June 23

There's a cold wind blowing right up my very short skirt which I put on this morning to celebrate my anticipated triumph over functional grammar- a horrible mistake, as whenI got to school my essay was semi lost and I had to retype two thirds of it before even embarking on a proof read. Hysterical reliance on technical support has been the order of the day- I'll have to thank them. Now I have one hour before I have to put it in the box and I'm too scared to look it over: instead I am dreaming of whisky and even contemplating a cigar.

June 22

Yesterday climbing until I could hardly walk- Nick regaled me with his tale of tragic love which quelled my fantasies about having my way with him in an instant, his resemblance to Dirty Rotten Jack being far too pronounced for my liking. Or maybe it was just the fact that he was hanging out the Access Denied sign (see? I can't just have a pure sex fantasy). I came home and fell immediately unconscious and dreamt about him: he had invented a very advanced kind of artificial intelligence which had an aesthetic sense. I said, they'll cut your head off for this, and he said (very proudly): No they won't. They'll hunt it. The computer (or whatever it was) liked the poetry of Basho and had built a fountain with some of his verses inscribed in the stones.

Then I dreamt I was a terrorist and two other women and I were going to burn down a dam. We spent a day dragging pieces of brushwood onto the dam wall while the dam guardians watched us from their sentry boxes behind barbed wire, doing nothing. It was incredibly high and I was scared of falling to the point of paralysis: below there was nothing but a vertiginous surge of jungle where we had to crawl about looking for wood. Afterwards I was euphoric at having survived my own terror, but as I was coming home a car pulled up beside me and a woman in a grey suit shot an arrow at me that administered me a shot of truth serum. They drove away and I crawled into somebody's garden (full of bright tulips)- determined that the woman in the car wouldn't have the benefit of my involuntary honesty, I went down some steps and knocked at the door and asked for sanctuary before blurting out the whole story.

This morning I had a message from Marcin who has provisionally booked a ticket for September 2. I felt instant relief and realised that when he has a visa and I know exactly when he's coming I will allow myself to feel something other than terror, doubt and indiscriminate lust for other men. I know that I'm luckier than I probably deserve and maybe that's why I can't allow myself to quite believe that everything will be alright. Hearing Nick's story (in which he exhibits deep interest and a desire to commit to a woman who has been demanding this for years, on the occasion of her meeting somebody else) I thought again about the pathological need to get what you can't have precisely because it's not available to you, and decided ( aided by a combination of will and logic) that what I have is indeed what I want, and will continue to be so for quite a while.

June 21

Yesterday I woke up feeling content (maybe even smug?) and counted my blessings as I lay in bed: three handbags, a Prospective Spouse, and a grammar paper that was proceeding as it should. It was a beautiful winter day and I went sleeveless to the university , where my sense of the bounty of the universe quickly evaporated in the face of the tortured generic structure of Amanda Vanstone's press release. By sunset baby Jesus had taken me well and truly off his Christmas card list and I had a disastrous cyber date with Marcinski, who first couldn't see me, then couldn't hear me, then had his utterances subjected to a half- minute delay. I aborted the mission out of sheer frustration and went home to watch murder shows until I was too scared to piss in case the homicidal dwarf had miraculously escaped the television and was lurking in the dunny.

I have successfully rationalised (but not exorcised) my eruptions of lust for Nick in a number of ways- here are some possible explanations which have occurred over the last few days:
1) 1 1/2 year itch. Have I ever had a relationship that lasted any longer than this? No. Why? Because after a year and a half I get bored and edgy and and start prowling restlessly in search of uncharted Y chromosomes.
2) Pre marital panic brought on by the thought that I may not have the chance to sex with anyone besides Marcinski
a) ever again
b) while I am still young and lovely
c) in the carpark of the climbing wall
3) ovulatory turmoil

If this story were made in Hollywood I could include the uncontrollable -meant- to- be option but as it actually revolves around a warehouse in St Peters I think it's safe enough to leave it out.

