Note to future self

Dear Future Self,

Well done on still being alive. I'm assuming you must have started sleeping or eating properly, or taking so much crack that it has somehow preserved your body in an eternal state of fucked. I really hope you don't take crack.

I hope you're happy in whatever you're doing. Because I know you will be doing something, and you will be doing it at 100 kilometres an hour, and giving it every ounce of yourself, because that is in your blood. I assume you're probably having sporadic breakdowns adjusting with constant changes and obstacles. You'll get over them. The shit times will pass and there is always friends/drinking/music/nature/crack. But again I hope you don't resort to taking crack. That shit is expensive and you're meant to be saving up to go somewhere sometime.

I hope you've learnt to see the good in everything, and to appreciate things a little more. I hope you're at least a tiny bit less narcissistic, and that you've stopped being so terrible with money. I really wonder about things. Do you still have an undercut? What colour is your hair? Are you seeing anyone? Have you left your hometown yet?

It's the strangest thing that I (that is me, who I am right this second) will never be able to know the answers to these questions. Even though I will be the one who decides their answers, I won't really be me any more when they have an answer. This is too deep and illogical for me to articulate in my haphazard writing style. So I'll do something completely unoriginal and use an example from a play I recently did some backstage for.

The play was called "Quartet" - and yes it had four characters and yes it was about music. The four characters were all great opera singers in their time, but now find themselves in an upmarket nursing home devoid of artistic stimulation, or stimulation of any description. Like any good work of art, the play is not simply about music, or about being old people in a nursing home; it's two most obvious themes. The play is about the very concept of art, the pains and joys of living and aging, and lastly the invisibility and inevitability of change.

Three of the musicians in the home decide that they should like to perform the "Rigoletto" at a concert held annually by the home in celebration of the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi. This is particularly interesting as the three musicians recorded the song together along with Jean Horton years ago in the prime of their operatic careers. However, when they suggest that Jean should need to join them and render them the complete quartet again, she refuses.

For the majority of the play's opening it appears that Jean's refusal is solely due to stubbornness, and as such the rest of the quartet are angered with her for what they perceive to be selfishness. However, later in the play she reveals the truth.

You'll have to forgive me because I don't have a copy of Quartet and can't find it anywhere online, so I have no actual quotes to use here. But the big reveal Jean makes is that thirty years ago, when she abruptly ended her operatic career and stopped singing, it wasn't a choice she made. It was assumed by the other members of the Quartet and any strange members of the public interested in the personal lives of Opera singers that she ended her career to focus solely on being a wife and mother, as it was after the birth of her daughter that it happenned. However, she reveals to the rest of her Quartet that after the birth of her daughter, she tried to sing for a much coveted role, but simply couldn't. She tried and tried, but alas no sound would come out. And so she had no choice but to end her career as an opera singer.

While the other members of the Quartet lament Jean's loss of her own ability to sing, Jean herself laments something much darker - the loss of herself. She claims that "the Jean Horton that was" was brilliant and "shone bright in the firmament", but that she is literally a different person now, who just happens to inhabit the same body as "the Jean Horton that was".

The concept initially appears to be nothing more than a hyperbolic statement used to heighten the significance of the loss of Jean's vocal ability. However, as it is explored and expanded upon within the confines of the play, the audience come to realise that the statement Jean is making is not an exaggeration, but a profound philosophical statement.

The concept is essentially that we change throughout our lives - moving from role to role, from place to place, changing things as small as hairstyles or as large as professions and goals. We lose friends and make new ones, end relationships and start new ones. As we journey through our lives, aspects of our personality change, and we ourselves change too. The underlying claim made by Jean Horton in Quartet is that we literally become different people throughout our lives as we change.

The concept is terrifying yet thought-provoking. If I look back on my own life, while I do feel as though aspects have remained the same in my life - such as the fact that I still live in my hometown - almost as many things have changed.

At five, I could not properly or completely articulate myself. The concept of sexuality or intellect were hardly present in my mind - I did not consider the notions of sex, or of intellect.

At twelve, I was articulate. Not yet fully developed, but articulate. At this point, I began to notice I was same-sex attracted - but denied acknowledgement of this due to my beliefs. My intellect was certainly developed, but again, not yet to it's full extent. I enjoyed study, and learning.

At eighteen, I am able to well articulate myself. I enjoy intellectual stimulation, and have now fully accepted my homosexual inclination.

It is clear that at these three ages, I was and am drastically different. Almost no remnants of my five year old self remain. In light of this, I am left to consider. Do we literally become different people throughout our life? Does my former self no longer exist in any form, or does he remain at least partially?

I am not apologetic for bombarding you, my future self, with all of this. Above all, I hope you always think. I hope you wonder, and search for answers, and question, and explore. Change is inevitable, and though so much changes, I hope this remains.

I do hope you don't do crack.

