oh, so bewildered

Change of address

2008-01-07T18:06:00.001+08:00

Hello all!

This blog will be demolished in a week or so, as I am moving house. You can now find me over here with all the cool kids...

Love,

Jess.

Tax return, hoorah!

2008-01-04T11:13:00.000+08:00

I was shuffling some cookbooks around this morning when I found a few important envelopes under the Stephanie Alexander. So that's where my tax return was! It's clear that we need to institute a better mail delivery system in this house, but I'm chuffed rather than annoyed, since now I have enough money to live until the next paycheck comes in. Ah, pay-as-you-go withholding. I'll never curse your name again.

The best thing about a chunk of money is the possibilities it offers. I know that this chunk will just be spent on prosaic things like rent, food, and electricity, but isn't it nice to imagine buying something ludicrous? I could get a new (second-hand) laptop. I could go on a short holiday. I could help finance another edition of the magazine, since we've been a bit slack about sourcing advertising...

I can daydream about ridiculously lavish things, because I'm lucky enough that a lot of my immediate needs and desires have been met recently. I have a bicycle being built for me at the moment at the bike shed (thank you, Channukah!). I have a very cool MP3 player (thank you, sisters who got tired of having such a Luddite for a relative!). The MP3 player is particularly gratifying, as I'm starting to listen to a lot of music that I haven't really been able to get into so far. It's blindingly obvious to anyone not living five years in the past that portable music thingies give you better sound clarity than a crappy old CD player, isn't it? And yet I'm just only now having the revelation for myself.

Maybe I'll post a few album reviews when I get around to writing something worthwhile, but now I'm going to pay a few bills (blah) and cash my return, and then fantasize about the extravagantly wonderful things I could do with that money were it not going to be chewed up by utilities. An Akira Isogawa gown? Dinner for my friends at the Flower Drum? A lifetime supply of gin? Feel free to add your own suggestions.

A week in review

2007-12-31T11:02:00.000+08:00

Because the year in review seems too fucking difficult in 40-degree heat.

Besides, anyone reading this thing already has a grasp on the majority of my banal ramblings for 2007, but which of you knows what I've been up to this week? Who participated a Pimm's/Campari orgy as the sun set over the last days of the year? Which of you surprised me with phone calls, gifts, and gossip? It's simply thrilling to guess, isn't it? The answer, of course, is no. But because you seem to still be reading this, here is the week in review. It contained:

- One partridge in a pear tree: not really but a family breakfast and general Christmas merriment (read: inebriation);

- One frightening and yet also tedious trip to the emergency ward (bonus points if you can guess which family member was writhing around on the floor in pain asking for morphine);

- One whistle-stop tour of Mt Eliza (and the relatives assembled therein) with a quick detour into Mt Martha for a goodbye beach trip with a very bestest buddy who is on her way to Washington right now (whose identity will be revealed when I link to her blog in the very next post);

- One Pimm's /dumpring orgy ;

- One completely delightful and unexpected breakfast date;

- One pizza packing night with aforementioned soon-to-be Washingtonian;

- Three seasons of Arrested Development;

- And some other stuff I just can't remember. Let me know if there's anything I've missed out. And Happy New Week!!

High on life. No, seriously.

2007-12-24T19:02:00.000+08:00

So right now I am flailing around my room, dancing to Tokyo Police Club, folding pointy origami birds for Georgia (don't ask), and drawing picture of dinosaurs. I just thought I'd mention it because I realised that this thing has been fairly downcast recently... I was also reminded by the lovely Mary K (of course) that life is actually pretty fucking sweet right now. Hence the dancing. Hence the recording of said dancing on teh internets.

Somehow I didn't even realise the date until the last minute, so I popped out today to get some craft supplies and now I am making craft like a motherfucker. I'm a little too broke to buy everyone presents this year, although since two of my housemates work at this bookshop I managed to get a whole lotta books at what I think was a slightly under-the-table discount, but luckily I have friends who find origami monsters and slightly abstract portraits charmingly whimsical. At least to my fact, they do.

Anyway! Dancing around the room, whoo! It's a party for one! Would you believe that I'm stone-cold sober, too? Jober as a sudge! I'm high on life! Maybe also meth! Just kidding! But I am happy, because I get to make things for all my friends, and because this year, which has been stressful and a little wearing but also incredibly professionally and socially fulfilling (props to my student media darlings!), is nearly over, and a shiny new one is on the horizon waiting to be unwrapped. Because someone tried to pick me up at Kmart today. Because I got a job that lets me write things and because I won't have to work in hospitality for at least three months.

So yeah, kittens and rainbows and all that. I have to go now and construct an elaborate diorama for an unnamed housemate featuring an origami paedophile and its loving yet dangerously infantalising mother. I'm heading to the beach for a couple of days, but I'll see you after the break - I hope you get everything you ever wished for!

Ouch, part infinity.

2007-12-23T16:33:00.000+08:00

Jesus Christ, can this year just be over? I don't think my liver can handle it anymore. I ended up leaving a party graced by my favourite Adelaide-dwelling people last night because my body just would not cooperate. And they're back to the city of churches tomorrow. Damn.

This morning, of course, hit me like a tonne of gift-wrapped gifts and I ended up lying very still in bed all morning until the room stopped spinning, then shuffled to the milk bar at three to indulge my craving for a white-trash breakfast. Lesson learned - from now on we will stock emergency cans of tinned spaghetti and a bag of liquorice alongside our more prosaic groceries. Oh God, the pain.

It's not even that I drank particularly much last night - or "binge drank", as the kids seem to be saying - more that a couple of weeks of accumulated liver abuse coalesced into one critical-mass style hangover. Can that happen? Apparently it can. I think the woman at the corner store thinks I lead a rather dissolute lifestyle, as she was full of matronly concern when I walked in looking anaemic and dressed like an Olsen twin by way of the Prada A/W collection from a few years back (ie. homeless but in rich, secondary tones). Plus, she probably thinks that all I ever eat is liquorice, flour, and tinned goods. If only either of those assumptions were further from the truth.

Cent choses

2007-12-19T21:08:00.000+08:00

Today was a good day, a day of things turning around. It's midnight now and a storm is brewing over Brunswick. All the windows in the house are open and I'm sitting in front of the computer with a mojito, feeling antsy in a good way this time. A change in pressure always makes me antsy, as if all the little ions zapping around the atmosphere are playing ping pong off the table of my skin.

It's felt like an uncommonly long day, actually. Time is doing funny things at the moment, stretching and snapping and generally playing tricks. This morning we, we being my house and we being a cohesive unit at the moment rather than the fragmented mess of previous months, went to the bike sheds on an adventure. One of the nice things is a bike waiting for me, a plum-coloured beauty being rebuilt for the new year. Insert easy metaphor here, please.

According to Blogger, this is bewildered's one hundredth post. I don't particularly feel compelled to celebrate the occasion. When I first started this blog is was as a way of avoiding getting lazy, to write frequently if not consistently. I've succeeded on that count, I guess. I've set myself a year's minimum on this thing and we'll see if it keeps going after that, or whether this experiment has actually taught me brevity and structure. Oh, fuck. I just gave away the ending, didn't I?

Trois choses

2007-12-16T19:40:00.000+08:00

1. In praise of sleazy dancing. Friday night was a spectacular night for dancing, with rhythm and motion being achieved at two separate venues. It was a sweltering night, and we danced so much that we felt almost purified, the way middle-aged women do after a sauna. I went to the bathroom and ran my head under the cold tap, and then continued to dance, my fringe slicked against my forehead in little wet clumps.

2. If my life were a movie it would have an indie soundtrack. Our barbecue got rained out yesterday so we converted the occasion to a pizza night on the sly. Various people attended and converged in a social manner. Two of them stayed over and we went out for breakfast and sat around talking about film, politics and etymology. I walked back from the bathroom and for a minute time blurred and they began talking in slow motion and laughing cinematically. The upended milk crates they were perched on and the studied bohemianism of the surrounding patrons precluded classical or popular music.

3. Christmas trees are the bee's knees. At my parents' in the afternoon a box was procured containing twenty years of homemade Christmas decorations. The smell of pine needles made me nostalgic. My dad made a joke about paedophilia and my mother confessed a fear of feral horses. I agreed that they would probably be more scary to confront in the street than feral dogs or cats but less likely to encounter in the inner suburbs. The sunburn on my shoulders from breakfast made me sleepy and I fell asleep on the couch. My mum drove me home, and in the car my sister told a story about witches' hats.

Stood up. And fatigued. But definitely not crying.

2007-12-13T16:34:00.000+08:00

There are times in my life when I think I'm cracking up. And there are times in my life when I know I'm cracking up. Fortunately, at the moment I'm pretty sure I only feel like I'm coming apart at the seams.

There are a few stresses in my life at the moment - job hunting, family stuff, household stuff - that I'm managing to hold at bay with a combination of demented optimism and baking. I tend towards certain Pollyanna tendencies that keep me afloat where otherwise I might not be so buoyant. It's a rather grimly determined policy of looking on the bright side, and making a conscious decision not to worry about things I can't immediately change and to focus instead on the smell of gingerbread, or the feel of clean sheets, or figs finally ripening on the tree.

It takes an effort though, I guess, and occasionally that effort is just too much effort. Tonight it feels as though I'm leaking out everywhere. I know it's not polite to talk about one's mental health, but I might as well put it on the table that there have been periods in my life where I have been, well, not so well. I've been pretty stable for the last couple of years, and I can tell when I'm going to hit a bad patch and ride it out, but it's the reason that I couldn't get out of bed this morning until no-one else was in the house. It's the reason I go for long stretches without sleeping more than two hours a night, and why I bake banana bread at three in the morning. And it's the reason why, after a friend called an hour before he was supposed to come over for dinner tonight to cancel, I started to cry, discreetly, on the tram.

I do tend to do things discreetly - most people would never notice that I was going through a patch, because when I am going through a patch I would rather die than let on that I'm not coping. And people aren't all that perceptive, either. Anyway, I never really considered writing about it on the internet, either, except that I just read this and something in me broke a little bit. This was me two years ago, right down to the baking. It explains things better than I could, anyway, so maybe you should just read it.

And then you should go bake a batch of cookies, and then be thankful either that you're not of a depressive disposition (why is it so hard for me to write that I might "suffer depression"?) or if you are, quietly remind yourself that there are other people out there who know how it feels to spend every day in a haze - to have a great cloud of static hanging over your emotions, to not be able to make even trivial decisions, to find yourself despairing that nothing - no matter how dramatic or self-destructive - will ever shatter the bell jar.

Like I said, I know I'm not falling apart. At least, not tonight. I'm going to brush my hair and go to a friend's gig and maybe have a quiet sulk when I get home, and then I'm going to wake up tomorrow feeling better and berating myself for being a drama queen. I'm probably going to dump the food I bought to cook tonight in the fridge, because my housemates aren't home and cooking a feast for one seems kind of laughable, and eat pickles out of the jar and finish off the so-pathetic-it's-charming(?) Weight Watchers brand cottage cheese in the fridge. I'll be fine. And if not, the world could always use another batch of gingerbread.

Somebody employ me plz? Kthxbye.

2007-12-10T10:32:00.000+08:00

The weekend passed in a haze of gin and animal masks and backyard-hanging-out, as Jono and I went to visit the lovely Caroline for birthday shenanigans. Caroline is based in Frankston, and Jono's parents have a place in Rosebud West, so we packed up the car with various bits and pieces and took a winding and scenic drive to the beach. It was a particularly pleasant weekend, commencing with Jono and I splitting a bottle of Aldi-brand gin and making increasingly crude jokes, and concluding with my being dropped of at my grandmother's house for the traditional Channukah overfeeding.

Unfortunately, delightful sojourns from the real world can't last forever, and so now I am back in the office, eating leftover bagels and looking for a job. There seems to be depressingly little out there involving writing/editing/subbing and I am afraid that I will have to return to hospitality in a few weeks' time. I don't really mind waitressing too much, but I would prefer a writing jo for obvious reasons, not least because cafe work is so notoriously badly-paid.

So, if anyone knows of any wordy-type positions out there, can you give me the heads up? I've done freelance technical writing for a dental imaging company before, as well as fooling around with student media and small press, so I'm game for any sort of technical writing as well as fiction and journalistic writing, editing, and proofing. A job truly would be the bestest Christmas present a friend/reader/anonymous commenter could give me... with gin coming in a close second. Just kidding! I am not a sleazy delinquent but fully employable! Seriously, someone hire me?

Shorts for summer

2007-12-05T21:32:00.000+08:00

I met the delightful Mary K this evening for dinner in the city, starting and culminating with free drinks at her place of work. Along the way we stopped at Pellegrini's for $13 pasta, and met up with our friend Ben for a quick cocktail at Madame Brussels, whereupon the conversation took a turn for the smutty. Amongst the printable things discussed, prompted by one waiter's incredibly hot shorts and blazer combination, was Ben's intention to bring short shorts in for summer.

I tell you, I could not be more pleased with this decision. Long have I been an advocate of trunks, shorts, and their leg-revealing ilk. I was recently mourning the fact that a man's well-turned leg is no longer considered worthy of attention or adulation, but hopefully a revival of short shorts for summer may help turn the tide back towards a celebration of the muscular calves and shapely thighs of our masculine friends.

What do you think? Are Ben and I alone in wanting to see more man leg? Personally, I feel that woman have shouldered the burden of legginess for too long. All I'm asking for is equality here. A little pin parity. After all, the fundamental tenets of feminism demand that men and women be treated equally. And men's legs, recently, have not been displayed, objectified, and lusted after as frequently as women's have. So it's only fair that mans flash a little gams. Preferably whilst wearing seersucker shirts, hats, and/or spectacles. And carrying a jug of Pimm's. That would just about make me pass out from happiness, I think.

Gingerbread jihad

2007-12-03T21:30:00.000+08:00

So recently I have been on an absolute baking spree, and I have to say I am enjoying every minute of it. Usually my compulsive baking is linked to nerves or stress (don't tell me I'm the only one who whipped up a batch of election cupcakes!) but lately I've just had itchy baking fingers.

Tonight I found myself at my parents' place, drinking Baileys with my mama and baking an army of gingerbread stars and hearts. I amused myself by imagining a star/heart gingerbread war, with each side attacking and devouring the other until they realised the devastating (and cannabalistic) gingerbread cost. Grief-stricken, many of the remaining soldiers offered up their lives in a ritual fire. This explains why there were half as many biscuits left in the kitchen an hour after I baked them as there should have been and why a few where looking a little charry around the edges. Well, actually, my sisters were probably responsible for some of the devastation...

We don't have that many holiday traditions in my family, as we tend to alternate Christmas and Channukah as the Big Deal holiday and thus get lazy about every-year kind of things. But one thing we've done consistently, without fail, is make gingerbread houses, decorated austerely with dustings of icing sugar or riotously with raspberries, mint leaves, smarties and liquorice all-sorts. Christmas is really one of the few times of the year that it's socially accptable to bake like a motherfucker, so I tend to take full advantage of people's willingness to eat tiny gingerbread soldiers and proceed accordingly.

Recently the whole gingerbread thing has gotten a bit out of hand, and I've found myself manning gingerbread house construction lines staffed with neighbourhood children, tiny cousins and tipsy best friends. Which is nice. Although, when I think about it, one of the warmest, fuzziest parts of the experience, for me, is remembering making the houses as a child with a twinkly old German woman named Sigrid. These poor neighbourhood children are going to remember some vintage-dress-wearing twenty-year-old, hepped up on sugar, swearing in French, and making up songs about the various stages of baking. Oh dear.

Anyway, I have such nice memories connected to the gingerbreading, and that's probably part of my deepseated baking fetish. The other part is probably pathological. But what the hell! We will let them eat cake, or at least gingerbread. And then let them lie down on the couch with a strange craving for gherkins wondering how it is possible to ingest that much molasses in one sitting as they fall into a hyperglycaemic swoon. Er, not that I would know anything about that...

The battle continues

2007-11-30T07:51:00.000+08:00

I scrolled through my newly acquired RSS list the other day to find that the world has acquired another holy warrior in the battle against insipid yet somehow wildly offensive bullshit. Reading Mary's post reminded me that I had attempted to post a comment in response to the very Ask Sam post she is denouncing. Mysteriously, it didn't get past the mods, and I forgot about it. Mary has requested that the text be reproduced in full here so as to strengthen the anti-Sam movement's internet presence. I am more than happy to oblige. The following rhetoric may contain ranting.

*****************************************

Hey, imogen and Magoo [sole voices of reason at the time of attempted posting -- ed], you beat me to it. I've never commented on this blog before, although I've often commented upon it (mainly upon its poorly constructed prose, total conformity to retrograde stereotypes and inherent anti-feminism), but the de Beauvoir comment was just the final straw.

I doubt very much that Simone de Beauvoir would read a syndicated dating column, but were she a) not dead and b) to peruse this blog, I am sure that she would throw up her hands at having her seminal treatise cited alongside this excruciating tripe and utter something violent and French.

Apart from having authored one of the most influential feminist works around, and as well as being a formidable scholar and philosophe, de Beauvoir was famously progressive in her relationship with Sartre, with both of them taking lovers and participating in menages a trois. This was before "feminism, the pill, and books like Why Men Marry Bitches", which I'm sure is a charming tome, turned women into voracious sexual creatures who are - quelle horreur! - having sex on the first date. Somehow, I think she’d be okay with having sex in a nightclub toilet.

Like I said, I read Ask Sam fairly regularly and usually respond with an eye-roll and a snarky comment, because I accept that there's not much meat in a dating column that maintains that everyone is equal, unique and deserving of respect, and because I accept that Ask Sam represents the views of one woman with whom I disagree heartily but who nonetheless has the right to her own opinions. But as soon as one of the founding mothers of feminism is used to justify the whining of a man who doesn't understand why women leave him when he makes no attempt to "please them or live up to their expectations", I find that I can’t just leave things with an eye-roll.

Its disappointing and upsetting the short shift feminism is given on this blog – it seems most often to paint feminists as man-hating, embittered hags who bitch at other women and constantly emasculate their men. All of which is fine as long as you accept that Ask Sam inhabits the same artificial landscape as Cosmo or Ralph, where the dynamics of social interaction are distorted and exaggerated for a cheap 300 words and which seems to be about 25 years behind the rest of society. But as soon as you invoke de Beauvoir, you describe another landscape, one where women (and men) can be strong, opinionated, promiscuous and independent without fear of being labeled ‘dominating’ (although I strongly suspect the word Sam is grasping about for here is ‘domineering’).

Simone de Beauvoir was such a woman, and the women who follow in her footsteps probably do scare the fuck out of Sam’s friend, who seems to look at the richness and intricacy of sexual and romantic relationships and see only constant opportunities for petty point-scoring. As to the question of whether women or men should be more ‘dominating’, I think the answer we are looking for is that no person should ever ‘dominate’ another based on something as arbitrarily prescribed as, say, gender. Hey, that’s pretty much feminism in a nutshell! Sometimes, it really is that simple.

"I'm an arsehole. Love me."

2007-11-26T21:51:00.000+08:00

Yesterday Jelly and I decided to indulge in a Winonathon, which consisted of sparkling rose, popcorn, Girl, Interrupted (remember when Angie used to be hot?!) and the inimitable Reality Bites. So much Winona! You know, it's a real pity she doesn't make movies anymore, what with the shoplifting and the court case and all. She may be kind of one-note, but she does doe-eyed waif with a French haircut like nobody's business.

Anyway, Reality Bites has always been a movie that I love to hate, partly because I was seven when it was released and the references grated by the time I saw it, and partly because I have met too many people like the kids in Reality Bites - self-obsessed, annoying, angst-filled and under the impression that an exchange of pop-culture references is a decent substitute for originality and wit. More specifically, I have met too many guys like Ethan Hawke's Troy Dyer - "brilliant", subversive, and total, irredeemable arseholes.

Why are we supposed to root for this character? He's nasty. He's jealous, petty, and condescending. His faux-Kerouac evangelising is supposed to be some kind of revelatory 'realness', but basically it smacks of the kind of arrogance that comes from a total disregard for everyone else. Troy, we're told, is some kind of disaffected genius, and because of that we're meant to think that his smart-arsery and mean-spiritedness about the world are somehow noble and pure - he's the savant that sees through the spin of the commercialised world and rejects it with a shrug and a quip.

Except, as mentioned, he's a total fucking prick. Winona Ryder's character isn't exactly sympathetic either, but at least she's flawed in a kind-of-identifiable-with way, and she's willing to see past the yuppie exterior of a woefully-miscast Ben Stiller and fall for his inherent sweetness. Of course, Ben Stiller is going to get a clunky nineties-style platform heel to the heart in this scenario - he wears a suit, for Christ's sake. That's part of the reason we know we're supposed to root for Troy. The other part is the speech he gives Winona when he tries desperately to make her love him. It goes, "I'm an arsehole. Love me."

Well, actually, it goes: "You can't navigate me. I may do mean things, and I may hurt you, and I may run away without your permission, and you may hate me forever, and I know that scares the living shit outta you 'cause you know I'm the only real thing you got." But the sentiment is the same. And let me tell you, Ethan Hawke - this is bullshit. Total, utter bullshit.

Disclaiming that you're likely to walk all over someone in a relationship does not, in fact, give you permission to walk all over them. Being 'upfront' about the fact that you're a prick does not give you a get-out-of-jail card for treating them with contempt. And telling someone that you're likely to treat them like shit because you're the only person that will love them is not in any way, shape, or form, romantic.

How many times have I heard variations of this speech? How many times have my friends? How many have you? And why do we keep putting up with this shit? In the end, Winona capitulates to Ethan's not-inconsiderable charms, because the dorky guy that adores her is worth less than the bad boy who treats her like dirt. Because she's not worth it - she doesn't deserve a guy who is charming and charismatic and emotionally functional. That's the implication.

She's not worth it, and hey, at least when Ethan cheats on her, ignores, hurts or condescends to her, it's not like she won't have been warned, right? Please. The fact that Winona Ryder falls for this shit - that we all, occasionally, seem to fall for this shit - is the number one, popcorn-throwing reason this movie makes me mad. That, and the fact that if you don't go out with Ethan Hawke, your only choice is Ben Stiller. But I don't even know where to start with that one.

Just a lovely day

2007-11-23T14:01:00.000+08:00

I was walking down Johnston st today when a women dashed out of a hair salon and bailed me up on the footpath. Would I be interested in working as a hair model? Did I have time for a colour today? I was, and I did, and now my hair is a rich and chocolatey shade of brown.

I think I am going to have to accept the redhead experiment as somewhat of a failure... I loved the colour but every time I went to have it touched up it seemed to get darker and darker, inching back towards my natural colour. Perhaps I will accept defeat until I have grown my hair out a bit more, and then go somewhere really expensive (ie. competent) and emerge the mermaid-haired temptress of my dreams. Somehow I'm banking on mermaid hair, although mine is taking an excruciatingly long time to grow.

I had such a nice time walking around Collingwood. Somehow I've managed to spoil myself rotten today. I had breakfast with my lovely friend Josephine, real crumpets with blackberry butter and darky, muddy-coloured coffee, and some good conversation, then headed off towards Fitzroy, managing to make a small detour through a lovely little op shop and picking up a cheerful plaid summer jacker with cap sleeves, a scarf and some sunnies. Then hair-pampering, and a short walk to Per Square Metre, where I picked up my darling illustration. It is very darling. Shut up, it just is.

Getting peckish again I hit upon a lovely, tiny, jumbly cafe with antiques and furniture cluttering up the back and paintbrushes drying out in the bathroom. A five dollar plate of spaghetti napoli later (the proper kind, with olives and capers and chilli) and I was basking in the sunshine, happy and replete.

It made me think how happy I am to be able to have my own life at the moment. I've done a lot of bleating on this blog about being a dismal romantic failure, but being able to wander around Collingwood, slip in and out of galleries, sit in a park, whatever, without needing to make plans or be accountable for my whereabouts is just a wonderful feeling. That total satisfaction you get from a successful day's solitude... it's nice. And it's nice to remember that I've always liked my own company. Especially on a holiday, in the sunshine, with a freshly-shampooed head.

Hot hot heat

2007-11-19T19:09:00.000+08:00

My word, it is hot at the moment. Somehow without my even noticing it the weather's steamed up to a consistent 30 degrees plus. I guess this means summer has started.

I never used to be a summer person, and autumn is still my favourite season (do you have a favourite season? you're missing out if you don't), but this balminess is novel enough to be extremely pleasant. It was far too hot the other night to cook so I had a ten pm dinner of smoked oysters, crackers and gin on the front porch. Its easy to lose track of the hours out there, whiling away time immersed in novels and eating icy poles and swatting away bugs. Sometimes hot summer rain falls in sheets and sizzles on the footpath and the whole street has a Belinda Carlisle moment.

I'm in a funny situation at the moment where I am still getting paid but no longer have to work, so I'm having just about the laziest summer holiday on record. I spent all of today lying under the fan in Jelly's apartment, drinking beer and watching Press Gang. It was a nice way to wind up the working year, although life at the Farrago office didn't involve as many hostage situations, actual news stories or unresolved sexual tension as at the Junior Gazette. Still. It's something for next years' editors to work on.

Clumsy

2007-11-13T20:04:00.000+08:00

I always thought that being clumsy was something that I'd grow out of, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't. This depresses me because I've always thought that a sudden acquisition of grace would accompany some sort of magical turning point of grownupness, turning me from vague and dropsy child to elegant and poised adult. Also being able to round a sharp corner in the car without making sound effects, and being able to run down the street without starting to giggle. But it seems as though I am actually becoming more clumsy as the years go by.

Am I doomed then to remain an eternal adolescent, walking into chairs and spilling coffee on myself, and burning my fingers on the toaster? If so, I'd like some sort of gangly adolescent charm, please. And a thirteen-year-old's metabolism. As it is, the myriad bruises and scratches on my legs (hello table!) and the blisters and cuts on my feet (goodbye, kettle!) just seem to point to someone who is tragically inept at looking after her own physical wellbeing. That, and navigating successfully through space.

Somewhat delightfully, Jono has started to refer to my rather more goofy episodes as being intimidating - which is a nice joke even if it's born of his utter disbelief that anyone would ever find me even marginally impressive. Oh well, at least I'm not in hospitality anymore... I tended to be quite wildly intimidating around sandwich presses, pie ovens and freshly-washed glasses.
And tables, and chairs, and stairs... and the actual point of this post? I forget. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go find the band-aids.

Art bitch

2007-11-11T17:10:00.000+08:00

This weekend has been a triumph of porch-lounging, punctuated with a couple of very cool shows. It's probably the bare minumum required to keep my art bitch status, but give me a break, it's not like I'm a professional.

The lovely Catherine Campbell had invited Jelly and I to a very, very cool illustration show at Per Square Metre gallery, and so we duly went and ate tiny cupcakes and marvelled at the pretty, pretty drawings. I ended up making my first ever art purchase, a Lilly Piri illustration. It was remarkably frustrating to only be able to afford one - to be honest, I can't really afford it - but I consoled myself by thinking that the others would be going to good and appreciative homes. Luckily, somebody snapped up the illustration of Catherine's that I was lusting over all night, because I was about to send myself broke to buy it. Maybe in five years' time...

(As an aside, Catherine is one of the illustrators who gave stuff to our magazine and was incredibly gracious about the not getting paid stuff. Another of our illustrators, Andrea Innocent, was also in the PSM show, and it just made me feel incredible lucky that there are creative young people in Melbourne who were willing to donate their time and effort for a project that looked at one point like it might not even get off the ground. They are both fucking talented and if you have money and you like good art, get down to Collingwood and buy their stuff.)

Tonight, after debating the value of theory in art with my housemates for a couple of hours, I hauled myself down to Utopian Slumps for the Nathan Grey closing exhibition. Also very cool, with some wonderful sound art and many many cute boys. Oh, and the installation itself was very good...

Throw in some pizza-eating, and some Pimm's-stealing, and some wee-hours-of-the-morning porch-drinking, and some brunch-devouring and lake-sitting, and that's pretty much the sum of my weekend. Maybe tomorrow I'll get down to the Gallery. You know, dressed in black, with a flask of gin. This art bitch life is pretty fucking sweet.

Teef

2007-11-08T15:41:00.000+08:00

Recently I've been dreaming that my teeth are falling out. A lot. Like, every second night. Most of the time I'm going about my business and I realise that one of my molars is missing, then a few of my teeth just start dropping out, and then a few more, until I am frantically trying to keep them in and running madly to the nearest dentist. A couple of times they've been smashed out violently. Once I had that dream within a dream thing where I woke up and gave a sigh of relief that I still had all my teeth, and then they started falling out again and that's when I actually woke up.

What the fuck? According to Google (or more accurately, the number one Google hit, Dream Moods),

One theory is that dreams about your teeth reflect your anxiety about your appearance and how others perceive you. Sadly, we live in a world where good looks are valued highly and your teeth play an important role in conveying that image. Teeth are used in the game of flirtations, whether it be a dazzling and gleaming smile or affectionate necking. These dreams may stem from a fear of your sexual impotence or the consequences of getting old. Teeth are an important feature of our attractiveness and presentation to others. Everybody worries about how they appear to others. Caring about our appearance is natural and healthy.

Apparently, it can also signify that I am nervous about public speaking, feeling powerless, or "putting [my] faith, trust, and beliefs in what man thinks rather than in the word of God." Um, not going to argue with that last one... According to my housemate Surineh, it could also mean that I am coming into money, which, as nice as that would we, just does not seem likely at this particular juncture. I don't know. Most likely it just means that I forgot to buy floss or something - I am, after all, a dentist's daughter...

Feel free to add your own interpretation.

