So, I've got half a dozen half finished posts on my life and how things have been for the last five months.
They mostly relate to the challenge I've had of finding work, of living on the smell of an oily rag, and on the challenge to be content with all of this, and to trust God in the middle of it.
It's been a hard road, and I'm not expecting it to get easier anytime soon, but I'm learning a lot from it, and I guess that's a good thing. So I'm going to keep on going, while nutting through more big questions than I've ever had to deal with in my life before.
I mean, there's only, like, two or three of them, but that's a 300% increase on big questions I'm wrestling with seriously, so it's keeping me sharp.
This blog post is about one of those questions.
See, one of the challenges I'm having with my life at the moment is, do I consider full-time ministry?
And I've got this big mental list of reasons for and against - it's a list of concerns and hopes and all it has really done is put more questions into my head.
I mean,
I'm concerned that I'm not at the perceived standard I need to be at to consider full-time ministry. I struggle with reading my bible every day. I think the last time I tried to have a gospel conversation with someone was about a year ago. I don't have a whole lot of non-Christian friends, or at least, not a lot that I have regular face-to-face contact with. It's difficult to have a conversation about Jesus and then invite said person to church when they live in Sydney, or on the other side of the world. I'm scared to share the gospel, despite the fact that I know enough to do so. I do what I can with ministry already, but can see my limits in what I have time to do, and the level of responsibility I can handle/am given reflects where I am, which doesn't feel like 'ready to take on an apprenticeship position at church'.
I'm concerned that I'd let the perceived status of the position go to my head. That the childlike equation of 'Church worker therefore competent/zealous/'perfect' Christian' would stay fixed, and I wouldn't be able to dispel it. I'd have to face off against the inside of my head and the challenge of making my relationship with God faith-based and not works-based - which has been a constant challenge in my life, and probably one of the marks of inheritance I received from the denomination my parents used to serve in.
I'm concerned that I'm thinking about full-time ministry because I can't expect to find work anywhere else, and would be hoping to find work in the church, but at the same time, be helping in the small ways that go unnoticed and don't require me to wander too far from my shell. I mean, everyone needs a supply runner, right? I can do admin stuff and not have to be called to task; be called to the hardest and pointiest parts of Gospel work.
These among others are my concerns. They're buds, small things that I can see as problems in my life that could interfere with Gospel work, if left unchecked.
It's a big list of what-ifs and maybes and potential negatives, and I don't really have a list equal in size to balance it. I do have these thoughts though.
When I was doing WAVE this year; when I was part of FORGE last year, I felt the purpose and the urgency of the gospel. I was part of something bigger, and we moved with purpose, and learned with purpose, and I could tell, that if there was something worthwhile in my life that I could do - really, actually worthwhile, then perhaps Ministry would be it.
I felt that if I threw my life at the gospel, then maybe it would be worthwhile. I was finishing my uni degree, realising that it was coming to an end and that once it was finished, I would be unleashed on a world that really didn't give two squats about my work or my life. None of it would really change the world. None of what I could make with my own hands would exist after I was gone, if that.
But what of ministry? What if I could do something that would have an impact beyond the here and now?
It's always been a challenge looking at things and holding eternity next to them, but I didn't have the same sense of uselessness looking at this in that way.
What does that lead me to now?
I'm still thinking through things. I'm quiet, so it's difficult to talk about something this big to any one person, particularly, as you can see, because the concepts I'm dealing with are half-formed; unfinished. I'm dealing with a lot of maybe and not much solid-state stuff. I don't trust my heart, or at least, I'm very cautious about chasing after a perceived notion.
I'm aware that doing an apprenticeship in church ministry would break me from the inside out. I'm aware that it would cause me to feel a lot of pain, and a lot of joy, and a lot of gospel.
But I think I'm prepared for that notion. To have the fairy-tale and the 'oh, they're an MTS-er, they have their Christian walk all together' blown wide open. I don't know if I'm capable of it though. I don't know if anyone would want me for the task.
(That's not passive-aggressive or anything, by the way. I'm genuinely looking at my faults and knowing them, concerned that I'm vastly inadequate for the task and wondering if I should try now or build up some more skills and try later.)
I know that we grow to the tank we're in, and that while I'm inadequate now, I'm hoping that maybe that would change if I went down this path. Maybe I would grow to what was required, if I was willing. Anyway.
It seems hypocritical to say 'I can't talk to any one person about this' and then blog it, but I think it's easier to blog thoughts. I'm taking you through a narrative, where we start with one set of thoughts, and then go through a process, and then end up at a conclusive point. I'm taking you through the inside of my head, on a well-worn path, pointing out the things that are problems and then devoting half a breath to why I'm still thinking though it.
Because in spite of my fears and concerns, I really can't think of anything more worthwhile to do with my life than to throw it at the gospel. That might be in ministry, or it might be in something else. I'm just trying to work that out at the moment.
It's not "I can't think of anything better, so I may as well do ministry", it's "I can't think of anything objectively better to do with my life than ministry". I know they read similar, but understand that there's tone required to make the difference between the two, and writing in text can't convey that.
I don't have a lot, but I want Jesus to do something with it.
For my non-Aussie readers, here's some context: Our government announced its budget plans about a week ago and nearly everyone I know has been flipping tables ever since.
Me, I'm a big bucket of unease over the whole thing.
See, I prefer to think my way through things slowly and methodically, and I prefer to read the source text of a document rather than image macros vitriolically thrown about on the internet.
But I haven't yet read the budget. I have had little time for the reading of complex documents, but I intend to read it, and then form an opinion, and then write some letters to people about it.
And in the meantime I'm just working off what other people are saying, which is kind of hinting that a lot of things are going to be removed from the social security side of things. I'm a bucket of unease about this, specifically, because while I have a job, it's not enough for me to get by without the assistance of the social security.
I don't like the situation. I don't like being in this part of the system - if you handed me a full-time job tomorrow, jumping off the welfare would be the first thing I'd do. But the situation I'm in is particularly difficult for a stack of reasons. And the fact that everyone expects you to not be poor once you're out of uni makes it more of a challenge. (Like, 'you're not studying, so therefore you're working, and you're working full time, in a job that pays enough'. This is not the case for me.)
