On Tuesday I was elected the president of the UNSW BITSA society, thanks to those that voted for me.  What does this mean?  It means that this semester is going to be potentially the most hectic period of my life with so many things to juggle.  Having said this I intend to see the year through with flying colours and so I apologize in advance to my friends if I seem like I don’t have time to go out (because I probably don’t haha)  Second Semester should start to see things improve since I won’t have ‘full-time’ work and I won’t have graduate applications (hopefully)

So this morning on the train the song “Hotel California” popped up on my iphone and while I was listening to it I came to think “wow this is a really old song”  then it got me thinking about how its a song my dad’s generation would’ve listened to and how its one of those songs that old people would say “back in the day we used to listen to…”.  So that got me thinking about the times we’ve lived through and how we let things simply fly past,  I speak for myself mainly but generally when something big happens I think to myself “Oh wow, thats pretty serious” but then a few days (or weeks depending on severity) you just kind of forget it and not give it a second thought.  911 is a prime example of this, I mean for most of us Australians it really was just something that happened in a distant land, too far for us to really care about it.  I mean we were shocked and surprised like the rest of the world but now, years down the track who gives a second thought to 911?  We know about it, but we just don’t care.

Thinking back, we’ve lived through some pretty fast-paced times.  I mean when I was a kid I was using black and white macs (yes the screens were black and white, no colour), we’ve lived through dial-up, cable, ADSL and now ADLS2, music has changed quite a bit too, we’ve seen the rise and fall of superstars, the death of Michael Jackson.  A lot of things happen and we kind of just go with the flow which is not necessarily a bad thing.

But thinking about it, at age 21, I can easily say “I’ve lived through such and such times” to someone even just a few years younger, and I get people only a few years older than I am telling me stuff that I have never experienced (and never will)  Am I old? Perhaps. But thats not the point.  When we let things fly by us so quickly and rapidly we don’t really appreciate the significance of the times we live through, but a few years down the track when/if we start to reflect we start to realise how profound the changes we’ve lived through are.

Perhaps its a good idea to keep note of the events we might deem ’significant’ and see how we think of them in a few years, a time line might provide a visual representation of how turbulent our lives are.  This also makes me think that if I was to make a personal timeline of my own personal significant events (the good and the bad) it might interesting to see what it holds…  More on that later perhaps.

So thanks to a very heated and argument on chat about openess in sexuality vs maturity  I came to think about something very important:  The Inner Child

Lets face it, everyone has an inner child, that little kid inside all of us that says “I wanna have fun!”  I think that everyone’s desire to enjoy themselves comes from the inner child and that it is an integral part of our personalities.  In some people the inner child manifests itself more then others, in others it is suppressed more than others and needless to say alcohol seems to bring out this inner child more by removing the inhibitions we put on ourselves.

Quite often people talk about maturity vs immaturity and how some people need to be more ‘mature’.  I think thats a load of crap, most of the time people are ‘immature’ because they’re trying to have fun, and if they want to have fun then let them.  What I think happens a lot though is that people who try to have fun do so at the expense of others and this annoys people resulting in the label “immature”.  In these cases I think the word “inconsiderate” is more accurate.  For example, you can be extremely drunk, obnoxious and loud and have the time of your life but just make sure you’re not being loud towards other people who aren’t in such a celebratory mood or disturbing anyone otherwise you’re being inconsiderate.  Also people who think loud and obnoxious people on the street are annoying, you ARE in a public area, not everything can go your way so just deal with it, you can’t force your views on other people.

You can do whatever you want, so long as it is not at the expense of others.

So all in all I think the inner child is something we should all strive to seek out, it makes us happy and allows us to enjoy life.  It’s ok to be silly and laugh at silly things, its not ‘weird’ as some people may think.

We all have an inner child, we should all let it out when we can.