-of-consciousness begins..

It's past one of the clock. My brain (so useful during the day) is of little help to me now. I really ought to have dreamed up something to write about during the day.

Why do people write, anyway? Why does it matter whether you or I or anyone else on the blogosphere, or in the rest of the literary world, bothers to type out a few vague ideas, a couple of poorly-strung together sentences? There are millions of blogs. Billions of minds that feel the need to express what they feel. But then, what would happen if millions of people suddenly lost the need to express themselves in writing?

Perhaps it would result in a suffocation of readers, who need stimuli to create mutations of ideas in their own minds. After you have read something, much of what you are left with is ideas and concepts.

We are intrinsically social creatures - made that way. I suppose that most of our lives are spent in a certain isolation, all those thoughts locked inside our brains. Only a few of them ever gain expression and the rest are stored away in some compartment of our minds, waiting to be expressed or meditated on someday.

There is something about writing that clears your mind and organizes it. Unless you are writing in a stream of consciousness, you are forcing your brain to order information and see each idea clearly. It is the same for reading: when reading something well-structured your mind accepts information more speedily. Speaking is similar, however it is not so necessary to be accurate when speaking: other people can fill in gaps for you of information they know already.

If we didn't write we would lose a part of what it is to be human.

Essential Diary writing

2010-05-05T00:12:00.002+12:00

Writing a diary is my thing. When something 'big' happens in my life I recourse to my diary to write it all down in an ordered and sometimes even clinical, way.

This isn't just a fad. I was looking through some of my diaries last night, trying to find some book review I'd done. I couldn't find the review, but it was fascinating to read what I'd written about my life and the world when I was 12 - 16 years old.

There are these philosophical and political ideas that are just creeping into my writing - at one stage, in my youthful 16 years I wrote:

"It scares me to think that I will become a mindless bolt in the machinery of the state if I don't literally take a stand against my society. We are not animals but they are indoctrinating our new generation that we are a higher level of apes. What frightens me is that by telling our children that they are animals, they are creating animals. Human beings who were never told that they are made in God's image, that were never taught morals...

Their evil plan is working. Already we live our little autonomous lives in our ignorance and stupidity. Someone irritating person said "Ignorance is bliss". The thing is, bliss doesn't matter if there's no grounding of truth behind it. We need to be real men and women and discover the truth, however painful it is."

Somewhere else, on the subject of mind slavery and conspiracy theories I was cooking up about the government's evil plans:

"Another way to get rid of thinkers or at least cut their numbers is to teach the new generation not to think. Because thinking is dangerous. Keep everyone simple, unified, ignorant, and the result will be Government slaves. Just like 100% tax would be slavery, so a deliberately uninformed mind is slavery. It is a pawn in the Government's game of chess." - 30 September 08'

Do you write a diary? Do you find it helps to organise your thoughts and help you to see events and ideas clearly? Do you write to your diary like Anne Frank, or are your posts to yourself?

- Lydie

On Lord of the Rings, Marshmallows and Hot Chocolate

2010-05-03T23:42:00.008+12:00

My brother Nathan and I are reading The Fellowship of the Ring at the moment. Gandalf has just 'died' - fallen into the black abyss of the Mines of Moria with the hideous Belrog. Aragorn has already proved his leadership skills, shouting: "Come! I will lead you now! We must obey his last command. - (which was "Fly, you fools" - Gandalf's gracious parting words) - Follow me!"

The rest of the company are outside the Mines, falling on the ground, weeping and pulling their hair out while the sun shines with obscene brilliance.

We have four days to finish forty pages of the book - wherin, methinks, we shall learn of Lothlorien, the gladsome Galadriel, and her hippy Lord, Celeborn. I dare say we'll hear from Boromir, who up till now has hidden his true feelings of the ring.

Nath and I have a tradition/rite of drinking hot chocolate and devouring marshmallows while reading books by the Great J.R.R. Tolkien.

There isn't anything that one can sip while reading a good book that rivals a steaming mug of cocoa that has marshmallows slowly melting and spreading on top.

Nothing.

Although we've found hot blackcurrant works well if chocolate powder is in limited supply.

And now, the certain somethings you've been waiting to see. Can't have a post on LOTR without including some pictures from the movie..

Here's the ultimate tall, dark, handsome hero: he's also got a sense of humour, natural leadership skills and vast quantities of courage.

As all dark, handsome heroes are apt to do, he doesn't marry the woman he should - the heroic, 'feminist', capable and lovely Eowyn (Miranda Otto in this picture)

Instead he goes for the perfection-of-beauty, Arwen. She's a stunner, but she's also got a very dreamy aura around her that makes me want to shake her back to reality. Aragorn seems to like her though, so I guess the tall, dark, dreamy women have their place.

Here's the tragic protagonist, Frodo Baggins. He's kind of obsessed with the ring, quite similar to Gollom but better looking:

What is it about the Lord of the Rings that you like? Is it chiefly the characters, the story, the vivid imagery, or the concepts? Do you ever read stories aloud to anyone? If you do, do you get into it and try to re-create the different voices?

And one more question: Please guys, I need things to write about. Sometimes I just don't have enough ideas happening, so please fire me some things you'd like me to write about, and I may (or may not!) give it a go! :)

- Lydie

The West's Ageing Population - what can we do about it?

2010-05-02T00:53:00.007+12:00

Every 'advanced' Western society around the world has a common problem: the number of babies being born are increasingly lessening, while the number of people dying outnumber them in these countries.

So what's the problem?

There are many economic issues that this fact causes - one being that because of the scarcity of young people, there will be many more old people who will retire, then need money from their governments. And where does the money come from? From young people who will be taxed harder because they will be supporting a huge number of old people.