I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that I'm poorer now than I was when I was a student. I can get by, but it's also taken me three months to save for car registration, and if you're in this kind of situation and someone walks up to you and says you have to cut down on 'luxurious spending', it's going to cop a raised eyebrow.
This is not a fun situation.
The prospect of having the only thing ensuring I don't starve removed has me uneasy.
The prospect of having my debt from study turned into a small mortgage has me uneasy.
The prospect of my siblings being in a worse place than I in terms of both these things has me really uneasy.
...
Despite all this, I have not yet read the budget. But I plan to. I plan to read the source text, draw some conclusions, and then write a courteous but direct letter to my local MPs, the head of the Opposition, and possibly the Prime Minister as well. Once I'm informed.
I disagree with a lot of what I am hearing, but I don't want this to turn into a poo-throwing fight. I don't plan on slandering people, and I don't plan on having that backfire.
I do plan on having an opinion, but it's possible to have one without smearing everyone and everything else. This can't be about the people, it's about the policies. We're still a democracy. I want to treat it like it is one.
And as challenging as it is to think through, we're told as Christians to respect those we have put in power over us. I believe that it's possible to respect and still disagree, or to ask some important questions about things and do it in a mature and well thought-out way, and I want to work with this for as long as I can. I still plan on having an opinion, but I'm gonna do it respectfully, not through a load of internet-hate.
I'm trying really, really hard to be grown up about this.
Expect an update once I've read the budget. And finished my job search for the week. We'll see how long the logic stays in place for.
And for the folks not in the know, Tupu was the name of a kids TV show from the mid-2000s. The titular character was a wild girl who lived in Central Park and it was about how she did (or didn't) fit in with New York.
The kid called me 'Tupu', because I, like the character, had fairly long, strawberry-blonde, wild hair.
Because this was 2007, I was really wound up about everything and found it hugely insulting.
And then a while back, my sister Prue brought it up again, because it's been a while, and I haven't had a proper haircut since I started tertiary education. I have a lot of hair. And at that point, I was kind of like 'I guess you're right. Look at that.'
So this is kind of a blog post telling you about my hair. Why it's so long, the interesting things I have learned from having absurdly long hair, and probably what I do to it on the side, because it's not uncommon for people to ask me what I do to it, or how it got so long.
To which I kind of just give them a weird look and say 'I don't cut it'.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but that's kind of it.
Anyway.
As a kid, my standard hair-cutting habit was 'let it get kind of long, and then lop it off'. So there's a variety of photos of me with different length hair. I think for the sake of manageability, Mum never let it get beyond mid-back before lopping it. We lived out in the sticks. She kind of just cut our hair for a long while.
I think the major haircuts I had in high school were year 8, when it went kind of short, and then at the end of year 10. Preceeding the year 10 hair cut, I'd just not cut my hair for a while. It got to perhaps waist length, and I was kind of pleased with it, although having to braid it every night for sleeping got on my nerves a little.
This wasn't as bad as the summer though. See, it was sometime in the later half of the year, that I decided on the hair cut. I think I went to formal with short hair, so that means that it happened before December, but that doesn't say a whole lot. I do remember the day though, because I rode over to the oval from Dunbogan to watch the cricket, and it was the kind of King Humid day that makes you hate everything in existence. The tepid air was like soup, and every time I leaned back to rest my head against the bricks of the building I was sheltering under, said building material would grab my hair and tangle it.
So I left the cricket that Saturday afternoon, deciding that at some stage that evening, I would get Mum to cut my hair.
This actually happened. I'm pretty sure I surfaced in the loungeroom at 10:45pm, holding my stepladder, the sharp scissors and wearing the dirtshirt, and said to Mum, 'I want you to cut my hair short right now'.
There was a period of time directly after this, when my hair and I were in disagreement. Mum had left enough there that it was mid-length, so I could go to a hairdressers in the near future and get it neatened up/have it layered, because Mum can't do that.
The first hairdresser I went to couldn't either.
There was waiting involved, but once that haircut had grown out, I think I ended up getting it cut by someone else, and it was an excellent haircut. It was like, longer than a bob, but ballooned out and kicked back in.
What was funny about that haircut was when I sat on the bus, heading down for Snow Trip dos-point-oh, and one of my friends introduced me to Bleach. And within minutes of seeing Rukia, one of the main characters, I was all like that's exactly what my hair looked like last year.
Weird and cool.
Anyway. I don't remember many/any other haircuts over year 12. I think it kind of just grew out again, until I had below-shoulder hair for formal.
It was cut short again right before TAFE started. January 2010. You can see it in my student card, along with the semi-manic look that came with my sleep deprivation for that week. (We'd gotten back from three weeks in New Zealand, to discover a letter from the real estate agents telling us we had six weeks to move. That had been sent the week we left. We had to pack the house up in a hurry.)
That was kind of it. I didn't bother with haircut business during that year, and then when Bec and I moved down to Newcastle, we kind of had that conversation. It ended up being decided that, since haircuts were expensive, I just wasn't going to bother. I was fine with that. I'd lasted a year of tertiary education, why not the next three years? So. I'd either get it cut when I graduated, or when I got sick of it.
So, the next three years passed without much account. At the beginning of 2012, not taking no for an answer, Mother marched me to the hairdressers to get a trim, since the ends were kind of ratty-looking. But that's kind of it. I cut my own fringe in when the need arises, and that's gotten easier since I found a hair-cutty-razor-thing at Daiso, land of the imported Japanese wonders.
That's kind of the history side.
It's now mid-March. I graduate in, like, six weeks. Five?
And I'm trying to figure out whether or not to actually go and get a haircut. I mean, on the one hand, that's kind of where I wanted to get to. Have photos to look back on in twenty years and people be like 'what? You had hair that long?
On the other hand, I've gotten kind of attached to it. (Pun not intended)
It's like. I dunno. The tips of my hair, broken, splitting and frail, have been there for a long time. I've been working on this thing for longer than anything else that has been a conscious project of my life. I mean, Uni was a three-year project. The HSC is something you only start thinking about seriously in year 11.
