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?
Friday, October 28, 2005
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.
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.
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.
Friday, October 07, 2005
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
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.
Monday, September 19, 2005
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.
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.
Monday, September 12, 2005
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
Friday, September 09, 2005
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.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
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.
Friday, August 26, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
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.
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.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
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.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
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.
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.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
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:
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.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
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.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
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.
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.
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