so uninspired

And I can't do this maths question. Exams are on Thursday and Friday and I think I've got things sorted (well I will have by then) but there's so much maths to do that's not even being tested. 

Feeling so ick right now. My minds all over the place and I haven't been taking care of myself and my usually cooperative skin is not cooperating. 

Think I will go to watch The Fault in Our Stars with friends on the Friday (we only have English which is 40minutes). Yeah that sounds good. I loved that book. What a typical teenage girl, right? 

There's no time for anything. I can't read for fun and I can't think for fun. I just do. But I never do enough. Sigh.

And I haven't taken a good selfie in like forever. Double sigh.

No inspiration. I don't have any direction for this post. But that doesn't matter. I'm going to keep writing until i have something to say. 

Oh yeah. My mum asked if I wanted to go to Shanghai late November because my HSC will be over. Usually I would be quite scared and nervous to go back by myself without my parents or my sister even, who has gone with me the past two times so at least I wasn't all alone but this time I was literally just like hell yes. I miss that place. I was so naive and boring the last time I went. No appreciation for the history. Or the slight nuances of the aesthetics architecturally and just in general. I miss it like fuck. So I was really excited and basically just said yes and my stomach was doing happy cartwheels and I couldn't wait to go back and see my grandma and all the family and my dad's old friends and their kids who are older than me but were still pretty easy to talk to the last time I was there. I didn't get any really good photos last time so this time I was going to capture things properly, all the French Concession buildings and how they're falling apart but still beautiful in a way that makes me think what it must have been like living in Shanghai in the late 19th to early 20th century. They called it the Paris of the East. Also the shopping is good. They have H&M and we don't. So much more freedom too. Australia is so expensive. China is to an extent, but not as bad. Especially the markets ! You can find so many cute trinkets and little knick knacks and useless shit that's pretty cool. 

But it's not certain. Actually for certain reasons it's quite unlikely I'm gonna be able to go. But maybe I might still be able to go. Maybe I'm too used to taking maybe as a no.

But it sucks. Until they tell me I can go, I'm gonna assume it's a no. So basically I have very little to look forward to after the HSC. It will be schoolies a week after my exams end and then I have a few days before formal and then possibly a family friend's formal (bc he is a chicken and refuses to ask the girl he likes. Also, I can't tell if he's fucking with me when he mentioned her. Or if she exists. He has a tendency to "troll" as he puts it. Either way I hate when people do that.) schoolies should be good but I'm scared that will be all I do. But it's down to me I guess. I'm just gonna slave my ass away for the next year bc I've already decided I'm going to go to Europe next year. I used to follow Ebba Zingmark's blog religiously and she went on a Eurorail trip around Europe and it sounds really cool. Also I'm getting The Tourist vibes about this. Like Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. They were on a train and it went from like France to Italy so I really just want to do something like that. Where else is on my list? Iceland, Chile, the whole of Europe (esp France, Spain and Italy. Also Greek Islands. And Austria/Germany and where all the cool architecture and kind of super old but classy buildings are. Like castles !) 

I follow this girl called Engracia (of vilicity if you want to find her tumblr) and she is so amazing and inspiring and she was in Italy for 2months ish and all her photos were so beautiful and Italy is so beautiful and I really want to go for that reason. Her life is actually the epitome of my goals. 

Hmm so that's something to look forward to I suppose. But still what am I going to do this year?!! Please if you have any suggestions as to where to go/see/do in Sydney region then tell me and I will love you forever. 

I'm dying here. Please let there be concerts and festivals to go to. I really wish Lana del Rey would tour Australia. 

Also the hockey's on. Stayed up til 1am last night watching it. So beautiful the way they control the ball. 

It's this castle in Hungary. I forgot the name. Hungarian as a language looks terrifying. Like Polish. 

From vilicity.tumblr.com - she was in Washington and I think it is proof of her superhuman talent that she makes Washington look beautiful bc honestly I have never even had a single thought about Washington until she posted these pics

The sky was nice. 

Friend's birthday party last week. It was good. So much fun playing Just Dance haha.

Just things I'm thinking of getting. Also on the list is a black velvet skirt or a black or white tulle skirt? Idk. So many things I want.

From fourchu.tumblr.com - seriously wish this was me right now. 