Another is that there will be so few young people, making it necessary for immigration laws in these countries to be slacked, as more youthful workers will be needed to pay for the aged. This causes problems too: while population decreases in the countries these immigrants come to, the immigrants themselves are likely to quickly re-populate the country, helping to cause divisions due to religious differences, cultural rights and diminishing the heritage of the new country they live in.

Here are some greatly disturbing facts from Stats NZ:

"The changing age structure of New Zealand’s population is inextricably linked with

a projected decrease in births and a projected increase in deaths. Births exceeded

deaths by about 30,000 in 2005 (June year), but deaths are projected to outnumber

births from the early 2040s."

the stats keep coming:

"The 65+ age group is projected to make up over one-quarter of New Zealand’s

population from the late 2030s"

and this, also chilling:

"The 65+ age group is projected to make up over one-quarter of New Zealand’s

population from the late 2030s, compared with 12 percent in 2005." (find the info here)

BBC News enlightens us to the never-before-seen situation in Italy (the vanguard of birth control and abortion, it would seem..)

"By mid-century there may be one pensioner for every one productive worker in Italy, which begs a simple, devastating question: how on earth is Italy going to maintain its pensions system?"

"...When will Europeans wake up to the implications of consistently low birth rates? Well, in the words of one European professor of population studies, probably not until they are all in their wheelchairs and they suddenly realise there is no one left to push." (read the whole article here)

This part of the article shocked me:

"Demographers calculate that by 2050 the current population of 56 million could have dwindled to 40 million."

I can guess why all this is happening. Can you?

Do you think this trend can be reversed, and if so, how should it be done?

Planned Parenthood Founder: Pro-life?

2010-04-30T23:22:00.012+12:00

Have you heard of Margaret Sanger, the eugenicist who kick-started the Planned Parenthood clinics in the US in the early 20s - 30s? This lady came from a Catholic home, and was one of 11 children. Her mother died through cancer and child bearing, and Margaret helped to look after her brothers and sisters.
Here's a picture. She's not bad looking for someone who wreaked such havoc..

I'll bet the photo's been digitally edited.. No one that evil could look that good.

Basically she gave her life to advocating birth control for the aim of creating a 'pure race'. She was all for reducing population, but more than that, she wanted the next generations of people to be bred from healthy, rather than mutant, genes. Poor people and immigrants she described as "..human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born." in her book Pivot of Civilization. In her own words, she said that the purpose of promoting birth control was to "create a race of thoroughbreds" - (Birth Control Review, Nov. 1921).

Her words have been the basis of a huge movement in eugenics, birth control and abortion.

When reading about her today (on Wiki! Isn't it great?) I found out something that stunned me. As in, I was actually sitting, staring at the university computer screen like a goldfish, with my mouth hanging open most unattractively.

This is the quote I read:

"While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization." (Women and the New Race, 1920)

The second quote I read was even more amazing...

"To each group we explained what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun." (from Marg Sanger's 1938 biography)

A 'disgrace to civilization'! 'Taking life'! Abortion is the 'wrong way'! Our Brave New World has then moved substantially past even Sanger's eugenicist literature and speeches: Every Western society is now killing off their next generations, even though the most basic science screams that abortion is a clever word for murder.

I find it remarkable that a woman who was all for eugenics and birth control, a heroine of pro-abortionists to this day, stopped short of advocating abortion, as she knew what every abortionist knows: abortion ends life.

Tomorrow: discussion on the West's aging population.. (guess why it's aging).

the art of writing

2010-04-29T18:07:00.004+12:00

It's a challenge isn't it. To produce a clever, interesting and well structured piece of writing is a herculean feat for most people, unattainable for many.

Why is it so hard? Our thoughts flow easily, even entertainingly in our own minds, but when it comes to typing them out, more often than not they seem commonplace and flat. When asked to write an essay, minds blank out - the demand for a thoughtful, succinct and structured line of thought seems too much to ask.
So what is the magic formulae? How did Shakespeare pen his dreamy sonatas, or Milton his epic Paradise Lost, or Dickens think up such complicated and fascinating plots, or Hugo write his Gothic Hunchback of Notre Dame? And how does Austen manipulate her texts to flow so well, and sparkle so brilliantly with well-timed wit?
As Austen's heroine, Elizabeth Bennett said, on her skill of piano playing: "I have always supposed it to be my own fault- because I would not take the trouble of practising..."(Ch. 31)

Because that's what good writing is. Each piece, each paragraph and pithy line is usually the result of years of practicing writing, most of which is rubbish. The result is literature that lives on.

Do you like writing? What do like writing about, and do you ever dream of writing a novel one day?

On Felting

2010-04-29T00:14:00.008+12:00

Tonight was felting night at our house. Mum's making gifts to give away. When she gets into a creative mood, the things she produces are quite spectacular..
Have you heard of felting before? It's a craft that consists of rubbing soap and hot water into wool. The wool 'base' has lots of cut out/strips of different coloured wools on it, making a picture, and when the warm soapy mixture is rubbed in, the wool fibers in the pieces meld into the fibers of the base, thus creating a picture that sticks together.

Here are some examples of felting, if you're curious. (Not done by our family!)

You have to love those colours! All it needs is a bit of green.. (green all the way, baby)

Haha! Cool what you can do with a few fibers..

Not quite sure what one would do with this - but it's unique and special in its own way!

Anyway, the artwork that me, Mum and a few friends who were around at our house produced was amazing. We rubbed the wool that was protected by bubble wrap (each plastic bubble is supposed to rub the wool) with the soapy mixture for over half an hour. Our hands had never been cleaner, and probably never will be again.
The picture was set against a creamy wool background, with blue waves and strands of white silk for foam. Among the waves dolphins and whales swam, wrapped in the waves, and overhead were white seagulls.. Ahh, so pretty.

