A week in review

Because the year in review seems too fucking difficult in 40-degree heat.

Besides, anyone reading this thing already has a grasp on the majority of my banal ramblings for 2007, but which of you knows what I've been up to this week? Who participated a Pimm's/Campari orgy as the sun set over the last days of the year? Which of you surprised me with phone calls, gifts, and gossip? It's simply thrilling to guess, isn't it? The answer, of course, is no. But because you seem to still be reading this, here is the week in review. It contained:

- One partridge in a pear tree: not really but a family breakfast and general Christmas merriment (read: inebriation);

- One frightening and yet also tedious trip to the emergency ward (bonus points if you can guess which family member was writhing around on the floor in pain asking for morphine);

- One whistle-stop tour of Mt Eliza (and the relatives assembled therein) with a quick detour into Mt Martha for a goodbye beach trip with a very bestest buddy who is on her way to Washington right now (whose identity will be revealed when I link to her blog in the very next post);

- One Pimm's /dumpring orgy ;

- One completely delightful and unexpected breakfast date;

- One pizza packing night with aforementioned soon-to-be Washingtonian;

- Three seasons of Arrested Development;

- And some other stuff I just can't remember. Let me know if there's anything I've missed out. And Happy New Week!!

High on life. No, seriously.

So right now I am flailing around my room, dancing to Tokyo Police Club, folding pointy origami birds for Georgia (don't ask), and drawing picture of dinosaurs. I just thought I'd mention it because I realised that this thing has been fairly downcast recently... I was also reminded by the lovely Mary K (of course) that life is actually pretty fucking sweet right now. Hence the dancing. Hence the recording of said dancing on teh internets.

Somehow I didn't even realise the date until the last minute, so I popped out today to get some craft supplies and now I am making craft like a motherfucker. I'm a little too broke to buy everyone presents this year, although since two of my housemates work at this bookshop I managed to get a whole lotta books at what I think was a slightly under-the-table discount, but luckily I have friends who find origami monsters and slightly abstract portraits charmingly whimsical. At least to my fact, they do.

Anyway! Dancing around the room, whoo! It's a party for one! Would you believe that I'm stone-cold sober, too? Jober as a sudge! I'm high on life! Maybe also meth! Just kidding! But I am happy, because I get to make things for all my friends, and because this year, which has been stressful and a little wearing but also incredibly professionally and socially fulfilling (props to my student media darlings!), is nearly over, and a shiny new one is on the horizon waiting to be unwrapped. Because someone tried to pick me up at Kmart today. Because I got a job that lets me write things and because I won't have to work in hospitality for at least three months.

So yeah, kittens and rainbows and all that. I have to go now and construct an elaborate diorama for an unnamed housemate featuring an origami paedophile and its loving yet dangerously infantalising mother. I'm heading to the beach for a couple of days, but I'll see you after the break - I hope you get everything you ever wished for!

Ouch, part infinity.

Jesus Christ, can this year just be over? I don't think my liver can handle it anymore. I ended up leaving a party graced by my favourite Adelaide-dwelling people last night because my body just would not cooperate. And they're back to the city of churches tomorrow. Damn.

This morning, of course, hit me like a tonne of gift-wrapped gifts and I ended up lying very still in bed all morning until the room stopped spinning, then shuffled to the milk bar at three to indulge my craving for a white-trash breakfast. Lesson learned - from now on we will stock emergency cans of tinned spaghetti and a bag of liquorice alongside our more prosaic groceries. Oh God, the pain.

It's not even that I drank particularly much last night - or "binge drank", as the kids seem to be saying - more that a couple of weeks of accumulated liver abuse coalesced into one critical-mass style hangover. Can that happen? Apparently it can. I think the woman at the corner store thinks I lead a rather dissolute lifestyle, as she was full of matronly concern when I walked in looking anaemic and dressed like an Olsen twin by way of the Prada A/W collection from a few years back (ie. homeless but in rich, secondary tones). Plus, she probably thinks that all I ever eat is liquorice, flour, and tinned goods. If only either of those assumptions were further from the truth.

Cent choses

Today was a good day, a day of things turning around. It's midnight now and a storm is brewing over Brunswick. All the windows in the house are open and I'm sitting in front of the computer with a mojito, feeling antsy in a good way this time. A change in pressure always makes me antsy, as if all the little ions zapping around the atmosphere are playing ping pong off the table of my skin.

It's felt like an uncommonly long day, actually. Time is doing funny things at the moment, stretching and snapping and generally playing tricks. This morning we, we being my house and we being a cohesive unit at the moment rather than the fragmented mess of previous months, went to the bike sheds on an adventure. One of the nice things is a bike waiting for me, a plum-coloured beauty being rebuilt for the new year. Insert easy metaphor here, please.

According to Blogger, this is bewildered's one hundredth post. I don't particularly feel compelled to celebrate the occasion. When I first started this blog is was as a way of avoiding getting lazy, to write frequently if not consistently. I've succeeded on that count, I guess. I've set myself a year's minimum on this thing and we'll see if it keeps going after that, or whether this experiment has actually taught me brevity and structure. Oh, fuck. I just gave away the ending, didn't I?

Trois choses

1. In praise of sleazy dancing. Friday night was a spectacular night for dancing, with rhythm and motion being achieved at two separate venues. It was a sweltering night, and we danced so much that we felt almost purified, the way middle-aged women do after a sauna. I went to the bathroom and ran my head under the cold tap, and then continued to dance, my fringe slicked against my forehead in little wet clumps.

2. If my life were a movie it would have an indie soundtrack. Our barbecue got rained out yesterday so we converted the occasion to a pizza night on the sly. Various people attended and converged in a social manner. Two of them stayed over and we went out for breakfast and sat around talking about film, politics and etymology. I walked back from the bathroom and for a minute time blurred and they began talking in slow motion and laughing cinematically. The upended milk crates they were perched on and the studied bohemianism of the surrounding patrons precluded classical or popular music.

3. Christmas trees are the bee's knees. At my parents' in the afternoon a box was procured containing twenty years of homemade Christmas decorations. The smell of pine needles made me nostalgic. My dad made a joke about paedophilia and my mother confessed a fear of feral horses. I agreed that they would probably be more scary to confront in the street than feral dogs or cats but less likely to encounter in the inner suburbs. The sunburn on my shoulders from breakfast made me sleepy and I fell asleep on the couch. My mum drove me home, and in the car my sister told a story about witches' hats.

Stood up. And fatigued. But definitely not crying.

There are times in my life when I think I'm cracking up. And there are times in my life when I know I'm cracking up. Fortunately, at the moment I'm pretty sure I only feel like I'm coming apart at the seams.

There are a few stresses in my life at the moment - job hunting, family stuff, household stuff - that I'm managing to hold at bay with a combination of demented optimism and baking. I tend towards certain Pollyanna tendencies that keep me afloat where otherwise I might not be so buoyant. It's a rather grimly determined policy of looking on the bright side, and making a conscious decision not to worry about things I can't immediately change and to focus instead on the smell of gingerbread, or the feel of clean sheets, or figs finally ripening on the tree.

It takes an effort though, I guess, and occasionally that effort is just too much effort. Tonight it feels as though I'm leaking out everywhere. I know it's not polite to talk about one's mental health, but I might as well put it on the table that there have been periods in my life where I have been, well, not so well. I've been pretty stable for the last couple of years, and I can tell when I'm going to hit a bad patch and ride it out, but it's the reason that I couldn't get out of bed this morning until no-one else was in the house. It's the reason I go for long stretches without sleeping more than two hours a night, and why I bake banana bread at three in the morning. And it's the reason why, after a friend called an hour before he was supposed to come over for dinner tonight to cancel, I started to cry, discreetly, on the tram.

I do tend to do things discreetly - most people would never notice that I was going through a patch, because when I am going through a patch I would rather die than let on that I'm not coping. And people aren't all that perceptive, either. Anyway, I never really considered writing about it on the internet, either, except that I just read this and something in me broke a little bit. This was me two years ago, right down to the baking. It explains things better than I could, anyway, so maybe you should just read it.

And then you should go bake a batch of cookies, and then be thankful either that you're not of a depressive disposition (why is it so hard for me to write that I might "suffer depression"?) or if you are, quietly remind yourself that there are other people out there who know how it feels to spend every day in a haze - to have a great cloud of static hanging over your emotions, to not be able to make even trivial decisions, to find yourself despairing that nothing - no matter how dramatic or self-destructive - will ever shatter the bell jar.

Like I said, I know I'm not falling apart. At least, not tonight. I'm going to brush my hair and go to a friend's gig and maybe have a quiet sulk when I get home, and then I'm going to wake up tomorrow feeling better and berating myself for being a drama queen. I'm probably going to dump the food I bought to cook tonight in the fridge, because my housemates aren't home and cooking a feast for one seems kind of laughable, and eat pickles out of the jar and finish off the so-pathetic-it's-charming(?) Weight Watchers brand cottage cheese in the fridge. I'll be fine. And if not, the world could always use another batch of gingerbread.

Somebody employ me plz? Kthxbye.

