No Sex and Dhaka City.

The dream of all young women is to return a hero to the past battleground of their fallen army, stripped of armour yet shining more than ever. Formerly defeated in said battleground and having retreated to foreign shores, upon returning to the homeland want no more than to do it with a little dignity. To shock those who ever doubted their strength, clicking their heels, the best kind of revenge comes in a glowing package, full of spirit and as vain as it may sound, looking fantastic. Unfortunantly, this dream scenario generally remains a dream and we return at best, with a new coat of paint over the old dog kennel and barely a pocket full of self confidence which seems to drain through a hole in the stitches that we can never seem to track down, little by little, with every familiar soldier we run into. They seem to be the ones with the brand new horses and suddenly youre quite aware of how fat you look with your armour shed. How the glowing is actually really unflattering and gives you a double chin, how your horse now seems like a donkey and you wish more than ever there was a trench to dive into, a fox hole...because all the muskets seem pointed at you. Sometimes this realisation hits you before youve even reached the landmines on what used to be your home land, so you pack on the armour and stuff your boots with grenades, ready for the attack, making sure to dock in a secluded bay and donning the camoflage untill you reach your barracks, poking your head out only when needed or on those days your armour feels a little thicker than most.

But what do you do when your army will be waiting for you on the dunes, its too late to change your dock and all your armour and weapons have gone AWOL?

This soldier is preparing herself to be gunned down and would give anything to have become a hero. But i guess i've gotta man up and take the blows. If i make it through gaping wound free, perhaps i can be my own hero.

Coffee 11.

On the verge of a world war.

Baksheesh.

.....Where do i even begin? 

Our Inferiority Complex.

Why do people insist on separating themselves from nature so? I was watching this documentary the other day and its really playing on my mind. The documentary followed the lives of two wildlife photographers, documenting and filming the coming of age of a young leopard cub. They had been following it since it was only a few weeks old, spending their days filming it from only a few metres away each day but never interacting with it. Eventually it left its mother and became completely independant, feeding itself, defending itself and living a completely solitary life as all leopards do, no mother , no companions. Its how the naturally behave and how they all spend their entire lives. However one day, this particular leopard, lets call it spike, walked over to its journalers and began to interact with them. It knew they were other animals and knew it had seen them every day of its life. It wasnt scared and it wasnt trying to scare them. It was interested. It was intrigued. It mouthed and pawed the feet hanging out of the car before climbing in and attempting to interact with them, in the same way he would with his mother or siblings. He was treating them as familiar, as friends, not as prey or predator despite the fact that they were a seperate species. This was a wild animal. They had never interacted with it before, only watched spike from afar. I found this so amazing and was so excited to see how this would develop but the people were disturbed and worried about the behaviour because it wasnt 'natural'. They saw it as an extremely negative act and something that needed to be strongly discouraged. That it was unnatural for it to interact with them as its not a part of a normal leopards life and interacting with it went against everything they believed in. They reprimanded it and discouraged it then and whenever in future it would attempt to play or simply be around them. It would constantly sit next to or under their car and whenever it was threataned by another animal it would run to them for protection. He behaved as if they were his pride, his family. They would protect and defend him against his attacker. A normally solitary animal had, completely independently and on its own desire, befriended these humans. They were mortified. It would ruin the animal, it would stop it being a wild leopard and render it domesticated. Now, to my issues with this. To begin with, what on earth made this unnatural? Are we now so pig headed that we no longer beleive ourselves to be a part of nature, that we beleive ourselves an entity so seperate from the rest of the earth that we may only spectate? We may create, destroy and mould it as we like but we are not a part of it? Do we have such i god complex that we own this earth, we control this earth, we destroy this earth, we consume this earth and yet we ourselves are not a part of this earth? What if, for instance, during their documentation of spike, he had become friends not with them but with a rhinocerous? This would be a fantastic discovery and they would have marvelled and studied it closely. It would have been in the news and they would not consider it domesticated or any kind of issue. It would be seen as an amazing breakthrough. And its own very natural act. People live in africa, we exist there too, the only difference is that we ourselves have seperated ourselves from them and chosen to only interact with them when hunting them which is why people only encounter them violently now. We have made sure they dont exist where we do, eliminating them and all other animals from our world. Which animal is behaving unnaturally here? Most animals brought up around people are infact peaceful and mostly friendly with us, we call them domesticated when really the only difference is that they are used to interacting with us when other animals are prevented from ever doing so, many times being evicted from their own environment, from their own homes. The only interaction ever being had with us being violent or negative. How would we have any idea how these animals 'naturally' behave with us aside from instances like spike and his voyeurs. They were entirely neutral towards him, they were neither positive or negative, they simply existed in his world and were a normal and common species. He grew up seeing them as another animal in his world, which is what we are and how we should be seeing ourselves. We behave like celebrities who forget they are just people too, who become self absorbed and think of everyone else as 'common folk', they seperate themselves metally even though just a few years ago they went to the same schools and had the same friends as us, wore the same clothes and went to the supermarket for themselves. We are still animals too, we always have been, when will we remember that?

