Consumerism and Cartoon Aliens

I need a thing. Something to go on. A jumping off point. A point from which I can initiate a tangent stream of nothing-much-in-particular and sprinkle bits of observation throughout. So I'll start with my day. Today during the corporate law lecture I drew this.

It's an alien.

The problem with that lecture is that it goes for two hours, and the problem with anything which goes for that long is that it has to contend with the tiny attention spans of the younger generation. Us with our fast internet connection and all those colourful advertisements tempting us, beckoning us here, there and all over the place so brightly and loudly we find ourselves trying to do everything at once and so we have to ration our attention into tiny portions per thing. We live in a world where everything is a mouse-click away. Now we feel like nothing is really deserving of our time. Everything has to make an appointment to see us and at the end of its five minutes it gets shoved aside to make way for the next thing. There's simply no room for something like a two hour lecture. That's how I see it, anyway. I'm sure everyone drifts off into dreamland before they can stop themselves or draws pictures of whatever the heck that is. I'm going to turn it into a comic strip. In the first one he (I've decided its male) works in an office. Shenanigans ensue when he eats his co-worker's last bagle and has to explain himself. Ha! What a knee-slapper! Also he'll wear a tie and the boss will always complain about the puddles of goo he leaves wherever he goes, and he can be like "don't look at me. I'm an alien!" Ahh, hilarious...

I'll get back to you when I'm on the front page of every newspaper.

On being the next Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton (if they lost their hands in an accident)

I finished work early today which is fantastic. That gives me more time to do homework (couln't type that with a straight face at all) and put up a post. I've been finishing at 6.30 on Tuesdays for so long that at first I thought I'd made a mistake when I walked out at 3. But that's okay, no one would notice. Fast food employees are a dime a dozen. Literally.

So here I am. What's a topic? How about playing guitar? Because music is always interesting and I've got plenty of anecdotes to draw on from the time I played on stage with Joe Satriani to the time I was in the Beatles to the time I went around teaching metal bands how to play pinch harmonics. Actually to be honest those things didn't really happen. I took lessons at this place in Box Hill for about three years before I quit so I could focus on VCE. My teacher was pretty good. Actually he was REALLY good. He was like Yngwie Malmsteem if Yngwie Malmsteem was good at guitar. And I feel lucky that the lessons were only thirty bucks because I'm sure there are loads of worse music teachers out there who charge more cough cough violin teachers cough cough.

Excuse me.

Anyway I got good enough that I could jam along to Dire Straits songs and Sweet Home Alabama and restring a guitar or adjust the truss rod. But I can't shred or pick a melody with my teeth or anything like that. If you want to see that then go to Japan, where I'm sure every child's first toy is either a musical instrument or a katana. But I'm pretty good. Good enough that I've already put the guitar down to go and pick up a new hobby. Now I'm searching the darkest realms of the internet for a course on Telepathy 101.

