Over time you encounter dishes you may have never seen before. You learn tips about cooking and food presentation. You come to bond with the contestants. You find some annoying, others inspirational. You have your favourites.

The thing that really struck me though watching the show was the language that is used by the contestants. You constantly hear things like “I’m cooking for my life” and “My life depends on this” and “This is a matter of life and death.” You can imagine my disappointment then when upon elimination not a single contestant was shown to the firing squad.

Of course it helps to remember that these people are aspiring chefs. They’re not aspiring writers or aspiring orators. The show has spawned a collection of unintentionally hilarious remarks from the contestants and judges alike. I think my personal favourite was when contestant Andre, having prepared his ‘romantic’ themed dinner, suggested that that was “literally my heart on a plate.”

Language issues aside, this really highlights the un-reality of so-called ‘reality television.’ These contestants find themselves in such a unique position that their very concept of reality is dramatically skewed. (I think you would be hard pressed to find a working chef anywhere in the world who would be required to cook one or two dishes a day and then await the verdict on the dishes and their career prospects.) But the contestants on Master Chef Australia seem to be slightly different to the contestants on other ‘reality television’ shows. Despite the verbal gaffs, they seem to be genuinely thankful for any experience they can garner. They have bonded with their fellow contestants so much that they feel genuinely disappointed when a friend leaves the competition. When people leave the competition they are philosophical. I suspect this reflects the ages and maturity levels of the contestants on this show.

This is a vast contrast to the likes of Australian Idol (the Australian variant of American Idol) and So You Think You Can Dance. Contestants tend to be much younger, less experienced. They tend to internalise the hype and rhetoric of the shows, the belief that ‘this’ is their one last opportunity to impress the world and that if they fail to impress the judges their life – or at least career – is over. You could be forgiven for thinking that upon elimination from these shows contestants have their voice boxes removed and legs broken.

Success on such a show does not guarantee career success. Indeed once a fickle television audience no longer sees you on television every day of the week they may very well forget you as quickly as they discovered you. But similarly failure to be deemed ‘the best’ in the context of a competition is not an indication of career failure. Use ‘life and death’ metaphors if you must, but abstain from attaching ‘literally’ to every panicked thought.

I keep having these moments in my head. They run in cycles. Infact if I was feeling more industrious tonight I would make you a flow chart. But, anyway, it goes something like this…

1. Should I tell (person x) about this?
2. It’s not that big a deal… why bring it up?
3. If it’s not such a big deal, why am I so reluctant to address it?
4. Hmmmm…
5. Repeat til fade.

It’s such an annoying holding pattern.

I wish I was more courageous. But I’m not. I need a ‘life strategy’ of some description. (Where’s Dr. Phil when you need him?!)

I think I need greater independence before I commit to this next stage in my (for want of a better word) ‘development.’

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of music through blip.fm and it’s made me really think about the songs I enjoyed when I was younger and the things I played on the radio. I wondered what happened to Diana King and eventually googled her and found her website and her myspace. She’s recorded her own Michael Jackson tribute, Mi-cha-el. I’ve been listening to it a lot today.

The second verse:

Well you’ve been with me since I was a child
So young and free with your perfect smile
Yeah you made me wanna be more than I was before
And even though they broke your heart
Baby God rest your soul
Such a tragedy I wish it was a dream
Thriller Billie Jean I couldn’t wait to see
But I’m like everybody else and I don’t understand
I’m asking why why oh why and this one’s for you baby…

You can download the song via her Reverb Nation page.

