It's the end of the world as we know it

So this is prob the last post I do before the New Year. It's been a weird year, but I'm glad I've been doing this blog for such a length of time. It's nice, when you feel like you've done nothing, to be able to look back and realise that you did do things.

Hopefully next year makes more sense. Until then, hope everyone has a nice Christmas or whatever and resurfaces in 2013 with their brains and bodies intact.

Day Off

It's nice to have a day off. I haven't been wearing anything worth photographing recently because I've been working most days, and when I haven't I've just sat around, wallowing in relaxation. I really appreciated Meagan of Latterstyle doing a photo series on work clothes. Even though both my works are pretty relaxed about clothing rules, when you're working in hospitality there's no way you can wear anything nice. I dress for practicality and choose the things which I don't mind getting covered in beer. And of course, I never wear heels. Which is why it was nice to break them out today, even if the boyf thinks they're ugly. I'm pretty sure I was prompted to buy them because of the ones Mary Kate's wearing in this picture.

Which are probably like Celine or something but whatevs.

November

Well, it's the end of November, and I finished my novel a day early. Or I should say, I finished 50k words. It's nowhere near finished. It has a start and an ending, but I mean... the middle is pretty weird, to say the least. There's more than a few loose ends. It's more like a tangled ball of string than a knitted sweater. If you know what I mean.

My progress graph.. got a little sketchy in the middle.

I've found Nanowrimo to be a very positive experience. If there's anyone out there who's dreamed of writing a novel, I'd urge them to sign up next year, even if it sounds impossible. It's totally possible, I just did it. I also did it with literally no planning. On October 31st, I was only just finished moving house. I had no time at all to think about it, and on November 1st I literally just opened a word document and wrote the first thing that came into my head. Somehow that turned into a story. And now I have 50k words of story.

Which is immense! For me, anyway. I've never, in any way written that many words before. Usually my stories peter out after about a paragraph. Let alone 90 pages.

Over the month I've really come to appreciate what the Nano website peeps do for us as well. They do it for no profit, it's free to sign up, and the only reason they do it is because they want heaps of people to write novels. They get famous and not-famous-but-inspiring writers to give pep talks throughout the month, which really keeps you going. They know how you're feeling, and they help all they can. I owe them, hardcore.

So I've written my first novel. It feels both better and not as exciting as I thought it would feel. There's a sense of awe that I always had for people who wrote novels, like it was this impossible thing that I would never achieve even though I longed to. It's kind of obvious now, but the first thing you notice is that it's actually very easy. You just keep writing. The hard part is writing anything good. That's where the not-so-exciting bit comes in. Most of it was pretty bad, and the plot is intensely holey.

But, you know. I had fun. My housemate got me a 1st novel cake. I wrote a novel. :)

Oh, almost forgot. Did our first gig at a venue, The Lounge. Was Rad.

And lastly, here's me looking cute for work.

So

My long, explainable absence from blogging and the internet in general has been interesting. Everyone who knows me already knows what was going on, but to recap - moved house and writing a novel. November is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which some crazy peeps try and write a whole novel in one month. Since the house-moving coincided exactly with the start of the month, let's just say it's been pretty insane so far. I doubt I'll be blogging again until the end of the month anyway, because it's pretty hardcore and I'm not the fastest writer. I've also never written this much on one piece in my life. That in itself feels pretty good. I'm just over halfway through it now, and this is definitely the hardest point. There are feelings of failure and resignation as the realisation sets in that the plot needs to be going somewhere now. But anyway, I'm still going to do it and hopefully finish on time, and I can rest and edit later.

Here are some pix from random stuff in the past couple of weeks:

See you in December. xx

Bleh

Just an outfit. I've photographed it before. Every time I wash this jumper it gets smaller. It started out as a baggy-ish adult sized jumper and now it looks like it's for a child. I made these skeleton earrings in purple and orange for halloween and life. I got some new lip tars that I'm excited about. And I'm extremely, immensely, overly and intensely stressed about moving house in less than two weeks when we are still giving in application forms. I have the sinking feeling it's going to be very hard to get our bond back. I hate everything to do with real estate agents and landlords.

I bought a ticket to Harvest though, and that is something to look forward to.

Makeup as Identity

To begin with, let me just say that I have watched the Miss Representation documentary, and I thought it was really good. Like, awesome. It should be shown in every school, everywhere. And although I knew most of what they were saying, I'm really really glad it's all there together in a resource that can easily be shown to people who don't know about sexism in the media, and it's all explained in simple language that everyone can understand. That is one of the most important things about feminism now, I think - because feminist theory can get very, very dry and dense. And no average person would be able to decipher it, if people who genuinely know a lot about it have trouble. So, hooray for that.

I also subscribe to the e-newsletter they send out every week/fortnight/something. And so far, so good - they are encouraging everyone to spread awareness, become aware of female role models and encourage them, and other awesome empowering stuff. They recently had a competition where people wrote in suggesting an action or campaign that they thought could benefit women/feminism. The action that won was from a school-age girl who suggested "Fresh-Faced Friday", in which anyone was encouraged to participate. It began with the idea that each Friday, women should go without makeup in order to lessen their addiction to wearing it, and to make them feel like they don't have to wear it. It has since grown into a "Take 5", where participants choose to lessen the amount of makeup they wear by taking five aspects away from it, for example; five products, five dollars, or five minutes.

