fifteen: two hours until the twenties

there is less than two hours left until i turn twenty.

i am absolutely tormented by the hideousness of this reality. i've never been concerned with the fact that time never stops - that at every moment we are going somewhere and that this is completely beyond our control. but that's only because before this moment, i have never had to think of myself as old. as long as you're a teenager, you are far far away from old age. as soon as you turn twenty, it's like you're on an accelerated road taking further and further away from "youth".

i don't want to turn twenty. and yet every time at the clock i am closer and closer to exactly that.

of course, time itself isn't actually real. it's completely constructed. seconds, minutes, hours were all invented in order to make life easier for us all. i could invent a completely new way to measure time, and if everyone else agreed to follow it, then i might never have to turn twenty at all. one day i would drop dead and that would be the end of that.

i would have lived life without worrying about clocks ticking and birthdays passing.

goodbye teens, and an extremely hesitant hello to the twenties.

fourteen: back to reality

so eid this year lasted for three days . it started on friday and pretty much didn't end until sundy night. i sleepwalked my way to uni this morning feeling extremely disgruntled and depressed - monday, and it's back to the reality of deadlines and 9am starts...

as such i've posted some colourful photos of eid with my family and friends, in an attempt to make myself feel better about the cold reality of urban life.

the first photo is of my little cousin shegufta, who as you can see is a bit of a loser. evidence of her loser-ness (as posted on aniqa's blog):

"parent: where are you?
shegufta: in aniqa's bathroom (lie no.1)
parent: where's brishti apu (me)?
shegufta: here with me drinking tea (clearly she's forgotten lie no. 1)"

the second is a photo of one of my bestest and oldest friends ritee (i think my absolute oldest friend is aniqa since i was there when she was born, but i didn't take any pictures with her).

this last image is a photo of ritee's hand, the henna on which was applied my your's truly. when sadia and i went to the mela earlier this year, we were charged FIVE DOLLARS for a tiny henna design which was not even half as pretty as my one (can you tell that my parents raised me as a stereotypical only child?). i could so earn a fortune if i set up a stall there next year...

in other news, i recently attended karishma's 23rd birthday party, a gathering i almost set fire to. observe how this happened:

we were at thairiffic newtown, an establishment which seems to be under the flawed assumption that it is possible to eat pad thai in almost complete darkness. to remedy this situation i gathered the candles of all the kind people in my vicinity and used them to light up my plate, as shown in the picture afi so kindly took.

a few minutes later i noticed a bright light to my right. i turned and observed that the candle lights were getting brighter. pleased by the extra light, i absent-mindedly returned to my food. about a minute later the lights seemed rather TOO bright... so a turned again and realised that my napkin had caught fire! i then started screaming and blowing on the napkin to extinguish the flames, but this only made the fire bigger. my companions merely pointed and laughed at my sad predicament, while my screaming attracted the attention of more and more customers.

finally, my dear friend sabrina had the good sense to grab a full jug of water and pour it over the napkin. this made a right mess of the table, but at least she saved the restaurant from burning to the ground :)

thirteen

i spent the entire month of ramadan incessantly complaining about how hungry i was, how sick i was of waking up to eat and pray at 4am and how it wasn't even worth it because i'd gained two kilos rather than shed them.

however, now that the moon is out and it's all over for another year, i feel... like something wonderful has slipped from my grasp. as i sat there sipping my lemonade and staring out at the indigo post-twilight sky during the last iftar of the year, i had a moment of sadness. ramadan is the muslim's version of christmas. a time for food, family and general happiness.

after this eid weekend, we will all return to our monotonous lives of urban drudgery. there will be no sehri and iftar to paint our days with an element of meaning and purpose, no sense of achievement and sacrifice from fasting for twelve hours straight despite having been at uni from 9am to 7pm.

ah well, enough mourning. it's eid! which makes it impossible to remain down-cast about anything for more than two minutes.

twelve: partisanship

today, i voted for the first time in my life. i'm one of those sappy arts students who like to romanticise the stories of the rising working classes who defied the aristocracy to finally seize their democratic rights. i'm not politically active my any means, but the very history behind the way that each of us received our right to vote, i find quite thrilling. i know, i'm a nerd.

