The show goes on...

I am writing this from the dining room table of the first floor of Eerste Atjehstraat 69.



Outside the window, I see a blue sky, a large blue winebego parked opposite my house, and the owner of the local cafe unstacking his chairs outside, preparing for a good day of trade I imagine. 



It's 9:34am on my last day in Amsterdam as a resident.



Tomorrow, when I wake up, I will be another traveller, passing through, without an idea of when I will be back in Amsterdam, The Netherlands or even Europe.



In an hour, my mattress will be taken from the house.



So will the 8 boxes and single suitcase of belongings that I have accumulated over the last 3 years.



Then I will return my mobile phone and travel card to the office.



And finally, come home and my bed will get taken away.



And herein, that becomes the end of my life in Amsterdam.



I will have one last dinner with my friends and then go to an airport hotel.



I am not sure what else to write, except that I am not sure how to feel.



I'm 30,  unemployed,  single and soon to be homeless - but as my dear friend Sarah said to me last night, all of this was my choice and that's what's important.



And damn it, that is what is important.



It was important to me 3 years ago that I had options and that I was allowed to choose from all those options with my best interests at heart. I wanted to broaden my world, not shrink it. When I went out into the big bad world, little did I know that after having a buffet of options spread out infront of me, the one that I would ultimately take would lead me back home.



One of the most resounding feelings that I have at the moment is an immense amount of pride. After landing here with no job, no friends, and hardly any money, I leave with almost 3 years experience at an international firm, a varied and fascinating circle of friends ... and still no money, but my life is certainly richer in other areas.



I travelled when it was possible, I shared times with old friends and new, I made stuff (some I liked and enjoyed doing, some I hated making and hated putting my name to), I ate a lot of good food and a lot of bad food, and I met a LOT of people.



I lived a  dream. At times it seemed more like a nightmare because it wasn't everything it was cracked up to be, but I can now say "I lived in Europe." and what is important is that everytime I say that I remember that I was the one that made it happen, and I can hold on to this achievement.



Now that I've ticked that one off the list, it's time to keep moving forward, and keeping ticking more dreams off the list.



So, let the show go on.



Leaving is hard, leaving is sad, leaving is confusing... but there is a quiet sense of faith inside of me that knows that leaving is clearing a path for growth and more rich experiences.



Goodbye Amsterdam. 

Australia Day

9:30 Standing at De Clerqstraat tram stop

9:40 Amsterdam Centraal Station, boarding Regional train to Brussels Airport

12:33 Receive sms invitation to go out to Cocos Outback bar tonight. (Amsterdam's only Australian bar.)

13:15 Car ride to Northern European office

13:56 Eating Starbucks chicken salad waiting for 2pm meeting to commence

15:08 Heated discussion with Northern European Marketing Director

15:40 Running to catch train back to Amsterdam

15:56 Dissecting heated discussion with Northern European Marketing Director with fellow colleague over Belgian Waffles with Nutella at Brussels Central Station

17:12 Discover Triple J hottest 100 winner is Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know".
("You're just somebody that I used to know.") Realise Gotye is originally Belgian and I am spending Australia day in Belgium.

18:30 Decline invitation to Cocos. After being accused of being "Unaustralian", send a prompt response by retorting " But I can listen to "You're the voice" at full volume and eat lamb sausages at my house without the sweaty backpackers and horny dutch girls trampling on me..." (Based on 2011 experience of Australia Day at Cocos)

19:10 Tram 13 home, debating if I should be going out.

19:55 Hot shower, ugg boots, laptop.

Goodnight Australia.

The Fear

I am kind of afraid of my future.

I remember Australia and then I get nolstalgic and homesick.

And then I remember other things about Australia and I am glad I am not there.

But then I walk outside of my apartment and I feel like I don't belong here at all.

So I wonder what it's going to be like to be 32 year old me. Which is only 2.5 years away.

Because the 27.5 version of me was afraid of the future for different reasons. And she had every reason to be.

A sign

I got something in my inbox today, which I am going to classify as a sign.

If I told you what it was, it would sound really weird and geeky.

