huagl – Page 12 – Crafts, Cats, and Occasionally Cursing

That Movie Book – Week Thirty

Week Thirty! We made it! Only, uh, twenty two more weeks to go? It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement when I put it like that, I guess. Anyway, I’m still pretty proud that I’ve gotten this far with only a few missed weeks.

This week’s theme was “Nazis Are Bad: just in case you forgot”. The theme is pretty straight forward, but not particularly appealing. I have always been interested in the Nazis in general, fascinated at the awful things that were done at that time. I go through phases of watching documentaries about the concentration camps, watching people talk about what happened to them and feeling awful but at the same time not being able to stop watching. Even though I find them interesting, I wasn’t really looking forward to spending my weekend watching films about it. I only managed to get through one of the suggestions, and that was enough for me.

I watched Downfall. It focuses on the last twelve days of Hitler’s life, where he’s stuck in a bunker under Berlin while the Russian Army advance and there’s no one left on the German side to come and help.

(I know the quality isn’t great, but it was the best trailer I could find with subtitles)

This was a good film, albeit harrowing. It is a bit of a slog at two and a half hours, in German with subtitles, but it was still interesting enough to keep my attention for the majority of the time. My one major gripe was that there wasn’t much blood for a movie about war. I’m not saying it should have been super gory, but when someone shoots themselves in the head there should be less head left than most people seemed to have. At one point a guy shot himself in the head and fell to the ground, but there was no bullet wound on his head at all. It is telling how much more violent things are these days that it makes it noticeable when things aren’t realistically bloody, even to someone like me who doesn’t play really bloody video games. I’m not even that big a fan of gore, but when you show someone cutting limbs off soldiers, there has to be some blood coming out of the wound. That’s just common sense. It got pretty distracting after a while.

I do think that the way Hitler was portrayed in this was quite well done, though. Marc Fennell made a good point in the book, which I didn’t really think about until after I finished the movie. He said there’s a fine line when it come to portraying people like the Nazis; you run the risk of either trivialising what they did, or making them into a stereotypical bad guy cliché. Downfall managed to tread that line quite well, showing that Hitler was pretty crazy and ordered awful things to be done, but also showed how he treated the people he liked who were around him well. There is a line between Eva Braun and one of Hitler’s secretaries, Traudel, which works well at describing this duality:

Traudel: It seems he doesn’t want anyone to see inside him[… ]In private he can be such a caring person. But then he says such…brutal things.

Eva: When he’s the Fuhrer?

It simply shows that Hitler wasn’t this caricature of an evil person. He was just a person; a person that did a lot of terrible things, but still just a person, with good points and bad. By the end of it he was obviously sick and didn’t want to admit failure, and he probably has something not right mentally to make it seemingly so easy to just let people continue to die fighting over a lost war. It’s not an excuse for what he did, and I don’t necessarily feel sorry for him, but it was still a good, fairly balanced portrayal of him at that time in history.

By the time I finished watching this is was pretty emotionally drained to even think about watching any of the other suggestions, especially seeing it was Sunday before I could convince myself to watch this one. As it is I still dreamed of Jewish people trying to escape from people trying to capture them last night. The other films that were suggested were The Great Dictator (with Charlie Chaplin), Judgement at Nuremberg (which I was considering watching), The Reader, and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. If watching things about the Nazis is your thing, maybe check those ones out. Next week is Miyazaki Week, so I am going to try reeeeeeeally hard to watch all five films. Because Miyazaki is great.

Melbourne Trip

For my birthday Ben took me for a trip down to Melbourne. I finally got the photos off my camera, so I figured it was time to show some of the good ones. There are some other ones on my flickr page, if you want to look at them.

I always feel a bit sad that I haven’t really seen that much of my country. I have all these grand plans to go overseas on holidays, but at the same time I’ve only recently properly travelled out of my home state. I’d been saying for ages that I’d like to go to Melbourne (and people kept saying I would like it) so when Ben decided to pay for a trip down there for my birthday I was stoked. We’d talked about it earlier in the ear, but once I quit my job I figured that was just another thing to put off until reemployment.

plane

I had found a site on my online travels called ‘air bnb’, where people rent out their spare rooms or whole apartments, so you can stay in an actual house rather than a hotel. We found the cutest little place right near Brunswick St that was also pretty cheap to rent, so we went for it and it was perfect for the two of us. I wish the weather had been better so we could have had breakfast outside, but that’s what you get for going to Melbourne in winter.