While I can see where they're coming from, and there is an immense pressure on women to look a certain way based on society's ideals (duh, this is feminism 101) I feel the campaign is really making the issue look black and white, when it is very, VERY complicated.

When the idea is spread that it is the women themselves who need to change what they are doing - by wearing less makeup - I feel this is putting the pressure on entirely the wrong people. It is society who expects women to look a certain way. Therefore, the pressure should be put on society to change their expectations, rather than on the women who are the victims of expectation. Everyone should be taught not to judge women for lack of makeup or grooming. If this were some sort of event in a workplace, for instance, where the employees decided to all wear no makeup together in order to inform their bosses that they should not be required to wear makeup to do their jobs, then yes, this statement would make sense. But just asking random women to wear less makeup? What type of message does this send?

Sure, it should be encouraged that if you don't want to wear makeup, you don't have to. But nobody can possibly blame a woman for feeling like she needs to wear makeup, in a world that constantly tells her she needs to wear makeup.

Moreover, not everyone is the type of person who hates wearing makeup but feels obliged to due to social pressures. SOME people are like that. A lot more women feel that their makeup is self expression. Makeup can be fun, and empowering. Makeup is tied irrevocably to many women's identities. Makeup can be your armor (to quote Arabelle, one of my feminist heroes.) I mean, sure, there's pressure to wear makeup, but once you wear too much makeup, or the wrong type of makeup, there is another type of anger directed towards you, as any fan of black lipstick knows. In that situation, makeup can be a form of rebellion. And it is no one's place to make you feel like your particular form of rebellion is wrong and making women less empowered.

For anyone who has scarring or a visible disability, makeup can mean so much more than just 'looking pretty', and I feel like this campaign completely disregards that. I understand it's coming from a simple place, but I feel like the adults who run this campaign should maybe have taken more care to educate the high-schoolers who are being influenced by it. It is a very prevalent high school attitude to shame the girls who wear makeup and short skirts by exclaiming how "normal looking" and "indie" you are, and that type of polarising behavior does absolutely nothing to help feminism. It creates divides between women who judge each other based on their appearance.

That said... I mean, I get what they're doing. I just think they're going about it the wrong way.

Educate the CEO's, the bosses, the managers who fire women who don't wear makeup, and who make it part of their workplace agreement that women have to wear heels and skirts. Those are the people who need to change, not the women.

When they talk about bad blood, they don't mean us

Ughhhhh the Jickkkssss. As soon as I saw Malkmus' little face it was like a familiar happiness. The Jicks are one of those bands I still get chills listening to, for reals. Goosebumps and shit. I was smiling the whole time. Except when I was angrily frowning at the dickheads in the audience. Seriously, Corner Hotel? Shouting out requests the second song in? Shouting out Pavement songs?! So fucking disrespectful. Dickheads and technical difficulties aside, they played amazingly. It was a little sad to be Janet-less, but their new drummer is awesome, and has the bonus of looking like Ron Swanson.

Sadly, (in my opinion,) they played Summer Babe as their last track. It felt like giving in to the assholes in the audience, and I was embarrassed to be unwillingly lumped in as part of that group. While I love Pavement, I went to see the Jicks, and they have SO many great songs. I would have rather heard any Jicks song than that. They didn't play a single song from Real Emotional Trash, and I speculated that maybe it was because of the lack of Janet, or maybe they had planned to and ended up cutting them like 1% (which I was sure they were going to play, but didn't because everyone was shouting it.)

But, you know. It was still amazing. In the end, watching them play together is all I need, even if Malkmus was drunk and silly. Maybe even because.

Post-Tim and Eric, Pre-Jicks

I gotta bunch of stuff I could say about Tim and Eric, but I need to figure out if I want to. I love the show, and it was my first time seeing them live. It was both amazing and disappointing, in different ways. Tonight I'm seeing the Jicks for the second time, which will definitely not disappoint. Thank you, Stephen Malkmus, the ultimate pick-me-up.

Large

Whaaat a large week. Saw Patrick Wolf on Tuesday for the third time, and he was excellent as always. It was an acoustic show so it was more like a classical concert. Amazing instruments and his singing was on point. He mostly played with one backup musician, and an oboist who joined in for a couple of songs. He made a couple of mistakes, but laughed it off, and who could be mad at that cheeky face? We also managed to hang out with him afterwards at the Strange Wolf Basement Bar (of course.)

My brother and I were happy we dressed up good and weird. We were some of the only people who did, and we got a few compliments from the bartenders. This is one of my favourite dresses, from Alpha 60 in one of their sample sales. I'm always glad when there's a Melbourne designer I really like, so we can reap the rewards of sample sales instead of hearing about them from across the globe and crying. My shoes are Michael Kors, and though I was happy to stomp around town, I was extremely relieved to take them off my poor feet at the end of the night. I almost never wear heels, let alone stilettos.

The rest of the week comprised of seeing old friends and the second gig for my band. Another house party. I don't have photos of us yet but I do have photos of our sisterbrother-band, Battle Club.

Now time for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Did not go to the cinema

Wild

Wore stuff to a 'wild things' party, not sure what that meant but felt kind of right in this. Exploring the world of fake lashes. This is only my second foray into said world and it was mostly a positive experience. Basically, they're a bit annoying but you get used to them.

Not a lot going on, many conversations, job hunting (and being denied from Woolworths, what an ego boost! FML.) and house hunting. David Bowie. Beans. Whisky. Tim and Eric. Making creepy little dudes: