I am bone deep hands down exhausted… and it’s all my own fault.
I wish I could report that I only had 2.5 hours sleep because I was having lots of lovely fun, (whatever form that may take) but instead I am a victim of my unwavering compulsion to push my deadlines to the last minute and my impossible need to shoot for the moon.
In this case the last minute has been all week this week and the shooting for the moon has been at the behest of one word in my assignment.
Artistic.
The assessment read as follows “Students will select one of the following writers, artists and/or performers and deliver a biographical presentation in artistic form in tutorial sessions.
Now… it was a long time before I ever felt confident calling myself creative (and even less so, artistic), in fact it took acceptance to performing arts school and a 3 year advanced diploma in performing arts before I actually began to believe it. And even in light of that I am a bit bemused by my flight of fancy which was the result of being assigned this task.
Given that I have lovely tools and an apparently creative bent, this week I took my first foray into iMovie. My subject was Aretha Franklin and as there are a whole plethora of resources online I was able to compile a whole lot of them, story board them and narrate them into my very own Aretha Franklin mini documentary. All 12:47 minutes of it… (and as Flick my old flatty is a film editor I now have the utmost respect for what she does… have you any idea what it takes to find enough content for a 12:47 video? Yeah… it’s a total nightmare)
Unfortunately, as the end result is of questionable ‘fair use’ and is basically a shameless abuse of any number of copyrights I’m reluctant to make it public… not to mention the fact that it’s too long for youtube… so I’m sorry, you’ll have to trust me that I did a good job.
A good job that resulted in less than 3 hours sleep.
Here’s the thing. Of the group of us who took their turn to deliver their assignment to the class today ,mine was the only presentation that actually answered the call for an artistic presentation… I don’t get it… we are presented with the perfect opportunity to do something really fun and total creativity of the other 4 presentations we listened extended either to a brief drawing or a video clip… or a recitation of a cleverly remembered discography.
I’m not meaning to be critical of my fellow classmates, I trust you’ll understand that I’m merely observing my own behaviour (particularly if you happen to be one of those fellow students)… my question is this, why can’t I settle for second best – a half done job? I know I didn’t extend myself much for my last two rush job assignments a couple of weeks back… (and I passed them both with a 60% and a 74% sheesh, imagine how I’d have gone if I really tried!). What made this assignment (one that’s actually only worth 30% of the total course) so different?
it’s all in that little word.
rtistic.
Guess that means I am a creative soul after all…

On any given day in Sydney or any other urban area – or, for that matter, on any point on the land masses of the world, there will be complete idiots in cars driving on the road. This is a fact of life. Most of the time they pass us by, sometimes only just missing, and we shake our heads, or our fists and we move on.
Today (I am horrified to admit) I was one of those complete idiots.
Oh;
the shame.
There is a context, and I will try and paint a fair picture… but the story, well she goes something like…
this.
I was driving home via my cunning, not so secret, back way and in doing so, while minding my own business I must add, became aware of another car very close on my tail. Or more precisely following Dolly, my starlet, far too close for comfort.
I have a tendency when this happens to gently apply the brake, not so much as actually to engage the car in slowing down, but enough to light up the rear of my car in an “I’m about to stop you bloody fool, so back off” kind of way.
This I duly did, to the usual good effect.
However, as I’m the kind of girl who generally drives with her foot gently resting on the clutch I was caught out by the fact I had not engaged my brain in advising my foot to return to the clutch from the brake after application of the aforementioned “back off you idiot” advanced driving technique.
And so, as I approached a traffic lit intersection I went to down-shift gears to slow down.
And slow down I did.
Particularly suddenly.
As in a rubber shedding, ear-splitting, oh-sh*t!, screeching halt.
FORTUNATELY, I HAD applied the “back-off” technique earlier, and I was fairly close to the left hand side of the road (for you US readers, that’s the correct side of the street down here) or else the woman behind me may well have connected with Dolly and caused all manner of damage.
But it was a 60 seconds before I was ready to get back in the flow. And a good 20 minutes before my heart rate had returned to normal.
Which does nothing to make me look less like one of those complete idiots in cars driving on Sydney roads.
At any given time.

A whole week and no blogging.
I blame Facebook.

There’s a boy from my past who I hear stories of occasionally but with whom I had an embarrassing moment so fierce as an impressionable teen, that in its wake he and I were never able to speak to each other again.
To think on it now is to laugh, he simply walked in on me in the loo(bathroom) on the occasion of one of those World Vision 40 hour famine sleepovers that were very popular with us in our younger days. There were probably 30 of us at the house so I probably wasn’t even the only one it happened to!
The embarrassment was compounded by the fact that he was the most popular (read gorgeous) boy in yoof groop and all of us girls thought he was next to God. I truly thought I.could.have.died.
To his credit, it remained our little secret, and as a less impressionable adult I just know that should I meet up with him again now we’d laugh it off and catch up on the intervening years. (And he’d be old and balding and thickening around the middle and I’d wonder what on earth we’d seen in him back then…).
I remember too, the first time I ever saw a ‘feminine hygine’ ad (feeling the full impact of what THEY were about having only just begun to require them) with my older cooler male cousin and wishing the floor would open up and swallow me too.
I blame the embarrassment on my puritanical upbringing. I think my sister was the only one to ever come face to face with the fact that our parents actually DID it by finding Mum naked in bed waiting… Dad certainly never gave us any indication of affection in front of us so the whole subject was a no go. Any whiff of it on the telly was quickly snuffed out and the prospect of going to the movies where there may be the barest prospect of the mention of sex, let alone the act, was strictly verboten.
And then I left home and went overseas, far from the confines of the family ethic (but still bound by the confines of my conscience) and there my eyes were opened to rather a spectacular degree.
So while there has been mention made in this blog about how my life choices have meant that there are some lines I am yet to cross in this regard, there hasn’t really been any discussion of just how far the boundaries have been tested… (Most of any relevant incidents were hazed by an alcoholic fog so even if you asked me to recount them, the details would be too fuzzy to make a good story – except the Greek sailing one *sigh… blush*).
In any case, had my alcoholic shenanigans not wiped out some of my embarrassment factors in my very early twenties the epic trip round Europe obliterated them. 21 people living on a bus for 45 days going from camp ground to camp ground, (sleeping, eating, drinking – EVERYTHING).
Nothing was sacred after that.
So it amused me to note that , having found myself at the movies watching a movie that not only discusses issues of sex, relationships and childbirth, but portrays them rather graphically (if not gratuitously), watching it not with my girlfriends, but with a couple of single guys, I do still consider sex to be a sacred thing… I can watch it without TOO much in the way of squeamish toe curling…
…and it’s bloody funny.