Tracey Emin and Her Bed

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Ever since my hands could caress anything other than baby toys and baby snacks, and ever since I have been able to sleep alone in my own bed, I have not listened to my mother and ever made my bed. In fact, due to my constantly messy bedsheets, I rarely have had the pleasure of sleeping in or owning a made bed, unless of course mum decides to abide by her cultural standards and act like a housewife and make it for me.

I have been waking up to and going to bed in a messy bed my entire life, basically. It is a well-known fact in my family and out of all of my younger and older relatives I am the only one who has not broken out of this so-called 'dirty' habit. I do not feel the need to. My reasoning behind my constantly untidy bed is that, well, I will mess it well up again and nighttime, why should I fix it now? or, what is the point? or, it needs to air out! or, I can't be bothered! My instincts simply tell me not to do it because there are a lot of things I have to get through in my days, such as finding time to draw or write. Not very active things, but highly productive. 

Today I came across a strange little article in the newspaper, which spoke about some artist selling her bed for 4.64 million dollars. I had to re-read the title thrice and re-read the article twice to believe it and it is actually true. I still cannot believe it. I have been living with the dirtiest - but hygienic - bed for my whole life and I have not thought once to sell it. What was special about this lady's bed, though?

This bed is based on the artist, Tracey Emin's life when it all went to emotional turmoil. She was suffering from a broken heart, and had used the bed and its surroundings, empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts and used condoms, to visually display this. She basically cloned her bed and forgot to add in break-up chocolates yet ended up getting paid over 4.63 million dollars more than what I would ever pay for such a thing. Can you imagine where this thing would be displayed? Or perhaps the Queen feels bored with her royal bed and wants a taste of something different and raw for once.

One would expect Emin to be satisfied with her insane ridding price of this bed, except she said "I don't know where it's going. It's quite scary, it's out of my control completely. Not that I'm a giant control freak. But I really care about the bed, and I really love it". I know how it feels like to be attached to art, I still hold onto my painting of a man being ridden by a horse and I hold onto it dearly despite the many offers I have received for it and if it ever were to be sold I would be upset, but if it were to sell for 4.64 million dollars then I would throw a greater party than a conglomeration of all of Gatsby's parties.

I have been creating a lot of artworks lately, but now that I have been exposed to this crazy sale, I wonder how much I can sell my bed for... If it helps, I can tell you that I have been sleeping in this bed, it has my smell all over it and I will even throw in the book that I am currently reading which is signed by the author. It fortunately does not contain any used condoms. 

It also features two elegant throws, the top one has an exotic tiger on it too but it is more valuable than the second because I have had it circa my birth year, 1991. I am debating on whether or not I will include my pillow pet because it is very special to me. Look at its cute eyes. My selling price starts at 5 million. Why not, right?

What the F*ck? Melbournians are Fined for Public Swearing?

Oh? So a new law just came in today stating that if one swore in a public place, they would be fined $500? And people are now swearing at that law because it oppresses their sense of public freedom? 

Let me bring in a little anecdote of something that happens all too regularly on an ordinary trip to a local shopping centre - I witness teenagers in their little groups of 'cool,' using derogatory terms about homosexuals, filthy words to replace the act fornication, and even more horrid words against people of varied races and skin colours. I hear older boys swearing around younger children, deteriorating one of their aspects of innocence by the simple act of cussing. I hear the not-so-classy people wearing torn pants and a stained singlet walking around swearing at kiosks for not letting them purchase a drink which costs five cents more than they can afford.

I still remember the first time I heard the word 'f*ck'. I was in the courtyard at my primary school, in a brick-cylinder, playing with a tennis ball, slamming it against the wall and talking to my friends about our latest Pok'emon catches. All of the sudden, the 'cool' boy in year six and his gang of followers walked in. They all gathered around him as my friends and I took a step back, and we, not knowing about the greatest spectacle that was to come from this boy's mouth, eavesdropped at the very moment he said it, and we all gasped. He gave a 'cool' smile and then walked out of the brick cylinder. We just stood there, unable to accept what had just happened. Did we just hear that? Did he really just say that? Yes, yes he did. I know that from that moment, at the age of just nine, an aspect of my innocence was taken from me.

I know that things are far different now than they were in the year 2001. I know that a lot of children nine and under have access to the internet and are exposed to things that they were never meant to know until they had neared the middle of puberty, and I know that some of these kids even use those words themselves because they hear it all too often in their households. Nevertheless, if the government imposes such a fine upon filthy public vocabulary, then the hearing of these terms would be sprawled around our public sphere less, and it will slowly but surely turn into a social norm that words such as 'f*ck' and 'c*nt' are not acceptable to use in sentences to describe things in negative or positive ways, nor are they acceptable to replace words like those that describe the act of fornication, those that come before a feeling to emphasise the feeling of that feeling, nor to replace 'heck' in exclamations like 'what the heck!'

I believe that swear words have their places, such as if one was speaking to their peers in a private room in the library about an assignment that they loathe, or if someone is in a lot of traffic on their way to a meeting that had started without them thirty minutes ago, but I do not believe that it should be used around the general public where innocent ears lurk, nor towards authoritative figures like police officers when the user of those words has clearly committed an offence: police are people too, they are just far more caring about the safety of others to ignore that man who is running off with a new television from Harvey Norman, or to ignore that drunk indecent man flashing his private parts to a group of year 7 girls exiting from their highschool and taking the shortcut home through an alleyway around the corner, or that crazy woman who pressed her lit cigarette onto a young man's forearm and as he came to hit her began yelling about how he is sexually assaulting her. There are far too many problems occurring in the world for us to just stop and complain about the stripping of our freedom because of the taking away of our indecency to use words of vulgarity around others in public.

I mean, think about it, really - do you really need words of profanity in your everyday discourse? Recently, I have excluded most of my vulgar language use in my conversations due to the fact that I now work with adolescents and children, and I have found myself using varied adjectives rather than that monotonous 'f*ck' word. I have found that my sense of description is far more expansive, and that instead of saying "what the f*ck?!", "why did that just happen, I don't quite feel comfortable about how that person responded to that and I particularly don't enjoy how that saucepan had almost his me right in the head had I not ducked in time!" works far more better. It states what happened, and it states my opinion about what happened, so that a three-dimensional form of reasoning emanates from my mouth, rather than an unpretentious, overrated word.

Challenge yourself, before a $500 fine does. The world is much more three-dimensional with artistic conversation. Try to use descriptive words rather than the bland words Samuel L. Jackson uses in his film Snakes on a Plane. I mean, he says the word "motherf*cker" so much that the viewer forgets the movie is about snakes on a plane rather than a mother who keeps on fornicating. Language is beautiful, do not kill it with profanity.