The weekend passed in a haze of gin and animal masks and backyard-hanging-out, as Jono and I went to visit the lovely Caroline for birthday shenanigans. Caroline is based in Frankston, and Jono's parents have a place in Rosebud West, so we packed up the car with various bits and pieces and took a winding and scenic drive to the beach. It was a particularly pleasant weekend, commencing with Jono and I splitting a bottle of Aldi-brand gin and making increasingly crude jokes, and concluding with my being dropped of at my grandmother's house for the traditional Channukah overfeeding.

Unfortunately, delightful sojourns from the real world can't last forever, and so now I am back in the office, eating leftover bagels and looking for a job. There seems to be depressingly little out there involving writing/editing/subbing and I am afraid that I will have to return to hospitality in a few weeks' time. I don't really mind waitressing too much, but I would prefer a writing jo for obvious reasons, not least because cafe work is so notoriously badly-paid.

So, if anyone knows of any wordy-type positions out there, can you give me the heads up? I've done freelance technical writing for a dental imaging company before, as well as fooling around with student media and small press, so I'm game for any sort of technical writing as well as fiction and journalistic writing, editing, and proofing. A job truly would be the bestest Christmas present a friend/reader/anonymous commenter could give me... with gin coming in a close second. Just kidding! I am not a sleazy delinquent but fully employable! Seriously, someone hire me?

Shorts for summer

I met the delightful Mary K this evening for dinner in the city, starting and culminating with free drinks at her place of work. Along the way we stopped at Pellegrini's for $13 pasta, and met up with our friend Ben for a quick cocktail at Madame Brussels, whereupon the conversation took a turn for the smutty. Amongst the printable things discussed, prompted by one waiter's incredibly hot shorts and blazer combination, was Ben's intention to bring short shorts in for summer.

I tell you, I could not be more pleased with this decision. Long have I been an advocate of trunks, shorts, and their leg-revealing ilk. I was recently mourning the fact that a man's well-turned leg is no longer considered worthy of attention or adulation, but hopefully a revival of short shorts for summer may help turn the tide back towards a celebration of the muscular calves and shapely thighs of our masculine friends.

What do you think? Are Ben and I alone in wanting to see more man leg? Personally, I feel that woman have shouldered the burden of legginess for too long. All I'm asking for is equality here. A little pin parity. After all, the fundamental tenets of feminism demand that men and women be treated equally. And men's legs, recently, have not been displayed, objectified, and lusted after as frequently as women's have. So it's only fair that mans flash a little gams. Preferably whilst wearing seersucker shirts, hats, and/or spectacles. And carrying a jug of Pimm's. That would just about make me pass out from happiness, I think.

Gingerbread jihad

So recently I have been on an absolute baking spree, and I have to say I am enjoying every minute of it. Usually my compulsive baking is linked to nerves or stress (don't tell me I'm the only one who whipped up a batch of election cupcakes!) but lately I've just had itchy baking fingers.

Tonight I found myself at my parents' place, drinking Baileys with my mama and baking an army of gingerbread stars and hearts. I amused myself by imagining a star/heart gingerbread war, with each side attacking and devouring the other until they realised the devastating (and cannabalistic) gingerbread cost. Grief-stricken, many of the remaining soldiers offered up their lives in a ritual fire. This explains why there were half as many biscuits left in the kitchen an hour after I baked them as there should have been and why a few where looking a little charry around the edges. Well, actually, my sisters were probably responsible for some of the devastation...

We don't have that many holiday traditions in my family, as we tend to alternate Christmas and Channukah as the Big Deal holiday and thus get lazy about every-year kind of things. But one thing we've done consistently, without fail, is make gingerbread houses, decorated austerely with dustings of icing sugar or riotously with raspberries, mint leaves, smarties and liquorice all-sorts. Christmas is really one of the few times of the year that it's socially accptable to bake like a motherfucker, so I tend to take full advantage of people's willingness to eat tiny gingerbread soldiers and proceed accordingly.

Recently the whole gingerbread thing has gotten a bit out of hand, and I've found myself manning gingerbread house construction lines staffed with neighbourhood children, tiny cousins and tipsy best friends. Which is nice. Although, when I think about it, one of the warmest, fuzziest parts of the experience, for me, is remembering making the houses as a child with a twinkly old German woman named Sigrid. These poor neighbourhood children are going to remember some vintage-dress-wearing twenty-year-old, hepped up on sugar, swearing in French, and making up songs about the various stages of baking. Oh dear.

Anyway, I have such nice memories connected to the gingerbreading, and that's probably part of my deepseated baking fetish. The other part is probably pathological. But what the hell! We will let them eat cake, or at least gingerbread. And then let them lie down on the couch with a strange craving for gherkins wondering how it is possible to ingest that much molasses in one sitting as they fall into a hyperglycaemic swoon. Er, not that I would know anything about that...

The battle continues

I scrolled through my newly acquired RSS list the other day to find that the world has acquired another holy warrior in the battle against insipid yet somehow wildly offensive bullshit. Reading Mary's post reminded me that I had attempted to post a comment in response to the very Ask Sam post she is denouncing. Mysteriously, it didn't get past the mods, and I forgot about it. Mary has requested that the text be reproduced in full here so as to strengthen the anti-Sam movement's internet presence. I am more than happy to oblige. The following rhetoric may contain ranting.

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Hey, imogen and Magoo [sole voices of reason at the time of attempted posting -- ed], you beat me to it. I've never commented on this blog before, although I've often commented upon it (mainly upon its poorly constructed prose, total conformity to retrograde stereotypes and inherent anti-feminism), but the de Beauvoir comment was just the final straw.

I doubt very much that Simone de Beauvoir would read a syndicated dating column, but were she a) not dead and b) to peruse this blog, I am sure that she would throw up her hands at having her seminal treatise cited alongside this excruciating tripe and utter something violent and French.

Apart from having authored one of the most influential feminist works around, and as well as being a formidable scholar and philosophe, de Beauvoir was famously progressive in her relationship with Sartre, with both of them taking lovers and participating in menages a trois. This was before "feminism, the pill, and books like Why Men Marry Bitches", which I'm sure is a charming tome, turned women into voracious sexual creatures who are - quelle horreur! - having sex on the first date. Somehow, I think she’d be okay with having sex in a nightclub toilet.

Like I said, I read Ask Sam fairly regularly and usually respond with an eye-roll and a snarky comment, because I accept that there's not much meat in a dating column that maintains that everyone is equal, unique and deserving of respect, and because I accept that Ask Sam represents the views of one woman with whom I disagree heartily but who nonetheless has the right to her own opinions. But as soon as one of the founding mothers of feminism is used to justify the whining of a man who doesn't understand why women leave him when he makes no attempt to "please them or live up to their expectations", I find that I can’t just leave things with an eye-roll.

Its disappointing and upsetting the short shift feminism is given on this blog – it seems most often to paint feminists as man-hating, embittered hags who bitch at other women and constantly emasculate their men. All of which is fine as long as you accept that Ask Sam inhabits the same artificial landscape as Cosmo or Ralph, where the dynamics of social interaction are distorted and exaggerated for a cheap 300 words and which seems to be about 25 years behind the rest of society. But as soon as you invoke de Beauvoir, you describe another landscape, one where women (and men) can be strong, opinionated, promiscuous and independent without fear of being labeled ‘dominating’ (although I strongly suspect the word Sam is grasping about for here is ‘domineering’).

Simone de Beauvoir was such a woman, and the women who follow in her footsteps probably do scare the fuck out of Sam’s friend, who seems to look at the richness and intricacy of sexual and romantic relationships and see only constant opportunities for petty point-scoring. As to the question of whether women or men should be more ‘dominating’, I think the answer we are looking for is that no person should ever ‘dominate’ another based on something as arbitrarily prescribed as, say, gender. Hey, that’s pretty much feminism in a nutshell! Sometimes, it really is that simple.

"I'm an arsehole. Love me."

Yesterday Jelly and I decided to indulge in a Winonathon, which consisted of sparkling rose, popcorn, Girl, Interrupted (remember when Angie used to be hot?!) and the inimitable Reality Bites. So much Winona! You know, it's a real pity she doesn't make movies anymore, what with the shoplifting and the court case and all. She may be kind of one-note, but she does doe-eyed waif with a French haircut like nobody's business.

Anyway, Reality Bites has always been a movie that I love to hate, partly because I was seven when it was released and the references grated by the time I saw it, and partly because I have met too many people like the kids in Reality Bites - self-obsessed, annoying, angst-filled and under the impression that an exchange of pop-culture references is a decent substitute for originality and wit. More specifically, I have met too many guys like Ethan Hawke's Troy Dyer - "brilliant", subversive, and total, irredeemable arseholes.

Why are we supposed to root for this character? He's nasty. He's jealous, petty, and condescending. His faux-Kerouac evangelising is supposed to be some kind of revelatory 'realness', but basically it smacks of the kind of arrogance that comes from a total disregard for everyone else. Troy, we're told, is some kind of disaffected genius, and because of that we're meant to think that his smart-arsery and mean-spiritedness about the world are somehow noble and pure - he's the savant that sees through the spin of the commercialised world and rejects it with a shrug and a quip.

Except, as mentioned, he's a total fucking prick. Winona Ryder's character isn't exactly sympathetic either, but at least she's flawed in a kind-of-identifiable-with way, and she's willing to see past the yuppie exterior of a woefully-miscast Ben Stiller and fall for his inherent sweetness. Of course, Ben Stiller is going to get a clunky nineties-style platform heel to the heart in this scenario - he wears a suit, for Christ's sake. That's part of the reason we know we're supposed to root for Troy. The other part is the speech he gives Winona when he tries desperately to make her love him. It goes, "I'm an arsehole. Love me."

Well, actually, it goes: "You can't navigate me. I may do mean things, and I may hurt you, and I may run away without your permission, and you may hate me forever, and I know that scares the living shit outta you 'cause you know I'm the only real thing you got." But the sentiment is the same. And let me tell you, Ethan Hawke - this is bullshit. Total, utter bullshit.

Disclaiming that you're likely to walk all over someone in a relationship does not, in fact, give you permission to walk all over them. Being 'upfront' about the fact that you're a prick does not give you a get-out-of-jail card for treating them with contempt. And telling someone that you're likely to treat them like shit because you're the only person that will love them is not in any way, shape, or form, romantic.

How many times have I heard variations of this speech? How many times have my friends? How many have you? And why do we keep putting up with this shit? In the end, Winona capitulates to Ethan's not-inconsiderable charms, because the dorky guy that adores her is worth less than the bad boy who treats her like dirt. Because she's not worth it - she doesn't deserve a guy who is charming and charismatic and emotionally functional. That's the implication.

She's not worth it, and hey, at least when Ethan cheats on her, ignores, hurts or condescends to her, it's not like she won't have been warned, right? Please. The fact that Winona Ryder falls for this shit - that we all, occasionally, seem to fall for this shit - is the number one, popcorn-throwing reason this movie makes me mad. That, and the fact that if you don't go out with Ethan Hawke, your only choice is Ben Stiller. But I don't even know where to start with that one.

Just a lovely day

I was walking down Johnston st today when a women dashed out of a hair salon and bailed me up on the footpath. Would I be interested in working as a hair model? Did I have time for a colour today? I was, and I did, and now my hair is a rich and chocolatey shade of brown.

I think I am going to have to accept the redhead experiment as somewhat of a failure... I loved the colour but every time I went to have it touched up it seemed to get darker and darker, inching back towards my natural colour. Perhaps I will accept defeat until I have grown my hair out a bit more, and then go somewhere really expensive (ie. competent) and emerge the mermaid-haired temptress of my dreams. Somehow I'm banking on mermaid hair, although mine is taking an excruciatingly long time to grow.

I had such a nice time walking around Collingwood. Somehow I've managed to spoil myself rotten today. I had breakfast with my lovely friend Josephine, real crumpets with blackberry butter and darky, muddy-coloured coffee, and some good conversation, then headed off towards Fitzroy, managing to make a small detour through a lovely little op shop and picking up a cheerful plaid summer jacker with cap sleeves, a scarf and some sunnies. Then hair-pampering, and a short walk to Per Square Metre, where I picked up my darling illustration. It is very darling. Shut up, it just is.

Getting peckish again I hit upon a lovely, tiny, jumbly cafe with antiques and furniture cluttering up the back and paintbrushes drying out in the bathroom. A five dollar plate of spaghetti napoli later (the proper kind, with olives and capers and chilli) and I was basking in the sunshine, happy and replete.

It made me think how happy I am to be able to have my own life at the moment. I've done a lot of bleating on this blog about being a dismal romantic failure, but being able to wander around Collingwood, slip in and out of galleries, sit in a park, whatever, without needing to make plans or be accountable for my whereabouts is just a wonderful feeling. That total satisfaction you get from a successful day's solitude... it's nice. And it's nice to remember that I've always liked my own company. Especially on a holiday, in the sunshine, with a freshly-shampooed head.

Hot hot heat

My word, it is hot at the moment. Somehow without my even noticing it the weather's steamed up to a consistent 30 degrees plus. I guess this means summer has started.

I never used to be a summer person, and autumn is still my favourite season (do you have a favourite season? you're missing out if you don't), but this balminess is novel enough to be extremely pleasant. It was far too hot the other night to cook so I had a ten pm dinner of smoked oysters, crackers and gin on the front porch. Its easy to lose track of the hours out there, whiling away time immersed in novels and eating icy poles and swatting away bugs. Sometimes hot summer rain falls in sheets and sizzles on the footpath and the whole street has a Belinda Carlisle moment.

I'm in a funny situation at the moment where I am still getting paid but no longer have to work, so I'm having just about the laziest summer holiday on record. I spent all of today lying under the fan in Jelly's apartment, drinking beer and watching Press Gang. It was a nice way to wind up the working year, although life at the Farrago office didn't involve as many hostage situations, actual news stories or unresolved sexual tension as at the Junior Gazette. Still. It's something for next years' editors to work on.

Clumsy

I always thought that being clumsy was something that I'd grow out of, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't. This depresses me because I've always thought that a sudden acquisition of grace would accompany some sort of magical turning point of grownupness, turning me from vague and dropsy child to elegant and poised adult. Also being able to round a sharp corner in the car without making sound effects, and being able to run down the street without starting to giggle. But it seems as though I am actually becoming more clumsy as the years go by.

Am I doomed then to remain an eternal adolescent, walking into chairs and spilling coffee on myself, and burning my fingers on the toaster? If so, I'd like some sort of gangly adolescent charm, please. And a thirteen-year-old's metabolism. As it is, the myriad bruises and scratches on my legs (hello table!) and the blisters and cuts on my feet (goodbye, kettle!) just seem to point to someone who is tragically inept at looking after her own physical wellbeing. That, and navigating successfully through space.

Somewhat delightfully, Jono has started to refer to my rather more goofy episodes as being intimidating - which is a nice joke even if it's born of his utter disbelief that anyone would ever find me even marginally impressive. Oh well, at least I'm not in hospitality anymore... I tended to be quite wildly intimidating around sandwich presses, pie ovens and freshly-washed glasses.
And tables, and chairs, and stairs... and the actual point of this post? I forget. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go find the band-aids.

Art bitch

This weekend has been a triumph of porch-lounging, punctuated with a couple of very cool shows. It's probably the bare minumum required to keep my art bitch status, but give me a break, it's not like I'm a professional.

The lovely Catherine Campbell had invited Jelly and I to a very, very cool illustration show at Per Square Metre gallery, and so we duly went and ate tiny cupcakes and marvelled at the pretty, pretty drawings. I ended up making my first ever art purchase, a Lilly Piri illustration. It was remarkably frustrating to only be able to afford one - to be honest, I can't really afford it - but I consoled myself by thinking that the others would be going to good and appreciative homes. Luckily, somebody snapped up the illustration of Catherine's that I was lusting over all night, because I was about to send myself broke to buy it. Maybe in five years' time...

(As an aside, Catherine is one of the illustrators who gave stuff to our magazine and was incredibly gracious about the not getting paid stuff. Another of our illustrators, Andrea Innocent, was also in the PSM show, and it just made me feel incredible lucky that there are creative young people in Melbourne who were willing to donate their time and effort for a project that looked at one point like it might not even get off the ground. They are both fucking talented and if you have money and you like good art, get down to Collingwood and buy their stuff.)

Tonight, after debating the value of theory in art with my housemates for a couple of hours, I hauled myself down to Utopian Slumps for the Nathan Grey closing exhibition. Also very cool, with some wonderful sound art and many many cute boys. Oh, and the installation itself was very good...

Throw in some pizza-eating, and some Pimm's-stealing, and some wee-hours-of-the-morning porch-drinking, and some brunch-devouring and lake-sitting, and that's pretty much the sum of my weekend. Maybe tomorrow I'll get down to the Gallery. You know, dressed in black, with a flask of gin. This art bitch life is pretty fucking sweet.

Teef

Recently I've been dreaming that my teeth are falling out. A lot. Like, every second night. Most of the time I'm going about my business and I realise that one of my molars is missing, then a few of my teeth just start dropping out, and then a few more, until I am frantically trying to keep them in and running madly to the nearest dentist. A couple of times they've been smashed out violently. Once I had that dream within a dream thing where I woke up and gave a sigh of relief that I still had all my teeth, and then they started falling out again and that's when I actually woke up.

What the fuck? According to Google (or more accurately, the number one Google hit, Dream Moods),

One theory is that dreams about your teeth reflect your anxiety about your appearance and how others perceive you. Sadly, we live in a world where good looks are valued highly and your teeth play an important role in conveying that image. Teeth are used in the game of flirtations, whether it be a dazzling and gleaming smile or affectionate necking. These dreams may stem from a fear of your sexual impotence or the consequences of getting old. Teeth are an important feature of our attractiveness and presentation to others. Everybody worries about how they appear to others. Caring about our appearance is natural and healthy.

Apparently, it can also signify that I am nervous about public speaking, feeling powerless, or "putting [my] faith, trust, and beliefs in what man thinks rather than in the word of God." Um, not going to argue with that last one... According to my housemate Surineh, it could also mean that I am coming into money, which, as nice as that would we, just does not seem likely at this particular juncture. I don't know. Most likely it just means that I forgot to buy floss or something - I am, after all, a dentist's daughter...

Feel free to add your own interpretation.

Farewell, Lucky: we barely knew ye

It's incredibly quiet around here; soft, peaceful, the night air unbroken by man or fowl. I can't get used to the lack of noise, although it's a welcome quiet. It's quiet because today a nice man came and took the rooster away. Farewell, Lucky: you've gone to a better place.

