Be(come) Yourself

Scrolling through your own social media history is the ultimate in narcissism. The very best bits of your life, documented in a scrolling timeline for people you hardly know. For people who, were they to change their name to something hilarious on Facebook, you would likely forget. Like ‘who the fuck is SteAmboat SArah? And why does she like capital As so much?’

I’ve been on facebook since 2007. You can scroll back to a time when they used to have that graffiti thing on each page, and when you could have a ‘pet’ and you had to feed it. You can scroll back to a time when I used the word “retarded” publicly and without shame, when I thought it was ok to call people sluts. You click through another month, another life and think, ‘who is this jerk? Oh wait, it’s me.’

I read this post on tumblr the other day and it said:

there’s a lot of unspoken pressure to keep liking the things you used to like and to keep dressing the way you’ve always dressed and to never question what you believe in and basically “be yourself” has slowly morphed into “be what everyone knows you as” but trust me when i say if you just give it up and simply make decisions and take actions based purely on what would make you happy, you’ll gain a very comforting sense of self peace (floozys)

This has never been truer than on social media. Where you’ve still got people hanging around who you went to primary school with. Hell, I’ve got people on there who haven’t seen me since primary school. Do they think I’m still really sad about being flat chested? Do they think I’m still the same girl who spread gossip and drama and left a love note in a boy’s desk? There are people on my facebook who were never my real life friend to begin with. Whose wedding dresses and beach holidays and puppies look pretty nice I guess, but whom I’m never going to talk to again. What do they think of me? Do they even remember what I was like in high school? Could they even picture my face if I didn’t upload a selfie every 3.2 days?

On this blog I have a written record of thought spanning back four years or so. My first post is a kinda sexist rant about how I think my opinions about other girls’ bodies actually matter. They don’t, clearly. Sorry women. I’ve changed, so should I take it down? 

I don’t think so?

I like to see this blog as an external record of some fairly complicated internal changes. And maybe it’s important to leave it here for all to see. Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know. But I’m gonna leave my thoughts out there anyway, for better or worse.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s really hard to acknowledge when you’ve changed. And for all the wonderful things I love about social media, sometimes making a solid, written, record of an opinion can make it harder to change. So let’s embrace our past stupidities, let’s acknowledge that we got facebook before we knew how to hold reasonable conversations, let’s proudly change our opinions.

The internet is forever, but our dumb-ass opinions don’t have to be.

 

Right?

Hi, I'm Not Dead.

Once upon a time I kept a weekly blog. During this mystical, magical time, I had whole Sundays to think about ideas, to write and edit and find pictures and generally be good at things. That time has ended.

Now we live in the dark times. Since the great reckoning, blog posts have been scarce, a thing of deep memory, of myth. There are some who question whether they ever happened at all. And those people are kinda dumb, to be honest, because it’s only been a month, sheesh.

So I don’t really have the brainpower to write anything too funny or clever, but I did just want to check back in and say HI I’M NOT DEAD and PLEASE DON’T STOP LOVING ME and other various things in caps.

So… hi, I’m not dead. Please don’t stop loving me. Here is what I’ve been doing since the last blog:

Teaching. Oh god, so much teaching. Prac teaching has been an incredible experience, I’ve taught whole days, multiple grades at once, cool science stuff, lame grammar stuff, some in between history stuff… whatever. I’ve made incredible leaps and bounds in my teaching, wonderful connections with kids, and a terrarium for some reason. 

Admittedly not a very good one.

·      All the other stuff that goes with teaching. I’ve been getting up super early, and planning late into the night. I’ve been photocopying everything I can get my hands on and giving up lunch times because kids are naughty. I’ve cried (only the once), I’ve laughed, I’ve hyperventilated, and I’ve sung instructions in stupid voices so that kids actually do what I’m asking them to do. 

Oh hey, that's me.

·      ASSignments. To be honest, I know that real life teaching is going to be super stressful, but it seems to me that doing that and then NOT having to write 5000 words about how I am doing that would be really good. So yeah, bring on the end to assignments. I’ve just finished two absolutely massive ones, but I have two more absolutely massive ones to start this week. Kill me.

Ok I know this looks like colouring-in but it was actually a really difficult assignment.

·      Baking. It makes me feel better, as discussed.

·      Buying a new laptop. One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging is because I knocked a bottle of water over my old faithful girl, the macbook in a red case I’ve been carrying around with me for almost five years. She spluttered, she coughed, and she died. I think I might actually write a eulogy to that beautiful machine for the next blog post I manage to write. Because while I love my new one, I don’t think I’ll ever be the same without that old white box.

