soul vacation
one of the highlights of the trip was actually returning home to a mailbox of all these emails and finding in the midst of all the academic babble, a very special email from janiel that really touched me, and another one from wks. so thank you both very much. especially for the list of websites which i plan to comb through over the next two weeks or so.
had actually felt rather cooped up in melbourne and so i decided to head up to brisbane to hang with a few of my old high school mates from st peters for a couple of days. this guy i used to be rather close to was going to graduate and though i usually find the whole business of uppity academics convoking in an overly-dramatic manner rather disturbing, i thought i might as well end the winter hols with a big bang and haul my sorry little big ass up to brizzie.
you know how certain ideas sound really great when you mutter them to yourself, and then when you happen to voice it out during a seminar, everyone turns to look at you incredulously like you've just revealed you were wearing a butt plug to class...well, this trip began kinda like that. i found myself completely displaced. it was like i was there and not there at the same time, having been the only one who had actually turned the proverbial page over whilst everyone else was still stuck on that same paragraph reading it over and over like some mantra to live by. so what was supposed to be a therapeutic and cathartic trip became more like a taiwanese gossip session in which we raved about so-and-so's new hair colour and smacked our lips at how incredibly silly this person was for doing it with yada yada in there, and out there, and some where (again!). and while we all know how i thrive on gossip, there seemed to be this whole undercurrent of spite, like how old gay men get when they've been left by themselves for too long. so after an excruciating six hours where i began to feel increasingly dirty with all the festering going on, i backpedaled and got myself out of there. ended up on the streets for a while before deciding to bunk in with nic who was there for his convocation as well. it's actually rather amazing how exhausting it is to just listen to that intensity of hate. it just hits you and all of a sudden you lose all sense of direction, of self and you're actually really tempted to wallow in the euphoria of feeling whatever perceived high one gets by thinking one is "superior" to someone else.
i thrive on gossip. not malice.
but all clouds come with their silver lining and this trip was no exception. i think i'll leave the details for some other post, but things had become rather awkward between nic and i over the last few weeks and somewhere during the course of the trip we managed to really sit ourselves down to go through all the great things we felt about each other and about living together, and it was really affirming. and ultimately very gratifying to know that i had such support in my own backyard (literally. wait. that sounds wrong somehow...) so i guess the downtime away from melbourne really did help us get us past the quagmire we were basically milling around in and i got to know a few of his really good friends in brizzy. i suspect gary will be calling me rather soon (mail me though).
i used to stay in brisbane with my family as a kid. we weren't very well-off and were renting this rather small apartment in auchenflower. stephanie (jigglypuff) hadn't even popped out of the mummy-oven at that point yet and it was a time where i still cared for the maggot. so i actually really wanted to visit the place again but my mum had actually forgotten what the address was. anyway, when nic and i were driving back from getting the car washed after our trip to north stradbroke island, we happened to pass by brizzy flowers and do's chinese takeaway, and suddenly something clicked in my head and i was like HERE! HEEEEEEEEERE! (i even tried to grab the steering wheel since nic kept thinking i was shouting for beer).
and there we were.
21 fairholme.
our apartment was the one beside the pool. the tooth fairy and i used to dare each other to throw ourselves into the pool during winter. and bloody hell, it was always freezing (duh). the cleaner also used to be bloody lazy, so leaves would collect in the pool, algae would grow and we used to play "swamp thing" much to my mum's dismay. heh. and the garbage bins. oh man. i used to hate pushing them out. the freaky fern that used to give me nightmares was still there... even the cabinets in the kitchen were still the same! (okay. i know that makes me sound like some crazy stalker. but i swear the windows were wide open. i didn't even have to jump (that much)). but the place holds so much memories for me. there was this one time my mum walked out on us after arguing with my dad and snuck in through the sliding door into my room. i had fled into my room after screaming my head off at my dad for over forty minutes (i had a pretty extensive vocabulary back then) and almost died of a shock. y'see, my mum had this frizzy afro-hair thing as was common in the 80's and in the night, i had thought THE FERN MAN was in my bed, under the covers (she was just cold). i must have set the record for being the only seven-and-a-half year old child to almost die from a heart attack because of a bad perm.
then of course there was the time when my dad promised to take me to the museum to buy this mood ring thing i had been saving two months for (it was $5 and i could only save around ten cents a school day). anyway, the moment my dad sat in front of a television with a bottle of beer in his hand, i think i must have started bawling... waitaminute. yup. THAT was why my mum wanted to leave my dad! anyway, my dad never held a bottle of beer in the home again. and last year, when i was in kyoto with my dad, we passed by this store selling mood rings, and i think he caught me staring at them. and he was like "buy it! buy it!". but i don't think he gets it. if i were to save five dollars every school day for two months, i wouldn't be getting a mood ring. but he's a good old man. so i'm glad they didn't get their divorce after all.
North Stradbroke Island was actually pretty decent. it doesn't really come across as gritty or as untamed as wilson's prom, but it certainly is eye candy. the ferry ride there is a disgusting 88 bucks per car though. if i didn't know better, i'd have sworn it was run by a chinese man with an astute eye for numbers, but we had a really good time trekking, almost getting ourselves shoved off the cliff, digging for lalas, balancing on the sole log in brown lake, picnicking, snacking, muching before finally ending up in little taipei at sunny banks for more eateries.
it was surreal to be heading back to toowong where we all stayed. five minutes from toowong village - the shopping centre where our vice-captain killed himself. he threw himself off the carpark. and for a long time, i never thought i'd visit the place. but having revisited the place, and raced around with the shopping carts, the memory that really sticks is of the time my mum brought us there after school (we were studying in ironside state school then) and the tooth fairy and i cooked up this brilliant plan to purposely get lost. my mum ended up sobbing and beating the crap out of us when we got home... but it was worth it. heh.
so i guess in the end the trip was cathartic and therapeutic. i got some parts of my life back on track, and i'm damn happy to be back in school even though touching down i was rushing to four hours of studio. y'see i used to really hate brisbane because of all the things that had happened in the st peters boarding school. everyone seemed so deliberately myopic and senselessly solipsistic that the whole joke of life suddenly became unfunny. but y'know after clubbing at family, going for the convoking, running amok at southbank, and returning to my beloved gallery (the brisbane gallery is fantastic) i guess everything kinda fell into place. in fact, on whim, because we didn't want the fun to stop, they're coming down to melb in an hour's time. so i think i should really get started on the presentation due tomorrow.
more to come.
