78 Emotions

I am so glad I can make time for this. So glad I can sit down and be the events rather than do them for a change.
Once again there has been an absence of posting, and this time and absence of content to fill the gap. I should have created a previous blog, which merely repeated some profound statement over and over, about how I am cementing this moment in my mind and in history via the internet in order to stop it getting away, to hold onto it, to make an example of its existence. Instead this whole thing has become that post.

I finally make my university application, all official like – and what a mountain of paperwork that was. But now I know that it is all set, and the only thing I have to worry about now is my end of year score. Which I severely doubt. I recently had a few complaints for my school and its teachers regarding all of that. It came to no avail. They don’t care that we’re not getting all the material we need to get the best possible English score; they don’t care that I am the one teaching year 12 Information Technology, they don’t care that my art teacher didn’t tell me I had to study seven more artworks than I have… I saw the man they sent to quash my concerns. A spineless saggy bug-eyed excuse for a co-ordinator. He walked past me the other day and instantly, without any warning, my subconscious produced the most succinct brilliant label for him, seething from my mind a voice spat – minion. Minion. The best thing they’ve got, the supposed liaison to all my results, the person sent to take action on sum of all my scholarly worries – is a hunch-backed man well past his prime bearing a blue slip of paper with a website address on it.
Thanks a lot.
You know what they gave me? (apart from a piece of paper with an address on it that I had already used in the first place the find out what they hadn’t been teaching me) they gave me practice exams. What better thing to scare me shitless about what I haven’t even been taught during the year that is much too late to learn now.
And so now there is a list.
32 pieces of homework and study that I have to get done these holidays. As if homework is going to make it all better.
I really tried with all of this though. It’s down to me now. I drew up a list, a list of every single thing that I have to get done; followed by a daily planner with each item of that list carefully planned for a day on the holidays.
It’s my very own thesis-o-graph. It’s not going well.

Speaking of counting down: I realised I only have 14 or so days left with my friends. That’s how many days of school there are left after the holidays. It hasn’t sunk in for them yet. It’s life-changing for me. I’ll be… well one can’t say ‘sad to see them go’ since I am the one leaving; I’ll be… sad to leave them behind. I told my mother with pre-reminiscent fondness I would buy one of those big roller suitcase things that you see people with at the airport, so I could take my computer on the train and still go to their computer parties.
She didn’t think it was sweet at all. She whinged about how I was talking about visiting them and not mentioning her, and then she said that they won’t even want to hear from me. I frowned at her stupidity quizzically; I’m going to be the one in the big city and them in the backwater now; I’m going to be the cool university chick while most of them still have two years of school ahead – if anything I’m the one who’s supposed to have better things to do, and I’ve made the decision to try and stay friends. I hope we can. Me and them and a few select adept teachers, it could be a nice group to keep around.
And if I don’t get a good enough score to get into the course I want; I have given some thought to going back for another year. I have that option since I completed high school in five instead of six years, it’d be a drag, but I’d have more chances at the score and still only be normal graduating age when I finished.
I don’t know whether I’d care for it. I still don’t have accommodation finalised. The people in my life simultaneously seem to care way too much about all of this and wonder why I’m not jumping off the walls with joy; and yet don’t get the significance and importance and the need to get this one chance right.

With all that has been going on lately I recently discovered that I only have 78 emotions. And that’s why I have stopped writing. You see I have written 78 songs, and a few days back I was in the mood for songs, doing a bit of singing practice and thinking of maybe writing one. I was feeling frustrated that I liked everything about singing except my voice, and how the criticism tainted it all, and I just wanted to perform… and I flipped though my book of lyrics – and there it was. To the letter, written more than a year ago. I’ve covered it all. Writing that song about Melbourne was the last unique thought I had and revisiting my unfinished song notes and writing that one about the vacuum of high school existence was the nail in the coffin. I only have 78 emotions and I have catalogued them all.
My singing teacher said something very memorable and regretfully painfully true to me the other day. She said you fool your mind when you sing along to other tracks. The line between your voice and theirs becomes blurred and you can’t tell who’s doing what. I never thought it was so ingrained in my thought process, but I do do that. It’s a great thing to realise, but a painful one at that; ’cos now I know I sound every bit as bad as I do singing unaccompanied, all the time.
I still entertain the fantasy though. Just for the sake of posterity you should know that I have decided to call my record label “Written In Sound”. I think it’s a fitting name.
But I told her that I do need someone else; on a deeper level, someone good for the musical part of my soul. Someone with a lot of moxie, who can sing and doesn’t give a shit about what anyone thinks, and can’t stand my despairing attitude. Someone who would cheerfully take me by the arm to the piano and make me laugh until I was joyously belting out a tune with him-them.