And with it being so long now, it's like I have to treat it like a separate thing, but it's still attached to my head. It can be touching someone who is at arms length away, and it is still connected to my head, so in a way, there's little difference between someone touching the ends of my hair and someone chucking a whole hand in the stuff that directly attached to my scalp.
Like I said, a little weird.
I have people asking if I sit on it.
Let me tell you, sitting on it is not the most awkward bit. The more awkward points are when someone else sits on it, or when I do something like wind it up in the window, or it gets caught in a door or on a jumper, and I don't realise until it's stacks away from my head and then all of a sudden it's 'goodness gracious, what is attached to my head?' Or you have to ask someone to move, because you can't get up. Because they're sitting or leaning on your hair.
It's something that's intensely personal, but it has the ability to be so far removed from my body that you wouldn't realise it, or think about it in that way. And it's not like if you touched the tips, that I would immediately notice or anything. Still. If you want to touch it, better ask first.
Boss on Saturday night decided to impart knowledge on me during work by putting her hand on my shoulder. She's busy telling me to walk over to the customers and check on them and I'm just like don't touch me don't touch me don't touch me this is no don't do this I will hulk out no don't touch me
But Brooke vs physical contact is a different blog post to be discussed never. Just appreciate that there's a very small group of people who touch my hair, and those are folks that are in the 'okay' list.
*mumbles something about being like a cat in that respect*
I once got told that it being this length showed that I had dedication and patience, and that was like the coolest thing anyone had told me about what I pretty much write off to 'not wanting to pay for a haircut'. I mean, there's a lot more in that now, because it's not hard to cut your own hair, and I absolutely rip though conditioner, so it's not like this is actually cheaper or anything. And I've lasted a few summers now.
Winter and long hair is fine. Summer, especially summer back home, with its tepid days and humidity of five billion, is suckfest when you have long hair. You bun it, there's just no other option.
So yeah.
To friends who wonder how my hair behaves like it does, what to expect from if you decide to have crazy-long hair, and how to keep it relatively neat, here's what my life looks like.
Expect to shed on everything. It's normal to drop hairs during the course of your life. Some break off, some get caught in things, some just fall out. When your total hair length is 20cm, that's manageable. A bit gross to find in your food, but not too bad. When your total hair length is closer to a metre, there's just a lot more of it. So, it's not about expecting to shed on things nearly as much as it is about expecting the shedding to be way more noticeable.
I did say that I rip though conditioner, and I often have people asking what I put in my hair.
Imma just say this now - there's far too many hair products out in the world, with all of the chemicals in the world in them.
Most of the time, I just shampoo and condition, and the difference is between treating the roots and the length. Shampoo really just strips sebum from your hair. It takes out the dirt and funk of everyday life too, but the main component it removes is the oil that your head/hair naturally produces. I shampoo the roots of my hair to take out the oil and funk, but avoid if I can getting too much of the stuff on the length, because that's where your hair snaps if it dries out. There's some kind of brand that woolies stocks that doesn't have Sodium Laurel Sulfate in it, and I use that sometimes. (SLS is the compound that causes foaming. I think. It's in toothpaste and soaps and a bunch of other bathroom things.)
The length gets drowned in conditioner specified for dry hair, and that's kind of it. I try not to blow-dry my hair if it can be helped (mostly because I don't enjoy burning my ears off). Towel dry and brush.
If I have Argan oil, that goes in sometimes too.
And that's honestly it for a hair-care regime.
The only other reason why my hair has managed to be in decent condition in the space of four years, growing from shoulder-length to I'm-wearing-decent-length-shorts-why-are-you-touching-the-back-of-my-legs-length, is probably because it just grows really fast.
This is kind of a weird blog post.
Here I am, rambling about cosplay and philosophy and deep thought, and then there's this post telling you about my overabundance of keratin. I apologise to the folks who don't care about this kind of thing, and are instead waiting to hear about the existential crisis I had last year, or how things have been with learning to trust God while living on the smell of an oily rag. These posts will be up soon.
To everyone else, I guess you know a little more about a weirder side of my life now. Please note though, that if you decide to call me Tupu, I may still get a little nope about it.
The jobsearch is drier than the middle of Australia and all I really want to do at the moment is eat chocolate and watch a Miyazaki film and it's too early in the day to do either. So, in the aim of being productive, let me elucidate to you what it was like for an antisocial introvert to work on a kids section at WAVE.
For the readers who aren't my Novocastrian friends, WAVE is a summer kids club that my church runs in January. I signed up to be part of the thing about halfway through last year.
I remember that because it was a couple weeks before my car accident, when me and the other Swift driver at church jokingly made a pact that whoever's car died first would serve as an organ donor to the other car.
Don't make jokes like that. Also, give way at intersections when you have to cross them.
I'm good at segues.
I already knew was WAVE was. It's like, the biggest event on Hunter Bible Church's calendar. We go absolutely mental with telling the gospel to Newcastle for a week. I don't think I'd been asked to do it before, but that's mostly because when someone at church walks up to me and says 'Kids ministry?' I have a habit of throwing smoke bombs and batmanning off.
Kids are weird. They weird me out, with their ability to run for ages and ages and their noses which run for about the same amount of time, and they're sticky, and I don't understand them. I don't understand most people. And yet if you put me in a situation when I have to look after kids, I go all Nee-san on the situation, because that's what I am - the oldest of four, used to picking up after my siblings and looking after them and trying to get them to help me clean the house before Mum comes home.
But I'd been asked on three separate occasions, by three different people if I wanted to do WAVE, so after some prayer I was like 'maybe this is God giving me a nudge to give it a go'. So I said yes, aware that seven months out of D-day, I would be out of my comfort zone.
Fast-forward those seven months, through the soul-grinding harlem shake that was June, past my apathy when realising that I was investing my time in something that was temporal and wouldn't have any impact past my lifetime (pretty much anything to do with this world), the existentialism and the small successes I had with cosplay, through December and holidays and two weddings, and then WAVE was there in all of its being.
