I really made a choice when I said I would write one blog per month. The month has tick tick ticked away and I have written all of five dot points. I have no real sense of what to write about this month, so I’ll stick to what I know most about… ME! 

I generally use this blog to help me deal with things, process the inner thoughts and whatnot. There is another reason though, and that is, I like to write. I have a novel I want to finish one day, and part of getting myself motivated to finish it, is by allowing myself to write junk. Just write. So that’s what I’m going to do.

So without further preamble, I present to you a list of my favourite things.

• Driving and listening to music
  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy driving (singular) and listening to music (singular) but there is something about taking a drive and blasting my music. When I was in my early 20s and everything would get too much, I’d hop in my car and drive. Most of the time there was no real destination in mind, I just wanted to be free for a little while. The open road, Eddie Vedders dulcet tones and maybe a sneaky cigarette – it was magical.
  Even now, in my late 30s, I occasionally get this sense of contentment and serenity if I’m driving by myself and listening to my tunes.
• Dogs
  Honestly, if this is a shock to any of you mother fuckers, you don’t know me at all (and hey, maybe you don’t know me at all and you just found me by WordPress, so hey there new friend). My dogs are my favourite people. Other peoples dogs too. Dogs make my heart happy, they get happy to see me, hog my bed, and seem to genuinely like my company. When I’m sad, they comfort me. When I’m happy, they’re happy too. When I’m eating, they decide they’ve never been fed.
  I’ve stopped talking to people because of dogs, I’ve cancelled plans to be with my dogs, I’ve driven to Moorabbin every other day for months to care for my dogs. I’ve taken time off work and cried on the floor hugging my dogs. I’ve grieved for my dogs. I love them.
• Comics & superheroes
  I’m a fan. Of many many things. One of my first things I obsessively loved was Superman. I remember mum folding out the sofa bed in the lounge room and watching Superman 2 and absolutely loving it. This would have been early to mid 90s, where the Christoper Reeve Superman movies were a thing of beauty (and not just a nostalgic staple). It was such a pivotal obsession. I would race home to my grandparents and watch the god awful Superboy series. I obsessed over Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher in Lois and Clark. I would go to the library most weekends as a 15-16 year old and borrow graphic novels and books on superheroes. I collected comic books for years and years.
  In a society which is often fraught with awful fucking things, the thought of people existing, beating the odds, and helping people just because they can, is bloody magical.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  I’m sure this is one of those things that will be odd or cringey for other people, but good news is, I’m not other people. I remember going to watch the Buffy movie at Northland cinemas in 1992, I didn’t think it was a great movie, but I liked it enough that when the movie spun off into a tv series in 1997, I tuned in. And I never stopped. I’m not even going to start breaking down the symbolism and all of the amazing storylines. Buffy introduced me to some of my best friends, both online and in real life. Some of my closest friends today are people I met because of a shared obsession with a teenage vampire slayer.
• Mia being obsessed with random shit
  Like, I obviously love Mia, my family and friends, but one of my favourite things is Mia’s odd obsessions. Don’t get me wrong, she’s loved some annoying AF things along the way (unboxing videos, random kids on YouTube who use dolls to act out stories, all that crap) but there’s something amazingly awesome about a 6 year old who is obsessed with Julie Andrews – she legitimately memorised every fact she could find about her and would make me quiz her. Then there was Amy Winehouse, Alanis Morissette (I’m fairly certain she wanted to track her down and get adopted by her), Dolly Parton (she sassed me for not following her on Spotify) and most recently Betty White. I hope she continues to be obsessed with these things.
• Technology (and figuring out how shit works)
  I am a self proclaimed early adopter. I love technology. We didn’t have a home computer till sister was in university (we were poor yo), and I remember Karly spending some god awful amount for a HP Pavilion desktop computer with like, a 4gb hard drive, 64mb of ram and a CD burner. I thought we hit the jackpot. I was so interested in how that shit worked that one of my high school friends and I would randomly take it apart just so he could show me how it worked. I went from knowing nothing about computers, to being obsessed. I have built many many PCs (for myself, friends and family), I’ve wasted hundreds (if not thousands) of hours trouble shooting computers, whether it was some fried internal component, or someone unplugging the keyboard, I’ve fixed a lot. I even took a night course in computer hardware and software (so I could prove I was fully sick). Computers, and most technology really, is logical. When it doesn’t work there’s a reason, sometimes that reason is stupid, but hey, it’s there. It allowed me to chat with my friends at 2am on mIRC, it let me burn CDs for all of my friends, it let me learn more about things than I ever did in school. It’s also allowing me to sit in my bed and write this post. Technology has ruined many things, but it’s also made a heap of things better, me for instance,

Anyway. There’s more things I like, but I don’t feel like typing anymore. 

Are any of you still reading this anyway? 

What are some of your favourite things? 

Until next time,

Tanya