Farewell, Lucky: we barely knew ye

2007-11-02T22:08:00.000+08:00

It's incredibly quiet around here; soft, peaceful, the night air unbroken by man or fowl. I can't get used to the lack of noise, although it's a welcome quiet. It's quiet because today a nice man came and took the rooster away. Farewell, Lucky: you've gone to a better place.

For those of you not in the know, Lucky was one of a pair of chooks bought to keep the duck company. The other one didn't quite make it, poor darling. For the longest time we were in denial about the fact that Lucky was not a girl chicken, but as with so many other male-types to which we had become attached, inevitably we had to face the fact that he was a cock.

Anyway, as well as being incredibly not kosher with the city council, Lucky was waking me up at five am every morning and continuing to crow throughout the day, as well as attacking Hegel and anyone who got too close. We didn't want to take him to the RSPCA, since we realised he'd promptly be put down, so Georgia listed him on the Trading Post ("Well-fed rooster, $1, price negotiable) and someone called up jubilant and came and collected Lucky. He breeds chickens, apparently - instead of getting the needle, Lucky is being put out to stud. There could be worse fates.

In any case, I can't quite get used to the lack of noise. Fortunately our street has some weird sound dynamics, otherwise the neighbours would have lynched us by now - that's how piercing the damn bird. It will be blissful to sleep past five tomorrow. Hegel is getting used to being an only child - he's getting more attention from us at the moment that he has since he was a duckling. And instead of a dollar, Georgia is getting a free soft drink next time she goes to Mr Breeder's 7-11. We're still trying to figure out who got the better end of the deal.

Sleepy weekend

2007-10-29T13:47:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-26T09:54:00.000+08:00

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!

2007-10-23T11:16:00.000+08:00

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)

2007-10-21T22:56:00.001+08:00

- 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.

2007-10-18T20:18:00.001+08:00

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

2007-10-18T19:09:00.000+08:00

That is all.

So I may just be single forever.

2007-10-16T20:43:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-11T23:07:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-08T19:48:00.000+08:00

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

2007-10-03T09:39:00.000+08:00

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.

Letters from Newcastle

2007-09-27T14:50:00.000+08:00

This is a very quick check in, written from the basement of a backpacker's, on a glorious, sunny day. I had to check my email this afternoon but so far I've spent a staggering 24 hours unplugged from the internet (which is more unnerving than I care to admit). And now I'm back here, sometimes. Never say I don't do anything for you people.

In a couple of minutes I'm going to buy a generic lemonade icy pole and wade into the ocean. It's warm here - my legs are bare for the first time in forever. My legs really get a short shift sometimes, constantly covered in stockings. I had some funny-looking scars for a couple of years and I guess I was a bit self-conscious about them, and then wearing stocking just became part of the routine, but this afternoon I took them off and rolled them up and put them in my handbag and now my petticoat is brushing against them in the wind and I'd forgotten how that felt. It's nice.

I think I might sit down in a park and read for a while, too. Take my shoes off, even. Just relax. I'm wearing the prettiest dress today, that I found in an op-shop, home-made, fits perfectly. We decided to hit up the op-shops before the hardocore TINA hipsters came and ravaged them, and in the second one we went to I saw this dress and fell in love. It's cream with green polka dots and piping and small puffed sleeves, which sounds not so appealing, actually, but it is. So it will please me aesthetically to go lie in a park in my pretty dress and wiggle my feet in the grass and just read.

Then tonight is ginger beer and readings; tomorrow panels and the ocean; and a long stretch of weekend filled by I don't know what. At the moment all I want to do is curl up like a lizard in the sunshine, so that perhaps. That and lots of lemonade icy poles.

Sun rise, sunglass...

2007-09-24T11:54:00.000+08:00

I've been wearing one-armed sunglasses for quite a while, now. Usually I am pretty good with keeping sunnies intact, but a few months ago I happened to leave my handbag in the vicinity of several small children, who had no compuction about borrowing my possessions for dress-ups (or writing all over my arms in permanant marker, which I admit I could have stopped but these were very charming small children. Sigh).

Anyway, I was in the city this morning so I decided to buy some new sunnies. I tried some white wayfarer-esque ones on recently, and they really suited me, and then I saw every fucking baby hipster north of the Yarra wearing them, so I did not go back and actually buy them. Which, really - it doesn't matter if they're trendy, right? I needed sunglasses and they looked good on me. I decided to buy them anyway.

The shop where I had originally tried them on was out - of course - so I did a quick browse of the chain-stores. Sportsgirl had a really fantastic shape, but in pale lemon - uck. Just Jeans had the right white but fairly crappy frames. Portmans had some hot pink ones, which were tempting as fuck, but I do tend to draw the line at neon. Eventually I ventured into the den of mindfuckery that is the Myer Basement, where some bright spark had labelled the house-brand faux-wayfarers as 'Dunsts'. Please, someone give that woman a raise!

Since I was in Myer anyway, I headed up to the toy department (shut up), where all thoughts of sunnies were knocked out of my head... because where once toys occupied every inch of the floor, one corner now was given over to Christmas decorations. Fucking Christmas decorations, rows and rows of them, and thin tinny carols being piped over the loudspeaker, and I think I swore out loud at the obscenity of Christmas in September. And then I felt incredibly guilty, because every time you swear in the Myer toy department, Santa anally rapes an elf - or something.

Anyway, I think that's it for me and Myer. After the Basement experience I wasn't too keen to actually patronise them (remind me to go on a rant about the Myer Basement in more detail next time we have a drink), but Christmas decorations? Really? Also, I started to veer off into a big mind fuck about conspicuous consumption and began equating my desire for new, unbroken sunglasses with the kind of mindless, disposable culture that big, corporate Christmas trees in September perpetuates. But then I realised that my broken sunnies were about to fall apart, and popped into Episode, that haven of all things hipster, and bought the fucking glasses. Because you know what? They suit me, and I like them, and I'll keep them long after the hipsters have discarded them for the next big thing.

Or until an adorable child rummages through my bag and breaks them. You know. Either way.

Hair today...

2007-09-21T15:19:00.000+08:00

So I had my first stint as a hair model the other day. On the upside, I got a ten dollar haircut from the most competent stylist at my salon. On the downside, I had to sit excruciatingly still for an hour and forty-five minutes while a dozen hairdressing students scrutinised me intently and discussed my height, posture, head shape, jawline, skin tone and personal style.

I came away from it with a shit-hot haircut and also a new respect for people who do appearance for a living. I guess you lose that self-consciousness quite quickly if being scrutinised is your job, but I've never felt so tired and plain and puffy in my life. It didn't help that I was massively hungover, undercaffeinated and had just rolled out of bed, I guess... or that I wasn't wearing make-up, or that the lights in the salon were rather glaringly bright. Or that because appearance kind of is a hairdresser's job, all of the students were perky and bright-eyed and perfectly groomed.

Anyway. I had the haircut, and then we had the party, which was fun (in retrospect... I was totally, utterly unable to be objective at the time, but there were balloons and cheese biscuits and the like), and the magazine should be in shops soon, so look out for it. And on Wednesday I am getting up at an obscenely early hour to catch a cheap flight to Newcastle, where I will be attending this festival and no doubt behaving rather rowdily when I am not sitting on panels and organising roundtables and the like. They want me to talk about getting started in the writing industry. Ha!

Also, notice how I have not mentioned my fortnight-long hiatus from this blog at all? Smooth, hey. Life has been rather hectic and frown-inducing recently, but it seems as though I am destined for sunshine and kittens and gin for the next little while, so life is good. Yup.

Nothing more to say, really.

Hooray! (plus shameless pimping)

2007-09-13T13:50:00.000+08:00

So finally, finally we've sent the magazine to the printers. No more coming in to the office on the weekend. No more freaking out over late content or wrongly-formatted illustrations or chasing ad artwork and getting nowhere. Hooray! We can all breathe out.

We have the proofs lying over a chair in the office as I type. They are beautiful. By next week they will be bound up into magazines, ready to send to boutiques and bookshops, so they can be sold to real live people who will read them and hopefully like them.

I can't believe that Jelly and I sitting around drinking gin and saying "you know, we should really make a fashion magazine" has eventuated in... a fashion magazine. I'm still not sure that we can afford to do this but it seems like we're doing it anyway. We're going to try to get the website up in the next week or so, with a bit of content and contributor bios and the like, so you should go check that out. By the way, when I say "fashion magazine", I don't mean something you won't enjoy, you nerdy, hyperliterate reader, you. We've got heaps of good stuff, like an etymology of jeans, an analysis of op-shop economics and a reflection on fashion's place in a post-surrealist art world. And lots of pretty pictures. And some hot design. And its all by hot young Melbournites, too.

You should definately buy a copy, but you should also come to our launch party and have some free beer, and watch me become a happy goopy mess without the girdle of stress pinching at my waist. Or something. Propping me up? I don't know. All I know is that I am so, so relieved to have this thing out of my hands.

Thus endeth the pimping. Oh, and also I landed an internship this morning that I'm pretty pleased about, so I have many a reason to celebrate. Let the period of stress be gone! Let the drinking begin!

Actually, I wouldn't mind a gin right now. Anyone? Bueller?... Bueller?

Blogging for Christ

2007-09-06T11:40:00.000+08:00

Not much new to report. New batch of cupcakes, lemon and rosewater, sitting on a trestle tale ready for sale. New not-at-all-what-I-asked-for-but-people-seem-to-like-it hair colour. New daffodils poking through the earth in the backyard.

I've been getting itchy feet, and have to fight the temptation at the moment to drop out of uni and get a credit card and pick up my backpack again. Since it's not likely that that will actually happen, why don't we both just pretend that I am not actually sitting in an office in Parkville but rambling all over India? Yes, it's lazy, but nothing I write today will be as entertaining as travel stories and also, the second comment over here still cracks me up. Okay?

God bless u 2, will pray for your safety and well being,

GBU

LOV jess.

Tired

2007-09-03T18:43:00.000+08:00

God, I'm tired. I was working in the office this afternoon when a great wave of fatigue came crashing down on my shoulders. The kind of fatigue that makes you feel physically sick. The kind that makes you feel tired in your bones. It was a battle not to crawl under my desk and sob, a battle that I think I would have lost had I stayed in the office much longer.

Yesterday I took a day off work to go to my grandfather's consecration. Unlike at his funeral, the sun was out, and it wasn't too cold. It was bitter when they buried him. Yesterday the sun was out and people barely cried, although I did get a lump in my throat when my father read the eulogy. We thought the rabbi was going to do it, but he didn't, just motioned to my father, who took a prayer out of the wrong pocket and got flustered and had to start again.

It was a nice ceremony. The rabbi talked about the symbolism of the tombstone, and translated the inscription from the Hebrew, and mentioned that we could keep Papa's memory alive by emulating his good qualities. That was nice. I hadn't thought of it that way before.

It's been a year since he died, and I miss him, but it was his time. What got me the most was seeing the blank stone beside his, and my nagyi's skinny little legs sticking out of her skirt. She always wears slacks, but you can't, not for a ceremony like this. My father renounced Judaism at seventeen, but he made sure my sisters and I wore skirts. My grandfather was a devout man.

The consecration, in Judaism, puts the cap on the mourning process. You sit shiva, do the kaddish, and eleven months later, cease to mourn. It's considered a sin not to get on with your life, because otherwise you're wasting your time on the physical earth, and God's not letting you stay here forever, you know. But deep down, I don't think you ever stop mourning. I'm not sure I believe in souls, and I certainly don't believe in the afterworld, but yesterday I was mourning for a man whose quiet dignity and strength of conviction often blinded him to the potential joy in the world, but whose life experiences made the joy he found extraordinary. That's schmaltzy, but it's true. I was mourning for my grandmother, who, after fifty-eight years of marriage to the decent man she married after her first love was lost in the war, has lost another love. I was mourning, most of all, for my dad, who, on Father's Day, a holiday he disdains, stood at his own father's grave and read the euology, saying, "these words were not written for me to speak - but I will say them."

Anyway. It's not the weight of grief on my shoulders, I know that. It's just a momentary fatigue that's probably come from too many days in the office, too many late nights, too few vegetables, and making countless cups of tea for the extended family who descended on my parents' house and didn't leave 'til dusk. Probably a good nights' sleep is all I need, but also a quiet sob, maybe - a quiet sob, not a sinful one, for the people left behind.

And then maybe I can put the cap on these last few months, and get on with my life.

Out and about

2007-08-31T22:41:00.000+08:00

There's a plastic bag full of delicious vegetables sitting in the fridge just waiting to be made into soup. I bought them on Tuesday. Soup has not eventuated.

For whatever reason I'm barely home at the moment, and I just want to make some fucking minestrone. It seems churlish, though, to complain, since it's been a pretty good week for being out and about. Jelly has chronicled her version of at her blog, and about two thirds of it overlaps with mine, which is what happens, I guess, when you work and socialise and drink together. I would like to state for the record that our trivia team, Editors and their Bitches, kicked some serious arse the other night, and I think its because as a working unit all of us have developed a kind of hive mind that we are able to tap into at any point. Thus am I able to retrieve information from Jelly's brain, and her from Seb, and so forth, without speaking a word.

It's also been a good week for alternative art/performance spaces, alternative art/performance spaces being I've been thinking about a lot recently. Wednesday night my friend Nicola was in a show at Albert's Basement, which is a temporary gallery/performance space set up in a sharehouse in Albert St. Tonight Seb and I went and ate saganaki pizza and saw this excellent production, the inaugural play of a newly-formed absurdist theatre company, in the carpark of the Collingwood commish. It's a great space, really deep, which allowed for a lot of broad physical comedy, fight scenes, choreographed dance, and the driving of a car through the middle of a scene. The play itself was adapted from Ubu Roi by our friend Paul (who is clearly moving up in the world) and rather pithy and surreal and I recommend that you see it. Cheapest bar in town, too.

Tomorrow is work - hooray etc. - but when I get home I might just make up some minestrone soup. Yeah, motherfucker. Of course, the irony is that a couple of months ago when I was feeling stifled by domesticity, nobody wanted to gallivant around launches, and now that there is something on every night all I want is soup and tea and novels. Yeah, irony. Someone should really write a song about that.

Wax on, wax off...

2007-08-29T10:09:00.000+08:00

You know how little kids barely have eyebrows, just soft adorable fluff perched above their eyes? Yeah, that wasn't me. People always used to describe me as striking - "She's such a striking child!" Partly, it's true, that was the pale, pale skin, big eyes, skinny arms and legs, charmingly crooked teeth (now rigorously orthodox, thanks to years of braces), and masses of dark hair, but I've always suspected it was the dark, full brows framing my five-year-old eyes. You can hardly call a child "adorable" when they look like Groucho Marx.

Anyway, I was always self-conscious about my eyebrows, and the first time I had them waxed was a revelation. Suddenly there were two of them - two distinct eyebrows - each thick and sloping like a stroke of follicular calligraphy. I felt old-school glamourous, rather than Old World peasant girl. And ever since then, getting my eyebrows "done" has been a luxury, a very particular craving that I indulge when I want to feel slightly more elegant than usual.

