30-day challenge

also, I've decided I'm going to post every day for a month. Just for the heck of it - and helped by the fact that I don't have much uni for the first 6 weeks of semester - yay!!

I don't have any particular idea of what I'll post, so it'll be just as much of a suprise to me as it will be to you!

wish me luck..

Bagful of joy

I wanted to show you my fun new bag I made:

It's from a pattern by Anna Maria Horner which my lovely friend Jodi bought and then made a bag from.. and inspired me.

(looks brighter with the flash, hey)

Pockets!

I made the strap extendable:

Added a fabric rose out of the scraps:

A little bit tricky, but so much fun to make! And I love the orange-ness.

In other news, it's a sunny sunny sunny sunny day today (I had to say it at least that many times to express my joy at the sun's glorious golden presence (and the conspicuous absence of black and bursting rain clouds!).

I went for a walk and discovered new and exciting patches of wilderness (in the midst of the suburbs, no less). Little drippy mossy gullies all overgrown and strung with glinting cobwebs.

Here are some cheery nasturtiums I picked on the way:

:)

night of a thousand coughs, or why I'm up so late blogging

I can't sleep. The little tickling, rasping beast hidden somewhere in my larynx won't let me. So I thought I'd update you on some stuff:

I'm on holidays! yay!!! man, if you ever feel in need of a holiday, just take up university. It's great for that.
So now I'm in sunny little Strathalbyn, the Antiques capital of South Australia: cut in two by a prettily meandering little river, dotted with old stone buildings and delightful cafes, and current residence of a disproportionately large bunch of the world's best people.

This week I have:
-Had coffee(s) with friends (and the best hot chocolate _ever_ from the Appleseed cafe)
-Wandered rainy Rundle st mall and sung songs to strangers
-Picked and squeezed a hundred lemons (give or take), ready for cooking all-things-lemon tomorrow :)
-walked, run & skipped along the river
-made new friends
-coughed (a lot)
-baked choc & walnut cookies
-been entertained by a friend's band in The Shed hangout space - along with a gang of young Strath punks
-drunk copious amounts of tea in the kitchen, with any number and combination of the constant stream of people
-written two cards
-started reading three books

That's all I can think of for now.

My throat seems to be settling (lemon and honey tea is my hero!), so I'll leave you with a quote from the toilet door:

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

- Albert Einstein

Our chain of thankfulness: very pastel, very happyhappyjoyjoys, very fun.

...couldn't resist

Jottings on Postcolonialism

Here is one of the compulsory weekly journal entries I wrote for my Postcolonial lit class. I don't know if you'll be able to make head or tail of it, but hopefully it might give a hint of what the course has involved (and why I've loved it!).

Wk 3 – Danticat – We are Ugly But We are Here, Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries, Bhaba.

I danced in the rain on Monday night.

On Tuesday I ate pancakes at 8am in the morning. I took my sister breakfast in bed and she was very happy.*

On Wednesday we bought a new packet of Earl Grey tea (Nature's Cuppa, the one and only). It smelt good and the whole household was content.

On Thursday I drank some beer. I didn't get a free lunch.

But on Friday I got free sushi and sand between my toes.

On Saturday I played an epic game of 500. 22 rounds, 3 hours.

On Sunday I played soccer in the park and sang in a silly voice to Mika.

That was my week (or one impression of it at least). I also reflected on stuff I read [finally!]:

I enjoyed the Motorcycle Diaries but it wasn't as substantial as I'd imagined it might be. It seemed to be little more than just two guys rambling around South America surviving on nothing but the hospitality of locals and enjoying it where they could. I would have liked to hear more about their experience of the leper colonies and a little more of the development of their thinking regarding communism, power to the oppressed and stuff. I did like the bit where they'd managed to get first class fares on a ship, but then concluded that they connected better with – and enjoyed more – the sailors anyway.

I really liked Danticat's piece. Wished it was longer! Her pithy observation regarding Haiti “economics and politics are intrinsically related; who is in power determines to a great extent whether or not people will eat” spoke volumes about her experience, and that of the people of Haiti. I liked the strong feminist overtones, introduced and then threaded through with the story of Anacona amongst the reflections on the other women in her life. It is confronting, even devastating, but there is still a beauty in the strength and hope expressed in their catch cry “we are ugly, but we are here.” There is a real solidarity and honesty about it. Life is hard, but it is still worth celebrating the fact that they have survived another day together. The ending expresses more of the concept of the circularity of life; as her grandmother believed: “if a life is lost, then another one springs up replanted somewhere else, the next life even stronger than the last.” They exist through memory in an endless circle of power and endurance.