·      Working on a musical. Yeah. I know, what. Boyfriend is directing the school musical. It starts tomorrow. Mostly my job is putting microphones on students, telling them to stop talking backstage and wading through their sweat to take the mics off again. It’s a good time.

Let's play, "Guess the Musical!"

·      Sleeping. A+. Would recommend.

·      Watching Game of Thrones. Super pissed about Cersei/Jaime/ the showrunners’ general lack of faith that their audience can understand nuanced characterisations. But still enjoying it very much. Though if I see another scene with Loras flirting with literally every man in Westeros one more time I’m going to hurl a brick at HBO. He’s meant to be heartbroken, you guys fail at queer characters ok bye.

·      ??

Yeah so, that’s me. I’ve missed blogging with every fibre of my being that isn’t devoted to all those other things. But I’ve honestly been working seven days a week, every week, for some months now. And it’s not about to stop. I have my fourth and final prac starting at the end of this coming week, three assignments and an exam and THEN I’ll be done. Also I have to be backstage in a musical for the next week. Basically, what I’m saying is, I’m not dead, please don’t stop loving me, and let’s reconvene in a another couple of weeks.

Until then, blogaroos.

xx

A Blog About Sex

A few housekeeping things: yes, I skipped another week. Soz. I started a post, realised it was boring, deleted the whole thing, had a bit of a sulk and then avoided thinking about it for a week.

On the plus side, Hum Drum Plum recently surpassed 40,000 views, which is NUTS. Even if we accept that a bunch of those are spam views, which we must, I’m pretty chuffed.

Also important, this week I visited the doctor who was my anaesthetist for the procedure I talked about in this post, and he claimed that I was actually talking about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, not Pixar, but never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I always say.

With that out of the way it’s time to get into this week’s blog post, which is about sex.

Woah, look out. Didn’t see that coming did you?

Without going into any detail at all because this is the whole problem I have a lot of difficulty with talking about sex.

To be clear, it’s not sex that’s the issue; it’s my own experiences I can’t discuss. I am super sex-positive. I am quite happy to talk about sex theoretically, quite happy to be accepting of other people’s sex lives, to not squirm or giggle or judge. But ask me about my own and I’ll probably die of shame. There’s nothing shameful about it, and I’m not actually ashamed, but still, I couldn’t just say, “oh this is a thing I like” or “this is how often I do that thing”. Even in a perfectly respectful and open context.

Here is the only detail I can bring myself to share in this oh-so-public forum:

When I was a teenager, I thought that sex was for boys. This was ok with me, the whole thing seemed a bit icky actually, and so I was quite ok with the idea of being the means to an end for another person. This, it seemed to me, was the logical role of a girl in a boy-girl sexy times scenario. This is obviously a totally fucked up thing to think, and I definitely realised this was not the case pretty early on, but I know that subconsciously, this attitude has been pretty deeply ingrained in me since then.

I also bought into the idea that all dudes want sex all the time. Every adult ever told me to be wary of boys, that they only had “one thing on their mind” at all times and that I couldn’t trust their seemingly innocent motives. This led me to believe for many years that any time someone didn’t want to have sex with me, I was a failure. Coupled with the belief that I was a sex object, not a sexual person, I began to relate ‘rejection’ to my self-worth. If these sex-mad boys didn’t want to have sex with me, didn’t this mean I was an ugly, unsexy, failure of a woman?

Without going into any more detail than this because I might die in a second, this has caused some issues in my life. But in the last few years I’ve been really working on it… sort of like a pet personality project. I’ve been trying to be braver, trying to think more positively about myself and my body, and trying to communicate better.

One of the things that has changed my life is Sexplanations, the sex-ed channel on youtube. If you’ve not watched any of these videos, can I just highly recommend that you do? Even if you you’re super educated on this stuff? Not only have I learnt some things, I’ve also learnt that other people don’t know stuff, that other people have questions, and that lots of things are normal.

But I’m also pissed off that I’m nearly 26 years old, and it’s taken me this long to feel ok with any of this stuff.

It’s very clear to me from my own experiences and from reading about others, that good sex education is completely lacking from most people’s lives. Kids should be taught that consent means hearing a definite yes, not just assuming a yes exists based on the lack of a no. They need to learn how contraception works, and to what extent. They need to be taught that virginity is a meaningless social construct, and that there’s no such thing as a slut. They need to have open and safe forums in which to ask their questions. And they need to not just be shown a whole bunch of photos of chlamydia in the hopes they’ll all abstain in fear.

Photo not relevant. Unless you want to consider the fog a metaphor for confusion and the trees a metaphor for grumpiness.

Memory, Un-Memory and Long-dormant Thoughts about Pixar

I have this really weird relationship with memory. I suspect everyone else does too, but I’ve never been in anyone else’s brain (that I know of) so I’ll just talk about mine for a bit, if that’s cool.

