The new guard

I will admit I'm not lovin' life at the moment. Not for any terrible reason, just an avalanche of little things - I'm very time poor at the moment and my wish to write has been over ruled by a litany of dreary time consuming demands that must be done as a priority. I'm physically tired, and I know if I could steal some time to exercise, that would help, but alas that's not working for me either.

However, such is the way of the world, and being a grown up.

The fabulous Shot gun wedding dress

At the gallery the other week, I was taken with an artist, eX de MEDICI who was formally a tattoo artist evolved into a street artist and now a fully fledged 'artist' in the National Gallery. I love the evolution, and have been saying for years that Adnate is the most talented artist on the planet at the moment, and the format is irrelevant. The street artists are the modern equivalent of the Fauves. They're changing the rules, requiring us to rethink our yardstick for evaluating art,  So I was pleased to see that the National Gallery was in agreement.

 Do you like street art? Who is your favourite artist?

Are you #LovinLife?

Linking with #PhotoFriday

First of the Month Fiction - June

This month has really flown and I'm playing catch up on pretty much everything! Hope your month is more productive then mine.

Newbies, write a story in 100 words exactly or one less than 30 words. Then link your blog (or don't if you don't have one).

She knew she wasn't meant to talk to strangers but surely this time was different? He was not like anyone she had ever met before. She would tell her parents when they got home. It wouldn't be a secret. She was bored and he made her laugh. She was always alone. She knew she could run away from him if things got scary. She moved a little closer to hear what he was saying, but he stopped talking and looked away, busying himself with his shoelace.

“How long have you been living in our linen closet?” she asked the elf.

Have a great month!

An InLinkz Link-up

Linking with #FYBF

Kicking around Canberra

This week has been uneventful. I'm packing the house up so floorboards can be put down, and just discovering how much stuff we have in the process. It's overwhelming. I've packed up 2 boxes for charity, but am struggling to find a charity to take them.

If anyone knows of someone who takes children's books and toys, in good condition and working order, let me know.

Last weekend, I was off on a girls weekend, and my roomy was a friend who'd moved to Brisbane, so we had plenty of time to catch up solo, as well as in the group shenanigans. I also managed to sneak off and met Leanne, which had been a long time in the making and quite the highlight for me. She's as warm and easygoing as her blog leads you to believe. It was like catching up with an old friend!

 It's so rare for me to take a break, to have an undisturbed night's sleep and to race around, free & easy. We ate, drank, went to galleries and exhibitions, and even for a hike up the hill at the Arboretum (I make that sound so much more energetic than it was). We also spent considerable time planning the next one. Daylesford here we come, apparently.

So last weekend I was truly lovin' life!

Can you walk a mile in my shoes?

As someone who loved To Kill a Mocking Bird, I was quite taken with the quote "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.". However, forty odd years later, T.I raises a slightly different aspect, in his song Ready for Whatever, when he says he can't be judged (by the listener) for what he's done because he thought he didn't have a choice, given what had happened in his life, and how it framed his decision making, and he ends with: 

'You'll have to put yo self in my position

You can't expect me to think like you 
'Cause my life ain't like yours’

As someone who strives for empathy, I had a startling realisation to the truth of this statement while in Vietnam. I was reading a lot about the country, and I had started reading The Trader from Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks.

Over the years, I've read a lot about the fall of Singapore and a lot of books set in Malaysia both during the war and after, however the Vietnam war was quite new to me, so I read a few books on the journalists and the fall of Saigon and then picked the Cruickshanks book because it wasn't focused on the war, and the rich Vietnamese history is so much more than that period.

Part of the story focuses on the rationing, and a stolen ration book. So it was that poverty post war, and familiar territory.  I'd read about 150 pages into the book when I suddenly noticed this on the back cover:

I was stunned for a minute while I recalibrated the setting. In my head, the book was set in the late 40's, not the mid 1980's! It completely threw me. Logically, I could see I'd just moved history around in a nonsensical fashion, but if you talk ration books, my brain immediately jumps to WWII, not late ‘70’s. All the other books I'd read set in Asia are referring to WWII if they are post war. 