Of course, it's a risky proposition, the eyebrows. Get it wrong - or get the wrong beautician - and you look startled for weeks. I'm looking slightly startled today because the new girl at my salon dumped a whole lot of wax above my eyebrows. What the hell? I thought it was universally acknowledged that you never waxed above the brow line. Startled and vaguely frowny, but if you run into me on the street, please come up and say high, as I am actually very friendly (and not strung out). Oh well. It's a step up from Groucho, and that's all that counts.

Awful quiet

2007-08-24T22:43:00.000+08:00

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?

Putting down roots

2007-08-18T16:38:00.000+08:00

You know how sometimes you're walking along, and you see two people in the distance, and something about the way they walk lets you know that they're together? It's as though if you just squint hard enough you might see a piece of telephone wire connecting them. I was walking home from the supermarket today and I saw you in the distance, with a piece of telephone wire connecting you to someone, and even though you were wearing different clothes and an unfamiliar hat I could tell it was you by the way you walked, one hip slightly higher than the other, each step slow and considered and slightly trepiditious.

On the way back I stumbled over George, who was lying on the footpath studying people's ankles. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was observing passers-by, counting how many stopped to help him up, but I think he just wanted to stare at the hard sky for a while. I asked him whether he had seen you and he said that you had passed by at three, trailing telephones behind you and taking slow and considered steps. He said that at four you were planning to turn into a tree.

Sure enough, when I got home, you were standing outside next to the clothes-line, holding your limbs up and shaking cherry blossom like dandruff all over the yard. I could hear the kettle boiling and it seemed shortsighted that you would put it on to boil before ceding the use of opposable thumbs. The dirt at your feet was cold and perturbed, and your soft eyes were fringed in moss. You stared at me sorrowfully, as sorrowfully as is possible for a tree. The kettle whistled, and I took it off the stove. I poured myself a scotch and reached for the axe.

My week sucked but my friends rock

2007-08-16T21:44:00.000+08:00

The other day I was running late for work, trying not to get rained on too much, and generally failing. As I scrambled out the gate I grabbed a lumpy-looking envelope from the mailbox and shoved it in my bag, and forgot about it.

Later that day I was fishing around for some lip balm, when I found the envelope, which turned out to be not an envelope at all but a A4 sheet of paper, printed on one side with diagrams of the brain and folded and taped up around a soft, oddly luminous piece of cloth. The return address was my address. It could only have come from one person.

Inside was a note, hastily scrawled on graph paper, that said, in part, I bet you're not getting your required share of funny, kitsch 1950s Australiana. [...] I only noticed after I had purchased this gem for you that it is a racist scarf. It's silk, antique, and yours.

Sure enough, the cloth the note was wrapped around was a handprinted silk square depicting a map of Australia fringed with postcard scenes of famous landmarks, native flora and fauna - and some naked, ethnographically-inaccurate indigenous children squatting in the dirt, captioned "Aboriginal Children OR 'Piccaninnies'".

Many thanks to Adelaide Jess for providing a perfect moment of joy in an otherwise fraught week. I might not say it enough, but my friends are fucking awesome. Back when Henry and Jess were living in Melbourne, they partook of a very sophisticated program of mail fraud, which saw drawings of Groucho Marx (mine), cocktail recipes and newspaper clipping fraudulently exchanged between various corners of the city. I miss that and might start regularly mailing people, because email is nice, but a racist scarf on an otherwise irredeemable day? Is just about fucking perfect.

Glory of... whatever

2007-08-12T22:01:00.000+08:00

I went outside this morning to hang out some washing, and the almond tree was suddenly covered in delicate blossom. Oh, the glory of spring! The majesty of the seasons! etc. If the seasons think I'm going to rhapsodize over them every time they make one fucking grand gesture of a change, they have another think coming. One grand gesture every four months or so, and the rest of the time it's forgetting to call and blowing hot and cold and being fucking unpredictable. As though one day of delicate blossom makes up for months of sulking. I'm sorry, honey! I was just going through a rainy phase...

Sure, I haven't spent much time with the elements recently, but it's not like I can help it. Do you think I'd be in the office six days a week if I had any choice? It's not like I'm ignoring nature, I've just been really busy recently. And it's not like I can live off sunshine and rainbows - girl's gotta pay the bills. But does the weather understand? No. It just hurls itself at my office window weeping frigid, hysterical tears, and then gives me flowers as though that will make everything alright.

Well, it's bullshit, weather. It might have been sweet blossom this morning but you're back to sullen cold tonight. I know you're temperamental, but this is ridiculous. And you know what? I'm going to close the blinds now, and curl up with a cup of tea and a novel, and I might not see you for a while. When you're ready to be sunny and warm all the time, and not just when it suits you, then maybe we can talk.

Public singing face.

2007-08-10T12:24:00.000+08:00

I'm going through a public singing phase at the moment. Not in a torch-singing-in-smoky-bars kinda way, or even a karaoke way - just in the sense that when I am walking home with a full bag of groceries or checking the mailbox, I suddenly feel compelled to break into song.

I've been caught out a few times. Walking home in the dark last night, singing under my breath, I passed a couple of people smoking out the front, curled languidly against each other on their shadowy front porch. I didn't see them at first, just had the vague sense that someone was watching me, and quickened my pace. When I realised that no-one was following me, I felt slightly foolish. When I realised that a couple of people had just witnessed me warbling Fiona Apple's "Paper Bag" and swinging my handbag in a vaguely choreographed manner...

I'm not sure where the urge to sing on street corners comes from, but I find I'm indulging this particular whim a lot more these days than I did a couple of years ago. It makes the trip home from the supermarket much less tedious, and sometimes I just want to sing. I don't know. Do other people do this? Is it common?

And if you run into me in the street, will you join me in some sort of ridiculous duet?

If you only see one film at MIFF

2007-08-05T20:54:00.000+08:00

...for the love of God, see this.

Jelly Hands is threatening to review it on her newly established blog, so I won't write it up, only mention that it ticks every box you could possibly expect and then some. Awesome. Come to think of it, it's possible a review of it might pop up here...

I've often wondered about the overlapping communities that exist, those on the net and those in the physical world (my first impulse being to write "in real life", but then it's all real life). Often reading blogs seems to be a matter of teasing out networks, deciphering the friendships and tensions that exist between writers in the physical world. Certain people whose blogs I read I see at launches, or get a drink with occasionally, and often I'm conscious of a disparity between the way I perceive people through their writing and how I react to them in conversation.

Occasionally it feels uncomfortably voyeuristic, knowing the intimate details of someone's life while preserving a distinctly formal relationship with them. It can feel as though you've caught someone undressing by mistake, or overheard them crying in the bathroom, and neither of you want to mention it. Occasionally it breaks the ice. Occasionally, people I didn't realise read my own writing comment on it in passing and I have a moment of panic, scouring my brain desperately to see if I've posted anything too revealing, or improper, or careless.

By the same token, I often wonder how the relationships formed over the internet would work out face to face - whether the people I meet and form word-crushes on would be people I could strike up conversation with in a bar or chat to on the tram. Whether flirting would translate into actual sexual chemistry.

Anyway, despite the occasional coffee with bloggers and the like, I've always felt apart from the main Melbourne blogger networks. Now that Jelly and Jono are writing the two spheres have collapsed somewhat, and I'm trying to dredge up as much Habermas as I can remember to try to make sense of it. Rigid separation of the public and private sphere has always been complicated by confessional literature and the like, but the internet, God bless it, has made the notion seem quaintly obsolete. Sometimes the privacy implications make me nervous. Unreasonably so.

On the other hand, I'm increasingly fascinated by the idea of the internet as a repository of memory, and the collective impulse to spew photos, jokes and journal entries into perpetuity. And since the three of us spend so much time together, it will be interesting to see how we each interpret events - the things we deem worthy of writing about, or how we write about them - and how much we can track our own lives by each other's writing.

Hmm. This is a very confused and meandering post. I'll refrain from babbling on about identity construction through the written word and the subjective memory and the confessional lived experience because I suspect I don't really know what I'm talking about, anyway. But hey!

If you only read one ostensible review of a MIFF film that takes a sharp detour into a ploddingly meta examination of the internet-mediated identity...

Good lit, bad lit

2007-08-02T20:58:00.000+08:00

Good lit: Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

I bought Fear of Flying at a uni sale a while ago, along with a glut of books of similar theme and intent. I've been wary of reading it for a while, partly because so many consider it a seminal work, and partly because some of her later writing really approaches unreadability (Sappho's Leap was turgid, uninsightful and weirdly phallocentric... at least the half I read before abandoning it completely). But Fear of Flying skirts the lethargy that her later work falls into, and I guess following on the heels of the just-released Miller novels, its publication would have been a statement of intent, a ruthless and salty counterpoint to the high "erotic" misogyny of those works. Thirty years on, it feels a bit pointless to review it, rendering this entire paragraph a bit pointless really, but witty, neurotic, slightly desperate (the way every girl after Plath secretly envisages herself?) and it did precipitate this dinner table conversation at my parents' tonight:

Me: So I finally got around to reading Fear of Flying...
Mum: Oh yes! The zipless fuck! You know, your father actually gave that to me to read, years ago - remember, Stephen?
Dad: Yes, I think we had just started dating...
My younger sister: Please pass the salt.

Bad lit: assorted student creative writing projects.

Speaking of unreadable... We've recently been judging entries for the union's creative writing anthology. On the upside, there were a few beautifully-crafted poems and passages of prose, which renewed my faith in the ability of students to produce moving and effective creative work. On the downside/ backside, the lure of sponsored prizes always brings the termites out of the woodwork, and while I tried to scrutinize and consider each piece with equal gravitas, after a while I just deducted points from any piece featuring any of the following:

looming horizons, dewy grass, purple sunsets (really), "her heart sank", "her heart skipped a beat", inability to distinguish between "its" and "it's", any entry in blue/purple/green ink, any entry in Comic Sans/"groovy" font, the smell of spice in a bazaar, staring at the unforgiving horizon, dappled sunlight, grey morning light, cold night sky, gratuitous sex scenes (so edgy!), gratuitous scatological references (so edgy!), unreadable formatting (so edgy!), his strong hand gripped hers, "love had us in its grip", he was my first love and the twist is... he was a cat!, he was my first love, and the twist is... he's dead!, huddling naked beneath thin sheets, our hearts were entwined, totally unconvincing and patronizing use of dialect (it's gritty!), single mothers despairing at their suburban lives, stories written "through the eyes of a child" eschewing basic style and grammar, "consumed by love", "my palms were sweaty".

And so forth. To protect the anonymity and privacy of entrants, a few of these examples are made up, these examples may not correspond to any particular piece, and those which do I did not read aloud to my colleagues in fits of laughter/ silly voices, as this would be unprofessional.

We're thinking of running a Bad Poetry Competition at the magazine, just to have an outlet for some of this stuff. Also, if any of you can find an example of my using any of these phrases previously in this blog, I will eat my hat and also send you a prize of some sort. Umm... bad metaphor? Poor phrasing? Used volume of Erica Jong?

Gah.

2007-07-30T20:02:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-07-27T22:56:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-07-24T20:39:00.000+08:00

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...

2007-07-22T13:39:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-07-20T19:55:00.000+08:00

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!

2007-07-17T20:21:00.001+08:00

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?

2007-07-15T21:13:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-07-10T23:14:00.000+08:00

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):

2007-07-06T16:50:00.000+08:00

'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.

2007-07-04T21:59:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-07-03T09:22:00.000+08:00

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.

(Filthy) hippie holiday.

2007-06-26T22:59:00.000+08:00

At the moment I'm curled up on the couch, eating mandarins and organic chocolate biscuits, editing the theory chapter of my cousin's thesis. Yesterday the rain was so heavy that you couldn't see five centimetres past the window pane. Today the sun is streaming in and the hills are so crisp you could cut them out with scissors. It's bliss.

I've been promising my cousin Jude I'd come up here for about four years. I'm here now and already I'm the most relaxed I've been in months. Partly it's falling asleep (asleep!) to the sound of rain. Partly it's endless cups of tea. Anyway, Jude picked me up at Coolangatta and drove down some twisty backroads for a while and then we were ten minutes out of Bangalow, eating homemade baba ganouj on a multiple occupancy in the hinterland. Jude calls it the yuppie commune, but it's not so bad as that. Isn't the word 'hinterland' delightful?

We're planning to attend an incredibly wanky post-grad symposium on Friday, something about "interrogating whiteness". Jude's partner John will cook us a nautical feast to celebrate building a mast for his boat. There are outings. In the meantime, though, there's tea, and wine, and BBC costume dramas and reading chapters of salutogenic theory with a red pen, and organic chocolate biscuits, and mandarins, and rain, and making fun of hippie drum circles on the beach. So yeah, I haven't dropped off the face of the planet, I'm just in a different state. And a very nice state it is, too.

Three o'clock again, again.

2007-06-23T00:53:00.000+08:00

It's three o'clock in the morning again. Again, again, again. I'm beginning to wonder whether my life isn't destined to be a series of three o'clocks. Right now I'm eating dark chocolate and listening to Nina Simone. At two o'clock I was crying. At two-thirty I poured myself another gin.

I'd like to blame this aimless melancholy on the cold, or the drugs, but it seems to be a function of being awake - endlessly awake - and alone, huddled in the cold of a single bedroom. Still restless, still antsy, still sick, still tired, but hey, at least I'm repeating myself. Staring at the ceiling at the peak of night. Seeing in another tepid dawn. Nina is telling me to break down and let it all out, and it seems like good advice.

Outside the window the air is frigid and I guess things could be worse. But Christ, if I have to see in another fucking dawn...

Not in an existential sense, of course. I can put up with day in, day out, but it's the prospect of watching the sky choke up with colour that makes me want to run and scream and groan. No rest for the wicked, I suppose. No rest for the rest of us. Tomorrow is an early start, and that start is inching nearer. And every time I blink, it's only to open my eyes.

It's three o'clock in the morning, and I think I'm losing my mind.

Argh.

2007-06-20T17:14:00.000+08:00

Still sick. Still tired. But at least I've started drinking again.

In other news, I went into the office today, only to find that we had been mailed a preview version of this cd. Can't say he isn't stalking me now, Mel!

Cold.

2007-06-14T20:40:00.000+08:00

That is to say, it is cold, and I have a cold.

Somewhere between 3.30am last drinks on Monday and 8am wake-up on Tuesday, my immune system went on strike. Consequently I've spent the last three days huddled under blankets, sipping tea and clutching a hot water bottle and dosing up on pseudoephedrine. Oh, except for when I sat under a marquee in the bitter cold with Seb outside the Exhibiton Building, that is. I think one of my kidneys may still be frozen solid. And when I had that meeting, and today when I spent three hours with Helen in the concrete-floored, unheated gallery she is babysitting...

