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.

On Actually Amazing Tegan and Sara vs Adorable Awkwardness and Superfluous Adjectives

Greetings to all my lovely readers!

So I saw Tegan and Sara again last night. They are probably the most enjoyable artists to see live (maybe Amanda Palmer beats them). They’re so fucking amazing.

The reason for this isn’t necessarily their musical talent and amazing songs (although I was totally singing along to every word), it is because of their banter. They are famous in indie/lesbian/hipster lesbian (aka the only lesbian that seems to actually exist these days) circles for their hilariousness and ability to make the entire audience seem like their best friends. Sometimes they will play a 3 minute song but introduce it with a story that lasts 5-10 minutes, also usually it actually has nothing to do with the song but they relate it in a quirky, turnaround way.

My actual hobby, no joke (do not laugh at me!), is looking up youtube videos of their banter and not actually listening to the songs unless they are rare tracks or old songs or whatever.

Anyway not only did last night not disappoint, it actually inspired this fucking blog because of the overarching topic of the night – how fucking awkward they are.

Sara: “Tonight’s going to get really awkward.”

Tegan: “I have this disability where I put way too many adjectives in front of a word… and now I wish I didn’t say anything.”

“You know that awkwardness we mentioned earlier? This is it… the tip of the tidal wave”

Yes.

So fucking true.

Who DOESN’T awkwardly gush when trying to talk about something they’re passionate about?

I’m pretty sure everyone has a moment (I have at least one per day) where they’re like “oh god I sounded like a complete, unintelligible, simpleminded, crazy, freaky moron. OH GOD MORE UNNECESSARY ADJECTIVES. OH GOD.”

TANGENT: What’s funny is 95% of the people who are like this are the intellectual ones, meaning they don’t believe in God. YET THEY STILL SAY, “OH GOD”.

As an anthropologist I find “survivals” fascinating. The celebration of Christmas in secular circles, the name of the month “August”. The fact that our entire calendar and every historical date that you remember is based on Jesus. Crazy. WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVOURITES, EVERYONE?

Anyway, given that awkwardness and incoherence is basically the OPPOSITE of successfully pulling off the appearance of a pretentious artist, this post is kind of a “how NOT to be a pretentious artist” or more of a “how to avoid looking like a moron”.

THE ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT I CAN’T TEACH YOU BECAUSE I TOTALLY DON’T KNOW HOW. I FREQUENTLY APPEAR TO BE A MORON, EVEN THOUGH I’M APPARENTLY WELL EDUCATED!!

My life would be so fucking amazing if I could be coherent at the times when I really need to be.

Hey, this relates the Tegan and Sara song “On Directing” which is basically “I suck and I’m awkward but I really just want to say this one thing to you but I can’t because I’m a moron”.

How’s that for a nice wrap up?

Wow this post was short.

I feel like I owe you something.

Well…

Um…

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.

.

.

…

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well that’s awkward.

…

I’m going to stop writing now and press “publish” before I kill myself.

PS: Tegan.

Literary fucked.

Hey everyone! What’s going on?

So, as you may remember from me mentioning it about 446d5 times, I am an English Major. WELL actually an “English and Creative Arts” slash Asian Studies (Anthropology) Major, BUT I DISPLAY THE CHARACTERISTICS OF AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

“What ARE these characteristics?”, you ask.

Well, that sounds like a good idea for a blog!

The first characteristic of an English Major is what I call “writer disease”. English majors like writing. They can go on and on and on about anything and everything as long as they are writing about it. We can tell you all about history, culture, writers, themes, media, styles, cliches, tropes, languages, EVERYTHING. This is because our degrees give us so many electives and choices, that, even with a double major/degree, we can learn about so many amazing things just by doing core units. However, we can only tell you about these things through references in our writing, or by toiling over words for hours. This is because we are not experts at any given thing. Our brains are basically wikipedia, but they are wikipedia if wikipedia was actually a set of encyclopedias that weren’t really ordered very well but still had a billion links to various tangents. This is evident in my comment on the ANZAC Day post. That took me all fucking morning to write and I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I just needed to consult my brain.

David: “Oh hey brain! Can you tell me all about the stolen generation?”

David’s Brain: “FUCK YOU FEED ME COFFEE GET A JOB FIND A HOUSE TALK TO YOUR SISTER”

2 hours later…

OK SO STOLEN GENERATION…

40 minutes later

AND THAT’S WHY AUSTRALIA IS FUCKED. ALTHOUGH IT IS NOT THE ONLY COUNTRY STAINED BY RACISM…

40 more minutes later

AND THAT’S WHY THE SOUTHERN US DEMOCRATS WERE RACIST FUCKS WHO MURDERED BLACK PEOPLE. RACISM DIDN’T STOP WITH BLACK PEOPLE, HOWEVER…

40 more minutes later again

WHICH IS WHY JAPAN WAS ALL “WWII, BITCHES”… NOW LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS BATTLE…

.etc

So yeah, it LOOKS like I know about all these things, and deep down in my brain somewhere, I do, very well. There’s just too much other shit swimming around for it to surface as soon as it is needed.

Also I am a rabid, binge drinking, alcoholic Australian. This slows the process down quite a lot…

What happens is, once we get into a certain context, or train of thought, we are on so much fucking fire that it actually means we don’t need to eat for days. We can write and write and write until even the most devoted reader will get sick of our constant stream of shit contextual facts. It just takes time to get the engine powered up.

So we’ve got “writer’s disease”, the next characteristic is the dreaded “being offended by everything” which is because of something I call a “context cocktail”. It is related to, and a leading cause of “writer’s disease”

Once English Majors actually get down to “Englishing” (VERY DECEPTIVE TERM AS IT ACTUALLY USUALLY MEANS “LITERATURE” IN GENERAL, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT IN REGARDS TO CONTEXT COCKTAILS), we read lots. We read so much that we lose track of entire weeks. Last night I actually had a dream that I was reading a novel. It was actually Sense and Sensibility (By Jane Austen, obviously, if you didn’t know that I am judging you). I was actually reading Sense and Sensibility in my mind and it actually was just my subconscious, displaying page after page of the novel, and I was actually reading it. THAT IS HOW MUCH WE READ, PEOPLE.

HOWEVER, most of this reading isn’t actually the novel that we are currently devouring. That pleasure is a reward for spending a long time reading ABOUT the novel. We want to know everything about the context of the novel so that, when we read it a second time (obviously we read it first to digest it with our OWN, CURRENT, context), we are in a position to further understand the story and the writer and the characters and the setting. This means that we learn to see the world from EVERYONE’S point of view and realise that EVERYONE is fucked and EVERYONE is wrong and EVERYTHING is offensive. An example: For my dissertation, I wrote about nobel prize winning literature from China, Austria, Japan and England (prizes if you can name the Authors!! Writers, you may need a few hours for your brain to try to remember these things) and how important contextual information was in regard to these pieces AND how translating them to English would destroy some of the original meaning and the beauty of the language, but then create others. This means that I read a lot, and a lot more, and then some more about Austria and China and Japan and not England because I am half English and was using that as an example of “my own context”, so I didn’t want to usurp that by adopting Doris Lessing’s context (oops! I ruined the guess who game, sorry!). This meant that I got angry (for the 42957th time) at the USSR, I felt sorry for the billions of Japanese people who have constantly been raped of their national identity and realised that the history and cultural spirit of China is so vast that I could never possibly hope to grasp very much of it at all. SO NOW I GET OFFENDED WHEN PEOPLE ARE DICKS TO: CHINA, RELIGIONS, JAPAN, THE JAPANESE IDENTITY, CULTS, AUSTRIA, POOR PEOPLE, POLICE, SAME SEX RELATIONSHIPS, THE WRONGLY ACCUSED, OLD PEOPLE, AND ETHNIC GROUPS IN ENGLAND, just from reading/writing about 4 books. I have been doing this extensively (aka for study) since Year 11 (I am not counting year 10 level as advanced enough, or this would be even longer). So six years. With about 12 “texts” in High School and at least about 50 through Uni. The above list was, on average, three points of being offended per text. That is at least 192 things that offend me, JUST FROM READING. These are serious and generalised things, too. If you broke say “RELIGIONS” down, you’d get “Being offended because religions are dicks”, “being offended because people don’t respect others’ beliefs”, “being offended because people don’t TRY to understand others’ beliefs” .etc