Connect, Create, Collaborate (JohnLacey.com)
• Dave Stewart: Flaunt Your Imperfections And You Will Be A Star My Dear
• Are Online Friends “Real Friends”?
• Perils Of The Project
• Podcast: Your Way’s Not My Way (And That’s Okay!)
• Enemies of Creativity
• Adam Savage: Failure Is The Car You’re Driving
• I Can Barely Find The Keys…
• The Shitty First Draft and Social Media
• The Blogosphere: Part II
• The Blogosphere: Part I

JohnOfJordan
• YouTube: What’s so quick about the capture?
• News: Apologies and Congratulations!
• YouTube: Vulnerability and Relationships

Personal Blog (blog.johnlacey.net)
• You’re Not Dreaming…
• Blood On The Dance Floor
• High School Reunion
• Due Process
• Facebook Thoughts
• Is That Jealousy Or Appreciation?
• You Can’t…

Somebody Think Of The Children (Guest Contributor)
• ABC: Don’t Mention The War
• Chaser’s War On Editing

You’ve lost your sense of adventure, dude! I don’t know whether something as stereotypically “adventurous” as travelling would be an appropriate suggestion – although it well might be [...] – but either you’re not dreaming much anymore, or you’re just not telling anyone about it.

What is the point in dreaming? Everything seems to come crashing down sooner or later, anyway. I have a chip on my shoulder the area of which is, say, approximately 186.68 square kilometres. (If ever there was an obscure passive aggressive remark to be proud of, that must be it.) You know as I sit here writing now all I can hear in my head is Tori Amos’ Things Fuck Up Sometimes improv. But then she stopped half way through the song, had a moment of whimsy and picked up from where she left off. I on the other hand had a mid (quarter?) life crisis, left my job, and um… did whatever it was that I did for the last twelve months. Made some websites, recorded some videos, did a few podcasts, I guess. I wasn’t thrilled by the state of my life. I wasn’t crazy about my job, particularly. But there was one lone beacon in the distance that made everything kind of seem worthwhile. But it was a mirage, a beautiful mirage. Lee Stringer gave an interview to Andrew Denton about his writing and his cocaine addiction and he said that after his father and brother died he just lost the will to even pretend that life would somehow reward him if he played along. And that is what it was like for me too. I literally drove to work one morning and (in my car) screamed at the universe. I said, “I have never asked you for anything but this… You and I are through, we’re done. I’m not going to play anymore.” (It is one of the most irreconcilable parts of my makeup; a belief that God probably doesn’t exist, that predestination probably isn’t true while somehow being convinced there is something out there, somewhere, pulling the strings and a general feeling of being cursed.)

So, fine, I’ll own it. I opted out of my life. I mean what has the universe done for me lately, you know?!

Maybe I’m not supposed to be happy.

Intellectually I know setbacks are a part of life. There are books and podcasts and videos in my arsenal with people talking about their creative – and life – struggles. There is nothing particularly special or different about me. I just don’t know if I have what it takes to try. Even now I do sometimes dream, but each time there is a part of my psyche that goes, “Wouldn’t that be great, but I can’t do that. I’ll fall on my face. I’m not good enough, talented enough, creative enough…” Although I rarely actually articulate those thoughts. Instead I go and eat too much or sleep in the hopes that the impulse is gone by the time I wake up. I don’t have any worth. I don’t even pretend anymore. I have lost the will to even try to keep up that facade. I don’t want to live this way, but I don’t know how to change this. I actually really want to believe in some benevolent force in the world because it would make it easier to try. Because, fuck, that is all I really want at this point – some support. I want to feel like I matter. I want to feel as though the things I do matter. I want a sense that I’m not alone and that somebody has my back. What I do feel is that nobody cares, that I’m not important, and that there is a seemingly-revolving door of people in my life. People just aren’t there one day and I’ll probably never know why and it breaks my heart.

Michael Jackson is dead. You probably already knew that. I never really thought of myself as being a big fan of his, I only own a single album and a couple of CD singles (mostly for the remixes). But the news filled me with such a profound sense of sadness. I heard someone suggest he was ‘our generation’s’ John Lennon. It is difficult of course; Lennon was gunned down, Jackson died of natural/medical causes as far as anyone knows pending the coroner’s report. But for me this is the first time I’ve really connected with a public figure who has died. I suddenly feel like I understand in some ways how people felt when Elvis died, or JFK, or Kurt Cobain or Jeff Buckley. I really admire the contributions of a lot of now deceased individuals but invariably I’ve discovered their works after they have died. This is new, this is strange. To me, at least.

