I'll keep this short and sweet...

I'm beginning to think that the whole idea of blogging is all a little too narcissistic for my liking, so I think I'm done...
Ciao xx

The Empathic Civilisation

Wow. Thinking scientifically and historically about increasing empathy. I can't think of a much better way for my mind to tackle this idea...

Kylie from Connecticut - Ben Folds

Oh Ben, you are the master and make me glad I'm getting piano lessons.

Want a challenge? Try Bikram...

One of my beautiful friends finally convinced me to spend Sunday afternoon with her at Bikram Yoga. I'd never heard of it before I met her, so here's the rundown; you spend about 10mins lying in the room then complete 90 minutes of yoga postures (check out the pictures at http://www.yoga-108.net/bikram_postures.htm) and a 5 minute lie down before you leave. Doesn't sound so bad except that the room is heated to 40 degrees Celsius! I've done similar yoga postures before and quite honestly it was nowhere near intensive enough for my liking, but with Bikram I had to stop for a few minutes in the middle of the session cos I was one step away from throwing up or passing out! I play a decent amount of sport and I would like to think that I am reasonably athletic (only once ever have I worked myself so hard that I nearly vomited), but Bikram, damn, you nearly had me beat! Who would have thought that stretching could be so demanding on your body? But I guess nearly two hours moving around in a sauna will do that to you! I have a free pass for next Sunday, but can I stomach it? I'm hoping so, but regardless, I know I'll be furious at myself if I pike out now so I know I'm gonna have to go back just to conquer it. My respect for my friend's mental strength has increased dramatically. She is tough. Love it!

Today's winners are...

Here's today's installment of gratefulness (though I do promise that this is not going to last). I'm not really sure why, but it comes with a food theme.

I am thankful that:
5. God tasked someone with the all important job of creating Nutella.
4. although I ate an entire tub of Nutella in 3 days, I can still happily fit into my skinny jeans.
3. I managed to stumble upon the delectable squid arrabbiata at Giuseppe Arnaldo & Sons on Southbank.
2. I am now officially addicted to Sacla's arrabbiata pasta sauce (and although it costs twice as much as any other, my Italian genes tell me it's close to the best you'll ever find in a jar).
1. my Oma taught me to make her amazing Dutch meatballs which I ate tonight. Yum!!

And the winner is...

Understandably, my husband is getting fed up with me being restless, so he asked me to find five things to be thankful for every day. I think this is definitely a beneficial thing to do (for everyone really), so write a comment if there's something you're particularly grateful for! I'm enjoying the fact that they're going to be quite mundane (so apologies if you don't find this to be groundbreaking), because what I really want is to be content with a good, old, normal life. So here are today's winners in no particular order.

I am thankful that:
5. I live close to my work and can sleep nice and late.
4. even though Paul is quite ill, give him a few days and he'll be perfect.
3. my workplace is so much friendlier than it has ever been.
2. many of my friends and family love me enough that they called to check up on me when I was injured.
1. even though I quite literally have over 2500 pages of exams to mark over the next week, I love my job and I love my kids.

Ethiopian anyone?

Tonight I went with my sister and a friend to try an Ethiopian restaurant in Footscray that we'd heard about. Danni put the word out to a group of her friends and not surprisingly most of them responded with cries of horror that we could not go to such a scary and unknown destination. Okay, I admit, we ate with our hands and didn't use any utensils or plates, but the food and beer was fantastic. What I really want to know is why people are so anxious about the unknown. I absolutely love trying new things! In fact I will even make a point of trying things that I'm pretty confident I won't like.

According to psychologists Costa and McCrae, there is a whole personality dimension devoted to openness to experience. Some people will be down the lower end of the continuum and I guess I would sit at the higher end. I absolutely love the way that their personality theory was created. The idea is that if anybody had ever behaved in a certain way or shown particular personality traits ever in the history of humanity, then someone would have created a word to describe what they saw. So Costa and McCrae compiled every single word ever used to describe a person and eventually whittled them down into five distinct categories. These are Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and are believed to currently be the most valid and reliable method of measuring enduring personality traits.

So if anyone thinks they may be high on Openness, grab my phone number and give me a call! Or if anyone else wants to use an atlas to choose a restaurant, then come join me! If there's anything that you've ever wanted to do but never got around to it, then lets do it. Variety is the spice of life!

Yes, effort IS required

Anyone who knows me well will be aware that I am definitely not the most creative girl in the room. I've been wanting to do something about this but I haven't had any ideas (haha, not surprising!). But then a few thoughts of mine came together quite opportunely.

