Tag Archives: popular culture commentary

blueprint for a lifehack, zineful of wolfpack (sic)

For the first time in A MONTH I’ve finally woken up at a decent hour, got out of bed, stayed upright, had meds and breakfast/appetite. It’s not groundbreaking: good sleep is essential to survival.

When I started my new job, much like another writing pal whose work you should support (hi Ali!), I had this idea that I’d use my work days to only focus on getting ready for work (travel, be dressed and ready, eat well etc.), and on my days ‘at home’, I’d blog here, or write and edit poetry and works-in-progress and book reviews.

That hasn’t really happened. My sleep cycle has been pretty bad of late, as I either crash too early to avoid life, or can’t sleep at all even though I need to be up by a certain time the following day. Cut to today where I woke up this morning (like, early), was actually starving and spent a bit-lot of $ on a lifehack thing I do when I’ve spent a sad day in bed: wake up early the day after, get breakfast and lunch ordered on delivery services…

It’s a lifesaver for folks with a chronic mental health condition. I know it’s not socially very responsible, but it’s hauled my arse out more times than I count. The trick is to get two serves of food so that when you’re too exhausted to prepare anything for next time you feel awful (which unfortunately, will happen), you’ve got a reserve (an açai bowl) in the fridge!

zine: Woolf Pack #10

drink: NU Healthy Cafe ‘Honey Nutter’ smoothie

Confession: I kind of slammed down my smoothie so only had a tiny bit left when I started reading the zine. Probably because it had: chocolate protein (powder?), peanut butter, chia seeds, and honey! It was delicious, not too thick, and had that thing going where you keep drinking and keep going ‘um, just one more sip’ and then all of a sudden the whole thing is gone.

Your day is off to a good start when you’ve eaten and you’re reading an essay on fat pink Pokémon?! The zine starts off with an editorial (am assuming) from editor-in-chief Rebecca Cheers about feminism and #metoo in Hollywood (let’s not forget that it was created by Tarana Burke a decade ago), before a playful but thoughful piece by the zine’s visual editor Talia Enright. There does seem to be a fair bit of cute, popcult discussion on the queerness of Pokémon, more recently as detailed in this delightful Junkee article (initially viewed in the author’s Twitter feed). For someone who was just a tad too old to catch the initial Pokémon craze, it’s pretty gleeful to learn that queerness and Pokémon doesn’t have to be age-specific: they’re allowed to keep morphing to suit whoever wants to find them a source of joy and identity.

Talia also has a few illustrations in this issue, as well as an excellent recipe for soy and sriracha tofu which I’m dying to try!

There’s also an essay on episodes from Black Mirror by Humyara Mahbub which name-checks some theorists that make my brain hurt this early in the morning (ie. anything before midday) but must confess that while loving this essay, I still haven’t seen any eps from start to finish (and forgotten ones I have seen bits of). I try not to watch a lot of TV because it’s usually my time-wasting thing, or my starting-to-get-really-unwell thing and try to funnel that energy into reading instead (though recently have been a bit obsessed with Versailles and more generally music from the period à la Le roi danse because it reminds me of a happier, more productive period in my life most likely never to happen again).

I tell myself I don’t like writing fiction, but seem to enjoy reading it when it’s in an anthology or zine. ‘Love and Baked Goods’ by Helen Taylor is really cute and full of that unspoken longing that two people sorta-kinda-maybe mutually acknowledge but don’t do anything about, and ‘Dead Channel’ by Brianna Bullen invokes my empathy so much in that it probably reminds me a bit too much of life not that long ago despite its highly speculative element of accessing ‘memory labs’ to experiences others’ memories.

Bec Jessen (‘there is nothing you could ask or I could tell that would reveal a true thing about me’) and Rae White (‘Go and Gone’) are two Brisbane-based poets who I met briefly at QPF, and the work they have in this issue are loooooovely in that they both articulate intimacies and awkwardnesses that exist outside of gender and heteronormative constructs.

The last piece I’ll mention is Honor Webster-Mannison’s ‘Inside Problems’, sequential art about imagining the interior very literally (the house one lives in and one’s body), and the interior emotional lives of oneself and others. There’s also a beautiful bit of text:

…out is a world born by endless roads filled with cars with windows rolled down to shout ‘suck’. It’s filled with mothers with laser gun eyes, with fathers at home, with leaf blower limbs that they wish were machine guns.

Tried to keep this one short and sweet, in the spirit of GETTING! SHIZ! DONE!