Anyway, cold and flu drugs always give me certain Pollyanna-ish tendencies, and so I've been trying to enjoy the physiological effects of being sick in an attempt to make the best of the situation. Cold sweats? Why, it's just like I've met a boy that I like! Dizziness and hot flushes? Hello, imaginary seventh glass of wine! Waking up three or four times a night gasping like a fish out of water, unable to breathe? Eh... not so much.

On some feverish level, I do appreciate the visceral qualities of being sick, the way that a change of two or three degrees of body temperature can skew so dramatically the delicate balance of all of our composite elements. It makes me better appreciate health (although, of course, with a multiplicity of possible modes of physical being, some would argue that 'health' is simply a spurious and commercially-driven First World construct [and I would say to them "pah! I anticipate you in parenthesis."]). In any case, there's something quite lovely and Victorian about the delicate shivers that flutter down your spine, and the swoony passing from consciousness when you finally rest your woozy head on a pillow.

Still. Three days of the dizzy blahs are quite enough for me. I would like to get better, please, body, so that I can get back to contemplating other, less mucus-related embodiment issues, such as whether Property dualism is congruous with a belief in basic neuropsychology, or whether you can be too fat for a haircut.

Otherwise, I might need some better drugs.

Tuesday night.

2007-06-12T16:24:00.000+08:00

Coming home tonight the tram was strangely silent. No-one talked on their mobiles, or chatted to friends. A few people listened to music, but all that provided was a lilting hum, a staticky background to the muffling quiet. Everyone seemed lost in contemplation as the tram lurched through the night.

It made me think about the New Years Eve a friend took acid and wandered around the city. I walked her home, and she kept stopping to hear the music, insisting that the rhythm of the trams rattling by formed some strange symphony. She made short films and wanted an all-tram soundtrack, and heard it wafting through the balmy city air.

On the tram tonight no-one was taking acid, but the gentle undulation seemed to rock everyone into a fugue state. Inside the carriage, the thrum of the tracks seemed to coincide with a collective breathing in and out. A few people pressed their noses to the cold glass, and left condensation marks on the window. And still no-one spoke.

At Brunswick rd, an old Italian man got on and started up a monologue, talking to everyone and no-one, and no-one and everyone breathed in and out. Two stops before the depot, I pulled the cord. The driver leaned over to her grimy window as I passed and said, "I feel sorry for him". I realised then that we were the only people left on the tram. The Italian man wasn't getting off. But he'd gone quiet and the silence was enveloping.

I got off the tram and dug my hands into my pockets. The sky was black with clouds. I sang all the way home.

Hipster update!

2007-06-08T11:04:00.000+08:00

Remember the perfect hipster*? After writing about him, I kept seeing him on various trams, walking along Smith St, and loitering on street corners. And then I was dithering around the internet recently, one vague and aimless day, and I came upon this photo... and this one... and this one... and either he's infiltrated every street pics blog in Melbourne, or I am stalking him now without even realising it.

Can you stalk someone by accident? I wonder, sometimes. Perhaps it is he who is stalking me, so carefully and subtly that I begin to doubt myself when I see him everywhere and assume that I am somehow persuing him. What he has to gain from this, I have no idea, but the perfect hipster is a sneaky beast. And I still find him faintly ridiculous.

*This entry has a very inglorious starting sentence. I suggest that you skip it.

Renovations.

2007-06-05T16:22:00.000+08:00

You might have noticed the schmalzy new colour scheme. Don't worry, it won't be around for long - just until I teach myself enough HTML to really, as the kids say, 'pimp' this site. Or until I bribe the magazine's tech guy to do it for me, either way.

Also, because I have done an absolutely crap job of protecting my anonymity (by making references to where I live and who I know, and by linking to an article with my full name and place of employment written at the bottom), I figured I might as well go the whole hog and put a photo up as well*. Where I look oddly pink (to match the new paint, dahlink). Internet stalkers, do your worst.

*This was taken at Is Not Magazine's spectacularly awesome two-year birthday bash on Saturday night. (Is Not Magazine is a wonderful institution, and you should go visit its site and donate some money. Also, the editors are all pretty and they smell nice, and are all upstanding citizens, and I am not just saying that because I may or may not have an article published in the upcoming edition. Hi, Is Not! Love your work!) The theme was Golden Years, and yes, I am dressed as an old lady in that photo. The tram ride on the way over from Brunswick was awesome, with people giving me the discreet eye and trying to figure out whether I was in costume, insane, or just another hipster. And so the line between coolness and insanity draws ever thinner...

Media I have consumed in the past 48 hours.

2007-06-04T18:27:00.000+08:00

Books: Fresh Apples, Rachel Trezise.
Hung over on Sunday morning, with the taste of tsatsziki lingering in my mouth and my hair smelling of other people's cigarettes, there was nothing for it but to go back to bed with a cup of tea and read a book from start to finish. I'd nicked Fresh Apples from the office where it was sent to us as promo. Andrew Davies, of no particular publication, is quoted in the frontispiece as saying that FA "can easily be compared to Jame's Joyce's Dubliners", which... lets not go nuts here. Some of the stories, 'Chickens' and 'Jigsaws' in particular, are cute, but mainly it's unrequited love, drug use, Welsh vernacular and plot 'twists' you can see a mile away. Trifling and decorously gritty = perfect for my sleazy tsatsziki Sunday morning hangover brain.

Hama beads.
Perhaps technically not media in and of themselves, but I used them to make some media-related bits and pieces, so maybe by some sketchy and tenuous graphic design association? What the hell - craft as media, kids. Anyway, the most fun I've had in yonks. I also made some lurid technicolour fruit to string on a necklace, and Helen made me a little penguin to turn into a brooch, so that we can be just like the hipster coolsie kids who buy their Hama masterpieces for far too much and miss out on the tea-drinking, chocolate-eating, Hama-ironing fun in the process. Suckas.

TV: The Mighty Boosh, Season One.
There are no words.

Film: The Science of Sleep, dir. Michel Gondry.
Hallucinatory and sweet. I kept trying not to compare this to Eternal Sunshine, since without Charlia Kaufman Gondry is a very different beast. In any case, since the comparison is inevitable anyway, it lacked the emotional coherance of Sunshine and amped up the visual innovation. Had a few cute bits about relationships that rang true; had a few that were creepy and unsettling, and a little too close to comfort to the Hollywood 'stalking = quirky and cute' schema for my taste, but probably any analysis of this film in terms of narrative or character development is futile. Watch it instead as an innovative and visceral take on the videoclip as cinema - a two-hour punch to the cerebellum. And maybe don't take any actual hallucinogens before you go in.

Music: Back to Black, Amy Winehouse.
This was impulse-bought at (shudder) Borders after the film, when my cinema companion rushed off to do countless important things and I wandered in looking for a specific CD and came out an hour and a half later in a sort of media coma. I saw this CD and had one of those moments when I couldn't remember whether I heard one of the songs and really liked it, or heard one and hated it. You know when you sometimes remember the extremity of the response but the accompanying emotion?... To be totally superficial, I was almost put of this CD because AMy Winehouse herself is so terrifyingly bony. Seriously, I thought that her clavicles would cut there way through the CD case and free her, whereupon she would devour me whole because she hasn't eaten anything in a year. Girl is thin. But it turns out three-quarters of her body mass is pipes, and the CD is really growing on me... especially the more uptempo ones like 'Rehab' and Tears Dry On Their Own'. Music to pump up and play while lying in the sun drinking gin and eating cupcakes. And offer Amy a cupcake while you're at it.

Magazines: Yen and Acclaim.
Bought for research purposes. No, really. Acclaim isn't normally my scene, but the layout is interesting and they had a good interview about tattoos. Yen I am saving for after dinner, as a nice sweet media dessert. Stay tuned!... or not! Either way.

Still life with eggplant.

2007-06-01T16:48:00.000+08:00

Someone at the supermarket - whoever's in charge of visual merchandizing (or its grocery-store equivalent), I guess - has decided it would be a good idea to wedge a compartment full of individual containers of chocolate 'dipping sauce' between the strawberries and the pears. It took me a second to process this, as I'm used to a fairly immutable supermarket taxonomy. "That's not fruit!" I thought, before promptly realising that the idea was for the customer to suddenly realise that her delicious fresh produce would taste even more delicious if coated in sugar and fat.

I wrote this off as fairly standard marketing practice, but then I noticed that someone - presumably not the supermarket's middle management - had buried a couple of chocolate bars in with the loose potatoes. And I assumed that someone was taking the piss, and this filled me with glee. And then, as I was doing my single girl/sharehouse route of milk bread eggplant toiletpaper chocolate, I kept seeing Things That Didn't Belong. Some of them didn't belong in fairly subtle ways, such as those that questioned the supermarket's meaningless ghettoisation of vaguely ethnic food, like the Italian chocolates in a store display of Freddo Frogs. And some things didn't belong in strikingly explicit ways - magazines stashed in the bread aisle, toothbrushes next to the biscuits - and these things made note of the cognitive dissonance that arises from the deviation from what is ultimately an arbritrary and/or cynical product organisation system anyway.

And look, I do realise that people just pick things up, decide they don't want them, and stash them away randomly because they're too tired or lazy to go back and find where they belong. But I prefer to think that my local supermarket has been infiltrated by a performance artist whose pointed rearrangement of consumer goods illustrates the inherent futility of a search for meaning in a codified site driven both by capitalist imperatives and the arbitrariness of a single prioritised taxonomical logic. By showing us these things of our supermarkets, they are showing us these things of ourselves. Or something. Who knows? This is Brunswick. Fucker probably even has a grant.

Just like an actual update (only crunchy).

2007-05-31T17:04:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-27T20:44:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-25T12:36:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-24T16:49:00.000+08:00

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

2007-05-23T21:25:00.000+08:00

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!

2007-05-22T21:10:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-20T22:22:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-19T20:56:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-15T20:35:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-12T18:50:00.000+08:00

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...

2007-05-09T07:11:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-05T22:13:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-03T12:41:00.000+08:00

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.

Three o'clock again.

2007-04-30T00:48:00.000+08:00

Three in the morning again, and the clock in the kitchen sounds unnaturally loud. Everything's cold and quiet and still I'm jittery, so cold and jittery. I'm making cups and cups and cups of tea. I want to walk barefoot to the park down the street, and lie there, cheeks nuzzling the dry grass, and breathe into the cold black soil, and wake in the chilly dawn covered in leaves. I want to chain-smoke in my knickers on the front porch in the dark. I want to dig my fingers into dirty concrete, and scratch out your name, and etch in mine. I want to drink the rest of that gin in the bathtub.

I want a first kiss.

I want to be alone with you, just a fraction too close, second-guessing myself, not able to breathe right. I want you to feel how cold my cheek is against your warm palm. I want to make some joke, some flippant remark, but I can't, because you're a fraction too close, and I can't quite meet your eyes, and our lips are barely touching now and the air between us feels heavy and compressed. All the blood is in my head. I want to pause, to remember this exact location, because this street corner that I've passed a thousand times or this unfamiliar porch will now be The Place Where. I want to feel how hot your breath is on the curve of my top lip. And when we do kiss, I want us both to realise that the only thing as sweet and poignant and terrible as this first kiss will be the last.

I want to stop being so fucking melodramatic, and remember that kisses and cold dirt don't mean much at all. But I can't, because it's three o'clock in the morning, and there's no cure for yearning until the daylight kicks in.

Baby went to Amsterdam...

2007-04-27T14:13:00.000+08:00

I have this damn Peter Bjorn and John song stuck in my mind. Get it out, get it out, get it out! Also, I am all hopped up on cold and flu medication and leftover seritonin-blaster pasta. It was the nicest feeling to wake up groggy and phlegmatic this morning - okay, afternoon - only to find several messages on my phone from other editors telling me that they are fucking off work until the next batch of articles come in on Monday and that I should consider doing the same. So I am. Hooray!

I should probably clarify that while I love my job, a lot of it involves staring at computers and trying to decide between swatches and choosing fonts and rectifying kerning* and peering very keenly at a faulty monitor for hours on end, and while yes, I am sitting at a computer right now thanks for pointing that out, I have the option of moaning on the couch and napping and popping more pills and hacking into tissues and making cups of tea and trudging to the newagent in my pyjamas for tampons and liquorice, none of which I can really get away with at work, especially not the pyjamas.

Was that entire paragraph really one run-on sentence? IT'S THE DRUGS, PEOPLE.

Being drudgey and sick, while certainly not pleasant, is nice in that is gives me time to catch up on reading (magazines) and watching trashy TV. And playing with the duckling. Oh my God, what if this is the avian flu? Except that I am pretty sure it's not. Anyway, what I am also doing when my eyes are feeling up to it is reading through the archives of other people's blogs, and it's actually rather comforting to see that some of my favourite web writers got off to a similarly slow, self-conscious start.

Hopefully, this means that in time, my "readership" (ha! ha!) will grow beyond half a dozen people, and I'll attain some level of web popularity, then a cult following, all of which will be in direct corrollary to a magically vast improvement in my writing skillz and culminate in some sort of weekly Green Guide column and a name-drop in the Sunday Life** next time they do a "kids these days and their technology!!" puff piece. Or not. Anyway, the point (as if there is one!) is that I've decided to stick with this thing for at least a year, and see what happens. The only one of those things that I'm actually hoping will occur is that my writing skills will improve - it's a fairly good discipline, blog-writing, even if the results are fairly banal. Of course, a few comments now and then wouldn't hurt, but really, it would be nicer to be able to look back in a year or so and shake my head indulgently at all those clumsy metaphors and run-on sentences and whatnot.

So anyway. I just had to hang the washing out. What was I saying? God, I'm so scattery... scattery, jittery, higgledy-piggledy. Baby went to Amsterdaaaaaaaaaaam... Sorry. I probably shouldn't be allowed to write when I'm full of pseudoephedrine. A few of the chemists around here have a sign up in their windows with the words 'Pseudo Watch', which cracks me up every time and that's when I'm not even high on Codral. Pseudo-burglars, look out! Your pseudo-crime has been detected by the elite memebers of the pseudo-watch! Quick, someone call the pesudo-cops!!

And, being as how there's no graceful way to exit this rambling behemoth of a post... I'm done.

*A lot of font-related jargon sounds pleasingly dirty. Just one more reason that I love this job.
** I'm not italicising Green Guide or Sunday Life as they are sections, not banner publications. Is this correct or should I have put single inverted commas around them a la poems and chapters? Tear strips off me, copy editors of the internet!

Oh, so exhausted.

2007-04-25T13:06:00.000+08:00

My God. I am feeling like the worst kind of stereotypical, tampon commercial/terrible sitcom crazy menstrual lady right now. I just ate an entire packet of liquorice allsorts, some pickles and cheese on toast, and a hefty chunk of banana bread, and then washed it down with several hot chocolates and glass of juice. It's like by getting my period, my body is reminding me of what it would be like to actually be pregnant. Or at least giving me a preview of how I am going to eat when pregnant. Whichever.