For those of you not in the know, Lucky was one of a pair of chooks bought to keep the duck company. The other one didn't quite make it, poor darling. For the longest time we were in denial about the fact that Lucky was not a girl chicken, but as with so many other male-types to which we had become attached, inevitably we had to face the fact that he was a cock.

Anyway, as well as being incredibly not kosher with the city council, Lucky was waking me up at five am every morning and continuing to crow throughout the day, as well as attacking Hegel and anyone who got too close. We didn't want to take him to the RSPCA, since we realised he'd promptly be put down, so Georgia listed him on the Trading Post ("Well-fed rooster, $1, price negotiable) and someone called up jubilant and came and collected Lucky. He breeds chickens, apparently - instead of getting the needle, Lucky is being put out to stud. There could be worse fates.

In any case, I can't quite get used to the lack of noise. Fortunately our street has some weird sound dynamics, otherwise the neighbours would have lynched us by now - that's how piercing the damn bird. It will be blissful to sleep past five tomorrow. Hegel is getting used to being an only child - he's getting more attention from us at the moment that he has since he was a duckling. And instead of a dollar, Georgia is getting a free soft drink next time she goes to Mr Breeder's 7-11. We're still trying to figure out who got the better end of the deal.

Sleepy weekend

All this week I've been struggling with a cold, and this weekend my body finally gave out. To wit: Friday night I came home, took a three-hour nap, ate dinner, went to sleep. Saturday I woke late, read the papers, had breakfast, read a novel, fell asleep. Sunday I napped all day before meeting Jelly for Mexican food and porch-drinking good times. Er, business meeting. I met Jelly for a business meeting.

Anyway, it was a rather delightful change of pace, given that I rarely get to bed before 2am on a good night and regularly go through bouts of gruelling awakeness. Reading in bed was particularly nice - propped up on cushions, cup of tea in hand, halfway through The Picture of Dorian Grey before snuggling down a bit and passing out completely. And that halfway in-denial feeling of just closing your eyes for ten minutes, knowing full well you are dedicating precious weekend moments to somnabulent bliss.

It was rather a rude shock to get up today and go to work, but it was nice to be able to do so without the aid of pseudoephedrine and gallons of coffee. So this is what 'well-rested' feels like. Bloody hell, well now that I know...

Argh

At the moment, I'm sitting in the office, waiting for a courier who assured me he'd be here first thing in the morning. I just called the courier company, and a very perky lady informed me that he'd be here between twelve and three, she couldn't be more specific. Well, I certainly am glad I got here at 8.30 then!

It's not the most dramatically awful hardship in the history of the world but I'm feeling rather cranky, especially since I rearranged my other work hours yesterday to sit around and wait for this same courier to not come. Now I'm going to have to call in and beg off again, although if I can get the remote access email thingy to actually work then maybe I can work remotely. Grr. It's looking less and less likely that the shipment will actually get to Sydney my Monday without some sort of exhorbitant fee, as well. UNLESS...

Does anyone want to go on a road trip with me? I can't drive but I pick great road trip music, always buy minties and am endlessly entertained by rounds of I Spy and the like. You, me, the open road... we'll roar into the sunset with a song in our hearts and half a dozen 21x22x32 cm boxes in the boot. Beat the jaded, drizzly Melbourne climes for a place where the tans are fake and the pokies light up the sky. Well, it sure as fuck beats sitting around waiting in the office... What do you say?

Figs!

I wandered into the back yard this morning to take some washing off the line, and apparently the fig trees are covered in almost-ripe fruit. I'm not quite sure how I managed not to notice them before, but it's a very exciting development nonetheless.

I only acquired a taste for fresh figs after moving into this house. I think the key is to eat them straight off the tree, still warm and soft from the summer sun, splitting them open with a fingernail and turning them inside out and scraping the flesh off with your teeth. Yum.

The other nice thing about an abundance of figs is the possibilities they offer. Fig, marscapone and caramelised onion tart? Fig and ginger bread? Blue cheese and fig pizza? Grilled figs and ricotta cheese on fresh rye bread? I can't decide. Maybe I will make a three course fig dinner and you can come around and we'll have a fig party. Hurrah!

Things I have done today (in no particular order)

- Cleaned red wine off the walls.

- Took a shower without first removing the ice from the bathtub. It was tingly and rather refreshing.

- Filled ten garbage bags with empty beer bottles.

- Ate a solo hungover breakfast of pumpkin cornbread, white beans, spinach, relish and eggs. There's a really good cafe thankfully stumbling distance from my house, so I threw on the cleanest thing I could find and mooned over a newspaper for 45 minutes until my food came.

- Cleaned up assorted pinata detritus, including (wrapped) condoms that Georgia thought would be an amusing touch but which rather added to the generally atmosphere of seediness enveloping the house this morning.

- Spilled wax all down my arm, in a non-kinky way. Stupid candles on stupid hight shelves.

- Received a new bookcase (yay!) and two green bags worth of books as a gift.

- Liaised with similarly debaucherous student media types. Ate saganaki pizza, drank pomegranate-flavoured vodka. Felt remarkably better.

- Made balloon animals; pioneered lascivious ways of achieving the perfect poodle tails.

- Fished around in my cleavage for a winged insect that had inexplicably flown down my top.

- Listed all the things I have done today in anticipation of some sort of memory loss/ sudden decline of mental faculties induced by too many mojitos and too much recovery fried cheese.

- Went to bed. No, wait. Now I have.

America is fucked, y'all.

Georgia had a friend around tonight to help make a pinata for our party on Saturday, and somehow the three of us ended up sitting on the floor in the lounge room eating pizza dosa and watching So You Think You Can Dance. We were sitting on the floor because Bec got into a fervour of party planning today and ended up moving all the furniture into the back room to clear space for a dance floor. Which came in handy, when we were emulating the 'peace dance' that every single fucking dancer performed solo tonight.

The 'peace dance' was an incredibly hackneyed piece of choreography that showcased some amazing technical ability and overly earnest emoting. Such terribly emoting. The 'peace dance' also involved dancers drawing a heart in the air with their fingers, making the peace sign, and wearing white pyjamas with a peace sign drawn on the front. In any case, none of us really thought it was anything more than a crass attempt to bring a 'story' to the boring process of solo dance performances and proceeded to make anal sex jokes and contort ourselves imitating the dancers.

Anyway, apparently Channel Ten shows the performance show and the voting show on the same night here, as opposed to it being two different programs in the US, and as soon as the second component started it became apparent that some parts of the US, not all but some parts, are royally fucked. That is, the host alluded to some controversy, to the station being bombarded with calls, and I just assumed that they suddenly realised that they had been duped into watching the same terrible solo ten times and wanted to complain, and didn't give it much credence.

And then. And then the executive producer and one of the judges, incidentally British and with a quintessential British manner that was both scathing and utterly sincere, was facing the camera, apologizing to anyone who had been offended by the 'peace dance', saying that it was possible to want peace without actively trying to undermine our troops in Iraq, and that everyone supported the troops and the dance was just trying to express the hope and optimism that the dancing youth of America have for the future, and really, that he's sorry that your son is serving in Afghanistan but he has the utmost respect for their decision and that showcasing several dancers making heart shapes with their hands is not some sort of elaborate ploy to indicate to Al Quaeda that America is fundamentally soft on the War on Terror.

I think he actually used the line, "it is not unpatriotic to wish for peace". And that is when I left the room, and screamed into a pillow for five minutes before returning to pinata shenanigans. It's just a dancing show. It's just a bunch of angry people telephoning in their ignorant, hate-filled disapproval, because they have nothing better to do than make their minority opinions as loud and hate-filled as possible. Because surely they're a minority, right?

Either that or America is fucked, y'all.


UPDATE: TWoP is more concise than me. Not that that will make me delete any of this pizza-dosa-induced rambling, so, like, whatevs...

Just kick me in the balls if I ever get that emo again

That is all.

So I may just be single forever.

I had a rather startling realisation last night, as one friend threaded cocktail umbrellas through my hair and another bombarded me with popcorn. Looking around Jelly's apartment, crowded with people I love, I realised that I am for all intents and purposes dating my friends. The sex is non-existent, but spending so much time with people who throw Press Gang parties and make lethal sangria and serve smoked oysters and crackers for dinner is making me happy in a very special way. There's little that I find more fulfilling at the moment than sitting around watching Spike and Lynda bicker and snuggling up to my peeps on the couch. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

I've always found it insultingly glib when people - usually people who are happily ensconced in relationships - tell single people that love and affection and tenderness are things that you get from your best friends and that if you have those friends, then you're probably not really lonely. It's always seemed like cold comfort to me - a rather patronising way of telling those of us not in relationships to suck it the fuck up, a way of making people who aren't in relationships but find them comfortable and fulfilling look like whiny bitches for mentioning the fact that life as a single person is not always ideal. But recently I've been so wrapped up in friendships, good friendships, that the little drop of wistfulness usually flavouring my day has disappeared. Altogether, I don't know that I miss it.

Somewhat tangentially, it does seem sometimes as though I should feel guilty for not really wanting to be single. I'm not unhappy by any stretch of the imagination, occasionally, sometimes with a strength of feeling that leaves me breathless, I begin to think that not being able to share any of my experiences makes that happiness rather hollow. And you're not really allowed to say that, what with the rah-rah rhetoric of singledom and being an independent womyn and all that. But I do feel that way sometimes, or I did - at the moment I just seem to want to hang out with my friends and forget the battleground that is dating.

Again, it's not altogether a brilliant thing. The more tight-knit our particular little gang gets, the less likely I seem to ever meet anyone outside of our cozy little circle. Why go hang out in an inner city bar when you have dinner and Hitchcock films waiting for you at your best friend's place? Why go on dates at all when you're guaranteed a night in with people who get your ridiculous jokes, laugh at your misfortune and pour your gin and tonic in a 1:1 ratio?

Why, in other words, risk rejection and the corresponding plummet in self-esteem when you're guaranteed a loving, warm, companionable time with people who care about you? The answer, for me at the moment, seems to be that I don't. And I know it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, as well - the more time I spend dating my friends, the less opportunity I have to meet someone, the less I am inclined to give it a try, the more time I date my friends. I don't know, things have been going so disastrously recently in my dating life that that almost seems like a good trade-off.

This is going in circles, isn't it? I guess at the root of everything is that I have a crush on an impossible boy at the moment, and the whole thing just seems too difficult to navigate. Meeting strangers seems impossible. Everything seems to hurt too much. So I curl up on the couch with my friends and eat dolmades and pretend that love and intimacy in friendship fulfills the same function that it does in romance and for a little while, it really does. But if I die a crazy old cat lady, single and alone, that will probably be why.

My feet hurt

My feet hurt because I've just come back from the Spiegeltent opening gala, where I danced to bad lounge singing in my second most dangerous heels. My most dangerous heels proved too dangerous when I feel out of them whilst practice-dancing around the kitchen. Shut up, sometimes you need to practice-dance a bit so that you know exactly how constricting your skirt is or how liable you are to fall out of your shoes.

It's early morning now but I'm not even vaguely sleepy. I've been oddly jumpy these last few days, doing mad ballet-yoga around the house (sensing a theme?) and most likely driving my housemates and neighbours crazy. I have lovely neighbours who let me sit on their porch and drink their wine pretty much any time they are home, which definitely comes in handy when you're bouncing around the kitchen in need of company and sedation.

Somehow tonight, between the cabaret and the burlesque, the conversation turned to sex blogs, and in particular the incredible amount of chutzpah needed to write out every last details of your own private life. When I started this blog I intended to be anonymous, but clearly that didn't happen. Now I'm still trying to navigate just how much of my life I throw up here, in what detail, knowing that I am not anonymous and that several of my readers who think they are aren't either. I don't know. My feet hurt. I'm going to bed.

Reviews, in haiku form

Hairspray
Christopher Walken:
oh, how my heart leaps for your
suave and sprightly form.

The End of Mr Y
Physics, Derrida
and really kinky sex: this
is my kind of book.

Life
Wants to have it all -
quirky lead, hot babe, Zen - but
Life sucks Buddha's balls.

Blue Velvet
Helen made me watch
as Frank beat poor Dorothy.
A young Kyle's cute, though.

John Thomas and Lady Jane
Not finished yet, but
I'm getting there. Lawrence is
kind of a prick, hey?

Soko - 'I'll kill her'
Revenge fantasies
sound so goddamn whimsical
with a French accent.

The Sex Mook
Okay, a blatant
plug for small and brainy press.
What? It's a good read.

In which I become nostalgic

So I'm back from Newcastle, hurrah. We rolled in late Monday night, and it was good to see the lights of Melbourne twinkling in the distance. I get these vast feelings of parochialism whenever I come back to M-town from another part of the country - parochialism tinged with relief. Note: I have never experienced this sensation when returning from overseas, so I feel justified in my belief that Melbourne really is better than Adelaide, or Newcastle, or whatever.

TINA was relatively undebaucherous - lots of naps and Jenga and red wine and dinner in the apartment. For whatever reason, the whole festival just seemed more sedate this year. There was less of a focus on visual/performance art as well, so traipsing along the main drag popping in and out of ridiculous shows was not really a viable option. Still, the panel I did went well, I met some interesting people, I bared my legs and I slept at least eight hours every single motherfrigging night, so it was a more than worthwhile experience.

It also kind of rounded out the Farrago year, in a trashy and relaxed and slightly nostalgic way. I think we all spent so much time together, hanging out and shooting the shit, because we realised that opportunities to do so were becoming fewer and further between. We put most of the final edition together before we left, and just proofed a bit and wrote the editorial yesterday. We wound up swigging whisky from the bottle and dancing to Chromeo on top of the desks in the office at about 9 o'clock last night as a final send-off to the magazine, before heading over to hang out with the Lot's Wife kids (and ending up in Stalactites, because none of us had eaten). I highly doubt that I will ever find a workplace quite like that, ever again.

It's going to be weird, not heading into the office every day and eating noodle and having long rambling conversations with the kids. It will be weird not going out for dumplings a couple of nights a week after work, or heading down to the pub, or to a gig together. I mean, we did work, too, but it never felt like work, because our office never felt like a workplace. Sigh. I suppose we will continue to see each other, and it looks like I might be getting an ed as a housemate at the end of the year, but it just won't be the same...

Oh bollocks, now I'm getting nostalgic, and the year hasn't even ended yet. This is ridiculous. So, back from Melbourne, many things to think and write about, will fill you in on details at some point in time kthnxbye. Love, Jess.

Letters from Newcastle

This is a very quick check in, written from the basement of a backpacker's, on a glorious, sunny day. I had to check my email this afternoon but so far I've spent a staggering 24 hours unplugged from the internet (which is more unnerving than I care to admit). And now I'm back here, sometimes. Never say I don't do anything for you people.

In a couple of minutes I'm going to buy a generic lemonade icy pole and wade into the ocean. It's warm here - my legs are bare for the first time in forever. My legs really get a short shift sometimes, constantly covered in stockings. I had some funny-looking scars for a couple of years and I guess I was a bit self-conscious about them, and then wearing stocking just became part of the routine, but this afternoon I took them off and rolled them up and put them in my handbag and now my petticoat is brushing against them in the wind and I'd forgotten how that felt. It's nice.

I think I might sit down in a park and read for a while, too. Take my shoes off, even. Just relax. I'm wearing the prettiest dress today, that I found in an op-shop, home-made, fits perfectly. We decided to hit up the op-shops before the hardocore TINA hipsters came and ravaged them, and in the second one we went to I saw this dress and fell in love. It's cream with green polka dots and piping and small puffed sleeves, which sounds not so appealing, actually, but it is. So it will please me aesthetically to go lie in a park in my pretty dress and wiggle my feet in the grass and just read.

Then tonight is ginger beer and readings; tomorrow panels and the ocean; and a long stretch of weekend filled by I don't know what. At the moment all I want to do is curl up like a lizard in the sunshine, so that perhaps. That and lots of lemonade icy poles.

Sun rise, sunglass...

I've been wearing one-armed sunglasses for quite a while, now. Usually I am pretty good with keeping sunnies intact, but a few months ago I happened to leave my handbag in the vicinity of several small children, who had no compuction about borrowing my possessions for dress-ups (or writing all over my arms in permanant marker, which I admit I could have stopped but these were very charming small children. Sigh).

Anyway, I was in the city this morning so I decided to buy some new sunnies. I tried some white wayfarer-esque ones on recently, and they really suited me, and then I saw every fucking baby hipster north of the Yarra wearing them, so I did not go back and actually buy them. Which, really - it doesn't matter if they're trendy, right? I needed sunglasses and they looked good on me. I decided to buy them anyway.

The shop where I had originally tried them on was out - of course - so I did a quick browse of the chain-stores. Sportsgirl had a really fantastic shape, but in pale lemon - uck. Just Jeans had the right white but fairly crappy frames. Portmans had some hot pink ones, which were tempting as fuck, but I do tend to draw the line at neon. Eventually I ventured into the den of mindfuckery that is the Myer Basement, where some bright spark had labelled the house-brand faux-wayfarers as 'Dunsts'. Please, someone give that woman a raise!

Since I was in Myer anyway, I headed up to the toy department (shut up), where all thoughts of sunnies were knocked out of my head... because where once toys occupied every inch of the floor, one corner now was given over to Christmas decorations. Fucking Christmas decorations, rows and rows of them, and thin tinny carols being piped over the loudspeaker, and I think I swore out loud at the obscenity of Christmas in September. And then I felt incredibly guilty, because every time you swear in the Myer toy department, Santa anally rapes an elf - or something.

Anyway, I think that's it for me and Myer. After the Basement experience I wasn't too keen to actually patronise them (remind me to go on a rant about the Myer Basement in more detail next time we have a drink), but Christmas decorations? Really? Also, I started to veer off into a big mind fuck about conspicuous consumption and began equating my desire for new, unbroken sunglasses with the kind of mindless, disposable culture that big, corporate Christmas trees in September perpetuates. But then I realised that my broken sunnies were about to fall apart, and popped into Episode, that haven of all things hipster, and bought the fucking glasses. Because you know what? They suit me, and I like them, and I'll keep them long after the hipsters have discarded them for the next big thing.

Or until an adorable child rummages through my bag and breaks them. You know. Either way.

Hair today...

So I had my first stint as a hair model the other day. On the upside, I got a ten dollar haircut from the most competent stylist at my salon. On the downside, I had to sit excruciatingly still for an hour and forty-five minutes while a dozen hairdressing students scrutinised me intently and discussed my height, posture, head shape, jawline, skin tone and personal style.

I came away from it with a shit-hot haircut and also a new respect for people who do appearance for a living. I guess you lose that self-consciousness quite quickly if being scrutinised is your job, but I've never felt so tired and plain and puffy in my life. It didn't help that I was massively hungover, undercaffeinated and had just rolled out of bed, I guess... or that I wasn't wearing make-up, or that the lights in the salon were rather glaringly bright. Or that because appearance kind of is a hairdresser's job, all of the students were perky and bright-eyed and perfectly groomed.

Anyway. I had the haircut, and then we had the party, which was fun (in retrospect... I was totally, utterly unable to be objective at the time, but there were balloons and cheese biscuits and the like), and the magazine should be in shops soon, so look out for it. And on Wednesday I am getting up at an obscenely early hour to catch a cheap flight to Newcastle, where I will be attending this festival and no doubt behaving rather rowdily when I am not sitting on panels and organising roundtables and the like. They want me to talk about getting started in the writing industry. Ha!

Also, notice how I have not mentioned my fortnight-long hiatus from this blog at all? Smooth, hey. Life has been rather hectic and frown-inducing recently, but it seems as though I am destined for sunshine and kittens and gin for the next little while, so life is good. Yup.

Nothing more to say, really.

Hooray! (plus shameless pimping)

So finally, finally we've sent the magazine to the printers. No more coming in to the office on the weekend. No more freaking out over late content or wrongly-formatted illustrations or chasing ad artwork and getting nowhere. Hooray! We can all breathe out.

We have the proofs lying over a chair in the office as I type. They are beautiful. By next week they will be bound up into magazines, ready to send to boutiques and bookshops, so they can be sold to real live people who will read them and hopefully like them.

I can't believe that Jelly and I sitting around drinking gin and saying "you know, we should really make a fashion magazine" has eventuated in... a fashion magazine. I'm still not sure that we can afford to do this but it seems like we're doing it anyway. We're going to try to get the website up in the next week or so, with a bit of content and contributor bios and the like, so you should go check that out. By the way, when I say "fashion magazine", I don't mean something you won't enjoy, you nerdy, hyperliterate reader, you. We've got heaps of good stuff, like an etymology of jeans, an analysis of op-shop economics and a reflection on fashion's place in a post-surrealist art world. And lots of pretty pictures. And some hot design. And its all by hot young Melbournites, too.

You should definately buy a copy, but you should also come to our launch party and have some free beer, and watch me become a happy goopy mess without the girdle of stress pinching at my waist. Or something. Propping me up? I don't know. All I know is that I am so, so relieved to have this thing out of my hands.

Thus endeth the pimping. Oh, and also I landed an internship this morning that I'm pretty pleased about, so I have many a reason to celebrate. Let the period of stress be gone! Let the drinking begin!

Actually, I wouldn't mind a gin right now. Anyone? Bueller?... Bueller?

Blogging for Christ

Not much new to report. New batch of cupcakes, lemon and rosewater, sitting on a trestle tale ready for sale. New not-at-all-what-I-asked-for-but-people-seem-to-like-it hair colour. New daffodils poking through the earth in the backyard.

I've been getting itchy feet, and have to fight the temptation at the moment to drop out of uni and get a credit card and pick up my backpack again. Since it's not likely that that will actually happen, why don't we both just pretend that I am not actually sitting in an office in Parkville but rambling all over India? Yes, it's lazy, but nothing I write today will be as entertaining as travel stories and also, the second comment over here still cracks me up. Okay?

God bless u 2, will pray for your safety and well being,

GBU

LOV jess.

Tired

God, I'm tired. I was working in the office this afternoon when a great wave of fatigue came crashing down on my shoulders. The kind of fatigue that makes you feel physically sick. The kind that makes you feel tired in your bones. It was a battle not to crawl under my desk and sob, a battle that I think I would have lost had I stayed in the office much longer.

Yesterday I took a day off work to go to my grandfather's consecration. Unlike at his funeral, the sun was out, and it wasn't too cold. It was bitter when they buried him. Yesterday the sun was out and people barely cried, although I did get a lump in my throat when my father read the eulogy. We thought the rabbi was going to do it, but he didn't, just motioned to my father, who took a prayer out of the wrong pocket and got flustered and had to start again.

It was a nice ceremony. The rabbi talked about the symbolism of the tombstone, and translated the inscription from the Hebrew, and mentioned that we could keep Papa's memory alive by emulating his good qualities. That was nice. I hadn't thought of it that way before.

It's been a year since he died, and I miss him, but it was his time. What got me the most was seeing the blank stone beside his, and my nagyi's skinny little legs sticking out of her skirt. She always wears slacks, but you can't, not for a ceremony like this. My father renounced Judaism at seventeen, but he made sure my sisters and I wore skirts. My grandfather was a devout man.

The consecration, in Judaism, puts the cap on the mourning process. You sit shiva, do the kaddish, and eleven months later, cease to mourn. It's considered a sin not to get on with your life, because otherwise you're wasting your time on the physical earth, and God's not letting you stay here forever, you know. But deep down, I don't think you ever stop mourning. I'm not sure I believe in souls, and I certainly don't believe in the afterworld, but yesterday I was mourning for a man whose quiet dignity and strength of conviction often blinded him to the potential joy in the world, but whose life experiences made the joy he found extraordinary. That's schmaltzy, but it's true. I was mourning for my grandmother, who, after fifty-eight years of marriage to the decent man she married after her first love was lost in the war, has lost another love. I was mourning, most of all, for my dad, who, on Father's Day, a holiday he disdains, stood at his own father's grave and read the euology, saying, "these words were not written for me to speak - but I will say them."

Anyway. It's not the weight of grief on my shoulders, I know that. It's just a momentary fatigue that's probably come from too many days in the office, too many late nights, too few vegetables, and making countless cups of tea for the extended family who descended on my parents' house and didn't leave 'til dusk. Probably a good nights' sleep is all I need, but also a quiet sob, maybe - a quiet sob, not a sinful one, for the people left behind.

And then maybe I can put the cap on these last few months, and get on with my life.

Out and about

There's a plastic bag full of delicious vegetables sitting in the fridge just waiting to be made into soup. I bought them on Tuesday. Soup has not eventuated.

For whatever reason I'm barely home at the moment, and I just want to make some fucking minestrone. It seems churlish, though, to complain, since it's been a pretty good week for being out and about. Jelly has chronicled her version of at her blog, and about two thirds of it overlaps with mine, which is what happens, I guess, when you work and socialise and drink together. I would like to state for the record that our trivia team, Editors and their Bitches, kicked some serious arse the other night, and I think its because as a working unit all of us have developed a kind of hive mind that we are able to tap into at any point. Thus am I able to retrieve information from Jelly's brain, and her from Seb, and so forth, without speaking a word.

It's also been a good week for alternative art/performance spaces, alternative art/performance spaces being I've been thinking about a lot recently. Wednesday night my friend Nicola was in a show at Albert's Basement, which is a temporary gallery/performance space set up in a sharehouse in Albert St. Tonight Seb and I went and ate saganaki pizza and saw this excellent production, the inaugural play of a newly-formed absurdist theatre company, in the carpark of the Collingwood commish. It's a great space, really deep, which allowed for a lot of broad physical comedy, fight scenes, choreographed dance, and the driving of a car through the middle of a scene. The play itself was adapted from Ubu Roi by our friend Paul (who is clearly moving up in the world) and rather pithy and surreal and I recommend that you see it. Cheapest bar in town, too.

Tomorrow is work - hooray etc. - but when I get home I might just make up some minestrone soup. Yeah, motherfucker. Of course, the irony is that a couple of months ago when I was feeling stifled by domesticity, nobody wanted to gallivant around launches, and now that there is something on every night all I want is soup and tea and novels. Yeah, irony. Someone should really write a song about that.

Wax on, wax off...

You know how little kids barely have eyebrows, just soft adorable fluff perched above their eyes? Yeah, that wasn't me. People always used to describe me as striking - "She's such a striking child!" Partly, it's true, that was the pale, pale skin, big eyes, skinny arms and legs, charmingly crooked teeth (now rigorously orthodox, thanks to years of braces), and masses of dark hair, but I've always suspected it was the dark, full brows framing my five-year-old eyes. You can hardly call a child "adorable" when they look like Groucho Marx.

Anyway, I was always self-conscious about my eyebrows, and the first time I had them waxed was a revelation. Suddenly there were two of them - two distinct eyebrows - each thick and sloping like a stroke of follicular calligraphy. I felt old-school glamourous, rather than Old World peasant girl. And ever since then, getting my eyebrows "done" has been a luxury, a very particular craving that I indulge when I want to feel slightly more elegant than usual.

Of course, it's a risky proposition, the eyebrows. Get it wrong - or get the wrong beautician - and you look startled for weeks. I'm looking slightly startled today because the new girl at my salon dumped a whole lot of wax above my eyebrows. What the hell? I thought it was universally acknowledged that you never waxed above the brow line. Startled and vaguely frowny, but if you run into me on the street, please come up and say high, as I am actually very friendly (and not strung out). Oh well. It's a step up from Groucho, and that's all that counts.

Awful quiet

I walked home from uni tonight, beery and full of crisps. I usually catch the tram after midnight, but I was in the mood for a walk. The way my life is at the moment, I only have a vague association with the days of the week. Today is Friday. I had forgotten that, and expected the streets to be empty. They weren't.

Apart from the usual fuckwits leaning out of their windows, yelling obscenities, and the guys loitering in side streets smoking and leering, it was pleasant. The air was cold and clean. Royal Parade is pretty at night, leafy and soft. I always mean to walk to uni, and inevitably run late, jumping whichever tram is closest and bursting into meetings five minutes overdue and looking fairly harassed. It was nice to just amble up to Sydney Rd, wandering past shops with the lights out and reading new graffiti illuminated by streetlights.

Towards the top of Sydney Rd, a couple of guys lurched up to me, a little tipsy, and one of them looked me in the eye and slurred, "Lookin' pretty tonight, baybeee!" And it took all my best efforts not to crack up. I've been having a fairly shitty time these last few weeks - hence the infrequency of posting, and the rambling, emo nature of what I have written - and have felt, for the most part, under some sort of figurative raincloud. I've had a few extravagant freak-outs, culminating in one holy fuck of a crygasm the other night, and suddenly it just felt as if all the shit had lifted. Because one twenty-something kid, with no intention of actually trying to pick me up, and no crude or vulgar follow-through - no show us you tits! or wolf-whistles or jokes about my sexual availability to his friend - had decided to tell me that I looked pretty. How very gangsta.

I know I'll feel better in a couple of weeks, when some of the stresses are magically alleviated. In the meantime, I can always take comfort from stupid, beery absurdities, which in the cold light of day are probably not nearly as amusing as I think they are. Oh well - that's a problem for tomorrow. Right now I'm boiling water for my water-bottle and giggling because some stranger thinks I'm pretty.

Ah, free Heineken and weird public quasi-sexual harassment. What can't they do?

Putting down roots

You know how sometimes you're walking along, and you see two people in the distance, and something about the way they walk lets you know that they're together? It's as though if you just squint hard enough you might see a piece of telephone wire connecting them. I was walking home from the supermarket today and I saw you in the distance, with a piece of telephone wire connecting you to someone, and even though you were wearing different clothes and an unfamiliar hat I could tell it was you by the way you walked, one hip slightly higher than the other, each step slow and considered and slightly trepiditious.

On the way back I stumbled over George, who was lying on the footpath studying people's ankles. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was observing passers-by, counting how many stopped to help him up, but I think he just wanted to stare at the hard sky for a while. I asked him whether he had seen you and he said that you had passed by at three, trailing telephones behind you and taking slow and considered steps. He said that at four you were planning to turn into a tree.

Sure enough, when I got home, you were standing outside next to the clothes-line, holding your limbs up and shaking cherry blossom like dandruff all over the yard. I could hear the kettle boiling and it seemed shortsighted that you would put it on to boil before ceding the use of opposable thumbs. The dirt at your feet was cold and perturbed, and your soft eyes were fringed in moss. You stared at me sorrowfully, as sorrowfully as is possible for a tree. The kettle whistled, and I took it off the stove. I poured myself a scotch and reached for the axe.

My week sucked but my friends rock

The other day I was running late for work, trying not to get rained on too much, and generally failing. As I scrambled out the gate I grabbed a lumpy-looking envelope from the mailbox and shoved it in my bag, and forgot about it.

Later that day I was fishing around for some lip balm, when I found the envelope, which turned out to be not an envelope at all but a A4 sheet of paper, printed on one side with diagrams of the brain and folded and taped up around a soft, oddly luminous piece of cloth. The return address was my address. It could only have come from one person.

Inside was a note, hastily scrawled on graph paper, that said, in part, I bet you're not getting your required share of funny, kitsch 1950s Australiana. [...] I only noticed after I had purchased this gem for you that it is a racist scarf. It's silk, antique, and yours.

Sure enough, the cloth the note was wrapped around was a handprinted silk square depicting a map of Australia fringed with postcard scenes of famous landmarks, native flora and fauna - and some naked, ethnographically-inaccurate indigenous children squatting in the dirt, captioned "Aboriginal Children OR 'Piccaninnies'".

Many thanks to Adelaide Jess for providing a perfect moment of joy in an otherwise fraught week. I might not say it enough, but my friends are fucking awesome. Back when Henry and Jess were living in Melbourne, they partook of a very sophisticated program of mail fraud, which saw drawings of Groucho Marx (mine), cocktail recipes and newspaper clipping fraudulently exchanged between various corners of the city. I miss that and might start regularly mailing people, because email is nice, but a racist scarf on an otherwise irredeemable day? Is just about fucking perfect.

Glory of... whatever

I went outside this morning to hang out some washing, and the almond tree was suddenly covered in delicate blossom. Oh, the glory of spring! The majesty of the seasons! etc. If the seasons think I'm going to rhapsodize over them every time they make one fucking grand gesture of a change, they have another think coming. One grand gesture every four months or so, and the rest of the time it's forgetting to call and blowing hot and cold and being fucking unpredictable. As though one day of delicate blossom makes up for months of sulking. I'm sorry, honey! I was just going through a rainy phase...

Sure, I haven't spent much time with the elements recently, but it's not like I can help it. Do you think I'd be in the office six days a week if I had any choice? It's not like I'm ignoring nature, I've just been really busy recently. And it's not like I can live off sunshine and rainbows - girl's gotta pay the bills. But does the weather understand? No. It just hurls itself at my office window weeping frigid, hysterical tears, and then gives me flowers as though that will make everything alright.

Well, it's bullshit, weather. It might have been sweet blossom this morning but you're back to sullen cold tonight. I know you're temperamental, but this is ridiculous. And you know what? I'm going to close the blinds now, and curl up with a cup of tea and a novel, and I might not see you for a while. When you're ready to be sunny and warm all the time, and not just when it suits you, then maybe we can talk.

Public singing face.

I'm going through a public singing phase at the moment. Not in a torch-singing-in-smoky-bars kinda way, or even a karaoke way - just in the sense that when I am walking home with a full bag of groceries or checking the mailbox, I suddenly feel compelled to break into song.

I've been caught out a few times. Walking home in the dark last night, singing under my breath, I passed a couple of people smoking out the front, curled languidly against each other on their shadowy front porch. I didn't see them at first, just had the vague sense that someone was watching me, and quickened my pace. When I realised that no-one was following me, I felt slightly foolish. When I realised that a couple of people had just witnessed me warbling Fiona Apple's "Paper Bag" and swinging my handbag in a vaguely choreographed manner...

I'm not sure where the urge to sing on street corners comes from, but I find I'm indulging this particular whim a lot more these days than I did a couple of years ago. It makes the trip home from the supermarket much less tedious, and sometimes I just want to sing. I don't know. Do other people do this? Is it common?

And if you run into me in the street, will you join me in some sort of ridiculous duet?

If you only see one film at MIFF

...for the love of God, see this.

Jelly Hands is threatening to review it on her newly established blog, so I won't write it up, only mention that it ticks every box you could possibly expect and then some. Awesome. Come to think of it, it's possible a review of it might pop up here...

I've often wondered about the overlapping communities that exist, those on the net and those in the physical world (my first impulse being to write "in real life", but then it's all real life). Often reading blogs seems to be a matter of teasing out networks, deciphering the friendships and tensions that exist between writers in the physical world. Certain people whose blogs I read I see at launches, or get a drink with occasionally, and often I'm conscious of a disparity between the way I perceive people through their writing and how I react to them in conversation.

Occasionally it feels uncomfortably voyeuristic, knowing the intimate details of someone's life while preserving a distinctly formal relationship with them. It can feel as though you've caught someone undressing by mistake, or overheard them crying in the bathroom, and neither of you want to mention it. Occasionally it breaks the ice. Occasionally, people I didn't realise read my own writing comment on it in passing and I have a moment of panic, scouring my brain desperately to see if I've posted anything too revealing, or improper, or careless.

By the same token, I often wonder how the relationships formed over the internet would work out face to face - whether the people I meet and form word-crushes on would be people I could strike up conversation with in a bar or chat to on the tram. Whether flirting would translate into actual sexual chemistry.

Anyway, despite the occasional coffee with bloggers and the like, I've always felt apart from the main Melbourne blogger networks. Now that Jelly and Jono are writing the two spheres have collapsed somewhat, and I'm trying to dredge up as much Habermas as I can remember to try to make sense of it. Rigid separation of the public and private sphere has always been complicated by confessional literature and the like, but the internet, God bless it, has made the notion seem quaintly obsolete. Sometimes the privacy implications make me nervous. Unreasonably so.

On the other hand, I'm increasingly fascinated by the idea of the internet as a repository of memory, and the collective impulse to spew photos, jokes and journal entries into perpetuity. And since the three of us spend so much time together, it will be interesting to see how we each interpret events - the things we deem worthy of writing about, or how we write about them - and how much we can track our own lives by each other's writing.

Hmm. This is a very confused and meandering post. I'll refrain from babbling on about identity construction through the written word and the subjective memory and the confessional lived experience because I suspect I don't really know what I'm talking about, anyway. But hey!

If you only read one ostensible review of a MIFF film that takes a sharp detour into a ploddingly meta examination of the internet-mediated identity...

