come with us now on a journey through time and space

Yesterday I smelled like a Bounty. Today I smell like bacon. I’m like a walking version of This Is Why You’re Fat.

I handed in assignment number two of the 10,000 word behemoth today. It is in fact due tomorrow, so I can’t help but feel a little smug with myself, although the truth of the matter is I probably require more than the seven days left to do the 3500/30-minute presentation that has me finished on the 12th. I’ve decided to make the most of my resources here at the NAA and have laid hands on a bunch of posters of the Faces of Australia Wall that we have here. (This is not the first time I’ve drawn inspiration from that wall. It was the inspiration for the PhotoWall part of my I Grew Up in the 90s proposal.) The plan is to pick out about a dozen of the photographs from the wall and then talk about how they fit into the collection and their relevance as images advertising Australia. Which may or may not involve some lifting of the knowledge I’ve gained from working with the Education tours here.

The countdown is on: in six days and 23 hours, I’m finished with this hellish semester.

I’ve been helping G move over the last couple of days – she is moving to the corner of the two streets that I’ve lived on in Ainslie with a pair of willowy blonde girls whom all the boys have decided must be lesbians. As it turns out, the two of them have been living in the same house for five years, and before that were in boarding school together in Sydney. Which of course, does not say lesbians, but does say very tight clique-y pair that might be difficult to get in with. Not to mention that there are post-it notes plastered around the house that remind the reader that they are safe, and it is safe to be them.

Not that I’ve judged them at all yet.

I’d like to draw all of your attention to a new link on my blogroll, Things Bogans Like. Written in the style of Stuff White People Like, it is in fact an indictment of all things that bogans enjoy, including but not limited to Ed Hardy, misspelled names, and Boost Juice.

In other news, I’m broke and Centrelink is fucking with me. Just for something different. I got an email from them the other day, asking me to call them in order to verify my employment details. I had a moment of terror, thinking they were probably auditing me and it was unlikely to end well. Then I remembered that last time that they audited me, they sent an email specifically telling me that they were doing so, and this email wasn’t nearly so explicit in what it needed from me. All I was asked to do was to make a phone call. It was like a guerilla tactic, because when I spoke to the lady over the phone, I was told that they were auditing me and just wanted to let me know that they were contacting my employer to verify my pay details. Also, that when they find that I’ve been overpaid, they’ll be in touch to let me know how to pay it back. (That’s what was scary – she didn’t infer IF she found I was overpaid, she pretty much said WHEN we find you’ve been overpaid.)

So, even though I’ve done my all to do the right thing with Centrelink, they’re still threatening to demand money back from me. Of course, there is every chance that they will find my pay situation too confusing to decide whether or not I’ve reported correctly, as I get paid two weeks back from when I actually work, and then I report on alternating weeks from pay and it’s all too confusing for me to even work out whether I’ve been reporting correctly. Fun times. Fun times had by all.

The kicker is that I’m pretty sure I won’t even be eligible for Centrelink in four weeks time. I’m being audited with less than 28 days until I’m due to finish reporting.

 

answers wrap this all down my friend

I just had a moment where I was convinced that the washing machine was going to charge through the back door and eat me alive. Turns out that the lid had just fallen off. Fortunately, there is a new washing machine on the way (by new I mean second-hand, of course. New washing machines are expensive. I am poor.)

I’ve set up a new study area, for the new assignment. This time I’m camped out on the kitchen table, which is a whole new place for distraction and procrastination. Nearly all forms of procrastination had been exhausted in my room, plus having my wall planner staring me in the face, counting off the days never pans out well. Rather than spurring me on to finish, it just introduces new and exciting forms of panic.

I did finally complete the manga project I was doing, with a whole hour and a half to spare. My lecturer emailed me telling me that she was really looking forward to reading it, which made me feel nauseous more than anything else. Not that I don’t enjoy letting down ANU staff by handing in sub-par work. It’s become something of a tradition, and this course really called for it. As does this one that I am currently writing the last two pieces of assessment for. Oh, holy Christ, this is a scary one. Scary partly for the fact that there has been no feedback as the two major assignments are due within six days of each other, and as a result I am writing them with only six days to dedicate to each.