As soon as we dropped our stuff off we for a walk down Brunswick St and chose a place that looked neat to have something to eat. The pizzas were delicious! That is one thing I can say with certainty about Melbourne: all the food we ate was amazing and I wish the trip had been longer so we could eat more. The random pizza was good, the yum cha was good, the pasta we had at Little Italy was good. Even the food we cooked for ourselves one of the nights was delicious. I don’t know how we lucked out on the food front, because everything was so great. I don’t know how the coffee side of the trip went, but Ben didn’t seem to have any real complaints that I can remember. There were a lot of coffee brands we didn’t recognise, which made it hard to be choosy.

We met up with a local friend at a pub where we saw some local bands and enjoyed them so much that Ben bought their albums. It made me sad that so many places like the Hopetoun have closed down around these parts and it’s harder for local musicians to get a foot in the door. The bar we went to that night was pretty awesome and looked like it had a lot of local people playing regularly, which was nice. It was a good night, but I was pretty knackered by the end of it.

The next day we went into the city properly. We started off with the museum. It was pretty awesome, with a big ‘forest’ type section right in the middle of the building, where we saw heaps of animals. I found a Satin Bowerbird’s bower, and was showing it to Ben when we realised the bowerbirds where right near us! We watched a poor bird get rejected that day; Obviously he needed more blue things to impress the ladies. That section also seemed to be the place where small screaming children congregated, but they also liked to run, so the majority of them overtook us pretty quickly and we were left to looking for the animals hiding in tanks.

There was also a big room full of stuffed animals, which was pretty creepy. Taxidermied animals always look just a bit wrong, so wandering through a room of them was a bit off-putting. Sure it was interesting to look at the different animals, and there were little touch screen things that would tell you information about them all, but it was still kinda creepy. We also looked at a lot of dinosaur skeletons, and learned a heap of things about the human brain. Museums are super great, I forget that sometimes.

The weather was pretty miserable for most of the trip. I constantly thought my face was going to fall off from the cold; I’m glad I brought my scarf and gloves, they got a lot of use. Most of the time it was pretty dreary, but still pretty with the remaining autumn leaves. Thankfully my umbrella fit into my bag easily so we were always prepared, and we also didn’t mind sitting at the house to keep warm. We had planned to go and have a heap of cocktails at various bars on the night of my birthday, but it was ridiculously cold and dreary so we just stayed in. And that in itself was a nice way to spend the time.

The trip was pretty last minute, so we didn’t really plan anything to do other than go to the museum and get yum cha for my birthday. It was nice to just be free to do whatever, but next time we go (and we definitely will be going again) we’ll have to look into things a bit more. It also felt a little too short to do as much as I would have liked. I think next time if we have more time to organise ourselves and work out what we want to do it will be an even better trip than this one. Hopefully this will be the start of a trend of us actually going travelling together more.

Anxieties: Hopefully the First in a Series

I found a comic on tumblr recently that chronicles a lady’s struggles with an eating disorder, and I ended up frantically reading through all that was available to see what happened. It must be incredibly hard to put herself through it all again in creating the comic, and at the same time making it an interesting and compelling (and pretty!) read, but she does it. Some of the pages really resonated with me and my issues, so I thought I would try and talk about my problems here in the hopes I can be comfortable with them enough that I can convince myself to go get help.

One of the things that really sets me off is job hunting. Applying for jobs is really hard for me to do. I look at the ads and my brain just tells me that I’m not good enough for any of the jobs, getting louder and louder the more I look at them until I can’t deal with it and I have to look at something else. I know this isn’t a good thing for a person who is unemployed. Even just writing it down like this makes me feel pretty silly about having massive anxiety over this.

