Hair-larious memories

There comes a point in life where you realise you're probably not going to become the entrepreneur-come-famous-astronaut who coaches a football team for fun at the weekends whilst juggling eight kiddies at home. No one really wants to give up the dream, but reality has this funny way of slapping you in the face every so often.

And slap me in the face it did. 

So I've had this life changing bottle sitting on my vanity table for the past everrr (c.5 years) because I've been waiting for the day I become cool enough to use it. And today I realised that day's just never coming round. 

The day which will never see my hair is "Platinum purple" blonde hair dye. In defence of my throwback purchase, it was for the times when I used to:
a) be platinum blonde (conveniently), and, 
b) thought looking like I'd dipped my head in a field of lavender would be a suitably cool look.

For those that know me, the juxtaposition between what I'm like and this fantasy purple-haired me I'd concocted in my head, it's similar to the equivalent of wanting to be a hipster whilst listening to opera. The two don't mix.

Try as I might I spent months, maybe a year even, cautiously dipping wisps of  my hair in it to see how it came out, one blue moon at a time. Nothing ever really showed, only I couldn't go through with it.

I'm just not that girl. I like simple things. Neat, chic, orderly. Purple hair doesn't sit in that lifestyle category. I chose then, and still do now, to subject myself to the normalities of hair colour; different shades of blonde, and occasionally - when I feel extra brave - I opt for a shade of brown. Light brown, obviously.

The point is that we all have this secret vision of a different persona we could be. Some are more confident than others to grab their new identity by the balls and throw themselves into it and I really do applaud that. Purple hair, or any wild coloured hair, does indeed suit a lot of people.

I tried. I really did. Alas, I think I'll wait 'til my pensioner years to play with the rinses again.

** N.b. I did once have an ever so slight pink tint added to my blonde, but it faded after two washes to great sighs of relief - what colour clothes to wear?! what style?! what colour lipstick went with the hair and clothes?! - forcefully being cool just took up too much time in my day...

The exception or rule: what are you?

It struck me this afternoon how torn we are in life by ever conflicting advice. 
The two most conflicting? For me, by far, it's the decision of whether to be the exception, or the rule.

Let's start as we mean to go on, with an honest, and perhaps blunt, reality: everyone strives for the exception. 

Who wants to be normal, to have found a normal route into their career, to have just met their partner through no bout of fate nor bearing a love story so sweet it'd melt the coldest man's heart? No one. Sure, getting by or falling in to place is fine, in fact it's the reality for most, but then there's this distant hope, a glistening dream of how your life could be, if only you could reach it...

And this of course is fed to us through every aspect of our lives. The Olympic hero you look up to so greatly who overcame a diagnosis that he'd never walk again, and yet won gold the next year. The child who was told she'd never make it as an actress picking up her Oscar. The childhood sweethearts who drifted but met again at a train station and fell back in love. Our lives are saturated with seemingly unachievable aspirations that, miraculously become achievable. It's what keeps our spirits alive, it's what pushes us to become the best.

I guess what strikes me so much is why life has to be universal and why that naturally entails our being the rule. We spend our whole lives measuring ourselves against others, seeing how others live and then comparing ourselves against an invisible ratio. It's invisible because there really is no way of comparing one story to the next; we are all born into different histories, economics, and social backgrounds. Undeniably we all partake in the same activity, of being together on this earth, but we, ourselves, are unique.

This isn't about crushing someone's dreams, and I apologise profusely if that's what I have done; it's about being a realist. Maybe if we all became somewhat more realistic in our life expectations, we'd appreciate the promotion we got that little bit more, or celebrate that first we worked so hard to achieve in an essay. The time you realise your life is unique to you, will be the time you realise you're the exception to everybody else.

The paralysis of life

Who are you?
Are you in touch with all of your darkest fantasies?
Have you created a life for yourself where you can experience them?

I'd like to say this happens rarely, but it's becoming more and more frequent that I wonder about my life. I lead a somewhat straight forwardly simple life - this isn't to deny its value however - and sometimes I wonder, am I doing it because I like it, or because fear gets in the way?

Undoubtedly for me the scariest part is not in asking such a question,  it's the fear of getting an answer. I don't really want an answer. Time is on my side. I'm young and independent and free. The one thing I do know though, is that I don't want to wake up middle aged asking myself the very same question.  

I want to experience the deafening sound of water crashing down Angel Falls, I want to lounge in the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, to see first hand the Aurora Borealis and I want to spend time abroad learning a new language.

Possessing such a list isn't greed, and it surely should not be considered to be too expectant. The stark reality is that seeing life through a television screen, or scattered across pages of a magazine doesn't satisfy my appetite.

My hunger is growing and I yearn for reality. 

"The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"

Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and sociologist, once made the profound statement that "The Gulf war did not take place". Some thought it genious, others dismissed this as a sensationalist headline grabber sparked by a continental philosopher searching for the truth and reality. Because naturally philosophers are solely tormented people in the search for truth. If, however, you read past this simple statement, you would realise that Baudrillard wasn't actually denying the validity that the event happened, instead he was making a bold statement about the contentious issue of interpretation. That is, Baudrillard questioned whether the events that took place where comparable to how they were presented through the means of media.

For those of you who know me personally and whom have read my articles prior to this one, you will know I have a keen interest in reality television and the frightenly blurred relationship that it creates between fact and fiction. I learned of Baudrillard and his views in my Media class when I was at school, and I would say he has definitely influenced my outlook on life and made me cautious of the powerful entity that is the media itself.

With relation to the Gulf war, Baudrillard put forward the notion that it was a media spectacle, rehearsed much like a war game and then played out to the public as a simulation. The war itself, including the real violence and real bloodshed, was lost in the heavily shaped electronic narrative. That is to say the news reports and other forms of coverage were so heavily edited and focused on dangerously shot hand-held video clips and boasting of their supply of missiles that the nature of the war itself dissolved. The media stood in the way of communicating the truths of the war, as opposed to adding to it.

Whether or not you agree with Baudrillard picking of such a contentious topic to use as the example to put forth his theory, it would be hard to dispute how much the media shapes, influences and distorts our lives. I for one believe it's a sad reality that newspapers and their highly one-sided political bias shape our views of politics. If we don't know the whole unbiased and unedited truth about politics, then surely it's a dangerous situation to vote for someone or a party to gain political reign of our country that you know so little about.

Naturally you would want to deny that the media is a replacement of reality, but that is exactly what Baudrillard believed and I advocate. Consider your use of social media: you de-tag the photos you look bad in, you upload the ones that you look nice in, you write comedic and captivating statuses that make you sound interesting and you 'check-in' at 'cool' and 'hip' places - because that shows your friends and followers that you too are cool and hip. So you might not do all of that, but you're guilty of at least one point I guarantee. (I used to be jealous of compulsive Instagrammers, until I attempted to 'join the club' so to speak, only to realise it would take far too much time from my day trying to edit photographs to make me look artistic and effortlessly cool.) We ourselves are guilty of shaping our own lives through the media, and the media does this in turn to us on a much larger scale.

Next time you're watching the news, or reading the newspaper just think of how fictional and contrived the "news" really is. Because after all, reality cannot be replicated or reported, only distorted.