And Twitter… oh, Twitter. Twitter, moreso than any other technology, embodies everything about humanity. It is us at our best and our worst, our most trivial, our most flippant, our most philosophical. Everything, really. So many people dismiss the service as a triviality but it doesn’t speak for itself, we speak via it. Just waking up and seeing the way these rumours of deaths (Farrah Fawcetts’, confirmed, and those of others besides Jackson that were all apaprently hoaxes) perpetuated the service was interesting. We know that we can’t blindly accept anything at face value, we need evidence. Half the world complains that journalistic interests don’t research their stories thoroughly enough, the other half complains that they take too long to report news, to be current. It is a balancing act, surely?

It seemed more and more certain that the rumours were true over time. And for me Twitter sort of embodies such a wide range of people that on any really topical issue you get the full spectrum of responses. A lot of flippancy and jokes about Jackson, people who were really passionate and distressed, people who weren’t really that interested at all.

I’ve been listening to Michael Jackson’s Blood On The Dance Floor album all day. I’ve really enjoyed it since the day I first heard it, but only actually bought a copy of it earlier this year. Some part of my psyche was searching for changed meanings in songs – perhaps Ghosts would take on a different significance for example. But, no, that song isn’t really about ghosts, it’s about jealousy. I am just impressed by the musicality of the songs, and also the raft of social issues present in the selections.

Jackson was 50. That Motown Records is also celebrating their 50th year this year is not lost on me. Indeed lately I’ve been enjoying their Motown 50 podcast, and just a few weeks ago I was listening to one episode featuring the Jackson Five, themselves just children, talking about their musical inspirations and which Jackson was interested in which girl at school. And then somebody mentions that actually for African-Americans 50 is a fairly typical life expectancy age, and this saddens me and angers me, and like the song goes it does make me wanna scream. And I think about Jackson in a larger context of African-American singers singing for equality. I think about Nina Simone and Billie Holliday, and how I had studied their plight briefly at university and how I understood it intellectually at that time but how I didn’t understand it emotionally until I connected with that music, that work. That is the function of art – to make us feel. [But then I stop and realise that the plight of Aboriginals in this country is at least as bad, and that their life expectancy is disgusting low. And the whole thing levels me feeling bewildered and sad.]

I guess that is why he is so dearly missed, because he did make us feel. He made us dance. He made us think. He made us sing. He mastered the art of the music video, staging elaborate theatrical masterpieces to accompany the musical ones. I don’t really think I can say anything that hasn’t been said already, but I did want to say something.

A few different people have actually said this to me. Each time I resisted the urge to slap them. I wonder now if my restraint was a great disservice. I mean imagine if people went around actually believing that? I imagine there are two forces at play here. Firstly their subsequent lives must’ve really sucked, or they achieved a social status in the high school ecosystem they couldn’t replicate outside of it. Secondly, nostalgia and romance and selective memory recall skew and distort our experiences. At least this is my most educated guess.

It has been ten years since I graduated high school. There is talk of a reunion. I’ve been wondering if I would go to such an event. I solicited the opinions of those on Twitter and Facebook and got a whole spectrum of responses. Everything from, ‘God no, those people ruined my life,’ to ‘Sure, why not?’ to ‘You will regret not going.’ I think by far the most reasonable response was something to the effect of, ‘You will regret not going more than you will regret leaving early if it sucks.’

It is funny but ‘those people’ (as one person described them) are so problematic. Despite the feel good reworkings of history some of them will likely subject you (and me) to, you probably didn’t have much in common besides age, geographical location and circumstance. They saw you five days out of seven for many many years. They saw you at your best and your worst. They were probably witness to things you wish had never happened and hope will never be revealed. (Although if the initial nostalgia/excitement/hysteria of their Facebook friend requests are anything to go by, chances are they don’t remember those things either.)

