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?