THEN THERE IS MY OWN CONTEXT, EVERYONE. I am offended by a lot of things because of my own context. This can vary from “being offended when people write “lyk dis bcuz dey tink its kool u guyz your just an h8rs [sic].”" To “being offended because there were only about 4 women in total who were performers during the entire soundwave festival”.

The next characteristic is what I like to call “not having a job because the university can only hire so many people before it gets ridiculous and to actually work in a bookstore or something you need to be really really really lucky, especially in Melbourne when there are 4w957349 74235 arty people without jobs”.

WHY DON’T WE HAVE JOBS, EVERYONE? It is simple. We basically have a sheet of paper that says

“Oh hey, I know a lot about a lot of things but none of that really relates to the real world because I live in a bubble where everything is OK because I understand everyone’s point of view and think that everyone does as well but actually the real world (slash this organisation) is actually fucked and full of discrimination and this degree is basically a warning siren that I’m probably actually going to complain about all the fucked-upness that you’re hoping people won’t bring up and you’ll have to put up with me doing this when you could just hire a business graduate who will just do the job without asking questions because they just want billions of dollars. Besides, reading is more of a hobby, anyway, there are a lot of people who studied “real” degrees who read quite a bit, like my sister or my friend, Matt. Here are their numbers, they would be better at this job, anyway.”

“with Honours.”

“PS: Ignore the fact that I can write/type a billion words per minute and that I can basically learn anything really quickly and that I was smart enough to get High Distinctions at University because everyone knows that English Majors don’t ever do any work ever, obviously that’s how they got this piece of paper.”

WHICH LEADS TO “BITTERNESS”, THE FINAL CHARACTERISTIC OF AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

We. Hate. The. World. We spend hours and hours (usually all at once, the few weeks before the end of semester) working and sculpting words and just generally being fucking amazing and debating and having discussions and talking about every topic under the sun. This is because we are at University because we want to be scholars. We are intelligent and driven and have something that no amount of money could ever buy. We don’t have a price and so we don’t improve the economy, and people with money don’t want to pay up to be told how fucked they are and how uneducated they are and therefore we carry the stigma of being “useless” and “lazy”.

COULD YOU FEEL THE BITTERNESS DRIPPING FROM THAT PARAGRAPH? SEE!

You know what. My last semester at Uni, I watched a billion TV shows, barely went to class and wrote all my assignments at the last minute. Not because I was particularly lazy. Just because I knew there was no necessity, no logic, to work my hardest when I knew I could get amazing marks with the effort that I gave (PS: I did). Plus also I spent most of my nights living in a theatre actually trying to work and was always too tired to put up with stupid people at Uni. Still, even I joke about how I did nothing for my degree and how “easy” English Majors are. Even so, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t trade having these characteristics for anything. So fuck off.

EDIT: OH MY FUCKING GOD (my god is Emily Deschanel, btw) YOU GUYS. I FORGOT THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF BEING AN ENGLISH MAJOR:
BEING OBSESSED WITH THINGS.

We can very easily/already are obsessed with:

• Characters in books/movies/TV shows (like Emily Deschanel’s portrayal of Dr Temperance Brennan)
• Smart people
• Coffee
• Books
• Writing
• Conversations
• Tank Girl
• Being offended by things
• Learning about everything
• Being arty
• Ourselves
• America’s Next Top Model/Tyra Banks *snap snap snap*
• Thinking we are better than everyone else
• Sexuality

Just to name a few.

