A Writer's Journal

I have to keep a writing journal for my writing class at university. So far, out of the 12 days I have had it, I've written in it four times. I'm supposed to be writing in it every day.

I've noticed I mostly write in it after midnight. And upon reading back over some of that stuff, half of it doesn't make sense. It may inspire a story someday, but it really doesn't make sense.

Since there's nothing extravagantly personal in it yet, I wanted to share some of these wonderfully thoughtful little anecdotes with you.

I really don't understand how my brain functions.

25.02.15

• I love the sound of the train pulling into the station. The high pitched whistle on the electric line at Joondalup.
• Tinnitus. Persistent ringing of the ears.
• A man driven insane by tinnitus.
• What does PTSD do to us? Is the war worth it if our soldiers are returning home broken?
• "For I know the plans I have for you," says the Lord. "Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope, and a future" - Jeremiah 29:11
• What if one day, you asked someone for directions, they gave you the wrong directions, and it altered the whole course of your life?

28.02.15

I apparently now have an imaginary hairless cat named Emperor Zurg. Ok then.

How do you tell someone you like them? It seems so easy, but it's so not easy. It's the most nerve wracking thing ever. I don't understand why. It's just telling another person that you have potentially romantic feelings for them. I tend to break things down like that when they're stressing me out. It doesn't actually make it any better.

I'm trying to write. JJ is meant to be getting food poisoning. So far it's not happening.

An unfamiliar song is playing on my iTunes. But I can just tell it's from the London Olympic Dreams album.

I was right.

Playing 'Would you rather marry?' via text with Damian.

I should write a story about a dancer battling injuries. Neuritis, ankle sprains, bad shoulders and knees. 

A mother watching her sick child receive chemo.

What is wrong with the world today? 

Apparently everything.

This pen is hard to read. This is why I don't handwrite these days. So much effort.

Mittens' human.

I swear all my best material comes forth after midnight.

3.03.15 - (this is a drafting of ideas for my presentation for this unit)

• An evil beast, winding its claw-like tentacles through my her daughter's brain.
• Every day brought a new enemy.
• The clear liquid winding through the tubing. Looks like water, yet it is so damaging toxic, it can burn skin.
• Covered with a bag to protect it from the light. Yet to protect her daughter, it has to cause so much harm.
• The room is so dark, da as dark as the cloud hanging over her family.
• Her daughter, who was supposed to grow up, graduate high school, fall in love, and explore the world.
• There is no God. There Since that fateful day, she had not once believed in a god.

4.03.15

All I can think about is AJ's baby. It was just SO unexpected! She hid it brilliantly. It's hard to explain, but it's almost alien to see her pregnant. It's been 7 years since she had Mekhai. It's like I forgot she is still capable of reproducing. I think she may actually have had trouble conceiving, judging by her Instagram [caption].

The shock has worn off. To think we always wanted her to have another baby and now she is.

We thought they had settled on one.

I'm so happy for her and Nathan. AJ looks beautiful, confident, happy and proud.

I can't wait for July!

On the other hand (literally), my wrist is very bruised and painful. I hope I haven't chipped a bone. I do love that contemporary dance though. I love contemporary. Can we do it in the concert?

9.03.15

Trying not to laugh in a lecture while writing about a character hopped up on oxycodone after surgery.

I'm sure there's more wonderful pieces of wisdom where those came from. Stay tuned!

Xo.

Criminal Minds Thursday - 6.11.14

Wow.

What a day.

So I made plans to catch up with my friend Damian in the city today. Parking in the city is an absolute nightmare, so I elected to take the train instead. I said I would drive to the train station, but my mum and her friends were going to Joondalup for my sister's school choir event, so she said I could just come with them and catch the train from Joondalup. So after having coffee with them, I walked to the train station (which is actually right underneath the shopping center for all you readers that don't live in Perth).

As I tagged on, I looked at the timetable and it said "Perth - 6 car - 9 minutes". I thought 'awesome, heaps of time, I can wait around for 9 minutes'. This was at 10:40am.

I get down to the platform and started scrolling through Twitter on my phone to see what was going on with the new episode of Criminal Minds. I had been scrolling for maybe a minute and then I glanced up at the train board again. It said 11 minutes.

This struck me as weird. I watched it for the next few minutes and it kept flicking between 9 and 11 minutes. Then it jumped up to 13 minutes.

I waved it off initially as a time glitch with the timetable board.