I shouldn't pretend that I am neither of those things but some things are just too strange for other people to get.

In any case.... the time is nigh!!!

First video interview

Interview and video direction by me.

Physalia motion design studio: interview from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

The Lost Thing

Part of the reason I have been so lax in updating this little platform has been because I have been trying to juggle a few balls in the air.

Freelance writing for a lot of blogs about pop culture and motion graphics and art, the full time job and then blowing off some general steam.

Also, the all-consuming task of working out my next move in the face of a rental contract that's about to end, and the fact that I am turning 30 soon, which means opportunities for working holiday visa opportunities will end very shortly in many many countries.

Do I stay here, do I move on, do I reinvent myself into a total creative and ditch the project management/strategy side to me, what-o-what do I do?!

In terms of moving on, I have often thought about whether I would fare better in London or even risk it all again and move to Berlin.

I decided to try and make an online portfolio of work I have been up to, to try and get myself another job, hoping it may help me present myself better online and be a one-click representation of myself as a writer.

This was instigated recently after Tommy Hilfiger emailed me - the company, not the man himself - after I applied for a creative copywriter job at their European Headquarters. They asked to see my portfolio and I had to send them about 10 links to 10 different articles I had written. I thought an online portal of one singular link might help me convey myself a little bit more professionally.

What was supposed to be a creative portfolio of my writing and copywriting to break into the creative side of an ad agency turned into me into thinking how I didn't really want to fit into one box and wanting to add some considerable projects I had invested a lot of time and energy into as a an advertising strategist. And then what about my cultural journalism stuff?

I don't mind fitting into a few boxes, but I know that companies think you look flakey as an all-rounder. Arent we all supposed to be specialists and not generalists?

Question: "Which side of the fence do you sit on? Creative or strategy? Editorial or conceptual? Video or print?"

Answer: " All of them."

To be quite honest, in this economic climate, I don't think companies can really afford to hire anyone who is good at one singuar thing or specialise in a niche but hey, who am I to comment?

This morning I woke up and someone I had requested an interview with had made a last minute decision to agree to meet me online.

In requesting an interview, I should say, I wanted to do a piece on him for my freelance job, not requesting him to meet me to give me a job.

It was 8.30am when I woke up. He wanted to skype at 8 am (my time).

Not thinking that he would agree to the interview, I hadn't prepared myself the night before.

I mean, I had notes, and a vague recollection of what he did, but I needed some time to brush myself up on his work and research him a little more.

In actuality, I think he's brilliant (and so does the rest of the world) and was certain he was a very down-to-earth and lovely guy.

How would I know? Well, he's Australian for a start, and the way he writes on his website, he seems to be...well... nice.

I logged onto skype and sent him a few messages, but he didn't appear.

"Damn. I should have woken up earlier and checked my email and logged on in time. I am such a noob. A failure at this whole thing. How could you let someone like him wait for someone like you? "

I spoke to my cousin in the meantime, had a bit of a pep talk with her and then he appeared online apologising for not being on time.

I interviewed him and he was lovely. Inspirational.

Who was he?

Shaun Tan, the illustrator and writer of a multitide of picture books (for adults) and graphic novels. Also a painter, set designer and director with a degree in fine arts and english literature.

One of his graphic novels was recently completed into a movie which took ten years to make and runs for 15 minutes.

Shaun told me the main animator was from Adelaide.

He also told me over our one hour interview that he just needed to be flexible and adaptable in his career and just learn on the fly for all the projects that life threw his way. He said he felt like he was getting a little PhD in learning to do what he does as he plays so many different roles.

This year, Shaun and an Australian production team won the 2011 Academy award for Best Animated Short film and accepted the Oscar from Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.

Watch the video here.

At the end of his acceptance speech, his counterpart Andrew Ruhemann says "This award is for Lost Things everywhere."

Apparently, there's nothing wrong with dabbling. In fact, being good at a few things might ultimately be more than ok.

Come so far

Buurvrouw, Sunday 7 August 2011, 3:34am

I think I'm in a good place. A really good place.