Thought number one: I love music.
Not that I am the foremost aficionado of music, but I love what it can do to me. I love that it can change my mood completely in a matter of minutes and that it can affect my body even more than my mind. I love the energy and power that it can contain and how it seems to penetrate right to my heart and soul.

Thought number two: I have rarely tried and struggled for anything in my life.
I am one of those people that you probably love to hate ;) Without raising a sweat I received one of the top few percent of VCE scores in the state, I've never had a boyfriend break up with me, I had scouts come and request for me to join their netball team, have been offered jobs with no interview, never had to be careful about what I eat. You name anything I 'have' and I probably didn't work very hard to get it. But there's a whole list of things that I don't have/can't do/don't know. Most obviously because I have never put in much effort. So the aim is to change that.

So I've been playing around on the piano/keyboard all my life and I'm still pretty mediocre. Creativity and melody are shown to be related to the function of the right hemisphere of the brain, while I am clearly left brain dominant with my mathematical and verbal abilities. But considering that I can't fluently read music and have never had professional lessons, I think I'm not too bad (hopefully!). I've always wanted to improve my skills but knew it would take a lot of work, but 'ta da' the time has come.

I vividly remember when I was a teenager that Danny Nahlia (you may remember him from the religious vilification lawsuit controversy) prophesied that I would be a 'tuning fork' and on a different occasion he spoke over me as a 'model'. Since then I was fascinated with the Yamaha trinity-esque logo. While I am the first to admit that prophecy is often fabricated, plain wrong and definitely aligns with the Barnum Effect (the idea that people will readily accept vague and flattering statements about themselves), his words have always stuck in the back of my mind.

So the plan is to learn. To put in effort. To practice. To spend a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time to develop something beneficial to myself and hopefully to others. Fingers crossed the will is in me somewhere...

Crave You - Flight Facilities

Ah, this makes me wish I was chilling in a little laneway bar on a Saturday night with a glass of wine in my hand and the lights down low...

Expectations vs. Reality

I was watching (500) Days of Summer again today and thought this clip beautifully summed up a few of the inconsistencies between what we would like to happen in certain situations and what actually occurs.

Tom desires and also expects that he will receive popularity, acknowledgment and appreciation. More importantly he also craves affection and intimacy from Summer. Instead, after the clip ends, Tom is left alone and rejected.

The discrepancy between his expectations and reality surely exacerbated his disappointment. It would be ideal if we could change reality to align with our desires, but also quite unlikely. We could also change our outlook so that we expect nothing extraordinary, but then we will invite mediocrity. So how do we get a happy balance? Hope for greatness, but be resilient enough to not be crushed by disappointment? Should I just accept that life will not always measure up to the scenario that my imagination can fabricate? Possibly, yes... I say yes, only because I know that my mind can create any number of fairy tales that will never occur, or even if they did occur they would not bring the satisfaction that I had hoped for.

But our imagination is there for a reason. Our dreams and desires are fundamental to who we are as human beings. So I'm going to keep hoping and have faith that anything that can be manufactured by my imagination is possible. Whether or not the realisation of these things will bring the fulfillment that I desire is another matter altogether.

You mean concentrating on the things you want won't make you happy?

My psychology class is currently studying theories of development and today I came across Erik Erikson's (the parents score ten points for originality) theory of psychosocial development. He proposed that there are eight different age related stages of development and in each stage there is a particular crisis that needs to be resolved.

I thought the most relevant ones were:
12-18 years - identity vs. identity confusion
18-25 years - intimacy vs. isolation
25-65 years - generativity vs. stagnation
65+ years - integrity vs. despair

Essentially he is saying that to have healthy development you need to know who you are, be able to form trusting and loving relationships, then work towards the greater good for your family or others and hopefully come to the end of your life with a feeling of peace that your life was well lived.

The other end of the spectrum is to not know who you are, form shallow and superficial relationships, become bored and too concerned with your own needs, lack personal growth and reach the end of your life with bitter feelings of hopelessness and regret regarding lost opportunities.

The bad news is that Erikson believed if you don't resolve the earlier crises properly then you'll have difficulty with every stage that follows. The good news is that he believed any problems with development could be resolved retroactively.