I don't actually have a lot of photos. Combination of busy and child-protection.
The group of kids I worked with, and the team I was part of worked with, were the Skittles. Four and five years old.
Prior, we'd divvied up different responsibilities in the team, so there'd be folks working on craft, and folks giving a talk about Jesus, and I got the job of being our MC or character, since that was probably actually the easiest thing for me to do.
Y'all know I make costumes. Y'all know about the cosplay, and how it's easier for me to become someone else in order to deal with problems.
We had a tent to work in with the kids, and thusly we became the Skittle Circus. I donned my tophat and waistcoat, and performed magic tricks to grab attention of the kids. Despite the fact that all but one of them were planned the day before, they seemed to go well.
Day one's trick involved hair.
But that was only part of WAVE. The whole thing was far more than merely babysitting for two and a half hours. During that time there was play and entertainment, yes, but there was also the sharing of scripture - of learning about the God-man Jesus, and specifically, about the people he interacted with and made new.
Because that was our theme for the week - that Jesus makes people new and specifically, that He can make us new.
Interacting with four and five year olds is interesting. You can impart really important knowledge to them, but at the same time, not be completely certain whether or not they understood or remembered it. But come Friday, there were kids who could remember back to the beginning of the week, kids who were asking more, and being challenged with comprehending how a relationship with the Creator of the universe works.
Which is kind of cool.
At the same time, we got to hear about how things were going with the other age groups over lunch with the rest of the folks involved in WAVE. All through different age groups, there were kids hearing the gospel, asking questions - actively wrestling with the ideas we were talking about. Which is hugely encouraging. There were kids committing their lives to Christ, and that's probably the coolest thing that happened.
So even though there wasn't earth-shattering revivals going on in our sauna of a tent, we were part of, sharing in, what was going on in other places. They shared their triumphs with us, and we shared the story of our fearless leader getting urinated on.
But like I said, that wasn't the only part of WAVE. While we were looking after five bajillion yelling kids, their mothers and fathers were hanging around in the coffee tent, being served with free barista-made coffee and equal portions of the same gospel we were sharing with the kids.
And then in the afternoon, after we'd been run flat by the kids, eaten and had enough time to nap, we reassembled and went out again, in twos and threes, knocking on the doors of Newcastle, asking if there were folks that wanted to have a breather and bring their delightful children to the kids club, and also asking people what they thought about Jesus.
This was an interesting experience. Day one was the hardest - as Nick and I walked from house to house, I remember him talking about how doorknocking is simultaneously the most encouraging and discouraging thing to do. Because you can knock on six doors and only get answers from three of them. One of those three immediately shuts the door again, one tells you that they either already go to church or you find out they have a serious bone to pick with their idea of Christianity, and once in a while, the last door opens up and you have a conversation with someone who will entertain you standing on their doorstep and talking about this Jesus man for a little.
Sometimes those conversations are really hard, because they've got something that is difficult to talk about with a complete stranger. Sometimes those conversations are frustrating, because of previous ideas and how those are supposed to fit together when you talk to a guy about Jesus and he immediately wants to know about the Exodus. And sometimes they're searching. Sometimes they're genuinely interested in this Christianity business.
And when you have a conversation with one of them, suddenly the fifteen doors you knocked on earlier which were not having a bar of it don't weigh so heavily. It's worth it. It's so worth it, to be sitting at lunch with everyone else and recapping how things went in our different sections and someone stands up and tells you about how there were kids in their section, or adults in the coffee tent, because someone knocked on their door. It's worth it to walk away from a door and realise that they've had the gospel spoken to them, perhaps for the first time.
Because I believe the gospel is worth that. That Jesus is worth that.
Now.
Let me explain you another thing.
In case you've not read anything else on my blog before, in case you've never met me or known me very well, it will help you to know what kind of person I am.
I am not an extrovert, is the best way to begin. Although I love to go to conventions full of people, and enjoy sitting in a room full of people, I am not an extrovert, in a society that reckons you need to be an extrovert to get places.
Why do you think I enjoy pretending to people who can handle the situation I'm faced with?
A good night for me would look like sitting on a couch with a bunch of close friends and us geeking out over something inconsequential but fun; getting lost in worlds of fiction; playing a pen-and-paper RPG until two in the morning.
So to say that WAVE put me out of my comfort zone is an understatement. I was so far out of my comfort zone that I could no longer see that zone. The closest I got to that zone was being a ringmaster for the five minutes a day it took to gather the kids into the tent, sit them down, and then pull scarves out of nowhere. Dressing up and pretending to be someone else.
Knocking on a complete stranger's door and greeting them with "Hi, I'm Brooke and this is Nick, and we're from Hunter Bible Church and..."
That's out of my comfort zone.
But you know what?
That week - that week of madness, of getting to bed and midnight and leaving my house at 7:20AM, of herding kids and knocking on doors - that week was totally worth it.
It was worth the stomach-churning anxiety that happened when I knocked on doors in Lambton.
It was worth the complete exhaustion that took a week to recover from.
Because in that week, I saw the gospel go out to Newcastle, and I saw seeds sown in people's lives and people come to have faith in Christ Jesus. I saw people made new. I saw my own faith grow, as I watched the change and saw confirmed in hearts and flesh that Jesus stuff was going on, and it was good.
So, even though I would be a total ball of anxiety over it, even though I would be drawn to the point of exhaustion faster than that time I thought I could make a suit of space armour in ten weeks, I would do WAVE again.
What follows is a true and probably partly embellished account of the time me and a bunch of mates from Church Took The Hobbits To Isengard.
Hopefully that video works. But honestly, if you haven't already seen it, I don't know what even. It was one of the viral videos that predate Youtube, I think. I mean, it's on Youtube now, but the first place I saw it was on a website that wasn't the monster video-playing website.
Anyway.
See what I mean with the partly embellished? Okay, it was a cheap joke. Let's move on.
The idea started back in perhaps August. I can't actually remember how far back, but it was a long time. And I committed to it back then. It was planned for early December - I would have finished Uni and NaNo by then, and wanted to do something to celebrate having finished my degree.
