quick update!

Whoa too many posts in a week, I need a life. That said, this will only be two lines, so doesn't really count. I changed the address thingy and it needs explaining.

SO I was listening to Edith Piaf's La Vie en Rose which is one of my favourite songs. The line goes, "je vois la vie en rose" or: "I see life in pink (rose tinted glasses)". La vie en brun (brown) just refers to the fact that I tend to complain a lot on this blog. Coincidentally, it's brown. I am also brown.

cya x

neglecting animals

The last week of my life has sucked.

I'd been super busy these holidays until last Wednesday, when it all suddenly... stopped. I've forgotten how to be with myself, and where I would normally rejoice in the freedom and watch movies/read books/paint, I have been filling the vacuum by reading the Daily Telegraph (srsly), stalking facebook (UGH!) or watching crap on youtube. Not all of it's crap, actually, Jane Eyre definitely isn't, and I found these old 50's educational documentaries for young ladehs. They are so funny! Anyway, among the other pathetic things I've done in the last few days, I started re-reading posts here, some for the first time since they were written. Something is definitely wrong with me because when I got to the part about street dogs in this one, I was suddenly overcome and just... burst into tears! I'm not usually a weepy person at all, and I am emotionally quite uncomplicated, so it's not like I had something repressed inside, or anything like that.

Eventually I was back to my normal self, albeit a little bemused. Then I started thinking. Why is human society so pathetic when it comes to taking animal rights seriously? On the one hand, animal activism isn't taboo like environmentalism or feminism might sometimes be. It doesn't raise eyebows in the same way, but unfortunately it doesn't draw much more than lukewarm responses either. Practically everyone will AWWW!! at cute kitties on the net, but why aren't there any hacks on campus, inflamed  about their plight in the same way they would for refugees or marriage equality? No subjects taught that address the issue? Well I assume that's the case, haven't actually checked. Why aren't they having any spirited debate *cough* on QandA about the barbarity of vivisection? What about the people that stop me in Glebe/Broadway? They're always on about poverty unless it's the Wilderness Society (which I've actually signed up to, they seem solid) who always feel the need to make their selling point: "imagine, if your kids can't get to see the Great Barrier Reef...". I have this problem generally with a lot of green campaigns, the human-centricity of it all.  Most crucially, just HOW is something as vile as hunting for leisure not criminalised? Yes I've heard the "overpopulation" story...  well, there's also an overpopulation of Indians in India, let's all pull out our shotguns and take them down, why don't we?

It's not considered politically incorrect to speak crudely of animals, as it is o women or coloured people, but both of these until recently used to be acceptable... so might we hope that things will change in the future? Nah. Our superiority complex is entrenched and the animals don't have voices to fight back with, so I doubt it. Not to mention that it also goes against the interests of capital. I assume that in part, people have been desensitised by well, eating them. I also partly blame the Abrahamic religions (I'm sorry guys, but this really irks me), specifically, the bit where Adam and Eve get chucked out of Eden and God says they are his own beloved creatures and they have priority over the rest. Who knows, maybe He was being sarcastic but it slipped past them. I really don't know, but this story doesn't make any sense to me.

I have definitely found my calling in ecofeminism. Maybe. I'll explain what that is in a later post, it's a little complicated and the wikipedia article on it is a bit rubbish.
Good night my lovelies <3

EDIT: bored, so imma add more words. Soz, flippant/pointless:

I want to write about the third-wave feminist influences on Indian movies these days... what with this Sunny Leone girl (who's like... not even that pretty) and The Dirty Picture, etc. etc. I haven't actually seen an Indian film in months though. hmmm

I don't think I will ever want to be an author again. Writing stories is even more painful than marking them.

Babakiueria

Learning about land reform in PNG and Africa has lately piqued my interest in indigenous Australians. I've been reading up a bit, and I also found this again after a really long time. It's brilliant.

Anji in brief

I've always found the concept of an autobiography stupid (Gandhi's excepted) so writing this feels strange. But this is not an excercise in self-aggrandisement, I promise it actually has a specific purpose. I've noticed that some of my closest friends don't completely "get" me, maybe because some important topics have just never come up in conversation before. If they haven't come up before, there's a fair chance that they also won't in the future and this bugs me.  It's so bizarre when I realise that people I've known for most of my life have no idea that I used to live in Singapore or that I like to paint or that I'm a recovering drug addict.  Inspired by a certain brilliant picture posted on facebook, I've decided to write this to fill in the blanks. It's nowhere near as cool as the drawing and it's about me after all, so you might not find it too scintillating.

