…worst places to get a pimple

1. Lip.  Bottom lip pimples sometimes resemble coldsores.  And you have to go around saying “I swear, it’s just a pimple”, which only makes people (read: potential dates) more suspicious.  Top lip ones, meanwhile, are painful f**kers which leave scars.  Apparently lip-balm is the culprit here.  Fact: I cannot sleep without lip balm on.  Therefore: I have a lifetime of embarassing lip pimples ahead.  And all because I’m weird.

2. Finger.  I don’t know if anyone else gets these, but I do get pimples on my fingers.  I’ve got one on my left pinky right now, between the bottom and middle knuckles.  It’s freakin’ painful - especially when I type.  So I hope you’re appreciating my dedication right now.

3.  Paris.  It would suck to get a pimple when you’re surrounded by all that style and history.  And butter.

…New Year’s resolutions*, draft 1.0

1. Finish what you start.

2. Be consciously courageous every day (or, in the negative, stop being such a chickensh!t), even when you can’t be arsed.

3. Consume more ginger**.

*it’s early December - WTF is wrong with me?!
**awesome

…TGIF Dos and Don’ts

1. Don’t wear crappy clothes on Fridays.  Even – nay, especially - when you don’t have plans for that evening.  Because, sure as I need a haircut, you’ll get an offer to go out – and almost certainly to somewhere a little bit fancy.  And when you’re running around that laser-tag maze*, you’ll be all off-target trying to keep your pants up.

2. Do plan more interesting things with your weekend.  For example, visiting places such as this might excite the imagination and feed one’s natural craving for absurdity if one were to, er, conveniently have said natural craving.  However, when all’s said and done, I am more likely to stay quite close to this instead.  On the plus side, I will be clocking up some more hours of this as well, so it’s not my whole life I’m wasting on vicariousness**.

3. Do/Don’t learn what pathetic really means.  My mum told me she is praying to St Jude that I meet the love of my life next year.  In case you didn’t know, St Jude is the patron saint of HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS.  Thanks Mum. 
I wonder who the patron saint of WHOOPARSE is - then I can pray for one of these*…

*Aw yeah, see and be seen, Daley.  I’m all about the really classy sh!t – like a mink tracksuit…
**just heaps and heaps and heaps of it

…for $1.80

1. Party Balloons – multi-coloured fun for $1.79.

2. Cosmic Karate Belts in strawberry flavour – these look like the most toxic of all confectionary, red strips of chewy lolly encrusted in what appears to be ground sugar and crack.  Get your (karate) kicks for $1.79.

3. Disney Princess/Tinkerbell/Rock Camp stickers - AWESOME – $1.75.
(5c waived if stickers feature Princess Aurora – or $50.05 fine incurred if Rock Camp is chosen)

…Sing Sing Sing

1. We have some kick-arse jazz songstresses here in Oz.  I went to see Michelle Nicolle on Saturday, who has the brightness of Doris Day with the vocal playfulness of Ella Fitzgerald.  Another is Kristin Berardi, who brings a hint of the best possible brand of pop sensibility and playfulness to very, very smooth jazz.  And I saw Jacki Cooper a couple of years ago at Manly Jazz Festival, who can sell a song in a way to aspire to.  I wish there was somewhere in this town you could go listen to singers like these every week.  ‘Cause, dangnammit, it’s educational and I could claim it on tax.

2. Practice makes perfect - 10,000 hours of practice, in fact.  When my singing teacher mentioned these alleged ”10,000 hours”, I didn’t quite believe her.  Surely, I thought, it’s 1,000, not 10,000.  But no - 10,000 hours is exactly what the studies say. “You’ve clocked up a few this year!” she reassured me.  
I thought so too.  I did some calculation and found that for roughly 400 hours this year I have learnt and performed around 40 new songs (and still my repertoire blows – how does that work?) in four back-to-back shows, plus a few other bits and pieces.  Sounds like a lot, right?  It felt like a lot, starting the year with a shiny new approach to my voice, discovering new things, tossing aside preconceptions of the craft and of my voice,  getting ever-so-slightly better at reading music, being constantly thrown out of my comfort zone and into the deep-end, at home and overseas.  Well, if I continue THAT for a total of 10,000 hours, I’ll have all the muscle-memory, skill and stamina to “make perfect” singing BY THE TIME I AM IN MY MID-50S.  Awesome.

3. Over and over and over till I got it right.  I’ve resumed this playing-one-song-repeatedly thing I used to do years ago.  I don’t mean stuff that I have to learn – just songs that fit a mood or make me feel better or, especially, match the weather.  On a sunny day, Get-Well-Cards by Conor Oberst is one of them (FYI, I’ve just changed this link because the previous one was rubbish!).  I still can’t get enough of that song, even though the lyrics make no discernible sense to me.  It just sounds like sunshine, despite the fact that it talks about peacock people and sunscreen and wanting to wrap your head in a picket fence.