Bhaba [Postcolonial theorist] was pretty dense. It took me forever to get through the shorter article (Of Mimicry and Man) and I barely touched the other. I did really like that idea of the colonisers keeping the colonised in a bondage of mimicry: they would give them a dose of the Christian faith, or of 'civilisation', what it meant to be a gentleman, etc, but just a limited amount that would prevent them from being able to be fully 'civilised' (in their terms) or a free Christian. I could see some of this in King's stuff from the week before – how there was this writing and rewriting of what it meant to be Indian which ended up being a lose-lose situation for them.

When we went over it in class, I grasped more of what Bhaba was meaning by hybridity and ambivalence. The coloniser is in an alien world with an imagined picture of their old world, writing the image of the colonised. The colonised meets them in the middle of these images – it is not all on the one side but an exchange that grows into something new. Some ideas of postcolonialism rely on traditional manichaean dichotomies, but these don't honestly represent the situation. There is a blending. Also, if it is defined with regards to possessions and lacks; with this understanding it becomes evident that everyone possesses and lacks different things, and so there are no longer dichotomies.

*I made that one up. Or Skye did. Don't remember. She wishes it happened...

I might try and tell you about my favourite books from the course soon.. & bug you to read them!

the day I died and other stories

Twas the night of our housewarming, several moons ago (ok maybe two), right on 6pm (the official party-beginning time) and I was in my room preparing myself to receive guests( ie trying to find clean clothes to wear) when I hear a knock at the door. And a strange voice.

"Hi, I'm a friend of Josiah's, I was meeting up with him here". Oh ok. Didn't know Josiah was coming tonight. And inviting a friend. Random.

One of my friendly housemates invites him in. He takes a seat and they make awkward conversation.
I come out, introduce myself, sit down. The penny still hasn't dropped.
Conversation begins again, I look away, and all of a sudden I'm being poked in the arm with a plastic card by mystery man.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!! That means he's my assassin*. That means I'm dead. Why the heck did they let him in?!?!?!?!?!

That was my head voice.
In reality I wailed 'oh no!', laughed dolefully, and offered him a drink. He declined, and took himself off soon afterwards, the dirty deed accomplished.

Apart from the grisly start, it was a great night.

There was sushi:

And fire:

(photo courtesy of Em)

The other stories?

Well, we had a Passover celebration, with as much Jewish tradition as we could muster. Rich and thought-provoking.


And our clothesline got squashed by a giant branch:

(photo courtesy of Mandie)

I should really have a good rave about Postcolonial literature and lamb-eating and bike-riding and QUIDDITCH. especially quidditch.
Maybe another time..


*uni-wide game of Assassin. You kill your target by hunting them down and touching them with a card.

When I thought I'd left it all behind...

In the hols I went to India and Malaysia. Then I came back. To Australia. But things are not always as one might expect..


About a month ago I walked over to uni.. and into a little Malaysia. It was the Malaysian Society's welcome do, and I was the only white person there (bar one). Everyone was speaking in their delightfully accented malay-english, or bahasa, or Tamil (I think) - or a bit of each. We played games - who could make teh tarik (literally pulled tea - poured at a distance from jug to jug to aerate it) the best (me and my partner managed to spill a fair bit on eachother!) We played giant games of tug-of-war, and did lots of what malaysians do best - eating, and drinking teh.




On my birthday I was in Sydney to catch up with people and hear Shane Claiborne (Christian-monk-hippy-dude) speak. While we were in Newtown we found this fantastic Indian/Sri Lankan/Malay restaurant that made dosai (massive crispy lentil-based pancakes), sambal and chutneys just how they tasted in India!! I nearly died of excitement.



On that visit I also found an asian grocers' that sold heaps of mixes and spices and other fascinating things.. which enabled me to make idli and sambal a few weeks later. (as we didn't have an idli steamer and the stove was full, I ended up cooking them in the microwave. shhh I won't tell anyone if you don't. they still tasted great, I swear!)