Where to start? Well, I was born in Sydney, then my parents got bored and moved to Singapore just to try it out, but they changed their minds and moved back. I went to primary school here, then high school and now I'm studying a bachelor of Political Economic and Social Sciences (B.P.E.S.S.) at the University of Sydney. Don't worry if you can't remember all of that, even my dad can't. I'm majoring (is "majoring" even a real word?) in political economy, pretty sure that I will also be doing honours also because uni is fun and I'd like to put off having to think about scary things like a job. I should have an idea about my thesis by now... all I know is that I am definitely interested in the Washington Consensus and anti-capitalism. I have a fixation with Africa but that may or may not wane by next year. If I do really well, I'm considering either a PhD afterwards, or law... but law sounds dull.

 Oh and I'm not really a recovering drug addict, GOTCHA!! AHAHAHAHAHA.

I've been fond of painting for a while, but it's very casual and I'm only just getting into the theoretical side. I started learning piano recently and returned to singing classical Indian music, i.e. carnatic. Since I was about seven, I've been learning carnatic music on and off. For most of my life I absolutely hated it and my mum for forcing me to persevere. After a long break, I decided to take it up again at the end of last year, pretty much just to prove to myself that I'm not whitewashed. Even if my reasoning was idiotic, (duhh I'm not) I'm glad that I did so because now I really like it.

I wasn't even slightly interested in the world at large till I watched the Motorcycle Diaries in year 12. I was more into literature and stuff, so most of the political views I hold are admittedly, still kind of rough. This is another very good reason that makes me want to stick around uni as long as possible, because getting a job would probably be stifling. I generally identify myself with the far left of the political spectrum: legalise drugs, marriage equality, fix the environment etc. Though I'm majoring (is "majoring" even a real word?) in political economy, my ideas on that aren't very firm either, because the contradictions and tensions of the real world have made me extremely confused. Capitalism is shit but I have no idea whether it needs to be scrapped entirely or if it might be fixed. I don't think the latter is going to be fruitful but the former is too scary. In my opinion we should ideally live in simple, small self-sustaining communes, but I don't normally tell people that because they'd think I'm batshit crazy. I consider the environment to be the most important thing that should be consuming all our attention, yes, even above poverty and human suffering. I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of the deep ecology movement, especially ecofeminism, and talked here about how strongly I feel about vegetarianism. Overall I'm pretty cynical about humanity, uhh yes I should be changing that thing on the left.

I've also expressed my views on religion before, but I should mention that though I consider myself to be a religious person, I don't adversely judge most people who aren't; in fact, I probably sympathise with them just a little. This is because I fanatically value sincerity in people over almost anything else and most people that think they're religious are just narrow-minded dogmatic sanctimonious cray-cray zealots. On the other hand, many atheists are some of the most earnest and honest people I know. But though I can accept their lack of faith, I detest the kind of antitheism Dawkins peddles. For similar reasons, I dislike Evangelism and have some smaller issues with organised religion. I think it's intrinsically personal... really, just mind your own business!

So I'm going through that phase again, when I want to do everything. I'm going to paint and read up on the history of the world in the rest of holidays. I'm going to try some creative writing (?). I also decided to join the Greens and even followed up on that decision, but a squizz through their facebook page is giving me the impression that some of them are crazy... not necessarily a bad thing I suppose, but crucially, it drove home that this will probably involve a lot of arguing. Besides the fact that I'm quite shy around strangers, I'm just not a confrontation person. I can rant about crap here and I can write impassioned essays but I hate fighting. Hmmmmm, verrons!

Speaking of which, I also hate facebook. I really, really hate it and how it distorts natural social relations. By the end of this year I'm going to delete my account! It will be scary. Nobody checks their email any more, so this will probably be my main form of online communication and I promise I'll try to answer my phone more often :)

Now that this is done I'm not sure that I want to post it on facebook, or even send in a private message. It's making me cringe a lot, so I'm going to just leave it here in the hope that the right people chance upon it. There's plenty more I could rabbit on about but I'll leave it for you to find out the natural, human way. urgh

*HUGS*

just to reiterate, I'M REALLY NOT A DRUG ADDICT, OK?