Beyond Selidor

Day 28: Your first celebrity crush.
I'm probably showing my age here, but when I was twelve, I had the most epic crush on Zac Hanson from Hanson. (Unlike most of my friends, who liked Taylor, I preferred Zac, who was closer to me in age and appeared to have more of a sense of humour.) I found this intensely embarrassing at the time, despite the fact that basically everyone around me was going mad for Hanson.

To be honest, though, most of my crushes of this type have been on fictional characters. I fell in love with Pagan Kidrouk of the Pagan Chronicles series when I was ten years old, and there's still a part of me that would follow him to the ends of the earth if he showed up on the doorstep. (While Pagan is 16-18 in the first three books of the series, he's in his late 30s in the fourth and dies when he's in his late 50s, so I feel less creepy than if only his adolescence was charted in the books.) I rarely had crushes on celebrities because I was aware from quite early on that whatever personality I could see was to a great degree a construct. In books and other media, I could actually see what a character's personality was.

I'm not sure how weird that makes me.

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I've been blogging on Wordpress about female lyricists, 'Persephone girls' and apologising for giving voice to my feelings.

I have noticed that when people criticise these lyricists – Kate Bush and Florence Welch in particular – they are often criticised for their insistent introversion, for the way they verbalise their emotions. (I once read a review of Florence’s Ceremonials album that essentially criticised her for not being Bob Dylan.) It’s as if what they sing about, what they’re feeling, is small and personal and irrelevant, whereas when a man – say, Neil Young – sings about his feelings, they’re large and universal and important.

Oddly enough, in light of what I'm talking about in that Wordpress post, this post about the transformation of fairytales from stories of female empowerment to Disneyfied tales of passivity and purity popped up on Twitter just as I was writing. Check it out.

Day 26: Name one place you would love to visit one day.
If I have to name just one, I'm going to be sneaky and say, rather generically, 'the north'. For the past ten years at least, I've had this desire to roam around places so far north that the sun never sets (or, conversely, that the sun never rises). Top on my list are Iceland, Norway and Finland, which all sound like they're really, really beautiful.

I will, at least, be able to cross Finland off my list pretty soon. I've been accepted to present a paper at a conference in Helsinki in early June, so I'll be heading off there in the not-too-distant future. I'm not sure if it's going to be 24-hour daylight there at that point, but I look forward to it in any case.

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Day 24: Tell us about the last movie you saw in the cinema.
The last film I saw in the cinema was The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, which was a very funny film made by the people who make the Wallace and Grommit films. It had an absolutely stellar cast of British thespie types having a whale of a time doing the voice acting, and told the story of a bunch of pirates who wind up hanging out with Charles Darwin. There is a dodo involved, and Queen Victoria is a pirate-hunting ninja.

That should tell you everything you need to know. I defy anyone to see that film and not leave it feeling better about life.

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As you can tell, I didn't catch up, and probably won't. I've been feeling mildly ill for the past 24 hours and think I might be coming down with a cold, which leaves me with less energy than I'd like.

Day 22: Do you play a sport? Tell us about it. If not, talk about a different hobby you may have.
Well, I don't really play a sport per se, since I don't do it competitively, but I go running for exercise. Sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I find it frustrating (mainly because I find my adult body frustratingly lacking in agility and stamina in comparison to my child or adolescent body), but I always feel better after having gone running. It's hard to explain, but it feels as if your muscles and veins and arteries have been washed, somehow. I don't know if that makes sense.

It annoys me that I can't find any sport that I enjoy as much as I enjoyed gymnastics, but I guess that makes sense. How could a sport that makes you feel as if you are flying compare to throwing or kicking a round object around an expanse of grass?

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My boyfriend's sister is coming to visit for the next three days, so I may be offline quite a lot and probably won't be writing this meme until she's left, so expect silence until Friday.

Day 20: Do you wear glasses? If so, what are they for?
I don't have glasses, but I imagine I will have to get them in about 15 years' time. My mother got glasses in her early 40s due to far-sightedness, and I think this is a problem that most people get when they get older.

In some ways, I won't mind, as I love glasses and think they look really snazzy. At the same time, I find them very uncomfortable and distracting to wear (to the extent that wearing sunglasses gives me a headache because of the effort of trying to stop myself looking outside the frames of the glasses), and the thought of wearing contacts makes my stomach turn. So yeah.

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Day 18: Do you drink soda more often than milk?
Until I was about 20, I drank massive, pint-glasses of milk every morning at breakfast. The only thing was that it had to be Shape, which is a very specific kind of low-fat milk which, if I recall correctly, can only be bought in New South Wales and the ACT. (Certainly I remember being traumatised on family holidays in Victoria and having to try to drink other kinds of milk.) The thing is, I found full-cream milk to taste too creamy (I find cream, butter, margarine, and occasionally yoghurt to be repulsive. Also bananas and avocados. It's a texture thing). All other low-fat milk I've tasted tastes like full-cream milk to me, but Shape was deliciously watery and almost sweet tasting. Everyone else I know finds it disgusting. I can drink any kind of milk when it's mixed in things, of course.

Anyway, I don't really drink milk at all any more, unless it's in coffee (and even then, not that much, as I drink macchiatos while I'm in Germany because, you guessed it, the way that German baristas make all the other types of coffee is too milky*). The thought of drinking milk actually makes me feel a little queasy, to be honest. (I think this might be somewhat genetic. My father is sickened by milk, yoghurt and even cheese, which is the one dairy product I love. My sister also feels queasy when she drinks milk, especially when it's warm.) I'm glad that I drank milk throughout my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, as the health benefits are pretty important, but I can't imagine drinking it now. So by virtue of that, I drink more soft drinks than milk as I don't drink milk at all.

