A new year signifies a lot of new things. Simple. I've always really loved the little window of time between Christmas and New Years Eve as one for unadorned reflection; a semi-habit I've sort of refined since I was fifteen or so. It's almost an assembly in my mind. I take my time, collect things that have happened and let them resurface - major events first, but then also those subtle nostalgic moments that mean absolutely nothing to anyone else. I flick through the photos I have taken and the words I have jotted down and the art I have created. Writing it down now it sounds really strange but it is honestly one of my favourite things to do, and when I think of it it's probably also why I carry around the same notebook in my bag for 365 days. Last year, this extended to a playlist of the most significant songs (high rotation/significant times/emotive 2am moments, the usual) my ears feasted on. This year it includes a disposable camera (I'm unashamedly excited to see the outcome of such a roll of film).
So, I share with you my 2012 edition of music (too lazy to hyperlink everything, but you must listen to The Middle East).
Hanging On - Active Child
Exes And Ohs - Buckley Ward
Terms and Conditions - Chet Faker
Big Jumps - Emiliana Torrini
Yet Again - Grizzly Bear
City Girl - The Jezabels
Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before - The Smiths
Boy - Emma Louise
Deep Water - The Middle East
Air - Snakadaktal
It's these little parcels of nostalgia that I so love. I can bundle them up and remove myself from them, keep moving, but when I go back to them they're the same and untouchable to new feelings. Following my little memory holiday, I almost always assemble little objectives for the coming year. They're hardly ever groundbreaking and usually just tiny little items of significance to me.
I started this blog with the intention of letting it grow. Distend. The simple change of date - like that of a new year - I talked about in my first post isn't as scary now as it was at the time of writing. It's still there, but it'll grow into something different now that I'm (mildly) assured where my future post-university is going. Next year will present me with a big change and an inevitably new routine to life; a new stage. This space has become its own little part of my end-of-year reflection and is a true time capsule of this year, and so, I am going to leave it here for the time being. I don't want to quit for fear of losing the rhythm of having a blog, but at the same time, a new year and a new routine is as best a time to leap to something new. For now you can find me at roseannetiziani.tumblr.com - I hope to eventually mix the growing archive I've created of my published work with more frequent, informal pieces of blah.
Saturday, 29 December 2012
Tuesday, 6 November 2012
Covet and Collect
I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to my belongings. Even when I was younger I would take the upmost care of my things - my toys - and cherish them like nothing else. I think it's okay to have an attachment to 'stuff', despite all the counter-culture and backlash society has cultivated over time towards it. It's okay to be grateful for what you have, to consider your purchases and to then appreciate them throughout their lifetime. Like this manifesto on stuff, I've always taken pride in carefully cultivating the objects I possess. This is not only in their obvious utility but also how they reflect (deliberately or not) my feelings about consumption in general. On a basic level, I think this is quality first. I can very rarely bring myself to buy items that are secondhand or based on the latest trend, purely because I envision items lasting my entire lifetime when I buy them. This is particularly of note with non-consumable items like clothes. I want to be able to weave my own narrative and experiences into them, and then hopefully, pass then onto my daughter for her to do the same; and to see the twenty-year cycle of fashion do its justice.
I'm also really interested in the concepts surrounding consumption, but to avoid a theoretical tangent I'll simply say that I'm mindful of the ethical and social implications of my choices. This is mostly with food and beauty items, and is perhaps a heightened repercussion of working at an international beauty brand for two years. I'm more than happy to say that it's not an entirely altruistic choice at the same time, too; the choices I make are also concerned with making sure what I consume and use contribute to my well-being at the same time. Listed here are the beauty items I use on a daily basis: the ones that I can't live without, the ones that I've carefully picked out from the others for various reasons and after endless trials, and because of this, I will use them for my foreseeable future. Call them staples, I call them collectables.
1. Coconut Body Butter, The Body Shop: One of my favourites since I was fifteen, this smells like a lot of past summers and now, more so, of a lot of memories. This butter has an amazing texture mostly thanks to the heavy concentration of Shea and Cocoa Butters (Community Fair Trade from Ghana) and the moisture barrier it creates lasts forever....so does the tub!
