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.

Something strange, in the neighbourhood...

I was washing the dishes just now when Pat called out from the backyard, "I think I can hear a marching band!"

I went out to join him, only to hear the faint drone of a tuba cutting through the mower-noise from next door. Then - a whole cacophony of brass, wafting in with the breeze. It was strange. We thought perhaps it was a school fete, but really, who has a marching band apart from American high schools and the Salvo's?

The sound was getting chirpier, and louder, and so we went to the front door to see what was going on, not thinking that there would actually be a marching band marching down our street. There was, in fact, a marching band marching down our street, ten metres from the front door. A marching band consisting of three hundred little old Italian men and ladies, the men first, wearing sailor hats and hoisting a golden effigy of Jesus, the women gossiping and traipsing after them.

It was surreal. A few men - the ringleaders - were wearing pirate-style hats with plumes. There was no-one under fifty in the procession. They watched us watch them, pointing at us occasionally, as we tried to keep it together. Jesus swayed in the breeze. They put Him down a few houses from ours, in the middle of the road, had a smoke, then lifted him up again, gilt-laced and benevolent, as they headed, with police escort at snails pace, towards the Masonic Temple at the end of our street.

And then, just as quickly, the noise was gone. Pat and I went inside to drink tea and talk about our weekends. The dishes continued to dry. Just another Sunday afternoon.

Fuck, I love this neighbourhood.

Soft in the head.

I think I'm a little bit in love with the world at the moment. That, or I've gone a bit soft in the head. Things seem crisper all of a sudden. Cleaner. I walked to work this morning with thin sunshine dripping around me into cracks into the footpath, breathing out and watching my breath evaporate. Watching cold puffs of vapour float into a blue, blue sky. I'm one step away from breaking into song.

Strangers on the tram are making me melt, a little bit. Little old men telling jokes, and adolescent boys romping like baby seals. I'm flirting with all my friends. I'm newly infatuated with the way you tell a joke, or your penchant for math-rock, or that thing you do with your hair when you're concentrating. I want to buy you a coffee, and smell the back of your neck. I'm sorry if it's disturbing you. It's disturbing me a bit as well.

Being relatively cynical, I'm not really prepared for those days when the world becomes overwhelming and visceral and intimate. How does it happen that you wake up one day, and the rain beating against your window seems comforting, not inconvenient? That out of nowhere you get the urge to crush grass between your fingers until you are carrying that wet, ripe smell on your skin all day? It's like all the little details that bad poets glorify in soggy verse are giving me soft, mushy hugs, and it's heartening and vaguely terrifying.

Vaguely terrifying, because every time I get this feeling, I seem to feel the need to analyse it to death - to pin it down, like a butterfly, and dissect it with wings still fluttering. I'm scared that I'm unable to simply accept that sometimes I'm enamoured of the world, intoxicated by being able to cherry-pick small moments of pleasure from my everyday surroundings. It's easier to accept an unexpected rough patch, a string of bad days, because for some reason the vastness of lived experience doesn't seem so overwhelming to me when I'm limp-haired and cranky and slumped beneath a doona. But I'm trying, at the risk of sounding like some reformed self-help book cynic, to just go with it - to write cheesily infatuated odes to beauty on the internet, to take the time to walk to work, to buy you coffee and tell you I didn't mean it about smelling your neck, or at least not in a creepy way.

Because this feeling? It's fucking fantastic. And if I look back in a month's time and want to hit myself with the misanthropy stick, so be it. I am putting it out there - I am in love with you, world. You and your bad-poet plethora of beautiful details. Also? Your hair is pretty. Call me.

Let's procrastinate!

Oh my gosh. I just sat down to edit fifteen pages of poetry, and somehow - you know, totally unintentionally - kind of accidentally turned the tv on. And now I remember why I try to avoid tv, because already I've been rendered slack-jawed and glassy-eyed by Victoria Beckham's new show. Forty-three minutes in, and she's reacted with middle-class horror to some wealthy socialites talking about money, used a blow-up sex doll dressed in her clothes to fool the paparazzi, and told a realtor that a $17 million house would be a "death trap" for her children. It's mid-numbingly awful - and awesome.

Admittedly, I've always had kind of a soft spot for Victoria Beckham. She's tacky as all hell, sure, but self-deprecatingly so. I like her for the same reasons I like Pamela Anderson, whose private eye spoof V.I.P is one of television's under-appreciated gems. Maybe I just have a thing for inflatable blondes who send themselves up shamelessly?

Actually, maybe I'm just going through a semi-voyeuristic phase, what with this and the Facebook and all. Am I a bit sick, to be suddenly overly interested in the doings of my friends and tabloid-haunting British footballer's wives? Or can I attribute this to simple procrastination? It's less creepy, so okay... let's do that. Anyway, this television thing is dangerous, but at least it's a step up from dicking around on the internet... oh. Shit.

Better get back to work then.

Face... hooked?

I've only been on Facebook for a week and already I feel slightly seedy, unwashed, like an old man in an anorak hanging around a children's soccer game. The stalkerly aspects of that site are outstanding. It's like they've taken the inherent voyeurism and desperation of the internet and upped it by a factor of... a lot. Needless to say, I'm hooked.

