Blink182 gig

 
 
all photos via Triple M


I had a realisation on Friday.
Blink182 are actually poets and kind of hopeless romantics.
Well..
Dick joke telling poets and hopeless romantics.


Anyway, these two songs were my favourites from the set.
The acoustic part was pretty eye-opening too. I didn't really
expect too much from the gig. To be honest I didn't expect anything from the new album
and it's pretty good. I love being proven wrong!
And their 'substitute drummer' was shredding away like there was no tomorrow.
I think it's just the entertainment value that suffered a little from Travis not being there. I imagine seeing this tiny little tattooed and pierced guy beating the shit out of his drum set to be quite awesome.
Looks like I have another thing to add onto my bucket list.
Seeing the lot play a gig. Preferably during a crazy as 80ies movie boobie roadtrip in the US. Or my living room?
Call me!

Craig and Lena

It's awesome how Craig Ferguson and Lena Dunham have this amazing chemistry and the whole interview is exciting, funny and completely unrelated to anything these two are currently doing in their real life (speak: current professional projects noone wants to hear about).

You know those awkward interviews on late night shows (and I'm not talking Joaquin Pheonix-awkward, I mean fake Angelina Jolie-awkward). I absolutely hate them. I much prefer people talking about "larding" and pretending to be snake charmers....

Adventure time: "Can you keep a secret?"

I have this inbuilt restlessness that makes me feel extremely uncomfortable when I happen to not leave the house for a certain amount of hours. You know those people that get moody and angry when they try to be lazy? Yep. I am one of them. This feeling if uselessness and wasteful handling of precious time is such an overpowering one, that even when I am sick or really run down I feel like HAVING to do something. Maybe I should see a doctor about that... HA!

Anyway, at least this sense of restlessness gets me around the place on a regular basis and so it happened that I ended up in this gorgeous Haus of vintage (it is an actual house!) yesterday afternoon.

They have a facebook page and turns out the ladies are organising a great variety of events on a monthly and weekly basis (dinner parties at the boutique...great stuff!)
Sounds like a frivolous and frankly fantastic life style! (The new F-word is frivolous, guys!)

Casually drooling over my keyboard

There is something really off-putting about the H&M website. They stock so many basics you have to go into eagle-eye mode and search pages in order to spot the good stuff.
Good stuff you might wonder?

Just scroll down and the product will speak for itself (And the award for smooth as hell overtures goes to....?)

EUR 34.95

EUR 29.95

best pleather I have seen in a while. EUR 19.95

EUR 19.95

Yes, yes. This one too. EUR 29.95

horse skirt. staple in everyone's wardrobe. EUR 14.95

Life Lessons

Today: What I learnt from Physical Education in primary school.

Yes, I did actually learn a life lesson in PE, all while completely failing at refining my motor skills and general fitness (to this day I am unable to climb a rope. It's the ugly truth. I have to admit I have not yet been confronted with a life or death situation that would have required me to successfully climb a rope so maybe making me feel so upset about the lack of upper body strength was a fail on my teacher's side, but it's definitely on a '100 page and growing' to-do-list. AAaaaand breath....)

Today I am not talking about how humiliating it was to be a chubby girl that had to strip down to her underpants to then squeeze into a pair of orange bike shorts and a t-shirt (hand me downs from my siblings for sure) that without fail had a print of a fucking palm tree on it. Oh my...good old locker room. The breeding ground for childhood traumas.

While this, oddly enough, turned me into a hobby nudist, I learned something very important outside of the locker room and inside of the gym.
I remember whenever the teacher was lazy, hungover or angry with one of the students, he would work us up real bad and let us play dodge ball. Now I am not too familiar with the rules of dodge ball here, but back home we call it "Voelkerball", split up the class into two groups and these two groups fight (= aggressively throwing a leather ball) each other. That is, until two of the same group are left and then have to smash each other... isn't there already a lesson disguised in smelly gym clothes right there? Don't trust anyone! ANYONE! If it comes down to the two of you they will turn around smash you in the face with a leather ball that's hard as rock, without a moment of hesitation. Humans...what a rotten species!

