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One of the banes of my life is my skin. It is incredibly disagreeable. We are heading into summer, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m rapped up in aloe and other burn products, trying desperately not to accidentally bump into anything and hoping like crazy that no flies choose to land on me. The reason that this is such an issue for me is that I really do try not to get burned. I’m just a sun magnet.
Well, you are thinking, you must not be trying hard enough.
But I do, I really do, and I have witnesses to prove it.
Cast you memory back to early 2006, and think about what you were doing. Can you remember? Well, I certainly can, and I’m going to share it with now.
It was art camp. We were staying at a little place that some people (rightly) referred to as a Japanese prison. There was a wonderful fire alarm that went off in the middle of the night, almost every night without fail, there was very little shelter, nothing but a few dried out trees and a bit of ocean to draw, and on the second day I broke the tap in the bathroom which resulted in the water to the entire camp being turned off for the hottest hours of the day. So we were all grumpy, covered in paint and dirt and to complete the pleasant learning experience, dehydrated.
Recognising this, the teachers decided the perfect move would be to drag us all down to the white hot beach sand where we could sit and draw a decrepit old bridge in the middle of the day, in the middle of summer.
Pleased as we were to have such an opportunity, my friends and I realised that this would be a skin-singeing activity and we went prepared. But none as prepared as I, knowing my skin as I do.
Step 1. I placed a towel on the sand so as to avoid burning from reflection off the sand. I sat on this.
Step 2. After liberally applying sunscreen to my already pink shoulders, I put on a hideously ugly shirt.
Step 3. I then placed a rather disgusting old hat on my head. (slip slop slap)
Step 4. I had a friend throw a towel over my head and shoulders.
I looked like a blob. If the skin cancer foundation ever needs a mascot I think the “sun-safe blob” is definitely the way to go.
Anyway, my teacher thought this was absolutely hilarious, and did some very amusing imitations of my hands darting out of my blob hut to grab chalk pastels. I could hardly breathe for laughing let me assure you.
You already see it don’t you? The hands. Foolishly, I didn’t wear gloves. My hands were so red people thought Elmo had appeared every time I needed to reach for something.
Since this experience, my friends spent many a happy week or so devising plans for portable tents, sun shelters and protective suits for me.
The saddest of all of this, I do not tan. I go straight from white, to red, to white. There is no justice.
I hope all remain un-singed for summer.
Ah, the perils and pitfalls of modern living.
(When I say modern, I refer of course to now, as opposed to a few decades ago, not, you know, centuries. I live in a house, and you won’t find me complaining about that, I’m sure my little house is much more comfortable than your average cave or mud hut.)
Houses, I’m sure you’ve noticed, seem to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually I imagine we will all be living in shoeboxes. Not just me. Yes, although the entire house has not yet shrunk into something you could easily migrate with, my bedroom is ridiculously tiny. It is the smallest in the house, and it’s a garish purple, with old daggy curtains and bits stuck in the carpet. It’s unbelievably hot in summer, and the window frame has a tendency to mould up in winter, so I spend my life in some sort of mix between “oven” and “bacteria farm.” Pleasant.
One of the more serious problems, according to my mum, is an issue of object to space ratio. For example, drop a pair of jeans on the floor of an average bedroom and you have, well, a pair of jeans on the floor. Drop a pair of jeans in my bedroom, and you have a new, denim carpet. Of course, add all my other worldly possessions and we have a store cupboard with a little patch on the end of my bed to curl up in at night.
Thankfully this is not a huge problem for me. I don’t mind mess at all. What bothers me more, is that it bothers my mother. Which means I have to clean it up. Which destroys my delusion.
I’ll explain.
In order to deal with the trauma of existing in my shoebox, I like to approach my bedroom as a series of tasks. Each task prolongs my attempt to move around in the room, thus meaning it takes me the same length of time to get from one wall to the other.
Ingenious. So I pick and stumble my way over clothes and strategically placed (or dropped when I got distracted) sharp things, hair clips, deodorant cans… and this voyage takes my mind off the fact that if I can’t stand in my room and fling my arms out with damaging my fingers on the wall. Why would I be doing that? Well, I don’t know but it would be nice to know that I could if I wanted to.