:) :( XD

I'm boycotting punctuation in this post because I feel like it so if that makes this difficult to read it's not my problem you'll just have to work around it or if you want you can read something else like a book with full stops and commas and colons and other little symbols used to indicate various types of breaks in the text because that would be more conventional today I went to uni and it was boring I felt like sleeping I also considered changing my chiropracter appointment around because I couldn't remember whether it was at 12.30 or 2.30 and I have a class from 12 to 1 and they told me it was on Wednesday I chalk that one up to Mondayitis or maybe I could dye my hair blonde and call it a blonde moment because it certainly was retarded I went and saw Evanescence at the Rod Laver Arena on Saturday night and boy was it loud the sound hit me in the face like a brick when we walked in but I got used to it and they were very good Amy Lee's voice cracked in places but I guess that's to be expected when you belt gothic rock for a living they finished ten minutes early which annoyed me because they could easily have filled that time with two more songs I don't care if I have to get up early for work the next day I payed a hundred bucks for that ticket you should keep me entertained well into the night but at the end of the day it was awesome there were guys outside at the end selling fake T shirts for ten bucks and for some reason every time I leave a show or a music festival there is an army of buskers waiting outside as if we want to listen to you bash a rubbish bin with a stick after watching the Foo Fighters Nero CSS Evanescence Tenacious D Reggie Watts LCD Soundsystem Naked and Famous and other good acts I've seen live you'd think they would go home or if they don't have one find a back alley and some newspaper and call it a day but surprisingly there are good people out there willing to toss them whatever change they have left that didn't go towards ridiculously expensive beer and hot chips so good on them I guess I just assumed everyone was grumpy like me anyway when I was walking home that night this guy started talking to me and I thought shit it's a serial killer but he turned out to be okay and he said he went to Xavier so he's probably burned a school bag or two but apart from that I'm relieved I didn't get raped and that I had someone to talk to on my way home my suburb is pretty safe good for walking home at night so anyway in case you're about to get all technical on me apostrophes don't count as punctuation at least in the sense that they provide breaks in the sentence so that's okay I can use them this is what I'm thinking of doing for Lent you can't read this out loud as it's written you would suffocate punctuation is a protective measure in that sense because it tells you where you can breathe but it's not like anyone uses it on the internet Youtube comments are full of incoherent rambling most Facebook status updates can be summarised as omg big night so hungover rofl lol XD or cbf going to work fml rarely do you see someone who structures everything they put up on the world wide web like they plan to take it to a publishing house that's all the end

The Daily Life of Niall the Aussie

Usually, after I put up a post, I sit back in my evil swivel chair with a Persian cat on my lap, watching the views skyrocket on a giant IMAX-size screen with my blog's stats on it. I tend to feel like a diabolical genius in this situation but because said cat is recovering from an operation and looks like a chunk of road kill someone Frankensteined back together - crudely - the illusion is kind of ruined. I have noticed a lot of views coming in from overseas though, so for the sake of those people, here is a quick outline of my day-to-day routine.

I wake up in my shack by the local billabong and the first thing I do is hunt a koala for breakfast. Then I hitch a ride on a kangaroo to work which consists of wrestling crocs and shooting dingoes. After work I might go grab a beer with a few mates and maybe even toss a football around (or a boomerang). When I get home the first thing I do is feed my pet aborigine. Then I cook some bush tucker over a barbecue and practise the didgeridoo.

Now back to that Indonesian essay...

The Moon

I have an Indonesian essay to write, so naturally I'm blogging because any excuse to be occupying my mind elsewhere is good enough for me. I have nothing to talk about either so here's a rant about space.

I loved all things space travel when I was younger. I don't know why, but I used to watch documentaries about the Space Race and the billions of dollars spent by various governments in reaching the stars. One thing that seems almost tragic now is how most of what that money went towards was jettisoned into space as soon as each mission cleared the Earth's atmosphere. Those poor tax payers. Still - at least it got us to the moon. And to all those conspiracy theorists who claim otherwise, I don't believe anything you to have to say about filming the moon landings in studios on Earth. Also, fuck off.

The first rocket from the Apollo program to land on the moon was Apollo 11. Michael Collins was the guy on that mission who didn't actually get to walk on its surface. It was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin who did. The guy doesn't even have a memorable name. The other two are burned into my mind, but I had to look his up for this blog because I keep forgetting it. Anyway he said that the time when he was in lunar orbit while the other two got to romp around on the surface sending their thoughts back to Earth was one of the greatest experiences of his life. I can't imagine that. The only thing I can imagine feeling is loneliness in that cold, dark, silent vacuum of space floating above a grey, pock-marked surface with the knowledge that you are the only person for miles and miles and miles and if something were to go wrong you would die alone, most likely leaving the other two stranded on the moon forever. And it's not like being stranded on an island with plenty of bananas and coconuts to live on until you go mad or get eaten by something. It's the moon - there's only one thing to look at and that's dust. What I'm trying to say is that you'd have that fear of death coupled with an immense pressure to stay alive for the sake of your buddies. Also, not getting to be one of the first humans to walk on the moon is like not getting invited to the greatest party of all time.

I think I'd go insane.

But it seems he must have felt fulfilled to the point of spiritual enlightment and he wrote an autobiography which I'm sure sold almost as many copies as Armstrong's. Also he survived, which is more than can be said for the crew of Challenger...and Columbia...and Apollo 1...