'Woman'

2010-04-27T23:22:00.004+12:00

For my English essay writing class, we're looking at what mechanisms construct gender in our society. I've been thinking a lot about gender, femininity, feminism, and the female because of that..
...

We see them everywhere. Their smiles fake, exaggerated with plastic happiness over a new product. A perfect smile, composed of full lips stretched over straight, flawlessly white teeth (no gaps allowed), sells anything. Shining hair falling in waves over a perfect pair of shoulders, strands gleaming in mock sunlight, a perfect figure, symmetrical in each proportion, eyes that have never laughed, eyelashes so long they sweep the smooth cheeks, hands that touch nothing but moisturising creams.

Her clothes are immaculate, no stains, stray hairs, wrinkles or rips. Nothing is too short or too long on this being: clothes sit perfectly on her figure, accentuating each curve.
This creature has never lived.

Her brand name is 'woman', and she is plastered in advertisements, billboards, magazines, TV, and movies.

'She' is the ideal that will never be realised, as she has never breathed.

..
What do you think about the way women are portrayed in our society? Do you think we have created a dangerous specimen that looks like a woman, but is also an unattainable stereotype that many women strive for, and men fall for?

View

2010-04-26T21:35:00.003+12:00

This is something I wrote last term, while sitting at a desk in the Uni library, looking out at the view. Looking at views invariably takes my mind off the practical and everyday, and plunges me into gynocentrism. Some of it is what I saw, some of it is distorted. Distortion and creativity are synonymous.

...

Sixth floor of the University library. There's a line of us students, sitting on chairs with desks, 70s variety, lined up by the windows. This room is ugly, with its yellow-brown carpet, glaring yellow bookshelves, purple columns and fading yellow window frames. The windows look as though they have never been opened and the long window openers hang dejectedly down, still fastened to their hooks. Paint is peeling from the frames, flakes lie on the ledge, undersides faded yellow, upturned sides white. The glass has splashes of dried-up matter on them - not cleaned, as students are meant to see their books, not their surroundings.

These windows look onto the brown, gray and cream-coloured buildings, oblongs that sit solidly on the concrete bellow, full of windows like eyes and more study spaces for more students. Remnants of old fashion, they are like imprints of another age, so immovable and entrenched, reminders of an ephemeral past.
Now their stained walls and roofs collect dove droppings, and their rooms, bare and spartan as ever, are the subsidiaries of mindless students.

Beyond the buildings is an expanse of trees that stretch out in varying shades of verdure to the gray hills.
Down the long stretch of desks I observe the students working. I feel no connection with them, although I am just like them. A man, black-haired, resting his arms on the desk and reading, serious, inscrutable expression. There is no aura of self-awareness encompassing him, his eyes and his mind are fixed in the realm of the book he reads. Two girls, heads tilted to one side like birds, hair - straightened more than Nature allows for - falling to the other side of their up-turned faces. One girl, sitting apart from the others strikes me as different.

If it were not for her attitude perhaps she would have passed with the rest. Her hands, ordinairy, pink, nail-bitten, rest loosely together on the desk in front of her, her shoulders slightly hunched with knotty tension as she leans back into her chair. A stack of books and papers lie untidily on the desk, as though she pushed them roughly to the side so that she could contemplate the view with slitted, black-fringed eyes.
The slanted, questioning eyebrows, brown, are pulled slightly together - the by-product of puzzling something out, or trying to sift through an idea, perhaps.

The intensity of her gaze - piercing, unblinking - directed beyond the University buildings suggests that her mind is not turning over her studies, in fact it seems more likely that she is exploring metaphysics. And like me, writing this down, her brooding thoughts were implanted by the view.

Of Leaves, the Sky and Skeletons

2010-04-25T23:01:00.007+12:00

When pondering what to write today, I realised that the leaves stewn in a thick blanket throughout Christchurch are blog-worthy.

It's Autumn. The trees, in order to start their budding program for Spring, rid themselves of every toxin they possess by depositing them in their leaves, then discarding them over the ground.
And the result is beautiful.
Today I went with a group of people from our church to visit the old folk at a resthome, and noticed that the trees outside the building had carpeted the vibrant grass with masses of ochre, orange and vermillion leaves.

So I picked some up. The veins had paled, and were made more distinct by the deep crimson of their backdrop, and on one leaf I found golden-yellow highlights, splashed in among the red.

On these trees, the branches were beginning to show through. Autumn is an undressing season: trees everywhere discard their leaves when they are at their most magnificent state, leaving only the trunk and branches, the skeletons of former beauty.

I like these skeletons. On nights when the sun is just leaving, but still touching some objects with golden light and casting others in shadow, the skeletons of trees are at their most eerie. The sky all around them is pale, while they stand out as black outlines, stretching branches like arms into the sky, as though embracing it.

..and another creepy picture of trees:

Tell me, reader, do you also have a love for this season of dramatic beauty? Stand in solidarity with me and explain what you like about it! Please do.

- Lydie

Anzac Day! (Tomorrow)

2010-04-24T15:50:00.019+12:00

Here's the butter and golden syrup, in two identical bowls. No-one would know that they would have such exciting adventures in the next hour.

It's Anzac Day tomorrow, Sunday 25th, so Anzac biscuits are in order. If it wasn't our special commemoration of the day when the Anzac troops landed at Gallipoli, it would be just the right time to make something in the kitchen anyway. It pretty much always is, from my point of view, if not from my mum's.