I kept watching the board and it seemed to work it's way down every minute with no problems, until it got to 8 minutes and it decided to jump back up to 13 minutes. By now, I had been on the platform for 15 minutes, 6 minutes past the time when the train was supposed to have arrived.

I messaged Damian to let him know that something was clearly not going well on the trains today and that I would keep him posted. Then I rang my mum, who was still in the shopping center, to let her know what was going on.

I watched the board again and this time it read "Perth - 3 car - 14 minutes". I assumed something was wrong with the first train and they had sent a replacement.

After another five minutes of watching the board jump around and play up, my mum rang back to see if I was on the train yet. I said no, and she told me to go up to the ticket booth and ask if anyone knew what was happening with this damn train.

By now there was a LOT of people accumulated on the platform. I made my way through them and headed up the escalator to the ground level (Joondalup is a sunken station). I asked a security guard what was going on, and he told me there was a problem with the timing points at the Butler station (which to clarify, only opened about a month ago). I thought 'well that explains the problem with the board'. Basically, when a train runs over a timing point, the sensors send a signal to all the digital timetables at the stations ahead of that train. If a timetable reads "Perth - 6 car - 2 minutes", when the train runs over the timing point a minute away from the station, the 2 changes to a 1 and the whole line of text flashes to alert people that the train is arriving.

I looked over the balcony back at the station and got a new surprise - the whole timetable had blacked out and instead had a single line of text scrolling through it. "SERVICES DISRUPTED BETWEEN BUTLER AND PERTH. WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE"

Great.

Right in front of me was a bus to Whitfords Station, which is two stops down the Joondalup line in the direction of the city (JO line goes Perth - Leederville - Glendalough - Stirling - Warwick - Greenwood - Whitfords - Edgewater - Joondalup - Currambine - Clarkson - Butler). I got on that bus, which was due to arrive at Whitfords at 11:25am, 25 minutes after I was supposed to meet Damian.

There is a train service on the Joondalup line known as the Perth W/Whitfords W pattern. It stops all stops between Perth and Warwick, skips Greenwood, and terminates in Whitfords, where it waits in a siding after unloading passengers until the next Perth (full pattern) train passes, then it heads back to the city following the pattern it left in. I decided to go to Whitfords and wait for one of those trains, as they would not be affected by the delays in Butler.

But when I got to Whitfords, I discovered there were no more W's until 2:45pm.

I ended up ringing Damian and getting him to pick me up.

GET THIS THOUGH. 10 Minutes after he texted me to say he was leaving the city, A TRAIN FROM BUTLER TO PERTH PULLED IN.

Damian came, so we went to Hillary's Boat Harbour and had pizza. It was really good to catch up. Lots of laughs and bitching about Transperth.

Then I got home and prepared myself for the Criminal Minds episode. Hence why this post is named so.

In the episode, JJ has an argument with her mother about her mother telling Henry (JJ's son) about JJ's deceased sister. Rosaline (JJ's sister) committed suicide when she was 17. JJ was only 11. It's clearly a touchy subject in the family, and it was made very clear that JJ doesn't just not talk about her because it hurts, she gives the subject a berth wider than the Pacific Ocean. Anyway, at the end of the episode, Henry can't sleep, so JJ tells him a story of two sisters who loved each other very much - Jennifer and Rosaline.

It was a touching episode (aside from you know, the murders). I definitely had tears in my eyes at the end, especially when JJ's voice cracked and she was clearly fighting off tears. AJ Cook is an incredible actress. I don't know how she brings on the tears so convincingly, but she does and she kills it every time.

Also, Chloe had a scare with her results yesterday. A spot showed up that was potentially a tumor, and if it was a tumor, she was basically done for. Her doctor rescanned her spine yesterday and phoned her mum today to say IT'S NOT A TUMOR! Chloe is officially 5 months in remission!

Anyway, so today was very eventful, and I'm sure I'll have more to say tomorrow.

Catch ya!

Corpse Foot Jigs

To the minority that may actually be reading this, my day was a little interesting. Just a little. Not a lot.

As a university student on 'study break' (waste of time. I have never studied, although now would be a good time to start), I can sleep in quite late these days. My sisters, aged 14 and 11, leave for school at 7:50 and 8:10am respectively. But they are so freaking LOUD in the morning! They argue, and crash things around, slam doors, stomp on the tiles...it's a wonder I haven't killed one yet. Anyway, I was woken around 7:30 by my youngest sister clinking her spoon as she stirred her tea.

