Failing at conformity

I'm a big fan of Facebook. I check it every morning, every evening, every lunch break, every spare minute I have... Even though there is usually nothing exciting happening I do like the knowledge that something could happen at any time and I would know about it. That, and it's fun to laugh/cringe at the terrible grammar and spelling used by my Facebook friends.

I like to think I was a Facebook Australia pioneer, and I'll tell you why.

The year was 2006 and I had just finished high school and been accepted into Uni, when my best friend (who was a few years older) moved to France for a year to study as part of her degree.

I attended one primary school for seven years, followed by one high school for six, so I was very comfortable with the highly structured school environment and I wasn't necessarily ready for the daunting prospect of a Uni degree.

Without my best friend easily contactable on the phone and Skype not being even mildly as reliable as it is today, I had no. Choice but to use email.

We would email back and forth and her experiences sounded incredible. The only thing that was missing was pictures. I desperately wanted to see what she was doing, but she told me the only way I could was to sign up to this site that all the Uni students in Europe were using. That site was of course Facebook. This was problematic however because although I had enrolled in my degree, I didn't yet have a Uni email address and as such could not access it. As soon as I started Uni about a month later I signed up and could finally see the pictures of her hanging out in a French dormitory. Admittedly, not that exciting, but I'd been waiting so long that I felt part of some elite club that nobody knew about.

And I kind of was. It was about 6 months until I had my second Facebook friend, and then almost immediately it escalated and I found myself studying it in my lectures and debating it in my tutorials.

While I've moaned and groaned about every layout change with everybody else, I have (in the end) embraced them and looked forward to new and exciting things. So it stands to reason that as a self proclaimed Facebook junkie I would be a fan of other social networking platforms right?

I had an MSN Space back in high school, as well as an original MySpace, a Bebo account, a Flickr profile, a Pinterest account, a linked in, a StarNow profile, a new MySpace, and every other thing you could think of. One thing I didn't have was a Twitter account.

As an impulsive subscriber, and registration junkie, you'd have thought I would have jumped on Twitter years ago. I thought about it many times, every time deciding I didn't need another social media platform to get addicted to.
I was so sure that if I started a Twitter account I would never get off and it would be detrimental to my general productivity as a person.

A few nights ago I made a rash decision at 12:30am that I needed a Twitter account. I could pretend that I had some really important reason to be in the loop, after all the papal election was trending world wide and everyone was waiting to see who the new guy would be. But I could get that info from Facebook, Google, or the old fashioned source, the news...
No, at 12:30 in the morning I decided it was vital that I join Twitter - I'm embarrassed to say - because I wanted to follow the account of the actor who plays Home and Away's newest River boy. Why? Because I'm a little bit in love with him. :-S

So join Twitter I did, and four days later I still have no idea how it works, why people use it, and why people go crazy with hash tags. To me it looks like a scrambled unformatted mess of words and colour on the screen. The biggest Internet sensation since Facebook is lost on me. I've tried tweeting about the football; I've tried tweeting about charity and St Patrick's Day; I tried tweeting about Aussie Pickers; and yes, I've also tried tweeting about my new favourite Home and Away actor @NicWestaway.

I just don't get it. It's still a mess of words and symbols to me, where people mostly retweet uninteresting things other people wrote for a whole bunch of other people to see.

In my effort to conform to what all the "cool kids" are doing I've failed miserably. It takes me back to one of those tutorials in first year Uni where I sat in the middle of a classroom with 10 students screaming: "CONFORM" over and over, while one girl whispered: "It's cool to be different." Today, I'm listening to that girl.

Who knows, maybe something will change and I'll become entranced into the world of Twitter, and the magic of crafting a beautiful comment in 140 characters or less. Maybe I'm just not following the right people.

Watch this space.

Twitter: 2/10

UPDATE 18/3:

My inability to use Twitter is obviously worse than I thought...
My account was suspended due to "Aggressive following" which can be described as:Aggressive following is defined as indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention. However, following a few users if their accounts seem interesting is normal and is not considered aggressive. 

I'm confused... my understanding was that the point of Twitter was to follow people??? Apparently the universe thinks Twitter and me are a bad idea too!

Dinner and a movie

I’ve always been an adventurous person. As a kid I would explore the bush, climb buildings and was a general tomboy. I loved trying new things, and going new places, but one thing I never did was do these things alone. I’m a people person, and with the exception of shopping, I like to do new things with others, and if I haven’t got people to go out with, I do my own thing at home.

I decided this week to challenge myself and go out on my own and do something typically done by couples, or two or more people. Dinner and a movie.

