This Day, This Month, This Year...

__, __, ____ .

Depending on whereabouts you are reading this (possible locations: USA, New Zealand, Australia, Alaska, UK, the Moon - ok the last one's slightly unlikely...), the above blank date could be month, date, year or date, month, year. Different systems but with the same meaning of course - except that if you're reading this from the USA/ UK you're most probably a day behind my current timezone (and if you're on the moon, I have no idea where you fit into this time equation). So for now just "pretend" it's the 28th and then we'll all be on the same pagelength. Or bloglength. Whatever.

Actually I kinda wish I was a timezone and a half behind, as I'm finding it a little hard to believe that it's the end of February ALREADY.  I know it's a few days below average length of months, but still, it seems to have gone by so fast.

And it's been an interesting 28 days.

For me in particular, February seemed to be filled with frustration, complications and an awful lot of waiting. Waiting for internet. Waiting for work to finish. Waiting for all my friends to move back to Palmerston so I could finally do something interesting. Waiting for that one song to hit my ears, to hit my mind. Waiting for that one thing to happen.

It seems the longer I wait, the less likely it is anything happens.

Ok, I'm flourishing the melodramatic statements here. I apologize. Things did happen. People came back. I finished work. Started Uni (again). Yet it seems like an awful lot of time wasted on my part just hanging out for something. I kind of wonder if I'm made to be doing this forever. Or as Matt Theissan so eloquently puts it "I feel like I was born/ For devastation and reform."

I really, really wanted to be able to write a different blog at the end of this month. Maybe post up the lyrics to the next "Let It Be" or some equally brilliant song. Or put something up about the changes I've made, or the bands I've joined, or the music I've written. When really all I have in my head and my hands are sketches. Things half-formed. Ideas which are still stuck in the hanger. Songs half written. Riffs that meander to dead ends. At the end of February, is this the best of me, or the worst?

"DISCONNECTED" (progressed little further than lyrics and rough ideas)

It's been over a week and my knees are still weak/ And my voice has been hurting from all the calls I've made. You sit there in your room while I sit here with the blues/ I've got everything to lose when we stay apart 

We're still so disconnected/ I'm not far from ending it now

It's one hell of a week when I'm on the losing streak/ And my ears are still hurting from all the excuses you've made. You sit there in your room, I sit here with the blues/ We've both got nothing to lose yet we still stay apart

"VALENTINES DAY" (mostly just music, as I pretty much dislike all the words I've written beyond these two lines)

Oh you caught me with empty hands and a restless heart that longs for you

Love will you find me? Love will she blind me?


Even though I've been guilty of doing more than a few, these days I just can't seem to force myself to churn out an average song. I guess this is good cos it means I'm getting more technical and in depth with my music, but in some ways it seems like all the sparkle, the magic and the wonder that makes a song a song is somehow missing. Am I doomed to inherit the space between average and brilliant-yet-unknown?

Bring it on March. Maybe if I'm ready for you, I won't have to wait...

The Great Addiction...

I have a confession to make....

I am an addict.

Now before I start getting comment after comment about "don't do drugs" or (even worse) "bro me too I light 'em up all day e'ry day", I should probably make it clear that that's not me. I'm not addicted to drugs or alcohol, even though that would be pretty rock n' roll....

No I'm addicted to something whose talons claw a bit deeper than those mere flights of fancy.

And although this may come as a surprise to many of you, you're probably just as desperate an addict as me.

I am addicted to the Internet.

For the past one and a half months I've been fighting withdrawal symptoms. Suppressing the need to check my Facebook feed every couple of hours. Fighting the urge to check my email to see if I'd been contacted by the various agencies who needed to contact me. Missing people desperately cos I couldn't skype them or even message them. Having a million words to say and not even being able to communicate to the online masses through blogging.

It's not as if I meant to break my addiction by going cold turkey, it's just the way things happened. After taking a hard shot of 2 gigs on my t-stick, like an junkie I surfed the web, bought some music (Ryan Adams) and wrote an epic blog about country music (which unfortunately has now been forever lost to the world).
Then I ran out.

As I was too poor to justify buying another crazily expensive top-up, I thought I'd do the hard yards.
So apart from the very limiting internet on my phone (you couldn't even type an email without it taking 3 hours and a myriad of spelling mistakes which were near impossible to correct!) and the occasional "trip" to Macca's and the Library to utilize the free services, I was internet-less as an animal. Probably more so, given the amount of people's pets you can find on Facebook these days...

Today, in my one of the first lectures I have ever attended in my life, the lecturer made an interesting point - that our ideologies, experiences and views of the world are so, so, SO heavily meditated. We don't even notice it when we take the hit, but it doesn't take us too long to go under and subscribe to a system that sometimes encourages distance more than it does bring people closer together.

