what’s your purpose for visiting?

Posted on Apr 11, 2012 in blog, conversations | 0 comments

Friend: If I have a time machine, I would go back to the 1980s and tell Madonna to stop it. She’s inflicted far too much crap on humanity.

Silence.

Me: “Really? Really?!! That’s what you would time-travel for?

Silence:

Me: HITLER!

Perfect Winter Days

Posted on Jan 29, 2012 in knitting, passtime, school of nelly | 0 comments

Sometimes, all you need is good company, dessert, and a weather-apprioriate hobby.

dum vita est, spes est

Posted on Jan 20, 2012 in school of nelly | 0 comments

However long, tiresome and dreary this week may have felt, make a point of starting the weekend with a fresh and light-hearted perspective on the future.

Seriously.

Enjoy the little things. And take time to watch this short video that will undoubtedly move you. A severely autistic girl is opening hearts and eyes everywhere when she begins to express herself to the rest of us.

Where there’s hope, there’s life (and vice versa).

encyclopedia randomica

Posted on Jan 18, 2012 in conversations | 0 comments

- How did you find out about this clip?
- I don’t know. The Internets?
- Did you know Wikipedia is down today?
- Yes I know. Protesting SOPA.
- Of course you’d know. You’re probably their most prolific user.
- Probably not.
- How many times a day do you go on Wikiepdia?
- I don’t know. Probably an average  of once a day.
- You’re the only person I know that has this much random information stored in their head.
- Yeah… I tend to like odd bits of information, don’t I?
- You’d be great on jeopardy. Go make your first million there.
- Nah. I’m probably more the spy-saves-the-world-using-random-information type.
- What do you mean? Talk me through this.
- I’d be one of those Ian Fleming/James Bond / MI-5/Jack Bauer type of people that have a national security situation, and the only way to save the country is to put in a password into a computer that unlocks some defence mechanism that will stop the inevitable attack heading our way from Russia, China, or bloody Iran. I’ll have 60 seconds to put together a series of random clues I picked up on the way from here and there, and be given just one shot at entering the master password that will save humanity. It’d probably be something like “koala falafel”, and with eyes firmly shut I’d type that in and push the “enter” key with 1 second left to total destruction. The red beepy codes stop and the Russians/Chinese/Iranians magically vanish. We emerge as a victorious awesome western nation and everything is sorted and the country is safe again.
- … That is … really…random. And it seems like you’ve thought this through before. Eyebrows raised.
- Well, I have to practice modesty somewhere. I’ve worked out the speech too, very much along the lines of “no no, I didn’t save the world. I’m just a little person doing my part for this great nation of ours”.
- You definitely thought about this many times. What a totally random scenario. Crazy lady.
- I’ve been making it up as we were talking right now.  I had to fill  the empty void that was previously my Wiki-ing time.
- You’re too creative for your own good.

Revolutions, Resolutions and Restitution

Posted on Jan 9, 2012 in blog, past lives, school of nelly | 0 comments

It was the holiday euphoria week — the one that falls between Christmas and New Year’s eve. People were feeling happy, rested, well-fed, and ready to think about the wonderful things they were planning to start in a matter of days.

I was feeling left out of all the New Year’s resolution conversations. I thought about giving something up, starting some new routine, being a better person, or being the change I want to see in the world. I began working on a 12-month plan to help me feel more accomplished by the time December 2012 rolled around. But I felt silly lying to myself by creating an aspirational to-do list that was fake. It was fake because it had the goals and achievement wish lists of other people that had little to nothing in common with me and my current state of life.

It was almost midnight on New Year’s eve, and I still had no resolutions picked out. The beginning of the new year was minutes away, and it was already starting to look like an aimless, worthless year.  As this depressing thought loomed over my head, a new train of thought was necessary: Since visions of the future were murky and unclear, perhaps a look back at what had passed in 2011 would prove to be a little more uplifting. Hopefully. And surely Kierkegaard wasn’t off point when he proclaimed that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

So I thought about the entire year, and how it seemed to be made up of small insignificant parts that had no big effect on my life. But while recounting some of the little happenings that took place, a comforting realization washed over me: 2011 was a very big year for me. This is for a number of reasons stemming from externalities and internalities.

Externalities
2011 was a year of revolutionary behaviour. Entire nations were angry with corrupt systems, dysfunctional regimes and embodied dejected and broken esprit de corps . People took to the streets, marched, fought, chanted, cheered, cried, buried, and marched all over again. They voiced their concerns, sought new options and demanded change. Significant shifts took place in some countries, while others settled for nominal transformations. The world remembered what it was like to fight for the possibility of a better future.

