Just like an actual update (only crunchy).

These past few days have been cold and a bit of a blur - a steady diet of emails and meetings and bureaucracy, washed down with a healthy measure of gin. I don't want to give you the wrong impression about my nascent alcoholism - I'm aware that a lot of my day-to-day life involves drinking, and that substance abuse isn't cool, kids - but I lazily refuse to get defensive about it also. I don't need to justify myself to you. Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh right. While I've been mostly staying in with soup and a good book since the weather turned frosty, I had a particularly pleasing night out on Tuesday. My poetry neighbour picked me up from my house and drove me to his gig. I drank wine from the bottle in the back seat with his lady friend (and my recently aquired breakfast companion). The gig was fun. My poetry neighbour is very good at poetry. We drank the rest of the bottle on the way back. Poets converged on the front porch, as they so frequently do, and then my breakfast companion (and my poetry neighbour's lady friend) and I had midnight tea and toast and more wine out of mugs.

At one point I found myself snuggled up between a couple of people on the front couch, insulated against the cold by body warmth, red wine and a old ratty doona, and then I fell into a state of absolute bliss when some genius decided to scratch my head. For forty-five minutes. I can't remember the last time I was that purely relaxed, and in the end I regressed a bit into a weirdly pre-vocal, tactile state, where the bulk of my focus was diverted into feeling warm and snuggly and headgood, and I must have dozed off for a while because when I woke up I was in my poetry neighbour's arms and he was carrying me to the spare room. I managed to convince him to put me down, and I walked home in the bitter cold and collapsed on my bed in the red glow of the alarm clock. It was five-thirty in the morning.

I've also been having vivid and swirly dreams that are a weird mix between the tediously hyperrealist and Frenchily and cinematically absurd. For example, last night I was typing a seven-page report on my laptop* when my housemate came in to tell me that there was a suspected gas leak in the house and that we had to get out but quick. When we got outside, we were outside my parents' house, and my mum was hanging out on the nature strip rolling cigarettes out of penne and wheatgerm. She offered me a smoke and went to light up, and I woke up panicking because gas leaks and penne cigarettes are a bad, bad combination.

*I actually did this in real life. It was fun, in a mind-implodingly bureaucratic kind of way.

In any case, the upshot of all this is that I have nothing really worth writing about at the moment, and everything you just read was merely a self-indulgent exploitation of the internet as externalised keeper of memory. I write, it caches, and I don't have to keep these memories in my head anymore. Then, when I am old and grey, I can simply search using particular terms and this entry will pop up on my screen. Or in my head. You know, because some day the internet will just be in your mind. You heard it here first, and if you're reading this in your head in the future, you should do a quick cross reference of your synapses to find out whether or not that's true.

For God's sake.

I just curled up on the couch with a bowl of minestrone soup and watched Grey's Anatomy, which this week featured an Amish teenager with cervical cancer caught between two cultures, and the rather melodramatic decisions she had to make. Then I flicked over to the ABC and caught the documentary version of Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion. Guess which treated divergences of belief with a modicum of sensitivity, and which exploited cultural and religious difference to make facile points about how 'modernity' and 'faith' are too incongrous to simultaneously exist?

Grrr. Dawkins make Jess angry! Jess smash! Seriously - it makes me depressed to think that there are people who consider this unutterably smug prick to be making any sort of significant constribution to debate. Amongst the things that are currently getting my blood pressure up: the condescension and disrespect he showed to anyone whose opinion diverged even slightly from his, which included cutting people off whenever they launched too deeply into real theology or showed any of the values - compassion, reason, a respect for equality - that he argued religion actively discouraged; the smarminess with which he curled his lip when he thought he was about to launch forth with a particularly stinging rebuttal (usually "Science is fact! Your worldview is stupid and wrong!"); the fact that he used "monotheistic" and "religious" seemingly interchangeably, completely ignoring the religious beliefs of most of the world's population, past and present; and the abuse he committed against the English language, terrorized as it was by hyperbole and poor simile.

Actually, all those things pale against the sins the man commits against logic. This man is not a scientist, or if he is, he's a very poor one. In what methodology do you possibly pick the most extreme examples and then extrapolate a theory around them as a mean? Use the most biased language possible in interviews, and cut people off before they have a chance to fully engage with the questions asked? Attack conservative religion for cherry-picking from the Bible, and then do exactly the same to paint God and the prophets as unredeemable thugs? It's a brutish, smarmy, poor excuse for "reasoned" argument, and I can't even go on about it because this sort of display of wilful ignorance and intolerance from a grown man, a professor no less, makes me throw up a little in my own mouth.

Also, I think I might have rants in my pants.

Recently, at a bar, a nice Irish boy asked me to explain my own existential position to him. (It's Secular Humanism, if anything - I deliberately avoid positioning myself as "atheist" or "agnostic" because both terms play into a dichotomy that organised religion sometimes perpetuates - that the only worldviews available are those comprehensive of or in opposition to religious faith. I tend to believe, quite strongly in fact, that it's possible to develop an ethical code outside of the dictums of the Church or outside of reaction to them.)

Anyway, he was intrigued by the fact that I don't believe in Jesus or the afterlife, and what he wanted to understand was how I got through the darker periods in my life without some belief in a higher existence. From this we launched into a long and drunken discussion of the merits of faith versus the reassurances of existentialist belief, and my point is that if two drunken undergraduates can tolerantly and respectfully find the holes in each others' beliefs and come up feeling enlightened and enriched (although that might have just been the beer), why oh WHY can't a PROFESSOR, no less, get off his damn high horse for a second and consider that an institution that has survived in one form or another since practically forever might have some evolutionary imperative of its own, and might actually serve a constructive purpose in people's lives if safeguards are effected to prevent the more dangerously evangelistic interpretations from gaining too much currency?

Okay, sorry, rant over. I promise. This Dawkins character is going to give me an ulcer, an affliction that the spunky doctors on Grey's Anatomy could easily cure. This is why commercial television is better than the ABC. Don't listen to your parents, kids. Channel 2 will make you angry and sad. This public service announcement was brought to you by the letter "Y".

Day off.

Today is about yoga and typing and cooking and hanging out the washing. It's about inventing a new taxonomy of laundry-hanging based on degrees of wetness and then making a song about it. It's remarkably sunny, and warm, and the few weeks of rain have made the backyard lush and green. Today is about hanging out with the chicken and the duck, lying in the long grass, feeling the sun on my face. Today is about bare feet, and finishing the last of the crumble, and doing the dishes and whistling as many different countries' national anthems as I can think of.

Tonight will be drinking and hobnobbing, and schmoozing and dancing and listening and more drinking. Tonight will be leopard print chiffon and torn stockings, and verbal sparring for torn poets. In the meantime will be napping, and herb-gardening, and endless cups of tea. And typing, and cooking, and hanging out the washing.

Hooray for a day off work!

Thursday night lights.

I'm alone in the office, slightly tipsy after drinks with co-workers, playing music from Jono's computer, typing on Gill's, and wearing a jumper Seb brought back from Hong Kong that says "Listen Flavour - whole lotta love and a little bit of insanity" on the front above a print of a can of soup and is far too big. I'm wearing Seb's jumper because I managed to spill a Tupperware container of pear crumble down the front of my jacket. Oh well. It needed a clean anyway.

There's something really nice about being back here late. If I turn the music off it is overwhelmingly still, with only the hum of fluorescent lighting to keep things moving along. The campus is near-deserted, the bar has closed, the air is cold and dark and clear. Fairly soon the cleaning staff will start vacuuming outside the office. The security guard will pop his head in and make a few jokes before continuing on his rounds. We're complicit in this game of being here after dark. It's a kind of hide and seek around the building, a few of us squirelled away in our respective offices for the night staff to find.

I'm contemplating curling up on the little orange couch for a nap before finishing the article I am supposed to be writing. Wedged against the filing cabinet I might even be comfortable. Theoretically, I could just go home and finish up there, but as soon as there's the option of dozing on the couch in front of Law and Order: SVU, I'm gone. Actually, that sounds like a pretty good plan...

I'M IN UR SOCIOLINGUISTICS

I've been a bit obsessed with lolcat grammar recently. I don't know why, but it is driving me up the wall that I cannot find a consistent syntax anywhere on the internet. Surely someone has parsed this, right? I read a fairly cute, but frustratingly brief discussion here, by way of this site, but it's not really hitting the spot.

In any case, I think the argument of a "kitty pidgin" is fundamentally missing the point, in that people aren't trying to emulate some sort of spoken cat English but rather are wilfully and consistently distorting basic syntax into new, winkingly-self-referential linguistic tropes. Hay guyz! I'm in ur sociolonguistics, making the wrong grammars! Oh noes!

I don't have the time, the training or the patience to parse and analyse this, so if there's a linguist in the hizz-ouse who's looking for a side project? Lolcat Linguistics, buddy. It's all urs.

Espresso machine!

We are now the proud owners of a very old, second-hand espresso machine, scrounged from my parents' garage and in dire need of a clean. It's called the "Cappucino Express". I'm in love.

I've had too much coffee already today - macchiato spiked with whiskey, as befits us editor-types - but I cannot wait to set the machine up tomorrow morning and take it for a spin. Polish it 'til it gleams, tamp the coffee down lovingly and watch the muddy, sweet liquid trickle down into the base of an old cup. I usually drink ristretto but I might even make a cafe latte, strong, just to pull the milk and watch it get glossy and foamy and thick. Then I'll clean the machine and do it again. And again, and again...

Welcome back, espresso in the morning. My God, but I've missed you.

Hair, coats, babbling.

I chopped all of my hair off the other day, Mia Farrow style, and now I have a hankering for Peter Pan collars. Peter Pan collars on shift dresses, Peter Pan collars on blouses with little cap sleeves. Specifically, I would like a winter-weight midnight blue coat with - you guessed it - a Peter Pan collar, princess sleeves and a slight tulip shape. Mid-thigh to knee will do. Single- or double-breasted, I don't mind. Does such a coat exist? I feel it must, and yet after scouring countless boutiques I am still to find it. My trusty black coat is getting so threadbare that the pockets are holes, so if anyone has a lead on this particular coat (which must exist, right?), drop me a line. If you fall in love with it and buy it for yourself instead, I will probably understand. That said, my feelings will be hurt.

(That's [imaginary] coats out of the way. Let's talk about hair!)

I don't know. Is hair such an important signifier for other people? (I know Cosmo would have us believe that a woman's sense of identity is intrinsically caught up in her glossy, luxurious mane, but apart from the occasional quiz where you learn that your short crop means you are "quirky" and "adventurous" it pretty much always perpetuates the Maxim/FHM coding of "long shiny hair" = "traditional/subservient sex goddess". You rarely, rarely see models in the women's blowjob mags [Cosmo, Cleo and the like - sex tips and retrograde gender politics] with anything else, but I digress.) I guess, loosely, there are a set of inferences you can make about a person based on their aesthetic choices, and that's the thing that's bothering me a little at the moment - I am still the same person I was a week ago, but my outward appearance now highlights a quite different aspect of my sum total of aesthetic inclinations/vaguely corrolating quirks and tics, and presents it up to the world - "interpret me!". There's a weird cognitive dissonance also, when I catch sight of myself in a shop window and don't recognise myself, or hear myself described now as 'elfin'. This haircut is a bit like a costume, or a charade. Or else it's like a goddamn haircut and I am investing far too much significance in the few inches left around my now-exposed ears.

This cropping of the hair has also prompted a barrage of comments and compliments, and there's nothing like a sudden surge of interest in your pyhysical form to make you (okay, me) feel suddenly self-conscious and start tripping over ideas of embodiment and identity and apologising for going on about your goddamn appearance on your sad little undernourished blog, even though you know that post-feminism lets you feel okay about believing the presentation of your physical self to the world is somewhat important, because you suddenly feel very vapid and girlie to think that your hair of all things is somehow worth priviliging above all the other things you could theoretically be writing about even though if you were writing an essay about gender and aethetics and identity construction you wouldn't feel that way at all, you would feel that what you were writing was important but then again you would craft a much better, more coherent exploration of the issue than above if that were the case.

Sorry, I am quite clearly feeling much too parenthetical to be of any use tonight. Thankfully, I already did some useful things in the real world, like make minestrone and do yoga and poach pears in red wine and make banana bread, so it doesn't matter here in cyberspace, if anyone even calls it that anymore, that my slightly tired and droopy musings are the literary equivalent of a Mobius strip, two-dimensional and eternally looping in upon themselves.

In short - I am tired, my hair is short, I feel the need to justify and then justify justifying my own temporary interest in my physical appearence to an uncaring yet all-judging internet, and I bake a kick-arse banana loaf.

The end.

A placeholder update, in list form, with links.

For no other reason than my feeling like writing an itinerary, here is a list of things I have done in the last week:


- Attended a reading of The Iliad with Helen and her family at The Stork Hotel. Books 22 to 24, the seige of Troy, Hector's battle with Achilles and Priam's journey to retrieve his son's body. I thought that I knew the story fairly well, but I had totally forgotten that before Hector and Achilles face off, Achilles chases Hector around the outskirts of Troy for a really, really long time. Also, I had thought that Patroclus by killed by Hector in a case of mistaken identity after borrowing Achilles' armour, but apparently Hector knew it was Patroclus the whole time. Clearly, I need to read some Homer. Also, Helen Morse: yes. Some blonde chick from Stingers who declaaaaaaaimed in place of any real performance: oh my God no.