These biscuits are full of rolled oats, butter, sugar, golden syrup and coconut - pretty much the recipe for happiness-in-a-biscuit. Texture: crispy edges, slightly chewy centre, with the oats and coconut making for a gutsy mouthful. Aesthetic appeal: actually golden-brown, like all the recipes prophecy then don't deliver on - the butter, sugar and golden syrup meld together in the baking stage, caramelising, binding the various ingredients together, and making the cookie spread into perfect circles. The surface of this comparatively thin cookie is flecked with the pale-coloured oats.

I decided to make glutenous and gluten-free cookies.

Water and baking soda added, and the resulting foamy, buttery mixture. Looks awful, doesn't it.

Another picture of the baking soda playing with the butter and golden syrup.

The pouring of the coconut and my thumb. Note the rolled oats in the picture, along with their packet to the left..

Meet Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. When making glutenous and non-glutenous food at the same time, it pays to use different measuring cups and utensils.

Also meet one of my favourite things: Fake Vanilla Essence. Of course I like the real stuff better, with the vanilla seeds and all, but this isn't bad for $2 something. The Pams' variety has a cute picture of a cupcake on it..

Don't be bored at this point. Let me introduce you, if you haven't met each other already, to Xantham/Xanthan Gum.

According to Wiki, "Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide used as a food additive and rheology modifier. It is produced by fermentation of glucose or sucrose by the Xanthomonas campestris bacterium."

Yep, I don't understand that explanation much either. Sounds like a kind of yeast though - basically sugar fermented by a special kind of bacterium. Lovely. It's brilliant - works like the Gluten Monster does, just not quite as well. Anyway, I added some of this to the g-free mixture, to give the cookies the right texture.

The unbaked cookies. Again, the tray to the left is free of Gluten, the one to the right is full of it.

The gluten-freebz were looking so delicious - everything that an Anzac biscuit should look. Then, disaster struck, a not irregular occurence when I am let loose in the kitchen.

I took the cookies out of the oven, and tried to put them on the bench, on a wire rack. Then Tragedy! Somehow the tray managed to slide off and fall Splat onto the ground, face down, smushing all my adorable, golden-brown cookies into our cork floor. After emitting a piercing shriek, I knelt on the floor and wept inwardly.

As I sat, I debated whether or not to take a picture: in fact, whether to puncture my pride and show a picture of them all crumbled, on this blog or pretend it didn't happen. The above picture demonstrates the result of the debate and of the fall.

Here are the finished products. Please do make some for Anzac day, whatever your gender, dear Reader.

Make them for your family, they'll love you to bits. Also follow the New Zealand tradition, eat them drowned in a steaming cup of Earl Gray tea, or if you are not so uncivil, seperately, with fine China tea cups.

100 Days Of Blogging

2010-04-24T11:41:00.003+12:00

Yes, you read correctly. I, the author of this erratic, unpredictable, inconsistent, fitful and intermittent blog, have decided to give myself a challenge: to write something on here every day for 100 days.

In this way, I'll be working on being more creative. The people who like some kind of regularity and consistency in their lives will rejoice on the un-erratic nature of the blog, if not on the (in all likelihood) erratic nature of its content.

I'm not swearing to anything, even though this occasion seems to beg a solemn promise from me that I will write on here without missing a single day.

I'm going to give it a shot though.

The Mish..

2010-04-19T13:16:00.013+12:00

Part 1

My blogging friend Theresa, from gisforgluten and I drove out about a week ago to Piko, an old curiosity shop. Apart from being an old-fashioned, red-bricked building with a sign that has an outré picture of a pumpkin on it, this cosy, out-of-the-way barn has hidden treasure. Walking in was like entering gluten-free paradise; the shelves that filled up every square inch of wall were packed with every kind of organic flour, spice, chemical additive, grain, fruit, tea and cereal known to man.

It was just the kind of shop that you could stay in for hours, meditating on flours like Amaranth, millet and sorghum, agonising over xanthan vs. guar gum and pondering the merits of rice flakes and chestnut powder.

We didn't stay for hours - closer to 1/2 to 3/4 of an hour, but it was enough. By the time we'd left, I was lugging a huge box full of various flours, organic cupcake cups, xanthan, guar gum and cereal. The next part of the mish was to go to my place and try to create something edible from the flours we'd bought.

Part 2

Theresa and I love cooking, so naturally we talk about it a lot: ideas for new, revolutionary g-free recipes, ways to create lighter-textured baking, and the results of what we make. Actually eating food is fantastic, but scheming, collaborating and creating food is where the pursuit of happiness ends. Pretty much.

When we got to my house, we'd already decided to make pasta: organic, whole-grain flour, eggy pasta, with Italian tomato and herb sauce.

Here's the pictures of what we came up with:

..An action shot of the dough. It was so stretchy and sticking-together-ish. Just beautiful.

The strips of dough - tagliatelle? Before they were cooked..

Here's the 'Italian' pasta sauce - good mix of caramelised onions, chopped tomatoes and paste, some Italian herbs, spices and sausages, and a good dash of balsamic vinegar.

..The cooked pasta. We weren't too sure how long to cook it, but it turned out okay in the end!

End result..
..the melted cheese and basil enhanced the flavour and appeal of the pasta.
It was so, so good. Here's a recipe for pasta, from Recipezarre. By the way, the speckled appearance of our pasta is due to our using different types of whole-grain flours (because they're good for you!). You can have a go substituting brown rice flour, amaranth and sorghum in small quantities instead of just using tapioca, cornflour etc.

Happy cooking!

Of Interest

2010-04-03T22:04:00.004+13:00

The posts on this blog have been quite un-tranquil lately. Not lately, actually - there haven't been any posts at all from me for a long while!

I won't thank you for your patience, since I'm sure you all lost patience a long time ago. Understandably.

