(Filthy) hippie holiday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...