Even back then, I wasn't quite sure what I was getting in to. I'd never done a proper hike - I'd done a lot of bushwalking and a lot of camping before, but I'd never combined the two. My optimism went 'how hard can it be?' and plans were thusly made.
Things began slowly, and then built up momentum as we neared the date. Camping passes were purchased. Boots were procured. Bog roll was packed.
And the day before, I still hadn't got hiking socks or a bag. I visited Kathmandu that afternoon, conversing with the store attendant about going on a three day hike. She asked when it was, as I paid for my goods. Tomorrow, you say?
I am yet to experience a look of more condescending surprise from a shop attendant than the one I got from that lady. Fair go, it's a late stage in the game to be picking up essentials, but I wasn't even the greenest one in our group, so let's leave my noobish behaviour to that, okay?
Something also worth listing right here and now, as it was something that didn't occur to me as important much later, was that the bag I bought was for day hikes. And I was all like, 'yeah, how bad can it be? This one will do, it's the cheapest I can get. We're hiking during the day.'
If your bag cannot fit your sleeping bag, folks, you will have problems.
Just saying.
Okay, where to actually begin?
The hike was a section of the Coastal Track, a hiking trail covering most types of Australian terrain, and was about 26kms long. Early Tuesday morning, we saddled up and headed down to South Sydney, catching the ferry from Cronulla to Bundina, a tiny township consisting of holiday flats, an IGA, and a disproportionately large liquor store.
It was at this point in time, as we sat on the back of the ferry in the hot December sun, that I realised I'd probably made another two errors, aside from the lack of sleeping bag. My hat, which was the closest hat I could find when I was picked up, refused to stay on my head for the most part, and instead its wide brim would alternate between falling over my eyes, completely obscuring my vision, and trying to blow off or fly away. The other was pointed out by my fellow hikers, who all wondered why it was I'd chosen to wear long pants in summer.
They are my khaki pants, obtained for the guerrilla theme we had during our last week of high school, and matched my army-surplus shirt nicely.
But between the two I was covered from wrists to ankles. In December. In Australia. It was a little warm.
Despite this, I still rolled in sunscreen. Y'all do not understand just how sun-sensitive I am.
But for the most part, that kind of worked. Everyone else got burned at some stage during the hike.
GUESS WHO DIDN'T?
The albino. Yeah, that's right.
Anyway.
I'm realising that if I give a play-by-play, this post will take forever to write. And will never get written. Lemme tell you about some of the highlights and lowlights.
DAY 1:
Day one was about thirteen kilometres. It stretched, like the rest of the walk, along the coastline, but most of the hike actually went over the tops of the cliffs that skirt the southern end of Sydney. Highlights included me loosing my tube of sunscreen halfway through the day, everyone's scroggin bags splitting, and running into about half a million boy scouts.
Scroggin is home-made trail mix, for those unfamiliar with the word. Trail mix is a bunch of high-energy dry snacks; usually rendered as M&M's with obstacles. But. Don't diss the walnuts, okay?
The boy scouts must have been up on a different hike of sorts. We'd pass a [collective noun] of about twenty of them at a time, going back the other way, and since they had the larger party, we'd pull over and squash ourselves into the dry brush lining the gravel trail.
They kept asking if we were doing our Duke of Edinburgh, to which we'd reply 'nah. Doing it for fun', they'd give us a weird look, we'd get 200 metres up the trail, and have to bond with the shrubbery for the next group to pass us.
The fourth group or whatever was all like
"Gee there's a lot of you"
Our party was eight.
I responded
"I could say the same about you"
And then we continued, across hill and dale, until we got to the first beach.
It had nudists on it.
So I'll write about other stuff.
Late afternoon, we pulled up stumps at what I'm going to refer to as 'Rivendell'. It was a spot that our equivalent of Gandalf knew about and was far enough off the track that we could set up camp. Further along the path again, there was a tiny waterhole, complete with crystal clear water, wide, flat rocks for sitting on, and waterfall. Dinner was set up, eels nibbling on unsuspecting toes, and Psalms read in the half-light of citronella candles, the quiet of the tiny hollow interspersed with the waterfall and the roar of 747s as they occasionally flew overhead, reminding us that even though it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, we were still in South Sydney and in fact under the flight path marked out by the airport.
I seem to remember jokes about Tomorrow When the War began made at some stage that evening as well (I can't remember if I was Robyn or Ellie), but am happy to allow the rest of that evening to lapse into the stillness and the quiet enjoyed by eight people who'd walked to the point of fatigue and beyond. We turned in for the night, me hoping that my sleeping bag liner would be enough if I used my tarp as a blanket to stay warm.
It wasn't. Sleep that night was memorable, partly because I froze, partly because my knees seized up in the middle of the night, but mostly because I found a leech in my clothes.
MOVING ON.
The next day we set off at a leisurely pace, only having to cover a couple of clicks before we reached the beach and the man they call Jed.
The guys who knew Jed spoke well of him as we headed off on day one, and I think I tried to ask what he was like.
"He's like the Kennedy administration without the Marilyn scandal"
"He's everything good about the 60's, but with modern sensibilities"
"He's tops"
By this time my head was like the scene in Bleach when Chad, Ishida and Inoue are trying to figure out what their cat guide's best friend looks like.
(And if I had that clip, I'd show you. *shakes fists at Youtube*)
And then we arrived at this beach which had flushing toilets and shade and no running water and Jed was there with fresh cold water and bananas and muesli bars and Jed is a Champion of Men, that's what he is.
For an hour, or longer, we stayed at the beach, still exhausted from the day before along with the tiny walk it had been to get to where we were.
Jed is actually a mad surfer, so we got along great. It was kind of like talking to any of the lads back home, since my home area is a major surfing spot on the NSW coast. So we yabbered about breaks and boards, and that was when everyone else found out that I used to do comp surfing.
I wasn't very good, but it's always a good story to bring up.
After a while we realised that if we didn't leave soon, we'd be setting up for night two in the dark, so we headed off again, Jed coming with us for a little while.