So anyway, playing Voelkerball always had a pretty predictable order of events. The really lazy or fat kids would get hit first, because they didn't want to run and therefore where an easy target. I hate to put this into writing, but we also always hid behind the really fat kids, because they were a great shield. We were horrible. I know. Then there were the nerd kids, and the popular kids always tried to  hit them really hard either in the face or the crotch. Now the nerd kids where always hated by everyone in school, which made it even more appealing to hit them really hard, because even the teachers would cheer when they started crying. No jokes. Real life events.
Then there were the semi-popular kids and I belonged to that group. We got targeted next. Now I don't remember much about this particular part, except for sweating in terror and trying to remain as unappealing a traget for getting smashed with a leather ball as possible, but I do remember that whenever we got hit the popular kids pretended that the ball was now "dirty" and didn't want to touch it, especially if it hit us on the ass, which added another level of humiliation to the whole concept that is primary school PE.
Eventually the popular kids were left and the rest of us, wounded, angry, ashamed, some of us crying watched these fuckers kill each other.
Towards the end those two or three boys and girls were so worked up they completely overestimated themselves and usually ended up with an ugly injury (see: broken nose or finger, bloody tongues, open knees) and a broken ego.
The winner was cool for the 2 min between PE and Maths and that was the extend of his/her glory.

So yeah...while this last paragraph might have been a bit of an unrelated slice of my life, I suppose you have to look at the bigger picture, the 'concept of dodge ball' in order to filter the life lesson I am talking about.
You have to keep on moving, otherwise you get eaten alive. You stand still for just a moment and a rock hard ball is already coming your way.
The lesson is: Avoid stagnation! Avoid stagnation of the mind, it's the biggest disease of our society. We have cultural revivals of past decades, because our minds are too small to create a culture of our own. We're too lazy to invent, so we take from the past.
 
Stagnation is what kills relationships. The concept of "routine" is the enemy. You don't evolute together and you'll start boring each other, which will most likely lead to either one of you starting a secret and tumultuous relationship with a pregnant stripper or something...
 
Stagnation is what kills your content. If you don't challenge yourself once in a while, if all you have in life is your work/weekend routine you will eventually become unsatisfied with where you are, who you are and who you are with, start taking copious amounts of Xanax and dump your murdered co-workers in acid baths Patrick  Bateman - style.

Come on now, don't let life smash you in the face. Move out of the way.
Do something!

Cravings

I like you! Be my friend. via asos

Adventure time: Lunar New Year at the Buddhist temple

On Sunday Dan and I went to the Buddhist temple here in Brisbane to have a look at the Lunar New Year celebrations.
The incredibly well groomed garden and cute lagoon next to it already did the job for me, but what we got to experience inside the temple was extremely inspirational.
There was a ceremony going on in one of the prayer rooms, the smoke and smell of incense was everywhere and lots of people gathered around to either participate or watch the ceremony.
I found it fascinating to see all of these people singing, kneeling and standing up, becoming a part of the room, the atmosphere. At one stage I actually had to hold back tears at the sight of this completely alien but beautiful culture. Yeah, I am THAT girl...


Once the ceremony was over the monks disappeared into a separate room and as they walked past I found myself being in complete awe over their lifestyle, their spirituality and their sense of being whole.
How good would it be to do what our society deems as "little to nothing" on a daily basis, yet feeling completely content, satisfied, one with everything around you?
Imagine not having to do what you have to do every day, without lacking a sense of accomplishment?
Heck, I feel like an insufficient human being if I decide to just read for 3 hrs, without doing the washing at the same time. What if that feeling would be replaced by something greater, something meaningful? What if I could live without worrying about money altogether?

Now don't tell me that wouldn't be flipping amazing!

But yes, yes. Even I have to return to the normal world at least at some point, but what I took with me from this adventure is a realization, one that clearly points out that possessions, location, social status, career, beauty - they don't mean shit, they don't contribute to anyone's happiness. It's about how you feel about yourself and the people around you. There is no recipe for happiness, it is not in the least affected by anything outside of yourself. Happiness is a mindset.
It's your choice.