- Read a lot, including some good chapters on art and space in The Sexual Life of Catherine M and as many newspapers as I could get my hands on. Listened to a lot of Tom Waits, French hip hop, and rain.

- Sent the magazine to the printers, blah blah blah breakfast and deadlines I have covered this already.

- Attended a function at which Jenny Macklin spoke about the Close the Gap campaign, which was stiflingly hot and at which I ran into many people I haven't seen for a while and made awkward small talk.

- Drank gin and guava juice with Jelly Hands at her apartment, under the auspices of a DVD night, which started with popcorn and Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Mighty Boosh and Black Books and ended with general hilarity and the mother of all hangovers.

- Cleaned myself up and took the tram into Carlton to have lunch with my dad at Tiamo.

- Vacuumed, tidied and rearranged the furniture in the front room. The bookshelves are now along the back wall, and what in God's name possessed me to try to move them while they were still half full of heavy, heavy books I will never know.

- Had coffee with my ex, also at Tiamo, and probably since I write about everyone else in my life using their real name it's a stupid and inexplicable distinction that I don't use his, but there you go.

- Attended nanoArts, got drunk with various poets, writers, journalists and festival directors. I somehow found myself in the VIP room, which had no sort of formal VIP affiliation at all but was rather a nice calm place to sit and eavesdrop. Also, still slightly hungover from guava and gin, it was remarkably pleasant to sit in a quiet little galley of a yellow and gold room, like being inside a carnation with a chandelier. And drunk poets. Later a contingent emarked upon a journey to the unofficial poetry hub of Funswick, my neighbour's house, whereupon my poet neighbour managed to surreptitiously steal my sunglasses. I want them back, Geoff.

- Attended a very busy opening at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, which was chock full of interesting art and very attractive boys and wouldn't you know it, I might just go back there this weekend to have another look. At the art.

- Retreated to Helen's for Law and Order: SVU and a bucket of dip. So much dip. I am a hollow vessel, filled with tzatziki, and so technically not hollow at all so that metaphor doesn't work dammit but I have an unofficial policy of not editing this thing like you can't already tell.

- Visited Helen at the Utopian Slumps gallery in Easey St (I love that name), which is a very cool little spot full of bright and interesting art and one of the spunkiest curators in town.

- Had tea and pancakes in the kitchen with Georgia just now.



And yet, without work I am already getting bored. I think I need a project. Aside from shirking any actual writing in this blog and just transcribing bits and pieces from my weekly planner instead. Did you like how I used the links to make it seem just like a real blog? Did you even notice? Eh, enough of this. I'm off to bed.

Brief, quiet.

Suddenly this edition is at the printers'. Proofreading has been done. Legals have been cleared. Deadlines have been met. Tendons untighten, stress headaches disappear, fingers itch to write and glistening wine unwinds spools of knotted neck. No deadlines for two months.

Breakfast this morning at Babka's. Celebratory blinzes, coffee. Who needs verbs? Short supply. Shoes to be ogled in Smith St stores. Hair to be cut, dresses tried on. Divest yourself of your physical person, your hair, your fingernails, paint your toenails and sit on the front porch. Eat dry biscuits and listen to the rain. Drink tea and watch SBS. Find yourself in your bedroom before midnight, lights out, only blue drops thrashing at the window. Moonlight shines through leaves. Clean sheets on a shorn neck. No alarm set.

Suddenly quiet. Days ahead stretch like rubber bands. No deadlines for two weeks, drink a cup of tea, listen to the rain, tomorrow tomorrow, tonight is quiet. Time hangs between clean sheets and soft sleep. That stretch of time is full of blue shadows. Quiet. Brief.

Flutter of lashes on skin. The room exhales.

Cute and cuter.

I think Georgia might be trying to kill me with cuteness, as she brought home two tiny little chicks today to keep Hegel company. We're waiting for Bec to get home to name them; they're quietly chirping out the back, dozing off snuggled up against each other and then jumping up and running around and falling asleep again. My gosh, but they're adorable.