But the point is: in 12 days, I am free. Free to hitchhike. Free to paint my car. Free to paint a cupcake. Free to spend 48 hours in bed with entire seasons of my favourite television shows. Free to mow the lawn. Free to write the airport novel in me. Free to bake. Free to spend all afternoon and evening on the balcony. Free to dress up in ridiculous costumes for themed dinners. Free to beat you in Articulate. At least until summer school starts in January.

Oh, God, I can’t wait. However, the prospect of all these wonderful things seems not to hurry me along in completing aforementioned assignments.

I was just written a haiku, by the poet-in-disguise, Pez. This in return for an ode I just wrote for him.

new blonde spring roll queen
she makes them most excellent
except too much tofu

I deem this to be wonderful.

Yesterday was Stonefest. It kind of sneaked up on me (as most things do when you don’t pay enough attention to what’s going on around you) and really, I didn’t have time to go, but oh well. I’d paid for the tickets in a time when I was in complete denial about how much work would be required in the last two weeks of assessment. So G and I went along… (speaking of G, she has just shown up in my driveway with a car leaking coolant. She’s having a shit couple of weeks.) It was the first time I’d been to a festival and not been drunk or otherwise affected. I drove because although I could kind of barely afford to take a day off for the festival itself, I couldn’t really afford a day in recovery. I soon discovered that two beers are not enough to help you deal with the kind of dickheads you generally encounter. Children Collide’s set was the worst of it, which sucked majorly because they played an awesome set and I really like them. You know who was unexpectedly awesome, though? Birds of Tokyo. I know some of their stuff, and don’t mind it, but would probably never buy their album. However, their set was AMAZING.

Today I enjoyed a little self-esteem-destruction in the form of shopping for a sports bra. I hadn’t realised how depressing it would be… it topped jeans shopping for depressiveness. I’ve been told I was a little optimistic in hoping for a sports bra that didn’t have the twin effects of Madonna style and duct-tape style. Despite this, it doesn’t quite reach the depressing heights of the swimmers shopping, which is going to have to take place fairly soon, as a whole bunch of us are going to the coast in November. I haven’t bought swimmers in over two years. I don’t look forward to it.

I am pleased to report that the hockey-effect has worn off somewhat… after the first match Thursday before last, where I could barely get out of bed, and was hobbling around at work, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to take to the field again this Thursday night. Fortunately, this Thursday’s effort was not nearly as bad for the day after, and I also manage to keep ball on stick around 90% of the time. It was a pretty massive improvement on the week before. I’m playing again tonight, which may not be the best idea, as it’s going to be 5.15 and I suspect there may be more than a little heatstroke involved. I hope the thunderstorms come in early.

Another awesome thing

My favourite feel-good blog, 1000 Awesome Things, has recently posted this lovely ‘Awesome Thing.’

#651 When the phone rings and it’s someone you were just thinking about.

I always find the way that the ‘awesome thing’ in question is eloquently and appropriately described by the folk at this decidedly lovely blog, and it almost never fails to make me feel wonderful about all the awesome things that I am lucky enough to have.

these words get overused

Here’s what I sound a little bit like right now:

“Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow beeeeeeep.”

That would  be the sound of me attempting to either climb in or out of my car and invariably hitting the horn at some point during the epic struggle. I imagine this is the struggle one goes through when heavily pregnant. But I don’t have the excuse of carrying around a small child 24/7 – instead I played my first match of hockey in three years on Thursday night, and my recovery is rather slow and fairly vociferous.

