november 28

In the psychiatric ward of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital there is a raging black market in cigarettes- anorexics beg Horizons from schizophrenics and the recently psychotic try to defend their private stash of Winnie blues from bipolar entreaties. To get into the minimum security section of the unit it is necessary to pass through two locked doors though it would be easy enough to leave over the fence. The observation unit for acute cases (the acutely fragile, the acutely unheard) is better defended by a four- meter metal fence, and this is where the damaged and addicted souls of the inner west come to rest when it all gets to be too much. I haven't blogged for three weeks because I wasn't sure if it was legitimate to discuss the revelation that this exists just at the back of the university with a view of the oval where the college boys play football in their underpants. I mistrust the mixture of pity and prurience inspired by my visits and wonder if there's an element of voyeurism in them- I can't help being fascinated by the idea that these people are on a voyage which I can't even imagine, although I probably wouldn't want it to happen to me.

I found myself in Jorge's blog disguised as an extra in a Cairene telenovela and got a strange proprietorial feeling regarding ownership of my past and my character. I am half fascinated and half defensive by the vision of myself in a revolting polyester frock parading through the pages of somebody else's not very fictional fiction. On the other hand maybe the copyright period on that particular incarnation of mine has expired. I am about to become the de facto partner (with a possiblilty of marriage if six monthly performance targets are met) of a Polish prince and I have to say at this point in time that I can't believe my good luck. Long may the honeymoon last.

November 6

Today I am discovering that it's possible to commit a rape against yourself. I am sitting in the library writing a discourse analysis paper about a debate between Keating and Howard and I have forced myself to do it without my consent. At the end of this week I will go to counselling.

October 29

preliminary list of logistical issues associated with arrival of a prince-

1.birth control pills for princess
2.internet access for prince
3. quarantine for white horse?

October 11

October 11

This blog is rated MA for mature audiences. May contain sexual references and adult language.

I dreamt that I was in a gymnastics competition and at the very beginning a voice predicted from the loudspeaker that I would win the beam event, Kim (Brendan’s ex-girlfriend who runs the mad people’s program) would win the on bars and my friend Freyja would win another event. Freyja got onto the beam and did a beautiful dance in an eighties bodysuit and tights and I got stage fright and ran outside (the competition was being held in a bar)- I was hoping that by some miracle my performance would take place without my actual presence. At some point I realised that it wasn’t going to happen that way and went back in to face the music: I saw that all the judges were ten year-old girls with freckles and teeth slightly too big for their faces and felt comforted.

Then I was in the lane outside my house with a Newtown bouncer. So you know what this means I will have to explain that in Newtown, there is a Maori bouncer cartel and that outside most of the seedier bars there is a musclebound gatekeeper of Islander stock who makes sure that no juveniles, delinquents or people in thongs are allowed to spoil the tone of the place. I am in the lane with one of them and in starts to rain. I am wearing a red jacket and suddenly feel an unbearable romantic urge and start kissing him passionately. Cut to five minutes later- we are fucking in the alley outside my front door – he is holding me off the ground with his 100-plus kilograms of pure muscle and when the rain falls on his skin there is a slight hiss like water falling on a hotplate.

So it seems that I have graduated from my series of nocturnal erotic encounters with Ghassan (my Palestinian colleague) to something even less salubrious. Why I can’t have these adventures with my Prospective Spouse is another issue but I’m sure that I’ll end up in psychoanalysis one of these days and I will explore it further then.

I will end this post with the overseas news, since this year I have been abandoned by my two dearest friends. Cameron is in Oxford about to start his academic career and Marcelle in Panajachel in Guatemala living happily ever after with her little brown lover and running a bar. It has been flooding there after a hurricane and she sent a long group email about life in times of natural disaster- no electricity, bridges washed away, drownings and the difficulty of getting food and clean water. I imagine her walking into town through the mud (which now takes one hour because the bridges are gone) as on an SBS documentary about the misery of other less fortunate climes and feel how far away she is from me. When I allow myself to think about it I get a sensation of equal parts loss and envy, because she had passed some final frontier to belong completely to a place which I have never seen.

9 October

Rereading my statutory declaration about my relationship with Marcin, with the footers on every page swearing that this is the whole truth and nothing but and so on and so forth. In fact it’s anything but the truth, this earnest unequivocal chronology of coming and going and holidays in the snow. It has nothing to do with the development of a love which has been miraculous and ridiculous in equal measures from the very beginning, a tie constructed primarily out of absence and fantasy, brought into being by two stubborn animals with the aid of fertile imagination and a liking for impractical romance. I wonder how this longing will translate itself into appreciation of a presence? I’m suddenly glad to have time to think about it and to savour my solitude: I am about to change my life in a dramatic way and I hadn’t really considered that aspect of it until now. Being loved from a distance has been easier in many respects.