When I started looking for jobs after I quit my retail job I spent a day crying over the idea of writing a cover letter. Even after Ben walked me through it patiently and went back to his stuff, I sat there and cried while I applied and tried to not make any noise because I felt so stupid that I was this worked up over it. Recently the same thing happened again over a particular job I wanted to apply to but couldn’t. I cried for an evening and left the ad open in a tab to look at but it was too much for me to handle actually applying. ‘Later,” I’d say. ‘I’ll apply later. I’ll apply tomorrow.’ Then I left it too late and just closed the tab sadly in defeat.

Yesterday I applied for two jobs. I looked at maybe twenty ads and decided I wasn’t good enough/didn’t want to work for the majority of them until these two were the only ones left. Then it took me maybe half an hour to convince myself that I had nothing to lose by applying and forced myself to go through with it. I felt sick while I adjusted my cover letter template to be right, I constantly hesitated before saving things, and it took a few tries to actually press the buttons to apply. But I told myself I had to apply to jobs before I could eat lunch, so I swallowed hard, tried to ignore the voices telling me not to bother and went through with it. I had bought soup so I wasn’t going to skip lunch like I normally do (shh, don’t tell Ben I do that) and it was a way to convince myself to suck it up already.

Then I got depressed to counteract the anxiety. The voices got louder again, saying that it didn’t matter that I applied; these agencies won’t call me back. Why would they? There’s obviously someone out there more suitable for the position, anyone would be better suited for it than me. I don’t even know why I applied in the first place, it’s a pointless activity. I’m going to be unemployed for the rest of my life because I’m a failure. It was getting ridiculous after a while, so I knew I had to stop those thoughts somehow. I watched trashy tv shows and Scout cuddled up behind me on my chair and purred until I felt better, but it still took hours to get over this. Applying for jobs takes up my whole day because of the huge build up and recovery for a five minute act. It’s ridiculous how tiring it can be.

But this is one of those things that doesn’t have an easy fix. I can be as confident as I want that I can do the job advertised, but years of telling myself I’m a useless person is too hard for me to shake off, even with someone telling me constantly for years that I am not actually a waste of space at all. The thing is that these days I know that those voices telling me those awful things aren’t real, they aren’t true, and if it wasn’t this situation that set them off they’d find something else to make me feel bad about. It’s hard to deal with, but there is a part of me that recognises that I’m being irrational. It knows that this feeling will pass, I just have to ride it out. I am learning, albeit slowly, ways to deal with it. Obviously dealing with the situation isn’t helping me get rid of those thoughts, but I guess it’s better than nothing. It’s still pretty harrowing to have to deal with these things on a daily basis, though.

So that is one of my anxieties. I have plenty more, but I’ll probably only write about them occasionally because it’s not a particularly light-hearted topic and I don’t want this place to be all depressing. But I still feel like I need to talk about these things, even if it’s just to remind myself when writing it out that they are irrational. I have trouble remembering that sometimes.

That Movie Book – Week Twenty Nine

Ok, So I know I haven’t been writing these for a while, but never fear, I am back and ready to… uh… give my vague opinions? Let’s do this! This week’s theme was “Serving Up A Platter Of Foodie Movies”. Food is an integral part of life that a lot of time I seem to take for granted. However, whenever I am really hungry or have a really good meal I start rambling on about how food is amazing. I love food so much, all the different things that can be done with food, all the amazing cuisines from various countries, why wouldn’t you enjoy and celebrate such a thing?

I know of a number of people who really only eat because they have to; if there was a magic future pill that gave you all the nutrients you needed so you didn’t have to eat they would use that in a heartbeat and not bother with cooking at all. It’s such a sad thing, because, like I said, food is amazing. There’s no way I would give up butter or garlic or chicken or chocolate or anything else (apart from maybe capsicum) and replace it with a pill or a drink. No Way. Thankfully my metabolism is good enough at the moment to be able to eat whatever I want whenever I want, so I plan to do so with gusto.

And so, that brings us to the first movie I watched this week. Tampopo. This is a Japanese film about a truck driver who stops at a small Ramen shop and has some bad noodles. He then decides to help the Ramen Lady (Tampopo) learn to cook the best ramen around so that she gets more business and can support her son better.