I don’t know whether I picked up on fragments of the emotions that fueled the uprisings, or simply reached some personal tipping point, but it seems that I mirrored these revolutionary inclinations. The demoralized nine-to-wheneverer in me went on a feather-ruffling mission. I’d suddenly had it with a lot of things; it was not okay to smile and nod at dysfunctional processes, outdated practices and belligerent dead weights anymore. I had a voice (when did I ever not have one, really), and I had the persistence and will to be heard. I didn’t have much to lose; whatever fragments of pride I had left were washing away with every tide of status-quo that hit me.

And so it was. I pushed back and… it worked.

Internalities
The other thing that happened last year was an act of restoration.

A cycle of indifference, blind acceptance, escapism and rationalization does not yield fantastic life-long results. I think that with time, such existence robs you from your essence – your joie de vivre. The sparks that make you a loveable human being cannot be sustained on an empty shell of passive living. There is nothing for it to feed on, and so with time you become spark-less — you lose your essence and consequently yourself.

I was turning into a really tidy shell in the last few years. It was comfortable knowing that I was so much closer to figuring a few things out — on the surface, at least. I liked checking boxes. Female: Yes. Interests: Shopping, Fashion, Technology. Yes, mail me discounts on things I don’t care about or need.

Some friends poked about, prodded, and seemed confused. They wanted to know what was going on with me. Was I depressed? Was it heartbreak? Was it work? A self-imposed chocolate deficiency?

The reality of it was far less interesting. I tried (and I use the past-tense confidently) to sustain a coping mechanism that helped manage the dual sense of my existence.  You see, on my left shoulder resided an entity that wanted a catalogue-like life, with pleasant things and a nice cushy sofa. But on the right shoulder lived a vagabond that knew all-too-well the fallacy of neglecting journeys in favour of destinations. My happy state of being had always been askew, restless and rootless. But there I was, stubbornly trying to be the person who wants the cushy sofa and doesn’t mind slipping away into a place where bashing and neglecting oneself are the norm. Little by little I tucked away the outbursts of emotion, passion and creativity that used to be key drivers in my life and passed the time in an unusually routine and calm fashion.

But at some point, something snapped. It was similar to the feeling you get when you’re at the first stages of the flu, with only two choices before you: fight the virus or succumb to a horizontal zombiesque state of living for a while.

One day, I woke up with a clear idea of what was to happen. I needed to find a way to restore the sparkle back to the crumbling shell.

I had to take the time to heal.
I needed to apologize to the sum of the parts that made up my disheartened whole.
I needed to mourn stillborn dreams, let go of borrowed aspirations and eschew contrived conflict.

And…I had to forgive myself for my own trespassing.

Whether by Providence or well-timed acts of free-will, the last year was about the restoration of my self.

And this year will be about the acceptance of who I am and what I’m not, and the resolve to respect the choices that I’ve made thus far and have faith in the ones that I’ll be making in the future.

Not Note

Posted on Dec 30, 2011 in blog, conversations | 0 comments

I’m not going to write a note about blogging regularly, or promising to do a better job at keeping it updated, un-neglect it, etc… I’ve done that many times before, with blogs no. 1, 2 …4…20. Didn’t work. I just kept feeling worse about lying to no one. Now I’m just more realistic, and honest. I’ll write when I write and have something to say, when I find some Internety goodness that has to be shared on plague-ish scales, or – more frequently – when I remember what it is I was talking to myself about before going on a safari adventure to find the computer’s charger.

Sometimes I experience technical difficulties as a result of working on blogs and papers at work all day long. I come home with no sentence-making capabilities left in me. I point to things, repeatedly, and provide adjectives. Eventually, lines of communication are established.

- Me pointing, poke-pointing, pointing some more: “Little, thing, fields, fluffly, dish, more things, more fluffy, yum”.
- “Nelly, are you telling me you’d like some rice”?
-“Hmmhm.”

For the more realistic individuals amongst you, feel free to subscribe to the random strokes of genius. Show the RSS monster some love.

Joan As Police Woman – Flash

Posted on Dec 27, 2011 in blog, earworm, music, passtime, playlist | 0 comments

This is a haunting song.

You’ll hear a snippet of it, and it will stay with you for a while.

I first heard it during an end scene in Luther. It was love at first sound.

The lyrics are equally haunting:

Sing to me lover all the things you hear
All your moments in time
Let me in the rhythms of your heart
And how your eyes rhyme

Help me remember that I can’t forget
And paint me jet black

Oh my lover let me tell you now
All the things that I feel
I already cried a river so deep
Now I’m ready to heal
Now I’m ready to kneel

On Luther

If you’re not already watching Luther on Netflix/your choice of streaming channel, you’re missing out on a top quality show. Idris Elba (The Wire, Rock’n'Rolla) is absolutely phenomenal. An engaging character from start to finish. He’s supported by great cast, including Ruth Wilson (Jane Eyre – BBC), who does a really good job of being a really bad person. Bonus: Warren Brown (Occupation) adds a sweet aspect to otherwise gritty and dark scenarios.

Plus, you can’t go wrong with a show that has Massive Attack’s “Paradise Circus” as the opening theme song.