Some people will tell you that high school is about ‘getting an education,’ fortunately you and I are much more enlightened. We understand that it is all about social structures and power plays. (Psychologists would be hard pressed to find better case studies than a high school.) And I guess that is what I wondered most… is this ‘reunion’ just a last ditch attempt to impose some social structure on a construct that hasn’t really existed in ten years? Are we all going to compare notes on whose lives have turned out to be most interesting and glamorous and whose lives serve as cautionary tales and joke fodder until the next reunion?

But an even more troubling question presents itself. Why do I even care what these people (most of whom I dislike) think of me? I have these moments in my head where I am so embarrassed with my life’s achievements (or lackthereof) that I start reliving that scene in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion where they pretend to have invented Post-It Notes. I realise some of my contemporaries have a lot of interesting ’stuff’ in their lives. They’re studying for careers in law, or they’ve been working their way up corporate ladders. Some of them have been married, some of them have had children, some of them have been divorced. I just think sometimes I’ve been living under a rock by comparsion. I haven’t aspired to very much. I haven’t been successful enough. I went to university and got some qualifications that enriched my life considerably but didn’t lend themselves to any particularly obvious career arc. I had a 9-to-5 (well, 8-to-4, sometimes 8-6) dayjob that drove me to despair and that I abandoned, determined to find myself and my creativity and make something of myself that way. Somehow.

My life is not bad, but it is a work in progress. Ironically in high school I really prided myself on being weird, on being different. There was no greater compliment anyone could give me than to say I was eccentric. I lapped it up. But since then I’ve been taking cues from the culture, internalising fears projected onto me from other more responsible (boring) conservative adult types. It is as if I need to keep reminding myself that I made the choices I wanted to make because I wanted to make them. The trick I suppose will be owning them, expressing them unapologetically, without flinching, even as people interject with stories about their promotions, their mortgages, and their children. And there is nothing wrong with any of those things. If that is your path I wish you well. But it’s not mine and I need to acknowledge that and take pride in my decisions.

But I’ve noticed that I keep asking questions about these things, not because I am particularly interested in knowing the answers but rather because I’m trying to get inside other people’s heads. I’m trying to engage them in their process – not the artistic process that I seem to be forever talking about, but their thought process.

One of the things that really intrigued me when I started listening to people talk about their religious beliefs was how they would (for want of a better expression) ‘cherrypick’ from different traditions. This was really apparent in self-help literature, the likes of Wayne Dyer would dedicate entire tomes to collecting and meditating upon the virtues and teachings of various spiritual figures. Some religions, notably the Bahá’í Faith, seem to try very purposefully to emulsify a lot of different traditions. But in individuals it seems to happen much more organically. An individual who was brought up as an Episcopalian might come to draw heavily upon Sufi mysticism for inspiration.

But even those who identify themselves categorically as being a proponent of one religion seem to emphasise certain teachings over others, certain books over others, certain passages over others. This surprised me, though I don’t know why it surprised me. Maybe now would be a good time to try and deconstruct my own thought process on this subject.

I think one of the things people need to appreciate is that my experience of God is that I don’t have an experience of God. I can’t trace back to a particular time when that energy, that entity, was made known to me in any way that wasn’t purely intellectual. Certainly I’ve heard a lot about God, but I haven’t had any visceral emotional experience that I would associate with that idea. I haven’t been blinded in the desert, regaining my sight later; hell I haven’t even felt transcendent singing a hymn. I guess to the extent that I haven’t had this experience – and I don’t know how to cultivate this experience – I figure my whole understanding of God would be completely dependent on religious texts. (I guess I forget that other people have had these experiences.)

