The Ramblings Of Xander

Two Girls (A Ramble Fuelled by a Frustrated 2-way 'like' situation)

2010-06-09T21:20:00.002+10:00

Her life is simple enough, golden and easy like a carefree maiden skipping through a meadow bejeweled with wildflowers. She knows how to trust those around to give her what she needs, as they are more than willing to supply her wants and asks. She is simple enough, in a way which gives her innocence and vitality, in a way which speaks of a water bird who cannot be made heavy by the weariness of the world. It is as if it simply cannot congeal in her being. She is too resistant, strong in her innocence and beauty to let trouble cause her grief.

She does however, know the pores of the world. If her being was likened to a tapestry, the wonder and beauty of the front side would be reciprocated by the thoughts and desires and knowledge that lie at the back, dark and twisted. Yet they do not change her innocent outlook on life. They merely exist to make the beauty stronger in the face of such situations. These stitches in her tapestry are not there to be paraded to those who view the tapestry. They are instead there to hold the tapestry together. And that they do marvelously, for she is strong and beautiful, no matter what indulgence besets her.

The other is hugely different. She is not golden, innocent or carefree. She lets life drag her whichever way it chooses, pulling, twisting, breaking. She is often torn and wrung, and knows not how any of her actions deserved such consequences. She dislikes stepping out of her comfort zone to do anything at all which requires exertion, and as a result she falls behind in everything, and as a result becomes disillusioned and upset, doubting herself and her abilities. Of these, she lacks none. She has abilities that most girls dream of, a fast mind, a good body, the ability to socialize perfectly and make all her friends feel genuinely loved and cared about. She knows how to please others, but she does not have the strength or the confidence, and so she is often alone, depressed, scared by what is outside of her comfort zone, and afraid to exit it, in case life drags her out further than she is willing to go

It is a vicious cycle. She will not exert herself, which puts more pressure on top of her, which draws out her strength to lesser and lesser degrees, shrinking her comfort zone smaller and smaller in diameter, until eventually, there is nothing. No girl. Nothing to fight for, nothing to fight with. Nothing except what is terrifying, what is outside, all is dark and cold and hateful. Soon there will not even be a consciousness to even be aware of this stage of loss.

Daughter, be like the first girl. Be a tapestry. Be strong and fight for your strength, and soon you will know how to live right, be loved. Exert yourself and have solid friendships with people who care and support you.

Be a tapestry. Strong and beautiful.

The End.

A Message from Me to You (Song)

2010-06-09T21:16:00.002+10:00

A little song I wrote one day... i kinda based it on a cross between Put A Penny In The Slot by Fionn Regan and Everything Must Belong Somewhere by Bright Eyes.
Its light, acoustic and cheerful.
Yes, I wrote it about a couple of specific people, but they may go nameless :)

I hope that this doesnt get between us
I only hope that you will also see
what ive been seeing inside your world
noone likes it very much

Ch

you think your crazily romantic
and you think your unbelievably attractive
well although the latter just might be true oo oo
i reckon that most would call you desperate

ch

maturities a bloom my dear you soon will see
picked in dawn's freshest garden bed
when dewdrops tumble down, unite and ble e end
with perfume sweet and precious just like you

ooh ooh ooh and stuff

all i can say my dear is wait wait wait wait
beacuse in God's good time youll learn your lesson
All i can so is dont be desparate
God's got the perfect man for you oo oo
God's got the perfect man for you

ch

This is the message from me to you
God's got the perfect man for you

2008-07-19T17:08:00.000+10:00

Yo to you all again!

We in are in Bourke at the moment, and it's warm and sunny, but nottoo hot with
a nice cool breeze blowing through the caravan park. Haha to you poor Melbourneites,
stuck in your freezing houses shivering to retain the tiniest shred of warmth.
I am having a lovely time in these warm parts =P. It's weird! The only people out
in the outback who have wireless are the ones who are clever enough to put WPA
encoding on their connections, and so I haven't been able to connect to any.
My family stopped at the Crossways caravan Park in Mildura, because they had an ad
for wireless internet out the front. However when I turned on my laptop, it came up
with a really badly made website which told me in big friendly comic sans letters
that the internet was $10 per hour. Shocking horrible ripoff. I hate Mildura.