On Saturday I went to see a South African film with Liz at the State Theatre. It opened with a very long pan over barren country, accompanied by music that sounded like somebody sobbing and twanging on a fencing wire and it didn't get any more cheerful after that as the protagonists developed AIDS, were ostracised and eventually died. I ended up asking myself why the world(against all the evidence) seems so beautiful on film, and concluded that it has something to do with the intensity of focus, with the reduction of the whole chaotic mess to a distillation of light and colour of manageable proportions. There's something precise and lovely about it.

Then there's the thrill of the State Theatre itself :there's a perverse pleasure in finding yourself, when everybody's dead and the curtain comes down, in the dress circle under a monstrous chandelier with kitsch as far as they eye can see. I always forget how much fun it is.

June 17

Today coming home from Chatswood via Redfern station I had some thoughts about begging, an extension of a prolonged disagreement I had with Evan on Australia Day, where he argued the They Should Do Something For their Money side of the debate and I said, they already are. He said that he was quite happy to give money to Greenpeace/ Save the Children etcetc but refused (on principle)to give anything to people begging on the street: it's a strange sort of morality which says that it's moral to fund some monstrous bureaucracy where most of the money goes into the pay- packets of public servants, but you must never give a penny to anybody who stands in your line of vision with their (usually well pigmented) hand outstretched and says, help me. In my opinion, however, begging is a job, an honest transaction but a delicate one.There are rules: don't look into the eyes of the mendicant: don't give such a puny amount that they will be forced to shout your stinginess after you as you scuttle off: don't give an amount you can't afford to give again next time to the same person. I don't know what they are from the other side, but I suspect you are forbidden from forming a personal relationship even with regular benefactors. The model beggar is friendly but not over- familiar, diplomatic but not obsequious, respectable- looking but doesn't drive a BMW (even if they own one as some are said to do.) And there is my Manual of Begging and Non Tax- Deductible Donation.

Anyway then I remembered Louise at Grandma's funeral who- when she found out I was still a student at the ripe old age of 27- said, well, just make sure you make a contribution to society, not like your father. (To which I responded exactly as my father would have, with an icy smile and a tell- tale rictus about the jaw which belies the effort it takes not to literally bite off the head of whoever has offended you. ) And then I thought, why is it that it isn't a Contribution to be intelligent, compassionate, and thoughtful, and to exploit all the resources that the natural and intellectual worlds have to offer, but you are a model citizen if you sit in an office all day for 30 years and sell your life for $25 an hour to somebody who probably doesn't even know your name? Conclusion: it's a sick old world.

In other news, the DG is in sole possession of my grey matter at the moment so that even when I am having guilty sex dreams about Nick it is within a functional grammar framework. Don't ask me to explain this but it's definitely the case. As for the guilty sex dreams it's that time of the month when I am in thrall to my hormones and I hope it will pass. The best bromide is thinking: OK, we go to bed (and I won't say it hasn't occurred to me in glorious technicolour)- what then? Answer: holocaust. It doesn't turn down my libido but it will definitely stop me from acting on it.

June 13

First of all happy birthday to the queen if she happens to be reading my blog- I am now back from Melbourne spending this alleged holiday sitting in the library with the DG who has returned from the Bahamas refreshed and alert. The trip didn't improve my affairs as I had hoped- in fact now they are in a more advanced state of decomposition than ever. The fermenting sheets in the bucket in the laundry and the carpet of papers on the floor are still there and I have to force myself not to tell stories about how everything would be alright if only Marcinski wa s here. No wonder relationships fall apart with such monotonous regularity: the love object is supposed to play the roles of maid, personal assistant and gigolo as well as fairy godmother and purveyor of happiness.

