Fifth Harmony - Miss Movin' On

New Acting Career! hahahaha

I recently got asked by my friend's brother to be in his short film! His HSC video got into Art Express (I'm pretty sure....) and he got into AFTRS.

In the script I only have like a paragraph of lines but I really like the whole idea in general. It's basically The Office meets teenagers at the supermarket. IMO, my character is Mindy Kaling-ish character - fast talking, oblivious to people's annoyance of her and gossipy/whingy.

Very excited. (Also really flattered considering I have no acting experience whatsoever and was recommended by friends. Albeit it was because I could speak Chinese, but majorly flattered nonetheless.)

Ylvis

(Click the subtitles/CC)

Legitimately my new favourite people on earth. Watch everything from the Intelevator series and all of their music videos. Fucking hilarious.

Feedback from Creative Writing Class

So I emailed that last draft I posted to my Creative Writing tutorial class for them to read and critique in the next tut. I was full trying to prepare and steel myself for any criticism. Massive butterflies, man. I was actually really wanting some advice, suggestions and critique.

So it turned out that people really liked it! I was so surprised and shocked and overwhelmed and I didn't know how to react. Like there were some people in the class who usually always had some great criticisms but they really liked it!

I did need to work on some character build up (backstory, personal feelings and relationships) and more motivation/connection to the impulsive actions near the end. So gotta work on that.

Other than that, I'm really excited to work on this

Edited draft for my short story. Still untitled.

I always wondered what they were all thinking. We were all in the same place, wanting the same thing but our reasons were different. I wondered what those reasons were and tried to deduce my way through my boredom. A black pencil skirt, a matching blazer and seemingly misplaced runners. She was an office woman who worked in the city and had a long way to walk before she could change into the more professional heels probably hidden in her deceivingly small bag. The un-tucked blue button up over navy slacks and an expression that looked as if the bulging, graffitied backpack was dragging him down to the worst parts of hell. High school senior. Looked about ready to hang himself by his crooked tie.

The game soon lost its already bland flavour as my eyes roamed what could hardly be called a crowd in most cases. I pretended to fiddle with my phone so that I wouldn’t look like a deranged stranger who stared intently at randoms. Every day I do this – text gibberish to no one while changing the song before it had a chance to even whisper a lyric.

How is it that everyone else looked like they knew what they were doing? They all knew how to move, how to stand, how to wait. And here I was, awkwardly trying to fit in with a group of strangers I may never see again beyond the next few, long minutes. Nobody else had this much internal struggle over waiting at a bus stop.

I stared at another unnecessary bus pass by. The driver didn’t even seem to glance in our direction. Not that I blamed him. There were only two buses that went through this town. The people around here mostly just caught the one that we were anticipating, not the hulking empty box that just turned an odd corner and went down a mysterious route away from the city. It seemed that not many people take the road less travelled. Sorry, Mr. Frost. 

                                               

And then something shifted as the high schooler started rifling through his pockets and pushed off the wall. Squinting into the distance I spotted scrolling words and the three glowing numbers. Relief came over the crowd and a movement began. People seemed to creak and moan as they moved from their stationary positions like statues that were given life and were moving for the first time. They shook out the stiffness in their bones from sitting, standing and leaning for what felt like forever. I eagerly joined a jumbled line and fiddled with my bus pass.

The bus lumbered and sank in front of us like an exhausted toxic beast, letting out a weary sigh from its exhaust pipe. The doors abruptly open and in a somewhat orderly fashion, we started to file in. The atmosphere was akin to the one of cows entering the slaughtering house. It was an odd and surprisingly morbid thought that passed through my mind. Then I worried that I was becoming bitter already at the ripe age of 21. No. In this day and age, you can never be too young to be bitter. Was that a reference to the Seinfeld rerun I watched last night before I fell asleep in front of the computer again? The question ran out of my mind as I began to step onto the bus and-

“No more room on the bus. You’re going to have to wait for the next one”

The cruel rasp made my heart feel like it was being sandpapered, more because of the content of the sentence rather than the grainy texture of the voice that declared it. A voice that seemed to be anointed to all bus drivers once they graduated from bus driver school. It, of course, came along with a deep cut scowl, intolerance for youths and the need to arrive too early or too late to all bus stops.