If there is one good thing to be taken from this, at least the horrifically bad mood I was in at the start of the week has dissipated. I apologise to all and any of you who I offended or snapped at – generally I was generous with the warnings, but still, I’m sorry. There are a couple of people I acted inappropriately towards whom I still owe apologies to. It was strange, it was one of those moods where I was convinced that everything was SO URGENT THAT NOTHING COULD WAIT A SECOND LONGER and I was very unreasonable to anyone who tried to tell me otherwise. I also felt like punching passersby. But the moment has passed and I am operating like a normal person again. I almost feel as though there is a chance that I might get the epic amounts of study done.

Today at the Lyneham Primary School Fun Fair, I bought a book about English. It’s no longer enough to correct your grammar and scowl at your poor grasp of the concept of the apostrophe. I look forward to taking it to a whole new level of anal retentiveness about your grammar.

Today has been warm enough for some of my posters to fall off the wall. How exciting! Summer really is finally coming.

The exciting news of the week is that Herbert, one of my new hermit crabs, has recently moved house. When I bought him, he came in a fetching shiny turquoise shell. He has since moved into a black emo shell, and is now in a shell the same size as Rodney, the American-football-clad crab. Herbert has also proven himself a bit of a climber -  as I type he is teetering on the top mast of the shipwreck, just kinda checking out what’s going on below. All of them are quite keen on climbing the shipwreck, but the rest of them are not so talented with staying on. Every now and then, while I’m ’studying’ or at night, I hear a “thwump” sort of noise as one of them climbs to the top, loses their hold, and falls off. Because they are a little bit special.

This week has been stupidly busy and stressful, which is probably something that contributed to my little flip-out on Tuesday. (I suppose it’s a coincidence that it was the 20th, but it was playing on my mind, and probably did contribute a little bit as well.) I did ten school groups this week (to put that in perspective, gallery hosts would not normally have more than three a week… and I had ten.) and I am now sick of the sight of children. I could also probably recite the dictation test off the top of my head, and spout out scary amounts of details about the Constitution. Uni has also been a little bit scary, and the 12th approaches rapidly.

I am feeling a million times better about all of that since hockey on Thursday night. Even though I’m still very very sore from the match, and it was exhausting, it still felt brilliant to be out on the field again. I played very badly – it was probably pretty obvious that it had been a long time since I’d had ball on stick. I managed to fluke a goal, however… but mostly through luck, rather than skill. It was clear that everyone but me had played a winter season, and were still capable of reliably trapping a ball. Which made it worse when I wasn’t. Oh, well. I can angle for a ‘most improved’ maybe, when some semblance of skill returns?

Have an amazing Saturday. Go on, really. Have one.

a quick foray into my 15-year-old psyche

I had thought that I might post a very old entry on here – one of the ones from the written journal I kept from the ages of 16 – 20. Having gone through them, I’ve realised that there is no way that I could post them. Despite some of them being seven years old, they are still excruciatingly personal, and in some cases kind of scary to read. I wish that my online diaries of the same era hadn’t been lost the big Diary-X crash of 2006 – like this blog, they were the public entries, but they were probably much more candid than my recent ones. Back then, most things were so emotionally turgid that I didn’t really care if I put anyone offside. I have been trying and trying to get into my WAY old school online diary at diaryland.com, but I cannot for the life of me remember the password for my account, and the diary itself requires my login in order to be reactivated. I had the password sent to my email address of the time – but do you think for the life of me I can remember the password for that email address? Of course not. It’s all a bit cyclical with my old email addresses - password resets only get sent to a different address that I can’t remember the password to. It’s devastating, as I know I wrote a LOT back then, and I would love to be able to get access to the entries – if only to compare to the way that I write now. (And to spend a couple of hours reliving my existential teenage angst. For some reason it really bothers me to think that all of that writing might be lost forever. I know that sounds stupid, but I really do like to keep everything I write.

Unfortunately, the written ones make up all the writing I did about love, heartbreak, and depression. And although they don’t hurt so much for me to read them, they are still a little too alarming for a public forum. I’ll reconsider it again in another six years.

Oh here we go… just as I’ve written that, I’ve managed to log in! Hell, yes! Existential teenage angst, here we come!

