On Learning from Mistakes

Ugh brb… coffee.

OK GANG! Who, reading this right now, constantly thinks of times when, in hindsight, they were really really stupid and/or embarrassing. I’m not even talking about being awkward like in a previous post. This is when, at the time, you thought that you were hot shit/being really cool and now that you think about it, you’re like “FML.”

I have those moments every day. I think every second of my life up until I was about nineteen consists of one of those moments. I blame being a teenager.

However. I feel as if I still make very serious mistakes quite a lot of the time. For example, just now, I decided to make milo instead of coffee and whilst it is rather delicious, it has no caffeine. I regret this.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU. Then I just accidentally kicked a chair with my smallest toe and that really, really hurts. It’s like the worst thing to possibly do. How many things can go wrong today? Brb going back to bed until this hell of a day is actually over.

…

THE NEXT DAY, EVERYONE.

These are seemingly trivial mistakes. They will be made better very very soon, the purpose of this post  is to discuss terrible mistakes. Mostly they pertain to social situations and explain why I didn’t have any friends when I was a child.

NB: I had SOME friends and they were amazing. I meant compared to know when I have a more than I have fingers and always  seem to forget to talk to them.

BACK ON TRACK.

The fact that most of my mistakes pertain to social situations means that they are rooted in the moment and are once off examples. This makes them very hard to learn from because you never know what variables are going to change tomorrow and the next day .etc.

THIS MEANS THAT I AM DOOMED IN EVERY SOCIAL SCENARIO FROM NOW ON.

Oh great, time to become a recluse. Except I am pretty sure that I consider being a recluse as a mistake.

Oh fu…
OK seriously though, we all make mistakes in a lot of things and learning from them is basically why we are all so smart (compared to the “old” usses [the plural of "us" not some retardation of "use"] anyway). It has nothing to do with what school we went to or how many times we pretended to go to class while we actually used facebook or watched DVDs and still got amazing grades. That is because we learned from the biggest mistake of our lives committed in first year. The mistake of thinking that actually attending class was actually important.

…

.

Except that one exam that I am pretty sure I didn’t know anything about.

I regret that.

So what is everyone’s current regrets?

Mine are:
Not moving to Melbourne earlier
Being a jerk to certain family members because “they started it”

Being a dick to my friends because they thought I was awesome
Being a dickhead to my superiors at my old work because I was a billion times smarter than them

Being a jerksnap to my superiors at Uni because they liked me

Thinking that, because I was achieving things whilst being a dicksnap, it was totally justified and OK.

The End.

PS: I am sure I am over-exaggerating how much of a jerkhead I actually was but I still regret things. I am pretty sure it would be like, one scenario in 700 that I was actually a dickjerk.

PSPS: I regret not having coffee for a second day in a row.

On Melbourne

8:30 AM. A house devoid of any other human life. The floorboards creak and ghostly wind rustles even more cliches through the trees, they are cliches because they are true. That’s exactly how to describe them. The creak is from the cats that have appeared because according to the routine, someone’s going to be eating soon and they might get to lick the plate in the sink afterwards. Cats are the auditors of the animal kingdom.

“Ahem. You made coffee before making toast today. This is different and I do not like it, so I will meow at you. I hope this trend does not mean that you will not stroke me after eating and before the shower. That would be most unpleasant.”

The kitchen has pink cupboards, by the way, and white (grey) linoleum floors and a reddish-pink plastic and metal table straight from the Post-War Australia boom. I can see the outlines of a bustling 1960s mum listening to the wireless while preparing a feast for her screaming kids and angry, possibly alcoholic, husband (who has a bowler hat and is reading a newspaper). They aren’t ghosts, they are memories that probably never even happened. Today it has one man (boy?) making toast and instant coffee with cats swarming around his feet. Meanwhile, as seen through the single kitchen window, the wind has blown someone’s shirt off the hill’s hoist and into a puddle. It doesn’t matter because it has been raining steadily for the past 24 hours anyway. This is probably why the cats are particularly affectionate today: they are bored and can’t play outside.

After showering the boy who likes to think that he’s a man loads up one of the two computers that aren’t his (like almost everything around him) and immediately signs into facebook, opens a new tab to check emails and then a third tab to a job hunter’s website. This is the morning routine. Sip coffee, laugh at an immature joke, archive spam, write a cover letter to a company that won’t ever be read, pretending to be someone who might be successful and, sip coffee. However, today is different. Today the boy who would be a man is packing his bag full of hopeful resumes that will never be read and is going to Melbourne.

Tracey Chapman is singing about fast cars and then Tegan Quin mentions that “it’s a little cold outside”. It is still raining outside but the boy has a scarf, that isn’t his, so he is warm.

He doesn’t waste money on the tram. Nobody checks tickets anyway because nobody buys them. If the occasional officer who hates himself comes along then surely someone else will be caught without one before him. Or he’ll get to his stop in time. It always happens this way. That’s the routine.

Flinders Street Station.

The boy begins to stroll down the Yarra River, asking wherever he can for someone to give him money on a regular basis for in return for completing some meaningless chore that he would probably hate. He passes men in suits and women in heels and people jogging in the rain, desperately trying to hold on to their youthful bodies. Meanwhile people who have held on to their youthful bodies (at what personal cost), jog next to them, yelling encouragement and trying to have a conversation with that they are stuck with because there’s nothing else to do.

Southern Cross Station.

