Lisztomania (Take 4)

Like so many people, Christmas is all about the ritual for me. I'm not alone - my father adores decorations and usually has our tiny house overflowing with them, crowned by his spectacular lights in the front yard. (This is the part where I'd show a picture as proof, but my phone has a crappy camera and I don't own another one.) My sister has the endearing habit of running a trivia contest on Christmas day for our immediate family, trivia about...Christmas, no less. She buys prizes and everything. 

For what it's worth, I won this year, so I haz bragging rights. 

My ritual is known to longtime readers of this blog, the annual Christmas mix CD. Previous mix CD inclusions can be seen here and here.

This year's effort is outlined below:

Little Houses

Adam and the Ants - Stand and Deliver
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Sacrilege
Haim - The Wire
Palma Violets - Best of Friends
Any Bull - Keep On Running
Poliça - Dark Star
The Griswolds - The Courtship of Summer Preasley
The Preatures - Is This How You Feel?
Vance Joy - From Afar
Jeremy Neale feat. Go Violets - In Stranger Times
Frank Ocean - Lost
Robyn - Dancing On My Own
Pulp - Common People
Patty Smyth feat. Scandal - Goodbye To You

Looking Forward, Looking Back

One of my dirty little secrets is that I love Christmas, probably because it always seems to be a time for looking back and reflecting. (For someone who reflects far too much and is in danger of having a crooked neck for looking over her shoulder too much, this isn’t always a good thing.) Of course, this time for reflection on what is past comes immediately before New Years, which is the king of all dates for looking forward and being hopeful – something I don’t do well.

Christmas is the holiday of memory. We spend the holiday period comparing our wins and failures to what has come before, whether it’s the successes of our academic year, or, as in my beloved sister’s case, that she managed to knock over all her Christmas shopping in one afternoon and beat her personal best from last year. We reminisce about Christmases past with those we love, and every now and again we adjust as someone we love is taken from us and the world as we know it shifts. There are the holidays in which there are young children once again, only this time they belong to us rather than our parents. There are the Christmases we spend apart from those we love, and the Christmases we spend in solitude, or perhaps only with a significant other. We travel far, we stay close to home, but ultimately we compare one Christmas with all the others we remember. Some of us try to recapture a sense of child like joy, and others just drink to get through it. But I’m willing to bet that at some point during the lead up to the big day, if not the day itself, you find yourself comparing the holiday to one that has come before and working out what that means to you.

I spent most of my recent trip to Melbourne anxiously checking my phone for the e-mail telling me what my thesis mark was. It was in a smelly ladies’ toilet that it finally arrived on my final afternoon of the trip. One of my other dirty little secrets is that my Honours result ended up being a lot lower than it should have been. It’s a secret that’s hard for me to admit.

But during this time of reflection, I try and acknowledge that things could have been a lot worse. Despite my illness being a greedy bastard for 10 of the last 12 months, I managed to finish Honours. I did more than well enough for acceptance to the advanced Masters program I want to study next year (I’m still waiting on this news, one way or the other). I have sung in beautiful venues and heard my voice ring out. I spoke at an academic conference and evoked an enthusiastic question time. I travelled for pleasure and for business on my own and managed not to get lost more than half a dozen times. I turned 30 in a room filled with my closest friends, and was touched by the love and compassion they show me every day. I stood in rooms filled with people as amazing artists and bands played and made me feel alive.

I am still alive. As bad as it got (and it got very, very bad) I am still here and still trying. I still have plans to make and things to look forward to, and I want to stick around for those.

This is my 31^st Christmas, and I’m kind of excited about it (although maybe that’s because I don’t have to cook….). I hope the same for you and those you love, and I thank you for continuing to read this little blog of mine. Frankie is written and dispensed with, but I’m going to be a student for some time yet and I hope you’ll stick with me for that. May your tomorrows be bright and sparkly, friends. 

Be Our Guest

I'll be writing here again soon, but in the meantime I am over at A Brave Life offering some thoughts on turning thirty and finishing a thesis. I'm not one to really offer advice, but Kim's a long time friend who I actually got to meet in person last December when she visited Australia with her husband. 

I'll be posting something more substantial here over the weekend, but in the meantime you can read my stuff over at Kim's. 