Anyway apart from this blow, the holiday has been fantastic so far. It was so cold
in Ballarat that it was snowing. Yes. Snowing. In Ballarat *shivers*. We had lunch
at our friend's house, the newly wed Mr and Mrs Deduegd (Pete and Genevieve) in
their house near Clunes, north of Ballarat. Thankfully it wasn't quite snowing there,
but still icily cold. Next stop was Maryborough,which as Mark Twain described as a
railway station with a town attachted. This is a fair observation, as Maryborough
railway station really is very massive. The weird thing though is that no trains
stop there anymore. We stayed that night in Charlton, with my dad's friend from
college. They had a rather big house, so we didn't set up the caravan that night.

The next day we drove to Mildura via lunch at Lake Tyrrell, a moonscape of sand.
That night we stayed at Crossways caravan park, which I mentioned. It sucked, because
of their stupid internet. Argh. The next day we spent in Mildura, shopping because
there wasn't much else to do there. Mildura is a very boring place. Possibly the
most interesting thing there was Lock 11, where the paddle steamers get lifted 3.7
metres up. Pretty cool, yeah.

Day 3 we drove to Broken Hill, via Wentworth where the Darling and Murray rivers
meet. Broken Hill is a very nice town, a little run down, but nice in a miners kind
of way, rough but warm (not literally =p). The annoying thing was, though, that we
stayed in Silverton, about 25km out of Broken Hill. The road to Silverton was shocking,
with about 40 places in the road where they didn't have the money to build a bridge,
so instead just made the road go down into the creek. A very rough ride indeed.
Silverton was nice enough though, for a town abandoned in the 1920s when the silver
mines ran out.This meant that everything in the town was 1920s original, restored
very accurately. It was here that Mad Max 2 was filmed btw, and his car is parked
outside the hotel, which looks very 'wild west esque'. That night we just unpacked,
and had dinner, and then a campfire.

The next day I went into Broken Hill, and after looking at the really boring train
station, and a rusty old 48 class loco doing some shunting I went to the music shop
to get the nut on my guitar fixed after the B string notch got exploded somewhere
between Charlton and Sea Lake. Then we went to Pro Hart's art gallery, which was pretty
fascinating, and then back to Silverton for lunch. For the rest of the day we looked
around old Silverton.

Next day was Sunday, we went to the Church of Christ, and then back to the caravan
for lunch. After lunch we had a tour of the old 'Daydream' silver mine. The most
annoying thing about this was that the miners, Cornish immigrants were only about
four foot tall, and so it was rather more like caving then a mine tour.

Yesterday we packed up and left Silverton. Lunch was at WIlcannia. Now Wilcannia is
a classic dodgy outback town. Everythings closed except for when the population get
their pay from Centrelink, as most of them are unemployed, everything's either
graffitied or smashed, there's broken glass everywhere, petrol costs 207.8 cents a
litre, you pretty much have to drive into someone's back yard to get it, and the only
greenery is the occasional abused mulga tree. Lovely place *coughcoughdie*.
We took as little time as was necessary, and just as the twenty or so gangish looking
aboriginal teenagers were starting to look a little weird we left. That night we
stayed in Cobar, in the only caravan park, which was right next to the petrol station
where the road trains fill up all night. Half of these were sheep trucks, so they
were noisy even when the engines were turned off. Also the peppercorn tree which
looked quite nice growing over our caravan site happened to be where the pidgeons
ate too many Eclipse mints it seemed, and congregated together to suffer their
consequence, which meant we had to spend a little more time than usual cleaning it
off everything. Other than these few things Cobar was a really nice place, people
were friendly and helpful and almost nothing was vandalized. Very different to
Wilcannia.

Today we packed up and left Cobar, which for an interesting point is almost exactly
900km due north of the Berwick-Pakenham area. We only had a short drive to Bourke,
160km. We left at about 10am and arrived at about 12:30. Bourke is nice enough,
OEC Silicitors have an unsecured wireless connection (however i'm using the
public library atm), and it's finally WARM!!! Yay!

The agenda is to stay here for tomorrow, and then the day after leave for Wyandra,
which is a little camping spot halfway between Cunnamulla and Charleville. The
day after tomorrow we are crossing the Queensland border as well.

Well, TY for reading through this massive PHD on the first week of our holiday.
Enjoy it =P

~Zackie

2008-07-07T17:43:00.002+10:00

Well, I have not posted for way too many eons, which is a pity coz there's been quite a bit of stuff going on. Anyway the biggest thing by far that is happening at the moment is that tomorrow, my family and I are going away on a massive 2.5 month trip up through outback New South Wales, across the top of Queensland and then down the East coast of NSW. It should be awesome.

My main problem with this is that I won't have any reliable source of internet, only if I can *cough*hackintoanybody'swirelessnetworks*cough*. Well, they should secure them! *cough*.
Naturally I will be taking pwnful photos of everything, which will undoubtedly find their way onto my Facebook profile.