Not to mention the matter of farting. Yes, we have been together for almost two years and still neither of us performs this small act of intimacy in the presence of the other. Katherine and Tawfiq laugh at me (‘oh that’s right he’s had that operation hasn’t he? That one you had? so that you never fart again?’)
This is a requiem for the days of farting in my own bed, of pissing in a bucket when I don’t feel like making the long journey to the dunny, for nose picking and spinster meals straight from the can and for a thousand other joyous antisocial habits which will have to be terminated in the early phases of the new regime.

October 8

Suffering a lethal cocktail of excitement and terror at the prospect of Marcinski's arrival in Australia- I feel like I'm in a fairy tale. You can have the prince but you have to kill the dragon. Or a game show- you can have the Ferrari but you have to know who the Australian cricket captain was during the third last Ashes test and what a coprophage might have for dinner . Doubting Thomas has joined my mental menage- what if he isn't the prince? What if I'm not the princess? And how the fuck am I supposed to do anything productive in this state of terminal agitation?

Last night Liz and Christina came around and we had our fingernails buffed and made racist comments about Chinese people and compared fellating techniques (I'm the only one who swallows.) I am feeling sad in advance as my spinsterhood draws to a close , and slightly territorial when I imagine sharing my room with someone who won't fart in front of me and expects the same treatment in return. And now I am going home to drink tea and watch movies and probably have virtual sex with my Palestinian workmate who has been walking unclad through my dreams this week . Over and out.

October 6

I sent on chain mail containing a sickening prayer, sucked in by the promise of being granted a wish and the next day Marcin called Klaus Masannek and got an interview. What can I say? Vomitous New Age magic has its place.

Dreaming holocausts of various dimensions – in one dream I am at a funeral of an old boyfriend, a friend of my sister’s that I lived with when I was twenty two. At that time he was in the opening phases of an addiction to opiates of every possible configuration- heroin, melted down morphine tablets, a revolting concoction made of steeped poppy seeds which caused me to lie on the floor and vomit for several hours when I tried it. A patient, easygoing, precise man with jeweller’s hands that could find their way around an engine in the dead of night, sounding out its convolutions and its ailments without faltering. He had an old Peugeot that started with a crank, an overbearing mother and an attitude to sex that bordered on absolute indifference. Once I watched him inject himself and saw how his quiet hands were shaking so much with the urgency that he could hardly tighten the belt around his bicep- since then he’s fulfilled all his early potential and gone on to become a full-blown junkie, one of that caste of middle aged Australian men drifting in a limbo of substance abuse and emotional incapacitation.

In my dream it was his funeral but he was still alive. People kept arriving until there were hundreds of them and I was the only one crying. Eventually such a festive atmosphere had developed that his mother started selling tickets for $25 a head.

From there to Siberia, where I’m travelling with a strange man in the middle of winter. We argue and separate, and I find myself wandering in a nuclear waste dump- everything is grey, there is no sign of human life, and I am in a state of extreme panic feeling myself getting more and more radioactive by the minute.

September 30

30/9/2003

The Basement with Freyja, Zaf and their gap-toothed eco-terrorist friend for a jazz concert. When I was small I used to have a recurring delirious vision whenever I had a fever : a disembodied spoonful of medicine floating in front of me, the liquid in it shaking slightly as it hovered there. The first half of the performance was the musical equivalent of that vision – repetitive, quiet, disturbing, trembling on the edge of an event that never eventuated. In the second half, it did happen: a frenzy akin to a prolonged bout of teenage masturbation. The three men on stage, eyes closed, sweating and thumping and fingering with single-minded oblivion, and the audience dead silent, some watching but mostly with their eyes closed, each wrapped in their own private hypnosis. Impossible not to listen and impossible not to feel horribly isolated- this is Australia, inarticulate, passive, infinitely thirsty and utterly unproductive.

Last week my new housemate's father died suddenly and I found myself with the quandary of consolation, complicated by the fact that they hadn't had a good relationship at all. The DG stood back and pondered the syntax of difficult moments, the Novelist was overcome with empathetic sorrow, the Public Servant arranged the funeral. The Bag Lady thought that it would be a good chance to get rolling drunk.

