Friday, July 29, 2011

Terror, and pie

Things that freak me out:  [insert scary music here]

1) Clocks whose second hands glide rather than tick.

With a ticking clock, the seconds hand is constantly doing little stops.
Like walking down a flight of stairs.  Plenty of time to stop and look at the view.

But with the gliding kind, time is always on the move!
Like you're on a slide, plummeting towards the end of your life at an ever-increasing rate!

Terrifying.

2)  The passing of time.  (This is closely related to number 1).

"I don't know where the time goes".  You hear people say that a lot.

But I know where the time goes:




Things that don't freak me out:

1) Graphs.
Ahhh...there's just nothing scary about a graph.
Like a pie graph, for instance.
A pie graph is like a clock, but without the scary hands.  Or like an apple pie, but without the delicious filling.


And they all lived happily ever after.  [insert scary music again here]

Monday, July 25, 2011

Hearing voices








FIVE HOURS LATER


MORAL OF THE STORY:
Do not listen to that voice in your head.  It is mean.  It is not your friend.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

A space odyssey

I've always thought I'd quite like to go into space.

But last week some friends and I went to the Planetarium.  We lay back in chairs and watched images of outer space projected onto the dome ceiling.
Looking up like that, it actually felt like we were flying through space.  It was an incredible feeling. 


But as I flew through the infinite darkness and looked back down to Earth, I suddenly realised I didn't want to go to space at all.


Space was HUGE and DARK and LONELY.


It was a journey into everything I feared the most:
Being disconnected from everything and everyone. 


Being completely ALONE.      

I realised that everyone I loved in the entire world was on that beautiful blue and green ball floating in the blackness.


And I realised how many wonderful things the Earth contained.       


In the face of such immensity, I felt a rush of gratitude for the little things I usually take for granted.
Being able to jump up and down on solid ground.  Feeling the sun on my face.



Being able to dip my foot in the ocean.  Hearing the kettle boil.  Curling up under a blanket. 
Being surrounded by people who know how many sugars I have my tea.  


I suddenly realised how much I loved the world.  


I didn't want to leave it at all.  Not even for a day.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Shoe Hell

I HATE shoe-shopping.
Shoe-shopping is my personal form of hell.  Shoe Hell.


You may be familiar with the several types of shops in Shoe Hell:
1. Cheap shoe shops (Too affordable; can't admit to having shopped there due to their definite use of  sweat-shop labour.  No shop assistants to bother you).
2. Normal shoe shops (affordable, and just enough ambiguity around manufacturing conditions to feel okay about shopping there.  Shop assistants all over you like a rash).
3. Fancy shoe shops (completely unaffordable, and shop assistants that only like you if you're a fancy person). 

In most social settings, you make friends by being really nice and smiling a lot.
But in a fancy shoe shop, the rules change.  Being really nice is a sign that you're not cool enough to be in their shop.
In a fancy shoe shop, you have to act like you are so unexcited by the prospect of buying a new pair of shoes, that they would be lucky to even have one of your toes touch one of their shoes for the briefest of moments.   

And people who work in fancy shoe-shops are like drug dogs.  They can sniff out a non-fancy person in a flash.  Usually by the state of your current shoes.
They think I don't see their disapproving darting glances at my shoes, but I do.

I always do. 



 "I can tell from your shoes that you do not belong in this shop."

"Actually, I'd rather you didn't put your giant working-class feet in my fancy shoes."

"Disgraceful.  Get out of my shop immediately, un-fancy girl."

"Price-dictated purchasing.  How vulgar."

"Five hundred dollars more than you can afford, peasant girl."

"Five, four, three, two..."
"...One.  Run along now."

 

The End.  (There are no happy endings in Shoe Hell, sorry...)