Ah, and did I tell you that we are leaving tomorrow morning?! Everyone's madly packing and being stressed, and I probably shouldn't be on the computer, but I needed to this before I left, ok, mum?

This morning I had my last checkup for a while at Dandy Pong hospital. Naturally this was a boring irritating depressing time even though the message they gave me was a very postive one, and the hospital repossesed my crutches and brace (yes, I was paying the rent :P). BTW if you ever need physio at Dandy, see if you can get Roseanne Molloy. She rocks a lot.

Anyway it's off to Charlton tomorrow, via Ballarat and Maryborough. Can't wait to see all the TRAINS! :P. Maryborough railway station is meant to be very very awesome anyway (like as big as Flinders Street - we will have to see....). Then it's off to Mildura for a couple of days, and then Broken Hill, and then all the weird sounding towns beyond. Eventually we will get to Longreach, and then Mt Isa, and then up to Karumba, which is at the bottom of the 'bite' at the top of Australia. Then across to Port Douglas and Cairns and stuff, and then down the East Coast past Townsville, and then to Brisbane, via Bundaburg (yay ginger beer), and then through Coffs Harbour, Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra, Albury and home.

Should be very good, as long as I don't miss you all too much :(

Anyway I have about 2 hours of organizing stuff to do in the next hour and half, plus dinner. Ouch.

BTW I should post along the way I hope. Unsecure your wireless if you are along my path. Please. Ty.

Cya.

Getting better

2008-05-18T14:51:00.002+10:00

As you will probably know from my previous post, I have a had a badly dislocated kneecap, which was broken by the surgeons in Dandy Hospital and needed two screws. It hurt really badly for the first couple of days, I was pretty depressed, coz I couldn't really do anything except lie in bed.

But two weeks on, I have reached a bit of a milestone. Today is Sunday, but yesterday, Saturday, I managed to get to my friend's house for the day to hang out with some friends. It doesn't sound like much, but it was great being able to get in the car and actually go somewhere.

Today I managed to get to church too, which is even better. I can walk around on crutches quite well, and I don't feel as inhibited as I did before. It's great, i've been feeling the prayers of my friends and people and church so strongly, it's amazing.

Tomorrow I am having my first outpatient's appointment with the surgeon, which should be interesting, as my mum is a bit miffed by the service that we got at the hospital. Should be interesting, yeah.

Anyway, I think i'd better go and do something useful now, so peace out and all that.

As things are at the moment

2008-05-15T20:40:00.002+10:00

Well, now that I have done my introductory piece, I thought I should tell you about how I am at the moment. To put it bluntly, I have been in a leg brace for almost two weeks now. I will be in it for a month. Ho hum. It isn't anything that bad. I dislocated my kneecap rather badly on May 3rd, just when my future principal was walking in the door for dinner. Quite an interesting situation. Anyway, I was rushed to Dandenong Hospital in an ambulance with nice ambulance people in it, and lots of morphine :P. At the hospital they tried into the night to get it in without surgery, but after about 4 hours, they realised that they needed to operate. So in operating, they happened to notice that there was a fracture. A fracture that wasn't there when I came into the hospital.

So you could say that the fracture is the hospital's fault, and if it weren't for that, I would be up and walking this Monday. Ah well, they're only people and i'm trying not to be too annoyed at them right at the moment.

Oh, and while I am complaining about Dandenong Hospital, I may as well mention that they gave me about 5 minutes of physio, which I don't think was enough. I wasn't seen by an OT at all, and they didn't give me any of the equipment which I really needed. They also didn't teach me how to walk up stairs properly, which was annoying coz i had to figure it out myself. Oh, and when I was in X-Ray, before they fixed it, they bent my leg. How could they do that when it was dislocated. It frikken hurt!!

Anyway, apart from all my gripes about Dandepong hospital, after all it is in Dandenong so something must be excused about its standards. I am getting lots of visitors and starbursts, and extra computer time (like the whole day), and a great family who will do anything just to make me comfortable. And yes, in a month, I will be a non crippled, normal, walkable person. *sigh*

Yo

2008-05-15T15:33:00.000+10:00

Well, I have created a blog, as you are probably well aware. I am not very good at writing, so bear with my all-over-the-place-ness. It seems like the right thing to do to start a blog with this sort of hello ramble, which I seem to be doing right at the moment.

Anyway, anyone who might actually read this, enjoy.

Peace out, yo peeps.