Election Night

Hi everyone! Just a few thoughts from my weekend here, but as of today I won't be blogging again until at least the second week of October. My thesis is currently more than a full time job, and I just can't afford to be writing anything else. I hope you'll all come back when I start writing with some frequency again.

On Saturday, I got up very early and went to a local polling place to work for the Australian Electoral Commission. Australians had to vote on Saturday for a federal government (it's compulsory to vote here, at all levels of government) and the conservatives came crashing in.

It's a long day, working a polling booth. My job as a 2IC is a sort of catch all position, basically anything that the manager needs to palm off. I was working quite a small booth this time around, and my manager was up to the task, so the day could have been a lot worse. 

We don't have it perfect here. The Senate voting paper is ridiculously complicated, especially for people who don't speak English (my electorate and the one I was working in have a much higher number of non English speakers than most), and the turnout was much lower than it should have been. But as I lined up to vote on Friday afternoon at a pre-polling venue, I couldn't help but get choked up at what I was about to do.

We vote in peace, without harassment (unless you count party workers, which I don't - usually). The AEC is mostly a well oiled machine, with pencils and paper so no defective machines for us. Rarely do you have to wait more than half an hour to vote anywhere in the country. There are sausage sizzles and lamingtons on offer at little stalls at many venues, fundraisers for the local sporting team or school. 

As the sign on every voting screen said, your vote is a valuable thing. Democracy, for all its faults, is a beautiful thing. And even though I hate the administration who just came in, I still feel strongly that our system of government and the way people are elected is one of the best going. It is a privilege and a responsibility that I cherish, and I exercise my right to choose with pride.   

Some time soon I will vote overseas, perhaps in an embassy, while I'm on a fellowship or a research trip. I can't wait, just like the little kids who eagerly push their parents' votes into the overflowing ballot boxes every election day. I remember doing the same when I was little, and I still poke mine through gleefully. My vote matters, and it's a personal, beautiful thing. 

Great Expectations

It's probably pretty obvious by now I expect a lot of myself. I feel like all my life I've been this untapped potential and chronic underachiever - and I'm sick of it. 

I had a frustrating time yesterday as I got one of the marks back for the seminars I took as part of my Honours work. It was bad enough that I was really upset, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should ask for my second mark back so I could get all the upset over with in one day. 

So I asked the mentor for the second mark. It was slightly better, but still far short of what I wanted, nay needed for the overall mark I am seeking from this ridiculous exercise in self discipline and self doubt. I was right to get it all over with, and mourn what I can't fix. I woke up today ready to try again and make the thesis, which is worth 60% of the final mark, as good as it possibly can be. 

Look, they're not bad marks. My supervisor assured me that I'm in the top couple of percent of students with these marks, but still. It feels like a failure.

Expectations can cripple you. If you're a perfectionist and you want the best, sometimes you can paralyse yourself and not even start. The blank page is both frightening and exhilarating, because you know it probably won't be as good as in your head.

The trick is to start, to draft, to cut, and to believe that it can be better than you'd hoped. Over and over and over again. 

I leave you with this video of Dylan Moran talking about one's potential. I worry that he's right, the bastard:

Friend of Ours

Three and a half years ago L. and I held hands, lined up behind a woman we love as she wed her high school sweetheart. Yesterday we held hands again outside a tiny country town crematorium as our friend farewelled her stepfather, who died suddenly last week. 

We stood, cold with the wind against our backs, part of the huge crowd that couldn't fit inside the small building. The deceased had been a prison guard, his fellow officers making up much of the crowd; the young guard next to me would wipe her tears away and then adjust her dress hat every few minutes as the service wore on. This man was loved, you could feel it, this man who had told me all about his kids proudly as he blew up balloons for my friends' engagement party. Everyone wept quietly, brought undone as the children said their piece. I'm not sure anyone could have kept it together as his youngest daughter struggled through her short eulogy. 

I sing at a lot of funerals, and you never get used to them. It's not unusual for me to be moved to tears with the odd story, especially if the person who's left is clearly adored and missed. So often, though, it's not for the deceased that we cry, it's for the people left behind who are hurting. It's for the people we love who one day will leave us. And it's the sobering realisation that, one day, a few people might gather and mourn us too. 