I have a really excellent memory. Sometimes. For example, I can recite every line in Toy Story because when I was 10 I loved it a lot, and my friend and I watched it twice (that’s right, twice). Ever since then I have been able to pick up at any point in the film and keep going until the eyes of those around me become very glazed indeed.

In Year 11 I had a main role in a play. I learnt everyone else’s lines including mine. Not deliberately, it just happened. In an exam that I knew I was not going to do particularly well in, I spent the 40 or so minutes at the end when I wasn’t allowed to leave, writing out the entire thing. Just for something to do, just because I could.

I was in a choir for all of high school, and the conductor was one of those amazing people who slightly terrified you, but mostly inspired you to do better than you thought you ever could. He refused to let us perform with music in front of us, so we had to memorise many, many pieces of music, most not in English, every term. And I never struggled. I felt guilty when he pulled me out in front of the others to demonstrate how I rarely looked down at music in rehearsal, because it wasn’t really an achievement for me. I’d sung the piece a few times, so now it was in my memory, perhaps forever.

But on the other hand, sometimes I have a terrible memory. Faces. I’m appalling at remembering people’s faces. I have started forcing myself to picture people’s faces right after I’ve met them, trying to focus on distinctive features so that if I run into them at Coles the next day I don’t completely blank them.

Going back to school, friends will often say to me ‘oh remember when this happened?’ and I’ll think *nope*. And I’m talking about big, important events here too. Like the time my grade got the school camp cancelled for successive generations due to our poor behaviour… I know that full story now, because I made people tell it to me, but I don’t have any real memories of it myself.

Worst of all are the false memories. Things I have apparently made up completely, but have somehow convinced myself are real. My minor in Psychology from the University of Queensland taught me that it’s very common to have false early memories, which I do, but I’ve also got ones from my teenage years, from adulthood even. And these tend to freak me out, really. If you remember something, does that automatically mean it happened? No. Of course not, but it sure as hell feels like it did. And if you forget something, doesn’t it really cease to have happened at all? At least for you anyway.

I often think about this late at night. You can never remember what happens right before you fall asleep, because everyone suffers slight amnesia during the first phase of sleep (thanks UQ Psych). But sometimes when I can’t sleep I’ll try to force myself to remember something. “Ok Lizzy,” I’ll say to myself, “in the morning try to remember that you thought about...” but I can never remember what that thing is. Sometimes I remember that I thought about memory and sleep amnesia, and sometimes I’ll think about it days later, but usually it’s lost to me. I assume, anyway.

I recently had a light sedation for a medical procedure. The doctor put the needle in the back of my hand and said, “Ok, you probably won’t remember anything after this.” I remember staring at an orderly’s pants that were in my line of sight and thinking, the last thing I’m going to remember is a butt and finding that a bit funny, and I also remember thinking why am I not asleep yet?

And then I woke up.

But it turns out I’d been out a lot longer than expected; they’d given me a double dose of the anaesthetic because I’d started talking (what a surprise). Somewhere after the thought about the orderly’s butt and not being asleep yet, I started jabbering away, and, unable to get me to STFU, they drugged me up a bit more.

The nurse told me all this as she checked my blood pressure and heart rate. And here’s where weird memory stuff comes into it. I know she told me what I’d been talking about. I remember that. And I remember being in the recovery ward, but I don’t remember getting there. And I remember giggling to myself and another nurse asking what was so funny, but I don’t *completely* remember what I said.

Because I’m pretty sure the first nurse told me I’d been talking about Pixar film conspiracy theories. Like… what? In the moments before unconsciousness, a bunch of medical experts couldn’t get me to go to sleep because I needed to tell them about how Andy’s mum is really Emily? About how all the Pixar films actually occur at different times in the same universe? Is that it? Is that what I was saying?

See I don’t know, because I don’t remember what the nurse actually said, only that I was giggling to myself in recovery because I *knew* that I’d been going on about Toy Story on the operating table. But maybe she said something completely different? Maybe Toy Story is so ingrained in my head that when I can’t remember other things I replace them with it? I honestly have no idea. If all we are is a brain controlling a meat suit, then I am a brain trying to understand itself. And that is enough existentialism for a Sunday afternoon.

I’ve been trying to write this blog on and off for about a year now. Ironically, I often forget that it’s an idea I had and then rethink of it, feel like a genius, and then realise it’s one of my oldest ideas and therefore not something new at all. But still, I’m pleased I’ve finally put thoughts to words to internet about this.

*Screenshots have been shamelessly stolen from Jon Negroni's blog, click on those theory links up there to make up for this, if you haven't already. You won't be disappointed*