Without the actual date mentioned, or defining situation, my brain just furnished the fictional world in dress and setting of the late '40's. It took what it knew, what it had learned over the course of my life, all my knowledge and put it into the world I was reading about. And it was wrong. Very, very wrong.

We are the sum total of every life experience we have, every lesson we are taught in school, everything we read and see, and it frames our world view, often without us even knowing. It's so ingrained, it taints every we see and think, and we're often completely unaware it's filtering our thoughts. Maybe we can't really ever walk a mile in someone else's shoes. However, we can and should, try.

If someone chooses to leave everything they know, there must be a very good reason. If they choose to risk their life fleeing, there must be little or no safer option. Maybe we need to understand more of their actual life, rather than sitting making judgments from our cosy living rooms. We can’t have a proper understanding if we are furnishing their world like ours, and giving them options and choices they really don’t have the luxury to make. As T.I says, we can’t really think like them if our life isn’t like theirs. And thankfully, for so many of us, it isn’t.

Linking with #BooknificentThursdays

A letter to my enemy

Anyone who has read me for any length of time will know that I am my own worst enemy. No one says anything as bad to me as the little voice in my head. It critiques how I look when I catch myself in the mirror, it judges my work and rarely finds it favourable, it worrys about things beyond my control.

There is no use writing a letter because it doesn't read.

However, I will say to it 'I don't have time to listen to you today' or 'I don't care for your opinion, keep that to yourself'. Then hold my head high and continue on my way.

It was once said to me at a lecture (not to me personally, but I've latched on to it). 'Often you aren't your friend. You don't have to believe everything your brain tells you'.

So if you have a nagging voice that chips away at you, today is the day you tell it to shut up.

To borrow from Kenny Powers, the only reply you ever need is 'That's cos I'm awesome'.

As an aside, in Amy Poehler's Yes, Please!, she writes a lot about this voice, and not listening to it. So maybe that's a better life manual than Eastbound and Down.

Linking with #Blogtober

Reflection

I came across a photography link up for reflections, so this is my first, and not very masterly attempt at that challenge. I was lacking my camera, so it's taken with my hideous appendage but the sun was putting on such a pretty show, and it made a very mundane activity quite spectacular that I had to try.

And that's the kind of thing that makes you love life (see what I did there? Double play on the word reflection!)

Are you Lovin' Life this week?

Linking with #WeekendReflection because I stumbled across it the other day and realised this must have been my first attempt at the link up...way back when....especially in times like this, finding beauty in the mundane is a special art.

Linking with #WWOT, #WordlessWednesday #AussieWordlessWednesday

What are you listening to?

I get really bored with music. Mainly because I find some new music and then play it to death until I have to move on. The difficulty, is where do you find new music?
I usually shazam in bars or shops and then seek out the singer when I'm back at the laptop. Occasionally we find a spotify playlist out of France or Germany, and then I dig out the foreign bands.(I don't mind if songs are in another language, as I'm now of an age that I have no idea what they're talking about anyway - on that, can someone tell me what Galantis's Firebird is about? They lose me after the cinema.)

I was driving home one night and I saw this:

I said to my partner 'I just saw the coolest poster. I'm going to get tickets to Leon Bridges. He looks like the coolest guy ever. He'll be great.' So I put it up on FB that I was buying tickets and asked who wanted to come.

My partner, a little more sensible looked him up. He's huge, has played at the White House and the Melbourne gigs sold out on the first day. We liked the music. We got tickets and my FB post got a taker so we're going with friends. I'm very excited.

People keep laughing at my decision to go based on a poster - but posters are the same as book jackets, and they're designed to appeal to a certain market. So to me, it's as good a reason as any to go and see a show.

How do you find new music? Would you go to a concert based on the cool poster? Are you a fan of Leon Bridges? What are you currently listening to? And what on earth is Firebird about?





Linking with #OpenSlather