July 25

The first day of the university term and the first day of my last term as an undergraduate-everybody smells fresh and looks enthusiastic, and there is a soft premonition of spring in the air. The last few days have been marked by minor technological triumphs: installing a printer and discovering how to burn CDs on my computer. Mobile phone in hand, I am proceeding apace into the 21st century.

I finished reading The Black Sheep, which dragged me in before I knew it with its good sons and bad, its peaks and troughs of fortune, its intrigues. All the favourite elements of the trash mags wrapped up and presented as literature which was good news as Appen seems to have cancelled its subscription to New Weekly and I am tired of rereading the Charles and Camilla Fairytale Wedding back issue.

On Saturday night there was a farewell barbecue at Liz's house: she got poisoned by the salad and went to bed, leaving me to be harangued on the combustion engine and architectural software by a chemistry student who insisted on telling me about his extremely boring life in minute detail. In fact it appeared to be quite similar to my extremely boring life but there was no opportunity to point out any of the miraculous parallels (poverty at the hands of Centrelink resulting in a diet of lentils and cabbage) because I wasn't allowed to open my mouth. His successor was a schoolteacher who had recovered from narcolepsy with the aid of Paolo Coelho, baby jesus and an Indian guru and now induces it in others instead. What is it about encounters with the majority of Australian males which leaves me feeling brutalised and unsatisfied? I think that it's a lack of reciprocal curiosity and a need to impress which is almost infantile at times, and usually has the opposite effect: the whole conversational transaction is draining and I can't imagine conducting any sort of friendship with these creatures.