I just need to tweak some things to make it better.

I am really fortunate.

Fantastic home.

Great flatmate.

Lovely, genuine friends.

A respectable job.

Youth on my side.

It was a very different situation two years ago and I'm thankful I've come so far.

Finally

PostSecret: 1st August 2011

Mystic Medusa

WEEKLY HOROSCOPES FROM JULY 2

GEMINI

Your ruling planet into Leo means snazz up, engage full powers of eloquence and hire a publicist/self-promo. Yes, it’s time. No more expecting not-exactly-quick-processing-peeps to gauge your brilliance unassisted. This applies to biz and romantic realms. Mars in your sign is also trining Saturn so your strategic brain is superb this week. Midweek serendipity enables you to solve an old mystery or turn angst to wisdom.



Thursday 7 July 2011
Eros, god of love, moves into Taurus today, soothing the rough edges, easing stress and techy vibes so that all is well. More than well. All is a sensual delight. Immerse yourself in your favourite form of bliss and remember to appreciate the heck out of it.
GEMINI: Sudden $$$ genius or even an offer hits by the weekend. This could be like a micro-idea of a bargain or saving OR something major. Whatever, be on high alert for it. Friday and Saturday are super-sensual but it’s a wild energy, channel it with Gemini verve and dexterity. Even cunning.


Wednesday 6 July 2011
Mars trine Saturn supports solid, steady and well planned action. It stabilizes the erratic path of Mars in Gemini and allows you to make progress that doesn’t need too much revision. The key is to know where you really want to go. Point your feet in the direction of your smile.
GEMINI: Advance warning now that you’ve got a three week Mercury Retrograde in your Comms Sector from July 15. Get your vital signatures done before then or leave till August. You are, however, about to get a really good $$$ breakthrough bit of luck or inspiration.





By Mystic Medusa

Bring it. Just bring it.

I wrote a short piece on one of my friends who is an artist, with his permission, and submitted it to a great arts and trends blog that has decent exposure in NYC and in Austalia.

I love his stuff and think he is exceptionally talented. And a super nice guy.

The blog, Lost in E Minor, picked up my piece and published it late on Sunday night (my time) about 8 hours after I wrote it. (Australian morning.)

Then they tweeted it. To over 10,000 followers.

I tweeted it. To about 150 followers.

Then I told my friend and he put it on his facebook page. ( His art page and his personal page, and he credited me in his foreword, which also drove traffic to my newly updated blog project.)

Then he tweeted it, and then the blog retweeted his tweet to the same 10,000 followers.

Then I put it on my facebook page.

Then his/our friends started to spread the link on facebook.

The friends of our friends picked it up on facebook and share it and one of them works for the Amsterdam city council marketing department, I amsterdam, who are by the way, a phenomenal brand in their own right, especially in the field of social media.

(As a marketer and a consumer and someone who lives in the city, I enjoy their campaigns, and reading their website for what's on (it's also very user friendly) and enjoy interacting with them on facebook and twitter and the like.)

I amsterdam put it on their facebook wall infront of their 25,000 fans.

Call it serendipity, call it synchronicity, call it the power of social media. Whatever you want to call it, I don't care.

The Universe is providing.

The Lost in E Minor blog then agreed to let me write for them regularly for the love, glory and exposure.

Then my phone rang. It was a creative production house called Yellow Submarine, in Amsterdam. They heard about me through someone and they asked me if I would be interested in freelance writing for their regular company newsletters, FOR MONEY.

Of course I am interested!!

Then I got an email saying that a short piece I wrote and submitted for Lomography Magazine is going to be published on July 24th.

O-M-G: It’s all happening.

I just got back from Australia about 2 weeks ago.

Before I left, I told my friend Amber that I was on the brink of something, something that felt good, something that felt real and something that felt right.

I think this is the something.

I am, in a word, floating.

She was right

I worried about coming home so much.

For various reasons.

Anxiety kind of plagued me.

Concerns washed over me frequently.

But Laura gave me some advice I once gave her.

And she's been right so far.

Dismantling the delusions

Sometimes, things happen where you say

"WHAT - THE - FUCK."