2. Vitamin E Eye Cream, The Body Shop: Don't look at me like that, you're definitely never too young for an eye cream. This is also my saviour when I've been staring into a computer for nine hours on end and my eyes are about to fall out of my head.
3. Coco Mademoiselle EDP, Chanel: As stupid as it sounds, I'd never experienced a fragrance that made me feel confident before this one (holla at me, ladies). The expense of the bottle outweighs the feeling; as well as it lasting forever and being the comfortable shelter of a lot of recent memories, I think this is the closest I've ever come to having a signature scent.
4. Lash Power Mascara (01: Black Onyx), Clinique: I really admire Clinique as a company; dermatologically-tested, fragrance-free, aesthetically sleek and trustworthy. Their mascara formulations are brilliant regardless which one you use, but I like this one particularly because IT LASTS. No more panda eyes because your full cheeks cause your mascara to smudge when you smile (...what), they're instead perfect all day. Even better is that it washes off in really gentle chunks which means you don't get dark smudges everywhere (towels included) or have that gross goop of black in the corner of your eyes later on!
5. Reverence Aromatique Hand Wash, Aesop: It has small chunks of pumice in it to exfoliate your hands. Enough said. And I'm not talking about the smell because you already know how good Aesop smells.
6. Blushwear Cream Stick (05: Shy Blush), Clinique: I've tried a lot of cream blushes and this one lasts the longest, looks natural, and you can wear it without anything underneath. Easy peasy.
Saturday, 3 November 2012
Bloodlines
The air smells full of anticipation tonight. It smells like listless nights, too hot to move. Of baths under the running cold tap and that incidental splash of the sprinkler over your feet, the grass rough and sodden beneath. We used to spend so much time with them, our cousins. In their cubby house we would play school. I'd be the teacher. A blackboard seems so archaic now. When we grew tired of it we had grown into our bodies and we could see that creation had continued. Our grandparents started to look different to what we remembered. Our Nonna had kept travelling as we had. We couldn't see that in our parents yet though, that would come later as our eyes opened. And so, we didn't see them as often, our cousins. Our father and our father's brother had started to look different to each other too; time had carried them apart. This we couldn't understand why. My brother and I made a promise to make sure this didn't happen to us. Our children will be cousins and never grow apart; my brother is my brother, I am his sister, and we will never grow apart.
Saturday, 27 October 2012
Cooling Of The Embers
I don't know where the time in this past month has gone, let alone most of this year. I've been busy of late; changing my routine, feeling out of control, learning very new things and meeting new people. My state of introspection has seemed to come into its own lately, but I can't really tell whether it's the building or the changing of it within me or just something plain new. Introspection is a strange thing. It makes you only as lonely as you'll let yourself be. For a long time I was worried I would never get back the enjoyment and solace I seek in being by myself, in enjoying my own company, but it's returned and it's stronger than ever. No longer do I lust the company of someone to know every single thought in my mind, or to be able to predict my existence. The nicest feeling I have is that I am working on the best version of myself; my days are carefully planned, I spend my time with people who make me feel happy and who I genuinely care about. Of course the downside of being so busy, as usual, is that I haven't been able to create in the capacity I wish I could. For all the time I spend around creative people, the spirit-crushing tasks I am assigned and the eternal blank stare deep into a computer screen don't do wonders for a daydreamer. The closest I've got recently is the stack of yellow sticky notes jotted with ideas. Today I even realised that I haven't been carrying around my blank notebook for weeks; I don't know what's happened but I'm sad that it took me so long to realise. It's not entirely all horrible though, because in that stack of yellow sticky notes is a reflection of my life nonetheless. "I'm scared I don't know how to romanticise or idealise anymore, and that's what I liked about us the most," I penned two months ago. I'm glad to say I don't feel like that anymore, and if this ramble of a blog post signifies anything it's that I'm as idealistic as ever. That 'us' no longer exists because disappointment is a word that carries so much weight to it, it doesn't really have much feeling anymore. Now I'm on the precipice of finishing my undergraduate degree and not knowing what is going to happen with anything, and this is what makes me scared. It's not paralysing, but just enough to be in the back of my mind. Sometimes I think back to when the year started and all the intentions I had for it, and comparing it to what