I think at about this point we had Carl leave the group, since his ankle had gone beyond the point of mere pain and we were close enough to civilisation that he'd be able to get back to Sutherland okay.
But on we continued, and with gritted teeth, when the discovery that the shorter path for the track had been closed due to falling rocks. Thusly, our next challenge would be to go over the cliffs again instead of around the bottom, skirting the coastline alongside the sea.
Wait.
Was Eagle Rock on Day 2? I think it might have been.
I had Eagle Rock explained to me on Day one, by Josh, who'd lived on campus at the uni prior.
Apparently it's a college thing, that when Eagle Rock plays at a party, everyone drops their pants. Pants go back on afterwards, but for the duration of that piece of music, everyone at the party goes pantsless.
It was actually enough of a thing that the Red Frogs crew, an organisation of folks who bring food and the gospel to partied-out teens, had to figure out a course of action specifically for it. Because being in a room full of pantsless minors isn't a good thing.
Thusly, everyone in Red Frogs leaves the house for the duration of Eagle Rock, should it begin playing while they're at the party. I had explained to me.
The more you know.
This is relevant, as one of the rock formations we passed on the second day of the hike was called, funnily enough, Eagle Rock.
This is also where we got our group photo, and if photos ever surface, I may consider putting one up. I'm still not sure if the guy who explained Eagle Rock to us made the photo better or worse by opting to photo-bomb it.
Day two's afternoon progressed in a swirl of piggybacking flies, and the singing of old hymns. Until we got to the Stairs and then I kept singing out of stubbornness. Everyone else stopped because those were steeeeeeep stairs. My legs are hurting even thinking of those stairs.
Consider yourself, as an untrained couch potato, carrying a sixteen-kilo pack, in shoes you've barely broken in, climbing stairs higher than your knees, up a slope that continues at an incline close to vertical, for about 2-300 metres.
And yet in the middle of this incredible pain in hiking and the steady fight to keep my heart rate at something below 300, I found something excellent.
There was quiet in the middle of all of this.
I've probably talked about this zone before; this elusive zone I've stumbled across at 3 in the morning, when the noises in the mind dwindle, blinking out one by one. You feel a sense of magnificent purpose steal over your soul as the tiny cares that your mind is preoccupied with shut down. At that point, I was unable to care about whether I'd be back in time for the opening night of my art show. I was unable to worry about the state of things at home, or the way I was choosing to relate to everyone on this trip, or back in Newcastle. I was beyond the point of caring that I smelled like a horse, or was wheezing like an asthmatic.
There was only the path before me, and the effort required to take a step, shift the weight of my body and backpack onto one screaming leg, and then climb the stair. And then do it again. And again.
On we climbed, the sense of anything but the moment gone. The flies didn't matter. The wind didn't matter. There was silence in my mind, and it was glorious.
Eventually we crested the hill, and received a lesson in reading the surf from Wizard Jed, and then he turned and we parted ways; he heading back towards his car and we onwards to the site for our second night. As the trail flattened out and it became a little easier to breathe, I pulled out my ocarina and began, not for the first time, to play Concerning Hobbits. And then more Lord of the Rings music, and then Zelda themes, because that's really all I know how to play.
And somewhere along the line. Actually it was probably earlier, that Jim piped up, requesting that I play the Song of Storms. I said no, because even though you can put it down to superstition, we were out on a hike, and I was not going to play the freaking Song of Storms. So I continued on with whatever I was playing at the time, and inwardly frowned when he continued to whistle the requested piece of music.
This becomes important in a minute.
Finally, with the yellow light of afternoon giving way to the grey light of dusk, we descended from another hill and came upon our camping spot for the evening. Sitting was lovely, and dinner, which this evening was my job, was excellent also.
Portable Protein, it was called, since I had no name for boiled rice with curry, coconut, rehydrated shiitake mushrooms, chopped boiled egg and peanuts.
No name, but it was delicious, and it also managed to remove about two kilos from my pack. We washed the dinner things in seawater and spent part of the evening watching the stars, praying and singing again.
Dude, singing at night with a bunch of people is great. Singing Rock of Ages at night with a bunch of people is better, the sound of the ocean punctuated only by the regular beat given by slapping hands to knees, keeping time as we sung.
We turned in for the evening, thankful that the grass here was soft and would hopefully be more comfey than the night before. I remember taking a cursory glance outside the tent before zipping it up, absentmindedly wondering if Josh would want to bring his hiking boots inside his tent, since he'd left them out. I can understand why - we all smelled pretty ripe at this stage. Still, this was Australia, and there were usually bugs. I shrugged and closed the tent. Josh is grown man. If he wanted to leave his boots out, he could.
This is also important to note. Because that night
There was wind. That's what woke me and Cait first. Mostly because the poles in the dome tent kept being blown down and then fwapping back up, blustering about as a howling wind came screaming off the ocean. I was voted to go out and do something, and my half-asleep brain complied and pulled the tent poles down. They lay on top of everything in the tent, including us, but that would be okay because they weren't really that heavy and then the tent wouldn't break.
I went back to sleep.
And then the rain started.
The first thing that I noticed of it was the water dripping onto my leg. I tried to ignore it, rolling up in the tarp in the half sleep and hoping that it'd go away. And it got worse. I reached up for my phone to check what forsaken hour it was for the rain to be here, only to have my hand plop straight into a puddle.
Next to me, Cait rolled over, having discovered that her sleeping bag was likewise soaked through.
And out I went again, frantic brain and fingers trying to reassemble the tent so the poles could keep the water off, the wind whipping my hair and my half-whimpered mutterings reduced to discernible noise around the torch I had clamped in my teeth.
Which idiot was all on Storm's Song business? Yeah. Not me.
Finally, soaked, shivering, and cursing the boardshorts I'd chosen to sleep in, Morpheus visited and I slept, too tired to care about anything else. The tent had nearly blown down. We'd half-flooded. I was done.