About the wedding: the bride wore near- white, and the assembled guests drank themselves into a champagne stupour as expected. A religious service which only made me cringe once, when the priest said "I acknowledge you, Matt and Renee, to be in a really good place right now." Or actually twice, because he said it again. Kylie Daley was there, and Vassi, who turns out to be gay which is not appreciated by her mad Greek family. Imagine having to 'confess' to a consensual love as if you had been selling smack to schoolchildren or putting your hand down their nappies.

Saying goodbye to Marcelle which was heartbreaking- I don't know when we'll see each other again and I felt worse than I did last time I separated from marcin. She's off to Guatemala on a one way ticket and I feel like an abandoned wife. Or actually probably worse than that because the abandoned wife has a sauve qui peut attitude that holds real misery at bay for a while.

june 9

I have made a conscious decision to suspend my disbelief in the possiblity of a real and enduring romance: it's hard to decide whether constant doubt or complacency is more boring but I have decided to give complacency its turn. At least it's a change.

Bleeding like a dying pig and feeling an accompanying disgust with myself as the producer of all this indulgent autobiography. Time to hunt down Umberto.

June 7

Marcin went to Lucynka's birthday party on the weekend and gave me the following definition of the Polish middle class, based on first hand anthropological research: they have fast cars, designer babies, and they drink wine not spirits. Feeling out of place, he found the other solitary hooligan and proceeded to get obscenely drunk on vodka. I wonder middle class middle aged complacency is what lies in wait for us all, a four wheel drive on the north shore, tea parties on the terrace. Its completely incompatible with the way I think about myself and i torture myself imagining that in 10 years I will have become fat and mumsy, running around to collect the children from tap dance lessons and bullying them into trying out for shampoo commercials while shouting about their giftedness from the rooftops.

Being examined on the rise (and ultimate demise) of Mussolini: all that sticks in mind is that (after all that) he was eventually shot in 1945 and his body hung up on display in an esso service station in the middle of Rome. This is as it should be, since the only reason people are really interested in history is because they (we ) are bloodthirsty perverts who want tales of death and strangeness and are willing to trawl the archives of the past indefinitely in order to get it. No really serious historian minds negotiating referendums, pacts, elections, the writing of constitutions and the coronations of kings, as long as they are rewardedby the discovery of one good concentration camp or a little known horse-fucking Roman despot. Ohhh-rereading this, I don't like my chances of attaining middle class normality, now or ever.

June 7

Well the Dysfunctional Grammarian has run off to the Bahamas with the Novelist, leaving the Public Servant ( i have decided that this sounds better than Bureaucrat) to keep the home fires burning and daily colonise another small piece of my soul. Under her influence (the PS) I am acquiring a dirty nocturnal look about the eyes and chronic narcolepsy as a response to the heating in the office, my breasts are swelling up painfully in protest at the caffeinated, immobile life she leads and I seem to be growing a beard as well. I feel as if I have been transplanted into some sunless alternative reality populated by grey phantoms in suits and headsets which emit moronic voices all day long (how do I get onto the internet? they ask, how do I make an overseas phone call?) Maybe this is the lake of fire, and reports of its interest level have been greatly exaggerated.

I haven't had time to discuss the main event of last week which was the exit stage left of the Hawking Goth, round about Tuesday. He owed us a certain amount of rent: we repossessed his D V D player and other electronics as surety, he called the police, who came to negotiate a truce. Which consisted of telling us to give back his things- yes officer, we said, and did. Trying hard to convince myself that money is no issue and that if somebody had told me that for $ 100 I could have him out of my life I would probably have paid ( Marcin said, I would have killed him for $50 and it would have been cheaper) but I have to admit that I still wake sometimes in the early hours in a bitter rage that despite zoloft consumption and dyslexia (emosion) he knew better than we did how to fight on the street.On the other hand, I inherited his bed, which turns out -after an exorcism- to be far superior to mine.

