March 24

Daylight saving has been extended in order to accomodate the Commonwealth Games so I now wake up in the dark to head off to my daily rounds of the mad people, where I am developing my feminist principles and my concept of social justice and trying not to purse my lips too much at frequent infringements of same. I am seeing the dark underbelly of Australian society which nice middle class girls like me don't usually infiltrate: the inside of psychiatric wards, the Housing Commission dumps with squatters living on the balcony, the supermarkets on pension day. I still have the energy to cope with this and to believe that things can be changed albeit in a random and very incremental way, but I can imagine that this optimism wouldn't last long if I had to live in the circumstances that a lot of the clients live in. ('Patient' is out, as a designation. 'Consumer' and 'client' are the tags of the day. ) . At the moment, despite being chronically underpaid, I am getting an education I wouldn't be without and regretting the loss of my student life less as time passes. And now off to a picnic in the rain with Julie.

March 14

Vision of the day : a roomful of schizophrenics and other damaged souls shaking maracas and singing 'Volare oh oh oh oh' at the top of their lungs in top-volume tuneless karaoke style. As we howled away like we were testifyin' to the good lord I felt my cynicism about these sorts of activities take a mortal blow : it really seems to work, and to give people an unselfconscious pleasure that they might not get in any other way. It almost created enough warm fuzziness to dispel lingering remnants of Wolf Creek which are lurking at the dark edge of my psyche. On the Gladesville bridge this morning on my way to work I theorised that inability to watch sadistic psychopaths taunting their victims on screen is actually an indication of a highly developed empathetic faculty but on the other hand maybe I'm just a sissy.

March 13

On one of my rare forays into the alcoholic land these days I ran into Marcelle and Brendan's friend Damien and his girlfriend in the Town Hall. Damien is fresh back from Guatemala and south America, with a moustache to prove it, and I stayed until two in the morning trying to inhale some odor of foreign parts. Unfortunately I drank so much and was so consumed by misery and regret the following day that all that remains is a vague impression of the physical similarity of Damien and Anna, who exhibit the same uncanny convergence of behaviour and features as the bandy-legged man who walks his bulldog in Camperdown Park.

In other news I've completed my first full week of work in about five years and although it's engaging I'm suffering from the constriction of social life that inevitably follows. I feel as though I have no time. I leave home just after sunrise and come home late in the afternoon : the year is growing old, the light is shrinking and fading, and I'm feeling coming-of-age pangs. I've got a live-in lover, a full-time job, and the tendency to feel a periodic stab of loss when I think of my spinster student life.

March 6

A weekend of staring into space and gossiping with Katherine- the Prospective Divorcee, the still-unemployed Pole and the try-hard social worker bonding in the bush. I got drunk for the first time in three months and started ranting about my father, but otherwise the expedition was a great success. Today the try-hard social worker started work, an exhausting day which began with an idealistic edge and is ending in a dream of the dole queue- do I really want to work? Have I made the right choice re: Appen? I have made a decision to leave Marcin to his own devices and to consciously attempt not to worry about his fagging and financial state, but it's useless. I am going to watch Capote thank you and goodnight.