the alternate versions.
I just spent like twenty minutes typing up this post and then Opera crashed and I lost all of it. You will never hear my wise words. They were probably really important, too, who knows? Fuck you, Opera.
I went to Brisbane for the weekend for my cousin's wedding. I don't really know my cousins that well because we moved away when I was young, so it's always kind of strange for me seeing them; in a lot of ways they seem my complete opposite. I really like the bride, my dad's niece, but it's funny to think that we're related because she's like five foot tall, blonde, and tiny. Her dress was pale green, my grandfather's de facto was scandalised. "Oh," she said, flustered. "Oh." I found that pretty funny. My cousin already lives with her husband and they have a two year old son together, I think it's pretty safe to throw the virginal bride traditions out the window. The wedding was really nice because it was really casual so it felt like watching two people making an actual commitment to each other just because they wanted to, instead of performing their lines like actors.
We stayed at my grandfather's place in the suburbs so we were more or less bored out of our fucking minds. Before I'd left I'd ordered Sam to email me constantly but when we got to my granddad's place he had no 3G reception. I kept staring at the Roaming label on the phone in despair. The first night my brother and I went to the movies after making the horrifying realisation that it was only 6pm and we already wanted to kill ourselves. We haven't been to the movies on our own in years. If ever. We don't spend a lot of time just the two of us, it was nice. We saw 300, which kind of sucked, honestly. I find huge battle scenes really dull, I like fight scenes in movies best when they're between two distinct characters and they're the only people really fighting. 300 was more or less just senseless violence, flashing swords and clattering spears, I couldn't really get into it. It had this real TEAM SPARTA, FUCK YEAH!! vibe to it too. When we left my brother was like, "What were they eating?? You can't kill that many people on apples alone." and I went on this long tangent about how I would have been really interested in learning about how they ate and stuff and how I find normal things really fascinating. I'd been thinking about it anyway because of the trailer for 28 Weeks Later. I'm really disappointed that the zombies come back because to me the idea of a society rebuilding itself after a zombie attack is really fascinating. I mean, your family and friends become zombies and you kill them, how do you move on from that as a culture?
Before the movie we had an hour to waste so we went to this pseudo-Irish pub called Dicey Reilly's or something. It was killing me because it was completely identical to Bridie O'Reilly's. The whole place was like this AU version of a Melbourne shopping centre, where everyone drank XXXX and watched rugby wore their polo shirts with shorts instead of jeans. Garden City is like Knox City's High School AU. I really hate those places, they seem like breeding grounds for date rapes and barfights and gross old guys that hit on you even though they probably have daughters your age. When we were walking in the security guy stopped me and asked for ID and then stared at my ID for ages like it might be a fake. I didn't know whether to be pleased or offended. I don't look young, motherfucker.
It was a weird weekend, kind of emotional in a lot of ways. My grandfather is getting really old and kept talking to my mother about what songs he wants played at his funeral, apparently. My poor mum, I could tell she was really upset about it. I wouldn't even know what to say in her position. I don't know what to say to her about it now.
The new KAT-TUN album is out and I'm ridiculously excited about it. Some of the songs made my heart beat faster, I'm not even joking. Sam and I have been screaming at one another about it in IM. When I was listening to MY ANGEL YOU ARE ANGEL I started crying, no shit. To be fair Jin sings in it and I had a pretty emotional weekend, but you know. I can't say swelling music doesn't always make me want to cry.
fitz: i just started crying
sam
cinta~hati: i just burst out laughing
fitz: i touched my fingers to my tears and now i'm staring at the wetness in horror
cinta~hati: LKFMASDF;DLSA,FDSFA,L;L,ADF;SL,'ADSFDFL,S,L'DSF,L,,,DSF;LA;LSD,F
ADS;LF,'LDSFDS;LFDS;LF
fitz: SWELLING MUSIC MAKES ME EMOTIONAL OKAY
cinta~hati: god me too.
fitz: MY HEART SWELLS WITH THE SONG.
JIN IS IN IT :((
cinta~hati: DON'T
I JUST TEARED UP
STOP
AFSDFSDF
fitz: :(( :((
HE AND KAME SOUND SO NICE TOGETHER :((
PERFECT COMBINATION :((
cinta~hati: here, this will cheer you up
while you're listening
sink into the song
and look at this
fitz: OH JESUS FUCK I HATE YOU
When I started listening to jpop I think it was with this kind of ironic distance but now I've lost that completely, this album makes me so happy. I'm kind of happy about that, it's nice to be able to cry over sentimental songs and things. It's nice to be soft. The album has a version of No Matter Matter on it, I'm so ridiculously excited. That's more or less my favourite old KAT-TUN song. When they say IT'S SHOWTIME, SHOWTIME!!! I feel really happy.