I have not yet discovered WHY it is that we collectively become obsessed with things. All I know is we cannot simply “like” something, or “like to hate” something. We obsessively love and/or love to hate EVERYTHING.

PS: Tune in tomorrow for “How To Be A Pretentious Artist #002″. I think this post changed from being funny/a joke to being serious, OH SNAP I’M SORRY, EVERYONE. A perfect example of “writer’s disease” because I got all fired up and went on and on and on for like, an hour.

Another project doomed to failure

So welcome to the very first LITERALLY THEORY blog post.

“What’s going on?” You ask with inquisitive desire.
“Well, I will tell you once the self-narration ends.” He said, seductively.

Basically I’m jobless (and looking!) so I have a lot of free time to think. Recently, that culminated in a blog about TV that wasn’t particularly well written (or interesting). What it lacked in literary aptitude, however, it made up for with “being fun” and “taking me a long time”. What’s that? Two things that I am in dire need of in my days alone at home (actually there’s usually between 1-3 other people in the house at all times but don’t ruin my story with technicalities).

Thus my desire to blog again was born because, well, the world TOTALLY needs more English Majors without jobs writing blogs, drinking Soy Chai Lattes and googling “How to be a pretentious, arty type writer” in between refreshing facebook. I mean twitter. Twitter is obviously more “arty”.

After several name ideas I decided to go for a terrible pun! Why? Pretty much I’m the person who assumes that everyone is stupid and they wouldn’t “get” the other names I came up with (these super-intelligent names included “Blog THIS!”, “Discuss THIS!”, and “Lit. Please”). Guess what, guys! I’ve been mega-organised for once!! I have actually totally already made a “Literally Theory” email, Facebook page, Twitter Account AND the blog and I still haven’t run out of my desire to be organised.

See, normally what happens is, I’ll come up with an AMAZING idea (examples: Do not fail at life today, actually go outside, finish your assignment BEFORE it’s due .etc) then get really excited about getting my act together and actually DOING something about it. Unfortunately getting excited about my new attitude and/or idea will burn up all my energy so I lose interest pretty much straight away (normally after I’ve bought a whole bunch of shit). Quite frequently, I will only survive the walk/drive/bus/train/whatever to the shops, wherein I buy some wicked-sick, amazing stationary or accessory for the project, normally spending more money than I have on awesome things like a calendar with colourful stickers, planners and files that match my wallpaper, $5 pens that are pretty but have 1/3 of the ink of a 50c ballpoint, get home, go on facebook and then never look at or think about the idea again. So do not hold you breath, the three of you who I actually managed to pester into reading this. I AM TRYING TO MAKE SURE THAT I KEEP AT THIS BUT I AM A NOTORIOUS FAILURE AT LIFE.

So, keeping positive, this time I went to K-Mart and bought 50c pens and a mega-cheapo notebook (with holes in it so that it can go in a file later, if I actually need one!) and I put all my neat cheap stuff in my PREVIOUSLY BOUGHT Kikki K. organisey shit. THEN I ACTUALLY WROTE NOTES AND PLANNED STUFF so that I will had some future post ideas so I might actually be motivated to keep going with this whole “do something productive or at least creative” thing (seriously my Vlog last year had one video and it was all “HEY I’M HELL STARTING A VLOG. STAY TUNED”, my photo of the day for a year thing lasted maybe 2 months and all I had to do was click a button on my webcam and put the result on flickr).

More than likely, however, my supercool/ultra-cheapo, amazing blog notebook will turn into what all of my lecture notebooks from uni eventually became. Two or three pages of incomprehensible notes, (with way way way too many arrows) then page after page of song lyrics and playlists that I think would be “thematically appropriate”.

Actually. I’m pretty sure the margin of the SECOND page of my amazing blog notebook reads “FOR WHAT IT’S WO-OOOO-OOORTH”.

Fml.

See you soon.

PS: The TV character thing I mentioned? I’m only halfway through doing that. Yeah. I’m a quitter. What are you going to do about it?