*sigh*

Today, I was determined to write a complete blog in one sitting. Normally, I have three or four blogs that I work on at a time and add and edit bits and pieces until I feel it's ready to publish. Not only could I not complete one whole post in a sitting, I couldn't write anything! My mojo is completely off today :-( Grrr!!

Will try again tomorrow...

Toodles!
xxx

8 True Things

A week or so ago, I was tagged to do the 50 Books Challenge.  50 books in a year!  Easy peasy man! :-) I'm gonna make an effort to review all the books that I read for this little challenge so by......21st September of next year, I should have read and commented on 50 books. 

So the first book that I finished (and I'm cringing writing this) is 'Breaking Dawn' by Stephanie Meyer.  I read the others a few months ago and just didn't get into them so didn't bother reading the last one.  However, I got bullied into reading the final one and, I have to say, it wasn't that bad.  The writing is atrocious and it's a killer anti-climax ending but the storyline is pretty more-ish, I have to say! 

I'm not in much of a writing mood today, so I'm gonna steal a little '8 things' quiz thing from Fras (check out his blog, it's good reading!).

8 Things I look forward to

1) Spending Christmas this year with my family in Australia! :-)
2) Starting my post-grad at Murdoch. Finally, my brain will be in function again!
3) Spending nine glorious days in the beautiful Bali sun.  Bliss!
4) Summer this year! I'm normally more of a cool weather person but after about two years of living in Narnia, I'm looking forward to being warm for a change.
5) Celebrating New Years in Sydney with my Edinburgh pals. Yay!
6) Going for dinner on Saturday with my good friend, Cheresy (,")
7) Having a Quinton Tarantino film night with Ash
8) Many more travel adventures!


8 Things I did yesterday (in order)

1) Had left-over chicken for breakfast
2) Listened to some toe-tapping 80's tunes
3) Worked for a measly three hours
4) Played with my new phone (sooo cute and pink!)
5) Wrapped Ashley's birthday presant (which is about 2 weeks late)
6) Took way too many stupid pictures of myself for daily booth
7) Washed my car for the first time in three months (poor Agatha!)
8) Danced my socks off :-)

8 Things I wish I could do

1) Fly :-)
2) Have my own creativity button.  Push 'on' and churn out amazing writing everytime
3) Play guitar
4) Speak French and Italian
5) Travel whenever I want
6) See all the people in my life that I miss so much
7) Get my revenge on all the people in my life who annoy me! Mwahahaha! (kidding, kidding...)
8) Get my dream job of being a travel writer

8 Movies I love right now

1) Amelie
2) Virgin Suicides
3) Braveheart
4) Legends of the Fall
5) The Other Boleyn Girl
6) Stepmom
7) Across the Universe
8) Troy

*Now Fraser's last list was was '8 Albums I currently adore' but I'm much more a book kinda girl so mine will be '8 Books I cannot live without!*

1) Bible
2) Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
3) Voice in the Wind - Francine Rivers
4) 'Chocolat' and 'The Lollipop Shoes' by Joanne Harris
5) 'Girl with the Pearl Earring' - Tracy Chevalier
6) 'The Bell Jar' - Sylvia Plath
7) 'Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
8) 'The Virgin Suicides' - Jeffrey Eugenides (loved both the book and movie)

Miss Manship and the Bible of Dreams

When I was in my final year of uni, I took a psychology/writing unit called 'Writing Therapy'.  The purpose of the class was to examine the therapeutic benefits of writing and to discern whether writing can be a help or a hinderance in some situations (using writers such as Plath and Sexton...was the outlet of writing a delaying of the inevitable or could it have been the cause of them taking their lives?).  Anyways, one of the exercises for the class was to put a pen and paper right next to your bed and start writing the minute you open your eyes in the morning.  Apparently, because you are still in a semi-dreamlike state when you first awake, you are likely to be more in touch with your subconscious.  The idea interested me a lot and so I started setting my alarm five minute earlier in the morning and writing down my dreams.  Once I started writing down the dreams, they started getting more and more vivid.  Every night my dreams were getting stranger and stranger and I was enjoying capturing them on paper so much that I was even setting my alarm to go off in the middle of the night so that I could write down more of my dreams.  Slightly obsessive, I know but some of the material that I was getting for my writing was unbelievable.  I would get up in the morning with notes from the night before (usually stuck to my face or written on my arm) and have no recollection of the dreams themselves.  I have notebooks full of these dreams and not I want to start recording them on my blog but I don't really want them to get in the way of my regular blog so I've set up a separate blog purely for the purpose of recording some of my more elaborate dreams.  It's just an experiment at the moment but if anyone is interested in having a squiz, the address is

http://missmanshipandthebibleofdreams.blogspot.com/

Sweet dreams (,")