I feel really confused because Kame's voice sounds really nice on most of the album and I can't tell if he's actually got better or if I'm just no longer capable of assessing it objectively anymore. Probably it's just that Jin's not around to compare him to.
ANYWAY, BEST FUCKING ALBUM IN THE FUCKING UNIVERSE. It is so retarded. I love how Jumpin' Up has this lounge-y muzak thing going on and then there's FREEDOM's ~Hawaiian Groove~ but all the songs still sound very KAT-TUN. I've had Jumpin' Up playing on repeat forever. A couple of weeks ago Sam and I hooked her laptop up to my tv to watch Gokusen 2 and we meant to watch the Peak performance just once before the ep. We ended up watching it on loop for 40 minutes, each time pointing out some exciting new detail.
A little while ago I started writing this Original fic thing that I was going to submit to a magazine, but I missed the deadline and never finished it. So I'm putting what I have of it here.
1992.
Stephanie is a rice cake child. At lunch, when the other children take their brightly coloured chip packets and white bread sandwiches from their plastic lunch boxes, Stephanie sits on the asphalt with her brown paper bag and its beige contents. She holds the rice cake in the palm of her hand, a round flat circle like the shiny compact discs she’s seen hanging in the window of JB Hi Fi. At home she does not have a CD Player. For her last birthday her cousin gave her a tape deck, but she doesn’t have any cassettes and does not know how to use it. In the mornings her mother listens to classical music on the radio. The piano and violins make Stephanie feel big and warm like the sun is inside her belly. She hums a little as she eats her lunch.
She likes to break the rice cake into shards to eat it; likes to feel the muted snap of pieces of puffed rice pulling away from one another. She puts the fragments in her mouth and squashes their softness under her tongue. They taste bland and flat but feel warm and gooey. Sometimes Jenny Parkins asks her if it makes her sad that she’s not allowed to eat chocolate cake. It doesn’t. Stephanie likes the rice cakes her mother packs for her, the seeds and nuts and fresh apples. She has never eaten chocolate cake but it looks dark and thick like mud. She does not know what all the fuss could be about. Her mother says that when they are twenty five years old all those kids stuffing chocolate cake into their mouths with small sticky fists will be big and fat like elephant seals, and that their insides will be rotting from all the sugar. Sometimes when Stephanie looks at Rob Merchant, who is two years older than she is, she can see his cheeks already swelling and flopping like a big fat seal. She is a little bit terrified of chocolate cake.
In May Jenny Parkins has a birthday party and Stephanie is invited. She is excited. Birthday parties mean playing Pass the Parcel and Pin the Tail on the Donkey, or her favourite, What’s the Time Mister Wolf? She is really good at tricking the wolf by standing extra extra still. She closes her eyes and imagines even her heart has stopped, that her fingers and legs have somehow turned to still and silent stone. The night before the party she lies awake later than her bedtime and fantasizes about winning the party games; Mister Wolf is played by a real wolf in a waistcoat and trousers, giant gold pocketwatch clutched in his enormous paws. The other kids are afraid of him but Stephanie is excited and after the game they have tea together at a fancy table in his den. She closes her eyes and dreams of hot porcelain beneath her hands and offering her new friend Mister Wolf a rice cake from her brown paper lunch bag. She dreams of winning and laughing and making friends.
Her father drives her to the party which is in Bayswater, a few suburbs over. The drive takes fifteen minutes. She likes her father’s car because she barely ever gets to ride in it unless they are going to her grandmother’s house or Lilydale Lake. Her father listens to what he calls a Golden Oldies station when her mother is not around and he likes to sing along. The songs all seem to be about surfing or California or taking girls to the Drive-In. She imagines her father taking her mother to the Drive-In in this car, her mother’s stark black hair pulled up and curled into a bouncy ponytail. They would stand in line for popcorn and sing Doo Wop Doo Wop, yeah. Stephanie feels an obscure flush of excitement and her toes tap the back of the seat in front of her. There is a big wrapped box on her lap; she went shopping with her mother and bought Jenny Parkins a soccer ball. Her cousin plays soccer. He has a beard and smells like grass.
There are big balloons on the letter box outside Jenny Parkins’ house. They are red and blue and one of them says HAPPY BIRTHDAY on it in stretchy, faded black letters. “Balloons!” she tells her father.
“This must be it,” he says, even though she has been to Jenny Parkins’ house before, for her birthday every year since they were three. Jenny Parkins has a big grey dog named Banjo and white furniture in her bedroom.
Mr Parkins greets them at the door. He is wearing a green t-shirt and is shorter than Stephanie’s father, and mostly bald with tufts of hair over his ears that look like grass waiting to be mowed. As he waggles his head and waves at her she can see the midday sun making patterns on the bare skin stretched tight over his skull, the light making a hill and valley out of a prominent vein.