That's not the only reason that I've been quiet of late, the other being that I've been run off my feet both socially and professionally*, but it's been the main contributing factor. Also, I've been in a mood to make ridiculous and terrible puns, such as that in the title (sorry!), so I figured it was safer to lay low for a while until the urge passed. I am still waiting for the urge to pass.

Anyway, I guess this is more like a paper-thin excuse for a post than an approximation of the real thing, so I'm going to wrap it up and write when I'm in a more amenable mood. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to check what my friends are getting up to on the in-ter-net...






*If this implies glamourous cocktail parties and business meetings with ballpoint pens and crisp suits, I apologise. The reality is more like sourcing silly fonts in the office and drinking too much cheap wine in an assortment of kitchens. Still, it has a nice ring to it, right?

Oh. Rats.

I saw a rat scurry across the kitchen the other night, and I am slightly hesitant now to wander around in the dark. I feel anxious to point out two things here: 1) our house is old and full of holes and we keep a sanitary kitchen, it's just that rats can get in through the holes, okay? and 2) I'm not actually afraid of mice. But ever since then, trudging to the bathroom in the dark, I keep thinking I see movement out of the corner of my eye. I'm just sure that that verminy little bastard is watching me, waiting for his chance to run up the back of my leg or something. I'm a fairly jumpy person anyway (with excellent reflexes, thank you) and it's making me jittery just thinking about a furry little creature plotting, plotting to running over my bare foot, so I'll stop.

The thing is, this rat is almost certainly the same adorable little mousey I saw a couple of times when we first moved in, a tiny scrap that wiggled behind the heater every time I tried to catch him. After a few attempts, I let it slide, thinking that a scared little rodent would be no match for big tall me. But hey, you know what? Little mousey is now about the size of a football, and no doubt has built a structurally sound little home from scraps of orange peel, where he sits drinking wine, eating cheese, and conspiring against me in French.

This is what happens when you have a chicken and a duck, and no cat, I suppose. I guess I could borrow one if worst came to worst, although I don't really want to kill it, just... dissuade it. Anyone out there know a humane way to dissuade a little mouse? Because this is what the internet is really for, right?

From the Byron Shire Echo (via my backpack):

'Lean and posey, like a ferret, Mungo gets the Archibald treatment from 30 artists as part of FEHVA at the A and I Hall in Bangalow. Here Camilla Connolly layers oil onto her piece while Ariel Schlesinger's blue Mungo looks on. The Mungo portrait prize is sponsored by the Byron Bay Writers Festival. See another political portrait on the back page. Photo Jeff 'Portrait of the Photographer as an Avid Onlooker' Dawson.'






Lean and posey, like a ferret.




Lean and posey, like a ferret.






Fucking marvellous. And yes, this is Mungo MacCallum we're talking about...

Home.

Twelve hours on a bus later, and I'm home. The streets are slightly colder, but they're my streets. I went straight from the station to pizza and beer with the kids. My room still smells the same. It's nice to be back.

The bus trip was only moderately horrific - it would have been quite pleasant had it not been for the (single?) mum in a Jim Beam t-shirt, feeding her whiny kids Cheezels and strawberry milk out of a bottle until one of them threw up across the aisle. Apart from the wafty, regurgitated aroma of fake strawberries, the trip continued without many distractions. It was a good advertisement for contraception if nothing else.

Getting up at 5.30 was a novel experience also. We took the bus, through the dark, to catch the other bus. Half-asleep in the foggy dawn, we wended our way through quiet suburbs, through to the outskirts, and then the hinterland, where deer (deer!) grazed behind a veil of mist. I bought coffee at the station and it was so hot it was almost tasteless. Eventually I fell asleep, only to be wakened by strawberrymilkageddon. In any case, it made me aware of how much I tend to romanticise cross-country bus trips, when they involve deer rather than children.

Anyway, I'm turning in early to sleep in my bed. My own bed. My cold, lumpy, saggy-inner-springy little piece of home. It's funny, the things you miss, even for a week of gin-sodden Good Times. There are no deer in Melbourne, but like I said - it's good to be back.

Radelaide.

Continuing my interstate adventures, I am now located in temperate Adelaide, drinking too much gin and talking all hours into the night with another, fabulous Jessica Anne. If you want to know how long it takes to polish off a bottle of Gordon's with someone lovely whilst having a good natter, it's approx. five hours and three Nurofens the next day.

I miss this particular girlfriend. We've been making up for lost time in a delightfully daggy way, op-shopping and cooking miso and watching movies, and it makes me remember just how easy our friendship is. As much as I bitch about the insularity and closeness of a suburb like Brunswick, it would be nice to have her living down the street again, since sojourns to Adelaide are time-consuming and hard to make spontaneously.

Anyway. Adelaide seems nice, if small, I've nearly been hit by several buses and I'll probably be back by the end of the week. I'm taking the train as it is romantic and cheap, something I'll probably regret five hours into the journey when instead of making small talk with someone interesting and handsome, or day-dreaming by an empty seat, I find myself sitting next to an obese Christian who smells like dim sims. Not to make generalisations about Christians, or obese people, or dim sims. I'm going to head off before I paint myself into a corner entirely. Bye.