Interesting things are happening in my life. Due to my negligence, I daresay my crowd of readers are quite uninterested. But I'm more than happy to monologue away...

I'm a real, honest-to-goodness University of Canterbury student now! I'm doing an arts degree in political science. This semester I'm doing a history paper on Revolutions, one on writing Academic Essays (to brush up my skills from Correspondence, and *hopefully* get better marks) and a Public Policy paper.

It's amazing to be paying to study. I really enjoy it - you can learn everything you want to, study as hard as you like, soak in the Uni atmosphere, catch up with friends around campus, and sit under huge old trees to study.. so good. Do you guys enjoy studying, or is it a bothersome nuisance to you? I'm curious.

I appreciate (while I'm listing the good things about Uni) the fact that when you're paying for your own tuition you have to force yourself to work hard. I like the challenge of handing in an assignment on time; all the components of the work that you have to think through yourself and present in a coherent, logical way.

I feel Pollyanna-ish.

While I'm noting things about me that might, or might not catch your interest, here's one that is big in my life right now: I went gluten-free a couple of months ago.

Please feel free to shed a sympathetic tear at this juncture.

It's actually not all that bad surprisingly. A Gluten-Freeite does have to forgo those amazing sandwiches that have their filling encased between thick layers of light, springy-textured, seed-embedded bread. Squiggles, Tim-Tams, normal cereal, most lollies, most sausages, most pasta - these things are dead to the person who is a G-Freeite.

But there is hope, due to one's cooking and baking abilities. Really, all you need is a few basic culinary skills, a bit of initiative, a bit of innovation - and you'll be able to adapt normal recipes into g-free ones. Being G-Free doesn't really limit what you can cook/bake - it just makes cooking or baking a little more difficult.
As I write, there is a large tray of Easter Egg slice cooling on the kitchen bench - I made up a recipe for a base, created some marshmallow mixture, poured it in and smoothed it over, waited for it to set then spooned melted dark chocolate over.

It's an interesting life, all up.

Part 2 of Runaway

2010-01-05T14:37:00.003+13:00

The runaway suddenly sat down, on a flat rock that perched precariously from the hill side. Raising his eyes he contemplated the city, quiet from this position halfway up the hill, but hectic with noise and meaningless bustle in its bowels. It spread out, just grasping the base of the hills then coating the massive plain with people and animals and machines and toys and rugby and malls and bowling alleys and abortion mills and always people. Growing and expanding it would fill up more of the earth, making 'developments' as new generations were born into bubbles one inch wide and half a centimeter thick.

The runaway wept. Salty droplets sliding down the rough skin and with a minute splash, landing on the edge of the Swandri collar. Exploding slowly from each hydrogen bond that made the surface of each drop so smooth and seeping into the heavy material. It was unashamed. Also helpless. The runaway had realised not long ago that people had become idiots, and first he had realised that he was an idiot.

They believed everything they were told, just like he had, every contradictory 'fact', so quickly losing the ability to think, and glad to lose it. They had been told they loved the lives they lived and they believed it: now they lived exclusively for their own amusement - self-perpetuating, mind-sickening material - and did love the way they were living.

They would never come to accept the truth now because the truth was the enemy of thier TV and heat 'n' eat meals and play stations and nintendo wii's and Facebook and sport.

Standing up, the man could view the sea, stretching out endless, it seemed. But across the glistening blue there were billions starving, being sold into slavery, trafficked for drugs or sex.

And there were millions of people who were all clones and who all looked like the people in this spreading city.

Part 1 of Runaway

2010-01-04T18:17:00.012+13:00

The man left. Four walls and a thousand objects can drown some people. This person wasn't thirsty, so he had to run away.

But he realised, as he ran, that he was still trapped. It was like some steel vice that he was being squeezed in, and the faster he sprinted, the quicker the questions and the stares would come, the faster death would come, the biggest, most obvious trap.

This man had shoulders that were strong, full of power. His thick, well-used Swandri reached to the bottom of the knees of his trousers, ripped and hanging loose. The shoes were actually leather, a substance used perhaps a hundred years ago, before a better and synthetic material was created. The rain drops falling from the leaden sky fell straight off them as he ran, the man had rubbed grease into them. No hat. He had very short hair, a stubbly chin. His features angular, eyes long and narrow, cheek bones making two sharp lines vertically. Hands clenched, one clutching the broken end of the back pack he wore, the other making up for this inconvenience by slicing the air with the rhythmic balance of running.

The scenery changed drastically as he ran steadily. Sodden parks with floating bark and swings, a skating rink, the black, sealed entrance glistening with dancing rain. A couple of skate parks and movie theaters, houses, cafes, shops. The man kept running past the scenery. His expression was set immovable, he breathed through his nose and his cheeks were flushed and wet.

Suddenly, he came to a stop and looked around him. Everything he could see was untouched by the machines, hideous instruments used to level everything, make everything useful, develop the city. Not here. The vivid paddocks soaked with water were surrounded by gorse sprinkled with yellow splashes. A hawk sailed lazily, gracefully in the sky, wings rough-tipped against the blue. Sheep ate grass slowly, wind tugging the coarse, creamy wool, driving the new-borns under their mothers, to drink. Behind them all, like the back drop of a play were the hills, firm, solid. Impossible that they could disappear.

The man took it all in one, gasping breath, then almost convulsively he turned to look at the city behind him.

'There's never any escape,' the runaway thought to himself, musing on the city behind and the country around him.