I was pretty intent on watching this film this weekend. Ben didn’t really seem to care about it that much, but I insisted, figuring he could do something else while I watched it. I had forgotten, in my excitement for Japanese cinema, that Japanese movies are, in general, really fucking weird. The movie starts off with a Snazzy Guy and his Ladyfriend sitting down to watch a movie in a cinema with a fancy meal in front of them, where he makes a comment about how he hates being interrupted while watching movies so we (the people watching this) better be quiet. A bit weird way to start off, but nothing really out there. Then the Tampopo storyline started and away we go. But The film kept cutting away from that to show non sequitur types of scenes to do with food that just made no sense because I just wanted to know about Tampopo!

And there was always a weirdly sexual tone to them all. We see Snazzy Guy and Ladyfriend getting all kinky with their room service meals (twice, actually. There is a scene where they pass an egg yolk back and forth between their mouths as some kind of sexy foreplay that made me feel ill); A guy goes to the dentist to get a tooth extracted and the dental assistants were all being sexy to him afterwards, then he went and ate an ice cream in a park and gave it to a little kid to eat and that was made to look vaguely sexual as well; A man rushes home to his dying wife and yells at her to stay alive and make him a meal, she gets off her deathbed, cooks some rice for the family, then keels over while the husband continues to scarf down the food; A Japanese lady is trying to teach the etiquette of eating spaghetti to some young ladies, but a fat Westerner is slurping away at his meal nearby so they all follow his lead and there are just constant shots of ladies messily eating pasta; and that’s only the ones I can remember off the top of my head. All these asides just made me stare at the screen and go “What is going onnnnnnn?!” repeatedly. I tried to just go with the flow and wait until it got back to Tampopo, but it was still really bizarre and wished things would get back to normal.

The whole tone of the film was kinda silly and it definitely didn’t take itself seriously, but Tampopo’s storyline was still a bit more realistic than those other scenes. I liked Tampopo’s story; it’s a pretty generic underdog working hard to get better at what they do to become The Best, but it was cute and not strangely disconcerting like the rest of it. I think I just need to watch more Japanese films to get used to the certain style they have so I don’t balk at weirdness.

On Sunday I watched Fast Food Nation. The film revolves around a fictional fast food company, Mickies, and the various people involved in it throughout the process of making their strongest-selling burger, the Big One.

I didn’t really care for this movie very much at all. The acting was ok, the story not entirely unbelievable (although all the things happening at one place felt like a bit of a stretch), but it wasn’t enough to grab my attention and make me care about it. I think maybe the execution could have been better. It looked older than it was (it had a vaguely late-90s feel to it, even though it was made in 2006) and the picture quality wasn’t great either, making it look cheaply made. It might have been the quality of the version I had more than the actual film itself, but I felt like it was trying to go for the fake documentary style and just missing the mark a little.

Plus, the messages were pretty hamfisted. I kept rolling my eyes at some of the scenes because the dialogue was was very obviously trying to be subtle about how big corporations are evil, but at the same time failing at that miserably. Also, near the end of the film when some people are walking through the ‘Kill Room’ at the meat processing plant, there was a montage where you just watched cows get killed and skinned and chopped up and gutted. As if repeatedly mentioning the kill room wasn’t a big enough hint, I think we got the point about how the place was awful. No need to keep showing us how these places are awful and killing poor dumb cows is a terrible gruesome job. We get it. Move on.

Honestly, this movie just made me want to go rewatch Super Size Me. It took me the length of the film to remember that name, because I realised that all this talk of fast food being terrible reminded me that I hadn’t seen Super Size Me since it first came out in cinemas and that I should probably watch it again.

So Yeah. Two films, one about how food is complex and affects all parts of life and should be revered and the other about how it can be used as a reason to exploit people and make them do not very nice things.

The other suggestions this week were Chocolat, Pieces of April, and Big Night. Next week’s theme is about all about Nazis, so it might be a short one, if I end up writing something at all. Maybe I’ll just intersperse the post with pictures of Kitler to lighten the tone.

Wishful Thinking

It’s strange how people always wish for things they don’t have in their lives, be it more money, better stuff, more stuff, a different partner, a nicer pet, the list goes on. I’m just as guilty of it as everyone else; I’m constantly thinking about how my life would magically be perfect if I just had a gas stove instead of what we have, if Ben put his clothes away instead of leaving them in baskets, if we had less stuff, or a cat that didn’t meow so goddamn much. It’s part of human nature. I think it would be more strange if you didn’t think this way, to be honest. I have taken to looking at pictures of other people’s houses and trying to work out what I want to do to my future house that I own in some degree, and there are definitely some common elements that I keep coming back to.