What's worse is that I've quite stoically, pragmatically gotten through the stresses and sadnesses of the past week and now suddenly, because of one stupid day of hormonal fluctuation, I am sitting on the floor crying, reading the sad parts of novels and letting the tears slide off my nose onto love letters that I foolishly keep in a shoebox and freezing with panic when I realise that the person who wrote them doesn't love me any more. Honestly. This is pathetic, right? I know that. But instead of getting up and cleaning up the banana bread detritus in the kitchen all I want to do is curl up in a ball, under the blankets, fully clothed, and close my eyes so hard that I get dizzy and see little spots, and fall asleep wishing that the doona were somebody else's arms.

I know this will pass. Tomorrow I'll get up and wash my hair and go to work and write some half-embarrassed, self-deprecating comment here about being so melodramatic. But right now I think I'll go and have a bath, despite the drought, and drink gin, and cry, and hold my eyes open underwater and listen to my own wretched heartbeat echo off the porcelain sides of the tub. Because right now I'm terrified that I can't hear my own heart beating. And I'm scared that no-one else ever will.

Hegel

2007-04-21T15:59:00.000+08:00

I'm an auntie! Pat came over last night with a bag of groceries and a big cardboard box, containing a german phenomenologist. Named Hegel. Who is actually an adorable duckling.

Right now he's chirping at his own reflection in my bedroom - he's only twelve days old, you can't expect him to have completed the mirror-stage - and trying to jump into a green bag of old clothes. Last night we had some people over for a boozy dinner and a good half of the evening was devoted to cooing over Hegel, who kept falling asleep in people's hands and trying to climb over their shoulders. His silhouette is all fuzz. He's damn cute is what I'm trying to say.

There have been a few scary reminders over the last couple of days of the transience and unpredictability of life, and having a duckling follow you around and fall asleep in your shoes seems to be an excellent counterbalance to those shadowy, three-in-the-morning fears. I very much recommend you try it.

Karaoke Cherry Pop!

2007-04-19T09:05:00.000+08:00

Well, I did it, in a most spectacularly underwhelming fashion. Went back to Karaoke Dokie for Seb and Gill's birthday party (after spending the day tramping around Fitzroy in the hot sun looking for birthday presents, falling asleep at my computer, and drinking godawful gallery-opening wine - I think I was delirious). For some reason the DJ kept playing people who had put their songs in before me, and nothing wrong with that, except that I got progressively drunker and tireder watching some very talented media types work the mic. By the time my name was called I was halfway out the door to catch the last tram, but came back, took a last swig, got up on stage and sang the shortest karaoke song known to man, hit - and bruised - some extremely delicate high notes, and made a semi-triumphant exit.

Why am I telling you this? I don't know, why do I tell you people anything? I thought you would be chuffed that I'm attempting to craft some sort of cohesive narrative from my fear of public singing, but maybe I'm being that aunt that gave you socks for your birthday when what you really wanted was a Transformer. Also, I'm hungover, and the thought of writing anything more than a snippet at the moment is daunting and head-pain-inducing. I'll try to write something later. Something cooler than socks.

On the upside...

2007-04-18T08:44:00.000+08:00

A good night's sleep makes a world of difference. What a nifty little aphorism! My mouth still hurts like hell but I made some jelly to eat for breakfast, so at least it will get some sweet, port-wine-flavoured relief.

Also, the phoenix rising out of the ashes of the crazy, tense, yet ultimately tedious work situation is this: a slightly butchered op-ed in The Age. I preferred my own header - 'What we have here is a failure to communicate' - but I am not bitching, no siree. At least now I can say I've been published in student papers, small press and the mainstream media, as if that arbitrary, probably-only-exists-in-my-own-head holy trinity will somehow set me on the path to a half-way credible journalistic career.

Anyway, we're planning a big birthiversary bash for Seb and Gillian tonight, involving gallery-opening wine, sushi, and karaoke, so I might raise a glass of champagne and then down several more. After all, jelly beats porridge any day.

Blah blah blah.

2007-04-17T21:35:00.000+08:00

I feel like a big sack of blah at the moment. A big, flavourless sack of gruel. Millet, even. Porridge made with water and no salt.

Work has been hectic and yet banal, I'm running on two hours' sleep, I've somehow cut the roof of my mouth so that eating spicy or scratchy food hurts, I'm looking at words and they don't seem to be spelled right. Maybe I don't feel like I am porridge. Maybe I feel like I'm wading through it. Maybe my metaphors are as pedestrian as... as... a pedestrian.

Yeah. I think I'm going to quit while I'm behind.

Victory!

2007-04-13T21:05:00.000+08:00

This morning I screwed up all my courage, did some sit-ups, and took on the Myer lingerie department for round two of the Great Bra-Shopping Smackdown! 2007. And, I am delighted to say, I won.

As I might have mentioned, I had my ass beat a few weeks ago when, dewy-eyed with optimism, I skipped blithely into that maze of lace and cotton and linoleum on a simple quest for bras. I had my ass beat severely. I'd forgotten, you see, how department store make me freak the fuck out when I'm feeling a little bit delicate. When I'm feeling a little bit delicate, I find something really sinister about the overly-cheery sales assistants, the confusing lay-out, the racks and racks of same and same again, the fluorescent lights, the piped music, the lack of fresh air. It's the same sort of feeling I get sometimes when I'm looking at twenty-something brands of toothpaste at the supermarket, most of which are made by the same two companies, or when I wander through the fruit and veg section to get to the checkout and realise that I can't actually smell anything. When the entire philosophy behind a physical space is overconsumption, and you're boxed in, removed from any organic sensory experience at all. That feeling.

So yes, I started freaking out almost immediately after walking in last time, but stubbornly I insisted on trying on underwear anyway, thinking that I could just get in and get out and not have to deal with it. I made my way through aisles and aisles of undergarments, and picked a few out that were pretty and that I could afford. And, oh my God. I had forgotten about the change rooms. Harsh lights, carpet, and three unforgivingly angled mirrors. I'm ambivalent on chunks of The Beauty Myth, particularly the idea that the patriachy is consciously subjugating women through the deliberate exploitation of body insecurities, but whoever designed these cells must truly hate women. Or at least, not realise that underwear, apart from being functional, is supposed to make a woman feel seductive.

Because when I try on intimate apparel - and if it's in the name, Myer, you might be able to take a few contextual hints - I want feel comfortable physically, but I also want to feel comfortable emotionally. Naomi, I am not subscibing to the hegemony of the male gaze when I say I want to feel desirable, okay? It's just that when I try on something that I may wear and buy, that will conceivably be the last thing revealed to someone else before my own skin, I want to fleetingly feel as beautiful and powerful as I might feel in the eyes of a lover. "Fuck the hierachy" would be my motto any day, but in this case I gladly would substitute the male gaze for the overtly critical female gaze, the one that eviscerates any romantic notions of desirability and picks up on flaws - and magnifies them - instead.

In fact, I would argue that the female gaze - especially in the case of self-regard - is more overtly objectifying of women than the male. In that change room, under glaring lights and with nowhere to turn, I became an object - a distorted mish-mash of forms, of legs and arms and breasts and belly divorced from any sense of self and subjected to relentless scrutiny. And if clothing really is as much about affect as function, you fucked up, Myer, because I just cannot imagine that this is a good business model. What custom do you have to gain from making women feel like shit? Do you think the more you send women scurrying out in despair, the more they will buy thinking that if they just pay enough now they can avoid the ordeal for a while? Because I just don't think it works like that. As soon as I earn enough to buy boutique lingerie for everyday, and not just Best Knickers, I'm outta here. You've been warned.

Ahem. Anyway, I was about to give up and leave in a huff when it occurred to me to utilise Myer's sole advantage over other shops - middle-aged "fitters", invariably no-nonsense, querulous women who will feel you up briskly, snatch away whatever lace confection you are holding with shake of the head, and return with something in a different size that only looks vaguely like your original garment but fits like a glove. And that is exactly what happened. Which is how I came to possess two identical bras, one navy blue with cream polka-dots, one cream with navy blue, with their respective matching ruched boy-leg knickers.

As I was leaving, the women who had fitted my smiled at my choice and said, "The one you had before is pretty, but it isn't doing many girls any favours. Now, that one is flattering, and you almost have a 1940s look about you, so you'll have that sailor-girl feel in it." And I could have cried I was so grateful to be reassembled from my various parts and made coherent and individual again. Hello, my name is Jess, and I am not a collection of blemished and misshapen limb-shaped lumps - I am a sailor girl.

Anyway, despite my totally unneccesary detour through the philosophical angst invoked by consumption and aesthetic facticity, I consider the expedition a triumph! (Leaving aside that it was a triumph defined by an act of consumption...) Most importantly, now there will be no more underwire poking into underarms, no more stretched straps, no more warped and lumpy cups from over-washing. Yes, friends, tomorrow will be a new day! Now, does anyone know any sailor boys?

Three unrelated things.

2007-04-12T22:59:00.000+08:00

1) 7-11 is currently advertising a "sports slurpee": it's the "AFL Sports Slurpee - CHARGED WITH ELECTROLYES!". I saw this going past the Brunswick Rd 7-11 on the way in to work this morning and it made me smile, partly because I imagined a big pink waxed-paper cup with tiny molecular particles jumping and sparking off the top, and partly because it seemed somehow charming and quaint that sportspeople should warrant their own special slurpees. I liked the idea of AFL footballers sitting in their locker rooms before the match, spooning up their special frozen sports colas with those funny spoon/straw things and then heading out onto the field. I also liked the scope it left for other specialty slurpees - perhaps the "yoga slurpee": some sort of frozen orange juice, "CHARGED WITH INNER PEACE!" Or an "arts slurpee": "BLITZED WITH CREATIVE JUICE!"

2) I had a really horrible dream this morning, and while I generally think it is really banal to write about your dreams I can't seem to shake it from my system. (A seamless segue, from ill-advised marketing ideas to the dark, dark workings of the subconscious! That is why these things are 'unrelated', fool.) It was one of those scary dreams that seems utterly real, and that when you wake up make you overwhelmingly relieved - a direct contrast, I suppose, to those dreams where you're madly in love with someone, which always make me sad and grumpy when I awake to realise that the dream lover does not exist.

Anyway, it was one of those pursuit dreams where you're being chased across a number of scenarios, constantly hiding from some shadowy peril. At one stage I found myself holed up in a country house that I have visited in real life, hiding out with several (real) friends. One of them volunteered to go outside with a gun and act as a guard, and I understood just a second too late that he meant to commit suicide. He'd locked the door and I forced open a window just as I heard the shot. By the time I got to him his breathing had become shallow, and the scene had changed to some kind of college dorm room, and I teased him for choosing such a crappy place to die. As his breath became more laboured, he asked me whether he would ever meet me again, and I said yes, even though neither of us believe in an afterlife, because we'd never had a chance to fall in love on earth. I stooped my head down and he lifted his to kiss me, and I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth.

3) The magazine was given a number of tickets to Keating! and the only thing I really have to say is that this might possibly be the best comedic musical in the history of musical comedy. There was a Keating/Hewson rap battle over the GST, a mambo for Mabo, a Cheryl Kernot/Gareth Evans love song. Sure, you could say that it pandered to a cetain partisan political viewpoint, but I believe humour transcends political boundaries and it would take a particularly stodgy bastard not to giggle insanely at the Alexander Downer number.

Since it was opening night, the place was crawling with photographers and celebrities. We ended up waiting in line at the box office Johns Brumby and Thwaites, as well as former soap star Kimberlie Davies. The biggest celeb there, of course, was Keating! the man, and the moment he stepped on stage with the cast a shiver went through the crowd. He was so fucking cool, too - the cast were all dancing around to the band, so Keating started jiving in a very deadpan, Reservoir Dogs kind of way. He thanked Casey Benetto for the tribute, hugged the actors and musicians, and then threw his arm around Eddie Perfect, who played Howard, and declared, "I can't help it - I love the little desiccated coconut!" And as they were leaving the stage, he grabbed the mic and added, "Don't worry - the coconut will get his comeuppance!"

I don't think Kevin Rudd is quite charismatic enough to warrant his own musical, but you could feel a swell of hope go through the audience as people let themseves believe that the next Federal election would return a Labor government. Anything to get out of the relaxed and comfortable rut. We all went for beers afterwards, and debated policy and sang bits of the musical until last call. Which reminds me, I need to enrol to vote...

Ouch, part two.

2007-04-11T22:21:00.000+08:00

Q. Why is Jess such a fucking idiot?
A. It's just habit, I guess.

So here's part deux in the series entitled, "Jess should not be posting when she's drunk". This series should possibly be subtitled "while booze is but a band-aid solution and no panacea, our heroine believes that drowning her sorrows in a haze of tears and then writing about it for the consumption of strangers while listening to Fiona Apple is a good idea", but any self-respecting editor would strike that immediately. No run-on sentence ever did no-one no good.

Anyway, it's past midnight, I'm drenched (internally) with beer and I can't walk in a straight line, and all these things are consequences of my own stupidity this morning (except for the passage of time - that's one thing that, comfortingly, I cannot seem to fuck up or fuck with). Which is not to say that the day was a total write-off - between its ignomious start and bleary-eyed end I conducted a pretty good interview with a Very Big University Cheese, did six or so hours of transcription, designed the cover for the next edition, and neologised a few fairly charming malaprops. I also bought Seb an "Ice T" brand iced tea as a birthday present, which I think no-one but he and I will find funny in the slightest. I plan on making him an awesome birthday card to go with it - something along the lines of Ice T telling him to stay off drugs and to avoid gangs like the plague. And perhaps a birthday sentiment, I don't know. Hey, it would be lame even if I weren't drunk. Leave me alone.

I think part of the problem right now is that I'm back in the insomnia slump, and so only had two hours sleep last night. Just as I was starting to fall asleep, Paulina woke up and started regaling me with tales of her Uncle UFO, a UFO-obsessed Pole who was also a hunchback from polio. Then she fell asleep, and kept kicking me as I tried to doze off.

Fortunately I'm still in the first flush of sleeplessness, where I can get up and read or paint or watch TV and not feel exhausted in the morning. I know that in a few weeks I'll be tired and grumpy, but at the moment I still feel I'm stealing hours in the dead of night, hoarding them against the daylight when I'll be forced to get up and go to work and can't wander into the back garden in just a thin slip and feel the cold dew beneath my sleepy feet. I'm still infatuated by the night, and standing outside in the cool thick air eating figs off the tree seems like an unimaginable delight.

Funnily enough, drinking doesn't seem to send me into any kind of stupor, so I suppose I'll be up tonight, toes in the damp earth, thinking about the day and wishing that I hadn't felt compelled to spill my intoxication into the neat, orderly world of the interweb. I should also mention that apart from occasionally proofing things I don't edit this at all, so the record will always show my drunken blatherings. That's okay, I guess - though I'm still trying to figure out the bounds of disclosure on this this, my own fallibility will always be up for grabs. And right now I am very fallible - so fallible, in fact, that I am falling... falling... off.. my chair.

Excuse me.

Happy Easter!

