These Essays and Other Essays

Since this is my one-hundred and forty-second consecutive daily essay, I think it is safe to say that I have gotten used to writing these dreaded things. I have gotten so used to it that I cannot go a day without writing one. However, this all dissipates when I come across needing to write one for scholarly reasons, for university.

It is then that my mind shuts down. I stare at a blank document, and I fear beginning writing it or even writing it at all. I think this is because I fear the judgement of my teacher. How is it that she requires me to write? Will I leave a silly mistake behind for her to pick up and judge me on? Will I fulfil all that is required of me according to the attached criteria sheet? All of this clouds my mind and I do not end up writing the actual essay until the day before it is due, rather the night before it is due.

Writing other essays, this included, comes almost naturally to me because I have the power to choose my audience, to write whatever it is that I please to write about and to write it at any given length, none of which exceed a thousand words and ramble slightly off topic. Writing particular essays, though, such as the one required of me by this Wednesday, proves an uncertainty, until of course the moment it is due. There has never been an essay that I have not been able to write and you may say that this is slightly hypocritical of me to do such a thing, that is write an essay about the struggles of writing an essay, however the contexts are quite varied in both situations.

Consider this: this essay, right now, is like a wild bird. It is not caged, nor is it rendered by 'owners' or people who have agency over it. Now, consider the essay for university a bird that is domesticated, controlled, a bird whose owner has agency on what it consumes, how long it is left outside of the cage and the lengths it can stray. That is how I feel about these two types of essays. Also, the essays I write on here are predominantly informal, which means that I do not need to bother to look through academic journals, use what I have found in these academic journals and then reference them. In the university essay, though, that is the vital part. The vital part in that case also lies within the links between the academia and my argument.

Like when I draw, I prefer to write in my own time, in a time allocated for myself, in a time that I see fit, and on a subject matter that I decide. I know that it is required of me to produce essays as part of inputting my own voice into the university system, and I know that I am certainly contradicting myself in that I am a pro-essayer and I encourage others to be too and to turn away from their fears of essays, however it is painful to form an opinion that is biased about a book that I did not at any stage tolerate and about the topic of gender which I equally cannot tolerate. It is simply too difficult.

However, I have spent three weeks internally complaining. The university essay is due this Wednesday, which means that I have the rest of today and tomorrow to begin and complete the one-thousand and five hundred worded piece. This is not enough time, so I suppose I will have to end this essay here.

Tony Birch's Blood Review

I have never been too fond of Australian stories, and that may be because I live and was born in Australia, so the excitement of anything Australian has surely died down since my eyes first opened – however, Tony Birch’s Blood was beyond my expectations.

If anything, it is a story, a journey, one that you feel like you are taking along with the main characters, Jesse and Rachel. Their journey was a tough one, reaching several climaxes and in each, I screamed internally, “no, no! Please don’t die!” And luckily enough, my wishes were answered. Throughout the book, which took me two days to read, I thoroughly connected with these young characters, and connected with every other Australian thing in the story – the ‘Scotch Finger’ and ‘Monte Carlo’ biscuits, the pies, the ‘servo’, the ‘jacks’, the Aboriginal paintings, and the famous ‘Commodore’. I felt at home the entire time.

And that is what was interesting about me reading this book. At first, I did not think that I would even want to connect with it at all, I had the motive of just finishing reading it for the sake of being slightly ahead of my Fiction class at university, and partly because I am excited to get on to the other three compulsory books. I like to be prepared, and in this case, I am glad that I am that way because it was the most interesting Australian read.

For its entirety I had not grown into boredom once. I was entertained, though in a negative way from all the violence, and the story played out in my mind just like a movie. I could picture the look on little Rachel’s face every time that she felt Jesse was emotionally slipping away, I could picture Jesses little pre-pubescent face as he tried to ‘step up’ to the bullies that they came across, and I could imagine the pain-stricken Gwen, the mother of these two children, who despite her best efforts in pleasing all of the men she had come across, failed her children to the point where her destructive lifestyle soon became theirs.

I automatically found myself wanting these children to evade the welfare, stick together and become reunited with their grandpa once again. I felt as though I was watching a documentary, only reading the subtitles. It all felt so real, and now that it is all finished, it still does not feel abstract. I still can see the children, dirtied with mud and blood and running through the back streets of the outskirts of Melbourne, my own hometown, trying not to bump into the criminals they are running from.

Tony Birch writes so brilliantly, in a down-to-earth manner, so as to make the reader feel as though they are not reading, which is in a way why this book was such an easy and fast read, just like my lecturer had made it out to be. It is addicting until the very last sentence, and captures every scenario in the most realistic way possible.

I do not regret spending double the money that I should have in the university bookshop to purchase this book, rather than waiting a couple of weeks after purchasing it online for around half the price I paid. I will gladly place it on my bookshelf, in its slightly withered state, and watch with pride as someone picks it up and asks me what it is about. “Home,” I will reply, “home.”

Is Pharrell Williams a Vampire?

The most common search suggestion on Google at the moment, when you type 'Pharrell Williams' is the word 'vampire'. It is as though Google is playing some accusatory version of the game word association, almost forcing the world to contemplate whether or not baby-faced Pharrell is a drinker of human blood.

Whether or not he is a vampire, Pharrell still is a good singer, or rapper, or pretty boy, or whatever he is. Why should we shun a piece of eye-candy because of the allegation that he prefers drinking human blood rather than Mountain Dew? So be it, let him be the next Nosferatu, the next Dracula, the next Edward Cullen - so long as he stays far away from my neckline. I appreciate the fact that I am way out of his league, in this instance, otherwise I could have been a form of prey. Just like LGBT equality activists, if Pharrell is a vampire, soon we will have LVA rallies - Leave Vampires Alone rallies. We would have parades through our streets, with human supporters of vampires lying down on stretchers with tubes hanging out of their arms and their fellow vampires sucking some blood from the tube, their hands held high, palms in the form of fists, smiling as blood oozes down the sides of their lips. And maybe Obama might accept all vampires as one of us, in which case most other countries will not and maybe they will wave black flags with a crossed-out wooden stake on it to commemorate their fight for equality. 