The other thing to note is that religion has a history of creating splinter groups anyway. This is why we have denominations in the first place. People who might agree in principle that God exists and that Jesus existed, and was in some way related to God, don’t necessarily agree on other things. Indeed these differences are considered significant enough to form separate groups. And I guess that is the crux of what I am wondering… how do you negotiate between these things? A friend assures me that the Bible has a lot to offer the world and that might be true. But which parts? Which things do you embrace and which things do you relinquish as being more relevant in another time or another context? Which things do you take literally and which do you decide are parables and metaphors? Does the bit about loving your neighbour take precedence over the tips for dealing with your slaves? How do you arrive at this hierarchy of understanding?

This one passage in Revelations stuck in my head after Julia Sweeney alluded to it in Letting Go Of God. I asked two Christians about the passage independently and was a little bemused that they both gave identical responses. “Isn’t that a Jehovah’s Witness thing?” they responded. A third party assured me that the passage made more sense ‘in context.’ The passage itself seemed baffling to me, but honestly the passage didn’t intrigue me nearly as much the response to the passage. What made people convinced it was a ‘Jehovah’s Witness’ thing? It came from the same religious text they were using, but it was filtered in such a different way… and in a way that was somehow understood by two people who described themselves in the same basic way but who had never met or discussed the notion.

I guess I’ve just come to realise that any religious understandings are remarkably complex and nuanced. And I’ve never actually had that be conveyed to me from anyone before. I do wonder why.

EDIT: What appears above was written several weeks ago. I actually have since had the good fortune to hear a talk given by the former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (albeit in podcast form, some time later). Mr. Holloway is a fascinating individual, I hope to be able to read some of his work in the future. I found his Shaking The Kaleidoscope talk very comforting on a lot of different levels, but mostly I found it illuminating on this particular subject. His talk offered a framework for religious belief that helped me contextualise some of the thoughts I’ve articulated above. I’d love to pontificate on his talk and perhaps I will at another time, but it really helped me immensely.

But here’s the thing… I don’t really use or like Facebook. I have an account because um… I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. I guess because people who don’t really use webservices use Facebook and you never really know who will come out of the woodwork. I just find Facebook really quite insular. People [*cough* @silkcharm *cough*] sort of instilled this great fear within me that I should keep Facebook a closed system with the greatest privacy settings available to me. So I did. Infact at one point the security was so intense my own Facebook friends couldn’t leave messages on my wall. That seemed kind of pointless. I like the idea of a private ecosystem just between me and my nearest and dearest, but when it comes to online privacy I am acutely aware that anything I share anywhere is only a screen capture (or download) away from being shared with the world. So I personally just start with the understanding that I don’t put anything online unless I am content with the world seeing it.

And actually the vague curiosity that keeps my Facebook account open (the uncertainty of who is online, vying in the shadows) is sort of the same thing that breeds my mistrust in the web service. The way that person from high school who barely had anything to say to you ten years ago adds you as a ‘friend’ and still has nothing much to say to you. There is something about Facebook that breeds nostalgia that may have never existed in the first place. I don’t know if it is just a desire to populate your friends list or the romance of rediscovering something (someone) who was lost to you or just a forgetfulness or revisionist streak that comes with age.

The good news though is that Facebook is not high school. There is no obvious reason to keep up pretenses. If you don’t want to associate with someone simply do not accept their friend request. (Though I did look at one person’s friend request for months before I decided to deny it.) And every now and then Facebook does something truly wonderful like suggesting a friend ‘you may know’ who is actually someone you know and wish to reconnect with. This happened to me just this morning.

What’s your Facebook experience been like?

I just wanted to share this passage from the chapter on jealousy. I concede I’ve been feeling a bit jealous of certain people who shall remain nameless lately, and the chapter was very helpful. This passage in particular made me LMAO (as we say in Internet acronym-speak).

Next I talked to my slightly overweight alcoholic gay Catholic priest friend. I said, “Do you get jealous?”

He said, “When I see a man my own age in great shape, and I feel all conflicted, wishing I were that thin and yet at the same time wanting to lick him, is that jealousy or is that appreciation?”

And I think there’s something in that for all of us.