Lately I’ve been thinking about if I lived somewhere else. Not for any reason in particular, my housemates are both awesome and our house is in a pretty convenient position in terms of where we are in the city and in relation to public transport and shopping, but we all know we’re not going to be living together in this house forever so it’s not really that unreasonable to think about these things. I think sometimes I just get a little stir crazy from being in the same house for a certain amount of time when I can’t really do anything to it. We’ve been living here for a little over a year, and I think it’s the longest I’ve been in the same place (apart from when I lived with my family), so the itch for a change is getting stronger. Plus it’s fun coming up with what I want in my dream home, even though realistically I’ll probably never get my dream home. If we could afford a house like the one we’re in now I’d be pushing to buy it, because this place would be really nice with a few tweaks. I can’t do anything about the screaming neighbours, but decor-wise it could be lovely.

Recently though I’ve been wondering what it would be like if I lived by myself. You see, I’ve never lived alone before; I went from living with my family to on-campus accommodation at uni with five other people in my ‘house’, to back home, to living with Ben in Sydney, then to now with housemates again. Moving in with Ben was supposed to be temporary until I could save up to move into a place of my own, but then it seemed more logical to stick together because the rental market around here is ridiculous and it seemed a bit silly to have to go buy stuff for my own place and then get rid of it later when we inevitably moved in together because of aforementioned rental market. Sometimes we both wonder if we moved in together too quickly, but it’s a bit too late to try living apart now just to see if I like it.

However, if I could afford to live by myself I wonder how it would be. In my mind I would have a sunny attic apartment with big windows that I could just happily spend time in reading or crafting or just being alone; sometimes the world gets too much for a person and you need some time to just be quiet, y’know? I would have a wall full of bookshelves and a big overstuffed leather armchair to snuggle up in. Another wall would be filled with frames of photos and colourful art. There would be a big overstuffed leather armchair where I could curl up under a blanket (that I probably made) and read of an evening. It would be tiny because that’s all I need, with a view of a tree-lined street. I have imagined this impossible apartment for years, since I was old enough to think about leaving home. I’m almost completely certain an apartment like that doesn’t exist in Sydney, and if it does it would be ridiculously expensive.

Also I probably wouldn’t deal well living by myself. While I like being by myself most of the time I am also prone to bouts of melancholy, and without someone to distract me I would probably just end up being miserable for no reason alone in this apartment. More realistically I would just spend all my time on the computer talking to people online (much like I do now), but not eat properly because I am too lazy to think about meals or cook them. It’s not a particularly realistic dream in a number of ways, so I try not to think about it very often, and it reminds me of a time when I was pretty naive and desperate to escape my life at the time. Maybe one day Ben and I will buy a house together that has an attic that I can make into that space. Maybe then the yearning for that daydream that tugs at my insides on occasion would go away.

I just have grand visions of exposed brick and wooden floorboards and a little bedroom with bright sheets on the bed and vases with flowers on the windowsill. In my head it is perfectly clean and tidy instead of full of the predictably messy reality. My kitchen would have mismatched but still matching crockery, bright mugs hanging from hooks on a shelf and open shelves to make the place look bigger than it actually was. I’d have a little table in the kitchen where Ben and I would eat breakfast together on the weekends, drinking coffee and eating pastries while talking about what we wanted to do that day. It’s so ridiculously, unrealistically, perfect but I can’t seem to let go of it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to move on from this idyllic image in my head.

When I think about what we will have to do to save up enough to try and buy our own place and what we will most likely be able to afford it makes me sad. I mean, I’ll be living with the person (and cat) I love, in the city where I feel most comfortable in out of all the places I’ve lived, but it’s not going to be what I imagined. At the moment I would be happy with a place where I can paint the walls and hang frames wherever I want, but there will always be this lingering feeling about how it’s not what I dreamed of. And I wonder if I will ever be happy with a home that isn’t my fantasy place.