Now: Adventure photos

Future feature fantastique

I have been thinking a lot about where I would like to go with this blog for the upcoming year.
It needs a revamp as much as my motivation and passion for it does - I hardly ever blog on time these days and this is mostly (fully) due to my own lack of interest in ANYTHING at the moment, as well as being short on time like...all the time.

Fashion will still be a part of it, but I feel it needs more variety. And let's be honest: Even though I enjoy fashion, I do tend to roll my eyes at a lot of the trends/copies of trends that are currently flooding the shops, as well as the people who mindlessly buy anything and everything deemed 'in'.
Also pricing is a factor and while a lot of bloggers have the financial assets, they also get sponsored a lot. Neither of that is currently part of my life and I also feel a refreshing urge to get rid of a lot of clutter, not accumulate more.

So here's the deal: I want to concentrate on life. Yes. Life. Unspectacular, I know. And kind of a broad spectrum ("Isn't fashion a part of life?" Uhm. Yes. But not the ONLY one).
I want to write about stuff that influenced me and influenced other people (feel free to contact me for any requests). I want to introduce new features to this blog, a few of them I have already roughly outlined, one of them will actually start this week (Stay tuned!). This might mean I won't be able to blog daily, but I am already stupidly failing at this so the losses there will be minor.

Once I have reconciled with my charger I will also take up a little bit of real DSLR photography again and give my smartphone camera a break. (Giving up instagram though? NEVER!) 

I am looking into starting a few interesting courses and classes and will start traveling a little bit more around my own neighborhood, a place that is still kind of strange and new to me. It's interesting how I never really gave this city the opportunity to introduce itself to me. There are so many places I only discovered form traveling so much for work (after 2.5 years of living here), but that I have yet to explore. Considering how little time and money it takes to explore and make memories (compared to a visit to the mall), I am baffled as to why I don't do this stuff more often.
Travel has turned me into a completely different person, but even with being in just the one location the possibilities of self-exploration and, you know...putting yourself out there are pretty much endless.


So yeah.

random photo of the crystal dome at the Swarovski museum in Austria. Love that place. It's a sparkly masterpiece, although seeing your reflection in a million facets is bound to make your go a bit weird. Put a visit on your to-do list!

Hipster husband

when I bully him into buttoning up his shirt AHAHAHA

Insirational writing

This is too good not to share. While I don't agree with all of it (some of it sounds a little too "conspiracy theory" to me), I can relate to the whole wastefulness after traveling. I think it's a natural reaction to fill a void that is only natural to appear, when your lifestyle transitions from "different places and faces errday" to "9-5". But hey, you have to take your own life into your own hands and make the right choices, no matter what the circumstances....

Anyway, have a read a and visit the website for some brain juice production stimulation writing.

YOUR LIFESTYLE HAS ALREADY BEEN DESIGNED

Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling.
Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before.
Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and I don’t get to savor the experience of drinking them on a sunny café patio. When I was away these purchases were less off-handed, and I enjoyed them more.
I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. And I won’t actually get paid for another two weeks.
In hindsight I think I’ve always done this when I’ve been well-employed — spending happily during the “flush times.” Having spent nine months living a no-income backpacking lifestyle, I can’t help but be a little more aware of this phenomenon as it happens.
I suppose I do it because I feel I’ve regained a certain stature, now that I am again an amply-paid professional, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. There is a curious feeling of power you get when you drop a couple of twenties without a trace of critical thinking. It feels good to exercise that power of the dollar when you know it will “grow back” pretty quickly anyway.
What I’m doing isn’t unusual at all. Everyone else seems to do this. In fact, I think I’ve only returned to the normal consumer mentality after having spent some time away from it.
One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.
It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. Why?

A Culture of Unnecessaries

Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.
In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.
This marketing campaign alone represents many millions of dollars that were spent because of demand that was completely manufactured.