On Sunday afternoon I rode over to Bronte to see Veronika and Evan after several hours of prolonged and highly effective procrastination. It was a golden sunny afternoon etc and in the alleyway just before Centennial park (One Way- Police Horses Excepted) I happened on box of clothing which a young eastern suburbs professional had discarded outside her house, some of it still with the tags on. I came to the conclusion that despite her best bulimic efforts my benefactor had been unable to fit into size small Supre pants and being unable to say no to such a gift I stuffed the lot into my panniers and pedalled away as fast as I could, thanking Baby Jesus for my summer wardrobe. What can I say? My total inability to resist this bounty made me realise that the middle class fantasy is as unattainable as ever - the DG, the Public Servant and the Novelist share lodgings with a bag lady who has a collection of used teabags and burnt matches and spends her nights amongst a hairy mountain of stray catflesh and her days drinking metho in the cemetery.

September 20

Last week I went with Christina to get a Brazilian wax in Dulwich Hill, emerging some hours later minus mustache, eyebrows and the rest. It's a measure of how intimate we have become in recent months that we could lie there with our respective pussies open to the four winds, having our bum crack waxed and gossiping about the pervert from the pool who has been wooing Christina from a Greek Club Med where he is holidaying with his wife. I started to think about writing a linguistics thesis on the discourse of Brazilian waxing from a functional grammar perspective but had to give up the fantasy at the point where I had to explain to Jim Martin what a Brazilian wax is.

Have decided that I hate the Palestinian I work with who endlessly approaches me from my blind side talking to me in Iraqi, Gulf and god knows what other sort of Arabic, which I never understand. After feeling inferior and stupid for several months I decided that one crucial component is missing in our communication- ie the will to comprehend and be comprehended- and that it doesn't mean that I'm retarded. A comfortable conclusion.

September 11

It has been snowing somewhere - there's a cold wind off the mountains and I am negotiating with my ageing liver which is making its distaste of my drinking habits known. At the same time I am girding my loins to begin the promised campaign of systematic harassment against Klaus. Yes, if you are a serious voyeur or a disaster- monger you have come to the wrong place - if you want real news let me direct you to New Orleans where cirrhosis and immigration ordeals have been rendered irrelevant by a grand Act of God. Thank you and goodnight

September 10

This week marked by a lucky escape from avian flu after sharing my lunch with the Chatswood pigeons and the onset of study panic at about 2 o clock this morning: to add to this I am complicating my life by making bizarre plans B-Z re: what to do if Marcinski doesn't have his visa by November. Caffeine is back on the cards as my one true and faithful love and I am sitting in the library palpitating and grinding my teeth while indulging megalomaniac fantasies sponsored by Campos, and last night I had a flood dream brought on by hurricane Katrina. Now away hame to drink beer and depilate for a garden party celebrating Nathans thirtieth birthday.

Last night I had racist dreams about my house being robbed by Aboriginal children from Redfern- funny isn't it how you never imagine a burglar from Mosman. I am having a midlife crisis and deciding that I don't want to work in an office but ride through the mountains of Central Asia instead: the middle class fantasy is crashing and burning and I'm not sure if it's spring restlessness or a real change of life. Just in case I mean it I am going into training for a high altitude cycling trip by swimming up and down the pool in Victoria Park a few times a day and eating my greens.

August 27

Back in the library transcribing away at thirty seconds of breathlessly boring 'intimate conversation' : I had always thought intimate conversation might be something that I'd like to hear but now I suspect that what I wanted was the selected highlights which probably crop up once every millennium. Perhaps I should watch television instead. Or is it television that has made me an event junkie? Last night I watched 'Spooks' and cried when the beautiful star of MI5 is sentenced to ten years jail for causing the death of an evil Turk (which by the way she did for the greater good of the human race, since she is not only beautiful and composed but also deeply compassionate). Luckily this is television and she doesn't have to serve ten years ( they swapped her for a smackie) but something even more heartrending occurs when the young black spy who has loved her since he first set eyes on her but can't have her because it's television and miscegenation is forbidden has to convince her to take her fake passport and leave for Chile. Actually that was probably the part where I cried.

A brief flash of excitement sometime last week when I realised that there were four comments on one of my posts. Here are the 'people' who love my work:

anonymous 1: Wedding Photographers UK
anonymous 2: Free software downloads site
anonymous 3: car loans related site
anonymous 4: cheap ceiling fan blog and website. ' I have a cheap ceiling fan website. It pretty much covers cheap ceiling fan related stuff.'

I'd just like to thank you all for your support: thank you and goodnight.