No question mark required.

The situation is so bizarre that noone could possibly ever offer an explanation that would or could satisfy therefore rendering it completely useless to pose the words in a tone that would present it as a question.

Sometimes, when you ask for a sign, a deafening silence can follow.

And that is actually your answer you were meant to receive.

Push the button.

I push buttons all day, everyday.

Keyboards for a start.

Phone keypads.

Light switches.

Elevator buttons.

Train doors buttons to open them. ( God forbid anything happened here out of courtesy, even the train doors aren't chivalrous.)

I push metaphorical buttons too: my boss, my colleagues, my friends, my suppliers. I may not like/mean to cause a stir, but the drama sometimes follows me.

I'm going to Madrid tomorrow to celebrate pushing buttons.

I've pushed enough buttons now to be happy about where these jabs and clicks and index finger driven actions have taken me.

Tapped enough keyboards to create enough of the right words to have the damn good life that I lead.

Dialled enough wrong numbers to learn some lessons and punched a few right ones to get a few good answers.

Turned out some lights on some good and memorable nights, and flicked them on again to wake up to a new chance everyday.

Pissed off enough bosses to get me where I am today.

It takes a split second to push a button and those buttons, no matter how trivial at the time, will definitely shape your life.

"Send"

"Open"

"Delete"

"Buy"

"Confirm"

"Apply"

"Call"

"End call"

Cheers to the buttons, the fingers that pushed them, and the hearts that tell them "Just do it".

Changing of the guard

What makes me an authority on the city I have lived in the for the last year and a half?

The internet does.

There are millions of people sharing their thoughts online about restaurants, bars, hotels and about every other service imagineable, be it on forums, blogs, online communities, micro blogging platforms, and they get heard.

Why shouldn't I?

I can write whatever the hell I want to, because I have access to a blogging platform, and I paid for hosting and a domain name.

Read the below: via The Pop Up city

Trend 2: Bloggers Are The New City-Branders

By Jeroen Beekmans | Published: Friday January 7, 2011

Most bloggers with an international audience write a lot about what happens in their home town — the place were they live and know about all the good stuff happening there. Doing so, they are great ambassadors of their city (most of the times unconsciously), and do a great job when it comes to promoting local excellence among a large group of influentials around the world. With their work, bloggers like Nalden (culture/lifestyle, Amsterdam), the Amsterdam Ad Blog (creativity/advertising, Amsterdam), Wooster Collective (street art, New York City), The Sartorialist (fashion, New York City) and Rebel Art (street art, Berlin) have established loyal crowds on an international scale and gained a solid position next to official marketing campaigns when it comes to setting the image of a city.

Official city-marketing campaigns initiated and controlled by local governments mostly try to tell the same story since they all want to attract the same kind of people to their towns — ‘international knowledge workers’. Bloggers, on the other hand, have a huge worldwide online audience and report about specific themes, styles and subcultures that more specifically characterize the city. In Copenhagen both elements come together. While the Danish capital officially tries to brand itself as world’s bike capital, blogs such as Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic independently report about innovative and inspiring bike culture in the city.

In the years to come, city-marketing could increasingly develop itself into an open source activity, thanks to technological innovation. Predict the people of Amsterdam-based cultural innovation office Non-Fiction, “we think the future of the city will be shaped by all of us together, via the technologies and tools we’ll have”. Although initiated by the ‘I Amsterdam’ city-marketing people, this approach could already be a signal for a more autonomous and open approach to city-marketing. The campaign asks tourists to explain (in video or writing) how they would spend € 1,000 in the Dutch capital. The most creative submission was rewarded with € 1,000 pocket money. Also interesting are the home-made parody city-marketing videos, for instance the one made by the Canadian comedian Mike Polk for the city of Cleveland. His happy video about the sad side of Cleveland was a hype on the Internet and encouraged the urban authorities to organize a contest for a more “positive” approach to tourism videos. Obviously, they did not get the point: “they might have been positive but they were not funny”, was stated on GOOD. Why should it only be governments to decide which identity about the city will be spread?

