One life, many stories

So I cut all my hair off and I still love it. Sometimes though I feel femininity and desire are all linked with long hair because it seems the moment I got a bob with fringe I was no longer looked at. Is it too hard for men to be with a more androgynous looking woman? I still have definite implications on my body that I am a woman, my curves, my hips, my voice, my petite face and lack of anything muscular would make me a pathetic looking man most likely to turn into a monk or a transvestite called Paige Turner.  At first I thought I was being paranoid but now after more than a month of short hair I am certain about my observations. The looks from men and the cat calls were, although sometimes frustrating or exhausting, a compliment. I was used to this compliment seeing as my long hair and I have been sharing each others company for almost three years now. I wear the same dresses as I did prior to the cut and it seems despite the effects it used to have, the effects have all been cut off along with 24 centimeters of tresses. Although this seems like a pathetic whinge.. it definitely proves that I am very much a woman. Is my whole self-esteem lost somewhere in that old matt of hair that I used to have, now discarded in some rubbish bin? Is all this lack of compliments and cat calls evidence that men place just as much importance on a woman's hair as woman do? I always thought men were about T and A's (work it out) but I have never heard of a hair fetish or a hair man, "I really like a girl with long brown thick hair to her waist." Whatever.. it is growing slowly and maybe in two years it will get to half its' length and my self-esteem might be half restored.

With University beginning again I have been more than frantic plus I made a new friend! One thing off my New Years Resolution.. Talking about which I made a Resolution with my girlfriend that we would go camping together. So during the middle of winter we pick up our sleeping bags and tents in an attempt to camp except we realise that Kiama is pouring with rain, so we settle for cabins. It turns out that these cabins are about 140$ minimum for one night, I don't know about anyone else but paying that for a trailer really puts a question on the term trailer trash? I guess one man's trash is another's business treasure.

So we finally settle upon a youth hostel however upon arriving late at night I realise that I have mistaken two of the names and that the Youth Hostel I had requested was 53 minutes from Kiama. Disappointed after driving from one trailer to the other around Kiama, umming and aahhh a Youth Hostel with no windows looking more like Auschwitz, I resort to my last option, ring up my mother and admit I screwed up. Yet again... So she manages to find us a deal at the Grand Mecure Apartments where for a cheap price we 'camp' the way we secretly like to camp and ticked it off our list based purely on the endeavours we had to go through in order to find a roof over our head.

Okay so I think four days post being 21 is enough time for recovery that I should get back into the swing of things. To be honest my life is pretty dull right now, I am painting my room frantically before I begin camping and I am really not enjoying it. Unfortunately I am now cursing my large room because of the all the space that now needs to be painted and I forgot all the arduous preparation that goes into just starting up let alone actually getting paint to brush.

In an attempt to finally finish my room the way I want it to look I am finally getting it painted in modern versions of white and going South Provincial France. The only problems I am having is finding a cheap French looking bed, not as easy as it seems and mostly hard work. Anway.. if anyone has any suggestions send them my way other than that my life has had nothing much happen.

I thought I would provide some photos of my 21st and the whole family. Enjoy.

4 days until I am 21, 13 days until my French man comes home and 15 until University starts again. I expect lots of comments wishing me a very happy birthday however I will be far too drunk to make sense of my own two feet let alone logging onto my blog via my HTC phone. A few days ago I was in a club sadly using facebook in the toilets to write an email to my Frenchman, I guess once you are single and the chase is no longer there all the excitement of a night has literally gone down to the toilet. Clubbing is so interconnected with games and fun that it really has became a large game of 'Life' where you are either forced to spectate if you have no one to play against or if wanting to play you have to be willing to deal with two players or more. The only game not allowed in clubs is solitaire, no longer are taken women allowed to roam the streets at night, why it feels like social taboo and with each venture out to a club without my boyfriend I realise that my long standing game of solitaire is best played in one's pyjamas in front of the television with a sorry looking tub of Honeycomb Butterscotch Ice Cream by Sarah Lee. May you all get addicted to it.

Upon realising that the only way to have fun is to play games and get caught in the chase I began to wonder, Is it just me or are there others out there? My girlfriend and I have gone out twice together, both of us have boyfriends and both of us spend the night watching jealously couples madly kissing against a wall. In the end we sigh, then we look at each other and realise that we miss our boyfriends too much and catch a cab home. I am all for the, I am woman hear my roar ... I would be the first to burn my bra seeing as it has little to support and abandon domesticity, seeing as all I can do is cook, but when I have all the club provides in my life, the boy and the game, it can no longer fill that void. Now looking at the girls madly reapplying eyeliner while wiping off old drabs that have slid down their sweaty face and pulling breasts out of bras to make them fuller in club toilets I sigh with assurance that for now those days are firmly behind me. A night out with the girls is more about going to the movies and going out to dinner or having a drink at somewhere like the Shang-ri-la Hotel, I am dying to go there sometime, and I guess my birthday is a perfect excuse?