I went to Brisbane for the weekend for my cousin's wedding. I don't really know my cousins that well because we moved away when I was young, so it's always kind of strange for me seeing them; in a lot of ways they seem my complete opposite. I really like the bride, my dad's niece, but it's funny to think that we're related because she's like five foot tall, blonde, and tiny. Her dress was pale green, my grandfather's de facto was scandalised. "Oh," she said, flustered. "Oh." I found that pretty funny. My cousin already lives with her husband and they have a two year old son together, I think it's pretty safe to throw the virginal bride traditions out the window. The wedding was really nice because it was really casual so it felt like watching two people making an actual commitment to each other just because they wanted to, instead of performing their lines like actors.
We stayed at my grandfather's place in the suburbs so we were more or less bored out of our fucking minds. Before I'd left I'd ordered Sam to email me constantly but when we got to my granddad's place he had no 3G reception. I kept staring at the Roaming label on the phone in despair. The first night my brother and I went to the movies after making the horrifying realisation that it was only 6pm and we already wanted to kill ourselves. We haven't been to the movies on our own in years. If ever. We don't spend a lot of time just the two of us, it was nice. We saw 300, which kind of sucked, honestly. I find huge battle scenes really dull, I like fight scenes in movies best when they're between two distinct characters and they're the only people really fighting. 300 was more or less just senseless violence, flashing swords and clattering spears, I couldn't really get into it. It had this real TEAM SPARTA, FUCK YEAH!! vibe to it too. When we left my brother was like, "What were they eating?? You can't kill that many people on apples alone." and I went on this long tangent about how I would have been really interested in learning about how they ate and stuff and how I find normal things really fascinating. I'd been thinking about it anyway because of the trailer for 28 Weeks Later. I'm really disappointed that the zombies come back because to me the idea of a society rebuilding itself after a zombie attack is really fascinating. I mean, your family and friends become zombies and you kill them, how do you move on from that as a culture?
Before the movie we had an hour to waste so we went to this pseudo-Irish pub called Dicey Reilly's or something. It was killing me because it was completely identical to Bridie O'Reilly's. The whole place was like this AU version of a Melbourne shopping centre, where everyone drank XXXX and watched rugby wore their polo shirts with shorts instead of jeans. Garden City is like Knox City's High School AU. I really hate those places, they seem like breeding grounds for date rapes and barfights and gross old guys that hit on you even though they probably have daughters your age. When we were walking in the security guy stopped me and asked for ID and then stared at my ID for ages like it might be a fake. I didn't know whether to be pleased or offended. I don't look young, motherfucker.
It was a weird weekend, kind of emotional in a lot of ways. My grandfather is getting really old and kept talking to my mother about what songs he wants played at his funeral, apparently. My poor mum, I could tell she was really upset about it. I wouldn't even know what to say in her position. I don't know what to say to her about it now.
The new KAT-TUN album is out and I'm ridiculously excited about it. Some of the songs made my heart beat faster, I'm not even joking. Sam and I have been screaming at one another about it in IM. When I was listening to MY ANGEL YOU ARE ANGEL I started crying, no shit. To be fair Jin sings in it and I had a pretty emotional weekend, but you know. I can't say swelling music doesn't always make me want to cry.
fitz: i just started crying
sam
cinta~hati: i just burst out laughing
fitz: i touched my fingers to my tears and now i'm staring at the wetness in horror
cinta~hati: LKFMASDF;DLSA,FDSFA,L;L,ADF;SL,'ADSFDFL,S,L'DSF,L,,,DSF;LA;LSD,F
ADS;LF,'LDSFDS;LFDS;LF
fitz: SWELLING MUSIC MAKES ME EMOTIONAL OKAY
cinta~hati: god me too.
fitz: MY HEART SWELLS WITH THE SONG.
JIN IS IN IT :((
cinta~hati: DON'T
I JUST TEARED UP
STOP
AFSDFSDF
fitz: :(( :((
HE AND KAME SOUND SO NICE TOGETHER :((
PERFECT COMBINATION :((
cinta~hati: here, this will cheer you up
while you're listening
sink into the song
and look at this
fitz: OH JESUS FUCK I HATE YOU
When I started listening to jpop I think it was with this kind of ironic distance but now I've lost that completely, this album makes me so happy. I'm kind of happy about that, it's nice to be able to cry over sentimental songs and things. It's nice to be soft. The album has a version of No Matter Matter on it, I'm so ridiculously excited. That's more or less my favourite old KAT-TUN song. When they say IT'S SHOWTIME, SHOWTIME!!! I feel really happy.
