I needed to believe.

All I want from life is to be warm, safe and at peace with my actions given my fortuitous position in this world. Sometimes I feel terribly, terribly lonely in believing that being lucky enough to be well-educated, secure and safe gives rise to some significant moral duties as one girl with an extraordinary amount of autonomy, one girl lucky enough to truly express a right to self-determination.

I hate it when people laugh at me for studying what I do - it's this stupid sense of duty that propels me through academia.

Kindness. Understanding. Passion. Selflessness. I just want to be able to look at my hollowed-out, pale face in the mirror and feel like, for once, I've done all that I can. I'm trying so hard - please cut me some slack.

it is the language of the beasts

Shackleton, Blood On My Hands

Journalists denying climate change science and the following inevitabilities, Rupert Murdoch's media enterprise bribing police and conducting illegal phone tapping and hacking; Australians continue to piss back and forth on the topic of asylum seekers. I met up with a friend who's been travelling overseas for the first time in eight months today and I remember confessing to not reading the newspaper anymore - all of it feels vaguely apocalyptic. Terrifying things happen, wrongs continue to be perpetuated, the world smiles, and carries on. So it goes.

As a younger girl I was always fascinated by the idea that a society so complex and tangible as ours could one day come to an end; these days, the concept seems far too real to think about.

I find myself less and less partial to opening up to others, these days. It's interesting to chart the progression of my personality over the past two years - from a bright-eyed, optimistic and outgoing eighteen year old to the quietly-spoken, moody, perpetually-despondent student I am now. These are the same old complaints, these are the same tired platitudes - what's the fucking point?

Sorry. This isn't quite self-pity, I guess. This year feels like a turning point of sorts. I am standing on the edge of the abyss and it is gazing back at me. (Sorry, Nietzsche.) These days I am almost convinced I know exactly what I want from this life, and how to go about achieving it. The problem is. Well.

baby baby baby

Mount Kimbie, Maybes

From an Abbey Road debut recorded mere weeks ago. Watch it: absolutely haunting.

I've been bruising really easily of late. Literally and figuratively. Current count is at four: the back of my calf, thigh, on my hip and shoulder. I don't think I have anything to worry about . My head hurts. Panic is beginning to set in.

Anyway.


--

1. Make a list of 5 things that you can see without getting up.
A set of drawers, Logitech PC speakers, various music-related posters, a bookshelf crowded with DVDs, CDs, novels, textbooks and a MIDI controller, and a clothes rack.

2. What was the last album you listened to in full?
Crooks and Lovers by Mount Kimbie.

3. What are you wearing now?
Levis 501 cutoffs I purchased for the reference in Dirty Epic, a Tiffany's necklace from my father, a borrowed black t-shirt, Bonds sloppy joe, tights.

4. What's your dream occupation?
My life would be a lot easier if I could answer that.

5. What do you hear right now?
Inspiration.

6. Who was the last person you hugged?
A boy I know.

7. Place yourself into one of your favorite shows. What would be your job/role on the show?
Intelligence analyst in Section D, MI5.

8. What did you do today?
Lazy day: no work or uni. Breakfast in Prahran, the train home, a session in Ableton, hanging out with James and listening to the Killers.

9. Dog person or cat person?
Both, please?

10. What's something you're looking forward to?
Semester break. James Zabiela at Brown Alley (media pass, excellent). The next time I see your face. Visiting Ikea and record stores in a few paycheques' time.

11. What was the last thing that you bought?
10 x two-hour Metcard.

12. If you could afford to go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
New York, Tokyo, London.

13. Where do you see yourself in five minutes?
Still in bed.

14. Last book you've read?
The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton.

15. Next movie you plan to see?
Unsure.

16. What's your favorite color?
Blues and dark greys.

17. Favorite word?
Fuck.

18. What is one thing about you most people don't know?
My biggest regret in life is giving up piano at the age of ten.

19. Name a hobby you enjoy.
Music production.

20. Did you replace many questions?
I wasn't aware I was able to.

hurting

Martyn, Far Away

Almost close enough.

"in the beginning, there was the word."

Day Three: a song to dance to.

The Chemical Brothers, Swoon

The best things in life, for me, are: the thump of a kick drum. The way my body feels when I'm shaking my arse with my hands in the air, shouting out lyrics into a midnight-coloured sky, dizzy and laughing. The way you smile, the sound of your voice.

"Just remember to fall in love: there's nothing else."

going down

Day Two: a song that reminds you of somewhere.

Scuba, Latch

I grew up in Preston, a small suburb located approximately fifteen minutes to the north of the Melbourne central business district for the first eighteen years of my life. Things happened: my parents divorced, my grandmother passed away, the house I spent my entire childhood in was sold and my parents both moved out to their own little apartments, far far away. It's been two years and I still miss Preston with a burning fever. Preston is by no means a beautiful or affluent suburb - filled with abandoned lots, barbed-wire and huge, intimidating factories and run-down shopping strips as opposed to well-kept lawns and beautiful houses.