You'd think after all the lives lost and money spent space travel would be as commonplace as public transport, but I suppose it's just a lot harder than it looks.

Wondermart

Let me preface this by saying I had the strangest experience this morning. My tram was full and this woman got on with her toddler who was probably small enough to fit in her handbag. Why you would bring a little kid on a tram tetris-style packed to the rafters with big bad uni students is beyond me, but this woman was using her kid (if it was hers) as an excuse to get first preference for everything from getting on the tram to validating her myki. She was saying things like "make room, can't you see I've got a small child" as if there's some unspoken rule on public transport that having a child with you is the same as being in a wheelchair. All of this would sit easy with me if it weren't for the fact that they could have walked to wherever they were going and if the kid hadn't somehow got her foot stuck in the doors when they were getting off, creating five minutes of panic during which people crowded around trying to pull her out and screaming at the tram driver "open the doors! No, close them!...Open them and then close them!!!" like a mob of headless chickens. I felt sorry for the poor child. Everyone was acting like it was 9/11 all over again.

Anywayzzz...Wondermart. But first some background information.

Wondermart is an mp3 which you download and listen to in a supermarket. For the ensuing thirty minutes, a silky-voiced European woman whispers instructions in your ear and you're supposed to follow them without question. It's basically a one-man performance in which you are both the audience and the actor and it offers a kind of deconstruction of the world of supermarket shopping. This was my Script for Performance homework and it sounded like a weird enough experience so I thought I'd check it out.

Everything that follows contains massive SPOILERS so if you're interested in experiencing it for yourself take note that I'm about to ruin it for you like a bastard.

The first thing you do is stand outside your chosen supermarket while the sexy voice does a soundcheck. After that you grab a trolley and that's one part you don't want to miss because the trolley plays a big part in the recording and you'll look like an idiot pretending to have one so it's best to grab one when Sexyvoice tells you to. Once you enter the store you get a couple of free minutes to go around collecting items that "represent you" and put them in the trolley. I grabbed some AA batteries, a roll of toilet paper, a scourer and some washing powder. When your time is up it asks you to stop and find someone who looks "more powerful" than you. Since there was only one other person in my aisle I picked her. She was this (rather large) middle-aged woman in a black shawl and a pearl necklace and I'm a skinny arts student so I gathered she was indeed more powerful than me. Sexyvoice told me to take note of what she was buying. Even though I was paranoid about being caught I managed to sneak about a dozen glances at her trolley, realizing that there was nothing in there I could use to identify her as a person. So when Sexyvoice asked me what kind of a person I thought she was my mind went blank. Assassin? Stand-up comedian? Teacher? Professional Lacrosse player? Who knows. Anyway I ditched her before she could get suspicious and was directed to the milk fridge.

Here you get to listen to a British guy talk about milking cows while you stare at all the bottled goodness on display. Sexyvoice told me to take one of the bottles out of the fridge, shake it up and put it back. I did so, feeling all the more rebellious because an employee was standing right next to me looking the other way. This is where it gets problematic, though, because Sexyvoice tells you to find the canned goods section and gives you at most ten seconds to do so. I was rushing around for about two minutes looking for them before I decided to settle on canned fruit and pretend it was the legumes Sexyvoice was drawling on about.

Nothing happens for a while following this. But then Sexyvoice tells you to pick up a product and consider stealing it. This is where you start to feel nervous because it asks you to look around and count all the staff members and CCTV cameras you can see. There were none in my aisle. Good job Safeway. I was eventually asked to put the product back (which in my case was some kind of disgusting-looking generic packet of biscuits next to the Oreos) and Sexyvoice told me I had one minute to put everything back and abandon the trolley. Because I ditched mine in the middle of an aisle I was pretty eager to get out of there before someone told me off.

At the of the day it's supposed to be an insight into people's buying habits and how supermarkets use this to psychologically manipulate people into buying their shit. For example, new products (such as disgusting-looking, generic packets of biscuits) are placed just to the right of popular brands (Oreos) so that when you go to pick up the Oreos your hand brushes the disgusting-looking generic packet of biscuits and that somehow gets you to buy it. I don't understand that at all - I'd rather just buy the thing I know from experience is good - but I guess I'm weird like that.

