Passenger - a poem

Passenger

Rhythmic clicks of wheels on tracks

Beat against a heart of painted black

Un-aware of what it lacks,

Numb in silence, unable to turn back.

Days and worlds flash by them,

A passenger alone in an empty car

No meaning left to condemn,

Their identity lost in a journey far.

A dirty window displays the world,

Locked above in a realm of blazing stars,

Bound away like a sail furled

Far from this hell scented of old cigars.

The journey holds no joy

When the destination is but a nowhere

Now devoid of youthful ploy,

The harsh and bitter end to a brief affair.

So they sit in acceptance,

Silent and sure in their hidden pain,

A passenger in penance,

For there is nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

Written by me very quickly on 16/6/15, as the result of too much Coldplay and half an hour of free time.

Image source: http://farm9.staticflickr.com

Because there is no such thing as too many books...

So head over here if you feel that your bookshelves could do with a little re-stocking. This lovely blog has 20 books available to be won, from poetry (there is classic Keat's that I'm eyeing up), to westerns, to classics, and to even blank journals. It's open internationally, and you are able to enter without needing to have a blog - it just helps if do, if you want further entries. :)

Pop over and indulge!

Dear one-week Sarah

Source: http://www.hdwallpapersinn.com 

  Congratulations! You made it. Yes, this is university, that paragon of excellence which society has always told you to strive for, and that you thought you would never achieve due to your different education. But that doesn’t matter any more. You are here! And you’re going to be awesome. At least, you think so.

  Truth is, I am a little sorry for you right now. You really don’t know what is coming up in the next three months and it’s going to be a completely different experience for you. Learning in a University environment is going to be almost as far removed from your previous educational experience as it could be, but after a week or so you are going to find it strangely comfortable. It really won’t take you long to feel at home and safe amongst the like-minded individuals surrounding you. But of course that first week will be slightly terrifying, as you navigate a completely new world that includes a large campus, numerous bus trips, and that bewildering sense of simply have no idea of where to go.

  You will learn so much in your quest for knowledge and shared wisdom, but at the same time you will learn plenty that you never needed to know in the first place. You’ll learn that just because someone has a few degrees up their sleeve doesn’t mean that they know how to successfully teach, and that those whom society might pass over for lack of education are actually extremely intelligent and caring. The average level of humanity’s intelligence will unpleasantly surprise you, and you’ll feel slightly betrayed by the amount of those who simply give up after the first couple of weeks. Most painfully, unlike your world of vibrant ideas that still has solid absolutes, you will learn that the masses of humanity around you, for the most part, float in a sea of fluid reality.

  But there’s going to be so much that you will learn practically! Your writing will undergo a major over-hall. You’re going to find out that the colourful, descriptive style you have favoured all your life is not academically suitable, and that will initially make you feel robbed, before you learn to rejoice in the sharing of researched opinions. You’ve always been a highly organized person, but that will have to rise to a whole new level as you enter university life and consequently juggle the demands of family, work and social life. Your understanding of time management will become invaluable as you learn to fit in university study by all kinds of creative means, such as studying in the slow periods at your work, or reviewing literature on the bus. Uni will give you a variety of useful skills that transpose into your everyday life, for example the use of critical thinking. You have always been a judgemental person who likes to weigh every option, but a certain lecture will open your eyes to the underlying currents around you. You’ll learn how to pick apart arguments and chose academic sources to give an informed opinion. I promise you, you will be in your element.

  You’ll never forget the feeling you had when you received your first assignment back. That poor, precious assignment of yours that you stayed up late the night before submission desperately adding finishing touches to, terrified that it wouldn’t be good enough and that you’d be branded a failure. You will never forget the smile in your tutor’s eyes as it passed between you. And when your shaking hands will have calmed enough to text your family the good news of how you have passed – indeed, done far better then simply passing – you will know, for the first time, a deep security and faith in your own ability.

  If I could say one thing to you, it would be to remember that feeling. Realize that yes, you can do it! University is going to feel so right for you. Your initial worries will soon be eased, and the depth of information you will have access to will make every experience worth it. This is a crazy carnival ride of words, opinions and literature, but hang in there. You will enjoy the ride.

 A summary/personal letter I was required to write in the final weeks of the semester. By the way, I made it. :) Ready for the next semester - after I have some time off.