August 17

Marcin, forgetting his Slavic pragmatism and resorting to near metaphor (admittedly plagiarised) told me once that a translation is like a woman- either it's beautiful, or it's faithful. This week the news has been of terrorist suspects in dressing gowns peering through their night googels and fondling rocket lunchers by a mosque where the light minaret is zodiac and has ceramic. It reads like a cross between a transvestite shooting outing and a science fiction novel and I have decided that the translated lady of Appen Speech Technologies is neither beautiful nor faithful, but very funny.

As for Marcin I'm currently deeply charmed by him and feeling the sort of pathological tenderness usually reserved for babies and puppies. I am reading Women Hormones and the Menstrual Cycle surreptitiously on the train and hoping that it will provide me with an explanation for this unnatural affection. Or is it enough to say that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Trying to rent out Cameron's room which has been a bit of a fiasco. One man called on behalf of his Thai girlfriend and rejected the room out of hand when he found that it was a seven minute walk from the station. Another came round and ranted for an hour about his days at a Scottish hunting lodge owned by the Swedish Tetrapak millionaire. Most candidates turned up their noses at the dwarf dunny in the back yard but eventually we found one nice normal girl who appeared interested. We will see tomorrow when she has to put her money where her mouth is.

August 13

Cameron is moving out of the house this weekend and has spent the last few days immured in papers lamenting the fact that no matter how much he throws away, the amount of crap around him never reduces. He is trying to get rid of his porn collection so I inherited White Trash Whore 17- the next night he had a dream that he was killing mice by feeding them poisoned Tim Tams and then wrapping them in the pages of dirty magazines, then burying them in the compost where they were (in a shocking twist) discovered by his father.

Looking again for a housemate: hoping for a somebody with two X chromosomes, a functioning bank account and a brain. I feel annoyed about having to look again but as Marcinski says homies have to help themselves.

August 8

A weekend in Newcastle with Phoebe and her lover Bruce- walking on the dog beach, Bruce regaling us with tales of canine passion- labrador meets golden retriever, schnauser meets doberman, chihuahua meets rottweiler. The beach is long and terminates with a red outcrop of soft rock at one end and a cluster of smokestacks at the other: in the middle Bruce and Phoebe stopped and I kept walking until I had worked myself into a state of low grade ecstasy where every touch of my feet on the sand produced the female equivalent of an erection. Driving back Phoebe told us about her grandmother who had advised her from a young age to 'keep herself nice' ('I thought she meant I had to brush my hair'), but wondered frequently in her cups why young women were ever homeless when they could pull out the furry chequebook in exchange for a roof over their heads.

August 3

Lunch with Jack in a Chinatown food court which left me -as always- feeling disturbed. Why did I think that I wanted to have a relationship with such a joyless creature? I listed his flaws all the way back to the university: unhappiness, a complex about being persecuted because of his swarthiness and dress sense, unhappiness, unhappiness, unhappiness. Is it a flaw? Then I realised that the reason these meetings bother me is because I have abandoned him so completely and can't (or won't) feel anything for him at all, when once I would have sold my soul to be loved by him. I find it hard to meet his eyes and I know that it's because I'm scared that he wants something from me, that he will ask me for something I'm entirely unable and unwilling to give. Ah guilt. That's what it is.

Later: I have just been to a yoga class at the university- the teacher is named Erin and she has a cavity where other women have stomachs. Here I discovered the shocking truth that I like to chant ommmm. I also spoke to Klaus Masannek last night (with much trepidation) and was surprised to find him a) available (Marcin's theory being that he was skiing in Bavaria) and b) civil. I will have to find a new demon for my romantic and other kinds of trauma.

August 1

A weekend at Bronte possessed by the irascible and antisocial spirit of my father, walking and drinking tea and ignoring the world. I feel anxious and worried and plagued by hormonal doubts about my future, romantic and otherwise. Until Klaus Masannek resurfaces I'm living in limbo and I resent it. I have forgotten the colour of Marcinski's eyes and I'm ashamed but vindicated- it means we've been apart too long. He doesn't seem to mind as much as I do, being possessed of endless Slavic patience (and stubbornness), but I'm starting to seriously wonder if it can go on like this for much longer without falling apart.