'You remain trapped, whether you realise it or not, in a cycle that always persists. You can't even stay a convict because you remain a life-force of the society you lived in. You still think the same way, the thoughts are still there, dammit, those same ones they taught you. Offered them to you to learn, you taught yourself really, the newspaper and the endless books, some of them, and Disney Princess movie propaganda and happily ever after, because everyone believes that lie, and period dramas, and ice-cold water and Facebook and Myspace and Bebo and emails and blogs and TV and fashion and love and war and sex and models and celebrity gossip and Christmas and politics and global warming and swine flu and you kept taking it, drugged and addicted.

And then, if you still can, you realise what's happening and you run away. But to where? People will live on Mars someday but not until they can bring the 'necessities' with them. When you stop running there will be people there, and if they aren't there yet they'll be there soon. People who drug themselves. With hands outstretched, they keep taking those drugs from their society, and inject themselves ecstatically.

The cycle never stops, the man decided bitterly. It never will because when addicted, the people become less and less concerned with how the world really is and more concerned in having a party this Friday. And watching the rugby this Saturday. And cleaning the car on Sunday. And dealing with that difficult customer on Monday. Society screaming at us all that 'this matters!' and ourselves injecting it with a hypodermic needle. After awhile it matters, life is worth living for in some vague, unexplored way. 'The meaning of life', that old, misused cliche, has been explained to the thirsty nation and they are drunk with it.

School Is Over! (forever)

2009-12-02T21:55:00.013+13:00

I have finished.

No more writing assignments, researching Mary Queen of Scots and her rebellions, phoning teachers, sending work away in the same old green bags, feeling pressured, learning interesting and random facts, studying hard out for practice exams and end of year exams. As the Raven so succinctly put it: 'Nevermore'.

So. Now I have to decide what to do with myself next year... Ideas?

Would-Be Murderers Receive Funding

2009-11-30T19:35:00.008+13:00

The would-be murderers are the 30 Family Planning clinics placed strategically around New Zealand, who have recently stated that they intend to apply to the Abortion Supervisory Committee to be given a license to commit feticide in each of their 'sexual health' clinics. Family Planning promotes 'safe sex' to young children, and is the biggest abortion referral organisation in New Zealand.

As seen above, there have been protests throughout the country to protest FPNZ's stated aim.

The funding they've received has come from Telecom for several years.

Here's what Right To Life NZ has to say about Family Planning, in their latest press release on this ground-breaking discovery:

"The Association is the major abortion referral agency in New Zealand; it believes that we need abortion as a back up for so called failed contraceptives. It supports girls under the age of 16 being able to have an abortion without the knowledge or consent of parents..

So. If you or I have been using Telecom as our service provider for the last few years/currently, we are directly sponsoring Family Planning who are being given $50,000 grants each year.

It's possible to stop this though: we can boycott Telecom - switch services to give Telecom a shock to its system, and stop being a part of a death scheme. What do you think?

...

thanks to Right To Life NZ for the use of their press release here.

Fudge, Glorious Fudge

2009-11-19T21:59:00.003+13:00

Fudge is exciting. Its caramelly flavour, crystallised and grainy texture, sometimes studded with nuts and swirled with dark chocolate - these things convince me that fudge is the quintessence of an old-time sweet.

One does not quickly tire of this smooth and visually stimulating candy: despite its almost indecent calorie-laden sugariness, it is possible to eat at least four pieces at one time - or a whole tray full, if you are of the male sex.
When I wrote the above few sentences a couple of months ago, I was feeling victorious after making a big dish of thick, smooth and just-the-right-firmness fudge without gloopiness, and without the hard, over-cooked texture commonly found in fudge trials.

It was maple and walnut. One triumphant tasting of fudge later I was writing the above lines, about to (modestly and understatedly) praise my brilliant culinary skills.

The success of the fudge made me heady: such a triumph over one of my Achilles' heels was worthy of a good glass of champagne.

Sadly, I didn't complete the post. You didn't get to hear the ravings of a girl in a fudge-mood.

Tonight I was waylaid by some Alison Holst books. (Beware of such an occurrence when you have been industriously studying all day. The sudden desire to make old fashioned sweets comes upon you more suddenly at such times, and you will be powerless to do anything other than obey your sweet instincts.)

I turned to the ginger fudge page. There it was, an old-school picture of creamy ginger fudge, sprinkled with walnuts and placed appetisingly in a little black box with tissue paper around it. Oh, so good. Seeing the picture was the point of no return.

Quickly, (before Mum could get back home and stop me in my illegal proceedings) I placed the butter, sugar and milk in the microwave-safe bowl, then pressed instant start on the microwave. And kept pressing the button and stirring the gloop and testing the sugary liquid in the bowl-of-cold-water-testing-solution.

I believed in myself.
The mixture was bubbling and becoming golden, then caramel-brown.

Finally, my instincts told me the toffee was ready, the fudge-making could begin. Engrossed in the mesmerising fudge process, I measured maple essence and a little salt into the mixture, then took the hand beater and began to beat.

After a minute I felt something was rotten in the state of the fudge proceedings - the mixture was becoming grainy. Then grainier.

It became at length so grainy that it was somewhat pointless to beat the resisting globules anymore.

Hastily, I grabbed the fudge tin, sprayed it and spread the hardening material inside it.

But it was too late: the fudge was overcooked.

My splendid visions of glorious, creamy fudge were gone. I had thought my fudge-making skills were invincible - that I knew the meaning of the mystery to true fudge production.

Now I knew the truth: happiness in fudge-making is entirely a matter of chance. There will always be vexations, and disappointments, but it is better to know as little about the trials of fudge-making before you start.

