Where Have All The Holidays Gone?

“Where have all the holidays gone?”

I’m sitting on my couch, my MacBook perched neatly on my lap, my belly full of chicken schnitzel, and my television set to “OFF” after I nearly caught myself watching ‘My Strange Addiction’ (tonight’s episode featured a girl who couldn’t stop buying shoes, and another who couldn’t stop eating her hair follicles). Riveting viewing for those people who have the mental capacity of a shoehorn.

Facebook ™ is alive with my fellow ACU’ers coming to grips that on Monday morning at 8am, we’ll all be back for a twelve-week semester. Booklists are being read and priced, lecturers are being judged, and pub sessions are being planned (well, they SHOULD be!). But with holidays now just a mere 13 weeks away, my mind casts back to the past ten weeks. What have I been up to? Where did I go? And how did I get here (or there, depending on where I am now and where I began)? Stupid questions really, and I know the answers to all of them.

Casting my mind back to sometime in…May…? I think that’s when the holidays started. There was an exam on 19^th Century Literature one day. I think I did well. I wrote on Frankenstein and Dracula, and how they related to science and technology. Maybe, I can’t really remember. The important thing is that I was there and I passed. Hot chocolate followed, I definitely remember that. We crammed into some chocolate place in Melbourne Central…there were pancakes and strawberries involved. But Goddamn, that hot chocolate was good.

Oh, now I remember. Camp was the next day! That was a lot of fun. I don’t think I slept for 4 days, and apparently I had ‘crazy eyes’ (probably not the best personalised description about a leader on a kids camp), but that didn’t stop the kids jumping all over me and singing endless songs about gibberish. Who knew entertaining kids would be so fun and easy…yet so very tiring. After the second day I hit the wall and from then on everything went kind of fuzzy. Fun times, and YES, I’m going back! 

A trip over to New Zealand followed (read/see all about it on my previous blog post), which was totally amazing (“totes amaze”?). Written words can’t express my joyous feelings about New Zealand, so next time we meet up, lend me your ear(s) and I’ll talk them off.

There was work throughout (but I won’t talk about the ABC on a public forum). Ask me about it after I’ve had a Scotch or two.  Murdoch’s empire is on the brink of collapse, but that has little to do with me. I’ll wait for South Park or The Simpsons to do a parody before I pass judgement.

Movies? Haven’t seen any for a while. Still waiting to see Harry Potter, it’s getting to the point where everyone is talking about it and it’s getting hard to avoid the banter. Captain America looks entertaining; it has Tommy Lee Jones in it, which makes me want to see it. Green Lantern? Meh, doesn’t do anything for me, and the trailer leaves me confused. Hell, if you can’t summarise a film in two minutes, you got problems. Plus Ryan Reynolds will always be that skinny nerdy guy from Two Guys and a Girl.

And so here I sit. Writing about nothing in particular. If you’re still here, great! If not, then go fuck yourself. It’s ok, you won’t read this. So where have all the holidays gone? Well it’s a stupid question, like asking ‘where did yesterday go’? Yesterday didn’t go anywhere. It’s stationary. The man made construct of time passed it by and now we have today. So the holidays haven’t gone anywhere. I’ve moved (physically and through time), and the holidays have been discarded and forgotten like a newborn ginger baby in a dumpster behind a hospital.

I’ll try and write more stuff between now and whenever. Hopefully with some good writing that’s useful and entertaining. I feel like I’ve added to the crap pile of the Internet blogsphere, but hey, at least it’ll be buried beneath all the other crap that people think is so important that everyone else must read it. I don’t have any of those ‘holier than thou’ writers’ hang-ups. I’m not trying to change the world, or impose my ‘art’ on to you. I write because I like it and it’s fun. And hopefully one day someone will pay me for it.

Take care, and see you wherever.

Tim 

Ancient Rome and Middle Earth

Hey hey it's been a while! I'm not apologising for my laziness. I'm on uni holidays and after a hard 12 week semester, I deserved a rest. Maybe not. But I'm lazy anyway.

I spent 5 days visiting my mate Liam in Auckland. As you probably know, he's a thespian who has just been cast in the title role in the new series of Spartacus. Well done! As part of the whole deal, I got to spend a couple of days on set with him. Unfortunately cameras/recording devices were not allowed, so I don't actually have any photos. And I'm not allowed to speak of anything I saw on the set (well, anything that could be construed as a 'spoiler'). However, the producers did fail to wipe my memory, so I have drawn a pretty good picture of what it was like on set.

Speaking of Hobbits, I also visited Hobbiton (or the Peter Jackson version of it anyway). I did take photos, but can't show them publicly. Once again, I have created some images using my extensive artistic skills to recreate my experience amongst the land of the Hobbits.

Enjoy!

 The above image is me and Gandalf outside Bag End.

 This image is of Bilbo's Party Tree.

Taken directly from the set of Spartacus.

I'll be back soon for more writings. There will probably be something more creative than this. I guarantee it.