Later and home from work- back on the Arabic project, though this time only half the conversation is represented so that the translation looks something like this:

condoms, singlets and underwear

sexy movies

no

blue

Abu Mohammad

two meters

green

bombs Kalashnikovs and RGB lunchers

They've given me a semi-real job and a chance to work on Arabic and learn something about the way a project is run and I feel slightly guilty: plenty of bilingual Arabs more competent than me are still labouring away in transcription hell. I feel -as so often- like an imposter which is one of my major causes for anxiety (the other being atrophy of my genitals after half a year of disuse). In fact everything is really OK - I am doing an interesting job, I have been encouraged to pursue something I love by someone I admire -Jim Martin told me that he hopes I become a linguist because I really do have more than what it takes-, I'm having a functional relationship, I have enough money that I don't have to think about it for the moment. The only thing is that I can't shake the idea that I should be pursuing animal happiness up a Himalaya instead of cultivating urban neurosis as I hunch over my computer hoping that nobody will find out I'm not really a grown up. Physical immobility doesn't suit me - ask my neglected reproductive organs.

July 27

There is an endless list of numbers which I need to run my life and operate as a human being. Bank account numbers, tax file number, phone numbers, passwords for logging in to my email, the Homeland magic card number for calling foreign parts, Centrelink customer service number, my student number, Marcin's case reference number for his visa, the code for opening my mobile, the code for opening the door at Appen (which, by the way, changes every five minutes). It's a kind of modern-day Kabbalah where numbers open the way and unveil the secrets of ordinary domestic existence - without them, it's impossible to survive a single day of life as we know it. A person can find out anything they want about you, rob you blind, wake you at three in the morning, read your personal correspondence, just by possessing the right combination of digits. It seems that words are superfluous so (for the moment at least) I will cease and desist.

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.

July 23

On Thursday morning I woke up at 5 am and started worrying. Here are some of the things I worried about, in order of appearance:
1. Marcin's visa. His case officer (henceforth referred to as Klaus- that really is his name) is AWOL and doesn't answer his emails or his phone calls. What if he is refused and I have to survive my state of suspended monogamy until the end of the year and then go to live in a country with 4 million Catholics and no vowels?
2.My future. Closely linked to point 1. Will I end up Warsaw housewife or a lifetime transcriber? Neither option looks appealing.
3. My tax return. Having not lodged one for the past 10 years I should probably start to consider the possibility of the ATO kneebreakers turning up unannounced on the doorstep. This led me into thinking about
4. the PAP smear police. I owe somebody $40 for the pleasure of having my vagina excavated which I have not gotten around to paying. See above re: visits from the kneebreakers.
5. When I went for a blood test in Jordan and they euphemistically declared me 'free of contagious and infectious diseases', did they definitely mean AIDS? because I have been watching Angels in America which reminds me that it's not a disease I would like to have.

These are only selected highlights and of course as any dedicated fretter knows the options are endless at that time of day and in that frame of mind. Things improved somewhat when I found out that there are jobs open for transcription supervisers and the office manager asked me to apply. At least I wouldn't have to listen to irate callers telling the robot what they think of it for 8 hours a day (and the irascibilty quotient has just gone up because now we're dealing with Americans.)

On Thursday night I went with Bob and Cameron and Liz to see Margaret Cho at the Enmore theatre. She made a lot of political satire and I realised how far out of it I am when it comes to current events. I have been steadfastly ignoring all media for so long now that even Pope jokes and reminders of the idiocy of George Bush have regained some of their novelty. I'm ashamed to say that I buy the newspaper so that I can play the word game with 9 letters in a box and read the book reviews and the House and Garden section (did I mention that I am nesting with a vengeance?) and then throw the rest away. The content bores me and the sensationalist language embarrasses me and that's my excuse if anyone is interested.

Back to school next week so there will be ample opportunities for diary updates as I hang around the library reading the desk graffitti and pining for my Prospective spouse. Stay tuned.

July 19

Back from QLD with carpet burn on my knees after 4 days as my beautiful tyrannical niece's horsy, and an existential dilemma is looming. Why I am selling my life for $17 an hour to optus and the CIA, in order to pay off the devil (thinly disguised as the Australian embassy in Berlin) who has no compunction about accepting my soul as payment for a migration visa for my Slavic lover? There must be other ways of making a living. Probably this crisis has been brought on by the fact that my beloved Arabic project is finished and I'm back in the outermost circles of transcriber hell where old ladies search in vain for their remote controls under the couch and the answering machine stubbornly refuses to comprehend the term 'adult movies' until the frustrated caller (who has probably had an erection pointed at an undisclosed target for the past week) finally shouts 'PORN! I MEAN PORN'. Which the innocent answering machine hears as poor. Which in the case of this caller is probably not that far off the mark.