it is now, it's hard not to think that this - right now - shouldn't be how it is. I didn't have to convince myself of this at the time though, I believed every bit of it; really hard, evidently. I'm now trying as hard as I can to keep learning, to speak up when I need to, but as my path diverges so does that of everyone else I know, and then that feeling of loneliness resurfaces. On Thursday I spent my last day of class with the person I met on my first day of university, three years ago. He is my greatest friend I have made in this time and a person who I cannot articulate my level of respect for in words. We visited the places on campus that meant a lot to our friendship and relived all the things to have happened since then. Sometimes it upsets me that our friendship isn't the same as what it used to be; not in its closeness, but in the fact that we've both grown up, that people have entered and disappeared from both our lives, and just simply that time has changed things. Our lives are both so different, and sometimes it's hard to ignore the feeling that this is going to become more pronounced with everyone I know in the immediate future. At the moment most of my days are quiet, but it's not a bad quiet. It's just making sure I'm anchored safely while everything moves around me.
Sunday, 16 September 2012
On Nostalgia
A sentimentality.
I recently found myself discussing this concept with a dear friend. Just like every other intangible emotion that humans experience, none of us find nostalgia in the same way. Yours will never be the same as mine. It can manifest itself in joy or pain; in yearning for, or in regret of, the past. Most often and logically its for your own past, but sometimes its for someone else or a time or place you never even got to experience.
Despite this, it's always wistful and romantic. To me, nostalgia is largely a method of the mind in retaining memories, those ones that ever so slowly melt away until you think of them no more. Your mind remembers (what it thinks to be) every single aspect of a certain situation, time or experience, formulating something so inherently unique to your own inner observations and perceptions that it is irreproducible to no one else but yourself. That doesn't mean they're gone forever, though. It usually just means you'll have to wait for that serendipitous moment when something years down the track, when you least expect it, brings its back to the surface.
I find my nostalgic moments mostly in smells, or in a particular time of year. Maybe this is because they are static; the same no matter where you experience them. My yearning for periods of time has heightened over the past few years, this perhaps more so as I get further away from them. Mid-May, when the weather begins to chill, feels like the pangs of loneliness I felt when most of my friends went overseas; September feels like when I returned from Europe to find Spring had sprung in my garden, and I got to begin a new friendship with someone that I had to leave behind before I went away. When I think of it I also have songs on my iPod that would fit these moulds well. These notes of nostalgia will stick for a long time before they are replaced. On the other hand, at the end of this year they might all culminate and neatly file themselves away as something I'll later wistful know as my undergraduate years. Who knows.
Smells are a little bit different. They seem to continually re-adjust themselves and build and grow in me. I've got smells of my Nanna cooking from when I was little that I can feel slowly becoming associated with my Mum in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. Eventually they'll become mine. Something as pervasive as cigarette smoke, even; it smells of my time in Europe, of my first boyfriend, of nights in sticky-carpeted pubs and now, of summer nights and carelessness. The bottle of perfume my parents gave me for my twentieth birthday used to smell so strongly of that balmy night I spent feeling safe in a dark cinema. Sometimes it still does, but now it also smells of special occasions and enhanced confidence.
Now I read back on my words and I try as hard as I can to feel something, anything; that pull deep in my centre that used to hurt when my eyes glazed over them and made me ache for days. It's still there now, that ache I wanted forever to end, but now it's different; it's more unsure, almost like a clock-hand paused in the middle of a second.
When I read over things I have written, however, I don't experience this same sense of feeling. I probably won't when I read over this piece either. I'm not sure why this is; the only thing I can possibly think of is that the act of writing enables you to expel something palpable for later on. You've taken the physical steps to get it out into the open and it isn't just caught in your mind. I wrote the above paragraph a few weeks ago on a scrap of paper, and there are only some things in it now that I can still relate to. The warmth and the haze of the memory is still there. Nostalgia, though, often creeps up on you and bursts itself open through a prompt you didn't even know existed.
