Dear Sara,

Here are a couple of things you should remember when you get home.

1. University Prep sheet
2. Ballet Shoes
3. hair barrettes
4. Books
5. Belt
6. Jacket
7. Contact Lens

Please iron up all your clothes before you leave!

Buy a red shirt for mum
Random presents and a huge bag for hiding drugs in.

Naze?

Saikin ni, iro iro no mono wa.. dou hanashite... konna ni kanashii ne. Watashi mo, tomodachi mo. Kyo, tegami ga yomita, naze sonna ni kowai. Yabai ne. nande?

"We're just young, we don't know what we want."- How can you say that, or think it true? To me, that is just shirking responsibility.

dou da?

Upside-Down
Turn it around.
Squint and twist your neck.

How strange a perspective my world takes. It is seldom that anyone should dare, even subtly, hint that they look through the same strange lens of reality. That would be a call into outer space I dare not make myself, for fear I should obtain an answer. Any answer. Alien lifeform-type or lost-human in space, I should cover my ears in mufflers in case someone dares to understand me. Instead, I would much rather sit here, or lie in the street, not caring, nor daring to care, what the passerbys think of me as I live my reality through warped, tinted balloon-colors glasses. I like my world pretty. If I squint, I can cut out the view from the corner of my eyes and focus on the shapes I see through my balloon glasses. I pretend the white sticks are stalks of plants and the burst of translucent color taints my world with a desperately needed coat of paint. I'm grateful, but soon it will be time to go home. I grab a couple of lifesavers on the way home, the rainbow combination ready in my morose bag, just in case I need to revive a little color. London's grey rain falls as I tread muddy puddles but I'm obscured from the bleakness by the colored lenses of my optic plexus.

Rainbow

Findhorn Beach at 3.40 am, taken during the solstice.

It's almost as if the lack of light shades you in your unorthodox quest to discover the beach at this untimely hour. The queasy calm makes you uneasy, as if the sea has issued its warning- what warning you know not. But that just makes you press on. You close in and sit on the makeshift wood, running your clean fingers over the coarse wood, weathered by wind and sand. Your cuticles catch grains of sand and the nerves in you fingertips respond to every nook and cranny of the wood. Your eyes scan the horizon and the chilly wind dulls your senses, making you shiver as it passes. But you expect it. You don't resent it the way you would on a normal morning at the beach, because it's 3.40 am and you haven't any right to invade the privacy of this shore, the time when secrets are exchanged between the sea and sand, and you are ashamed to be evesdropping even when the conversation is foreign. Your toes clutch at sand and you are drawn, ever lured, by the repetitive, intermittent swishing of the waves. Waves bring things, and they remove things. A bit of driftwood, and old sandal. The horizon has shifted ever so slightly, but you don't notice. You want in on the secret of this shore, the whisperings you hear but don't catch, the wispy wanderings of the creatures you don't see in the sand. But they don't speak your language, although you've tried to listen, and there is no true translator of nature save it's creator. You've paid out your sand dollars but the hermit crabs have shrugged you off and gone home into their underground worlds. So you take a picture, and you trod away in the sand, the last of the wind chasing you gently.

A policeman receives a red nose by a protester dressed as a clown, right, during a demonstration in from of a nuclear waste depot in Gorleben, northen Germany, on Satuday, Nov 11. (Fabiam Bimmer, AP. From news.yahoo.com, "This week in photos").

While the main issue that comes to mind really should be creative protesting methods (Loud, peaceful, nude, blood-spattered signboards or dressed as clowns with zucchinis, whatever floats your boat) I found myself a little more enamoured by the smiling policeman. No doubt he was meant to stop the protest (not peaceful, violent, but fun- and you know fun isn't allowed) yet perhaps there was some doubt in his mind about the policies pertaining to free speech, and about whose side he really should be standing on. We talk about free speech, and while we don't specify it's form of expression (except when it's tendencies lean toward the lewd), we do limit it's execution. And maybe, just maybe, policemen don't have to be opposed to fun. =) I liked his eyes, smiling, glimmering with fun, and I liked the fact that no matter how opposed one may be to a fake red nose on top of your normal one, you have to pull your muscles into a smile to take it off. Fake noses: forced fun. They're more dangerous weapons than you think. They're subtly manipulative. And I think zucchini lady knew this, and saw the willing glint of fun in the eye of our policeman.

I like this picture.

Cluster Analysis

Will the world stop without numbers, without graphs?
Wilt thou consent to set thy calculations aside for more idle things?

Cluster Analysis is lecture 11's work.
What is brightly allows you to do is a marvel.
It allows you to take a group of Dependant Variables
And classify the scores to see if they have any tendency toward a particular grouping.

Fascinating is not how it came to be (or to be on my notes),
But Fascinating is how it applied itself
Swirling strangely in my head.

