K is for Klutz

I am a very clumsy person, and not always just due to my lack of coordination. A lot of the time I just don’t think things through long enough to process the consequences in my mind. Take today for example.

We had boiled beef for dinner – it was supposed to be corned beef but mum bought the wrong type of meat – and I had to clean up because it’s just one of my jobs. So I grabbed the pot full of boiling water and tipped it into the sink. Unfortunately, the plug was still in and, obviously thinking it over a lot, I stuck my hand into the water to let it out. I got burnt, pretty badly too, so I swore and glared icily at the water in the sink. I don’t know, maybe I thought my glare had cooled the water in some way, and for the second time I got burnt attempting to get the plug out of the sink.

So now it hurts a lot to type – but it’s considerably less painful than the time at the start of year ten when I lit my sock on fire by kicking over a candle, then tried to throw a glass of water at my foot and missed. Mhmm, that’s coordination for you.

Today was the first day at school and it was sort of lovely. The year sevens were all really sweet, albeit nervous and sort of drowning in their oversized tunics. Tunics are supposed to be big in year seven though; it goes with the job description. So it really annoys me when those tiny baby eleven- and twelve-year-olds buy tunics so they fit well. IT JUST DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. Growing into your tunic is a rite of passage; you can’t start off with it fitting like a glove – or worse, too short. Year nines get to wear short tight tunics; year sevens must wear big ones. Year nines are too cool to run for the buses; year sevens won’t let anything get in between them and the first 610.

Oh! One last thing. Yesterday I went to the Shire – I know, I know – with a bunch of my girls to go see the local production of Spring Awakening. I was pleasantly surprised. Whilst the actors were obviously chosen for their singing ability over their acting ability, it seemed to be a really well-funded and directed performance. The guy who played Melkior Gabor got on my nerves a lot because he couldn’t maintain his American accent, and it annoyed me that they pronounced ‘Wendla’ the German way, with a V, even though they were doing the American version of it. But other than that I was very impressed and there was this moment in The Song of Purple Summer where there was this gorgeous a Capella harmony thing going on and that just sent shivers down my spine. If you’re ever near the Shire (and I won’t judge you if you are), definitely check out the Shire Musical Theatre’s production of Spring Awakening. It’s a brilliant musical.

Off to bring pain to my brain and burnt hand to finish my modern homework J   

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You look a little familiar ...

I just spend a lot of time on the bus, okay? So don’t think I’m weird or anything. But my favourite thing to do on my way home from school is to sit across from interesting-looking people, or boring-looking ones, I’m not fussy, and write down every single thing about them. It’s really fun and nice and people are all so different from one another that every time I do it, I discover a little more about humanity in general. There was a guy from IGS on my bus once, and there was just something about him that was intensely beautiful, like a marble statue, and I just had to describe him because that’s what I do. So:

He is an IGS kid and he has big hands. He’s staring intensely out the window with narrowed eyes as if trying to intimidate the shop fronts. Big lips, flared nostrils, pale, washed out skin, bags under eyes, try-hard fringe. He holds his arms in a monkey grip across his stomach, veins on his hands prominent, red knuckles. He has pen marks on his calves that look like hourglasses.

He rests his head against the board; he’s sitting in the pram/wheelchair area – with his eyes closed, resting them from all that intense staring. His legs are apart, backpack resting between out-turned feet. He reaches up to press the button as though it’s some immensely taxing chore, then leans forward with his palms on his knees and drags himself up. When he gets off the bus he turns to the driver instinctively but doesn’t say anything. He walks up along Dalhousie Street, glancing back over his shoulder at the bus as we turn the corner in the opposite direction.

This guy is now so clear in my head it’s as though I’ve taken a 3D photograph of that moment and can walk around in it whenever I read back on what I’ve written. I just found it so intriguing, the strange way he held onto his own arms like he depended on it, how he narrowed his eyes at the world, those hourglasses drawn on his legs. And the exhausted, vulnerable moment when he rested his head on the board and loosened his grip on his wrists and his consciousness.

Okay, yeah I’m weird. Get over it. A big grown-up IGS kid like that can handle himself. But if you ever find yourself wondering who that weird girl is who keeps staring at you and writing notes, well, it’s just me, and I’m not stalking you or anything. I just find a ridiculous amount of pleasure in the tiniest things. Like you, apparently, so just be flattered and don’t call the police.

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Poetry for a Rainy Day

Oh I wish I had an umbrella

A brolly or ‘brella for two

Umbrellas for one

Are dry, not fun

I’d like to spend damp times with you

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Things I Don’t Understand (and most likely never will)

What would you do if I sang out of tune?

Would you stand up and walk out on me?

See I don’t actually know how the lyrics to that song go. But then again, I don’t know an awful lot of things. Here are a few:

1.       How trains work.

Have you ever thought of this? How the hell do trains work? Really, they’re attached to cables at the top, and they sit on rails, and then, all of a sudden, they just start moving, often at great speeds. And because I have no idea how they work, I find them pretty scary. At least with buses you can see that the petrol goes in, and there’s an engine, and the wheels spin around, and a driver sits in the front with their hands on the steering wheel and turns the bus and stops the bus at traffic lights, etc. But not with trains! Oh no. That’s why I hate them so much.

2.       Fireworks.

I get the ones that just shoot straight up into the air. But what about Catherine Wheels and the sparkly white ones which just stay up there, glistening? How do they work? I remember there used to be an exhibit at Powerhouse Museum where you could make your own fireworks (on a computer, that is) by choosing all the different types of colouring and gun powder and a little movie would play and in the end you got to see what your fireworks looked like. But I still don’t understand them. I used to be so frightened of fireworks too, in the days when they were legal my school used to buy a bunch for school discos and then set them off in the top playground, and I would find my mum and she’d drive me home as fast as possible and I would just get so hysterical, they were so loud. And scary. And they defied everything the kindergarten-me knew about the world.

3.      Time.

There is one thing that makes me want to bash in my head every time I think about it and that is time. I just don’t understand it. And when I watch Doctor Who, which is one of the world’s most fantastic brilliant shows, and the Doctor does some awkward time thing, I think, but-but-but, I don’t understand! But I don’t hate time. What is strange about it is how we’ve almost harvested it, roped it into doing our own bidding. What are seconds, minutes, days and years? Who created them? Why do we start school at 8:55 and finish at 3:20? Why do we have a big party at midnight on New Years’ Eve, at that one second of that one day out of millions and trillions of seconds? And sometimes I try to work out, if we were nocturnal, would that mean we would celebrate New Years’ at midday? Would we cloud-gaze instead of stargaze? And what if Earth suddenly got knocked a little bit off its orbit around the sun and the days grew longer all of a sudden and one year was actually five hundred days? Because that’s us, we, humans, have created this thing called time, and I just wonder if things were a little bit different, how we might see the world.

Ouch, my head hurts J

Anyway, this is what it is like to live inside my brain. I’m one of those people who delight in hypotheticals and won’t stop thinking about something until their mind just aches or someone interrupts them and brings them back to the real world. Ah, the real world. Isn’t it just a brilliant place? Because if we lived on Mars we’d probably be three times as tall and covered in a thick layer of fur.

Yeah, that’s right – Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night – but colourfuller. It took me approximately an hour and a half. I wonder how long it took Van Gogh.