june 4

1596 words and it's time for a blog break before lunch. As always I feel a mild attack of stage fright at the sight of a blank blog- box on the screen and the need to please my audience of millions (or anyway of one- hi Liz). Today the day is devoted to Anna Wierzbicka who is advising me (indirectly) of important Polish cultural values which might help my marital life- so far I have discovered that sincerity is prized, that a mobile face is an asset, that the use of diminutives (koteczku, sloneczku, and others which constitute more or less my entire Polish lexicon) reflects a the Polish emphasis on showing affection, tenderness, etc. Maybe this is my own form of psychosis- looking through 35 years worth of linguistic publications searching for personal messages which will tell me how to import an eastern European Prospective Spouse and live happily ever after.

Later:

It's now almost 5 pm and I am returning home triumphant with 2000 words of reasonably well constructed earnest and opinionated rubbish in my little bag. I think that I deserve a beer.

june 2

I had expected the highlands to be full of pallid, unassertive ghosts, retired churchgoing phantoms slithering amongst the yellow grass and dirty sheep without enough energy to undertake a good haunting. Instead my grandmother (converted by Billy Graham in 1959 a and more than capable of raising her posthumous voice one last time ) spoke from beyond the grave to perform her final missionary act, and warn us that those who had not accepted baby Jesus as their saviour would burn forever in a lake of fire. Her chosen mouthpiece for this sermon was the Pastor Shayne Hanes-inarticulate, self righteous, and without an ounce of poetry in his smug middle-aged bones. Inventer of deathbed repentance and alienator of heathens, the hero of the Picton Bible CHurch and its congregation of pensioners whose deaths he appropriates on behalf of father son and holy ghost. I will consult Umberto Eco and diagnose him for certain as either an idiot or a moron- watch this space.

Otherwise an opportunity for a family reunion with cousins first second and third- Kay (last seen as a young bride in white) is now a pushy middle aged mother, and the rest have shrunken or sprouted hairs in strange places or submitted- in general- to the unmistakeable mutations of age. Lyn, who I remember as a 14 year old in shorts with a hairstyle that situates her beyond doubt in the mid eighties, has gotten old even more quickly than the rest with the assistance of an abusive husband (thankfully departed) and a lifelong Holiday habit. Richard is a lonely old man, retired to his father's old house on the opal fields of Grawin and longing for some human contact to keep him tied to earth. On the way home I woke out of drooling uninhibited sleep to see my face in the obscurity of the train window looking creased and weary. In a couple of years I will be thirty and there's no more unavoidable reminder of the passing of time that a family event where nobody recognises you because the last time they saw you you were jy\ust learning to walk.

may 30

Grandma's funeral is today: I am dreading it. I dread Joe's brutality and I feel guilty that I didn't go and see her. This is the way I used to feel when we turned up at the Sunday school picnic when we hadn't been to Sunday school for the whole year, and I never wanted to go because I didn't think we had earned the right to stuff ourselves with jelly beans and pin the tail on the donkey. I don't want to be the sort of person who can always be counted on to appear for an Occasion, but doesn't want to perform any of the small acts of affection and attention that constitute real caring. It's the kind of behaviour I expect from men and Americans- the grand gesture at the expense of genuine effort.

To change the subject, on Saturday Daniel had a housewarming party in his new penthouse in the city, with all the frotting and leering and casual betrayal that you find at any drunken gathering but with a veneer of sophistication because conducted in high heels on the 25th floor. I'm ashamed to say I got earnest and was punished the next day by a blinding hangover which manifested as a combination of headache, nausea and general self loathing . And now off to the funeral.

may 28

Today is Joe's birthday, which he is probably spending with his own dying mother in her final rest stop in Picton. She won't know who he is, and if she does is incapable of saying so since she has recently had another stroke and can't even swallow. The four of them have decided to stop feeding her by force, but still it can take a long time to starve to death and in the meantime he is camped out in the southern highlands remembering- too late - mother's gifts of Ravel and Omar Khayyam, long interred beneath mother's curses of god and self-righteousness. As for us, it doesn't mean very much and I'm ashamed and somehow resentful of him for pushing us away from both him and her so that we don't know what to do except make flippant comments. We are as straitened by callousness as we would have been by grief, only instead of beating our breasts we mock because that's the only thing we can do without feeling like hypocrites. I'm horrified by the realisation that we've all colluded in a process of emotional cauterisation in order to please father: he has bestowed on us an immunity he really wanted for himself, and now we can't help him. Talking about it makes me uncomfortable so I am going to stop.