And that is why I miss it so much. All the hours spent wandering around the suburbs late at night, unable to sleep with an iPod to keep me company taught me to appreciate the beauty inherent in urban environments. It's an interesting juxtaposition: even in the discarded cans of Coke crushed into gutters and the blur of headlights along roads amongst stretches of concrete and steel are signs of movement and life. A bird taking flight from a razor-wire fence, the flood of lights switching on as a security system activates itself. It's a study in constrasts that's always fascinated and inspired me.

Miss you, 3072.

concrete heart.

Cyantific, 'Empty Streets'

What are you looking for?

unanswered questions

Kito, 'What If'

Grey days. Where does it all end?

here i am, and there you are

UNKLE, 'Unreal'

A dyed blonde with a leather jacket and a tan standing on a corner in the depths of the city lights up a cigarette carefully with fingers like glass, waiting for lights to turn green. Junkies and cold hearts on the last train home. Urban living.

set myself on fire.

vaccine, 'fever'

--

How do I tell you all these things?

hands of silver, hands of gold

cut copy, 'pharaohs and pyramids'

--

Blinding lights and cold nights. The days are growing shorter and colder but I can't stop dancing.

it's hard sometimes

high contrast, 'tutti frutti'

Some days I feel like I can do anything and they're the best.

the bells, the bells.

four tet, 'there is love in you'

I am steadily trying to teach myself guitar. The days are long. It feels like summer. Open notebooks and wandering around the suburbs with the housemate, armed with cameras. Strange and interesting noises coming from Ableton. Remembering good times with a track from one of my favourite albums from 2010.

burn in the face of love.

walking through a paper town, counting all the reasons to burn the others down
seems like every chance i take brings me ever closer to being far away

Surely there must be hundreds of thousands of teenage girls like me, out there. Unfocused, impotent anger with the world at large, an arrogant delusion that there's a quick fix to all the world's problems and all it takes is one pure, focused mind to put it all back into order.

That's what I thought at fifteen, anyway. Now, things are a little different, but some things stay the same. Nothing changes: we are all but a whisper in the passage of time.

"There is nothing new under the sun" was first written in the book of Ecclesiastes and then quoted by Alan Turing centuries later in a paper on the metaphysics of thought and mind. Turing was a mathematician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher, who in his writings, focused in particular on the philosophical question of whether it was possible to conceive of machines as having the same abilities as humans, capable of cognitive thought.

While that quote takes on a different context with background reading on the topic, it's still a thought that tends to stick with bitter little girls studying Year 11 Philosophy, such as myself. Nobody should give half a shit about who I am and where I'm going because I'm just another cliche. I'm just another story somebody's already heard. I'm nothing new.

Drop another pill. Write a half-arsed fucking poem about it. Fuck a stranger. Make jokes. Don't take anything seriously. Delude yourself into thinking somebody cares in an attempt to cover up the gaping ache. Kill yourself, inch by inch, measure by measure. When you're nothing but dust, who's going to know what your story was?

rapture's coming.

Struggling to breathe. This is like watching myself drowning in slow motion.

wishful thinking.

Naked beneath your gaze. Watching me through glass. Fragile, steady. The train is leaving. Be careful with me.

morning comes.

Every second is electric around you. You're a golden haze on the horizon above the buildingtops in my eyes, the gentle kiss of twilight across the suburbs. You think my life's a dream - I dream my life away.

why don't you turn your radio up?

Writing clears your head in a way that’s difficult to describe. It’s a sense of things lifted from you, a sense of freedom that’s found in the stream of electric things scribbled down in notebooks, on scraps of paper hurriedly, tucked away in coat pockets and drawers. You walk through the streets of the city with ink-stained hands and a secret smile that nobody can read, carrying messages to lovers and friends understandable only to you.

we are the night.

You're unreachable. Alive, alone.

simple distinctive (floating world)

My headache pounds with the same force of a kick-drum and my eyes look dark and blank, ringed by circles from exhaustion. The blur of scenery outside the train windows is too fast. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

That said, here are a list of things I am grateful for.

Taking acid on sunny, Sunday mornings with two of my favourite people. Recon missions for pancakes while tripping something shocking and scaring the normals out in the wilderness. The strawberries that came on top of them. Sitting in sunny playgrounds shooting the shit with these two wonderful creatures, playing on the swings and hearing their voices come to me from three metres above the earth, quietly humming You Do Scribble to myself and feeling like a little princess. The sight of a bird's wing splayed perfectly across a glass window in your loungeroom, the way the sunlight lit up every single feather. Wondering at it's beauty as it takes off in flight. Almost falling asleep peacefully on an 9:10 train to Epping and waking up in a glorious sunlit morning, ready to take on the world.

What are you grateful for?