Study

  

Source: http://badassbookreviews.com

  I'm sitting tucked away in the University library. If you were to walk around the three rows of morbid philosophy that separate me from the the rest of the world, then you could probably find me on my laptop, guiltily eating a packet of peanuts. It's a sunny warm nook and perhaps the only armchair on this floor, so I'm guarding it fiercely. My claim has been well staked.

  If I look out in front of me, I can gaze over the city and the river flowing through like a ribbon round a cake, the tiny boats adding subdued character to an otherwise silver gleam. Autumn is painting the trees around us all shades of the sunset, while on the horizon a church tower juts out majestically from the low-dwelling appearance of mere humanity that surrounds it. If I could only move the hideous pipe towers and 1960's brick of the faculty on front that interfere with my contemplation of the scenery, then I would be guaranteed to complete no study. But then I'm sure they serve their purpose, somehow. It's just that man's infrastructure, even be it to instruct in nature, is always an eyesore compared to God's handiwork.

  The shelves around me form a comforting barrier of aged words. To my right lie books of advice to young men and women, essays on the polite world, and appropriate etiquette over the years. By contrast, on my left are row upon row of dismal philosophy as everyday human try their best to navigate this roaring sea of a world without even bothering to work a basic moral compass. The titles themselves are grey enough. Interested, I pick up and flip through a 1954 work that attracts my eye simply due to it's relatively diminutive size and apparent age. It's called "Morals without Religion", and it makes me giggle laugh silently, for I know that there is no such thing. Nobody is born good. Then the sadness creeps over, that someone could feel so little of the magic that I see around me every day, know so little of the wonder that makes a young soul wise through no deed of it's own. Some of my peers are paying thousands in dollars and precious years in their lives to be told this is all they are, a blob of senseless matter in a Humanistic world, that they must fight against the basic principles of Christianity, such as the divinity of Christ. It's more than painful, it's heartbreaking.

  As the light streams in and floods my chilled winter-weary bones with warmth, the ring on my left hand shines like a brilliant beacon. The new year came in like a flood, filled with promise and tantalising adventures. December brought the man in the white ute knocking on my door, and April brought him to his knees in front of a glowing sunset and my eager heart. Now we plan our life together and delight in our shared wanderlust that will carry us all over the world, yet always return us to the paradise we will call home.

  Life is good. People are flawed, home is not always a peaceful place, and true knowledge is ignored, but as I sit here trying to study, I know my role in the story of this life is something I would never trade. I'm all up for the plot twists that God will bring.

November Favourites

Source: http://wallpaperus.org

What have I enjoyed the most about last month?

First things first - the most important article of last month was Things You Should Know About Introverts. Yes. Someone finally understands me!!!! I am an introvert, but am good at switching on an extroverted personality when the occasion or social settings around me demand it. Then of course you have to make people understand that, no, I'm not unhappy just because I'm being completely quiet and not interacting - I'm re-charging so I can be around you!!!
Of course, not all aspects of this article apply to me, but points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 11 really make perfect sense.


And we have to have a new favourite blog - the Freckled Fox. I've half-heartedly skimmed through a few pages every now and then whilst 'blog-jumping' but after having a good read I really enjoy it. And her sense of style (though not always what I would wear) is impeccable.


How to Create a Blog Button (the simple way) Hopefully this still works. It helped me heaps, as I willingly admit that I really don't have much of a clue when it comes to blog design.


15 Things All Dads of Daughters Should Know Very important. My father's had six daughters to practice on but if more men could choose to be with and try to understand their daughters, then the domineering attitudes that so many women hold toward men could be quite different.


The Dinner Guest This is a short film/skit that I was part of with a couple of friends. We had an absolute blast writing a script, creating characters etc, and I'd love it if you hopped and gave us your views...


I'm Just Not Attracted to Him...  Read this!!!!! What if you admire a young man's heart but can't find it in you to admire the flesh that holds his heart? I highly recommend this article, and in fact this whole blog. I'm constantly on it. :)


Quaintrelle Another little gem of a blog that's worth following.


This soundtrack I LOVE IT!!! Way before I'd seen the movie, I used to cuddle up on our old couch with a good book and listen to this on tape. So many good memories! I have unashamedly declared to my whole family that I want to walk down the aisle to some of these pieces. :)


And to finish with, something timeless that seems to have escaped from my long-restrained romantic side - 9 Chivalrous Habits of a True Gentleman That Make Women Melt My personal favourites? Numbers 1, 3, and 5. Take note, single men.