Having spent the better part of the last month inside staring at a computer screen, I had the revelation yesterday that it's no way to live, and I'm longing as I haven't for months to be off on my bike, smelling the road kill and eating the amoeba(s?ae?) of a foreign land. Currently sitting in the library trying to get a start on my grammar assignment, a text comparison of a prevaricating press release from Amanda Vanstones office and a slap on the wrist from Human Rights Watch officially condemning the detention of children- both involve manipulations of language that make my brain boil and I'm inclined to go home and vacuum the floor and think about it another time.

may 27

Aska in my dreams again, where she makes a periodic appearance- it's worth pointing out that she's always a benign presence (adjudicating crocodile races, talking to her friends on the phone) and that when there's an Other Woman, it's never her. This time I am staying in her house, which looks like a hotel and has at least 4 spare rooms. I am asleep in a huge bed and she comes and goes, wearing a blonde wig and purple blusher, wearing high heels and a suit. She is looking for a job and she tells me that she would like to work at Buckingham Palace because that way you get to know a lot of soldiers. We discuss the trials of job hunting, and how hard it is to go to an interview when you've forgotten what job it' s for. I peer into another room and see Monika sleeping there, a dark -haired hump. After a while Marcin comes. He has a fat friend with him who is carrying a magnesium bag, which is grey and plump just like his stomach and emits chalky puffs as he walks. Marcin gets into bed with me- he has no shirt and the entire surface of his back lies aganst my chest so close that it would be hard to slide a blade between us. I put my hands on his shoulders and feel ecstatic.

Then I am in Cambodia, in a barren, dusty no man's land. I am caught in coils of barbed wire and can't get free. Next to me is the entangled corpse of a woman who has obviously met the same fate. A man comes and cuts me down and carts me off to god knows where- I kill him with a knife, put on his clothes, and I am free. I feel strangely at home considering that I am blond, enormous and don't speak a word of the language. This is followed by another dream of capture , with a group of others. We are being carried off somewhere to be shot. I am in a state of suspended animation, thinking nothing much beyond a hope for intervention, which soon arrives in the form of an ageing white gunman with a face like a skull who appears from a swamp and guns down every one of our captors methodically and precisely but with a sorrowful look in his eyes. I can't help wondering (grateful though I am) if the intervention is any more morally laudable than the crime it prevented.

As winter tightens its grip it's getting harder to get out of bed: I ignore the alarm and burrow under the blankets, and find it necessary to decide what I'm going to wear before I move in order to prevent frozen vacillation in front of the cupboard. The dawn coffee ritual now takes place at Campos, which has an underwater feel and an Italian movie soundtrack- the only people around early on a weekday morning are the business crowd. Women in spike heels wade through ankle deep sunlight with their sombre escorts, trailing a cloud of perfume. Everybody is clean and beautiful and nobody is happy.
Now I'm off to show Jim Martin my complexes. To be continued.

may 26

Last night I went for a drink which turned into about 10 with Liz at the Sandringham, where we were accosted by two kiwis who work degging siwage detches at the earport (we hive a high security pass and iverytheng): mocking their accents was fun for about 5 minutes and then they became tiresome. I am busy developing a theory re: men in bars, which expresses the mathematical certainty that the less interesting they are, and the less you want to talk to them, the smaller the probability that they will ever go away. I want it to be simple and elegant but at the same time to account for fluctuating factors such as blood alcohol level, IQ and whether or not there is a state of origin match on television. Unfortunately it can't be expected to predict the likelihood of vomiting out the window later in the evening which is what Liz did when we got home.

