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.