The day is both extended and somehow redeemed by the long commute. In the train humanity is at its most naked- nobody is trying to impress anyone, here. There's no point. We pick our noses and stare out the window and push people out of our way like children on the school bus, and for those who care to look the world is wearing its heart on its dust jacket. A hairy youth in a beanie reading Twelve Steps to Successful Living, a fat middle-aged man engrossed in Memoirs of a Geisha, a mousy brown lady of indeterminate years perusing The Satanic Verses- their secret selves are on display. ( I am reading Balzac but I hide the cover in case anyone is attempting to leap to conclusions about me- as I do about them- based solely on my reading matter.)

In other news I am now the not- so- proud owner of a mobile phone, a castoff of my fathers which heralds my entry into the techno-age with a tinny rendition of the Mexican Hat Dance. I pretend I'm not interested in it's eruptions but I'm not fooling anybody as I slink off to the dunnies in my break to see if the vibration in my handbag was actually an abbreviated signal of love from eastern Europe. Now there's no way back.

July 2

Everything is functioning as it should except that there's no time for autobiographical updates- I have been working every day proofreading translations of interviews with Iraqis which is more nteresting than I would have imagined possible(everything that you get paid for must be obscenely boring, in my world- that's why they have to give you money to do it). For the moment everything is apposto- financially, romantically, professionally. Let's leave out sexually for the next couple of months, though at least I've stopped having mad extramarital fantasies.

That's all. This is for the record so that if and when my fortune fails I'll have a reminder that sooner or later it will be back.

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.

may 17

In Sydney it's raining and will not stop- I have the impression that the sickness of winter has begun and that this is a kind of celestial haemhorrage. I am suffering my first blogging dilemmas, first of all about the wisdom of doing it at all. Is it the literary equivalent of hanging your tits out in the jacuzzi (see Big Brother down under 2005)? On the ethical front, am I obliged to give aliases to the people that I know? Probably the wisest thing would have been to give myself an alias but since I have been keeping a diary for years hoping that somebody would do me a favour and read it and think what I wanted them to think about what I was thinking, I prefer to use my real name. Also because I'm tired of doing weekly google searches on myself and finding that in this incarnation I don't exist on the www- although I have a number of interesting alteregos including a country and western singer and a pro life anti-abortion pill activist.

may 17 5:30 pm

Back from a wasted trip to the north shore- it's been raining sporadically and unpredictably all afternoon and even sitting downstairs on the train, with a knee high view of the commuting hordes, it's still possible to identify the fashion victims by the sodden ugg boots that weigh down their feet like waterlogged rabbits. It's already dark and beginning to clear- the moon is out (half full) and about, multiplying itself in the puddles and it's hard to belive that days get shorter than this though I'm sure they would n ot agree in St. Petersburg.

So- where were we? Why did Edith leave Jorge? In my excavations I found this answer- she did not leave him. She left 'fusion and codependencia': she needed to live. About to step into the same tunnel from which they are just emerging, alone and shell shocked, I can't help wondering if it's bound to end like that. If, sooner or later, when you have shared the same air long enough, when you know the contours of what you will find when you stretch out your hand so well that it doesn't matter if it's there or not, does love stop augmenting you and start to diminish you instead? Will it happen one day, after 2 years, or 3, or 5, that I start to stay awake all night, gathering the leftovers of space and time that nobody wants in order to have something that belongs only to me? Will Marcinski and I revert to the irrational mathematics of embryos, where one and one still only make one?

In the interests of building an enduring love, I am colonising this small piece of cyberspace in advance, so that I always have a place of my own. I don't want the love nest and the lovely Polish face on my pillow to fill my horizons until one day I decide that it's obscuring my view, and I don't want to be driven mad by peace and comfort until even pain seems like an improvement, because at least it carries some intensity. If it ends let it be for a better reason, defeated by the pragmatics of language or money rather than by the perversions of human nature which always wants what it hasn't got.

may 16

I am inaugurating this in honour of my friend Jorge who has just been abandoned by the great love of his life and is blogging his broken heart out in a Parisian Mc Donalds, all unaware that there is a cyber pervert on the other side of the world who is scratching about on the surface of an unknown language trying to build an anatomy of pain and reading conjugal warnings in his every word. Because I am about to embark on my own personal attempt at marital bliss I'm taking them seriously. It's still strange to be writing a diary in a public place so that's all for today- I don't want to give away all my secrets at once (or actually other people's secrets since I obviously don't have a life if I have to spend my time deciphering maudlin Spanish posts in order to keep myself entertained.)