2007-04-09T13:42:00.000+08:00

This year, the Easter Bunny brought me:

- Polish almond chocolates
- pomegranates
- a discussion of electric gherkins and the botanical requisites of "berry" classification
- a slumber party with Paulina
- the discovery of Coburg Lake
- a relaxing picnic at said lake
- many cups of tea
- a five-day weekend
- hours of sunshine
- a hangover
- a delicious breakfast at my old work (including 1 x sexy ristretto)
- piles of washing up
- a Jean Cocteau films
- a Tarot reading
- wild exhiliration, utter contentment and crippling anxiety (though not neccessarily in that order).

How about you?

A beautiful clumsy day.

2007-04-07T18:35:00.000+08:00

Just book me a show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival already, because my morning was a comedy of errors.

It's my dad's birthday today, a fact which I had completely neglected last night when I was madly sewing buttons onto a canvas. Shit shit shit, thought I. My dad never makes a fuss over birthdays and if it were up to him they would probably just slip by unnoticed, which is an attitude I've inherited. I mean, it's nice to acknowledge the fact that someone's alive, but isn't it nicer to just be generous and thoughtful on a daily basis instead of concentrating all that attention into praise for the fact that someone was born? Congratulations - you successfully escaped the womb? I digress because I am loopy and tired, but the point is that I had nothing to offer the man who raised me until I had a fuzzy moment of illumination in the shower and decided to take him out to see Carlton lose one night. I mean play. Where am I going with this?

Oh right, he was coming over this morning to drop off a dress that Mum had made for me to wear to Lily and Ryan's wedding*, and so we sat down for a cup of tea and had a chat. It's funny how much I sometimes miss the little things about living at home - snuggling up on the couch, racing my dad for the nine letter word, drinking cups of tea, silly running jokes that don't really go anywhere. I think also in the last years my parents have started to treat my like an adult - a vague, occasionally petulant adult - to the point where I was having coffee with my mum the other day and she said, 'It's so good to take a break from parenting!' Which was nice, but at the same time, I'm still not really used to being an adult yet so if you want to adore and protect me a little while longer that would be fine.

I am wandering all over the place here! Anyway, after my dad left, I went to wrap the watercolour I had done for Lily and Ryan - I'm a bit broke and making things is always a good way to say "it's the thought that counts" - and what did I do but SPILL WATER ALL OVER IT. I spent the next fifteen minutes betwixt stages of dress, trying frantically to dry my hair while simultaneously drying the canvas. In the end I just had to add more purple, so Lily and Ryan, that is why there is so much goddamed purple at the bottom of the painting. Man, I hate purple. I can't think why I even included it except to even out all the yellow. Which is now unbalanced. By all the purple.

Because I didn't have time to dry my hair properly I threw the curling iron on, and promptly burned myself with it. Burning myself reminded me that I had left the kettle on, which had pretty much boiled dry by that stage. Oops! I finished my hair and put on the dress, which turned out to be too short for the slip I had borrowed, and fortunately it was Housemate Bec and her super-fantastic lingerie collection to the rescue. Thanks, Bec. Feeling somewhat calmer I went to touch up my make-up, putting on concealer in the steamed-up bathroom without realising that I still had paint all over my fingers. I had a purple chin. Thank God I had a second look before leaving the house.

Getting dressed I laddered my stockings. Somehow, I cut my foot. And my hand. But then none of that mattered, because I went and met Tilly on the corner and walked to the wedding and the clumsy clumsy day became a beautiful clumsy day.

*I kind of feel a bit uncomfortable writing about the wedding as it was so intimately Ryan's and Lily's that it feels like theirs alone to tell. So I will just mention briefly that it was beautiful - funny and unpretentious and charming, and full of a quiet grace. It made me feel temporarily less cynical. I think everyone felt that way - warmed pehaps; melted slightly by being in the presence of two people who are so genuinely and steadfastly in love - and it felt like their little house was throbbing like a golden heart, illuminated against the eggs-and-bacon ordinariness of a Saturday morning in Brunswick. It made me wonder how many small fragments of beauty play out every day, unseen by most but cherished by a few. It made me feel optimistic about the inherent goodness of the world, but maybe that's just the champagne talking.

A few things you might already know about me but then again why would you.

2007-04-05T10:38:00.000+08:00

1) I wander around when I brush my teeth. I find it almost impossible to brush my teeth in the bathroom. If I am forced to, I will pace like a caged animal. It's as though I forget how to make a brushing motion when I am standing still.

2) It is rare that I am actually reading my book on the tram. Secretly, I am watching you.

3) When I am very nervous, I recite parts of 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' underneath my breath.

4) I cannot remember the last time I wore trousers.

5) In my handbag, there is: a tube of mascara; a pink lipstick; eyeliner; a crumpled up easter egg wrapper; a turquoise comb; some loose change and bobby pins; a strip of Panafen Plus; tampons; my wallet' a notebook; a phone; a pencil; a studio photo of Harold from Neighbours; a pen; and The Four Quartets.

6) I will have a macchiatoni or a ristretto, thank you.

7) I refuse to accept that the international standard spelling of "sulphur" is now "sulfur" and will continue to spell it the old-fashioned way.

8) I am terrible at telling jokes (see a few posts previous). But I am very good at making puns.

9) Last night I dreamed that I was forced to sleep on the floor at a holiday retreat while all the couples there were given beds. This morning I woke up with an extremely sore back. I don't think it was a coincidence.

One-Handed Reading List

2007-04-04T20:01:00.000+08:00

I found a little bit of money in my account the other day. There was a book sale at uni. I think you can see where this is going.

While I didn't go all-out bug-fuck crazy - that is, I left the Phaidon coffee table books on the trestle table where they lived after slavering madly over at least five of them - I did come away several kilos heavier in books. And it seems that at the moment I have a one-track literary mind, because apart from a Lester Bangs anthology and a Sylvia Plath volume this is what I bought:

The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis
Crash, J.G. Ballard
The Key, Junichiro Tanizaki
Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
The Sexual Life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet
Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Laura Frost.

I bought the Amis because I remember reading a review that was quite passionate about it. Unfortunately, I can't remember whether the reviewer loved it or hated the book, and now I suspect that perhaps they hated it, but I've always meant to read some Amis at least and this one is quite slim. The others I bought partly because I was in a saucy mood but mostly because I have been giving serious thought recently to a thesis based around sex, subjectivity and the abject in twentieth-century literature, and they seem to get more or less consistantly referenced in the readings I've been doing. (Ho ho, it's one-handed reading because you need the other hand to take notes! It's funny because I mean academic wanking and not wanking in the literal sense!)

I'm not sure that Sex Drives is really going to resolve many ideas for me, since it's based around Sontag's idea of "fascinating fascism", and (from a quick read of the introduction anyway) seems to focus the erotic appeal of fascism as sublimated by the subject - that is, cultural influence on the erotic imaginary - rather than the idea that libidinal urges are repeated at a national level, sublimated themselves as political discourse. That's not really a quibble. It's interesting to read something that approaches the topic in a way I probably never would, and certainly no-one is obliged to go around spouting Freud - it's way more complex than that. But at the moment I tend to believe that the political will of a country is reflective of its inhabitants' psycological nature, and not the other way around.

Anyway, there's an interesting-looking chapter called '"Every woman adores a Fascist": Margeurite Duras, Sylvia Plath, and Feminist Visions of Fascism' which should provide food for thought, particularly as Duras is one of the writers I want to focus on. If my French were better I'd even consider doing a comparative study between Duras and Pauline Reage. I guess the thing I'm getting at, which the French do better that I can, is exploring the link between sex and the broaching of subjective stability - either by the abasement (and therefore transcendence) of the subjective self as in The Story of O, or by sex's explicit (ha!) relationship to the abject and so its temporary abolition of psychological "order". I guess what I'm getting at is something like "jouissance" being translated as "orgasm" in the English version of L'Amant. I am getting at a thesis-length version of that very translation.

Also, when I say subjectivity, I mean I would want to look at both the character's psychological subjectivity as created by the author, and also the language in which sex scenes are written and the critical distance the author/narrator maintains - which I guess is more Lacan than Freud. It would be both. Am I even making sense anymore?

Dear God - this pseudo-intellectual yearning for a theoretical analysis of dirty stories is making me realise how much I've been missing study, and how slack my faculties have become from a few months of inactivity. It's a bit scary, and I think I need to go and read some Kristeva and stop posting my first-year-level observations (there's a lot of tension between the subject and the abject! sex both informs and is informed by politics!) on the internet lest any academics be reading this and laugh at me. You know - as bored academics are wont to do. In the meantime, why don't you go read a dirty novel? It's good for the constitution, you know.

Judaism for Dummies

2007-04-04T10:14:00.000+08:00

or: This Seder Felt Strange for Many Reasons.

(So a Catholic, an Anglican and a Jew are about to be knighted, and they all must go and kneel before the Queen. The Catholic goes first, and kneels down before her. He says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The queen taps him on the shoulders, then the head, and commands him to arise, for he is now a knight.

The Anglican goes next, and kneels before a Queen, and says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The Queen repeats the process and commands him to arise.

Finally, it's the Jew's turn, but he can't remember the words. His mind goes blank. He kneels down, and begins to mumble under his breath, "Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh, Mikol haleilot..." and the Queen turns to her chancellor, raises her eyebrows and asks, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?")

Why was last night different from all other nights? Because it was the first Seder we'd celebrated since by grandfather passed late last year, and no-one knew what to do.

Seder (the Passover meal) has always been an oddly formal occasion in my family. My grandfather was very, very religiously conservative - probably the most orthodox you could be without, you know, actually being Orthodox - and so high holidays were always celebrated very solemnly. No hymns for us - no lively debate around the dinner table - no banter over the passages of interpretation. The Haggadah was always read in Hebrew. So the Seder for me was always much more grave and mysterious than it was for most people I know.

The table was always presided over my my grandfather, who was deaf and increasingly frail and demented. In between the ceremonial parts of the meal my grandmother would be back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, fretting. I don't think she has ever eaten more than two bites of any Seder meal. Anyway, things followed a pattern, and pattern becomes tradition, and tradition becomes law. We continued to do even the things that are generally just included to distract little kids - like hiding the matzo and demanding a prize for its return - long after all three of us girls were in our teens. In the last few years, as Papa grew increasingly frail, the roles became reversed, with us humouring him and playing along as he pretended not to see the square, flat serviette perched obviously on the mantlepiece, or behind a cushion. His face would break into a grin as we pulled away the cushion with a flourish, and bartered for glinting foil gold coins or lilac-wrapped blocks of Kosher Swiss chocolate.

This year there was none of that. My grandmother had a bossy Hungarian woman in the kitchen fussing over things, but she still didn't eat. No-one shouted and mimed our after-school activities to the head of the table. There was no maror, no potato dunked in salt, no wine to dip our little fingers into. There was no Hebrew, no arguments in Hungarian across the dinner table so that the kids don't understand. In another world my dad would have taken over the ceremony, but he left the shul at seventeen and never looked back. So we decided to just have a quiet dinner - my parents, my sisters, Helen, who my dad has taken to calling the Fourth Daughter, and my nagyi and her sister.

It was pleasant, but breaking with tradition after all those years is still disquieting. Towards the end, in the hospitals wards, the hospice, with the smell of antiseptic and the cheerless painting, the intubation, the drips, the dementia, it seemed better that Papa goe quickly. We couldn't imagine his anguish at conducting the Seder from a hospital bed, and frankly he was so out of touch with reality by the end that I don't think he would have been able to.

When we were young and he was babysitting, he would sneak us chocolate wafers. He worked in the schmatte trade and could fold a shirt beautifully. He refused to talk about Hungary or the war until he had Holocaust flashbacks two years ago, last Seder, and we found out that his sister died at Auschwitz with her children. My sister is named after her, although my father didn't realise at the time. When he rang to say it was a baby girl, Papa cried. He worked in the Kodak factory after immigrating, almost every day, for a year. He always called my dad's friends by their full names. His pants had creases down the front, precise. He would poke us in the back to make us sit up straight and gave us horsie bites that left bruises. He didn't know his own strength. I miss him.

Papa died on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year. He was in a coma but I'd like to believe he'd been holding on in order to go out with a little symbolism. Patterns make tradition, and you break with law, and traditions become memories. This Seder felt strange. For many reasons.

Ouch

2007-04-02T22:58:00.000+08:00

I started this morning crying in the changerooms at Myer, found myself attending a ridiculous anti-bullying and harrassment seminar at lunchtime, and then ended up hiccoughing on the last tram home.

All in all, an utterly inglorious day.

The Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad.

2007-04-01T13:20:00.000+08:00

So since Tuesday I've been craving this vaguely Japanese eggplant salad like crazy. I bought most of the ingredients at the supermarket on the way home, and then realised that I had forgotten the miso and tofu, so the eggplant went back in the fridge. Wednesday and Thursday I was out, and then on Friday, when I went assemble the salad, the eggplant had mysteriously vanished from the fridge. Foiled again!

By yesterday afternoon I couldn't stand it no more, and so, armed with all the neccessary ingredients, I began to cook.

The thing is, by that stage cooking the salad had become much, much more important than eating the salad. Now, for me there's a fairly simple corollary between cooking and stress. Namely, I get itchy baking fingers when something is going wrong in my life. I spent a blissful evening making a hundred cup-cakes for a party recently, and come exam time I am usually to be found in the kitchen, wreathed with steam from the oven, fingers burned, mixing batch after batch of biscuit mix, mashing bananas into a pulp for bread.

But this was the first time I have ever craved the making of an Asian salad. The baking/stress corollary is fairly straightforward, but what does it mean that I suddenly felt compelled to slice an eggplant into paper-thin slices? Why did I need to boil dried seaweed until it felt pliant and gelantinous? Why, for the love of God, was the highlight of my day seeing thick, spongy tofu become soft and slippery in its miso-and-mushroomy blanket of broth?

I don't know. I just don't know. So I made the goddamn Japanese eggplant salad, and I had three bites of it, and then I went to a friend's for dinner.

Anyway, if you ever develop this specific compulision, here is what to do:

1) Put some dried seaweed and shitake mushrooms in a pot of warm water and bring to the boil. When I did this yesterday, I added some shitake mushroom stock, but I have no idea how such an item appeared in my cupboard to begin with or where you'd go about purchasing it. It's blatantly unneccessary, anyway - just the mushrooms will do.

2) Cut a shiny purple eggplant and a few waxy potatoes into very thin slices. Cut the slices into slices. Set aside.

3) Crush a shitload of garlic with the back of a knife and dice. Chop up an onion, trying not to cry. Add half a not-too-hot chilli, also diced, and for the love of God do not touch your eyes after you've chopped it up, or then you'll really have something to cry about.

4) Saute* the garlic, onion and chilli until the onion is caramelised, and then add the eggplant and potato.

*Imagine this word with an acute accent. An accute accent that I can't figure out how to make on this computer.

