My giraffe hat

Recently my daughter and i travelled to Dunedin to go to the ballet. It was Cinderella, after the Frederick Ashton version, and nicely done. There were absolutely rows of little girls who comprised whole ballet classes, and they were all called Lily and Brooke and they whispered and shushed each other all through. The Regent Theatre in Dunedin is one of those marvellous Victorian neo-Baroque affairs. When i lived in Dunedin i was a student, and i never went to the theatre. We were all way too broke.

i had a rotten cold. The next morning, after a chilly night in a cabin, i awoke and prepared for some sightseeing around Dunedin and the trip back. i took a medium sized swing of Robitussin because i have always had a fairly impressionistic approach to dosing, (there are small, medium and large swigs. On reflection, this may have been a large swig) and at about 11 am i confessed to my daughter i was probably not capable of driving home.

Nasty stuff, Robitussin - if you drink about eight bottles you might just get psychotic. i was nowhere near that but i did spend the next few hours wandering around staring intently at walls, drinking coffee, and buying unusual things. Eventually i recovered enough of my senses to drive, and just as well because we struck rain and hail and fog and darkness on the way home and of course arrived far later than expected with no decent explanation.

One of the unusual purchases was my giraffe hat. Here are pictures of my giraffe hat.

Giraffes are pretty trippy things anyway. One cannot fail to appreciate giraffes. This hat is hand made in wool and polar fleece and it comes from Nepal. It is very warm. i look completely ridiculous in it and of course being very short in stature my giraffe hat is a major ironic statement.

It is impossible not to smile while wearing my giraffe hat.

i have before talked about the malleability of states of consciousness, and there are some cool legal ways of playing with this. Theatresports people know about them and use them for warmups and getting into roles. A good first exercise is to walk quickly around the room pointing at objects and naming them by wrong names in a loud voice. So you see a table and shout the word 'lamp' for example. Of course it is best done in a group, and by the end of it you feel a bit buzzy and light headed. Another exercise is to pretend you are mingling at a party. Mingle mingle blah. For five minutes while mingling normally in every other respect, you keep your eyes narrowed. You find yourself feeling silghtly low in mood, a bit suspicious perhaps, a bit shut down. The next five minutes you spend mingling normally in every other respect, except you keep your eyes very wide open. Now you feel awake, chatty, literally wide eyed, and your voice becomes louder. Simply by narrowing or widening your eyes you can change how you see the world in ways you can easily experience consciously and comparably.

Thus it is impossible not to smile while wearing my giraffe hat, except if i forget i am wearing it. Wearing it around the hospital i move faster and even take on a little giraffe gallop down the corridors. i give my thanks to the god of Ridiculouslyosityness, and take fine note of the wonderful complexities of my funny old brain.