I find his theory so interesting because I (and I'm sure you) have a strong desire to never get to the age of 80 and look back on life with dissatisfaction. I love that he actually proposes some clear means to help achieve that goal. In particular, it's a refreshing idea that perpetually worrying about your own needs will lead to regret rather than fulfillment.
So lets see if I can aim for that, shall we.

What's the trouble with Paris?

To my delight, my school generally has very well behaved students. But this is mainly achieved through tough, consistent punishment and high expectations. So not surprisingly on the Attitudes to School survey, our school rates quite poorly in the student wellbeing category. To combat this, the school has recently introduced a token monthly home group to cover our pastoral care quota for the year. This week's discussion is based around 'working tough', essentially to tell students that even if the work is boring, difficult or purposeless, you just need to sit down and do it. Good advice? Yes. Palatable advice? No.

I was thinking about how to make the concept more attractive and my thoughts were immediately drawn to Mark Sayers' The Trouble with Paris (Paris Hilton that is, seeing that she epitomises the fake, celebrity lifestyle that middle class suburbanites tend to dream about). Here's a quick extract from his website to describe the content of his book and video (which is amazing, by the way).

Doesn't everyone want the good life these days? Our shopping mall world offers us a never-ending array of pleasures to explore. Consumerism promises us a vision of heaven on earth - a reality that's hyper-real. We've all experienced hyperreality: a candy so 'grape-ey' it doesn't taste like grapes any more; a model's photo so manipulated that it doesn't even look like her; a theme park version of life that tells us we can have something better than the real thing. But what if this reality is not all that it's cracked up to be? Admit it, we've been ripped off by our culture and its version of reality that leaves us lonely, bored, and trapped. But what's the alternative?

So the question for my students is: should life always be fun, exciting and pain free? Where does, boredom, death, hard work and washing the dishes fit into life? Do we just run from one exciting experience to the next and everything in between is mundane and void of meaning?

If any of those questions resonate with you, all I can say is, get the video (from me), watch and enjoy. It will be music to your ears.

So in honour of these things, I thought a few photos of my friends at a recent wedding would be fitting. The fleeting, glamorous moments of life that look amazing from the outside, give us sweet memories to cherish, but disappear shortly after with only veiled memories to prove they ever existed.

Ah, the serenity!

I've been down at the beach house with some friends for a few days. Life is pretty sweet :) I have a free holiday house for the whole family to use and ample school holidays to go down there and enjoy.

Here's a pic of part of the top floor lounge room.

As you can see, it's a highly stressful environment! I'm the type of person that usually hates sitting still, but there's something about the serenity (can I use this word now without sounding bogan?) of Venus Bay that forces you to stop and relax. Here's a pic of my beach.


Even though it's a 10 minute walk from our house to the beach, I'm sure you can understand why I call it my beach. Even on New Year's Day, which I imagine is one of the busiest times of the year, we could easily find a giant patch of sand to call our own.

So when it's not swimming weather (which for me is about 90% of the year), I pretty much stick to walking the beach or the bush tracks. I didn't waste all of my time though. I managed to read a few of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's essays, most notably An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment?.
Here is an interesting excerpt from one of his essays:

The second source of man's dissatisfaction with the order of nature is the shortness of life. It is true that anyone who continues to wish that life might last longer than it actually does must have little appreciation of it's value, for to prolong it would merely add to the length of a drama made up of endless struggles with adversity. Nevertheless, we may excuse those of childish judgment who fear death but have no love of life, and who find it hard to complete each day of their existence with some degree of contentment, yet can never have days enough in which to repeat this painful experience.

Are the simple things in life the best?

Tell me... How can a person plan a life of happiness, when it's often the simple and unexpected parts of life that prove the most satisfying?

Today was lovely. I went to the travel agent and booked flights from Los Angeles to New York. Aside from the thought of an excruciating 5 hour stopover at LAX, it's getting me somewhat excited and motivated to investigate a few hotels.

The comedy festival is on once again and of course Paul and I have been waiting patiently all year to go and see Andrew McClelland's new show. (I just had to put a picture of the blackboard. Maybe it is the teacher in me, but damn, isn't that the most beautiful board you've ever seen?!)

Although I have loyally watched each of Andrew's shows over the last 4 years, I also crave anything that is new. Regrettably, we didn't get around to seeing any new comedy acts tonight but we did have a few minutes to waste before the show began. How better to burn some time than by having a drink at a bar that I had been wanting to explore for ages. Unfortunately, the most exciting part of the bar turned out to be a leadlight glass box that was attached to the roof. Who would have thought that chicken wire could turn out to be a design feature?


