The Black Swan - a review

I was going to say that the trip along the river and across the bridge, on a freezing cold evening to get to the cinema was more interesting than the film itself...but it simply wouldn't be true.
I passed many swans on the way there, and another couple swimming in the sea beside the bridge on the way back. Walking and wondering would the movie live up expectations, I reminisced on my own brush with the art of ballet as a child. My stage performance and my giving it all up to annoy my parents who had abandoned the just gone 10 year old in a 'horrible and lonely environment commonly known as a boarding school. I also remembered a recurring dream i used to have as a six year old about my parents ice-skating on the lake. As they romantically skated towards each other, instead of falling into each other's arms they would skate into the melted ice in the middle. At this time in my life i was living with my grandparents, and wasn't too happy about it. I think the dream was a sub-conscious effort at punishing my parents for abandoning me. So that was twice being abandoned. I had killed my two ice-skating parents, the swans on the lake, in my dreams. For years I blamed myself after I discovered they had been having difficulties, and had eventually broken up their marriage. I thought my dream had put some kind of magic spell on their relationship. I did used to think my mind had those kind of powers. But I am all better now....um...

Back to the movie. What struck me was the hardship born from beauty, the insanity derived from striving for perfection. The inevitable corruption of innocence and the fighting will-power of the artiste who is prepared to push so hard for self-control, that the control becomes self-defeating. The fluffy, baby pink and blue world transformed into the black and white raw emotions of first love, and the alternate universe of insanity driving ambition full circle round back to insanity creating the thin line between reality and imagination. Provoking thoughts such as:
'Death is the only thing we can be truly certain of.'...leading to....'Is death itself an illusion?' Do we die over and over without even noticing?
Do I want to put the theory to the test? No, I don't.

As I walked home, a swan followed me across the bridge and I determined not to read too much into it. This would have happened no matter which movie i had gone to see. Wouldn't it?....

order out of chaos.

I am very tempted to get lazy and post something one of the many writings lying idle and gathering dust on my hard-drive. This started out as live up-dating and no matter how rubbishy my writing becomes here, I will not succumb. So I have decided to use this place to assist me in my adventure in the creative writing course I have signed up to. (Notice I have used the personal four times in the last sentence). For some reason my use of 'I' and 'me' makes me uncomfortable. I have no clue why...no matter.

Moving on....

For many years I have been told : "Write!" by varying personages. Encouragement in a way and to be appreciated by all accounts. But...being stubborn by nature, and having an avid dislike of being told what to do, I have been stomping my metaphorical foot and saying : "No!" ..but doing it anyway, tee hee.

Trouble is, there is an eclectic variety of subjects I want to explore. Sci-fi, social unrest, music, psychology, life's experiences, the list goes on and on. But which to choose. That is where the value of the structured college environment enters stage right. Give me a sentence and I will expand. That is the hope. Already i have started something in response to an email prompt. As I walked about the house performing domestic duties, the ideas began plundering in. The end result will be nothing in comparison to what my imaginings churned out. I felt I had to cull it down to something 'presentable'. And now it is becoming only a quarter of what it could have been.

Oh and I have been teaching myself latin, because I wanted to do something utterly useless.

Puella casam laudat!

Does playing Farmville reflect back to us our social attitudes?

Musings of an hypocritical rustic hick.

I remember when I first started playing. I clicked on a request out of sheer curiousity. It didn't seem like there was much to it, so I pressed the correct buttons and managed to grow a few virtual crops. The gifts started rolling in. Feeling a duty to return to my friends, I started obliging and eventually I got roped in after becoming ambitious to rise up the levels, so I could get to the Pink Roses. A few of my writer friends were also playing which made it feel like a 'respectable' time-wasting occupation. Didn't we all have the writer's block, so my excuse goes. When I looked into the farms of some of the higher levels, I felt a surge of attitude flow through my bones. "Who do they think they are, with their large mansions, and massive plots?". I began to think of it as 'us and 'them'. My meager few acres seemed paltry in comparison. It didn't take long to transform into an inverted-snob. But as I rose through the ranks my reluctant dislike for the 'big-shot' farmers dwindled, and to my horror, I realised I had become one of 'them'. I enlarged my acres, bought mansions, upgraded my harvesters and and started wallowing like a pig in muck. I had to log in every morning to 'harvest my crops'. Once while visiting my brother in the real country-side, he actually placed a ban on Farmville and policed my activities on his lap-top. It was at this point I perceived the problem. The 'us and them' dilemma was not restricted to the world of cyber horticultural pursuits, the real problem lay between the players and the non-players. To the point that I almost fell out with my own sibling.
There are other social nuances that can be squeezed from Farmville analysis, but I think the game has bled dry enough of my free-time as it is, so I will leave it at that.

something a little different.

My mother was ten when the war ended. She was in London at the Victory parade, with my grandmother, her aunt Monkey and her older cousins Jessica and Mickey. They had spent the duration of the war living together, it being safer for women to live together in a community. Her parents and her had been living in London when the blitz krieg bombing started, and spent many a frightened night and day in the underground shelters. So for their safety they had been sent to live in Antrim, Northern Ireland, back to her roots really, a coastal town on the east coast of Northern Ireland. Once there she went to work as a young child in a parachute factory, while far away, her father commandeered an Air-Craft Carrier somewhere in the ocean making it's way towards Hiroshima. They landed shortly after the bomb had been dropped, and he never did want to talk about what he saw there, and never did. One can only try to imagine the horror and desolation they must have found on the shore-line of that once thriving city.

Plea To the Wind. Blow me in some assistance.

Suffocated by my inability to function in the way I think I need to. Need and want are two words I can't differentiate between right now. Shackled to the spot, pinned down by my inability to clarify the how's of what needs to be done. Inside a brown paper bag trying to punch my way out. Like one of those dreams where I am walking along but not making any progress. My ambition to do Nothing was a false ideal. There is something important I need to do, I know what it is, but there are barriers preventing me. I make a plea for assistance but find I am calling into a void, a vacuum. Where are those who said: "Just holler if you need me?". Just a distance echo of long ago. Somewhere my karma lost it's way.
I am always there when asked for. But to get something back is too much to ask. I don't ask anything for myself. I ask for the one who gave me life, who's own is fading, who needs me.