This past week has been busy and tense and faintly boring, that sort of boredom that results from having many pressing small tasks to complete but not being able to do them until someone sends in some copy/ the receptionist at the printers gets back from her lunch break/ after the meeting. I did manage to meet a friend for a drink on Thursday, though, which was nice except for the fact that we were falling asleep in the bar. And last night a friend was playing at the Empress, so a bunch of us went out and drank in moderation and discussed, variously, 'Piss Christ', zombie literature, time travel, the abject, arts administration, the fragile and arbitrary line between 'music' and 'noise', secular humanism, and dickhead hospitality workers. And got cool frog stamps. And Spit was awesome. (Woo! Take your top off!! etc.)

I think officially the link between bands (Spit, Amplifier Machine, The Spheres) was that they all fell under the 'experimental AV' umbrella, but in my mind the theme of the evening was Playing String Instruments In Unusual And Sometimes Unprecedented Ways. Spit (okay, Ryan.. I can't keep it up any more. A stage name is one thing, but it feels squicky and artificial to refer to him by it here, even if it was under this guise that he performed.) played the guitar with a tiny electric fan; Amplifier Machine's drummer played the cymbals with a violin; The Spheres had two bass players, one of whom attacked his with a bow, and their firecracker violin player/ pianist raping her violin in the most aurally pleasing manner imaginable. So, all in all, a good night.

Today was spent running aroung the city looking for an appropriate birthday present for my mum, who conveniently managed to be born in very close proximity to Mothers' Day. I had planned to make her a painting of some description, but this tedious and hectic week has left very little time for non-work-related distractions and suddenly it was three in the afternoon and I was battling the Mothers' Day crowds for something that was not kitch or twee or predictable (why does Myer assume that every woman urgently wants a blender or some teddy bear slippers?) - basically, something suitable for the woman who raised me to swill gin and curse like a sailor and stalk platonic boy friends late at night for kicks. (Happy birthday, Mum. I love you.)

Tomorrow will be spent laying a stone on my great-grandmother's grave with my Nagyi and cousin, then eating a lavish afternoon tea with my mum and sisters and female rellies from the other side of the family. And then, contingent on Jelly Hands' TV issues resolving themselves, lying on her bedroom floor drinking gin with like-minded souls and generally having a slap-bang hilarity-filled Eurovision orgy. Hey, it's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Now if I could only think of some perfect chicken names, my weekend would be made. Any suggestions?

It's not me...

Oh John, you shouldn't have. A $5 billion package for higher education? That's really sweet... and it's not like I don't appreciate the gesture (because I do!), but you and I both know this thing was over before it even began. I was just a child when you came into my life. And look, this education reform is really unexpected - I didn't think you felt this way - but it's not enough. You can't sustain a relationship with grand gestures alone. I know you've gone all out on this - even though, let's face it, Peter probably chose the flowers and bought the chocolates and knotted your tie before you came over - he did, didn't he? -

What? I know you're trying to win me back, but we were never really together to begin with. Look - no - I think you had the wrong idea. I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, but I was just with you out of convenience, and I thought we both realised that. Yeah, I know that's a horrible thing to say, but it's true, John. Don't look at me like that! It's not like you haven't behaved deplorably yourself - no, let me finish - let me finish! - it's not like you didn't make it nearly impossible to get support while I was studying, support I could have used three years ago before your grand economic gesture, by the way - it's not like you didn't spend every night together with Brendan fucking Nelson at the pub abolishing student unionism - look, I know he didn't think of that on his own, all right? And it's not it's not like you didn't let that grubby wench Helen Coonan put her dirty little deregulating fingers all over the industry I want to work in - yeah, I know about you and her. Well, it's not like you were being discreet about it.

So don't start with this "I'm doing my best to support you now" crap, okay? You haven't learnt from you mistakes, and you're not fooling anyone. And anyway, I'm seeing someone else, someone who can really revolutionise my education, if you know what I mean - yeah, fuck you right back. It's over, babe.

And also, I want my Nick Cave cd back.

Reality and fiction are not the same thing.

I was rifling around on the internet this morning, waiting for some copy to come through and making cups of tea and thinking about things I needed to write and generally doing the soft-shoe shuffle of procrastination (with jazz hands!), when I stumbled across a reference to Beautiful Agony on someone else's blog. And - this is embarassing to admit - my first thought was gee, I'll have to tell Arno about this.

It took me a heartbeat to realise that Arno Strine does not, in fact, exist.