So we headed off to see the Somewhat Accurate History of the Fall of Roman Empire. True to form, Andrew combined his storytelling skills and interesting facts into a skit, which had us either listening intently or laughing hysterically. When I look back over the last few years I think Andrew has definitely found his niche. Last's year's show was about time travel, the one before about the history of the 'gentleman' and the year before about cults. And surprise, surprise he turns out to be a history teacher. If he was my teacher maybe I would have been able to pay attention long enough that the lessons would have actually stayed in my memory!

But what surprised me the most is that the best part of my day didn't include any of that. When we exited the theatre it was uncharacteristically pouring with rain. My happiest moment was just snuggling under the umbrella with Paul, chatting and walking the streets to get back to our car. Haven't I heard it said before that the simple things in life are often the best? Or was it the best things in life are free? Or was it some other advertising line, song lyric or anonymous quote? Either way, I'm sure there's something profound I can learn from this...

Is this the way of the future?

It seems proper that my next post should be about the beginnings of life. I met with my high school best friend for lunch today at a cute cafe on main street. As you can see by the picture below, her little bun in the oven is about halfway cooked.

It now appears that I've hit the age where the next natural step in life is to have children. I can see the difference my friends who have taken the bold step and their priorities have changed dramatically. They no longer live for themselves and their own personal pleasure and satisfaction, but they now live for their child who gives them pleasure and satisfaction in a whole new way.


I'm not sure about you, but I am definitely not ready to take that leap yet. For one, my current thinking (and this entire blog!) is dedicated to finding the variety in life. I think it might be a few more years before I am ready to settle down and banish myself to the four walls of my home for the indefinite future.

But surely this is one of the things that gives your life meaning, that makes life worth living. So why not jump in now? All of the newly appointed parents seem to think I'm crazy for waiting. But then I realise that in many cases this is what they have desired for so many years.

But that was never one of my dreams... It was on the to-do list, but was never the desire of my heart. So all I can do is embrace their enthusiasm, acknowledge the deep and lasting purpose that this will bring to their life and pray that one day I too will understand the joy of parenthood.

So why are we all here?

So the first question on my lips is "why are we all here?"
While my heart's desire is to have an existential answer for this, I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.
So for now, let's take the question at it's most literal meaning.
I'm sure you have your own reasons for reading this.
I can only really say why I am here...

I have an amazing, perfect, easy life. I have a wonderful husband, a job that I love, a beautiful church, a nice house in the suburbs and loyal friends. I am in my mid-twenties, have a great brain, great body and I have everything a girl could ever want or need.

So then why is it that often life feels meaningless? Why am I always searching for more? Never satisfied that I am doing enough or being enough.

Through many conversations with many friends it appears as though we all feel the same. We all feel the pressure to live in a trendier suburb, to have nicer clothes and eat in fancier restaurants. We feel the need to enrich our lives by watching the cultural elite at the theatre or going on more extravagant holidays. We feel as though without these life experiences that we are not reaching our potential, as though we are not 'living our lives'.

I spent every minute of my weekend eating, drinking and laughing with my friends at a number beautiful spots around Melbourne and only a few days later I thought to myself that I haven't done anything fun or exciting recently! I have so many blessings in my life but the shame is that I forget. My wedding day, my travel overseas, my nights of crazy fun. They are all a haze in my memory.

So what are we supposed to do with our lives? What makes us happy and content? What is purposeful and meaningful? What will make me look back on my life without regret?

I don't have the answers to these questions, but I do know that I have so many amazing experiences to look back on. So my aim is to create a chronicle of the events of my life. Hopefully this will help me register what a life is made of. I don't want my memories of life to fade. I want to take every moment, whether exciting or mundane and appreciate it fully. I want to pursue the finer things in life and exult in all the amazing experiences I have, but I want to enjoy everyday life with the same fervor.

I remember in 2004 when I heard the lyrics to Natasha Bedingfield's song Unwritten, they burned themselves into my brain. These words were the cry of my heart and still are today...

I am unwritten,
Can't read my mind
I'm undefined
I'm just beginning
The pen's in my hand
Ending unplanned

I break tradition
Sometimes my tries
Are outside the lines
We've been conditioned
To not make mistakes
But I can't live that way

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words
That you could not find
Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

So from these musings comes the title of my blog, 'this life...'

You can interpret it how you like.
My emotional response is 'what the hell am I supposed to do with this life?...'
My rational one is 'here is what makes this life...'