walkers point | Free State of Jen

2019 wasn’t bad. It wasn’t all easy though. Some shit went sideways and I said goodbye to a few relationships and also some beliefs that I’d been hanging onto for too long. I also extricated myself from a toxic workplace. None of this was easy because it’s hard to see people for what they really are. I don’t want to believe that people are intentional arseholes, but the truth is that sometimes they just are, and contrary to what said arseholes probably think, that’s not actually my fault. It would have been easy to blame myself and say that I should have done this, I should have done that, I should have learned how to breath underwater, defy gravity, turn water into wine, tame dragons, control the weather, and I should have kept my mouth shut about the shady shit that was going on, but I didn’t because it’s not right to do bad shit to people and it’s not right to accept that from anyone, be it your boss, your brother, your neighbour, your best mate or a government department. If I kept accepting that kind of treatment then I’m just as crappy a person as the ones who are treating me like shit because I’m teaching them that I deserve that kind of treatment. I’m also teaching them that they can treat other people the same way, and that’s not OK with me.

I did some pretty amazing stuff in 2019: I hiked 450 km on my own to Brisbane and got to meet some really cool people, and I raised over $6000 for brain injury while doing it. I read close to 100 books, exercised for 377 hours, ran more than 180 km, learnt some wicked skipping drills, went to some great gigs, grew out of my clothes because I built new muscle, got my first reading glasses, survived a bushfire, and made some freakin’ awesome plans for 2020.

In 2020 I’m going to see how much I can learn. Can a skill in one sphere emerge in another sphere, giving rise to an ability where none previously existed? Basically, will a lifestyle of breadth, rather than depth facilitate emergent abilities? I believe it will. It’s going to be tricky to measure this, but I’ll do my best. I’ll be recording everything I do and putting it on YouTube so everyone can see how much I suck when I first start out, and how that’s actually OK, because everyone sucks to begin with!

Watch me as I suck at these things:

playing video games*
knife throwing
tap dancing
learning a new language
skateboarding*
graffiti
juggling*
rubix cube*
macrame
physics
wood carving
singing*
kiteboarding
navigation*
chess
playing the banjo*

* These things I’ve tried at least once before, but was never any good at and/or it’s been over twenty years since I’ve done them.

Here’s what I’ve been doing in the last couple of days:

Snorkelling around the snags in the river. It’s a hard life.

Kayaking up the river and down a creek. This is where I suck. I made this ridiculously stupid and hilarious documentary about the Burrum River on a GoPro, but can’t get the damn thing to transfer to the computer so I can upload it to YouTube. Waaaahhhh!

See, it’s ok to suck, because that’s what pretty much everyone does the first time they try something, and this was the first time I’ve used the GoPro.

Learn by way of failure

Because

No one ever started off being an expert

I recently learned that my clothing has magical qualities, namely the ability to disappear. Luckily this only happens when the clothing is not on my body otherwise it might make for an embarrassing episode of unexpected public nudity. I’ve only noticed the magic once so far and that was on the 13th of November this year and I wrote about the incident that lead me to believe in magic here.

After the people in question stole my clothing I submitted a complaint via the relevant online portal for that particular state government department (yes, it was public servants who stole my belongings) suggesting that my clothing be returned or I be paid the amount of money I calculated to be a fair sum to replace the articles that had gone missing ($194.95: pocket knife, lip balm, hat, sunglasses, New Balance running shorts and branded t-shirt). Imagine my surprise (sarcasm alert) when the department denied that my clothing had been stolen, which of course absolved them of the need to return it and meant that they wouldn’t need to compensate me, or even take any responsibility for anything that happened that day. How convenient for them! I wonder how I would have fared if I had done the same to them?

Ok, so if I’m insane and the cops didn’t steal my shit, here’s what I think might have happened. I have a few ideas. I’d love to hear what you think of them:

China has been secretly tunneling to Australia and the opening of their new tunnel just happened to be directly under my clothes and the clothes got sucked into the negative airspace, fell at an alarming rate, and through a fissure in the rock came to fiery demise in the earth’s core. See the accurate diagrammatic representation:
A giant squid, and I mean really giant, was laying in wait for all of us to turn our heads so that she could steal my stuff as an offering to the Kraken, who she’d fallen out with in recent times over the beheading of medusa. This is what she looked like:
I’ve been living on this planet as a spy for an alien race. After 40,649 years, my people finally came to retrieve me, but their navigation system was disrupted by a solar flair, so they mistakenly took my clothing instead of me, damning me to twelve more lifetimes of human existance. I was so sad when they flew off
An escaped naked convict happened to be hiding out in the bushes and seized the chance to dash down under his cloak of invisibility to steal my clothes, so that he could pursue his lifelong dream of living as a woman. He’s now beautiful:
The clothes never existed in the first place: