Oh, so lazy.

Spent a very relaxed Sunday by the beach, sketching, making notes, and eating scrambled eggs and grainy bread in the sunshine. Helen and I had a whole lot of painting planned, too, but true to form we both forgot our paints. So it looks like we'll be going back next week to finish what we nearly started.

Actually, it was nice to just hang out and watch DVDs, something I haven't done for a long time, and something I felt I could only justify because I'd spent the previous afternoon cleaning and defrosting the fridge in my pyjamas and some gumboots. The gumboots spent the previous weekend traversing the dusty fields of Golden Plains, and weren't too happy about my scrubbing fish sauce off the bottom shelf. Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

And speaking of the conflation of public and private spaces, I had a weird and confusing experience on public transport the other night*. I was sitting on the tram listening to Antony and the Johnsons and reading The Story of O** when a rather dashing boy got on. There was fleeting eye contact and then he went back to his newspaper and I went back to my ballads and my book and we stayed that way for the next 20 minutes and there were two things I found incredibly frustrating:

1) I couldn't figure out whether I genuinely fancied him or whether it was the combination of some awesome specs and a black leather jacket that got me - I've always loved that rockabilly-nerd look

and 2) much more pertinantly, I realised that we had created so many barriers between us that any sort of contact was pretty much impossible. If it had JUST been the books, there could have been a bit of back-and-forth about what are you reading oh isn't it good and the like. Just the headphones and it would have been harder, but do-able. But by insulating ourselves in alternate visual and aural realities, we'd managed to place ourselves in a position where we weren't sharing a public space any more - rather, we'd created two private spaces in close proximity to each other that were almost impossible for the other to broach.

Well, duh. And maybe that was the point. And maybe he didn't want to be chatted up by some crazy girl reading French erotica and swinging her feet from the tram seat like a child. But it kind of startled me to realise how easy it is to alienate yourself from the world around you, and for the rest of the trip I pulled out my earphones and put away the book and paid attention to everything that was happening on the tram.



*Again, this sounds like something that might potentially be dirty. It's not.
**Nuh, not going anywhere sexy either. I might as well join a fucking convent.