How perfect is she? And that dress

Sort of in love with this outfit from Macgraw at MBFWA

Sorry kind of got bored with this post halfway through. Trying to track down a film camera. Maybe I'll get the Fujifilm instax 90 

vagabond soul dancer

I love how that (phrase? clause? idk) sounds. It's from Robert Dessaix's (oh god, everything from him is designed to challenge my literacy skills - can we even put apostrophes after x?) novel Night Letters which just so happens to be our new novel in English Extension, and I'm actually really liking it. A lot of it is pretentious, but that completely escaped me until it was the focus in class the other day, bc I usually like the pretentious texts which assume you get all the inter textual references they make every other page. 

Just got back from our weekly grocery shopping trip and my feet hurt like fuck. I thought it would be a good idea to wear heels today. God I am so impractical sometimes. But the lower half of me is so cute today. 

Nearly cried in the car on the way back, when my mum was talking about her early days as an international student, and all the things they did to save money bc to get out of china one needed to take out a considerably large loan at the time (communist china sucked. Everyone was poor) and it was meant to be funny and these other old Asians (I have no idea who they are, I just know they have a son here, and a granddaughter who is half Chinese and half Korean and tag along with us every Saturday sigh) laughed along and so did my mum but I was trying my hardest to not burst into tears bc it makes me feel like an ungrateful and spoilt little brat. I owe so much to my parents, and it's something I can't (won't) forget. Especially when I complain about not having a life bc of school and wanting to ditch an ordinary life in favour of something exciting. Life out of a suitcase. 

Everything makes me want to cry nowadays though. I don't understand myself. I've changed a lot. I barely even remember how I used to be. I used to be really conscious of how i act or what I say, and I made an effort to be less antisocial and be all peppy and not scared of people which I am glad I did because now I'm pretty damn good at small talk with like old people or strangers when the need arises, but I literally just say whatever shit comes to mind now around people I know and it ends up more awkward than small talk lol. They are probably thinking "fuck what the hell happened to her over the years". 

But I'm having all sorts of thoughts I never had before. Sometimes I'll hate how I look. Sometimes I'll hate who I am. I guess it's just because I feel the time for deciding who I am, goals or whatever, is coming to an end and i should be the girl I want to be by now. 

Long overdue camp photos. Last three aren't taken by me. Was a really good time, for many reasons 

Coffee is ridiculously photogenic. It's become a routine for me and my sister to visit this cafe on Sunday afternoons. 

Lol

Friday trips to Towers 

School drags the life out of me

Goals

Sister

Told you it was cute 

Want both of them omg

je malheureuse, je suis responsable

Godard's Nana Kleinfrankenheim in Vivre Sa Vie makes a lot of sense. I love French films for that. They always have the best quotes. 

There's an entire scene in that movie which was earth shatteringly clever but simple at the same time, and as I nodded along I couldn't help but feel a longing for who I used to be. 

[voila, the scene when Nana meets with Yvette and Yvette says it's not her fault she's miserable]

Moi, je crois qu’on est toujours responsable de ce qu’on fait… Et libre…

Je lève la main, je suis responsable. Je tourne la tête à droite, je suis responsable. Je malheureuse, je suis responsable. Je fume une cigarette, je suis responsable. Je ferme les yeux, je suis responsable.

J’oublie que je suis responsable, mais je le suis… Après tout, tout est beau…

Après tout, les choses sont comme elles sont… Et la vie, c’est la vie.

This is how I think. This is how I used to think. I haven't been the most rational person in the past week though. I've been a mess, if I'm honest. Because I don't know how to feel, or why I feel so much at once, because I'm so used to not caring that I don't know how to stop caring about someone. I want to ask so badly what it is that went wrong, or if anything's wrong at all because if someone was doing something that pissed me off or upset me greatly I would speak up, but I can't bring myself to chase after him when he walks away. 

People confuse me so much sometimes, and it scares the fuck out of me that one day can literally change everything. And then I hate myself for not doing anything to change it when I can and should. I've played this game too many times before, so I understand if he is avoiding me, because that's what I did as well, but I never thought it'd hurt this much being the recipient. 

I will do something about it, I promise. 

But it's not just him, to be honest, I'm just having a shit time at school. There's so much work to do that I live in a perpetual state of panic, and I'm sad when I think about the amount of people around me who are too complacent to live any life beyond the mundane ritualised tedium their parents have in mind for them. And that some are ok with it. It just makes me want to work harder so I can see the world, while swearing under my breath that I won't let their reluctance affect me. I'm not scared because others are, that's just stupid. 

We've found a place for schoolies though, and I must say that it's pretty sick. We're heading to Avoca Beach, which happens to be near Terrigal, which is where half my grade happens to be going. Found out the other day that when people said Terrigal, they actually meant Avoca Beach so now I'm kind of pissed that there's gonna be so many people there. The house is actually amazing, there's one room which looks like the room where we first meet Daisy Buchanan in the movie. I'm going to have a blast photographing that. 