The next morning was cold, but mercifully dry. Drier. The other tents had fared a little better in some ways, and a little worse in others. Liv and Bri's tent had the addition of a waterbed come morning light, but I think the guys had gotten on alright. Until Josh stumped over to our kitchen setup and looked mournfully at his boots before tipping out a solid inch-and-a-half of water.
The morning progressed faster than the previous one - we had eight or nine clicks to cover, and I wanted to be back in Sydney in the early arvo. Before leaving, as there was nowhere to dump rubbish, we did a quick pickup of our mess along with other stuff that previous campers had just left there. For a while, things looked as though they'd start sprinkling, and it was at that point, when we'd donned raincoats (or binliner coats, depending on your budget) that Sam the Wizard taught us some gnarly dance moves.
The rain ceased, and we headed off down the beach, which gave way to a seashack hamlet, which lead to overland hiking, and then some kind of weird rainforest, and then there were more stairs. I remember those stairs with more pain than the other set, since at this stage I had hit the don't stop phase of hiking.
I was simply at this point where I could no longer stop and enjoy the scenery properly. I was in a hurry, and i needed the others to be in a hurry too, and the longer I walked with this mindset, the more I realised that this was how I did a lot of things, or was heavily encouraged to do a lot of things.
Back in the land of home and reality, I'd just completed my Bachelor of Fine Arts. I was still waiting on results, but was fairly confident that things would be okay. And once I'd told my folks, they were immediately asking what would happen next.
"Can't I just enjoy having this thing done for a little?"
Regardless, that was how I hiked for the first half of the day. We made good time, in part because I was refusing to stop and look back to see what we'd already covered, in favour of looking and seeing how much more still needed to be done.
And then the rainforest began to give way to Australian scrub, and the most heart-bursting set of stairs you'll ever see, and I kept at them with roughly the same speed, because if I stopped, I would be unable to start again.
I didn't throw up when we got to the top, but it was close. Slowly, painfully, my heart rate slowed down, and the two guys who'd been keeping pace with me at the front of the group turned to head back and help the others.
Well, one made it.
Cait had caught up, and we were talking a little, until we heard a snap and an almighty yell of pain.
There are different yells, different shouts, that people are capable of. The one concerning pain is never heard often, but to hear it is never a good thing. I went to investigate.
And there was Jim, kankle in the stream - because that's what it was even at this stage - looking at me like 'this kind of hurts'
And I was looking at him like 'I am not surprised'.
"I was running to catch up and my ankle went snap-crackle-pop on the slope"
"Yeah. I can see that."
I can't remember the finer details of that conversation, but for some context, Jim is a RAAFie. I've written about him on the blog before, because we dated for a while. He was the one in the group who decided to take eight-ten litres of water instead of four, the one with a pack that was bigger than me, and the heaviest guy in the group. With a kankle that might have been broken.
I think there was a raised eyebrow and a sigh on my part somewhere, before heading back up to where the stuff was, to find the first aid kit, painkillers, and some food to help with the shock.
By the time this was taken care of, the rest of the crew had caught up. We stayed a bit longer, Jim had his ankle strapped up, and the rest of us divvied up the pack he now had zero chance of being able to carry. It was at this point that Sam gained his fourth or fifth nickname, due to the rubbish we were carrying.
Binjuice.
Binjuice is the worst. It is the scent of death and decay, its cloying smell enough to make even a hardened veteran gag. And it had spilled from the rubbish bag Sam had strapped to his pack, onto his pack, shirt, and the tent that had been strapped on there as well. It was not pleasant.
So down the hill we went, Jim's bung ankle setting the pace, my mind accepting that there were more important things to focus on than being at the art show as we made our way slowly through the leaf-littered floor of the forest.
I found myself carrying the binjuice-soaked tent with Liv, and we talked at length about the Realm of Eventide and the story I'd written for NaNo that took place in it - Skybound. We yabbered about the plot, and I got to share the history that had been written for the place, trying to figure out how to phrase things so that they made sense to other people and not just me.
We sung again, the highlight of which was Sam the Wizard bringing up the Songs of Angry Men or something. It's from Les Miserables, a movie which everyone raves about and I have not had time to see yet. But it was memorable, this rendition, given as Sam leapt atop a nearby boulder and sung with gusto, beating his chest in time with the words, to the laughter and invigoration of everyone.
And somehow, after much stumbling and half-steps, we clambered out of the brush, down some stairs and into a car park.
There was a sign and everything, noting the beginning of the Coastal Walk from the Otford end.
We'd made it.
We rested a while, and then began the trek back to civilisation, looking first for the train station we'd need to get back to where the cars were.
I think I got called a Sargent when we got to Otford by two young yahoos, which was confusing until I remembered that my kahki shirt had triple-chevron badges on the arms. And then, somehow, we managed to get to Sutherland.
Dude, you want something surreal?
Try going on a big hike, being all dirty and smelly and tired, and then somehow get yourself to a busy train station, full of workers, mums and school kids. On the one hand, my brain comprehended that we looked kind of homeless. On the other hand, my chocolate stash had melted and reformed around my lolly snakes, and although the result looked kind of gross, it tasted amazing.
Eventually, we got back to Cronulla, reshuffling our car crew for the leg home so that Jim wouldn't have to drive with a bung leg or something.
Successfully, Bri, Cait and myself, three ladies who'd never done much Sydney navigation, managed to get out in one piece, before driving back to Newie and getting Raj's. It was a pretty satisfying curry, if you ask me.
And then there was a shower, and then there was an inner spring mattress with pillows and a doona, and there was sleep.
And it was very good.
That kind of covers the hike. There was more, and there was less that happened. But I need to get back to Job Searching, so that's all you'll get for now.
Perhaps an update if/when photos happen. (Hey, Bri and Cait?)
It's been two months since I last burdened everyone else with understanding how mussed the inside of my head is.
In the meantime, I managed to finish the novel from November (It's like 60k long or something now.), went on a three-day hike that I did not take enough photos for, went home, went to Queensland for Christmas, volunteered for a week-long kids club for my church and am now back in Newie, looking madly for a job before the meagre savings buffer I'd built up last year disintegrates.