Enjoy reading, and let me know if you found anything personally challenging...

Book Review: Rebecca

Description: (from Amazon)

"Last Night I Dreamt I Went To Manderley Again." 

So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeches, white and naked, to the isolated grey stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten...her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant -- the sinister Mrs. Danvers -- still loyal. And as an eerie presentiment of evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca...for the secrets of Manderley.

(Apologies for this somewhat gothic and un-realistic description, I was too lazy to write my own)

It's not often that I come across a book which I wish I could say that I'd written - it's easy to admire talent from afar and marvel at the splendour and skill involved without desiring any part of it. It may sound ridiculous to a non-reader, but there are some books that simply get under your skin, live and breathe before your eyes, play their scenes out in your head, and that you perfectly understand and yet still know nothing about. That's kind of what I felt about 'Rebecca'. 

I'd fallen into a 'non-reading' rut and hadn't really found anything interesting to catch my fancy, when I remembered an article that I'd read years ago about this book after coming across a beautiful, history-filled copy from 1940 in my dusty local bookshop. It ended up siting on my bursting shelves for several weeks with the very best of intentions, but it wasn't until I finally decided to have a peek that I realised it was too beautiful to put down. And really, "too beautiful" is all that sums up 'Rebecca'. 

It's harsh yet tender, whimsical yet broken by reality, the perfect gothic thriller with the simple touch of ordinary humanity. The true strength of it lies not in it's storyline, (the 'mystery' surrounding Rebecca's death and character is not difficult to solve, I guessed it from the very start), but in the beauty of it's writing. Du Maurier's use of metaphors and descriptive writing gives an amazing depth and allows the story to breathe through what might have been a rather dull and tedious work. The young woman who narrates it is never given a name (despite the fact that Maxim tantalisingly tells her -and us - "I told you at the beginning of lunch you had a lovely and beautiful name...") - a stroke of genius on the author's part, so that even though we can read her deepest thoughts and dreams there is still some part of her that remains hidden and sacred. Maxim himself is slightly wooden in his controlled and structured denial of the past; it's not until the slowly devastating end that his character is understandable. Mrs Danvers is cruel in her devotion and non-believable in her love for Rebecca.

True, it has it's fair share of faults - it moves slowly, so much so that you feel almost dragged into the everyday, and the conversations between characters can be at times meaningless. For a realist like myself there is perhaps the occasional overdose of hopeful sentimentally - we realists like to have sense to prevail. But you can't read 'Rebecca' like a novel. It's really just a journal, quite literally the 'breathings of the heart' of a naive young girl with a beautiful and unusual name.

I've had a hard time choosing just one passage to share with you, but in the end I decided on the beginning of chapter 5, it perfectly illustrates Du Maurier's writing style and takes what could be called commonplace, making it beautiful to read about.

"I am glad that it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls at the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then- how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself."

October Favourites

Source

A collection of the articles, blog posts, blogs themselves, giveaways, online items/wish-list fodder and other random things that I really enjoyed this October. (And maybe a couple in November too!)

Ten Things You Shouldn't Say to Singles  This one speaks for itself. And the fact that it's first on my list says enough already.

This girl's style   It's so beautiful and vintage, not to mention she has an awesome photographer!

Consulting Fangeeks  This etsy store is the best yet that I have seen, far too many fantastic items and tons of Sherlock deliciousness!


Are You Fighting the New Greed?  Interesting article about how as women we can become dependant on technology for affirmation and purpose.

Out of My League  Yes, guys, this can be a great compliment, but quite often it's just an excuse not to be a man and fight your heart out for what you love. And that in itself is a far greater compliment then any sentiment you could express.

This amazing giveaway!   Have you heard of the P&P95 Forever club? If not, make sure you head over and indulge in some Janite rantings about how Colin Firth is the only Mr. Darcy. Their giveaway has only one prize available for aussie readers - there are more for those from the US, but it's still worth entering, and maybe even joining the club. ;)

This song  It's not generally something that I would enjoy or find entertaining, but, hey, let's keep surprising ourselves.


15 Honest Questions the Person You Marry Should Be Able to Answer  I don't agree 100% with every detail of this article - just because you can answer these questions doesn't mean you will be able to keep your answers when life gets hard. But I do believe every couple should be able to say why they love one another. "I love you because I love you" is a weak hope for a stable future.

Enjoy reading!