Anyway. The mess works. However, when I am asked (ordered) to tidy up, what was once a journey from the door to the bed, becomes, well, a step. A small step. I don’t know if you could even say step, I personally think shuffle is more appropriate.
I hope you are all tremendously grateful for your decent, even average sized bedrooms. And to all those who share my shoebox living, may your coping mechanisms be supported by those you live with, hogging the larger rooms.
Imagine, if you will, a snail on the morning after a big night out, trudging reluctantly through quicksand in order to spend a long brunch with his in-laws.
The speed that you have now established in your imagination is the precise “pick-up speed” of my little car. To put it simply, it takes a fairly significant chunk of time to get to a speed that’s faster then your average 6 year old could comfortably walk at. I exaggerate a little, but you get the idea.
This would ordinarily not be too large an issue for me, as I’m not generally in any particular hurry to get anywhere, and I don’t suffer with any form of road rage. However, I do value my life. I really do, it’s quite important to me.
Sadly, truck drivers do not seem to hold my life at as high a priority as I do. Why, oh why, must they go so fast and sit so close to you that you see your life flash before your eyes. Or at least little glimpses of your life from the corner of your eyes. Or possibly just catch sight of your own terrified reflection in a rear view mirror… Either way, why?
At times I have been so petrified that I was actually hoping my car might be jolted further forward by each wild thump of my heart against my chest.
I have become convinced that there is some sort of test that must ascertain a person as being either psychologically insane, or at least establish the possibility of psychopathic tendencies, before that person is allowed to even enter a truck.
So I put forward this plea to truck drivers everywhere. Please slow down. I know I would be forever appreciative if every highway trip was not a near death experience.
Hope all are well, drive safe
With a world so full of irritation it’s difficult to decide where to begin. I briefly toyed with the idea of starting at the beginning, namely with “getting up”. I am, as I’m sure many of you may be, not a morning person. However, I fear that might be a little discriminatory as I hear there is a strange breed of human out there that actually enjoys getting up. As horrified as this information makes me, I would hate to start out by alienating an entire people. So I have decided to start somewhere safe, as I have never met a single person who enjoys public transport. Presuming I was a studious little being I would now be going off to find some enlightening statistics about how many people use public transport, but I think it may be unnecessary. You are all intelligent people and I’m sure with a little imagination we can all picture the thousands of people, squished up on tiny little busses and trains. And trams if you live in Melbourne, we don’t discriminate here…
And I think all this could even be tolerated if the person who designed the bus routes ( and I apologies if they are reading this) could maybe take a second and think about where people like to go. I don’t know about everywhere, but I am sure my little city would cry with joy, I mean there would be dancing in the streets, if there was just one direct route going somewhere useful. And I think a few security guards that can actually “secure” would not go astray either. I don’t know how many of you have been grabbed by an hysterical, drunk, sobbing woman, called a whole host of undesirable names and held hostage for about 10 minutes, while the security guards huddle in a ball at the other end of the platform, but I have and it’s not pleasant.
I sincerely hope you are all well, and survive your next public transport experience
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Although your interest in my life is probably sitting at around nil as you don’t know me and I have yet to give you anything that might suggest I am in any way an interesting person whose life you would crave know more about, I am going to begin by introducing my blog topic with a little ramble about how I came to choose it. I am a uni student studying a double major in Performance Studies and Professional Writing and Presentation. I don’t know about you, but the alliteration in that sends shivers down my spine, which is of course why I chose it. No, as I’m sure you can tell, that is untrue and I would hate to begin our relationship on the rocky foundations of understanding that I chose my future based on the satisfying “P” sounds I get to repeat when informing you of my majors. Moving on…
As I’m sure you’ve all probably guessed in Professional Writing we, ah, do a lot of writing. So, in order to keep our tutors awake, we are instructed to choose different topics on which to write about. I am one of those people who struggle with topics, as I have a distinct lack of passion about one particular thing. Don’t get me wrong, I have passion, I just have my fingers dipped in too many pots (Is that how it goes?). However, one thing has always stood out in the ramblings of my friends and family, and that is my ability to draw attention to, and make comment on, the things which I find to be excruciatingly annoying. And thankfully, as I’m sure you all know, the world almost seems to exist solely to annoy us, and in that vein of thinking this could possibly be a never ending blog. So my topic is born, “In the face of continual annoyance”. I hope you enjoy it.
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