I met Veronika and her son yesterday (I asked, what will you be wearing? and she said, a baby) and we went to eat cake in a cafe in Haymarket- relieved to find that she hasn't turned into Boring New Mother version 105, though we were distracted by his need to eat every ten minutes. Then I had coffee with Sally who started to tell me about the messages she receives from god and I spent the rest of the afternoon pondering why I don't consider her to be mentally ill and diagnosing Baby Jesus and Mohammad with schizophrenia.

Having a new cycle of marital doubts, this time brought on by an attempt to tell Marcinski a knock knock joke- culture and distance conspired against us and in the end I had to explain to him what a knock knock joke was and why this one was especially funny. It goes like this:
a: knock knock
b:who's there?
a: the interrupting cow
b: the interr-
a: MOOOOOOO
Unfortunately there wasa delay on messenger and the interrupting cow didn't actually interrupt, and anyway they don't have knock knock jokes in Poland. I decided not to divorce on thesde grounds after I tried it on two of my cultural contemporaries and got the following responses:
1
a;knock knock
b: who's there?
a: the interrupting cow
b: hahaha that's really funny

2
a: knock knock
b: who's there?
a: the interrupting cow
b: I don't get it.

may 25

Yesterday off to the linguistics factory on the north shore, to listen to kiwis talking to automated answering services, and try to unravel their accents. ictiviting pen code, for example. After fifteen attempts I finally figured it out and had to restrain myself from dancing around the room- the same feeling I get from working out the nine letter word from the grid when reading the weekend paper. So as you can see it's not totally devoid of job satisfaction.

Jack is pursuing me but I (bitter irony of life) am immune. Yes, I'm lonely and sexually frustrated, but he's the absolute last person who's going to profit from it. Instead I feel irritated and somehow sullied by his attentions, and slightly embarrassed, the way you do when somebody repeats a joke too often. I wonder if this is how he felt when I was pursuing him? horrid thought.

Still pawing through Jorge's blog with a mixture of pity, voyeurism and love of foreign literature. I spoke with Franki on the weekend and finally got a slightly more elaborated version of why she left Tony- his lack of interest in her internal life. Wait: I'm paraphrasing again. What she actually said was, I wanted him to ask me all sorts of questions that he never asked. So I'm compiling a log of unsatisfactory situations and behaviours-
fusion, codependencia, asking the wrong questions or just not asking. She gave me all the encouragement that a bitter cynic is likely to give and i ended up feeling that I had been patronised and my domestic fantasy dragged out of its dark cupboard and ridiculed in the market square.

may 22 pm

I was stopped in the middle of my torrent of words by the announcement of the library closing, and the flood of pasty students emerging from dark rooms, from behind bookshelves and computers, to stream through the doors like the rats after the Pied Piper, united in their rodent recognition of his musical talent. I wonder what he was playing. If i was a rat of Hamelin, the only thing that could make me follow irresistibly would be bad 80s disco music.

I gave a lesson to Lily today which consisted of reading book reviews from the paper- my Dysfunctional Grammarian, under the influence of caffeine, blue skies and an impending full moon accompanied me home in a daze usually only experienced in the early stages of a love affair consisting of equal parts bewilderment and adoration. Once arrived, however, he had to fight it out with the Bureaucrat and the Novelist, both demanding their 5 minutes of fame on my internal stage. (I don't know why but I know that the DG is a man) . If I were to try and predict the final outcome of this battle I would have to say that the Bureaucrat will probably win and that the DG will die of confusion and the Novelist of self consciousness. Here is \Marcin we are going to chat