March 5th, 2001

why?

Greetings, from not so warm or sunny Korumburra!! Actually, it’s not too bad right now. Sunny, kinda warm, just not terribly pleasant from my view. It’s strange, two days before my fifteenth birthday, and I am hating Korumburra and my life. Not hating exactly, just not enjoying it. Feeling trapped in an endless routine of school, work, parents, work. I don’t like it.

When I said to Ryan last night, that I feel trapped, he tells me “try to break free”. Break free of what? I’m not sure exactly what is making me feel like a caged bird, so how am I supposed to break out of it? Actually, I kind of do…it’s sort of like the commitment, and the idea that that I HAVE to do some things. I know, there are going to be deadlines and things all through life, but I always wonder WHY exactly I have to do things. Why do I have to go to school? To learn things. Why do I have to learn things? So you can get a respectable job, and getting married, and be socially acceptable. Why do I have to have a respectable job, get married and be socially acceptable? Because that’s the way it is. Why is that the way it is? Why can I just live how I want to live? Why can’t I just keep on walking past the school, because I don’t feel like school today. Why do I have to be somewhere I don’t want to be? Why do I have to do work I don’t want to do? Why do I have to be surrounded by people I don’t like, don’t want anything to do with? Why am I being restrained? Why does life have to be so complicated and confusing and hard? Why why why why why WHY WHY? 

Eh…well, that’s just what I think.

 Bye, Mr. Web Diary.

Um… wow. For those out of the loop, Ryan was my first boyfriend, whom I met in NZ. (We’ll be giving up the nicknames for the moment, I guess.)  What surprises me more than anything I have to say about him is my overuse of internetspeak, my hyperbolic writing, and my obsession with ICQ and MSN. I used to live a whole other life through MSN and ICQ, with the friends I had made in NZ. I think everyone goes through that “I must be connected to MSN 24-7 in order to chat to people I will see at school for seven hours a day anyway” around about the age of 15. No doubt in seven or eight years I’ll look back at my writings now and be horrified by my reliance on facebook and twitter.

To be honest, the 2001 diary doesn’t make for all that interesting reading. It appears everything interesting that happened in my teenage years happened from 2002 onwards.

 

i could be standing on the shadow of your ghost

Ohhhhhhh my GOD, I feel like my brain has exploded.

As I have just explained to a couple of people, I am struggling in a big way with this term. Last term was ridiculous, and I was so burned out by the end of it. After ten weeks, I had reached saturation point for all things museums, galleries, anthropology, photography, and how any of these have anything to do with anything else in the universe. I didn’t do anything at all with my brain over the two weeks break – even if I opened my reading brick, I couldn’t focus long enough to get through a paragraph. I thought it might improve when I got back to Canberra, but it really hasn’t. The simple thought of doing any uni work makes me feel like physically ill. Which is a bad way to be when there are 10,000 words between me and November 12… 10,000 words that I’m not sure my worn out and overtired brain is going to be able to churn out. There is nothing logical about this term system, ANU. If anything, you’ve ruined my semester, you stupid school.

On a slightly brighter university related note, this week I’m doing a study on porn and how it is used in Australia. Yep, porn. The readings for the week are full of old school French pornography. So I suppose I can’t complain too much about some of the things that I have to do for uni. (I have yet to work out how I can do my major photographic study on porn, however. It’s the only thing that has been mildly interesting in my anthropology seminar series, but I don’t know what I can do with it. I need to analyse a series of photographs, does anyone know a series of pornographic photographs I can analyse?) 