Do you guys have some tales of fudge making? Do you find fudge difficult to make - or at least, difficult to get right - or do you find it a breeze? And if so, could you please share your recipe? :)

Family Planning Assn. Seeking to Commit Own Abortions

2009-11-01T21:31:00.007+13:00

You guys heard of the new debate around Mifepristone? Otherwise known as RU486, the name they gave it in its testing stage - this drug is an abortafacient in pill form, created to kill unborn babies up to nine weeks old.
This drug is good news for women who don't want to have surgery to 'terminate their pregnancy'. It's as easy as getting a couple of government-subsidised pills, drinking them down and waiting for the side effects. Nearly all women who take mifepristone experience abdominal pain, vaginal bleeding and/or uterine cramping. Other side effects include nausea, vomiting, dizziness and/or fever, and possible (but rare) death - rare for the mother, that is.

The first dose of Mifepristone blocks progesterone, a chemical that helps build up the uterus for the baby, giving it the nutrients it needs to survive. Starvation.

Then, a drug called misoprostol is taken to start contractions, and the baby is born - dead.

This abortaficient is being used increasingly around the world as a safe and easy abortion method. Here in New Zealand, our top 'sexual health' advocates, Family Planning, are vying to get the right to commit abortions using this drug. FP has 17 clinics around New Zealand, a friendly website and a clean image. At the moment they're starting with the FP clinic in Hamilton, as a kind of incubator for their idea. If the Government allows them to use this drug, our country's abortion statistics will grow gargantuan.

When all one has to do to get rid of a mistake is swallow a couple of pills, the life-death question becomes sidelined.

Welcome to our Brave New World.

There are things that people with conviction (John the Savage-ites) can do about this debate: Join us in our protest here in Christchurch.

See you there.

Twilight.

2009-10-04T22:39:00.007+13:00

I watched it, finally.

Because I didn't set my hopes very high, I wasn't disappointed.

I guess, because there had been such a big song and dance about 'Twilight' and since I'd heard teenage girls saying things like: 'Oooh, Edward!', 'Oh my gosh, Edward.', and seen pictures of a pale-faced guy hovering over a fairly normal-looking school girl, I was ready for an emotionally-charged movie full of smoldering guys and drooling girls - not my cup of tea, to say the least.

And for anyone who may want to challenge me on my liking for period dramas - with particular reference, if you're being specific, to North & South and Pride & Prejudice - it's an insult to those movies to compare them with Twilight.

Because it's really late (11:10pm to be exact) I'll bullet point my thoughts on Twi.

1. Isabella Swann/Bella has: A poorly-formed character. There is little getting-to-know-the-heroine time. As a concession to a character, Meyers made her clumsy, anti-social and humourless.

What you see of her character is almost always in the context of conversations (or sneaky glances) between her and Edward, the pale, jaw-jutting hero. Through these stilted conversations, Bella shows her obsessive traits. For example, she's not content to leave Edward alone - but stresses over whether he's at school or not, and when he's at school she's always.. staring at him. Eugh. Not only this, but she goes full speed into a relationship with a vampire - don't try this at home, kids. She doesn't seem to care about the consequences, the danger or the morals of the issue.. one wonders whether she has even thought about these things.

2. Edward Cullen. His chief characteristics are: following Bella around to tell her to stay away from him/declaring that they should never be friends, glittering in the sunlight (bizarre, but a wise alternative to becoming ashes) changing eye-colour (I found the golden-brown eye contacts Pattison wore alarming), crawling up trees with Bella and saving her from perilous situations. Very similar to kids stories where the hero always turns up at the right time to save the Damsel In Distress (see Snip for more info.) Oh, and did I mention he's a vampire?

3. Edward's problem. He's a vampire, he's in love with Bella, and he most desperately wishes to DHB. (Drink Her Blood). Since he cannot both love Bells and DHB as well, he has to abstain.

(Abstinence 101)

The other thing he's got to cope with is that Bella most un-Victorian-ly throws herself at him.

Fortunately for him, he's from an age when pre-marital relations were totally unacceptable. He is faced with one of two options therefore: stay with Bella and eventually kill her - or leave her. No third option because Bella, completely unable to do without him and unconcerned by the danger, won't leave him.

Right. On to a couple of the things I felt were wrong in this movie.

1a - This movie is exactly the kind of thing that all teenage girls and boys should be kept away from. My reasons:

This move apparently upholds 'abstinence'. However, Bella's obsessiveness in this relationship, the overtly sensual tone of the whole movie, and the very fact that 'abstinence' is so strongly shoved into what could have been an innocent friendship makes this movie very R18. In fact, I would prefer that no one watch this.

Bella surrenders her mind to Edward - she may have started out with a poor character, but by the time the movie's over she has nothing, she just wants to spend the rest of eternity with him, being eternally damned.. She has no control over her emotions. Because of this she lets them lead her to do all sorts of stupid things.

What a great message that's sending to kids desperate to get into the boyfriend-girlfriend thing.

One of my biggest problems with this movie is the blurring between good and evil. Edward is portrayed as being a 'good vampire' - an alarming concept since traditionally vampires are those living dead (zombies?) that are eternally damned.

But here's Edward - and how could anyone so handsome be wicked?

It's really important I think to have clear lines between good and bad in stories. Once you start getting 'good vampires' and 'bad vampires' in stories, a message is going out to impressionable teenage minds that there is good occult and bad occult. For instance, seeing the future, reading people's minds and being eternally damned is okay, if you're a 'vegetarian vampire' (haha, whatever next? In the next movie, New Moon, will there be vegan and fruitarian vampires?).

I don't think it's wise to mix good and bad in that way. Anyone agree/disagree?

Summertime

2009-09-22T16:21:00.007+12:00

There was a most un-tranquil storm today. It was so exciting that I felt compelled to grab my diary and write about it. Seeing and hearing a storm is like having a tantrum - except someone else is doing it for you, and you can sit there and agree, silently.

....