So there you go. I hope no one shoplifts today because if they check the security footage I'll be a prime suspect. Seriously - I must have looked like I got lost on the way to special education, putting things in my trolley and then putting them back, shaking things, following people, reaching as far as I could into the fridges to touch the back wall.

I'm glad it's over with.

The end.

'Leges' and Technology

I was contemplating whether or not to post at all today. I went to uni for a lecture and then worked for nearly eight hours. I've had the life drained out of me. I'm a shadow of my former self. But I'll put this up because I have stuff to say.

First off I'm warming more and more to the idea of getting into Law. The law subjects I've done so far have been hard but interesting. I'm doing all the Business Law subjects which require you to learn a heck of a lot of convoluted crap: case law, contract law, terms, acts, court heirachies, famous cases, companies, shareholders, the Corporations Act, directors, secretaries, class rights, replaceable rules etc. etc. etc. If I end up doing the JD (which stands for either Juris Doctor or Jargon Diarrhoea depending on how you feel about the whole thing) I'm sure there'd be more of that. But it's all fascinating stuff regardless and I have a pretty good vnderstandingvs of latinvs phrases so that's good too.

But that's not what I wanted to say. I wanted to bring up little kids and iPhones. At our work Christmas party last year the bosses' kids were playing on their parents' iPhones and they were eerily good at computer games for toddlers. When I was that age the closest thing I had to a toy like that was a ten piece jigsaw puzzle and these kids are beating everyone's high scores in Angry Birds and that game where you cut fruit. Now I keep seeing little kids with iPhones on public transport. I feel old and dumb. I guess that means we're heading into a future in which everyone lives inside computers or something. Those of us who can't score well in Angry Birds will be quickly dispatched in the grand-scale, Tron-like cyberspace gladiator tournaments our future totalitarian rulers require us to take part in.

I'm so glad I have that to look forward to.

Fvckvs myvs lifevs

Also our cat came home from the vet looking like a walking lamp with that cone thing on his head and off his face on whatever they gave him. He hasn't said a word all night and it looks like his face was stitched together from other cats' faces.

Niall: The Movie

About a year ago I wrote a screenplay about myself in a bout of gratuitous narcissism and sent it to Robert Rodriguez. He liked it but thought there were some things that could be improved to better fit his "style". So with a few small adjustments it was greenlit by Troublemaker Studios.

Although some of it was changed, I got to pick the actor who would play me which is good because in my mind there is only one man for the role and after a string of shitty action and sci-fi movies this was just the thing he was looking for.

I've seen the trailer, but because it has yet to be released I can't show it to you. So I'll describe what happens instead.

It starts with a sweeping shot of the Melbourne city skyline, accompanied by Nicolas Cage as me in a voiceover.
Nicolas Cage as me (v.o.): All my life I've been influenced by the people around me. My parents...
Cut to Samuel L. Jackson teaching a young version of me how to ride a bicycle.
Samuel L. Jackson: Enough is enough! I've had it with these motherfucking training wheels on this motherfucking bike! Get my screwdriver, son! It's the one that says Bad Motherfucker!
Nicolas Cage as me (v.o.): I had part time jobs...
Cut to Cheech Marin training Nicolas Cage as me in a Mexican restaraunt.
Cheech Marin: This is how you wrap a burrito.
Shot of Cheech Marin shooting a guy in the face.
Cheech Marin: Your order is up, muchacho!
Nicolas Cage as me (v.o.): I went to school.
Cut to Nicolas Cage as me and Leonardo DiCaprio sitting at a desk, shot on location at Camberwell Grammar School.
Leonardo DiCaprio: I can teach you how to mould your dreams into creative inspiration for zany blog posts.
Cut to Nicolas Cage as me sitting in a bar with Matt Damon.
Matt Damon: As your best friend I think we should start a blog together.
Cut to Nicolas Cage as me kneeling over Matt Damon's dead body.
Nicolas Cage as me: NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
In comes that epic, intermittent horn blare from the Inception trailer.
In the next shot Nicolas Cage as me is fighting Danny Trejo with a machete.
Cut to Tommy Lee Jones staring out a window from his office at the top of a skyscraper. He turns around to face his minions who are sitting around a big table.
Tommy Lee Jones: That's it. We gotta shut that guy down...
Various shots of Nicolas Cage as me in car chases, fighting people, jumping from a helicopter while Danny Trejo shoots at Nicolas Cage as me.
Cut to Nicolas Cage as me in a hotel room with Jessica Alba, who is loading a suppressed weapon.
Jessica Alba: I think we should be partners.
Nicolas Cage as me: One thing you should know about me is...
The music cuts out in preparation for the coming epic line.
Nicolas Cage as me: ...I always work alone.
The music returns with more intensity and there are more shots of me fighting people, chasing people in speed boats, punching Enrique Inglesias in the face.
Cut to Alan Tudyk staring at a computer screen. Nicolas Cage as me and Jessica Alba are also looking at the screen.
Alan Tudyk: We need to hack the mainframe.
Cheech Marin blows the computer away with a shotgun.
Cheech Marin: You've just been quaeadilleted, amigo!
The title of the movie - Niall: The Movie - fades into view.