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* This isn't the fault of the German baristas. It's just a style of coffee, one that I don't like much. I prefer my lattes to look and taste like this rather than this.

Day 16: Your favorite Disney princess movie.
When I was a child, my favourite Disney princess films were The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. I think this is because I had aspirations to be both Ariel and Aladdin. (I spent a long time during my childhood pretending to be both of them. My sister pretended to be Flounder and Jasmine because she's cool like that.) I also think they had the best music of that era of Disney films.

I was in no way a child when Mulan came out, and encountered it through the younger daughter of a family friend, who was obsessed. After watching it, I understood why. Mulan is without a doubt my favourite Disney heroine, and can be described as feminist with much more justification than Belle in Beauty and the Beast. (I hated that film when I saw it as a child, and I hate it now. I realise that's the sort of admission that sees you shunned from certain corners of the internet, and I don't care.) I realise that judging Disney films on the basis of their feminist credentials will only end in tears, but in the end, I have to take the one that has the least damaging message as my favourite.

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I'm back in Germany for another semester, and have blogged about my initial impressions of returning to Heidelberg here.

Day 14: Do you have siblings? Talk about them, or talk about what it's like to be an only child.
As you're all probably well aware, I have three younger sisters. I love them to bits and find it very difficult to live so far away from them, as it's meant that I've either drifted apart a bit from them (as is the case with my first sister) or missed their entire childhoods (as is the case with the other two).

Mim is 23 years old. After finishing up her undergrad degree in Sydney a couple of years ago, she moved to Melbourne to start a degree in media and communications and work part-time for a small film production company. Last (southern) summer, she got a cadetship working in Canberra for the public service, and at the end of the cadetship, they offered her a full-time, ongoing job there if she wanted. So that is what she is doing now, while finishing off her Master's degree part-time by distance. We were closer as children, but ours is a resilient friendship that seems able to be revived at any minute, and whenever we're both in the same place, we end up chatting away as if we've never been apart. We share similar tastes in music, movies and food, although she is not in any way a geek and isn't so fannish about stuff (for want of a better word). Our childhood was absolutely idyllic. We were not allowed to watch much TV, and in fact had no desire to do so (oh, how things have changed), but instead spent all our spare time playing imaginative games either outside or in the house. We had whole worlds, with ongoing storylines that could be picked up at any time, and dropped whenever we felt like it, only to be picked up, not where we left off, but accounting for any real time that had passed. I am so grateful to her for our childhood.

Kitty is nine years old. She lives in Melbourne with my dad and stepmother. I saw a lot of Kitty in her earlier years, as she lived in Canberra and I lived in Sydney and would visit for a week at every set of holidays. Now, if I'm lucky, I see her once a year. She's a lovely, chatty, clever girl who seems so enthusiastic about everything. Last time I visited, she was learning ice-skating. The time before that she was doing two types of dance. She loves to write things in journals and she is coming to enjoy reading, although she struggled with it initially. She's also obsessed with music of the Miley Cyrus variety.

Nell is four years old, and she is, as you'd imagine, the one I know the least. She lives with my dad and stepmother in Melbourne, of course. Like everyone in my family, she is very, very chatty. It seems to me that she gulps down life, grabbing it with both hands, full of wonder and curiosity. Although I've only stayed with her for relatively short periods, we have the most amazing conversations.

I love having sisters and couldn't imagine being an only child. I'm sure there are some good things about it, but I would feel bereft and lost without my siblings.

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Day 11: Your top three favorite bands.
I'm going to cheat a little bit because I can't narrow it down to three, but can do so to four.

My favourite band in the history of the universe is Massive Attack. They've been my favourite band since I was 15, and I can't see that changing any time soon. I love them in particular for their clever lyrics, and for their careful blending of diamond-hard sharpness with soft darkness, for their ethereal vocals mixed with deep earthy music that you feel in your stomach.

For example:



I blog about them here.

My second-favourite band is The Knife. I love them again for the lyrics, for Karin Dreijer-Andersson's discordant vocals, for the way their cheerful, poppy sound belies the painful, disturbing nature of their words. See, for example:



Also:



My third-favourite band is a tie between Pendulum and Florence + The Machine. Pendulum indulges my love of bass. I listen to them when I write my thesis, when I clean, when I exercise. For some reason it just makes me want to get stuff done. Their music seems perfectly designed to work with the way I understand and react to music (that is, it tells me stories and shows me images). I blogged about Pendulum here.

Their music is, I think, best represented by this:



I was a latecomer to Florence + The Machine, but when I finally gave them a chance, wow! It wouldn't work without Florence Welch's voice, but I am a lyrics woman at heart, and what really sold it for me was those words. She sings the things I think but don't dare to articulate, even to myself. The truths she sings hurt me, they are so true. I blog about Florence + The Machine here

The songs of hers that mean the most to me personally are:



and:




Well, it looks like I've blogged about all my favourite music save The Knife. I guess that'll have to be remedied at some point.

Sometimes I think it's crazy, how much music means to me, how much I identify with it, but I just feel so much, so deeply, and am so affected by stuff in my life that I need these external things, these sad girls who sing darkly about my life, these heroines of literature and television whose stories I feel as if they are my own, in order to cope with the extremity of emotion. I know that sounds self-centred and adolescent, and it is, but I'm sick of feeling that it's something for which I should apologise. I feel. I am.

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Day 9: Favorite meme at the moment.
I know it's a little old, but I really like the memes floating around that are based on the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half. My favourite of all is the one that I think made the comic famous, This is why I'll never be an adult, it of 'clean all the things!' and 'Internet! Forever!' fame. I also really like Expectations vs reality, for the immortal meme 'I wanted the opposite of this'. I use these phrases in my offline life. I probably need help.

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