After 2 more hours of very uncomfortable sleep (you know when you're tired and you're dozing but not quite fully asleep and you just can't get comfortable?), I pulled myself out of bed. After Mum rang home to get me to run an errand, I ended up driving up to the shopping center to see her at work (funnily enough, I also work there).

I hung around long enough to annoy her and then came back home to make lunch. Lunch was not exciting. I don't normally eat big meals during the day, which is probably so bad for my diet, but I just don't have the motivation to cook a healthy meal. Anyway, today I was unusually hungry when I got back home, so it was a 'what can I excavate out of the freezer today' kind of situation.

Yeah, it was kinda sad. I salvaged some pan ready paratha bread (Indian flatbread that is greasy as all get out), and fried up three of those. While they were cooking...

...I danced around my house to Albannach - more specifically 'Corpse Foot Jigs' and 'Auld Nick's A Piper'. For clarification, Albannach (THE MIGHTY NACH) is a Scottish tribal pipes and drums band. There is something liberating about their music. Dad doesn't think so ("drive your car to Nana's and couldn't figure out how to work the bloody radio so I had to listen to your bloody bagpipes the whole way. TEN SONGS"), but I feel like the Scottish beast (I know some people will laugh at me for that, laugh all you like) inside of me just lets itself out.

After dancing like I was at a Scottish festival (maybe I'll do that when I go to Scotland), I lounged around and watched The Social Network (2010), which honestly wasn't exactly enthralling. It was interesting and had me Googling all different things about Facebook, I'll give it that, but it was kind of...flat.

Then I had to pick up the monsters and take them to my grandma's, which I do every Tuesday afternoon, and of course that means I get to see my FAVOURITE little monster. Boyd. He's a cheeky little feral but my god this kid is cute.

(I mean, come on. This kid is ADORABLE)

He was being a little turkey as usual until I took him out the back to look at the fish pond in my grandparents' backyard. He liked that until he realised he can see the cars on the road from the backyard. So off we went to stand on the fence while he waved 'bye bye' to every car that went past. He did learn a new word though.

Bus.

Bravo cutiepie.

So after surviving the drive home (there are some serious idiots out there), I lounged again, and then had to go to dancing. Nothing really exciting to share from that except we finished two concert routines tonight and by the end of it, I was sweating like a pig. And my childhood cancer ribbon was stabbing me in the chest so I had to pin it to my shorts.

Fun times.

Catcha later.

Blogging my way to Scotland

Well I did it! I finally joined the land of blogging (I can hear some of my friends applauding this in the background).

The reason I started this blog is probably like many others out there. Somewhere to put all my thoughts. Talk about myself for twenty paragraphs with the glimmer of hope that someone out there cares how much Vegemite I had on my toast this morning (Answer: None. I don't eat breakfast).

But I also started it because of an event that hasn't even happened yet. To be honest, there isn't any real certainty that it WILL happen. But hopefully my drive and determination to make it happen will help get there.

This thing that I speak of is a trip to Scotland. Actually, in my mind, I refer to it as more of a pilgrimage.

You see, I am an Australian born girl. But my maternal grandparents were born in Scotland - in the towns of Beith and Hamilton. My mum always said when I was growing up that she would have loved to take me and my sisters to Scotland, but it was something we just could not afford. Therefore, I decided a few months ago that it is something I must achieve for myself. And when I finally get there, knowing that I funded myself and worked hard for it will be the greatest feeling of fulfillment I've ever had.

The reason this trip will be a pilgrimage for me is because I know that by going to Scotland, I will discover myself and learn so much more about my heritage and culture. The day I am immersed in that beautiful country is the day I greatly look forward to.

But enough about Scotland, and a little about myself.

As said, I'm Australian. I live in the 'boring' (beautiful) city of Perth, on the western coast. Maternally, I am Scottish, and paternally, I am Australian, but my paternal roots probably trace back to England. I'm 18 years old and still haven't touched an alcoholic beverage (18 is the legal age in Australia and many Commonwealth countries). I have danced since the age of three and have a back like an elastic band - hence my favourite style of dance is acrobatics, and I also take part in gymnastics.

I am the driving force behind the Twitter hashtag #believeforchloe. This was started in the name of childhood cancer but the story behind it is one for another time.

If you got to the bottom of this post, congratulations. I probably bored you to death.