And that's it. Expect it in cinemas next Summer.

In the meantime I'm going to do that Wondermart thing for 'Script for Performance'. It's a recording that you put on your Ipod and then you go to a supermarket and do what it tells you. It sounds like a quick way to get arrested but I'll do it so that I can blog about it I guess.

My cat's face is still gross. I want to put a bag over its head.

The end.

Pet Peeve

I was just about to sit down for dinner last night when my cat walked in and destroyed my appetite for life. His abscess had burst (again) and one side of his face was caked in dried blood. It looked like a chunk of his head had been couged out. I would have thrown up but every muscle in my body had seized up in sheer horror. It was absolutely revolting. No elaborate combination of quease-inducing words can adequately describe it. It's probably time to take him to the vet yet again. Maybe they can fix him up, turn that abscess into a 'fab'scess so that I don't later discover it's infected during meal time when he walks into the dining room with pus dripping off a jagged crusty hole writhing with maggots, red-yellow puddles of bloody pus goo forming in trails everywhere he walks. Excuse me, I'm think I'm going to be sick...

(Half an hour later)

...that's better. Feel free to follow this blog if you like it. It's not going anywhere.

Attack of the AIDS Robots

Big night last night, featuring beers, gambling, apple martinis, drunken Hungry Jacks runs, Poker, more beers and an univited appearance by religion. I was waiting outside Flinders St for about half an hour waiting for the others and this old guy was preaching his ass off about repentance and the end of the world and all that shit and this other guy offered me a pamphlet with pictures of crosses and Jesus and clouds. He was like "I couldn't help but notice you were watching the sermon" and it didn't occur to me to point out that I had no choice. He asked me what my opinion was on Christianity and I shrugged and told him not much. "You don't believe in Heaven and Hell. You think when we die we go six feet under and that's it?"
"Sadly yes."

Because my belief in an afterlife is like my belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in that it's pretty thin.

He launched into this rant on how Jesus is great because he was forgiving and he went around spreading hope and the belief that there's more to life than taxes and marriage and how if you're good you go to Heaven etc. It's not that I hate people who preach at me so much as it's just that I find it really boring, like talking to people fifty plus years old than me. The generation gap is too big for us to have anything interesting to say to each other, and in this case I hold no stock in a conversation about how much the other party in said conversation loves a man with a beard and holes in his hands.

That doesn't mean what he said didn't speak to me. No, it gave me a lot to think about - not about God, but about how neat it would be to start my own religion. I'm not really sure how it works. Do you have to register it like a company or do you start off as a cult and work your way up. Well I've given it some thought and I think I've come up with what could be the next big belief. Hopefully once I've finished the pamphlets I can spread the word like wildfire. In the meantime, this blog will serve as the very first Niallologist sermon.