George.

And then everyone left, and I got a job

It has been a fucking long time since I last posted on here. I guess I'd better quickly fill in whoever's unfortunate enough to be reading this on what's been happenning.


November: Well, the HSC finally came to a profoundly anti-climactic end when I finished my last ever high school exam. It had been Society and Culture, I believe. We drove off into the bush immediately afterwards for our much cheaper, earthier version of the notorious schoolies.

Our version of schoolies didn't go for very long. It actually just consisted of camping by a river, drinking, smoking, and swimming. At one point we all journeyed across the river, away from our campsite, for a bit of a wildly unnecessary bush bramble. We left one of the girls behind at the campsite because she was asleep and is one of those people that you just don't wake up. The interesting thing was that this particular friend of ours was terrified of lizards, and exceptionally large goannas had been circling our campsite for most of the morning. We figured leaving a girl who was terrified of lizards alone with a bunch of large lizards was a perfectly dandy idea, because, you know, she was asleep. For some reason, none of us took into account the wild notion that people often wake up after they've been sleeping for a while.

We all eventually returned to the campsite, slightly sun burnt and incredibly exhausted, to find that our friend had mysteriously vanished. We gazed up the hill and discovered that she had not, in fact, completely disappeared. Rather, she had merely teleported herself into her car, a place where she would be physically protected from the goannas that, upon waking up, she had discovered were circlcing the tent.

Somehow, we all convinced the goannas that the three of us were remarkably fearsome and, as such, they should vacate the premisis. Getting our friend to leave her car and return to the campsite - now completely but probably only temporarily devoid of goannas - was a much more difficult task. 

After two nights of camping, I returned home. In the same day, I attended a job interview for a job I would later recieve and officially signed out of high school. Straight out of the exam hall and into the work force. For the next week or so I entertained an old and dear friend who was in the process of moving from Dubbo to Cairns, and decided to visit in the mean time. When we weren't drinking, being emotional, catching up or wandering the streets in a thoroughly existential search for meaning/something to do, I was attending training sessions for the job I would soon begin.

Suddenly, I found myself bidding farewell to my friend at the local airport, crying, next to another crying friend. Before I knew it I had started the job, which was to be a strange cross between Barrista, Till Person, Waiter, and Wholesale Delivery Boy. But for the first month, all I did was help move the entire business from one venue to another. That was quite the induction.

December: My workplace officially opened, and I was introduced to two new friends I would be seeing a lot of in the future; "Overtime" and "Wages".

Christmas came and we all sat out the back of my brother's house. I managed to move my entire life from one house to another in five days. There were gifts and deep conversations about things that happenned before I was born with people I never knew. There was beer, and wine, and pavlova. I managed to move my entire life from one house to another in five days.

The new year came in while I was on the toilet. The Dixie Chicks Greatest Hits played in the background as I heard Lola and her boyfriend shriek about the New Year. I rushed out, washed my hands, and changed the music to "Midnight Radio" - a glorious song from off-broadway musical "Hedwig & The Angry Inch" that I'd always wanted to play at midnight. We drank wine and peppermint tea, played scrabble and nibbled on chocolate before spooning in my double bed.

January: My new years resolution was really just to be healthy. But somehow January ended up as a month of alcoholism, parties, take-away and not sleeping enough. I went to work, saw my friends, got drunk and that was about it.

I was (of course) working when my mum and her husband left town in their caravan to travel around the country. I came home and suddenly realised that I now had to do my own washing and cooking.

Two of my closest friends turned eighteen in January. Both are from New Zealand and neither seemed very fussed about their coming of age. I owe one of them a pub crawl.

February: I'm not sure if anything remarkable happenned in February. I worked, a lot, but decided to start looking after myself at home. I re-entered the kitchen I had evacuated when the HSC hit, and learnt when to add red wine and what works in a quiche. The answers were "always" and "everything".

I ventured to Sydney in late February to celebrate a friend's 18th/go out clubbing/get out of the fucking small town I hadn't left since October. I took myself to Arq and then Bondi, where I snuck into the backpackers and intended to stay until sunrise. It became very freezing very quickly, and so at 5 in the morning I gave up, picked myself up off the grass and caught a bus back to where I was staying.

I spent a lot of that weekend on busses. I snuck a bottle of wine into the East Hills Hotel, caught up with a friend I hadn't seen since school ended at Coogee, and had a few drinks, Thai Food, and a go at the Pokies with my mum at Beverly Hills.

I sat at the airport terminal for two hours until my plane finally arrived at 7am on a Monday morning. I read Frankie for an hour, then we were there. I got off, went home, showered, ironed my uniform and headed to work.

And that about sums things up. I'm no longer a student, or a child. Working to pay my own way, rent and bills is thrilling and terrifying. At the moment I'm a bit under the weather, and for the first time, am really missing mummy.