as such, i jumped out of bed this morning and practically ran around the corner to the polling booth. every time someone handed me a partisan leaflet, i grinned like a maniac and thanked them vehemently. then i realised i was holding liberal party leaflets and threw them in the bin.

i voted labor for the lower house, and in the senate i voted above the line for the greens. i know - this makes me sound like a typical follow-the-crowd young person who will sway to the right when i have to start paying half my income in tax. but i doubt i'll ever be able to vote anything other than labor. my memories of the john howard years revolve around a racist media, the over-use of the term "un-australian" (without defining what "australian" even is) and a rising nationalist bogan class.

and this perception is only cemented when i see tony abbott's disgusting "we'll stop the boats!" ads. on the surface the ads appear to be about queue jumpers, but really they're about a notion of who is australian who is NOT, and a fear of australia being taken over by the "other". so if people coming in from asia are the "other", then who is included in the "us"? white people only? the racism and nationalism inherent in those ads is appalling, it makes me want to cry. that's why i don't think that the liberal party, despite their apparently superior economic policies, is conducive to a tolerant and accepting australia.

two funny encounters from election day:

1. a bengali aunty at the polling booth pulled on a bright red labor party shirt OVER HER SARI, placed a labor party cap on her head, and started handing out leaflets! pure comedy.

2. our elderly egyption neighbour informed me that she had voted for "the man" (tony abbott) because "the woman (julia guillard) has a boyfriend! she is not married! very bad... very bad."

eleven

last friday i was at a hollywood themed party. what was significant about it is that NO ONE BELIEVED THAT MY COSTUME WAS REAL.

i was meant to be a flapper, an icon of the roaring 20's, when the american economy was booming following the very successful first world war. flapper's were a new breed of young women who had money to burn and who were laughing in the face of pre-war conservativism, ready to change american culture forever.

of course since the stock market crashed in 1929, and the great depression/new deal era lasted for a decade after that, the flappers were in reality quite a fleeting figure. in hollywood however, they live on for eternity. they embody perfectly the exact mix of elegance and rebellion which hollywood heroins are made of. if you don't know what a flapper is, then i'm sorry but you are a very sad human being.

so anyway, every time i told anyone that i was a flapper they'd say something like "you mean like a bird?" or "what's a snapper?" or "stop making shit up mez". and when i tried to explain the history of it, they tuned out and started dancing. the condescension i faced was appalling!! especially since in this case, i was clearly the more cultured and historically informed involvent (made that last word up).

by the way, the drink is just guava juice. i myself haven't thrown all conservative values to the wind. not on purpose anyway.

ten

over the years i have been systematically increasing the amount of purple in my room.

i really enjoy purple. all shades of it.

nine

i've been volunteering as a peer networker at uni orientation for the past three days. basically this means that i run campus tours, serve at barbeques and coffee carts, usher people into halls and walk lost new students to their desired destinations.

it's a a tremendous amount of work and when i get home at the end of a long day i feel like i could just fall flat on my face and sleep through a hurricane. but at the same time, it is SO MUCH FUN. not only have a met a huge group of amazing new people from all faculties across uni, but i also feel a profound sense of actually being useful in the world.

since it's mid year orientation, all the new students are international. i have met hordes of gorgeous europeans and even had yum cha with a group of them, i've attempted to use my long lost french skills on a french canadian and i've spent fifteen minutes listening to an emiratie complain about every aspect of australian culture while i walked him to the library in the rain. as for the indian engineering students, my friends and i try to avoid them because of our inherent fear of receiving marriage proposals in lieu of Permanent Residency visas.

definitely one of the more eye-opening and stimulating experiences of my life.

eight

so that's a scan of my brain. the random white blob in the top right corner is a picture of the ball of blood (hemorrhage) which was in my brain during the summer.

according to the doctors, my brain bled for only 10 - 15 minutes. which is an almost entirely ludicrous concept, despite it being true. consider this - that one teeny tiny blood vessel, out of the bazillions in my brain, stopped doing what it was supposed to be doing for only ten minutes. and this is what happened to me:

1. i puked continuously for three days straight, in airport bathrooms, in hotel lobbies, on airplane seats, and on my dad's jackets

2. i spent five days in hospital

3. i had massive, massive headaches which persisted for about a month

4. i lost half my vision field for a month

5. i couldn't read for a month, and am now the slowest reader on the planet probably

all that trauma and disorientation caused by one tiny blood vessel. what a little bitch.