In unrelated news… I have crabs! No, okay, not the kind you’re probably thinking of. I have hermit crabs. I bought four of them this morning! The floozy bequeathed me an aquarium, I gravelled it up and made it a haven for my four, glorious, hilarious little crabs. There is a big one, with a rugby ball painted on its shell called Rodney, a medium sized one in a shiny green shell called Herbert (G named that one), one little one in a natural shell called Ernest, and a tiny little one in a bright purple shell called Sparkle Princess Unicorn. When G and I went to the pet store to pick some out, there were about ten in a crabquarium about half the size of mine, so I thought I should get a few more to help fill up mine. (I had initially thought I would buy only two, but considering the size of the crabs compared to the size of the tank, it made sense to have some more.) A couple of the huge ones were kind of scary – the girl working in the shop picked up this one in a yellow smiley shell, and the enormous crab inside it was like “Rrraaaaaggwr!” (Okay, no, they don’t make any noise, but he came out all pincers and legs, and we all kind of went “Aaah!” and decided that he was not the crab for me.) But I am very happy with the four that I have, and I just wish I was at home watching them crawl around the tank rather than hanging out at work listening to Aunty Jack footage.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the way that manga affects how non-Japanese societies view Japanese art and culture?

No… me neither.

There is something that I love about my new haircolour that I didn’t experience last time I was this blonde. Last time it was quite gradual, so there wasn’t really the amount of double-taking that I’ve experienced this time. One of my Masters supervisors didn’t recognise me, neither did the cleaner at work. With most people, they sort of look at me once, and then a second later recognise me. It’s hilarious, and obviously it won’t happen once my friends get used to it, but it’s been cool while it’s lasted.

Andrew Stockdale shits me. A whole week of listening to his stupid intros? Uncool. Speaking of other uncool things – what’s with this constant reminding on Triple J of the new Twilight film? They have been playing a new Death Cab For Cutie track which is on the soundtrack – I swear every time the song is introduced, the announcer mentions that it’s for the new Twilight film. Why, why, why?! Why must Death Cab for Cutie – whom I will admit fall squarely into emo, and I make no apologies for that – lower themselves to Twilight level? I mean, there is a respectable amount of emo, and then, several floors down, there is Twilight. Have any of you read them? I read the first one, so at least I’d know what I was moaning about, and god I found it awful. Never mind the whole Mormon propaganda thing, nor the fact that the vampires freaking SPARKLE, the writing itself is offensively bad. She is like a year eight girl writing fanfiction. I could forgive all the other sins (the fact that her heroine is so whimperingly pathetic that she relies on Edward for absolutely everything, the enormous plot holes, the shamefully ridiculous action scenes, the essentially two-d characters) if only she was able to write well.

Seriously, in an entertainment environment where True Blood also exists, how can you possibly even vaguely consider Twilight to be worth your time or effort? (I mean, True Blood is awesome. And hot.)

after all of this is gone, who would you rather be?

There is a church sign on the road between my folks’ house and most other things in Melbourne, that reads “Anger is only one letter away from danger.” It infuriates me every time I read it. (How dangerous.) Yes, it is correct that anger is only one letter away from danger in a literal sense. Can’t fault that. What drives me nuts is the implication that just because the word one for emotion is only one letter different from another word, there must be some causal link. It’s like saying that because the word heater is only one letter different from the word header, there is a causal link between the column heater on the floor and the small bar on a Word document that tells you page numbers. Oh, well, sorry, of COURSE there is! There’s only one letter different, after all!

I was told recently that I should watch Glee. I’m really sorry to anyone who does enjoy Glee… but I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I have little doubt there are lots of wonderful things about it… in fact I’m inclined to agree with you about most of them. I have always enjoyed the prospect of bursting into song at appropriate moments of my life. (Appropriate moments include: spontaneous realisation of undying love, moments of large but not entirely unexpected disappointment, and of course, that moment where you realise you’re all in this together.) Those things don’t bother me about Glee. It’s mostly the fact that it thinks it’s so different from everything else on television when it’s really not. You know, a comedy with bite, about the underdog, and all of that. The thing is, at it’s heart, it’s predictable and saccharine. This was probably best illustrated for me last week, when I nearly made it through a whole episode, thinking that I could probably learn to enjoy it – and it was ruined in the end. The episode wasn’t particularly original – it was one that was very much like the whole plot of Bring It On – but the worst bit was at the end when the cheerleader told her coach, “Thanks for teaching me a lesson about something something something something.”

