Learning the hard way

So they say if you make a mistake you learn from it, but what happens when it isn’t your fault or out of your control? Is it the balance of the universe, that in order for good things to happen to you, you have to experience the bad things too?  Yesterday, a terrible accident occurred. It saw me howling with grief in a messy pile on the floor, at the loss of my past two weeks of photos taken on my camera. Long story, short: sister and I took artistic photos, I let sister look at camera, sister presses some buttons, camera deletes all photos, including precious pictures taken with relatives who we only see once a year, days spent with friends and photography I had taken. Has there ever been a moment when you’ve lost hours worth of work on a computer, and a sudden wave of frustration combined with anger coupled with sadness mixed with utter disappointment surges through you, and at a loss for words, you cry your eyes out. Maybe I was just overreacting when I wailed over my lost photos, but the knowledge that all that time setting up scenes for pictures had gone to waste, that I would never again have a frozen memory of that day with friends and I kept on thinking “How could she have been so stupid as to press the delete button?! You have to go through like, three different stages to do that!” After finally getting a grip back on reality, I reminded myself that I am powerless to do anything about it, and the pictures are irretrievable. All I could do was move on. A hint of guilt snuck its way into my conscience and told me that there are billions of starving people out there who are struggling to feed themselves, never having even seen a camera, and I was a disgrace to society for whining about some deleted images that could always be taken again, another time. What was the lesson in this? Don’t ever let somebody else use your camera? Always set protection on your favourite photos so they cannot be deleted? Upload photos regularly so they can’t be lost? Life’s a bitch? I'm guessing all four.
Why do things work out the way they do? I could blame karma for what happened, that squashing that bug to its death has finally caught up with me and what goes around comes around. I could blame my sister’s short attention span or inability to work a camera. I could blame the “Camera software recovery program” for not being able to retrieve my lost images. Yet, perhaps it was no ones fault, and I am not being punished for my wrongdoings. Maybe we don’t need to understand why bad things happen in this world, maybe they just befall us and we have to accept them, deal with them and move on. It could be a test of character. What still baffles me though, is that no matter how much preparation or effort goes into something, there will always be a chance that it won’t work out, and failure is always a possibility. I had been planning the photo shoot for weeks in advance and my sister is the technology whizz of the family, yet still, what happened, happened and the photo shoot did not go ahead. Disturbances will interrupt how things turn out, obstacles block our way and when you think you know everything about a person, they will always turn around and do the complete opposite of what you expected.
For some reason, whenever I really, really want something to happen, thinking and wishing and hoping for it - it avoids me. When I've given up hope on it, stopped believing in it, what do you know? The one time it isn’t on my mind,  it happens. You thought that if you work hard you will be rewarded? You will. But not when you think you will, as nothing is for certain. You know what I think? The only thing that is for certain, is change.

Holidays are here

We are in the midst of the best time of the year. In case you didn’t know, I am referring to that period of six weeks that precedes the four tedious school terms each year, the time of year for endless days of sleeping in, chowing down on summer fruit and leftover Christmas food, giving your bedroom a much-needed makeover, watching repeats of Degrassi and Friends that you didn’t get to see during the year and getting away with days spent doing nothing. Yes, the summer holidays are indeed the most enjoyable, more so than the two week breaks between school terms. They last long enough for you to rest rejuvenate, but they simply don’t allow you to get all those things that need doing, done. What frustrates me about the two week break is that, lasting only a fortnight, you have enough time to relax and complete all of the holiday homework you were given in preparation for the coming term, but by the time you have recuperated, the holidays are over and you miss the chance to fix your broken earring and knit that stuffed animal you planned on making to liven up your bookshelf. The benefits of the summer holidays is that you get what I refer to as “The four stages” – to veg out, clean out, fly out and accomplish inner peace.

The first stage describes the first two weeks that mark the beginning of the best time of the year, where you get to sit in your pyjamas on the couch all day reading, sleep all afternoon, post blogs complaining about lack of motivation, or waste time watching daytime shows like The Doctors at lunchtime, munching on chocolates with high sugar content that weren’t consumed during the Christmas festivities. In the second stage, or the weeks following expansive episodes of inactivity, your body feels the need to move, and your motivation returns. You actually manage to use a sweltering night unable to sleep to sort through your school papers that have occupied a corner of your room since exams, coated in a nice layer of dust and resembling a “before” shot of a bedroom makeover. Naturally being quite an organised person, I have a tendency to enter a frenzy of sorting, where I lose all sense of time, preoccupied with the nature of my untidy room, the grotty garage shelf, the cupboard that won’t close.
By the time all of the cleaning has been completed, with outings among friends and days of shopping in between those of tidying, the time has come for the much anticipated family holiday overseas. What can I say? Two weeks in New Zealand takes oneself away from the troubling realities of home life in Australia (what I mean is the knowledge that the days of freedom are limited from here on in), and the sights, sounds and tastes of a foreign country make for a memorable adventure. Upon return from the land of the kiwis, your to-do list has halved in size, with the burden of returning to headache-inducing homework and hot afternoons of long car trips looming like an image that won’t leave you, it hits home that only a week remains to finish the bedroom art you started and to label all of your school books for the year.
At this current point in time, I am in the final days of stage two, preparing for the trip of the year, having completed the majority of cleanouts that need to be done, but suffering from holiday burnout, which is ironic since breaks are supposed to relieve you of the stress a full-on schedule brings. Even so, it is the kind of self-satisfaction-sense-of-accomplishment burnout that makes me feel okay about slaving away late at night, designing the layout of art for my bedroom, because hey, this opportunity only comes around once a year.