seven

i am not really a sports enthusiast. i watch the cricket when Bangladesh plays, because of some socially constructed perception of myself as a bangali, which i need to hold on to in some ceremonial way.

and, every four years, i watch all the matches in which australia is a particpant in the soccer world cup. i watch this because i believe that australian soccer is truly a multicultural sport. it is run by the children of immigrants, and most of the players are children of immigrants. it began as a "wog" sport, and endured racism and marginilisation just like all of us whose parents are from another country. i guess i feel an affinity with australian soccer. we share a profound cultural experience which, as we have grown up in this country, has become a core part of our identity.

when i grow up, i will invest in the future of australian soccer by sending all of my kids to soccer schools(?) from the age of three and a half.

this song by k'naan is two things. firstly, it's nostalgic. it reminds me of summer and running around the grass in the scorching hot australian sun when i was a little girl.

secondly, it's ambiguous. it is full of people waving flags, or moving there arms in flag waving motions. this act is one of the most widely recognised symbols of nationlism. in some countries, nationalism is almost harmless. such as bangladesh. in others, nationalism is the kind of thing which kept institutions such as soccer subjugated for so long. nationalism can be equivalent to racism and hatred. think the cronulla riots and the bogans who chant "we grew here you flew here!" while pumping their southern cross tattooed fists.

i do love the song though. i just thought the irony inherent in its symbolism was interesting.

six

the glimmering new york city skyline outshines even the stars which rise above it.

but that's only because the stars are too far away, too vast, too lost in billions of years of galactic stories to even look twice at the impudent humans running around trying to defy gravity. the stars don't even know we exist, but we spend our whole lives trying to be just like them.

and that is the rationale as to why there is a rather ostentatious and superfluous banner of new york city at the top of my page. i hope it is at least half viable.

five

the best way to write radio scripts.

four

is there a justifiable reason for why lecturers have us hand in assignments in groups? working in groups creates an absolutely impossible environment. take today for example:

after my driving lesson which finished at 12.30pm, a jumped on a bus (literally) and hobbled through central station trying not to be late for the arranged 1.30pm group meeting. i was then left to sit by my lonesome on the talk-permitted level of the library for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. i could have spent that time being productive as to a number of other commitments i may or may not have, such as eating my lunch for instance.

it is this kind of pure dysfunctionality and outrageous time wastage which is borne of "group tasks", and why group tasks must be eradicated from the face of our sweet Earth.

ps: guess which country this photo is from. hint: it is not brazil. hint 2: this is my grandad's house.

three

the law makes me feel powerful and important. but at the same time it drains all the humanity out of me.

i have stopped caring about asylum seekers, i have completely forgotten why i ever supported a welfare state, i have started seeing poor people as a burden on the system, and, finally, everywhere i go i notice negligence and gleefully consider the legal construction of the case i would lay against my neighbours when i take them to court.

of course after ten weeks in an arts based degree i've realised that i'm just participating in a discourse, and therefore allowing my identity to be shaped by the knowledges it consists of. but for a while there is really did believe that the law was the closest we'd ever get to the only stable version of the truth, even if it is mad-made.

this is not to say that i am disillusioned by the law. i still want to live out all its glorious cliches especially the morally-bankrupt corporate lawyer who measures self worth by the quantity of her shoes.

but that life isn't the only possible answer, the only valid construction of self. it's just on of billions of equally invalid, equally untrue wretched paths out there.

two

went to see the neurosurgeon this morning. she's a sweet lady with wispy blond curls and bejeweled square-frame glasses. she suggested that i'd probably need one instance of radiotherapy to treat the stray blood vessels in my brain.

then i picked up the spans and photos of my brain that i'd had done. i'm pretty excited about those - how many people can actually say that they've got pictures of the stuff inside their brain!

one

every artistic endeavour should begin with a reminder of what inspired us to be artistic in the first place. for me, it was two separate events:

+ the first was studying modernist art in year 9 visual arts classes, and feeling absolutely elated when i was face-to-face with a real monet (not this one) in london later that year.

+ the second was a a couple of months ago when i discovered michel foucault's works on discourse, power and the battle for truth. hence, the title for my blog - foucault has either brainwashed me, or eloquently persuaded me that everything is socially constructed, even myself.