Flushed with frustration, irrational anger and embarrassment, I walk off the bus and try to unimagine the mocking stares of the commuters going on their merry little way to where ever the hell they needed to go.

The next bus didn’t come for another 45 minutes. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I really couldn’t be late to this business tutorial. I checked my phone even though I knew that there was no chance I would be able to make the class on time unless I could grab a ride off someone. For a split second I considered calling home and asking dad but quickly shook it off. I really didn’t feel like getting another lecture on responsibilities and what I was doing with my life.

As I was about to sink to the floor in defeated frustration and begin smacking my head against the pavement, I hear hurried footfalls and loud panting coming closer to me. I look behind me to see him frantically waving his left arm out, waving like a mad man. Confused and not really thinking rationally from the shock of not being able to function properly in society, I began raising my arm to wave back before it froze in mid air as the sound of another bus stopped in front of me. Well that would have been mortifying.

A blur of disheveled black hair skidded to a halt in front of me. When the doors opened, his brown eyes nearly rolled to the back of his head as he sighed with relief. He was boarding the bus that no one took. Well, at least, he was trying to. He desperately rummaged through his sticker-riddled bookbag while trying to apologise to the bus driver for probably leaving his ticket at home. Unimpressed and unsympathetic, the bus driver’s stubbly scowl and deadpan eyes all pretty much told me he was about to kick the guy off like the other driver kicked me off.

All of a sudden, something inside of me just threw its hands up and said, “Not today. Not again.” I quickly walk behind Mr. Messy Hair and slipped my bus pass in his hand. Feeling the weird disturbance in his quest to stay on the bus, he looked at his hand, shot up his eyebrows and turned and smiled at me. It was the kind of smile that made me really see the kind of guy he was, even though the moment lasted five seconds. Mr. Messy Hair had faint freckles dashed across the bridge of his really, really straight nose. A nose that sat between two ordinary brown eyes made extraordinary with the twinkle of relief and gratitude.

He swiftly dipped the ticket into the machine and took it out, flashing a smug, cheeky grin at the bus driver. He handed it back to me with a simple thank you, the smugness no longer on his lips but rather genuine happiness. The cheekiness was still there though.

I looked on with the bus pass still in hand as he walked straight to the back of the bus and sat down on the back seats.

I didn’t realize I was staring like an idiot before a voice almost identical to the first coughed out, “So are you just going to stand there or are you going to get on the bus?”

I was about to apologize and get off before I looked at my bus pass. It was the ticket that allowed three sections instead of my usual two. Odd. With an impulse that I never thought I would ever feel I quickly dip it in the machine. I took it out and immediately walked over to the middle of the bus and sat on the left.

This was exhilarating. The unexpected courage and giving in to a weird impulse left me with an adrenaline rush. It was if I just woke up really rejuvenated and was ready to take on everything.

But then the bus started turning that odd corner that would then go on a mysterious route away from the city. Suddenly the courage fizzled out of me and the adrenaline became much more like the unpleasant anticipation one faced when looking down at the steepest fall of the rollercoaster. What the hell was I doing?

Midnight Rambles

If you think about it, it is remarkable the fact that me and you are human. We are all made of the same things. Blood, flesh, bone and nerve. But somehow, we were born with different chemistry's in our body. Your chemistry made you broader, with the affinity to games and mechanics, and the ability to compete with the speed of the wind. My chemistry made me with the mind of an artist, the face of deceiving, frustrating youth, and slight height over my family. Maybe it made you slighter, with the mind of an inventor and urges to twitch when you lie. My chemistry made me with the ability to bear a child with their own unique chemistry that would resemble their parent's or their ancestors while they stubbornly argue that they made themselves.