It would have been easier to explain to myself had I briefly and mistakenly attributed the passage about O-shots I was reminded of to someone I actually knew - gee, I was talking to someone about this the other day at the pub. I'll have to let them know - oh wait, no I wasn't, it was actually a passage from a Nicholson Baker novel. Never mind. But, alas, for a fleeting moment I was fully convinced that a fictional character existed, and that I knew them, and that we had had some sort of inexplicable deep and meaningful about women's orgasm faces. I guess in this postmodern society, where our lives are so profoundly mediated by technology that we now consciously construct our own narratives through various media (such as I might be doing on this blog, oh ho, I'm so meta) rather than through a physical, immediate relationship with our friends and surrounds, the boundaries between self and literary/media environment become ever more finicky and seemingly permeable, thus forcing us to question the very concept of a stable subjectivity in which one might actually realise that reality and fiction are not the same thing*. Or something.

Anyway, I just flicked through The Fermata trying to remember exactly why I thought I needed to ring up old Arno and let him know about this website, to which: "It surprises me, incidentally, that nobody has launched a men's magazine called O-Shots, devoted exclusively to close-up photographs of women's faces in the midst of orgasm [...] I would subscribe. Or perhaps an O-shot calendar - the March orgasm-face, the November orgasm-face?" (pp153)**.

So I'm not going entirely crazy. That's a relief.

Anyway. The other thing that Beautiful Agony reminded me of was the time my ex-housemate tried to convince me to pose for the website. I was in the middle of an essay, hunched over my desk in a ratty old cardigan with a cup of tea, when he shuffled in warily. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and then he took the Beautiful Agony business card from his pocket and put it on the desk in an excruciatingly faux-casual manner. "If ever you're short of cash..." he said, "I mean, I know they don't pay you much at the cafe... you should really get involved with the site. It's really cool. I've done it. And, um, if you do, could you mention my name? I'll get fifty bucks."

I think I sent him out and then collapsed in a fit of giggles. Soon after that the whole living situation went to shit, and Paulina and I moved out, and I haven't talked to him since. And after that conversation I have studiously avoided Beautiful Agony, because as cool as the concept may be, and as sexy the execution, I don't really need to see my crazy ex-housemate in the throes of intense masturbation. I think the expression on his face when he used to mow the lawn shirtless, French hip-hop blaring, was trancedental and sweaty enough to make me leery of what aesthetic horror the actual footage might entail. And this is much more about masturbation and orgasm-faces than I ever intended to post here, so I think I'll just leave it at that.






* This sort of surely-I'm-being-hilarious-pseudo-academic-wank is what happens when I haven't been studying for a while. I'm yearning to dip my toes in the golden pond of theory, but intellectually stunted from having been away from real critical though for six entire months. And so the only-funny-to-me ramblings that I feel compelled to point out are a joke, thus drawing attention to my academic insecurity and adding a nice layer of meta-narrative icing to the records and tires and tiny figurines sponge of the oh, so bewildered cake.

**(of the paperback edition with the fermata notation scribbled on the woman's belly.)

Nothing much.

1) There's the most fantastic drizzle outside the office window at the moment. The sky has that eerie, lucid look that means it's probably going to storm soon. It's calming. We're listening to Bjork. If I could climb inside my computer and curl up with all the nouns and verbs and prepositions I am editing, I would.

2) I think if I could change one thing about my body, I would want the ability to breathe underwater. Isn't being amphibian such a nice idea? You could lie under the water in the bath for as long as you wanted, wrapped in a wet, level blanket of warmth. Or you could run to the ocean and plunge into the salt, and feel it sting your eyes, and swim out as far as you wanted and watch fish and boats and clouds skim across the surface of the water above you. You could bury yourself in the sand at the bottom of a lagoon until only your nose and eyes were uncovered, and watch the phosphorescent fish and glow-in-the-dark eels wiggling around your face. You would never have to worry about laughing too hard at a joke in the pub and panic at momentarily feeling your lungs fill with water that you inhaled by mistake.

3) This morning as I was tidying my room/looking for clean underwear, I found a green bag full of decomposing pomegranates. In my semi-coherent state, they seemed full of fuzzy symbolism, although that might have just been the mould... the fuzzy, symbolic mould. They would have been sitting in that green bag for a few weeks, left over from a picnic with a boy, previously the boy, which may or may not have been a date and which, true to our retarded, self-referential form, seemed charmed for a little while and then fell spectacularly apart. I don't know. When rotting fruit seems like the most rapturously apt metaphor for the state of a relationship, perhaps it's time to move the fuck along.