Although I love going out I much prefer chasing a bus down the road and playing games with my girlfriend and a Scrabble board. I guess I forget but sometimes I'm so busy trying to chase fun that I forget how fun life can be without playing chase.

Right so the holidays have begun and rather than having so much time to write to you I have been so busy that I have completely forgotten my blog though I have been inundated with friend requests. There is so rare a moment in life when one does absolutely nothing and still gains friends. So to compensate I am going to write all that I have thought and have been doing so those reading better be prepared, get those glasses out or start getting comfortable with a soy chai latte, the latest addiction I have discovered though all rather too late in the chai verses coffee debate. I must admit I always feel rather pathetic when other people in line at the cafe order a double shot flat white to go because I am oh so important with my life that I don't have a minute to drink it and then I meekly stand at the counter ordering a soy chai latte please, oh and a large because I have nothing to do.

The first week went by slowly thus the last blog entry and then I went off to Forster to visit the grandparents. After four days with my cousin and them I went to volunteer at St. Vincent de Paul for a camp for troubled kids who are from welfare or refuges, though I cannot say much about it other than it was exhausting. It was almost a twenty four hour job and for three solid days. Though the day it is over you are relieved I felt guilty that some of those children whose problems became evident through the passing of time have not been at the forefront of my conscience since camp. Does this make me a bad person or simply a person subconsciously attempting to find peace through ignorance?

Visiting my grandparents was difficult because my grandma began discussing her will, which is hard to accept when cancer has not managed to kill my grandma twice. It seems as though she is immortal and I have distinguished her  by firmly placing her in that "Jesus Christ- life for eternity" category simply based on how much pain she has had to survive in order to remain here. To me she is indestructible, a solid military tank of a woman.  My grandma is a religious woman and her husband is a priest. Over the three days at her home she asked us on the final day to sort out her will and the jewellery that she had. It was very difficult to hear her mention indirectly her own death. She knew she was mortal and me, age 20, was still unable to see her as a human being. It was like being told by your father in the Santa suit "You know it's just me under all these clothes." In the end my cousin left the room unable to handle the presence of death while I remained listening to every word until she had said what she needed to say but as soon as I got into the shower I silently sobbed until the pain of her absence left me. I know when people are going to die and no one knows this but I knew when my other grandma was going to die. Before it happens I cry, I allow myself to cry for as long as I need so that when they are dead and others are mourning I can remain solid like an anchor among the madness while people begin to loss their identity. With death comes a loss of self and a feeling of loneliness, in that time I cannot also be lost I need to remain focused on staying above the emotion for I fear that I would submerge so quickly that I would never surface. It is in me to wallow and self destruct.

I relish like a pig in mud on drama and problems because they give me reason to put myself down or to focus on something so much more trivial than the core issue, why am I addicted to it? I read in a book that a child who moves all the time has no stability and relishes constant change in ones' life, so when one settles they look for change in their life through creating unnecessary issues for themselves. It also says that a child who was forced to grow up quickly often feels deprived of a child hood and is lacking important developmental stages that allow them to handle complex social issues. Maybe this is just psycho BS or maybe this is what will help me sleep at night, knowing that someone understands my kind of person and that this book implies that I am not the only person that instead there are many more out there creating mess and then forever frantically trying to clean it up.

I think it is one of the reasons why I begin a relationship and then do all I can to get out of it by creating problems, I hate his hair, I hate his selfishness (over something as petty as he always pours water for himself first at a restaurant) and now with my recent relationship I am trying all I can to reverse this bad behaviour. Instead of fighting we are attempting anger and conflict management where we step by step go through the phases to manage the problem rather than having a useless fight that ends up doing so many circles that you feel nauseated by the end of it. I am also planning things to ensure that I have commitments that make me unable to make up some pathetic excuse to break up, we are travelling to Tahiti at the end of the year and prior to that we are doing the City to Surf charity walk and we are going trapezing together. Crazy but I am using this relationship to change all future relationships, this is the first stone in hopefully what will begin so tritely be titled the foundations to future marriage, loyalty and love. I laugh at myself while reading this... I sound like I am talking out of my ass but if we are being honest often what we most often wish for does sound rather cliched, money, women, world peace, wealth...

I wish to go to bed and with that good night.