Marmalade Musings

*Dream from the eve of September 10, 2009*


In this particularly vivid dream (not too long after watching 'Coraline' by the way), I had a bit of an Alice in Wonderland moment and stepped through my bedroom door into a nightclub.  It was a bit of a 'Jazzbar' type club, three levels underground and quite cosy.  The weirdest part of the dream (not the fact that I had a club connected to my bedroom, of course) was that everything in the club was orange.  It was called 'Zest' and absolutely everything in the room was a shade of orange.  Coloured lampshades threw a tangerine glare on the faces of the club-goers (who were all Scottish redheads apart from two 'Bugsy Malone' white rabbits sat at the bar, mixing gin and tonics with carrot stick stirrers). There were baskets of orange tic-tacs on pumpkin-patterned tablecloths and big, orange thought bubbles floating above people's heads, popping every now and then and dousing the thinker in a citrusy spray.  Coldplay's 'Yellow' and Simply Red were playing over the soundsystem.

It was almost like being trapped in that Beatle song...

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies


What does this all mean??  I don't even like orange...

Untitled Piece of Prose

*AUTHOR UNKNOWN*

I stood on a grassy embankment,
And at my feet a precipice broke sure down to infinite space.
I looked but saw no bottom, only cloud shapes, black and furiously coiled.
A great shadow shrouded hollows and unfathomable depths,
I drew back, dizzy at the depth.

Then I saw forms moving single file along the grass
They were making for the edge
I saw a woman with a child, holding onto her dress
She was on the very verge

Then I saw that she was blind
she lifted her foot for the next step
It trod air
She was over and the child with her
and, oh the cry as they went over

And then I saw more streams of people,
Flowing from all quarters
All were blind, totally blind, all making straight for the precipice edge
There were shrieks as they suddently felt themselves falling
And tossing up of helpless arms
Catching, clutching at empty air

But some went over quietly and fell without a word

I wondered with a wonder that was simple agony why no-one stopped them at the edge
I couldn't
I was glued to the ground
I couldn't call, though I strained and tried
Only a whisper would come

And then I saw along the edge
There were centuries set at intervals
But the intervals were far too great
There were wide, unguarded gaps between them and over these gaps people fell in their blindness
Quite unwarned

And the green grass seemed blood-red to me
And the gulf yawned like the mouth of hell

Then I saw a picture of peace
A group of people sitting under some trees with their backs towards the gulf
They were making daisy chains

Sometimes when a piercing shriek cut through the quiet air and reached them
It disturbed them and they thought it a rather vulgar noise
And if one of their number started up and wanted to go and do something to help,
The all the others would pull that one down

'Why should you get so excited about it?
You must wait for a definite call to go,
You haven't finished your daisy chain yet
It would be really quite selfish,' they said, 'to leave us to finish the work by ourselves.'

There was another group
It was made up of people whose great desire was to get more centuries out
But they found that very few wanted to go
And sometimes there were no centuries set for a mile on the edge

Once a girl stood alone in her place
Waving people back
But her mother and relations called and reminded her that her time was up
And she mustn't break the rules
And being tired and needing a change, she had to go and rest for awhile

But no-one was set to guard her gap,
And over and over the people fell
Like a waterfall of souls

Once a boy caught a tuft of grass at the very brink of the gulf
He climbed convulsively and he called
But no-one seemed to hear

Then the roots of the grass gave way
And with a cry, the boy went over
With two hands still holding tight to the torn-off bunch of grass

And the girl who longed to be back at the gap
Thought she heard the young boy cry and she sprang up, wanting to go
But they reproved her, reminding her that no-one is really necessary anywhere
The gap will be well-taken care of

And they sang a hymn,
And then, through the hymn, came another sound
A sound like a million broken hearts,
Wrung out in one fearful sob,
And a horror and great darkness was upon me,
For I knew what it was,
It was the cry of blood

*Reminiscing of a summer past*

After my recent jaunt of being a penniless traveller, I am slightly overwhelmed with the amount of clutter I have accumulated in my room. A major clear-out is in progress and between the stacks of sheet music and pressed flowers, I found this note. It's dated a few days after my return from my trip to Scotland in 2007, my first ever trip away from home and was scribbled in the wee hours of one of my jet-lag induced sleepless nights.

'I am missing Edinburgh. I miss cold, stone buildings and misty meadows and twenty different shades of lush green. I miss the buzz of learning and laughing and singing. Excitement and pleasure and feeling as though I have never been happier than at this very moment. I miss Carly and Liza, Amir and Tashi, Roxanne and Will and my Spanish senoritas. I miss feeling dumb and inspired and light and slightly beautiful. Also, the lovely sensation of belonging. I miss Japanese tourism, pillaging, dancing and discovering.