This article belongs to the Top 10 Trends For 2011. Over the last year we have been writing articles about urban culture and innovations in cities on a daily basis. Reflecting on 2010 and looking into 2011 we have put together a list with ten of the most remarkable trends that we spotted. We would like to deepen them out a little in a series of articles published this week on The Pop-Up City.

Mission accepted

I'm about to make a dent in the Universe.

Who is...Seth Godin?

images courtesy of Moo Business cards ( So hot!)

"SETH GODIN has written twelve books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. Every one has been a bestseller. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.

American Way Magazine calls him, "America's Greatest Marketer," and his blog is perhaps the most popular in the world written by a single individual. His latest book, LINCHPIN, hit the Amazon top 10 on the first day it was published and became a New York Times bestseller.

As an entrepreneur, he has founded dozens of companies, most of which failed. Yoyodyne, his first internet company, was funded by Flatiron and Softbank and acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. It pioneered the use of ethical direct mail online, something Seth calls Permission Marketing. He was VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! for a year.

His latest company, Squidoo.com, is ranked among the top 125 sites in the US (by traffic) by Quantcast. It allows anyone (even you) to build a page about any topic you're passionate about. The site raises money for charity and pays royalties to its million plus members."

via SethGodin.com

I'm so excited, and i just can't hide it!

My life recently? Late nights, 18 hour working days, Repetitive Strain Injury on the cards for the not too distant future...

And I'm still excited!

Why?

One of the things I mentioned in this post is about to come to fruition....

Countdown!!!

Brussels = Salmon + Pickles

I went to Brussels last weekend. (aka. The town of salmon and pickles - coined by me because French culture and dutch culture don't seem to be the most blendable of things. Funnily enough this is also how the Belgians see it, having been without a properly formed government for the past 7.5 months because of the reality that...surprise, surprise, french culture and dutch culture are VASTLY different.)

Fun and weird at the same time. Met lots of nice, intellectual and funny individuals. They study important things like International human rights law and Conflict and Security, and I am pretty damn sure that all of them will change or shape the world for the better. I'm going to turn on the news one night and see these people ratifying treaties for the disarment of nuclear situations or bringing North and South Korea together as one. Mark my words.

Some of these heresaid people came with me to see a bit of my world in their city ( ie. less about articles, books and treaty documents and more about arts, culture and theatre) We ended up seeing one of the best performance art pieces I am likely to see in my entire life.


When we rolled up to the theatre, a lady led us outside of the theatre and took us to a metro stop. We had no idea what we were doing there, until some guy on the opposite platform starts harassing one of the people I was with about taking photos of him (with my camera.)

It wasn't until he turned his boom box on that the penny dropped and I suddenly realise the performance had already begun. We were watching street theatre and breakdancing where it was born and bred - on the streets.

Then we went to see some guy eat yogurt at an intersection, and he was talking in dutch and I lost the point of it all. Too avante gard for me. I was exceptionally confused when he ran away from us. Then we were led back into the theatre and the show in the theatre was amazing, and powerful.

Just a casual game between friends... infront of a palace. BSIS lads get into a game of football - infront of the grand palace Leopold built after colonising Congo.

A couple of pensive characters @ Le Montmartre bar

Another pensive one: this time at a beautiful little secret called L'Atelier bar


The gi-normous Belgian Beer selection at L'Atelier


The entrance of L'Atelier. We were almost going to give it a miss because it was closed when we got there but the owners turned up at the same time, chased after us and let us in as they opened. Magical.

Hip Hop(e) @ KVS ( Royal Flemish Theatre)

Being led down the Rabbit Hole.


"Take my picture dude!"

Bad Ass.

Man eating yoghurt. At an intersection.

...Like a Hammer

Retrospective #7: Reunion, Fate + Architecture

Christmas Day in Barcelona:

Parc Guell, Santa Maria del Mar Cathedral, Christmas lunch and escaping the oldies for a drink turned into one of cousins getting robbed without us even realising it.

Roasted pigeon and charcoaled spring onions: my Christmas lunch