I love a good rom-com, and I LOVE Josh Duhamel, so decided to see Safe Haven. As I walked up to the ticket booth I was expecting a strange look from the ticket guy as I ordered a ticket for one, but to by surprise there was none. I procrastinated going into the restaurant for a bit, searching for a book to read while I sat by myself, but it hit 6pm and the shops closed, so I went to the restaurant and asked for a table of one.

If I didn’t already feel self conscious that I was about to eat dinner in a restaurant alone, when they seated me at a four seater booth that was against the window facing out to the crowded bus stop area, I started feeling more anxious.

I made a rule that I wasn’t allowed to use my phone for the duration of the night, so as I sat down I set an alarm so I knew when the movie was going to start and put it away. I ordered my food and then sat there for what felt like an eternity waiting for it. It was probably only 20 minutes, but with nothing to keep me occupied I actually felt like I was going crazy. I looked around the restaurant aimlessly for a while, and got a few strange looks from the bartender and rummaged through my handbag several times looking for something to read. By the time my food arrived I was so excited to have something to do, that I started shoveling my souvlaki plate into my mouth probably the fastest I've ever eaten. It was about 5 minutes into eating that my alarm started going off and simultaneously I was hit with the world’s worst indigestion pains. I got the rest of my food to take away and headed back to the cinema.

I got lucky and was in one of the ex silver screen cinemas, so I had a nice big comfy chair, and was only sharing the cinema with two couples and a small group of friends. I actually really enjoyed the movie, and it worked in my favour being alone because nobody was there to see me shed tears at the sad bit in the end.

I'm sure there is a fluffy quote or something that goes along the lines of "You can't be happy with someone else if you're not happy by yourself." So that was my motivation for this week and even though the food wasn't bad and I really enjoyed the movie, what I learnt is that I can be perfectly happy by myself without needing to sit in a restaurant eating dinner alone. Oh, and not to eat so fast, as the pain lasted until I woke up the next morning.

Dinner: 4/10
Movie 8/10

A new take on an old skill

For a few years now I have been doing the front of house and ticket sales for a bunch of my friends who have a dance troupe that started out of the Macquarie Uni musical society. Most of the girls have been dancing since they were the age of three, and a couple of the girls did pole dancing, so the next show - Alice in Wonderland - had a a pole.

As I watched that show, I watched in awe as the girls manoeuvred up, down and around the pole. I knew at that point that it was something I wanted to do. I'd never done any dancing before, but I thought the worst that could happen was I was terrible and I quit.

It has almost been two years since my first pole dancing class, and I love it! I even invested in my own pole which I have (somewhat illegally) installed in my bedroom at home.

In recent times I've realised I want to do more and learn more, so I get better quicker. My studio is fantastic, they are fitness focused (no heels thankfully) and the instructors are amazing, and the skills I'm learning are fantastic, but I've always been clunky when it comes to being graceful and actually being able to "dance." I'm very comfortable where I am right now, so the only way I'm going to get any better is to challenge myself more.

I was perusing some deals website a few weeks ago and saw a $29 deal for four introductory pole and burlesque classes at a studio in Chatswood, so I decided I had nothing to lose and booked myself in.

The first week was focused purely on the burlesque side, where we learnt a little Betty Boop routine involving a chair. It was relatively easy. A few poses mixed in with a little bit of walking. Even though the music was fun, the routine was a little bit boring, and though I'm not a dancer, I felt even I could master more skill than that. Then they asked everyone if they wanted to try it on heels.

I'm not a big heels person, and the hardest choreographed dancing I've ever done in heels is the Nutbush and the Macarena, and even those are a struggle sometimes. The heels they had at the studio were a ridiculous height, and when I stood up I felt like a giant. Going through the routine again was next to impossible. I managed to stay upright for the whole thing, but there were a couple of trips into the chair, and many wobbles. It was definitely a challenge.

The highest heels I've ever worn

I missed the second week of burlesque due to other commitments, so I just had the intro to pole to go. I didn't know what to expect with the intro class. I thought it would be a few basic skills and I'd leave bored. After all I learnt beginner skills 2 years ago.

I was surprised at just how difficult I actually found it. I'm used to using 35mm poles and so the 50mm pole hardly fit my whole hand around it, and was slippery chrome that was nearly impossible to grip to.

I also learnt different and harder ways of doing different skills, and one spin that I'd never done anything like before.

While I probably won't go back there again, as the studio was small and I didn't like the poles. I did realise that I need to work on my strength a lot more, especially on my much neglected left side if I do ever want to progress at my own studio, and It has motivated me to experiment more with my own choreography at home. In terms of the heels, I'm not sure how I feel about them at this point. If I ever decide to try them again i'll definitely need to learn to walk first!

Pole & Burlesque Intro 5/10