It starts with Robots, because every good cult/religion/mental illness must have robots. The Robots in this case are giant AIDS carrying machines manufactured by an alien race which was subsequently wiped out by an AIDS epidemic brought on by the AIDS robots. Master-less and left free to roam the universe, the AIDS robots are on their way to Earth to annihalate all of us in a similar fashion. How do I know all this? Because I have psychic powers, duh. And you can too if you join my religion. You also get an immunity to AIDS as an added bonus. All you have to do is join me in a special ceremony in which we light scented candles - chocolate, lavender, French vanilla - and hold hands for about thirty minutes in silent meditation. We hum some kind of weird mantra and viola! You're an AIDS-vaccinated telepath. But the fun doesn't stop there because at this early stage your psychic powers are very weak and you need to build and shape them to become a powerful AIDS wizard like me. There are several ways to do this, including:

• Sending me lots and lots of cheques
• Massaging my feet
• Doing my housework
• Buying me shit
• And any other favour you can think of

I guarantee you'll be a powerful telepath in no more than ten years. Thus, when the AIDS robots get here you'll be able to survive the apocalypse and together we will rebuild. I'm already designing my ruler's outfit, which is basically a purple toga and a dazzling gold crown with rubies and stuff in it.

I hope I sound absolutely insane, because otherwise this will never leave the ground. I guess what I'm going to have to do is start on the internet (which I just did), because the internet is a breeding ground for the bizarre. Then, once it goes viral, I'll stand outside Flinder's St station, blabbing on about what I've just blabbed on about in this post, handing out pamphlets with a picture of me in a toga and "Niallology: the path to reading minds and not getting AIDS" spelled out in an epic font at the top. Hopefully people will see me and be like "Hey! It's that guy from the internet!" and buy into the crap I'm selling like the mindless automatons they are.

I'm so excited, I can't wait.

Join the Church of Niallology today.

Disclaimer: This post is solely for the purposes of eliminating my boredom and is not intended as a stab at religion. It doesn't matter what faith you belong to, be it Christianity, Catholocism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, the one John Travolta likes to talk about, Matrixism (which is actually a thing), Niallology, Protestantism, Jehova's Witnessism, Jedi or whatever - if it makes you happy and helps you make sense of the world than go for it.

top 5

I feel better. Nimble, like a cat. All that stiffness and most of the pain is gone and I can move around all silky and free like liquid. It's great. Now that I'm sitting here with my laptop perched on two old atlases to keep it at eye level (I'm correcting my posture) I need something to talk about. So here are my top 5 top 5 lists.

5. Top 5 craazzyy laws, including just what you're allowed to do with your pets and the size of the stick you're allowed to beat your wife with.
4. Top 5 inappropriate commercials
3. Top 5 Bottom 5 lists
2. Top 5 ways Top 5 lists are better than Bottom 10 lists
1. Top 5 Top 10 lists of the Top 10 worst Top 5 lists

This list itself is Number 2 in the Top 5 Top 5 Top 5 lists, which is itself featured in my Top 10 Top 5 Top 5 Top 5 Top 5 lists. That list is in turn Number 3 on the Top 100 worst Top 10 Top 5 Top 5 Top 5 Top 5 lists. It's a neverending cycle of lists formed by nerds who need to structure every aspect of this crazy, seemingly unknowable world in which we find ourselves. Everything is structured in Top 5s because the internet is one big collective Rain Man consciousness. Top 5 movies, Bottom 5 movies, Top 10 songs, Top 10 songs that always show up in Top 10 Worst song lists. And so on.

This post is Number 3 on my Top 3 blogs posts.

"Check out my backpack, man. It's Charizard!"

Reading about "Integralism" in Indonesia makes me want to cut myself. This isn't Arts. Or at least it doesn't fit the stereotype. It's all serious and academic and it's been too long since I saw a cup of chai or a ukulele or a pair of thick lensless glasses or pink skinny jeans on someone trotting the fine (probably non-existent) line between proud Arts student and metrosexual.

It's all about irony with young people these days and as a young person I know all about irony (although I still can't quite seperate it from sarcasm when someone asks me to define it, but apparently only God and Chuck Norris can, so it's okay). I feel sort of impressed and sort of annoyed when I see people wearing Pokemon T shirts or using brick phones from the nineties, but good on them for trying to bring it back in their own ironic way.

