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I've got nothing on today
Which is not to say I'm naked
I'm just sans plans





Made by hadtobe_blue hadtobe_blue. THANK YOU!

Layout for journal version 9.0 (snerk) is "Belle & Sebastian on the High Seas" featuring Belle & Sebastian, surprisingly enough, (Stuart Murdoch, Stevie Jackson, Chris Geddes, Mick Cooke, Richard Colburn, Bobby Kildea and Sarah Martin) and was made by me.

I miss the nineties. I kind of miss the eighties even though the only thing I remember about them is being forced to eat a ham sandwich at the Royal Melbourne Show in 1989 and also Geelong losing the Grand Final that year. But, you know, they were good times because being a toddler was fun. Especially the parts where my sister and I got up early to eat whole blocks of butter and pull books out of the book shelves. But the nineties, they were special and if someone would realise that maybe they'd bring back Captain Planet and we'd all be able to save the world from Climate Change and look cool (with a bright blue mullet) doing it.

Life's pretty good, but it would be better if it were permanently a musical. Talent for singing and dancing? Not necessary. Currently I'm meandering through University doing a major in History (which I really, really love, in a kind of fanatical way, at times). Later on maybe I want to do Social Work. It's all about people, isn't it? History, Social Work - it's all the same thing and for such a sarcastic, unsentimental person, I care strangely deeply about humanity's constant struggle to be beautiful.

Australia is clearly the best place to live, Melbourne in particular. Try it. Give yourself over to the good life. You won't regret it. But I'd leave if someone offered me a TARDIS in which to fly away.

ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC MOOD THEME MADE BY THE WONDERFUL crackified. Thank you!

Background pattern thanks to zinzibar.

Lots of beautiful resources for graphics from www.hybrid-genesis.net

(P.S. Nothing beats The Beatles.)

[In case of emergency, rosiew has my full contact details.]

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You’re the ones responsible for our country’s misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders!

And the accused responded: We didn’t know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we were innocent!

In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?

Tomas followed the dispute closely (as did his ten million fellow Czechs) and was of the opinion that while there had definitely been Communists who were not completely unaware of the atrocities (they could not have been ignorant of the horrors that had been perpetrated and were still being perpetrated in post-revolutionary Russia), it was probable that the majority of Communists had not in fact known of them.

But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

Let us concede that a Czech public prosecutor in the early fifties who called for the death of an innocent man was deceived by the Russian secret police and the government of his own country. But now that we all know the accusations to have been absurd and the executed to have been innocent, how can that selfsame public prosecutor defend his purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, My conscience is clear! I didn’t know! I was a believer! Isn’t his ‘I didn’t know! I was a believer!’ at the very root of his irreparable guilt?

It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus: Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realised what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by ‘not knowing’, he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defence of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your ‘not knowing’, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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But if you're going off to war
Then I wish you well but don't be sore
If I cheer the other team
'Cause killing people's not my scene
I prefer to give the inhabitants a say
Before you blow their town away
I like to watch them play
I like to marvel at the random beauty of a simple village girl
Why should she be the one who's killed?

"If You Find Yourself Caught In Love", Belle & Sebastian

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