Okay, so I can’t even remember the whole line. That’s how disinterested I actually am in Glee. The point is that it was a thoughtful line that neatly summed up everything that had gone on in the hour preceding said line. And it was the stuff of diabetic comas.

In other news, today I bought all that is required for hermit crabs. Indeed, later this week, I will be the proud owner of a pair of hermit crabs. From SPACE. Well, okay, the hermit crabs aren’t from space, as far as I know. But today the floozy and I went hermit crab supply shopping and I bought a background for their hand-me-down tank, and it’s of space. For my space crabs. I’m rather excited. There were mixed reactions from my housemates… (for whom I still need nicknames. They both have names that begin with A. Thus making initials more difficult. I suppose for now they will be AS and AK. Something better will come along, no doubt.) AS seemed similarly excited by the prospect of hermit crabs, and wanted to put them out in the living room. AK was less than impressed and demanded that they remain in my room. She seemed convinced that they might bite. I doubt they will, unless AK plans to spend a lot of time in my room with her fingers in the tank.

Melbourne was good, for anyone who has asked. Very quiet, really, but that’s okay. I had a mountain of school work to do that I didn’t even really look at. There were far more important things to worry about… like America’s Next Top Model, and three whole hours of Animation Domination. I caught up with M&N one night, although they weren’t expecting me. I had called N while G and I were in the city on Saturday, and we had made plans for the Wednesday night. I got there on Wednesday night, and N was kind of confused as to why I was there… as it turns out that both she and M were riotously drunk when we made the plans. Saw S, as well, which was delightful, as the two of us exchanged farcical lovelife stories over wine and olives.

And now, back in Canberra. Yeah. Oh, well, I was looking forward to coming back, wasn’t I?

Si’l vous plait ma cherie allez tombez la chemise

Again, I write from the floor. Again, I write in front of Ally McBeal reruns.

Holidays are wonderful.

I also haven’t been smacked in the face with any sporting implements yet, either.

G and I drove down to Melbourne on Friday, and I am well and truly in a spectacularly chilled out holiday mode. Which may not be so great, considering I still do have a lot of work to be doing, but I’m in no way ready to do any of it. The drive down was fun – we turned it into a proper roadtrip, complete with stops at all the major tourist attractions that the Hume Highway has to offer. It was possibly the longest drive from Canberra to Melbourne ever made (excluding my six hour stop in Holbrook when Harriet broke down in 07), especially since I got a little lost with the new roadworks from the Hume into the city. I missed a city turn off that I wasn’t expecting, and we ended up on the road out to Geelong before I turned around and somehow found myself crossing the West Gate Bridge from the other side of the city. The whole thing was a bit of a mess, but in the end I didn’t have to cross four lanes of traffic like I would have had to in the past.

G and I went into the city on Saturday, ostensibly to see Dali, although we didn’t actually get to see it. Having spent large amounts of money in several vintage stores we eventually wandered down to the NGV to discover it was going to be a three hour wait to get into the exhibition. It was the final weekend of the exhibition, so naturally everyone in Melbourne had decided they would go that afternoon. We were both kind of wrecked by this stage, and decided we would go and look at the permanent collection and then come back after dinner to see what the line was like. (I heard the following day on the news that at four o’clock in the morning, the line was from the NGV all the way back to Flinders St station.)

We discovered an awesome installation upstairs in the contemporary gallery – a ladder, made from led lights, from the floor to the ceiling. At the top and at the bottom, there was a mirror, so that when you looked up it was like the ladder went up forever, and when you looked down it was like it disappeared into a bottomless hole. It was really awesome, and just a little bit scary.

After the permanent collection closed, we went for some (very questionable) bowling at Crown. Actually, that’s not fair, G was quite good at bowling. I was extraordinarily bad. After a few beers and some very bad pool, we decided to go and put a couple of dollars into the pokies. We got lucky again, and this time won $80 after putting in six. Not a bad record for the entire two times I have played the pokies in my life – $50, and then $80. Of course, I could never play the pokies without G, as I would probably never win again. She kind of understands how the things work. I just enjoy the flashing buttons and putting in the dollar one at a time.