may 22

Last night a dinner in honour of Liz's 21 st bit\rthday against the iconic backdrop of harbour bridge and opera house (so much Sydney that I didn't really believe I was here at all,) which left me bankrupt and with a great sympathy for the travails of transvestites who stand determinedly upright in fashionable bars in their killer heels as a matte r of routine, and not once every 21 years as I do. Unlike my tranny counterparts I didn't last the night and found myself mincing through the park with great relief on my way to my flannelette sheets at about 2 am- we had been to the Sly Fox karaoke the night before (Liz, Jack and I) for old times sake and I was labouring under a persistent seediness for most of the night. Jack by the way is mad as a meat axe and now that i have a Prospective Spouse has decided that he wants to have my babies-I'm not playing.

Thinking about my own 21st birthday, in the restaurant in Jerusalem. My co-slaves gave nme a lurid clock which I accepted with a performance that indicated I would be justified in pursuing a diplomatic career- I think that I worked a 13 hour day, coming home through the meat market around midnight and seeing a cat dragging a stolen liver stealthily into the shadows of the holy sepulchre. As always when I try to feel my younger self I have the sensation of running my hands through mist: and this is what it means to get older, a gain in density, a sense of solidification, the acquisition of accessories and habits that hold you closer to earth. At 21 I was unimpeded.

Now I'm not and this is the time for nostalgia- the summer is dying in a procession of sharp gold days so beautiful that I feel all the pain and loveliness of the world lying up against the frontier of my skin. Stranmge to remember that on the other side of the planet time is opening up and I am getting a vicarious whiff of spring down the wires from Warsaw where the sun is out and the vulgar European trees are putting on their party frocks. At this end, invece, I am retreating into fiction and flannie sheets and waiting for an unimaginable future to resolve itself on the horizon.

A sleepless night for the sake of functional grammar- sometimes I think it's lovely and elegant and explains the world and sometimes (now )I think that it's an instrument of torture invented by a cruel uncaring deity. Off to my death.

may 19

Last night I dreamt that I found a treasure cave at the top of a snow-bound mountain in India- it was full of beautiful (or maybe not, says my conscious aesthetic sense, since they resembled nothing more than Christmas baubles) pendants and earrings carved meticulously from greenish stone. And for the first time in a long time I dreamed a smell, the odor of these treasures: a calciferous smell like limestone, part metal, part salt.

On the pragmatic front, nobody is offering me either money or a job, which doesn't bother me unduly as I have no free time either to work or to spend. Thinking about the future, I have the sensation of conducting an exploration in reverse, standing on the frontiers of the known world (the 9 to five domesticated lands of strangeness) and feeling like Columbus about to fall off the edge of the planet.

Last night I watched Closer with Liz and felt my marital warning bells going off in all directions-four unlikeable characters (2 American, 2 British, if it matters) with too much time and not enough imagination, torturing each other for entertainment and only capable of loving what they don't have. I went straight home and called Marcinski- I wanted to ask, will we live happily ever after? but instead I just said goodnight and went to bed.

may 18

Yesterday I saw Dirty Rotten Jack who is back from tormenting his family in Lebanon- we went for a drink and I found that he doesn't register any more on my love radar. I have sprung back from the impression he made on me with the resilience of rising dough -into which, to extend the parallel, he stuck his finger without much interest or intention, just to see what would happen. There is sexual tension but it isn't mine - I had a minor (and not particularly welcome) revelation that despite the great intellectual advantages that a union with me could provide, he has only ever been interested in my body.

I have just been sitting for an hour listening to an aging man in a pink shirt lecture his beard on the greater transitivity of kicking dogs as opposed to drinking beer, and a further hour in front of the computer writing about politeness, a subject which interests me less and less as time goes by. Every day I have to fight my way through a crudescence of paper from which I am trying to extract something concise and elegant - if I had the energy I would make some gross generalisation about the waste generated by the creation of the most unimportant product, but I won't. Home instead to my spinster's larder with its tin of bean and bag of green sprouting potatoes- thank you and goodnight.