Am I not of swift right mind anymore?
My lecturer's work is done,
his confusion is spread like plague.

I saw it in photographs: they took out the DV of an individual's reality.
That is why one can capture only what is borderline satisfactory with a camera.
If you drew a regression line
you would see that the awesome silence of observing beauty
can be segregated into a number of DVs
and the camera successfully eliminates one.
Leaving the data mundane, unfufilling, sepia.

I saw it too in my sick anxiety.
How much of my ailment is caused by stress
how much by indigestion
and how much indigestion by stress?
Cluster Analysis.

Cluster Analysis, breaking your life into the simple orthogonal components when life is just one big dynamic system.

Silly Scientists.

Correspondance with a Memory.

strange how reality and memory weave themselves together so firmly yet so subtly. There is no sense in reality if memory is not present. There is no 'leave the past behind' because that means you don't understand the present. One's understanding of the now is based on the before; yet the misty colored memories hide themselves coyly from the presence of now. More than ever, the weaving continues, and as I become increasingly aware of it, a sense of manic joy as well as sadness washes like gentle wave, repeatedly and persistently. It will all be over in 5 days. I'm bullet-training toward a bump and i wonder if i am prepared for impact. Examine-Nation straight on, full steam ahead! I think this rocky-rollercoaster will be just beginning once the exam ends. ;)

The space between a thought and speech

How strange this time-period feels, how stretchy ... 6 days to exams (rush, rush hurry hurry now come to me) and 18 days till I fly. How much there is to do in that span of time! Fortunately I have forgone the prospect of losing anymore weight. I am quite happy, strangely.

Nevertheless I am only 1/2 way through my notes and I really need to be done. Yes, I AM stressing but it's not premature so I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I've been making a lot of honey joy and eating a lot of honey joy... and i am going out to buy nutella. NUTELLA. with bread, with apples, with everything anyone can think of, most especially cornflakes. Ah me, I feel so distracted as it is, and so excited about year-end and about next year. But part of it freaks me out. I feel like I'm losing things, losing the wispy, elusive ends of memories I will never get back. I feel like some things I lose without knowing what they are. I woke up thinking of... thinking of.. strange- how cruel that memory can be when you know you've been denied somehow.

I finished 'White Teeth'. Irie's the one I really identify with and I never did expect a good end to such a confused novel, but I guess it's satisfactory. It's satisfying, the way I've been hung there, trying to guess, is it Millat, or Magid? Majid, or Millat? We'll never know, even in fiction, even in your logical mind, even if you try your hardest to know. The best thing is, it will be whoever you wish.

bring me back to a time-- but don't change the way it was, that's just too much.

The Jazz and Wooden Boat Festival.

I have much to say about the festival and no words to say them. Instead, let pictures speak their thousand words each, and let me save my words as alms for assignments..

Claisebrook Cove.

Ger and I, don't we look content? There's an unmistakable air of festivity...

The Karen Sue, going for $210, 000. I wouldn't mind living on her.

The platypus and it's supplementary tadpole.

Gondola on the swan.

The Fab4, my mini roadtrip buddies.

Forgive the Narcissism, I really like this shot.

Skyline; view from the bridge.

What goes up must come down: the view from below.

I just love these cute little boats with their seemingly eclectic people.

My Narcissism is boundless. Myster Saylor, take me with you.

I like this perspective shot. So there you have it. Claisebrook Cove on the corner of Royal St. and Plain St, so tucked away you never knew the hidden secret of the smiling wealthy.

From the less green side, to the greener side. With no love, Sara.

Well, we had a chat today, Ger and I, and the age old question of "why does size matter?" came up. I guess it's not meant to matter. I guess it does. Life is life, c'est la vie, they tell me. They've told me everything, this world. That sometimes fat is good, that fat is unacceptable. That fat means you aren't working out to your best ability. That you were born with fat. That fat just means lack of self control. All half-truths, and all mortifying as one hand goes around the waist to cover a torso in an effort to conceal what we think is the ugly truth (but it isn't ugly. It's just truth. And sometimes, raw, honest truth is beautiful).

I don't want to justify my own size. I know I could be smaller, fitter, slimmer... and so could everyone else. But sometimes I have a creeping feeling that it matters more than it should. And that I should just love me for me. *shrugs* I guess I do sometimes?? I should more often..

Ger told me that Claisebrook cove is the most expensive area in perth. Dreamlife was birthed there, and I don't know where that will take me because I reckon that is all it really is: a dream. Maybe one day, something extraordinary will happen and I'll find myself back there.. I just have a strange feeling about that place because I feel like I've seen it in a dream before..

I cannot wait to go back to SG! And I get to see Joanne.. I miss her too! Oh man.. I'm just jumping junipers here!