I saw someone walking down the street dressed like a hippy and strumming a ukulele. I want to know where on campus they're giving out free marijuana so I can get in on it. Maybe the greenhouses aren't for botany students after all...

It's fun being S-shaped. You get to take time off work so a chiropracter can do to your back what Looney Tunes characters do to each other with sledgehammers.

I think job interviews should be conducted entirely in song, with an accompanying pianist, like an audition. You go in, they sing the questions and you sing the answers and if at the end you've got the job the walls lift up a la some giant Broadway musical and the entire office erupts into an epic dance number with glitter and confetti and acrobats. Wouldn't that be neat?

panoptic symbolistic cultural fetishisms and blogging

It begins.

Finally. I'm opening this up, brushing off the cobwebs and decorating it with words so that I don't feel lazy. I like to write. I write things on paper, toilet paper, post-it notes, receipts, old bandaids, labels, powerpoint slides, excel spreadsheets, in emails, on Facebook, on my phone, in resumes, in books, on desks. I also draw things on all of the above. My mind wanders. My hand itches. I stick a pen in it and suddenly I'm sitting in a lecture thinking about random shit while I draw. I don't write in lectures, but I think about writing in lectures and when my mind finally catches up with me and drags me back into the present, into reality - the history of modernisation in the Archipelago or Dutch colonialisation in Indonesia or some shit - it's like I've awoken from a deep sleep. Ten seconds later I'm back in dreamland. I spend so much time there that I might as well stay there. It's March 13th. My birthday. My thread of life has had another year hacked off it so now is as good a time as any to start blogging. And maybe, juusssttt mmaaaybbeee, I'll pick up a kind of rhythm and this will become a habit to satisfy my addiction whose symptoms are outlined above.

A history of me and blogging: This is my second blog. The first was for university (Melbourne). Every now and then you take a subject whose coordinators think it's sooo hip to have a blog assignment. Because blogs are so in right now and lecturers don't want to look as stuck in the past as they probably feel, what with all these computers with little apple silhouettes on them and digital light switches, it's too much for their seasoned, thesis-writing minds. So they decide to look hip-to-the-hop by setting up a blogging site and an account for all the students so that they can share what they've learned that way. What you end up with is a surprisingly efficient way for the student body to share ideas. So don't get me wrong because I think university blogging is a neat idea. The only problem is that they expect you to post regularly, which translates as "write me an essay every week". For Culture, Media and Everyday Life they wanted us to start early and spread our posts out over the semester, rather than starting in, say, week 11 and shitting out as many posts as possible until exam period. So I started as soon as I knew it was up and running and customised it with pictures and humour and cleverness.

A week later I was sick of it and stopped.

But then, gripped by a sudden surge of inspiration, I managed to chunder up two posts in a week, both long. Both insightful.

Two weeks later I realised I'd forgotten the blog existed.

But then, realising I was nearly out of time, I threw together something about Jean Claude Van Damme and Americanisation and Glocalisation and the Panoptic Gaze and how films extol the cultural values and beliefs of their target audience and how digital manipulation plays a vital role in the intended message and aesthetic value of a photograph and how stardom has come to heavily influence the film industry because we watch movies based on who's in them and how the phenomenon of fandom has emerged in recent years and how that fits in with culture and I guess also media and everyday life because everything we read about and everything they crapped on about in the lectures was supposed to link back to one or more of those three things and here I was cramming it all into a single post (or maybe two or three) like one of those clown cars. I forgot to mention semiotics - iconic, symbolic, indexical and all that crap - because it seemed too boring to put in a post. In the end what I ended up with was a semester's worth of learning mapped out on the page before me as if saying "see, uni's not a waste of time after all." I was proud of that blog. But I wasn't sure whether I was proud enough to keep blogging elsewhere or whether I was proud of it because it proved I'd learned something. It's taken me soooo long just to put up this post because I'm always wondering whether or not it's a waste of time. Does anyone care what I have to say?

Well fuck 'em, it's my birthday.

The End