Archive of ‘Outside the NM world’ category

(and you may ask yourself) how did I get here?

Okay members of the networked media world, what is happening to me? Slowly but surely, over the course of roughly 18 months, I’ve become one of those “media people”. The half-hearted battle I played out before signing over my soul to a full blown Instagram addiction was the first sign. Soon after, The Vine and PedestrianTV became interchanging homepages. The intoxicating world of Tumblr re-entered my life alongside the greasy hair and caffeine-fuelled all-nighters that I believed my 16 year old self had left behind for good. I got a kick out of a Twitter bio that referenced Helen Garner and described myself as a “Youth Worker & Journalism Student”, and tweeted about my love for mangosteens and dim sum and an addiction to fruit ninja and online shopping in the menswear section.

Blogging, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter etc. etc.

But tonight reached new heights when I found myself browsing other student’s blogs, following a link to a short time-lapse video of Melbourne, feeling inspired and subsequently perusing the Canon website for DSLR cameras and finally, receiving an email from the lovely Canon people confirming my purchase of a 700D EOS DSLR camera.

Feeling quite a few hundred dollars lighter, I’m in shock at the speediness of my decision making. I’ve never been super into photography or movie making, but the constant exposure to stunning examples of each, (combined with my recent education in the myriad possibilities of Adobe Premiere), lit a very keen urge to start creating my own.

This is the short film, (found on Bonnie’s blog:

This is another video that circled around facebook by a young Melbourne-based photographer that I admire shot in Thailand:

Thailand Travels from Nic OJAE on Vimeo.

You can check out some of his other stuff here.

procrastinaht

Apparently procrastination is a very effective tool that allows you to do high quality work in the smallest amount of time possible. As much as I use this for comfort when its 11.30 the night before an assignment is due and I’m just making a start on my third episode of Orange is the New Black for the evening, I think it’s probably a much deadlier safety net than most of us realise.

By using it to validate my laziness, I’m never giving myself a chance to not be lazy. The language around it – “I can’t start an assignment until I have the pressure of it being due the next day…” “I do my best work the night before…” etc – is so engrained within my approach that when I sit down to try and make headway on a task a few weeks out, my subconscious is excusing my Brown Cardigan browsing before I’ve even opened my laptop. The fact that I’m trying to get on top of things early seems to equate to deserving a break and a Kit-Kat before I’ve even started.

So now here I am, the night before class with Elliott and the gang, trying to find the creative juices needed to squeeze out four blog posts that don’t run along the lines of “I found blah’s reading interesting because he made a point about blah which is very relevant to blah”, and have me falling asleep before I can even click Publish.

Nothing has made me more acutely aware of my perfectionism like starting a blog. I started a WordPress account earlier this year that consists of about eight posts. Roughly half of these posts finish with something like “I’m making a promise to my blogging community (of 7 people) to continue to post at least once a week, no excuses”, with each of these posts written weeks or months a part.

Writing is what I love to do, and more importantly, what I would one day love to be paid to do, and yet I spend the majority of my time on the internet playing Tetris or googling how to make gluten-free vegan sugar-free caramel brownies (which I never have the ingredients for!) and as far away from WordPress.com as possible. I am so scared of publishing anything even slightly subpar that I very rarely publish anything at all. By the time I finally get myself sitting down to write, I’ve backspaced and re-written my opening sentence 17 times and it’s definitely time to find out what’s been happening at the Litchfield Correctional Facility.

I’m sick of pretending to be a writer who doesn’t write, I’m sick of doubting each word as I type it, sick of drowning in cliched metaphors, of moving between the extremes of ‘boring’ and ‘try hard’ as I constantly question each sentence.

The annoying thing is, is that I can’t even say that I’m just going to do it anyway. Clearly trying to pre-trick myself into it by holding myself accountable to the blogosphere has not worked so well in the past. I’ll probably jinx myself by proclaiming on here that I’ll be updating MediaFactory five times a day and then give up forever.

So what I’m going to do instead, is just try to challenge my language. Stop validating my behaviour as a “classic perfectionist trait”, or that I was a born procrastinator. And just be, someone who wants to write.

“I’m just like this cloud puppy, ready to bound into life head first.” – Not Louisa Keck

Surely it’s not really for real?

Adrian posted a link to the article ‘The Novel is Dead (This Time it’s for Real)’,
written by author Will Self and published in The Guardian that confirms some of my long harboured fears. (You can read the article here).

My father is a diagnosed workaholic, but before he was that, he was a boy growing up in a highly dysfunctional family in Melbourne’s outer Eastern suburbs in the 60s and 70s. His mother was a young Italian woman, 20 years younger than her husband, who could fly off the handle at any moment, chasing her three children around the sun room with a feather duster before clutching each child to her chest violently and sobbing about how much she loved them. For all her eccentricities, she valued family above all else, which is partly why she remained in a difficult and likely loveless marriage to a deaf and reclusive war veteran for over 50 years.

On the seemingly innocent Peacock St where my father grew up, dysfunction seemed to be a common theme behind closed doors. Throughout the 20 years he spent living on that street, he gathered information about all that went on from eavesdropping on whispered evening exchanges between neighbours, or gleaning what he could from the ambulances parked temporarily across the road.

He has since relayed these stories to his own children, which is how I know about the alcoholic who shot his wife and then himself at the kitchen table after finishing a pint of VB, or the charming and well known restauranteur who hung himself from his wardrobe railings.

Behind the manicured rose bushes and cups of tea shared between neighbours, children running under sprinklers in the stinking heat and drives around Burwood in my grandfather’s powder blue Valiant, backs sticking to the tan leather and seatbelts rubbing on necks, it seems my father grew up in a melting pot of simmering discontent.

These stories have entertained, educated, moved and enlightened us as Dad’s told them throughout the years, his unique wit and knack for timed exaggeration taking the downright disturbing to pointedly comical. And with every story about what went on, either from his own family or the families that he grew up among, he’s promised to one day get it all down and write a memoir that captures an era of such unique dysfunction and preserves it forever.

Thinking about my father’s memoir, currently nowhere near to being physically manifested, I can imagine it so clearly that it feels as if it already exists. It is so important to me to have this piece of history captured and represented in ink and paper, a history of my family and a history of a bizarre subset of humanity, and I can visualise so much of it on the page typed out in my father’s witty, dry prose, that the idea of it not eventuating feels very foreign.

When I imagine holding this book, seeing its cover, passing its spine in the Australian fiction section of Readings Carlton, one thing is very clear. It is not a story made for a kindle, or an iPad, or any type of e-Reader that you might watch middle aged women hold close to their chests on the train, blushing slightly at the racier parts of 50 Shades of Grey. That is a novel to be read electronically. I can also cope with any children’s series, university textbooks, any type of manual, crappy fem-lit crime fiction or anything by Dan Brown.

I will never be able to come to terms with reading for pleasure on anything that doesn’t let me turn its pages by hand. If there’s no potential for paper cut related eye watering, there’ll be no tears of another sort either.

If what Will Self is saying is really really for real, the idea that I will never be able to read my father’s unborn memoir in a non-computer format saddens me more than I can say.