May 2013
14 posts
I think if I was ever the last person left on earth, I wouldn’t believe it. Surely there would be throngs of people, hidden people, over the hill, behind the trees, aware of me but me not aware of them.
I just don’t think I would ever accept it.
I should stop listening to Chelsea Wolfe.
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You are doing this.
I do this thing where I run when I fuck up, rather than fixing it. It’s why I’ve never had a real relationship, it’s why I so frequently isolate myself from other people. I don’t fix things, I abandon them. It’s somewhere between expecting to be discounted if I try and fix things, and the specific laziness that accompanies being a perfectionist. It’s like an...
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Beethoven: ARE YOU READY TO HEAR SOME SYMPHONIES?!
Audience: *cheers*
Beethoven: I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!
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Do you know what it is? We’re seeing Don through the lens of the other characters this season. What I initially read as the end of the writer’s empathy is just a shift in viewpoint. Don is out of step, strange, other. We always felt it, but he owned the narrative, and so it was harder to get perspective. This is the grimmest season yet, divested as we are of Don’s reflexive...
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Goodnight, 20s.
You were weird.
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The Houses that Can Burn
In the Blue Mountains bushfires of 1994, my cousin’s house was caught in a firestorm. They knew it was coming. Half the street fled, half stayed. There were no right answers, each family did what they thought was best, or all they could do. My uncle stayed in the house with them. They’d hosed the roof, removed the dead leaves, taken all the precautions the rural fire brigade had issued. Houses...
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S9E01 Castiel and Dean shopping montage straight up or GTFO.
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Fixed Points
My grandparents didn’t know, when they married May 19th 1943, that 40 years later, to the day, one of their grandchildren would be born. We don’t know anything until it happens, until it pops into existence from the fog of the great unthinkable. I bought a coffee one morning, maybe seven years ago, and got on a train, and on that long train ride into the city I made plans and promises to myself,...
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The Untitled Dental Assistant Screenplay Motion...
So there’s a film I want to make about a really strange thing that happened to a friend recently. I can picture it perfectly, in parts, the cinematography catching the morning sun on a suburban street, a dark park, the menial tasks of a quiet job. Sadly I’m incredibly unmotivated and not particularly good at writing things like that, so it shall remain in my head for now. I just threw this...
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office space.
Let’s pretend this is that incredibly dense and interesting piece I keep meaning to write about the special kind of relationship you form with co-workers, and how it’s the closest thing to being born into a family that we ever experience, short of when we are actually born into a family (we don’t choose these people, we are grouped with them by chance). Through the lens of...
April 2013
10 posts
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Remember anything, any context for hollows and freckles any cover of night, any night. It’s a mid-marathon terror dream, sweat and salt to prove a point, years of unchallenged thoughts and an inward-facing altruism, a wave you pass under alone before washing up awake, wild. Remember nothing of the waste, the pinch of winter flavouring your skin, the roll of eyes above your shallow grave of...
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The Handsome Old Cloak
I know all too well that my states of mind are fluid - I can spend months on an upswing followed by relative darkness, with little to no discernible trigger. It’s a scary thing, that your brain can just flip a switch like that and then you don’t get out of bed for four months except to go to work. But one thing that I’ve finally learnt from having that as a reality is to...
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“Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where...”
– Henry Jenkins, in Textual Poachers: Media Fans and Participatory Culture (via jaimelannister)
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“Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t...”
– Robert Brault (via creatingaquietmind)
March 2013
21 posts
A Retraction by You
A retraction of everything I’ve said, of joylessness and unmade beds, of priority to autonomy, of the old world, the old shapes a body makes as it curls around itself to sleep.
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midnight train
Afterwards, the long walk, rounding the corner home, it was just me and a small black cat blinking passively,
and it was not enough, and too much, that autumn ghost in the breeze, itself a wild-willed girl and I wanted to be driving south, through the arcing brambles of headlit-caught country turns, screaming and remembering, to the ocean, to the ocean, ink rolling over itself, a midnight train...
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What it Means to Grow Up
[written over Christmas 2012, finally edited and reposted after his concert, March 2013]
I adore Bruce Springsteen. Without irony or concern for trend, I adore him. And I’m not alone in this: I am surrounded by people in their 20s and 30s who are fervent in their love of him, in a way that extends well past the typical shorthand for ‘80s cool that can accompany any popular retroactive fan base...
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Me: Hi I'm Michelle and I really love that one New Radicals song
Everyone in the world: *silence*
Me: I thought this was a safe space
Everyone in the world: excuse you there is not a space safe enough for that kind of talk.
I take back almost everything I said here last night.
throwing one's voice.
I figure that seeing as I’ll be replaying today over and over in my head ad nauseum, I may as well write about it. So today I intro’d a new initiative that I worked on with P&C to the wider company. Just a quick talk about what the policy involves, and why it’s great - and I love the policy. Helping people develop is definitely where I want to go. Speaking in front of a...
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I'm living the most inane double life ever.
It stems from a few things. 1. That I retreated completely inside my own head for the last 6-12 months, to reconsider and reset myself. 2. To do that I used work as an outlet, a place to be where no one expected me to be anyone in particular 3. The outcome of that was to put an inordinate amount of effort into what I was doing, and the outcome of that was to be given lots of opportunities to do...
When Teenage Girls Save The Day: Or Why Krissy...
flutiebear:
Teenage girls who kick ass are, thankfully, not as rare as they used to be in fiction. Seems like the YA bookshelves these days overflow with new, interesting heroines, who run around having adventures and changing their world for the better. Even in Hollywood, we’re seeing more and more teenaged heroines, including Katniss Everdeen, Hermione Granger, Merida, and so on.
But let’s be...
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I’m stuck on the notions of choice and control this week, I think. I’m inexplicably furious, today especially. I think it’s about choice and control anyway. I can’t slow it down and find the root of it. Whatever it is, it feeds into how ineffective I feel daily. I want to punch holes through things today and I don’t know how to stop it.
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extension
I cannot help but think of you as extension, as trailing metaphor, a translation I’ve never mastered but that plays out, pleasingly, a fat little word of no consequence. You make me slightly less still, me, the stillest of still lifes, a tundra in parallax, the ancient pyramids, all bones buried silent, ever, you make me less myself, less these things, more myself, or something else. I fold myself...
February 2013
22 posts
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An Odd Thing
Sometimes I read my own name somewhere and my stomach drops and I think, I know her, before realising.
Also if I look at someone for too long I think I look like them.
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look at the trees & look at my face & look at a...
If I could take the fire out from the water
I’d share a life and you’d share a life
If I could take the fire out from the water
I’d take you where nobody knows you
And nobody gives a damn
said nobody knows you
and nobody gives a damn
[[MORE]]
and I could take another hit for you
and I could take away your trips from you
and I could take away the salt from your...
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stay, stay, stay with me.
I think one of the things I’ve done over this last year is outgrown messes. I used to always have one toe dipped in some complicated pool or other; it’s a distraction, a way to insure yourself against a plan, something to do that has a finite lifespan. The argument would be that I’ve disengaged entirely, but honestly I don’t think that’s a bad way to get out of a...
