"Le son du rire"

 © Brodie

The sound of laughter. The French call it Le son du rire, the Italians Il suono della risata, & the Polish Dźwięk śmiechu. Even the Poles can't help but appreciate it's worth, even if their way of describing it resembles a strange cross between a sneeze and a cough.

Earlier this week, my drama class and I were taken on a picnic by our teacher. We sat outside and ate sandwiches that none of us really knew the origins of, even after asking. Nonetheless it was a lovely time of talking, cautiously discarding suspicious sandwich contents, and above all laughter. There are few sounds more blissful than that of genuine, uninhibited laughter, especially when it comes from someone who cannot stop laughing once they've begun.

I envy people with loud, booming laughs. When they laugh, the world stops and joins them. When I laugh, people give me strange looks and ask if I'm right, which I find a little bit shameful. I'm probably one of the loudest people I know, but when I start to laugh, I go quiet, and begin to rock back and forth with my mouth open. My friends tell me this resembles a crow, hence the name my laugh now goes by, The Rocking Crow. I'm a little bothered that my laugh is better loved and appreciated, if not better known than I am, but I guess I should be happy. Not many people have that.

Bobs.

A few days back I was in one of those teenage depression spirals, where there seems to be no meaning to life and no purpose to it. That all vanished when I set foot in the town of Bellingen for the local Readers & Writers Festival. Writing is normally a lonely, depressing craft, but now I was in a town full of writers, many of them published authors.

Never had there been so many eyebags reaching such southerly extents in the one place. Masses of middle-aged women packed the local coffee shops, struggling to determine which of the four women with thin, black-rimmed glasses and a sophisticated bob was their companion. There was squinting, and sipping, and shouting, and bitching, and laughing, and learning, and countless late comers to every session.

So much coffee was consumed over the two days of the festival that on two separate occassions, people actually attempted to barge into my toilet cubicle before I even had the chance to display the engaged sign.

But it wasn't all coffee and perversion. There were, as one would hope, actually panels of people from the realm of writing, discussing everything from Telling Refugee's stories to the internet. I really pity the panel that had to encompass all there is to know about the great sea of information that is the internet in just an hour. But they managed, barely, and I discovered that there is hope for queer writers on the internet, something I've been worried about ever since I started this blog.

I also met up with Alex Neill, one of my inspirations, who worked with me at last years festival to polish a piece of short fiction. And then I added another person to my list of inspirational writers; Alice Pung. I haven't yet read her work, something I'm not proud of and probably shouldn't put on the internet, but I intend to.

Quickie

Boys: Well, I've now declared myself as a bisexual, so the title's a little redundant. I wouldn't say I'm lonely; just single and surrounded by couples. Seriously. There are three affectionate couples in my presence most of the time. In fact I recently had one of them over. They spent most of the time making out, I spent it playing Age of Empires.

Bitches: There's a noticeable lack of bitches at the moment. There are however a lot of women, and the love triangles are amazing. I'm of course part of one, but on the giving end, not the recieving. And of course I just managed to make unrequited love look like anal sex.

HSC: Well, I'm doing well at school. Most of my teachers are partly happy with me. The main problems are punctuality, being bothered, and losing the very Eastern Eurpoean accent I seem to have when speaking in French.

Jorge