By the time we got back to the NGV, the line was around to the edge of the building (yeah, not as bad as it got), and we were wrecked, so we just grabbed our bags and went home. It was a real shame we didn’t get to see Dali, but it was a fun day in the city nonetheless. If I lived in Melbourne, I wouldn’t have left it to the last weekend of the exhibition… and seeing as I live in Canberra I blame ANU’s stupid term system for the reason that I could only get there on the final weekend of the show, rather than three weeks ago.

I should go, my car is at the mechanics and requires picking up.

alas i cannot swim

I just nearly spilled inky blue water all over the carpet. Fortunately, disaster was averted. It’s kind of nice to be able to leave cups of paint-stained water around the room knowing that the cat won’t jump up and knock them over – it’s only my own clumsiness that I have to look out for.

I feel strange today. It was a strange day. I helped out with the first Waterhouse workshop at work… many small children. Many small children with scissors, glue, and fluffy things. To be honest, it was a lot of fun. And I got the messiest whilst setting up, rather than when any children were in the room. I still have PVA glue in my hair. I’m also covered in blue and white paint, but that’s from this afternoon, not the workshop.

I still feel strange. I was quite frustrated last night and took it out on a canvas… it’s actually a really terrible picture, but I feel an odd sort of attachment to it. Not at all like anything else I’ve been painting lately. The reason I’m covered in blue and white is also a strange sort of picture.

Video clips ruin songs for me. Does anyone else have this? I used to sometimes feel a video clip could make a song, but now I only ever feel that they ruin them. Perfectly lovely songs are destroyed by less than awesome clips – the clip for Lisa Mitchell’s Coin Laundry is one of them. I think that song is adorable. But the clip, where she’s wandering around with her eyes half closed, really cheapens everything that I think is endearing about the track.

I feel a lack of inspiration. I need to go home for a bit, I am going a little bit insane. Don’t get me wrong, life is chipper at the moment. I finally unpacked all of my stuff and found the floor in some kind of permanent fashion. Work is brilliant, I love my job. I’m finally on uni holidays. But everything feels a little disjointed, and I am tired. I realised just before that it’s been nearly six months since I was last home, which is quite possibly the longest I’ve ever spent in Canberra without a trip back to Melbourne.

I went to hang out at the gallery on Sunday afternoon, which brought a level of comfort. Changeover is happening, though, and my favourite Magritte painting has been taken down, replaced by a Sidney Nolan. In fact, it’s a Sidney Nolan that is delightfully reminiscent of one ‘Big Giant Head,’ Dij’s year nine masterpiece, equalled only by ‘Painted Rocks On Board.’ Dij didn’t seem to know it at the time, but she would have fit remarkably well into abstract expressionism, by way of ‘Painted Rocks’, or perhaps fauvism with ‘Big Giant Head.’ Really they were works that displayed an unusual level of understanding about the political atmosphere of post-war Europe and it’s relationship with the art world for a Year 9 student.

I can’t stand Dizzee Rascal. He’s the feature album this week. Recently, the Bloody Beetroots were, as well. Both make me want to stab things.

I always go a bit strange when left home without housemates for days at a time. It’s also so cold. Very cold.

weep little lion man, you’re not as brave as you were at the start

Sorry to sound like a loser but… where the hell did September go? How is it already September 25? Pez was saying last week about October always disappears for him and he has suspicions that it’s not in fact a real month, but I’m feeling a little that way about September. I always had a soft spot for Septembers in the past, but this one seems to have disappeared with little to no evidence of ever having occurred.

I have a new one for you  – Lovely Listings. I post this with Emily the Strange in mind, and her fascination with looking inside other people’s homes. My favourite is the spaceship. Or perhaps the creepy Egyptian themed one.

