By Augustine Cerf

Paying Attention 

Standing on the cusp of the ‘rest of my life’, thankful for a year of SCA to cushion and to delay my entry into the ‘real world’ has made me both clichéd and nostalgic. Looking forward with excitement and nervous anticipation to a new start has come as a package deal with looking back. I recently got back in touch with some friends from school I had lost touch with and I’ve been reminiscing about the things that have been important to me throughout my life. It is in the name of this kind soppy nostalgia that I decided for this blog post to write a list of one important lesson or influence for each year of my life, in case I forget later or stop paying attention. The Early Years may be a bit hazy but here goes:

1.    Sleep
2. Roquefort cheese.
3. If you shout ‘poo poo!’, everyone laughs. Nursery school is sweet.
4. Big Girls get homework. ‘Cat on the Mat’ and ‘Dog on the Log’ is a great read.
5. Spitting on people is not as funny as saying ‘poo poo!’
6. It’s cool to steal Cinderella’s identity
7. Stories are better when they have animals in them.
8. Being hospitalized for constipation (three months!) taught me a thing or two about the world.
9. Gooey aliens don’t actually reproduce, but you can buy baby ones and propagate the myth.
10. Being a bitch gets you into trouble.
11. Binged on biographies of abused children. Taught me something superficial about suffering. Nirvana did something similar and helped me to cope with it all.
12. Fashion choices have a pervasive impact on your relationship to yourself and to other people. Kurt Cobain is a genius.
13. Shit got pretty philosophical around 12 – had that moment when you realized everything in the world is a bit fucked and you’re like “Does anybody know about this!? Why aren’t we doing anything, man?” Enter stage right: Sum 41, Simple Plan, Blink-182, etc.
14. Strong friendships are foundational.
15. Bob Dylan. Naked Lunch.  Writing ‘automatic’ poems, which now make me cringe.
16. Naked Lunch, On the Road, Howl, anything Beat Generation.  I went nuts.
17. Gulliver’s Travels.
18. When you lose sight of yourself, shit gets ugly.
19. The Rainbow – thus begins a potentially life-long obsession with D. H. Lawrence.
20. Man Repeller & Leandra Medine, who still make me feel empowered e’ry day.
21. The almost complete works of D. H. Lawrence – I actually went nuts here.
22. To be diSCAvered