In that time, I've been to two weddings, travelled 1000k in cars over 24 hours, done doorknocking, and had some wonderful late-night conversations with friends.
But the future's here, and it's sitting on my floor like my lunchbox that I know has a chinese container with off curry in it, and I'm terrified to open it, because I don't know what to do with it anyway. It's sitting here and looking at me and the longer it looks at me the more terrified I get, because I feel like this was supposed to be easier, but I'm in the In Between space again and am scrabbling about worse than a rabbit on tiles.
And the similes are easier to write, and I constructed a monologue describing my skills in my Oddspeak, but that doesn't change where I am.
Oddspeak is the word I've coined just now. I once wrote a blog post in Oddspeak, last year, I think. It's here if you want to read it.
I can't think of another word for it now. If you read the previous post, you'll notice that it's super lyrical and super involved. It's laborious to speak, because of the double statements and constant comparisons, but the way it weaves back and forth is designed to conjure an image in the mind, layered and built on with every line, every syllable, until the image appears alive and strong, and very, very real and now...
...and I'm doing it now, aren't I?
I think the first instances of me using this kind of language was when I got mad in school. The use of big words weights your statements, and the time it takes for the other person to get what you're yabbering on about usually buys enough time to solidify the argument in your own head.
But that's not the purpose of me trying to write now, to get the thoughts out of my head because I'm stuck in my house at the moment, too freaked out to go look for more jobs.
Last night was Skype night - Wednesday always is. And I got to catch up with my folks, and gave them the lowdown on how I'd thrown my resume at eight different places yesterday, and I was actually really pleased with it, considering that I'd been nearly paralyzed with anxiety for most of it.
Dude, I do not like this job hunting business.
And the response to 'I gave out eight resumes at local places looking for work' was 'are you looking in career-oriented places'?
I'm not at the moment. I'm stuck in this boggery right now, because I just need a brainless job, and I don't want to leave Newcastle this year, but the kind of job I need to go get to be doing what I want to do will pretty much without fail require me to move.
Dad suggested one he'd found right away, and the title and description made it sound exactly where I wanted to be.
But it's in Melbourne.
Why is everything in my industry in Melbourne I don't even want to go there it's too cold and I've only just established my life here and it's too far away and moving and stress and friends....
*Flips table*
There's other jobs out there like this. I'm reading through things now and they're exciting to look at, but so far away. The stress of even considering these is making my palms sweat.
I was kind of hoping that I could just stay in Newcastle for a little longer. Find out if there's anything here I should be staying for - there's stacks going on with my church in either case - and then perhaps entertain the idea of leaving if it didn't mean leaving so many people behind.
I feel like I'm waiting around for other things, too, or waiting to see how those things unfold, but I'm running out of time, and I've picked an industry you need like five years experience to be in entry level anyway, and I have my cosplay, but it's still not amazing compared to the professionals I see at cons, and...
...and I'm sorry I'm babbling. And not sorry.
Look, the next blog post I'm writing is going to be on the hike I did in December. Much less intrusive, more about my stupid hat.
There's a lot going on but I'm a long way from having the momentum to get at any of it. And I feel like I should have gotten onto this earlier.
So, pretty much exactly how things were just after I finished High School.
At least I didn't bom out with uni.
On the bright side, I found an incredibly complex recipe for Turkish Delight on Tuesday. Some of you will know this, and some won't, but I've picked up a habit of baking to decrease stress levels. And I don't have an oven.
But that's okay here, because I don't need an oven for Turkish Delight. I just need a buttload of sugar and four days to work on it.
But you're floating in space, and there's nothing to act a force on you. This is all hypothetical, so imagine space with no gravity (like, none. No far-off planet to drift to, no sun to orbit around). You can't grab anything or touch anything, because there's nothing to push off from. Your space suit is totally contained, so the theory of being able to fart yourself across the void is also nullified. You're just stuck there, waiting for something to happen, unable to actually change any of your circumstances.
"This is less exciting than I was hoping for."
This is what I call the 'In Between', and I hate it. It makes me want to bang my head on things and shout and kick stuff but I can't because there's nothing to touch in the In Between, and nothing to change that circumstance.
I find myself in the In Between on days when I have nothing for the majority of the day and then one thing in the evening. I sit around and wait for that thing to happen, and nothing gets done because why would you bother? There's no time to get the thing done. You don't have enough time to invest in the thing before the other thing you have planned happens, so you don't use the In Between time constructively. You just sit there, pottering around, waiting for something to happen.
Last year, I did that for literally a week in the September holidays. I got back from Animania, and did nothing in the week between it and my 21st, because I had to leave Newie and travel home halfway through the week. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy for me to hang out with people, so I usually need at least a day to mentally prepare for it, and if there isn't enough time like that to be prepared, then nothing happens.
And even an afternoon stuck in the In Between is enough to make me mad. I get to the end of the day, and look back, and realise that I did nothing with my day because I spent all my time waiting for something to happen. Imagine what it's like to be stuck in that void in space for weeks.
I end up in that space sometimes without noticing. I'll suddenly turn around, and there's nothing. Or it'll happen because I've finished one giant project and want to veg for a bit, and then I just stop. And can't start again.
Or, like right now, I won't be able to define my circumstances clearly. I won't know who I am, or what I'm doing, or where anyone else is or what they're up to, so I'll just float in my In Between space, perpetually confused but unable to get out of it because there's nothing to push off from.
So if you see me, and I'm looking confused and frustrated, but I can't tell you why, please define something to me. Something simple, or stupid. Something that can be made solid in the realm of space that I can either hang onto or push off from. Because otherwise I'm just sitting there, getting bored and feeling like I should be doing stuff when I can't.
And I'm of no use to anyone like that.
...
Sorry for the rant. It needed to be put out, and there it is, sitting out like Grumpy Cat on a bad morning with no coffee. I've got a long way to go to catch up with the novel and a dozen other things going on besides. I also finished Uni on Friday. Like, finished, finished. The end of the degree, finished. And as long as I didn't bung up anything this semester, they should be giving me the funny hat next year. I hope.
Gonna have to make something to wear to graduation.