I finished my last assignments for the term on Thursday. Woot! Three weeks of no uni… kinda. More accurately, there are three major assignments due in six weeks time, so it’s not really three weeks of no uni. At least there are no two hour periods of dry mumbling from a David Attenborough doppelganger about punctums, studiums, and colonial ethnography. I celebrated end of term a little earlier by going out and having an evening of wine, ear-drum destroying, and questionable logic. After I handed in the two big assignments last week, it was only two class summary presentations for the final week of term, so I went and wrote myself off unexpectedly. Started at Kremlin, where I met up with a uni friend, and then we wandered around Civic until eventually settling on Tongue and Groove, where David Bowie came on to the screen and… well, David Bowie came on. That’s really all there is, isn’t it?

It was an evening where one moment you look at the clock and it’s nine thirty, you’re on beer no 2 and it’s all cruisy. Then suddenly it’s four thirty in the morning and you’re barefoot halfway between town and your house without the most certain of ideas as to how you got there – though certain it involved at least three pieces of pizza. It was definitely like that. I got to see the sun from O’Connor Ridge, all though I never really intended on that…I kinda just wanted to go home and possibly make a toastie and then sleep for the next eighteen hours.

The weekend was a strange and glorious one. Saturday, one housemate and I were both hungover, so we decided to vaguely tackle Mario Kart 64. What began as a half-hearted attempted to not feel so hungover ended as a screamingly determined effort to beat the final track. In the end we didn’t quite make it that day – it took Sunday for us to finally get there, but it was glorious when we did. 

It has sparked something of a N64 revival in the house, and I spent this morning tackling Super Mario 64, a game that I have never quite been able to get into. I always kind of fell apart at the Cool, Cool Mountain, after the slippery slide. That’s a 3 star kind of thing, and this morning alone I have managed to find 12 stars! I’ll be honest, I’ve had some help in the form of a Russian Coach Father and StrategyWiki, and I’m not ashamed of that.

Sunday resulted in the spectacular gnomes of which there are facebook photographs. The floozy and I climbed Parliament House again, this time to paint Floriade gnomes. You’re supposed to buy these gnomes to paint them and take them into Floriade for their gnome-painting competition, the theme of which is this year ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ (I think). We decided to shirk this, and took our gnomes for painting on Parliament House, with our own themes. Which turned out to be David Bowie and B-grade superheroes. I’ll post some gnome pictures soon – since the initial painting our gnome collection has grown to four – Ziggy Star-Gnome, Mr Incredi-Gnome, Captain Gnome-Beard, and Gnomey Smurf. It’s not far to go to have a gnome army… the idea is that we will spray them with fixative and then position them around my backyard in a decidedly creepy fashion.

I got sunburned on Parliament House. It’s now rather itchy.

The summaries that I had to do this week went spectacularly badly, especially the Anth one. Since I spent the weekend drunk, hungover, gnome-painting or in front of Mario Kart, I’d done next to nothing on the Anth one, and ended up writing most of it in an hour and a half between work and uni. Needless to say, it went badly, which much ad-libbing, but I got there in the end. The Art in the Asia-Pacific went much better, probably not least because the article made sense. The celebration for the end of my term was in fact more gnome painting: in my opinion a fitting way to end any term.

The NAA had an opening last night that I had to work at… The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize exhibition has just opened, so I got to do fun things like cloaking and handing out slushy cocktails. Not bad for four hours of overtime pay.

Feel I should perhaps comment on the dust storms…but really what is there to say apart from the fact that my formerly silver car was turned brown? And it was slightly eerie. The storms were cooler – we had a lot of mega lightning and thunder over our place on Tuesday and Wednesday night. Windows shaking and all that kind of stuff.

I love that Mumford and Sons track. Little Lion Man. Also very fond of the new British India track, Vanilla. I can’t wait to see them at Trackside. They were a lot of fun when I saw them in London, despite their crazy groupies. Hoping those groupies stayed in London.