“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.” ~ Lucy Hughes, co-creator of “The Nag Factor”

This is only one small example of something that has been going on for a very long time. Big companies didn’t make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money.
We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

The real reason for the forty-hour workweek

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.
I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.
The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.
Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago. While I was abroad I wouldn’t have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it’s out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days!
The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.
This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’ve already proven to myself that I can live a fulfilling lifestyle with less than I make right now. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. My clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after 1 p.m., even if I could convince my employer not to.
The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.
As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.
But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.
Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.
Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives?
The economy would collapse and never recover.
All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy,” America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.
The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.
You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It is often used in reference to time usage: the more time you’ve been given to do something, the more time it will take you to do it. It’s amazing how much you can get done in twenty minutes if twenty minutes is all you have. But if you have all afternoon, it would probably take way longer.
Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living (or at least our rate of spending) every time we get a raise.
I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, pretending to be a deaf-mute, as Holden Caulfield often fantasized. But we could certainly do well to understand what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.
The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.
Is this you?
Two weeks ago I would have said hell no, that’s not me, but if all my weeks were like this one has been, that might be wishful thinking.

Music magicka

I told you you can't escape the 80ies.

TEGAN AND SARA NEW ALBUM YES YES TEGAN AND SARA NEW ALBUM YES YES!!!
Cannot wait.

GALA CAROUSEL

I love spending time on the old internet, exploring new websites and blogs and finding information treasures that are totally worth consuming. But let's face it, it can get tiring to find those treasures from time to time and while I still want to know what's going on, I sometimes don't care enough to work my way through all these piles of information after a long day. Good to know there are a lot of quality blogs that do exactly that for me, absolutely for free.  Talk about time management skills!

It's even better if someone as awesome as Gala Darling puts together a list
of interesting reads - I have been desperately holding out for a new "Carousel" and here it finally is. I am a bit gutted she is cutting it down to once per month but hey, it's still better than nothing, right!

all images via paris1914.com

This is kind of girly stuff but if you're interested in beauty, new age, fashion, business techniques, photography, self help, feminist reading and all kinds of creative you should definitely give it a shot.

It's basically a plate full of fun served with a side of knowledge.

You get the idea.

Dig in.

Decade mash up

Only two days ago I talked about how the 80ies sweater is back to make us all look extremely out of proportion, but here I am today talking about how the 90ies are back and they are back for good. Fark.

I can still remember when my sister insisted on getting these dreadful creatures to frolic around in:

Sneaker   (see more platform sneakers)

That was in the 90ies.
Please, everyone made mistakes in the 90ies.

It wasn't until a couple of days ago when I oh so happened to scroll through my instagram feed, very unamused I may add, and stumbled upon these giants, that I realised the 90ies. Are. BACK! And worse than ever!!!!

via Solestruck - $ 599 and SZ 5 - 7 were sold out within 5 hrs of solestruck posting this on their instagram. What is the world coming to?

Here is my problem: The only aspects of our lives that really seem to progress are scientific ones. We have this mash up of decades in fashion and pop culture at the moment, it really makes me wonder why there isn't a particular style for our time? Why do we have to source inspiration from the past, rather than from the present? Why is there this stagnation of progress in culture, music, art and fashion?  Why the fuck are we thrift shopping (What what, what what?) when we could make things that are DIFFERENT ourselves? Why lurk around in the past?
Why do the 90ies come back? Why does anything ever have to come back?
Have we as humans reached our potential in regards to creativity? In regards to reinvention?
Because right now we live in a society that praises the one person that can rip off someone else the best. Boo.


I do understand the soothing feeling one might experience when something from a different stage of their lives comes back and is to be seen everywhere. To me it simultaneously looses its sacristy. It's like someone writing a poem and another person taking it completely out of context, by presenting it to their bogan partner on a nasty low-budget talk show on a Wednesday morning.
You get my point.

The only thing I can really accept as passable is this song.
This song and no other one.



I have dissected the video too and will post the outcome sometime this month.
There is just so much in there...it's insane!