I miss being the Pied Piper and the lone Australian. I miss being Red. I miss being a mystery. Life without chores and T.V. and my cellphone (but not facebook...that I could not live without). I miss early morning lectures and frosty nights and terrible cafeteria food. I miss grumpy old ladies and blistered ankles and broken glasses.

I miss defiant graffiti!

I miss sparkly red Dorothy shoes and terrible pick-up lines and even worse poetry scribbled in the sleepy aftermath of a beautiful dream. I miss having beautiful dreams. I miss the colourful Indian shops, cluttered second-hand bookshops and classy vintage stores.

Like that place where you bought your kilt from.

I miss being able to get away with wearing pink snakeskin ballet slippers and shiny blue tap shoes. Roald Dahl coffee mugs and C.S. Lewis biographies. Being defiant and cheeky and indulged enough to get away with it. I miss sharing secrets and wicked whispers in dirty pubs and trendy coffee shops and having my grammar corrected. Persian and Hebrew, Spanish and Gaelic. I miss feeling alive.'

The Weird and Wonderful folk of Edinburgh!

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in one of my favourite coffee shops along Nicholson street. I was in one of the booths facing the street and was thoroughly intrigued with the people I saw passing. Nowhere in the world have I loved people-watching as much as I have in Edinburgh. Old Town especially seems to have an abundance of people who simply like being a bit quirky and off-beat. These are just a few of the people that I saw during the course of two hours and three regular lattes:

~ A young woman of about twenty appears in the window of the second-storey flat above Tescoes directly opposite me. It is possibly one of the busiest places on Nicholson street, yet she doesn't seem to realise this as she throws the curtains open with gusto, wearing nothing more than a pale blue T-shirt that reads 'Little Miss Naughty'.

~ A 'Kirstyn Knowles' look-alike (maybe even her!). She has dark auburn hair worn down over her shoulders with bright turquoise eyeshadow. But her most distinguishing feature! A pair of apple-green stripey 'Wizard of Oz' tights. If she had been carrying an electric guitar in her hands, she would not have looked at all out of place.

~ During the course of the morning, a black jacket is dropped on the pavement. This presents a fascinating dilemma! Will someone pick it up and keep it? Put it on a bench to stop it from getting dirty and stepped on? Ignore it and blatantly step on it? The young student who looks like she will become a nurse or a vet such her innocent eyes and kind face dodges it like a dog poop in her path. The grandad with the cuddly jumper and jelly belly actually stopped and stood on it for a while. It turned out to be a tattoed hobo with one massive dreadlock running down his back that picked the jacket up and folded it neatly onto the bus bench for the owner to find.

~ The strangest little woman just walked past! She must have been well into her sixties with white, white hair and a pin-striped business suit. However, underneath the jacket, she had on a pink and silver ruffled satin blouse with a matching bag. Not pretty, lacey satin that could look quite feminine underneath a suit jacket. The kind of cheap, trashy blouse that you would buy in less reputable shops. The frosted pink eyeshadow painted up to the pencilled eyebrows and letterbox red lipstick added the finishing touches to the whole ensemble.

*Why are there so many people walking around with guitars here?*

~ I take it back! I have now seen the strangest woman in Edinburgh! She is a tiny, hunched-over lady supported by what looks to be her daughter or maybe her carer. She is wearing a midnight blue velvet cloak that could quite easily be mistaken for a magician's cape. Perhaps she is in the theatre? Sticking out from the hem of her cloak are the thinnest, spindliest legs I have ever seen. And I don't mean 'lolli-pop lady' thin - I mean 'where the heck are your bones' thin. You might think that she would be wearing comfortable, flat leather granny shoes. Her frailty might excuse her wearing slippers even. No, this little lady had on nothing short of the sparkliest, brightest, cherry-red stilletoes I have ever seen.

~ A genuinely pretty girl is walking along by herself. Every detail of her is perfect, matching, clean and crease-free. Her hair and make-up are immaculate. She obviously puts a lot of care into her appearance. Either that or she is extremely meticulous. Her eyes are glued to the pavement as she walks along with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She peeks out from under her fringe and, seeing someone glance in her direction, blushes terribly and walks faster.

*Scratch what I previously said. Edinburgh is just plain full of weirdos. Some guy just walked past, stopped dead in his tracks in front of me, stared intently for a good thirty seconds and then yelled 'nice laptop! with two thumbs up! Haha!*

~ I love the boldness of this one girl dashing down the street in the rain! Her outfit clashes horribly but she certainly makes a statement! She is wearing a red trenchcoat with flat red pumps. Underneath, she has on a royal blue dress with little red hearts all over it. Finally - the killer detail and the cause of the outfit clash - royal blue tights!