Change of address

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.