Coming from as Catholic a background as I do, I'm always unsure of funeral etiquette for others. Catholics all go funerals a lot, because it's not just a celebration, it's a requiem, a chance to pray for the deceased. So if you know them at all, you go. I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing going into yesterday, but the moment our friend C. walked out of the church and saw us, the look on her face told me we had absolutely done the right thing, making the 3 hour trip down from Sydney. When she was able to break free of her family, we held her close and told her we loved her, which is what we had gone there to do.

We ended up at a workers' club for drinks that were filled to the brim and slopped down the side as we tried to budge our way through the crowded wake. L. and took turns looking after our friend and after her mother, who was doing pretty well all things considered. The crowd dwindled, and eventually it was just us and the immediate family ranged around, sipping drinks and trying to make each other eat. We made inappropriate jokes, we made plans to catch up when C.'s in Sydney next week, we talked about L.'s daughter's birthday party. 

My friendship with C. worries me from time to time - do we have enough in common to stay friends? Are we really close if we can sometimes go quite a long time without speaking? The answer was on C.'s face when she saw us, and how pleased she was to have us there as she tried to take care of everyone while trying to come to terms with her own grief. The petty, paranoid stuff ebbed away, and I am grateful that my presence meant something to her and made a shitty day a little bit better. No friendship is perfect, we're not close like girls on television shows, but we do have an intimacy that no one else can share. 

We take care of each other. Sooner or later there'll be different combinations of friends holding hands at different funerals, but that won't change. We have each others' backs. 

All The Pictures On The Wall

I'm currently immersed in writing hell, almost 4800 words into a 6000 word paper (whee!) so what you're getting from me is a bit of picture fluff....literally. 

I'm a committed and regular letter writer, and a lover of the medium. My plan for Masters is to use letters as my main source, lots of them, from lots of people. But a few years ago, when my life was a total mess and finding nice things to write about was difficult, I would occasionally fall back on an old writing trick of mine, where I would describe my surroundings. It came to me that there might be something interesting in talking about what I loved enough to put up on my wall. 

My parents wouldn't let me put posters up as a teenager, but eventually they stopped tearing them down and my tastes evolved, just a little. (I still kind of miss my Buffy poster that my mum destroyed....) When I first lived by myself it was mostly movie posters, but now it's swayed back to music, as I find the nicest and most interesting designs are being done for bands and solo artists. Having said that, I do have some art prints up there. 

So this is what I have my walls right now:

Oh, Chrissie. I had a clipped magazine article about The Pretenders that I'd nicked from the library that also didn't survive my mother's purge of '99, but here she is in a fabulous, wonderfully colourful poster I bought two years ago from a 2007 concert. I love it.

I wish I could link to the etsy seller from whom I purchased this, but she seems to have closed up shop. This is a 8 x5 inch card, and I don't know why I love it so much, or why it appeals to me, but I do and it does. It's also the most feminine design on my wall. 

(Hieronymus Bosch, 'Christ Carrying The Cross')

I think some of you know I have a thing for Bosch. No, not the power tools. Especially given some of the craziness in my head, this poster has a certain strength for me, and is especially relevant given the paper I am trying to write  at the moment. (Shuddup and forget about the damn thing for ten minutes!)

This image does not do the poster justice. It is this beautiful, thick paper and the design is shiny on the page. These guys are amazing live, so I like that this is a concert poster, albeit for a concert in the UK (Wembley, April 2009).

Hey look, it's Kyp Malone before he shaved his afro off! This is a much more modern design than most of the stuff I like, but the colours and silliness of it are very appealing. TV On The Radio are one of my favourite bands on the planet, can't live without'em.

The 'Writing Frankie' poster girl. I had this in my etsy favourites for about a year before I finally bought about a year ago. You can buy it here from a lovely lady in Finland. 

There's a positivity to this that I love.

Finally, apart from a two month calendar from my favourite magazine, there's a small square of paper with a definition of what a 90+ Honours result looks like. A 90+ result would mean that I have produced 'work demonstrating the highest level of accomplishment and intellectual autonomy that can be expected from an undergraduate student'. 

That's what I'm hoping, so it's back to the paper now.

What do you have on your walls?