Lately I've found myself pausing when I enter this contemplative mood. Something in my mind has been wanting to turn it off. Maybe it's for want of actually living in the present, being consciously thankful for what I have now, or not dwelling on the past. But I've also realised all of these things are the polar opposite to what it means to be nostalgic. After all of this, nostalgia isn't something just for dreamers, or wishful thinkers, or even idealists. It's something that makes us human, and reminds us so when we forget.
I recently found myself discussing this concept with a dear friend. Just like every other intangible emotion that humans experience, none of us find nostalgia in the same way. Yours will never be the same as mine. It can manifest itself in joy or pain; in yearning for, or in regret of, the past. Most often and logically its for your own past, but sometimes its for someone else or a time or place you never even got to experience.
Despite this, it's always wistful and romantic. To me, nostalgia is largely a method of the mind in retaining memories, those ones that ever so slowly melt away until you think of them no more. Your mind remembers (what it thinks to be) every single aspect of a certain situation, time or experience, formulating something so inherently unique to your own inner observations and perceptions that it is irreproducible to no one else but yourself. That doesn't mean they're gone forever, though. It usually just means you'll have to wait for that serendipitous moment when something years down the track, when you least expect it, brings its back to the surface.
I find my nostalgic moments mostly in smells, or in a particular time of year. Maybe this is because they are static; the same no matter where you experience them. My yearning for periods of time has heightened over the past few years, this perhaps more so as I get further away from them. Mid-May, when the weather begins to chill, feels like the pangs of loneliness I felt when most of my friends went overseas; September feels like when I returned from Europe to find Spring had sprung in my garden, and I got to begin a new friendship with someone that I had to leave behind before I went away. When I think of it I also have songs on my iPod that would fit these moulds well. These notes of nostalgia will stick for a long time before they are replaced. On the other hand, at the end of this year they might all culminate and neatly file themselves away as something I'll later wistful know as my undergraduate years. Who knows.
Smells are a little bit different. They seem to continually re-adjust themselves and build and grow in me. I've got smells of my Nanna cooking from when I was little that I can feel slowly becoming associated with my Mum in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. Eventually they'll become mine. Something as pervasive as cigarette smoke, even; it smells of my time in Europe, of my first boyfriend, of nights in sticky-carpeted pubs and now, of summer nights and carelessness. The bottle of perfume my parents gave me for my twentieth birthday used to smell so strongly of that balmy night I spent feeling safe in a dark cinema. Sometimes it still does, but now it also smells of special occasions and enhanced confidence.
Now I read back on my words and I try as hard as I can to feel something, anything; that pull deep in my centre that used to hurt when my eyes glazed over them and made me ache for days. It's still there now, that ache I wanted forever to end, but now it's different; it's more unsure, almost like a clock-hand paused in the middle of a second.
When I read over things I have written, however, I don't experience this same sense of feeling. I probably won't when I read over this piece either. I'm not sure why this is; the only thing I can possibly think of is that the act of writing enables you to expel something palpable for later on. You've taken the physical steps to get it out into the open and it isn't just caught in your mind. I wrote the above paragraph a few weeks ago on a scrap of paper, and there are only some things in it now that I can still relate to. The warmth and the haze of the memory is still there. Nostalgia, though, often creeps up on you and bursts itself open through a prompt you didn't even know existed.
Lately I've found myself pausing when I enter this contemplative mood. Something in my mind has been wanting to turn it off. Maybe it's for want of actually living in the present, being consciously thankful for what I have now, or not dwelling on the past. But I've also realised all of these things are the polar opposite to what it means to be nostalgic. After all of this, nostalgia isn't something just for dreamers, or wishful thinkers, or even idealists. It's something that makes us human, and reminds us so when we forget.
Saturday, 15 September 2012
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