Good lit, bad lit

Good lit: Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

I bought Fear of Flying at a uni sale a while ago, along with a glut of books of similar theme and intent. I've been wary of reading it for a while, partly because so many consider it a seminal work, and partly because some of her later writing really approaches unreadability (Sappho's Leap was turgid, uninsightful and weirdly phallocentric... at least the half I read before abandoning it completely). But Fear of Flying skirts the lethargy that her later work falls into, and I guess following on the heels of the just-released Miller novels, its publication would have been a statement of intent, a ruthless and salty counterpoint to the high "erotic" misogyny of those works. Thirty years on, it feels a bit pointless to review it, rendering this entire paragraph a bit pointless really, but witty, neurotic, slightly desperate (the way every girl after Plath secretly envisages herself?) and it did precipitate this dinner table conversation at my parents' tonight:

Me: So I finally got around to reading Fear of Flying...
Mum: Oh yes! The zipless fuck! You know, your father actually gave that to me to read, years ago - remember, Stephen?
Dad: Yes, I think we had just started dating...
My younger sister: Please pass the salt.



Bad lit: assorted student creative writing projects.

Speaking of unreadable... We've recently been judging entries for the union's creative writing anthology. On the upside, there were a few beautifully-crafted poems and passages of prose, which renewed my faith in the ability of students to produce moving and effective creative work. On the downside/ backside, the lure of sponsored prizes always brings the termites out of the woodwork, and while I tried to scrutinize and consider each piece with equal gravitas, after a while I just deducted points from any piece featuring any of the following:

looming horizons, dewy grass, purple sunsets (really), "her heart sank", "her heart skipped a beat", inability to distinguish between "its" and "it's", any entry in blue/purple/green ink, any entry in Comic Sans/"groovy" font, the smell of spice in a bazaar, staring at the unforgiving horizon, dappled sunlight, grey morning light, cold night sky, gratuitous sex scenes (so edgy!), gratuitous scatological references (so edgy!), unreadable formatting (so edgy!), his strong hand gripped hers, "love had us in its grip", he was my first love and the twist is... he was a cat!, he was my first love, and the twist is... he's dead!, huddling naked beneath thin sheets, our hearts were entwined, totally unconvincing and patronizing use of dialect (it's gritty!), single mothers despairing at their suburban lives, stories written "through the eyes of a child" eschewing basic style and grammar, "consumed by love", "my palms were sweaty".

And so forth. To protect the anonymity and privacy of entrants, a few of these examples are made up, these examples may not correspond to any particular piece, and those which do I did not read aloud to my colleagues in fits of laughter/ silly voices, as this would be unprofessional.

We're thinking of running a Bad Poetry Competition at the magazine, just to have an outlet for some of this stuff. Also, if any of you can find an example of my using any of these phrases previously in this blog, I will eat my hat and also send you a prize of some sort. Umm... bad metaphor? Poor phrasing? Used volume of Erica Jong?

Gah.

I am wavering between being totally infuriated and snickeringly amused by the Age blogs at the moment. Ask Sam, previously Fucking Sam in the City (adjective and emphasis mine), is one of the most socially regressive, sexist, coy, badly-written Cosmo knock-offs out there at the moment, and I cannot tear myself away. It's like a train wreck, were the train carrying three hundred scantily-clad girls heading to the Gold Coast, and had it crashed into a truck carrying five tonnes of margarita mix. Or something.

Occasionally it does throw up some gold, such as this gem from a discussion on Australia's "sexiest profession":

Philosopher Alain de Botton, author of the pioneering book Status Anxiety, reckons it's all got to do with our anxiety over our status.

or this totally naturalistic prose:

That's right gents: move over corporate hot shots because women these days are hankering after someone who can work a power tool, sweats on the job and doesn't wear a suit. Introducing the sexiest male in Australia: the tradie.

The comments are rather adorable, too, with much emoticon winking, poor syntax, and clumsy flirting. And many people trying to come off as self-deprecating about their own line of work, while flagrantly fishing for compliments. As to the actual sexiest profession, nurse, tradie, firefighter and lifeguard were fairly well-represented, with writer/editor noticeably missing... Apparently our tatty cardigans, grammatical pedantry and hypercaffeination do not a fantasy make. Oh well.

I'd be so tempted to just write off the whole blog as the sort of sexist pap that so many relationship columnist seem to indulge in, except for the fact that it's a Fairfax blog. And though there are a few serious writers out there - Barney Zwartz, for example - who seem to put as much effort into their blog posts as their print work, for the most part, the Age blogs are one steaming pile of hot mess.

Ask Sam, with its dubious and retrograde sexual politics and complete disregard for the basic tenets of literacy, is offensive enough, but it also feels symptomatic of the contempt that The Age shows for its non-print audience. For the most part, its blogs are shoddily written, poorly researched, and reek of the kind of smug egocentrism that would be unacceptable in print. What the fuck is wrong when one of our major media institutions so badly misunderstands the nature of blogging?

It's as though they think that if they throw their laziest, most patronizing shit at the kids they'll suddenly be considered hip. As though they're saving all their A material for grown-ups who read the real paper. It makes me feel that even if I churn out some of the wittiest prose here the internet has ever seen (...don't worry, you're not in danger of it actually happening), I'll still be considered a journalistic second-class citizen.

There's little to be gained by treating an online audience as a bunch of LOLing fools - children and idiots who can't discern between quality journalism and poorly-disguised attempts at appearing au courant. If Fairfax want online writing that's representative of the people who actually write online, there are plenty of good, intelligent bloggers who could run rings around Ask Sam and her ilk, people who are slaving away at fairly shitty jobs while lazy writers dash off peons to the hotness of firefighters. For fuck's.

So anyway, Ask Sam. Ask her about lipstick, ask her who should pay on a first date, ask her why she thinks that dashing off three-hundred inane words enforcing gender stereotypes entitles her to unmediated, unedited and utterly unquestioning publication. Come to think of it, maybe vacuous twits like her are the reason people don't fantasize about writers. I wonder if it's too late to become a tradie?

A certain kind of nothing.

I cut my hair close and dyed it red the other day. There's a soft spot at the back of my neck from moments of forced intimacy with the lip of a hairdresser's sink. I catch my reflection and don't recognize myself. I kind of like it.

Somehow "a soft strawberry blonde" transmuted in the salon into a bright auburn that clashes with everything I wear. It's making the Mia Farrow crop less romantic and more tough. I don't feel tough, though. Tonight I'm feeling spineless and quavering - tired, longing, and worn through.

Earlier this evening, at a gallery launch, I noticed a kind-looking man. I caught his eye a few times, fleetingly, and he smiled at someone behind me. Standing next to him at the makeshift bar, I wanted to break the ice - crack a joke, say something brilliant about the paintings. Minutes before, his friend had spilled red wine on the floor, flecking the soft sculpture installation with crimson drops. It looked like the sculptures were bleeding. When I turned to face him he had already gone, back into the safe haven of conversation, and I was left kicking myself for being so fucking lame. He wore spectacles, too. I've always had a soft spot for spectacles.

Now I'm clutching my hot water bottle and typing in bed, the night chill doing nothing to assuage my longing for someone in bed with me. A late night text from my ex, completely innocuous, heightened the feeling, and I'm wondering what it will take for me to catch someone's eye and keep it - to make a joke off the cuff, to not worry that the girl he is talking to with is his girlfriend, or that she's almost always prettier, or funnier, or smarter than me. Not a haircut. Not a too-bright dye job.

Tonight I'm feeling tired, and stretched too thin. It's particular to late nights, I guess, too much wine, and the dull, plodding fatigue that comes from being starved of physical touch. A certain kind of nothing. I'd better stop being melodramatic and turn the computer off, turn the lights off, turn my mind off. And dream of the mythical tomorrow, when, redhead or not, I wake up relatively unlame.

Not so much.

On the tram coming home tonight, things were relatively quiet. Students disembarked along Lygon St, little old men met their wives, office workers gossiped tipsily after staff drinks. People listened to their iPods or read books.

At the corner of Lygon and Blyth, a middle-aged man got on and sat in the aisle opposite me. Overweight with a beer belly, unkempt, and wearing a grubby maroon tracksuit, he'd spilled out of some pub or other, or killed his night sitting in the park. He stared at me vacantly, and I looked out the window, which bounced his reflection off the hard glass as he fidgeted with the folds in his tracksuit pants. For a few stops he continued, nudging at his inner thighs, adjusting fabric and jiggling his pockets. At Albion St he seemed to relax. Obviously realising that I wasn't game to confront him, and he fixed his eyes on the two girls sitting a little way back and just... went for it.

And... continued to go for it, until I reached my stop. Christ, what was I supposed to do? Gaze out the window and he was there, in wavering reflection, his glassy shadow stroking the thin and dirgey fleece of its pants. I obviously couldn't look at him. In the end I stared straight through the girls, willing them to turn around and pay attention, to realise the part they were playing in some lonely pervert's masturbatory fantasy. They didn't. I sat as still as I could, and rushed off the tram at my stop, turning on some stupid impulse to see if the girls were okay. He caught my eye, and the tram pulled out into the night, rumbling towards the depot.

Ugh. And - ugh. And the part about me being in love with this neighbourhood?

Yeah. Not so much.