But if the theory and the science says that humans share the same qualities and elements of animals, plants, organisms and even non animate objects, then the true remarkableness comes from the fact that out of all the possible things you could have become in the world: a circus ring leader in Russia, the starring contortionist in that circus who backflipped off an elephant, the elephant that contortionist jumped off and danced on a stool, the stool that held up that elephant as it strained and yearned to be a tree again. Of all the things in the world that you could be, you became you. You were the lucky guy who got to the egg first. Of all the chances in the world that you were born were remarkable. What if you were in the batch from when your father jerked off? What if some other sperm won and you and the thousands of others in the race died off? Would the born product grow up to still be the same person? Would they have the same chemistry as you? They would have the upbringing, the family and friends and the environments that you would have, but would everything turn out the same if it had been some other sperm that had won and not you?

It is remarkable that all this coincidence, circumstance, happenstance, fate, destiny, intentional, unintentional, inevitable, possible chance happened and lead to you where you are now, to where you have been, what you have felt, have seen, have heard, to the unknown future and how the future is an impossible concept because we can never experience it because once we do, it's the present.

It is remarkable that humans have evolved to a point where every single part of the body works in tandem in order to live, laugh, cry, love. That somehow the atmosphere and the percentages of gases in it were made just right so that so much could thrive and live. We look to the stars in the space and see that for some reason, we cannot do it so easily on any other rock or ball of gas.

There are an infinite amount of what ifs and somehow we landed with this one. We are a different world's what if. We are our own what if. There are infinite ways that we could have died or suffered in the past. We could have been one of the victims that we saw on the news the other night but our parent's moved away just in the right year. We could have been born in a different country where war and terror and famine riddle the majority. We could have been born a different race and experience different prejudice and troubles in society. We could have been married to royalty had we have gone on that impulsive European trip. We could have died in a freak accident, a normal accident, by someone's hand, by our own hand. But we're alive. Battered, bruised, scarred and traumatised but alive.

So congratulations on being a born when you had so many chances of not making it. Congratulations for being a human when even the slightest shift in DNA, chromosomes, science and chance could have made you a male Emperor Penguin. Congratulations for staying alive despite it all from the past and present. For your chemistry. For being remarkable.

BSOC Ball

So I went with impulse and bought this dress for BSOC Ball. The theme is French Affair. At first I was going to wear this:

Which was the dress I ordered from Siren London and just wanted it for casual purposes. When It came it was much nicer quality than expected. It could be formally but I figured it wasn't BAM enough for the Ball. 

And so I went with this: 

From edressy. I was really unsure about it at first. It's gorgeous but I don't know if I'll be able to pull it off or whether it was going overboard. But then I just said, Fuck it and buy it because I love it and I want it. A little birthday present for myself I guess. So hopefully that when this arrives, it'll be perfect.

Just some art from COFA

The criteria was to combine two objects to create a different context/message. I got tarot cards and guns.

Draft of the first part of my short story

I literally just titled this: "The trouble with being left alone with your mind while waiting in public for extended amounts of time"

She always wondered what they were all thinking. They were all in the same place, wanting the same thing but their reasons were different. She wondered what those reasons were and tried to deduce her way through her boredom. A sensible, black, pencil skirt with a blazer and runners. An office woman who worked in the city and had a long way to walk before she could change into the more professional heels in her deceivingly small bag. Black dress pants with a garishly orange polyester shirt. She guessed that the mandatory animal shaped hat and name tag were shoved unceremoniously to the bottom of that worn canvas bag that did not conceal the overtly cheery fast food logo. And the un-tucked blue button up over navy slacks and an expression that looked as if the overflowing and graffitied backpack was dragging him down worst parts of hell. High school senior. Looked about ready to hang himself by his crooked tie.

The game soon lost its already bland flavour as her eyes roamed what could hardly be called a crowd in most cases. She pretended to fiddle with her phone as to not look like a deranged stranger or a creep. Every day she does this. Sending messages of gibberish to no one and pretending to be dissatisfied with the current tune carrying through the earbuds. How is it that everyone else looked like they knew what they were doing? They all knew how to move, how to stand, how to wait. To her, they gave off a sense of direction. Purpose. And here she was, awkwardly trying to look busy – awkwardly trying to fit in with a group of strangers she may never see again beyond the next few hours.

Nobody else had this much internal struggle over waiting at a bus stop. She stared at another bus pass by. The driver didn’t even seem to glance in their direction. Not that she blamed him. There were only two buses that went through this suburb. The people around here mostly only caught the one that she and the others were anticipating, not the hulking empty box turned an odd corner that lead down a road to an unknown destination. It seemed that not many people take the road less travelled. Sorry Mr. Frost.

Creative Writing Exercise: Childhood, first memory of fear

If a person does not remember their first memory of fear, it does not necessarily mean that they had a fearless childhood or was a fearless child. As children, we all think that we are invincible. It is in those naive moments when the child experiences fear for the first time that they learn and start to become the person they will be in the future. 

As we grow older, we do not so much accustom ourselves to fear but we learn to cope and understand why we feel it steal a beat from our hearts and drive our minds into a chaotic frenzy. But as a child, where fear is new and unexplored, it is terrifying. Racing heartbeats and irrational tears which result from the smallest fright. A child does not understand this physical reaction to the fear, least of the the mental states that instantly transform.

For her, it was the fear of the dark. She shared the room with one other occupant which would in some cases provide security but she could constantly sense the predators lurking under her bed, ready to take her when she was most vulnerable. Even though in her young brain she knew that monsters did not exist, it still did not settle that itchy and suffocating dread that enveloped her heart. What was worse was that her untamed imagination ran rampant with vicious scenarios. These images were pitch black and empty. A void. However she could still hear the inhuman snarls, the tearing sounds of sheets and the feeling of being taken by an invisible predator.

Mitchell Thompson - The X Factor Australia 2013 - AUDITION [FULL]

He got into home visits! I remember hearing him sing live at HSC encore performances in 2012, "Burn For You" where every girl melted and fell in love. He was amazing. I was absolutely gutted when he was kicked off The Voice. Deserved to go through. I have the highest hopes for him for this show. Please let X-Factor and Australia see how absolutely amazing he is.

Haiku

Week 3 - Tutorial

Exercise: Distilling classic novels in a haiku

• Unsolvable crime
  What there isn’t leaves what is
  Elementary

• Nineteen eighty four
  Hide in a world of cameras
  Big Brother knows all

I can't believe I forgot this

I HAVE A PUPPY! I've had one for about 2 months now. His name is Archie and is the most gorgeous thing ever. Super fluffy and cute and sweet. A bit barky and bitey though....

He is the friendliest dog ever. But to a fault. He wants to run up to everyone which makes him easy to dognap or run away. Nevertheless, the whole family is in love with him. The first day we brought him home he was 2 months old an 5.4kg. He is now 4 months old and at least 13kg

PUPPY PHOTO SPAM TIME

I'm not dead, update, clothes

I am not dead! Just this blog is. I don't know why. I really miss personal blogging. Maybe I'll use it as a place to:

• Make lists (see what I did there?)
• Write down ambitions, dreams, wants, ideas
• Post up some short stories or drafts of them from Creative Writing class
• Post up music that I really love
• Rant

Anything really. So here is the occasional update that I have failed to do:

• Semester 2 looks promising. Painting and drawing at COFA, creative writing is getting me really excited about life again and film studies is just something I look forward to all the time
• I literally JUST passed media. 50. And credits for all else which I am very happy about.
• I have been shopping. A lot. Here are some examples:

The picture of me in the mirror and the messy room was me wearing these amazing boots. But this is pretty much everything I have bought in the past month or two. Dress from SirenLondon, novels from BookDepository, boots from ModCloth, the picture of my in mirror with jumper and leather shorts are from Chikabootie and the instagram photo was from a shopping date with Milly in Newtown where it has these amazing boutiques.

Also I have found and am in love with a lot of vintage online stores. I am willing to sell my soul for these two:

40s/50s Pink Chantilly Lace Ball Gown - Better Dresses Vintage:

White Silver Flapper Dress - Miss Selfridge:

And I found my dream wedding dress but everyone is telling me it's insane to buy one at my age especially when I have no boyfriend. But it's a vintage, one-of-a-kind wedding dress made by my new favourite vintage designer Mike Benet:

Better Dresses Vintage

"Shadow" - Sam Tsui