A woman in a blue uniform is sweeping water all over the floor. So it doesn’t form puddles. The boy muses that he could do that. Anyone could do that. They just didn’t get picked, for better or for worse. The woman looks like she hates herself, a shame. In the department block with “hundreds of specialist stores” the boy is told hundreds of times to apply online. He probably already did it this morning. He leaves and heads down Collins Street where men in suits keep bumping into him because they are everywhere. It is probably “lunch”, although it feels more like 5:00 PM, if you get what I mean. Elizabeth street feels deserted after the previous gauntlet, maybe the artist didn’t have the scope to see both directions or maybe that’s the difference between lunch time and 5:00 PM.

Melbourne Central Station

“Hi, I was wondering if you guys were hiring.”

“Yep, if we are then the best place to go is actually our website. We do all our applications online now.”
“No worries! Thanks for your help”
“Have a good day!”

“You too!”

“Desperate, jobless bum.”
“Two-faced Bitch.”

The boy isn’t upset, he just looks sad because of the rain. It is impossible to be upset when you’re surrounded by ancient streets and the wind, blowing memories across the city and into the suburbs. That’s where the boy is now, he’s on a computer again making sure that all the places he went to have his details. They probably just get emailed straight into a bin. That’s where all the resumes that he collected when he had a job went.

Seemingly fed up with the routine of failure. The boy who is a man but thinks he doesn’t deserve it sends a few letters to places that he thinks will never read them. He is different this time.

“To whom it may concern,

I am amazing.”

The next day he wakes up to the same routine but pauses when he reaches the “open a tab to check emails” stage.

There are two letters in reply.

The general purpose of one is, “We weren’t really hiring but please come in for an interview.”

The other one is better, even if the news isn’t so good.

It was polite because the woman wanted to be. It was personal, not automated. It suggested that, out of 1000 resumes, one person actually read it with interest, even though she didn’t need to because she wasn’t hiring.

For 3 minutes, the little house with the same routine was the happiest place that the world has ever known.

The cats had no idea what to do.

How To Be A Pretentious Artist #001 – Coffee

Hey kids, how is your day going?

See what I’m doing here? I’m writing multiple blogs a day. This is so that when the majority of you eventually come here (when you’re really bored and procrastinating at 3 am), there will be a plethora of amazing posts for you to browse (i.e. I’m doing two today because the first post was more of an introduction to the blog).

So the subtitle of this blogsite is “How to be a pretentious artist”. ACTUALLY, EVERYONE, GIVEN THAT IT IS A SUBTITLE IT SHOULD REALLY BE “How To Be A Pretentious Artist”, remind me to edit that once I post this.

ANYWAY START AGAIN.

So the subtitle of this blog is “How To Be A Pretentious Artist”. That suggests that I will teach and/or discuss some things that successful pretentious artists do (aka me and some arty people I have met). Note that when I say “successful pretentious artist” I do not mean successful artist, I am referring to the fact that we are successful at being pretentious (NB: I am not actually a dickhead).

TODAY’S AMAZING TIP:

-Coffee

Coffee is the fundamental core of being a pretentious artist. You will learn to be addicted to coffee and it’s wondrous taste and aroma. HOWEVER, unlike those people who have real jobs/are studying real degrees like maths, engineering, science .etc you do not NEED the coffee in order to actually pass your degree. You are an Arts Major, you have maybe 3 papers (and/or maybe a presentation) per unit a semester (trust me, real degrees have about 1 per week). UNTIL DISSERTATION TIME. THEN YOU ARE ALWAYS SAD FOREVER. If you are an Arts Major who has finished uni, you are unemployed or working in retail .etc so you also don’t need coffee to do you job. THIS MEANS YOU CAN EXPERIMENT WITH VARIOUS TYPES AND FLAVOURS, EVERYBODY. So while your deprived, hegemonic, matrix-trapped Engineering friend will be all “Here’s a 3 litre bucket. Fill it with coffee. None of this sugar/water/milk/flavour shit” you can be all “I’ll have a Soy Chai Latte!” or “I’ll have a 2/3rds topped up soy long mac with a shot of vanilla”. YOU DON’T EVEN NEED TO GO TO STARBUCKS OR GLORIA JEANS OR OTHER GROSS PLACES (I totally still go there and get wanky flavoured drinks). Everybody knows that it is unattractive to order a normal type of coffee. Nobody will take you seriously as an artist unless they can’t pronounce your favourite coffee.

EXTRA CREDIT FOR THIS AMAZING TIP:
Remember how you don’t have a job/any money because you’re “an artist”? WELL, once everybody KNOWS that you don’t just drink coffee, you basically make the barista (who is a unicorn) wank magical amazing juice into a cup for you, you don’t actually need to BUY coffee anymore (remember how you don’t actually need coffee to function like normal, hardworking people? You’re just pretending to seem edgy.)!! Just carry an EMPTY takeaway coffee cup around everywhere (preferably from the wankiest establishment possible, it doesn’t matter if you can’t afford the overpriced/amazing coffee regularly thanks to this amazing tip). EVERYONE WILL ASSUME THAT YOU ALWAYS HAVE/NEED COFFEE. Especially when you use your acting skills to PRETEND TO DRINK. This way you can both afford food/rent AND still look like you’re cool.

“Wait!” You ask, “What happens if someone needs to hold my coffee or asks for some or something?”

SIMPLE!!

“Oh I just finished! Too bad! You should totally go get your own though!”

THEY MIGHT EVEN OFFER TO BUY YOU A REAL COFFEE BECAUSE THEY KNOW YOU’VE RUN OUT.

How amazing is that?