5) Drain the seaweed and shitake broth into a bowl, keeping the re-hydrated seaweed and shitake mushrooms. Add in some miso, mirin, and soy, and then add it to the eggplant/potato mix with a ladle, spoonful by spoonful, as with a risotto. Keep doing this until the eggplant is mushy and the potato is just cooked through.

6) Turn down the heat and add cubes of spongy tofu. Boil up some noodles in a seperate pot - I like sesame noodles, because of the texture, but soba would work - and then drain them in the same colander as the seaweed and mushrooms. Add to the pan, toss, then let cool before transferring salad from pan to bowl and letting cool in the fridge.

Ta da! It's your free Sunday recipe/exploration of my quirks and neuroses. It's a Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad. Enjoy!

Blogging makes you compulsive and weird.

2007-03-30T18:25:00.000+08:00

I've only been doing this for a fortnight and already I'm writing about my own vomit. Bitch, please. Nobody wants to read that.

Except apparently some people already are. I had kind of hoped that I would have a few weeks to myself to hit my blogging stride: I shuddered to think that people would unwittingly come across this and think to themselves, "Hmm, clearly this person is rather incoherent. Perhaps she hasn't hit her blogging stride." But perhaps that was an unrealistic expectation.

Actually, I'm still rather ambivalent about writing what is basically a play-by-play account of my life for public consumption. Partly, it's because I think my life is not that interesting. I mean, I run a student paper; I don't excercise frequently enough; I rarely go to wild parties; and I watch far too much Law and Order:SVU. I'm overly fond of footnotes. I drink. In the office. Sometimes alone.

But I do find it so far to be a nice challenge to go through my day and notice everything extra hard, hoping to glean some material to shape into a post later on. It wakes you up a little bit. And here I'm reminded of a very nice artist/blogger named Lucas that I met at last year's TINA festival. After doing an artist-in-residence stint in the WA town of Kellerberrin, he decided to repeat the experiment in his home suburb of Petersham, doing community-based projects and talking to people who lived and worked there. I like that idea, and while I'm not so sure about the not-leaving-the-'burb-for-two-months part, the notion that there is beauty and art to be found in everyday life - even if everyday life is fairly banal - is appealing.

SO, without further agonisingly self-conscious ado, here is a list of things that have amused or otherwise pleased me today.

1) I crashed at Helen's house last night, after a French film and Greek food with my mum, and blearily took the train home this morning. The connection was seamless. The train was clean. And when I stepped off onto home soil at Moreland Station, I was serenaded in a deep Irish brogue by a gentleman standing in the middle of the footpath with his arms flung wide. I tried to keep a straight face as I passed him but dissolved into giggles instead. He grinned at me and sang another line. The song was 'You are always on my mind'.

2) I picked some flowers from the back garden and put them in a vase on the kitchen table with a candle and a wooden camel. The temporary tidiness of the kitchen was nice (as nice as it was fleeting), as was the red of the flowers against the pale yellow of the walls. The floor still needs mopping but I am choosing to ignore that.

3) A perfect, perfect hipster got on the tram today at the corner of Sydney and Glenlyon roads. He was tall and rangy, and impeccibly turned out, in skinny jeans, a stripey T-shirt, a grey vest, navy sea-shanty blazer, and silk scarf. He had sunglasses on over a very girlish bob and was clearly cultivating some insouciant facial hair. He was also carrying an old-fashioned suitcase, the type that snaps closed, and probably couldn't see because the weather was cloudy. But I don't think he could bear to be without his accessories. It was as though some glamourous water-bird had alighted upon the tram. He kept glancing back at me as if to determine whether I appreciated the effort he had gone to. I did, my friend. I did.

4) The weather. I've been wearing jumpers and scarves and stockings for the last three days and I love it. I tried to express my joy at the grey, windswept sky the other night to my friend Geoff and he just looked at me in disgust and said, "It's people like you..." He may have shaken his head. I don't care - I think summer is overrated and now that the air is finally crisp and clean it feels like things are starting afresh. What things, I don't know.

5) I am now represented on the Farrago website by an adorable dinosaur. Thanks, Jono! Email me with story ideas concerning "the arts, robots and dinosaurs". No really, that's what the website told me to tell you.

6) When I got home, the kitchen was flooded with light. No more making dinner in the darkness! Thanks for replacing the light-bulb, Georgia and Pat!

7) I had an idea about a brooch made out of Harma Beads, comprised of a Harma Bead milkshake, Harma Bead hamburger and Harma Bead french fries. I just realised that this idea was probably sub-consciously inspired my that McDonalds "we're healthy! we swear!" ad that is running where the people make said foodstuffs with their bodies but look like little Harma Beads. Oh well, I am still going to make that brooch.

8) Also, I have laid out the materials for and started making a necklace representing a dementedly amorphous monkey swinging off two ropes of plaited kimono fabric. If I have it finished by tomorrow I wear it into the city while shopping for bras. Because you always need to check how a new bra looks with an amorphous monkey necklace.

All in all? A thoroughly enjoyable day. And although everything stayed in my stomach, I still find the idea of a concept Abject Japanese Restaurant charming and funny instead of gross. That is because I am sick. And I am compulsive, and I am weird. And I am going to go make that necklace now.

Milk was a bad choice.

2007-03-29T02:32:00.000+08:00

As I bit into a piece of squid tempura this evening, I had a momentary flashback to my last bad battered sea-food experience, referred to variously by my friends as "the time you ate those prawns", "the time you got really trashed" and "the time Paulina gave you that concussion". It was all three, but I think the honey prawns were the main contributing factor. God, that was spectacular for all the wrong reasons. Then, as I was heading to the party, I got a text message from Helen, saying, in relation to minor indignities suffered during the day, "don't try to drown your sorrows and end up vomiting prawns on some gorgeous guy".

So of course I just spent the last ten minutes hanging over the side of my bed, heaving into a waste paper bin in the darkness. When I turned on the light to go empty it out, I started laughing at the mass of undigested udon noodles at the bottom of the bin. It was Abject Noodle Soup!!

And I'm done.

Karaoke Dokey

2007-03-28T22:48:00.000+08:00

I have a long and noble history of chickening out of karaoke, and tonight was no exception. But it was a rather lovely night all the same.

I spent most of the afternoon designing a poster for the Melbourne Model forum that the university is running, and since I am in no way a graphic designer, I needed a drink by the time it was done. So Gillian and Libby and I headed upstairs to an art opening and much free wine. Ah, gallery opening grog: so bad you need another glass. Then Gill and I headed off through the rain into the city and ate so much Japanese food we thoroughly regretted wearing cinch-waisted skirts.

Even though I see Gillian daily, it was nice to spend time with her as a friend - to sit around and eat tempura and chat about non-work-related things. She had to go off to a New Leaf meeting, and since the New Leaf crew were planning on heading down to Miss Libertine for Penny's birthdy afterwards, I figured I would wander the city streets and then go with them as a group. Don't ask me why I couldn't just go alone: I am a chicken. I told you that already.

Anyway, it started to piss down a bit so I took refuge under the arches at the GPO, and watched the rain against the hard city lights. I had my non-Pod with me, so I listened to PJ Harvey and shivered in the light breeze until the battery ran out. I don't know why, but sitting by myself for an hour watching a near-barren streetscape really cheered me up. I think partly it was the feeling of being vulnerable to the elements. It's somehow comforting (...and trite) to realise that whatever is going on in your life, the forces of nature are still at work. Partly it was that the air felt crisp for the first time in months, invigorating, not wilted from hanging around hot concrete all day. And partly it was being almost perfectly dressed for the weather. I don't know why, but that always puts me in a good mood.

Gillian turned up a little later without the rest of the bunch - they'd inexplicably bailed - and we headed towards Miss Lib's. We held a party there at the beginning of the year and because of that Jerry and Steve always greet me with a kiss on the cheek, which I like. The bartender was cute. And Penny, when we found her, was in such good spirits that I felt slightly irresponsible giving her a bottle of tequila. I gave it to her anyway.

And it was fun. I don't know whether it was because I was in a good mood to begin with, but I didn't feel like an impostor the way I usually do at a party where I don't really know anyone. Instead, there was a drunkenly anthropological excitement to watching everyone interact - trying to figure out who knew who how well, figuring out who belonged where by looking at their shoes, trying to predict who would sing what.

And oh, people sang. I have never heard so much good and bad (which is also good) karaoke in my life. I got a bit swept up at one point and leaned over to Gillian and said, "You know, I really feel like tonight is the night I'm going to lose my karaoke virginity!" But then I realised there was only seven minutes until the last tram, and so I piked.

Of course.

On the tram going home, I looked out the window as we were going past the Victoria Markets, and into a long, concrete corridor. Two men were batting around sheep carcasses suspended from the roof - as though the sheep were those metal balls that people have in office building, where the two balls on each end bump the row and set each other in motion. Through the drizzle I got a fleeting glimpse of a long row of carcasses swaying from their butcher hooks, and then the tram pulled away. This has nothing to do with karaoke. I just thought I'd mention it.

What does the sea want, anyway?

2007-03-26T18:45:00.000+08:00

Whenever I get a new CD I tend to play it over and over again until I kill it, and then resucitate it a few months down the track. At the moment, I'm slowly leaching the life out of Sarah Blasko's What the sea wants, the sea shall have , an album that Paulina recently nominated for the Worst Album Title of the Year awards. It's a bit clunky, sure, but the title encapsulates something I find intriguing about Sarah Blasko, which is her ability to give lyrics that are fundamentally quite empty the impression great depth and vice versa. Consistantly, they border on the edge of trite, senitmental or glib, only to be pulled back from the brink by some fucking great arrangements and kick-arse vocals.

'Queen of Apology' is a case in point - the lyrics are fundamentally quite cutesy, but they're overlaid with a thumping military beat and some great cymbalic drumrolls* and very restrained strings. 'Hammer' is pretty awesome also, with that same semi-military beat (I appear to have a weakness of military drumlines, which is why I love Edith Piaf's 'L'homme de la motto' and Outkast's 'Pink and blue' in equal measure) and according to iTunes I've been listening to 'The Albatross' and 'Planet New Year' more than the rest of the album. I only downloaded iTunes recently and feel a bit ambivalent about the fact that it is already keeping dibs on me.

Anyway, even though I know I am going to be thoroughly sick of this album in approximately five listens' time, at the moment I am fairly enamoured of it. But as the previous two passages so cogently demonstrate, I'm not a music critic, so what the hell would I know.

*I tried to describe the sound of drums with lots of cymbals and dissonance to Jono recently as "cymbolic". He corrected me, but I really like the notion of symbolic drums and plan to start a concept band around it. We would all wear black turtlenecks and smoke pipes and OMFG!!!1! we could be called THE SIN TAX!! Would there just be a picture of some drums, though? Or would there be a signifying guitar, and a signified bass as well?

Oh my God, I am far too excited about this idea.

An entire hand!

2007-03-25T17:36:00.000+08:00

On an entirely unrelated note, there's a biscuit jar in the kitchen for the first time ever and I just managed to eat five Scotch Finger biscuits without even noticing. This is not good.

I don't wanna be a pop star tooooooo...

2007-03-25T15:05:00.000+08:00

When Paulina and I were living together one of our rituals was to dash home from whatever it was we were doing to watch Neighbours. "Watching" Neighbours involved telling each other what our favourite storylines were, evaluating new characters, howling at particularly bad acting or dialogue, developing lame running gags about certain actors, criticising hair, costume and make-up decisions, deciding who should get together and who should break up, and predicting what would happen next. I once got a text message during a date which excitedly read, "I forgot to tell you, Kerry is Dylan's baby!"

So when Seb told me that his dad was directing a video clip for Ian 'Harold Bishop' Smith and needed extras, we were there.

After Paulina arrived an hour early to pick me up (thank you, daylight savings), we headed out for a coffee around the corner, and then onwards and upwards to the Darebin Performing Arts Centre. When we went in, we found ourselves surrounded by... many Christians. Maybe, in a nod to Harold's long association with the Salvos, they had recruited a church group to make up the bulk of the extras? Maybe the single would be a morally hard-core Christian rap song, in the vein of 'Baby's got Bible'!!! Except, it wasn't. We had just wandered in to some sort of post-church get-together. So we wandered out again and sat on the steps in the sun until Seb came over and pointed us to the door around the corner, where a hundred British backpackers were waiting impatiently for to be let near the man himself.

The actual filming, as anyone who has ever being involved with any sort of film production would know, was extremely boring. We sat around while a guy in a green shirt tried to keep us entertained with repeated references to his nipple and many rounds of "meet the staff". One of the staff turned out to be our lighting director friend Katie, who wasn't too impressed with being interrupted in the middle of what she was doing to wave to a theatre of mad keen soap fans.

Then! Go-go girls! Teenage go-go girls in microscopically short skirts, of course. We watched them finish their take, and then they were joined by Ian Smith in a black turtleneck, who put his arms around them in a grandfatherly way and cracked some mildly dirty jokes. The bald rugby-player type next to Paulina nearly started hyperventilating. It was surreal to watch the fans in their room lose their collective shit. Most of them had been trucked in from Neighbours tours and trivia nights, and Ian was quite gracious about the fact that he would probably be seeing half the audience at a pub tomorrow night.

Anyway, Paulina and I decided that if we were going to be there, we might as well make the most of it, and so we screeched and jumped around and pretended to sob when Ian came on stage and clutched each others arms. There were a few glittery signs going around for the 'audience', and we nicked one while people were being herded around and waved in above our heads madly. I mouthed "marry me Ian" at the camera. Paulina jumped up and down in the 'mosh pit' like a schoolgirl.

In between takes of the 'audience' going wild, there were shots of Ian dressed as four different women in the crowd, who the real Ian on stage would serenade. The go-go girls writhed around a spot where Ian's gigantic head would be superimposed. Then they disappeared and came back in Pulp Fiction wigs and show-girls feathers, and you could almost smell the collective pheremones rising from the lads behind us as they did some 'show-girl' dancing. We took great delight in impersonating the oaf on Paulina's right - oh yeah! Objectify those schoolgirls! Hey lay-deez, you're UNCOVERED MEAT!! And then we collapsed in a fit of giggles.

Eventually, though, the novelty wore off, and just as Paulina was getting a bit hungry and grumpy* and making motions to leave, Ian Smith came out in a final ludicrous sparkly Elton John number and thanked us all for coming. People wanting photos and autographs could line up to the right of stage. We headed off to the left and ducked over to say thanks and goodbye to Seb, who was standing with his dad, who was chatting to Ian. So we ended up having our photo taken anyway, and while I am NOT a photogenic person, I can honestly say that I looked better that Ian Smith in a teal sparkly jacket, a fright wig and a gold headband. So that, my friends, is truly something.

I'm not sure when 'I don't want to be a pop star too' is coming out, but keep an eye out. I'll be the one in the leopard print scarf whose face is contorted in spasms of delight, overacting my heart out, and putting it all into one last tacky Neighbours hurrah with my best friend.

*Paulina was being a bit short with her mother once, and her mum turned around to her and said, "Are you hungry Pusia? Because Polish people get cranky when they're hungry." And God bless her - it really is true.