My friends, lovely as they are, aren't very keen on getting drunk though, and really, it's probably going to be the only thing I want to do so I can forget the entire fucking HSC year. 

Also, I'm really excited that we're doing Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters in English and that the whole focus is going to be the decay of his marriage with Sylvia Plath, because she's my favourite poet ever. No one understands just how excited this makes though, or how Sylvia Plath's poetry literally gives me tingles over my whole body, and makes me want to cry half the time, because of the sheer magnitude of her emotion in her poems.

non dulce non et decor

I feel so restless, when I really should be throwing myself into my chemistry work with vigour because exams are coming up and my understanding of nuclear chemistry right now is just little balls flying around and hitting each other and KABOOM the world is ending. 

But here I am, blogging and waiting for my sister to finish bullshitting her essay so we can watch teen wolf together. 

Tumblr makes me feel so lonely at times, and then I cringe when I contemplate the fact I am entering the slippery slope of turning into an attention seeking little brat, who is one step away from stating her favourite book is Lolita and quoting song lyrics on every single damn post for self promotion. Like, every single person on that website is depressed and the more I look at how sad and pathetic and desperate some people are, the more depressed I feel myself. 

Why that site fetishises sadness and mental health issues is beyond me, and irritates me to no end bc if I see another 13 yr old claim to have an eating disorder bc they threw up once, or have depression bc they thought they'd try cutting themselves bc they were sort of sad, I will be tempted to punch something. It's not cool, nor is it fashionable or artistic to be fucked up. 

Of course, I'm not saying that mental health is not important BECAUSE IT IS, but my only issues with that lie in the fact that by telling people that all their problems matter, we're seriously distorting what "suffering" is. Everyone has issues, and everyone gets sad, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're depressed, rather sometimes you just need to learn to suck it up. Resilience, people.

Friday: it was so good

Friday night: my bible 

Saturday: I was hobbling by the end of the day bc of a blister

Saturday afternoon: didn't get that cami, the straps were too long ):

It started raining like crazy. Like actually crazy. 

I tried herbal jelly milk tea for the first time ever. So good

Some of the reasons why I'm permanently broke 

I got my big hoops on

X

Jess

an ode to art

Between my many existential crises of the past month, I've reached an impasse in my life. 

I started a new tumblr (I'm prone to doing this like every few months), and I was going to do fashion posts on there, but now it's more of a photography blog, and kind of an ode to my love of skies. I've been inspired by Nan Goldin's work, and it's kind of made me keen to get back into taking photos. I love the feeling of capturing moments, and my nostalgic/sentimental tendencies, apart from making me cry a lot, romanticise little moments a LOT. I think in pictures, and I want the physical proof for when memory later fails. 

But I digress, I will continue doing fashion posts somewhere, because really, fashion was my first love, and an artistic outlet for me. I've decided I'm going to combine my love for clothes with my love of writing/reading/quotes and so that's a project I'm going to work on after my exams. 

Also, I'm kind of in a I-have-nothing-to-wear-what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking-when-I-bought-this-animal-printed-harem-pant moment in my life, and have decided that from now on, I will only buy black, white, or vaguely-90s looking clothing items (read: I really want a tartan skirt and anything worn in clueless, bc you know, it's clueless). I need to buy some basics before going crazy (it's hard because I have all sorts of phases where I'm like yes, I wanna look like a mermaid on acid) 

Yes, I have the best friends in the world. 

Mmhmm the Windsor Smith Lilies :)

lol, with my sister sleeping in the background - this was from last week when our hot water system broke and I went for like 3 days without showering and a week without washing my hair. Ick. 

Looking mighty impressed - this photo doesn't show it, but my mascara was so good that day

On the drive home from math tutoring - fisheye looks pretty cool 

I found a picture book for my history extension project lol 

Hey it's a cartoon hitler

I can't really stand Vogue but everything else is cool with me. Thursday afternoons. 

The suburbs

Something is fucking wrong with me. I bought a wig on a whim. Tempted to dye my hair now

What I wore yesterday. 

Lol we went to daiso and my sister wanted to get stickers

I'm actually in love

Oh did I mention my sister bought a copy of Rookie Yearbook Two?! It's like my bible. 

I have to go write up my chemistry practical now. 

My photography tumblr: manicpixiegrrl.tumblr.com

Xx

Jess