(NB: I actually wrote this in july earlier this year and as a perfect example of my need for mental postiting, actually wrote the entire thing into my phone before the thoughts had a chance to escape me and i could no longer process it...)

Post-it Notes: Every end is a new beginning.

So.

This shall be the new bucket to catch my mind vomit. 

I have run out of the instant mental gratification that is Post-it notes.  I find that if i don't write down what i'm thinking very soon after i think it then it is quickly replaced by a new thought, sending the previous one spiraling down into an endless alice in wonderland like abyss, lost forever with no white rabbit to lead it through the wonderland of my mind and back to concious and present thought. So i had taken to carrying a pad of post-its i jacked from the Australian High Commission's office one day to prevent the loss of , for some reason the lately ever increasingly constant supply of, random thoughts, epiphanies, questions and sudden realizations that seem to flood my brain. Tangent after tangent. At night it becomes a traffic jam of thoughts, crashing into each other, seeing a small gap and trying to squeeze through at the same time as three other thoughts, only succeeding to further wedge itself in the mash up. Noone ends up moving, they all end up stuck there, beeping their horns and screaming crass remarks at each other and i slowly go insane, unable to concentrate on any one of them with all the noise and commotion, and therefore preventing the progression of traffic which would result in the freeing of the mindjam....a vicious cycle i need to break. For some reason writing them helps. I can't deal with the thoughts mentally at the time, particularly just before sleep as i'm fully aware that by morning those brilliant discoveries or burning questions needing to be answered will be down the rabbit hole, off to wonderland. But with a post-it note, i can turn on turn on the green light, yes i still get run over because my hand will never be able to keep up with my brain, try as i might, but i manage to catch a few of them and ticket them on a post it note, stick them on my wall and deal with them in the morning or at a later date when i'm not with people, doing work, other wise preoccupied..etc. However i have discovered a fatal flaw in my traffic jam solution - eventually you run out of post-it notes. Also, a good amount of the time you clean forget to carry them with you, let alone a pen. I do however, pretty much always have my laptop with me so i have decided to trust the internet with my mental sanity, give my future self a look at the utter bullshit past me wasted years obsessing over and, although i'm starting fairly late, archive my adventures and experiences in Bangladesh and across the world. I know how much and how deeply i have changed since moving here and i very much regret not having documented the journey as i think it would be really interesting to read the progression of thoughts and opinions that brought me into existance as todays version of Brodie. Better late than never. This is more for myself than for anyone else but i'd still love your opinions or to hear from kindred spirits who, reading my thoughts, feel as if they are reading their own. I love that feeling. Its so validating. 

I'm not going to bother editing or trying to be eloquent as even though typing is faster than writing, i can still never keep up with the constant flow of thoughts, each one is a catalyst for another and id like to quote my brain word for word.

Okay. Well that is a sufficiant enough introduction, i suppose? 

You'll find out the specifics of who i am and what the hell i'm on about along the way.

I'll try be faithful to this blog as i have abandoned so very many others.

With hope,

Brodie.

In a coffee shop. Listening to Jazz.

Cofi 11, Gulshan 2 Circle, Dhaka, Bangladesh.