I do seriously ponder if I’ll be missed among my friends. I worry about that, for all the right and wrong reasons. I think one boy in particular will miss me. Some part of me thinks I might be in love with him/there is no way I’m in love with him. Hey, I mean how ironic can you get? I am the purveyor of casual things, the only girl who understood flirting for flirting’s sake; the centre of mutual admiration – it cannot be.
But it slips into my mind so easily… ‘I’m gonna miss them so much; god I love him…’ And the worst thing, worse than all the remonstrations from my own mind at this thought’s utterance – is that I have the sneaking suspicion that I have always felt that way.
We dated once. Bet you didn’t know that. People won’t believe that we did. We still talk, we still flirt like… boisterous lascivious teens that just laid eyes on each other, like anything. I said to myself when I broke up with my partner of about 10 months, that we would keep contact, we would keep good terms. The break-up was traumatic but amiable, and there was every reason to stay friends. But I got used just the same, maybe more so after the promise of romance was gone. And I said something about it, as I do, as think most people would; and then it got spiteful on her end and I saw no use in the chore of it. It all turns sour in the end.
Someone said to me, one of my last wavering yet enduring female friends, said that I was too strong a person for the girl I try not to talk about. I was too much for her. And it was the first time that I really looked at things from my side without letting it go to my head. I could always be on her side and say that I was stupid and an evil arrogant witch, but I was right. But, then yeah maybe I was a selfish, but I really tried and made up for it, and she couldn’t take that, the resoluteness and passion – it wasn’t something she saw in herself. ‘I don’t need to deal with you right now.’ she said.

Ah, back to when I was dating this boy. It was a bit of a non-relationship of course. We were in school, he couldn’t make time for me after school, I wasn’t particularly fussed. He was just someone to receive that desire. There was this big deal with whether we were ‘dating’ or not; all from other people. Who were physically pained by the fact that we flirted but weren’t attached. What is this? Teens with pseudo-morals – please! They kept asking and bothering, and prying and so I was of course at pains to ask. And I never got a straight answer. So then I was in it because I didn’t know where we stood, and it bugged me. But I knew that every question that I asked him (through tedious notes I had devised as a way to emulate the substance of other relationships) made him grimace and swear ‘Women!’ under is breath. So then, because of all that red-tape bullshit which we both despised – we… dissolved, is the better word. And then later I found out that he had just wanted what I would have been more comfortable with in the first place – a casual friends with benefits kind of arrangement. And I know how cliché that sounds, it either never works because someone gets jealous or you miss the meaning and exclusivity. But the thing is, it does work with him. He is Mr. Perfectly Alright alright.

And I’ve missed the mark on the point of this anecdote twice now. What I wanted to say was that when we were dating, this one time, he got hit in the head with a football. Oh the gravity of that sentence! No, I laugh now but he was hit pretty bad, like sitting down on the verge of unconsciousness bad. And I was really cut with concern, like I never had been. His pain was my pain and I ran to him and helped him with the same sort of uncommon karmic contentment that came from teaching. And I told my mother about that when it happened, she got all mushy about it and made me want to forget it completely.
But I kept thinking, with that uncanny wafting realisation that could be mistaken for a voice from outside yourself – that I could end up marrying him. Passive voice, passive events, it could simply happen. And normally I would view marriage as a fate worse than death (my mother’s influence there too) but with him it was and still is this eerie unforeboding acceptance. Creepy but fine.

And it keeps me awake at night to think that I might never see him again.
But then I think how I must be suffering from one of the worst bouts of Reality TV Syndrome ever recorded.
This is well known affliction which flourished in the damp inane self-important world of Big Brother and spread like a disease to other reality shows from there. Unfortunately due to the explosion of these it had escaped containment lines and thrived in the wild, affecting everyone from the weak-willed TV addict to the melodramatic isolationist. The symptoms all have their origins in the show, which include equating departure with death; as people tended to do when someone ‘left the house’ – they passed on into the real world that none inside were prepared or equipped to deal with. And also going completely hysterical over give-aways. You may observe this one for yourself if you listen to commercial radio winners long enough.
So maybe all of this sappiness stems from the thought of leaving to Melbourne, as something big like that usually tends to amplify the emotions around it. And I’m being a terrible cliché letting it get to me.
But then some part of me is so fixed in the idea that I couldn’t stand the thought of never getting to make love to him. To have him there to talk to and flirt with, to have him touch me…
I think I’d feel guilty to deprive us of that.

Is that love?



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