I mean we've all done it - messaged your family/ mate when they're sitting right next to you? Skyped your friends when they live a block away? It's cool right? Makes you feel pretty funny and you have a good laugh about it.

But are our physical lines of communication that bad that we have to resort to such desperate technological measures? 

See the thing which makes internet so addictive is that it's convenient. As a Generation Y-er sitting on the edge of Generation Z I know from personal experience that my, that our generation is all about what is comfortable and convenient for us. See, we're all about the individual, as long as that individual is us, not someone else. Yet is this always for the best? I've always found that the times in my life which are the best times are when I have been pushed out of my comfort zone. When things aren't always convenient, we unplug our devices and get down to the business of actually living, outside of the technological cage which we voluntarily make our prison.


I really guess now that I should have used my time wisely to connect with people on a much more personal level instead of pining about not having my latest web fix. It's funny how we notice these things in hindsight.

Still, there has been a few pointers I've picked up on. 
1) You get things done a lot faster if you go there in person.
I would have got so lost today if I hadn't visited Uni in the weekend with one of my very good friends and checked out my classes. And I most probably would have got the awfully long process of getting internet at our flat sorted a lot earlier if I had have been able to visit Slingshot's head office and complain about it there.
2) Worship is actually the best way ever to get some decent R&R in the midst of a difficult situation.
See, while internet is a quick fix, a short dose that never really manages to fully connect or satisfy regardless of what you're doing with it, worship is like a cure-all vitamin tablet that is good for the body, good for the soul and longer-lasting than anything we could find online (yes, even blogging!). There was one evening where I was having the roughest day out: had some family problems, problems sorting out uni stuff, had found out I wasn't getting internet for another week, and to top it all off my flatmate had just told me he was moving out. After a completely exhausting day at work it was the worst dose of bad news to happen. Not going to lie, I was close to tears. Then I picked up my guitar and began singing, and it was like a totally different spirit came on me, and I could see more from God's perspective than mine and couldn't help singing to his glory. It really was the best thing out there.
3) There is nothing better than a real-life conversation.
Although we've had some rough times in the flat already this year, my flatmates are pretty good sorts. And one night we all just ended up sitting in the kitchen talking for 2 hours about life and everything and it was just the best time ever. Real good community, good chat, and we had more than a few laughs. Really when you get down to it, that is one of the saddest things about this internet drug - that it can keep people away from each other because really it is easier to send a facebook message than actually arrange a time to meet up.


See, sometimes this thing called Internet ends up using us up rather than us using it.


While I reflect on all this and am now cautious of not taking my "addiction" too far, I can honestly say that it is good to have internet back. It's good to be back on blogspot.com again, and I hope that YOU'VE found it good that I'm back too. And maybe one day we will actually catch up for real, and we might just talk about this blog and what I was thinking about when I wrote it and what it made you think about when you read it. Then maybe, just maybe social media and the internet might be working for me rather than me working for it....

Blessings,

Jordan

Surrounded By Words....

As I punch in the letters on my keyboard, I am reminded how much words surround me. They fly around my head, they come out from my fingers and they make up a significant portion of all the things that have ever impacted me.

I'm sitting in the city library on a sweltering hot summers day, feeling extremely content with life. There's so much to be thankful for right here - namely the air conditioning, and for the free internet (my modems still on it's way, so desperate times call for the uses of public facilities! Thanks City Council!). So finally, after a good month and a half of near-silence, I finally get to write again.

It's not that I have been absent from the way of the pen. In fact, there has been many things to write about, probably more than ever. My mind is filled to the brim with words, words which are almost overflowing the top of my head and dying to get on paper.
Or webpages.

And yet, in the library, all I can think of is books.

It's kind of self-explanatory. After all, this is a library, the third home of books after a printing press and a bookstore. So really it is no wonder. There's even one sitting on the table in front of me, a particular novel entitled "Dust".

Funny how I came to the library primarily to use the public facilities of free internet and air con, and yet I still can't resist picking up at least one book.

I believe one of my favorite author's, Terry Prachett was correct when he said (to the effect of) "Books are dangerous. That's why the ones at the [Unseen Univsity] library had to be chained down..." It seems a strange idea that mere writings on paper can be considered dangerous. How much harm can a book do? (Unless it's a very voluminous dictionary which someone happened to throw at you).

But stop and think about it.

I can honestly say that, besides conversation/speaking and music, out of all the things in life which have impacted me the most, it would be books. Sure movies, plays, and websites all have their own ways and means of making you think (some better than others). Yet books seem to do something to you. They can twist your insides out, and make you wonder about a particular idea for days, sometimes even weeks. The way they subtly suggest things, or even make you suggest them yourself rather than plainly stating facts, is an area which has always fascinated me.

I guess maybe that's why I want to be a writer.

Here I sit surrounded by words, just trying to add my own to the masses....