IT happened quickly, this change. Ten minutes ago there was a vast sky that stretched out, on and on with no clouds. The blue shone, the sun brightened everything and bathed the earth in warmth. Curling leaves on the hydrangea bushes radiated a golden glow and the azure above them spoke of possibility. Music coming from the piano danced with the sunlight around the little room, in tune with the day.

Then a shadow fell across the book sitting open on the piano stand. Suddenly the warm light left the room, disappeared. An inky cloud that had amassed from the north suffocated the sun and swelled, spreading outwards. A smoky gray blanket draped itself over the azure brilliance - and spat. Wet splotches were first visible on the neighbour's roof, like polka dots, black splashes on the sloping lines. White pellets fell among the droplets, bouncing on the hydrangea leaves then finding a place on the gravel path. A roar shook the sky, starting with a low, ominous growl then becoming more angry, dropping bigger specks of white that started to crash on the resisting aluminum.

Too soon it was over. A cloud, dazzlingly white against it's contrasting backdrop, moved cautiously across the dark sky. The light caught on the leaves and in the room, defining shapes with a hard brilliance.

....

Anyone else out there with a thing for storms?

Blossom

2009-09-15T22:59:00.001+12:00

Here's a poem my brother Andy wrote - thought it was so good more people should read it :)

Blossom

half-past midnight; it's dark out here,
blossom petals floating through the air -
defy gravity, time and space;
the warm breeze blowing against your face

dewy grass, my jandals slippery,
holding hands, we walk very quickly.
stars come out in a cloudy sky,
the moon is shining for you and I

forever young I want to be,
walking forever; just you and me.
we need no sleep, we'll talk all night,
thinking out loud til' the sun is bright

we speak of doubt; uncertainty,
and if what's happening is meant to be
we can talk our problems away -
and everything's gonna be ok.

you've got to go, i understand,
things never happen the way we'd planned
lifting my head I see again,
blossom petals floating down like rain

The character of a blog and the analysis of a villain

2009-08-06T18:13:00.005+12:00

I've just realised something: I glanced at the header for my blog just now, the pretty picture of the bee and the apple blossom, and asked myself why I have that picture as the header for my blog. I like it for what it's worth, but the header of someone's blog ought to convey their character.

A cute wee bee sitting on an apple blossom spray does not convey my character, or the character of my blog at all. Now I'm wondering why I didn't think of this before, now that I've had that picture sitting there for about a year.. I'll have to get my brother to sort it out for me, see if we can find a picture that is suited to most tranquil.

Anyway, here's an essay I've just finished, for English. It's on the play Othello (yep, I'm obsessed) and it focuses on Iago. It was difficult to write because Iago is an incredibly complex individual who has a split personality (very Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde) and it was hard to cut down my ramblings to 500 words. This version is the pre - 500 words massacre.

Activity 11 A

Topic: The play Othello should really be called 'Iago'

There is some debate over the name given to the play Othello which is arguably the greatest of the four tragedies that Shakespeare wrote. This argument centers around the two main characters of the play: the tragic hero Othello, and the devilish villain Iago. Shakespeare's main villain has greater character development, power used for manipulation and knowledge of every situation than the other characters within the play, therefore the play 'Othello' would have been better named 'Iago'.

Iago is a fascinating villain. His character is explored and developed to a greater extent than most of the other characters within the play, including Othello and Desdemona, the hero and heroine. It is difficult to understand who the real Iago is, as he has a split personality. One side is all honesty, love and caring while the other is a deep abyss of vengeance, hatred and scheming. Often however, these two sides merge and he shows his true character when he is giving someone advice, for instance when he says to Othello, "Do it not with poison. Strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated." (Act 4, Scene 1, Lines 206-207). Here Iago has no other reason for Desdemona to die by strangulation other than that he is driven by a sadistic nature, part of the darker side that he usually conceals. Othello, on the other hand, has a comparatively shallow character that lacks the intricacy and depth of Iago's more complex psyche.

Because Iago presents an honest and caring front to the other characters in the play, he possesses great power that he uses to devastating effect. He holds this power because everyone believes him to be what he pretends to be and confides in him, and Iago takes their trust and uses it for his own evil purposes. In this way he could be compared to the puppet master of a puppet theatre, pulling the strings of each 'puppet' character in the play, and orchestrating each disastrous event. An interesting aspect of Iago's manipulation is that he uses reverse psychology when giving advice to characters within the play. In his early insinuations to Othello of Desdemona's unfaithfulness, Iago says: "I am to pray you not to strain my speech to grosser issues, nor to larger reach than to suspicion." He uses this devious device throughout the play, with terrible consequences as each of his victims falls for his 'honest' farce.

The reason for Iago's success in controlling and manipulating the other characters in the play is that he has a comprehensive knowledge of each situation, and of the various foibles of his victims. In one of his soliloquies, he says of Othello: "The Moor is of a free and open nature that thinks men honest that but seem to be so; and will as tenderly be led by th' nose as asses are." This saying turned out to be prophetic, as Othello, who had complete trust in him, believed everything that Iago insinuated about his wife. Iago continually seeks to find information that will aid him in his schemes to achieve a higher rank and take revenge on those people who prevented him from attaining it in the first place. Contrastingly, Othello is a pawn in Iago's chess game, never knowing that he is being used, or that his trust in his 'honest friend' Iago is misplaced until he has killed his wife and destroyed his own chance of happiness.

For these reasons, the play Othello would have been better named 'Iago'. The villain Iago presents his audience with both a captivating and a deadly character, a clever, manipulative power, and a comprehensive knowledge of his victims and of each situation. The psychopath Iago is the driving force behind this play, and he deserves to have his own, tragically engineered story named after him.