I feel really confused because Kame's voice sounds really nice on most of the album and I can't tell if he's actually got better or if I'm just no longer capable of assessing it objectively anymore. Probably it's just that Jin's not around to compare him to.
ANYWAY, BEST FUCKING ALBUM IN THE FUCKING UNIVERSE. It is so retarded. I love how Jumpin' Up has this lounge-y muzak thing going on and then there's FREEDOM's ~Hawaiian Groove~ but all the songs still sound very KAT-TUN. I've had Jumpin' Up playing on repeat forever. A couple of weeks ago Sam and I hooked her laptop up to my tv to watch Gokusen 2 and we meant to watch the Peak performance just once before the ep. We ended up watching it on loop for 40 minutes, each time pointing out some exciting new detail.
A little while ago I started writing this Original fic thing that I was going to submit to a magazine, but I missed the deadline and never finished it. So I'm putting what I have of it here.
1992.
Stephanie is a rice cake child. At lunch, when the other children take their brightly coloured chip packets and white bread sandwiches from their plastic lunch boxes, Stephanie sits on the asphalt with her brown paper bag and its beige contents. She holds the rice cake in the palm of her hand, a round flat circle like the shiny compact discs she’s seen hanging in the window of JB Hi Fi. At home she does not have a CD Player. For her last birthday her cousin gave her a tape deck, but she doesn’t have any cassettes and does not know how to use it. In the mornings her mother listens to classical music on the radio. The piano and violins make Stephanie feel big and warm like the sun is inside her belly. She hums a little as she eats her lunch.
She likes to break the rice cake into shards to eat it; likes to feel the muted snap of pieces of puffed rice pulling away from one another. She puts the fragments in her mouth and squashes their softness under her tongue. They taste bland and flat but feel warm and gooey. Sometimes Jenny Parkins asks her if it makes her sad that she’s not allowed to eat chocolate cake. It doesn’t. Stephanie likes the rice cakes her mother packs for her, the seeds and nuts and fresh apples. She has never eaten chocolate cake but it looks dark and thick like mud. She does not know what all the fuss could be about. Her mother says that when they are twenty five years old all those kids stuffing chocolate cake into their mouths with small sticky fists will be big and fat like elephant seals, and that their insides will be rotting from all the sugar. Sometimes when Stephanie looks at Rob Merchant, who is two years older than she is, she can see his cheeks already swelling and flopping like a big fat seal. She is a little bit terrified of chocolate cake.
In May Jenny Parkins has a birthday party and Stephanie is invited. She is excited. Birthday parties mean playing Pass the Parcel and Pin the Tail on the Donkey, or her favourite, What’s the Time Mister Wolf? She is really good at tricking the wolf by standing extra extra still. She closes her eyes and imagines even her heart has stopped, that her fingers and legs have somehow turned to still and silent stone. The night before the party she lies awake later than her bedtime and fantasizes about winning the party games; Mister Wolf is played by a real wolf in a waistcoat and trousers, giant gold pocketwatch clutched in his enormous paws. The other kids are afraid of him but Stephanie is excited and after the game they have tea together at a fancy table in his den. She closes her eyes and dreams of hot porcelain beneath her hands and offering her new friend Mister Wolf a rice cake from her brown paper lunch bag. She dreams of winning and laughing and making friends.
Her father drives her to the party which is in Bayswater, a few suburbs over. The drive takes fifteen minutes. She likes her father’s car because she barely ever gets to ride in it unless they are going to her grandmother’s house or Lilydale Lake. Her father listens to what he calls a Golden Oldies station when her mother is not around and he likes to sing along. The songs all seem to be about surfing or California or taking girls to the Drive-In. She imagines her father taking her mother to the Drive-In in this car, her mother’s stark black hair pulled up and curled into a bouncy ponytail. They would stand in line for popcorn and sing Doo Wop Doo Wop, yeah. Stephanie feels an obscure flush of excitement and her toes tap the back of the seat in front of her. There is a big wrapped box on her lap; she went shopping with her mother and bought Jenny Parkins a soccer ball. Her cousin plays soccer. He has a beard and smells like grass.
There are big balloons on the letter box outside Jenny Parkins’ house. They are red and blue and one of them says HAPPY BIRTHDAY on it in stretchy, faded black letters. “Balloons!” she tells her father.
“This must be it,” he says, even though she has been to Jenny Parkins’ house before, for her birthday every year since they were three. Jenny Parkins has a big grey dog named Banjo and white furniture in her bedroom.
Mr Parkins greets them at the door. He is wearing a green t-shirt and is shorter than Stephanie’s father, and mostly bald with tufts of hair over his ears that look like grass waiting to be mowed. As he waggles his head and waves at her she can see the midday sun making patterns on the bare skin stretched tight over his skull, the light making a hill and valley out of a prominent vein.