Maybe even Google is part of the infamous Illuminati, and it is for some reason forcing us to accuse poor Pharrell over something barbaric, and utterly fictitious, unless of course he is a bat, so that he could lose the fame he had acquired with the help of the Illuminati because of possibly going against them? Perhaps they did not like it when he told the world that he stays up all night to 'Get Lucky'. Perhaps how good-looking he is is a reflection on how easy his life is with the help of the monetisation from the Illuminati, and they wanted to offer another explanation which deters fans from the Illuminati's existence - that Pharrell is a vampire. And this does not become difficult to believe, especially considering all of the oversized hats he has been wearing as of late, perhaps he is protecting his lovely skin from the light?

Maybe in the song 'Get Lucky', Pharrell was trying to imply something by telling us that he is 'up all night' - vampiric beings are, assuming their realness, like owls and bats, nocturnal. Maybe in a subtle way that hinders most of the types of fans of that type of song, in that it makes them think that Pharrell too enjoys staying up late for some sexual action, when really he is staying up late for some neck-suction action. The possibilities are endless when it comes to how sensational Pharrell looks at his seemingly inappropriate age of forty. Perhaps he is one of the lucky sorts of human beings with flawless genetics that allows him to age a lot slower than most. Pharrell has been asked if he is a vampire, to his face, and he replies with something a vampire would reply with: "No I am not." He then wishes to prove that he is not by being "willing to go on record saying that [he does not] drink people's blood", and that he simply looks a lot younger than he is because he "wash[es his] face". 

Ever since Pharrell Williams had claimed that washing his face makes him look younger, the sales in soaps and other hygiene products has sky-rocketed, even taking companies such as Dove and Lux to the top of the stocks on Wall Street. Thanks to Pharrell's allege vampirism, not only do we know the secret to immortality, but we also know that we can lay down at night with one less person wanting to suckle on our precious necks. 

Feisty Female Mosquitos

Female mosquitos are involuntary and forced mobile blood banks. While males innocently suckle on flowers and nectar, females prey on unwilling donors, human or livestock, and penetrate them secretly, slipping silently far away before their prey realise.

One mere bite from a female mosquito, and one is set for almost an entire week of pain-staking, irritating, itchy, scratchy mounds of inflamed skin. All this from miniscule fly-like flying creatures with six oversized legs. They are nature’s vampires, and they feast on humans in the summer. It is not only horrid that these miniscule creatures take your blood without your attention or permission, but they may also, in some cases, leave treacherous diseases behind, such as ‘Malaria’, which attacks and in most cases defeats one’s red blood cells and many other body-parts such as the liver, ‘Yellow Fever’ which can come across like the gastro virus and in its worse cases allows your mouth to bleed, and ‘Filariasis’, a parasitic disease that can travel into your lymph nodes and cause you to get worms in your eyes or abdomen, or ‘Elephantiasis’, which literally leaves one looking like an elephant.

Travelling a maximum speed of 2.41 kilometers per hour, these blood-thirsty beings track you down every time you exhale. Humans breathe in oxygen, which contains carbon dioxide, and when they breathe out, they release the carbon dioxide. Soon after, a nearby female mosquito will smell this exhalation and stalk you in a zig-zag flying pattern until she sucks a substantial amount of your blood, 0.01 millilitres to be exact, and innocently flutters off. The solution? Do not breathe. Do not breathe, or enjoy sleepless nights spent scratching your skin to near depletion.  

To avoid the attack of these ‘Draculas-on-wings’, one must be sure to stop breathing – no exhalation of carbon dioxide means no mosquito bait. The more you sweat, smell bad or warmer you are, the more a mosquito can find you. Mosquitos can sense heat, just like the Predator. These female mosquitos need some loving, the hotter you are the closer they will come. They mind not your body odor, in fact they adore it. And even better, if you are wearing perfume. That way, your floral scent will make it easier for them to spot you.

If you have smelly feet, you are by far the biggest victim of a mosquito attack. A scientific endeavor proved that the scientist’s three-day old socks proved the most attractive to hungry female mosquitos. Make sure you keep the base of your motion-sticks clean, otherwise a mosquito will be sure to lick it up for you. And why is it, exactly, that a mosquito prefers your blood over mere nectar? Well, for her babies. Her eggs require protein to develop properly, just like how humans require slaughterhouses to acquire protein – at least mosquitos only suckle on a small part of us, one could imagine a human-sized mosquito slaughtering a human in the name of protein.

If you ponder why you have an itchy-effect after you are bitten by a feisty mosquito, it is because they spat on you. They salivate on your skin before they suck your blood in order to numb you – this is beginning to sound like a scary medical procedure. Once numb, the mosquito will drink. After it has gone, you will begin to itch because humans are allergic to the saliva left behind. Other than being plain disgusting, this is horribly frightening. A spitting, sucking devious flying creature that lays eggs in water. Any form of water, too. If you leave your cup of water outside on a hot summer day and pop inside to fetch something to place on the barbecue, upon returning and taking a drink, you could have drank the eggs of mosquitos. A free protein shake.

For total avoidance of mosquitos, it is advised that one lives in the desert and risks getting bitten by venomous snakes and scorpions, instead. Alternatively, to soothe one’s mind about how horrid this creature is, imagine a hybrid mosquito-llama, wherein it spits a gigantic numbing ball of saliva on your face and feasts. Then, thank your God for the non-existence of such a creature.