My office on campus is next to the ladies. It's a curious toilet, more a halogen-lit vestibule with a toilet behind an elaborate, heavy door suspended from a complicated-looking hinge bolted into the ceiling. It's quite nice, actually. The toilet-using ladies of my floor have come to an unspoken agreement that if you go into that toilet and find the door shut and locked, you leave and go elsewhere. It's jarring to run into someone else there, and when you do there's a lot of startled apologising and shuffling for space.

It makes sense, really. In your standard public toilet, with its rows of cubicles and wash basins, there's an anonymity in the crowd. You can go about the evacuation of bladder and bowels secure in the knowledge that there won't be someone waiting outside, or if there is there'll be enough space for you to pretend as though they aren't there. With this toilet there's no buffer zone, no bathroom cordon sanitaire. If you don't leave the vestibule as soon as you see that the toilet is occupied you'll be forced to come face to face with the previous occupant, and it's uncomfortable.

So today I was surprised to find someone did exactly that. I was there, enjoying my private time, when I heard the door to the vestibule swing open and close. I waited to hear it open again and heard nothing. I heard a handbag snap open and snap close. I heard an impatient sigh. I waited for her to leave, counting down from ten, but still she stayed.

When I summoned the courage to leave my fortress of solitude the woman stared at me blankly, an expression my girl's school-school damaged brain parsed as 'bitchface.' She had one of those Chloe padlock bags in the crook of her arm, the other hand on her hip. As she went into the toilet she checked me, ever so slightly, into the counter with her shoulder. And I stood there for a moment, flushed with rage. Then I washed my hands and used the drier just long enough to make her feel slightly uncomfortable and left, letting the door slam behind me.

Calm, in control, and quit

'You don't need cigarettes.'

'I like cigarettes.'

'Well, you shouldn't.'

'...'

'I didn't want to tell you this, but cigarettes have been talking behind your back.'

'I don't believe you.'

'Yeah, they have. The other day I was out and I heard those skinny white bitches talking about you. They were all like, "that foreign man is so annoying. He, like, just talks and talks and talks, and I'm all like shut up, nobody cares."'

'Who were they talking with?'

'Pot. And then pot was all, like, "yeah, and foreign man has totally put on weight."'

'Pot would never say anything like that!'

'That bitch did.'

'I don't believe you. I'ma go have a cigarette. You're a stinking liar.'

Anyone remember the group food blog I started called 'Thus Bakes Zarathustra'? Well, I took that name to be my very own and started a second food/research blog at the beginning of the year, that's about, well, food and the things I read about in the name of my PhuD. It is called Thus Bakes Zarathustra also, and even though the 'about' blurb at the bottom if still full of faux latin nonsense there's lots of content up, so you should go visit. And comment. It's lonely over there.

I am a fair skinned blonde, and at the best of times this makes me a bit twitchy about the sun. But it's so hard to avoid the searing kiss of the radioactive sky ball, and there are so many parts of the body which are easily overlooked. For me, it's my head. I first realised I had a problem with head-burn when I went away to the coast with the foreign man earlier this year. After a walk on the beach he told me my scalp was sunburnt. 'Like, blood red,' he added. 'It's really gross.' Since then I've noticed the skin along the part is consistently a lurid pink, and I fear a dirty great melanoma is soon to emerge. Short of plastering sunscreen onto my scalp, I really must wear a hat.

The problem is hats make you look stupid and, to avoid a truly vicious scalp cancer, I'd have to find a hat I can wear everyday without wanting to kill myself. It's a rare person who can nonchalantly wear a hat and not look like, to use primary school vernacular, a try hard. Furthermore, it's a really rare woman who can pull off a hat. I mean, there are plenty of great male hat wearing role models, such as:

But hat wearing women? Not so much.

And then there are hats that are simply too awesome for me to handle.

So I'm at a loss. I don't want to come down with cancer of the head, but hats leave me cold. Anyone have any hat suggestions?

By a serendipitous turn of events I found myself with a free ticket to the BDO on Monday, which made my little heart so very, very glad as all I've wanted since I was 14 was to see Bjork play.* However, that also meant that I would have to actually, y'know, go to the BDO, which I didn't want to do for the following reasons:







I do not like festivals. In fact, it would be fair to say I hate festivals. Hot sun makes me actively, whiningly miserable, I have few practical outdoors clothes, I resent port-a-loos, dislike warm, flat beer in plastic cups, and a music festival really is the worst place to actually watch music. The crowds are restless and chatty and the sound is not so good. But the worst thing about music festivals is they contain the kind of people who actually like music festivals, which is to say the kind of people who like getting drunk and sunburnt before 5pm and ruining everyone else's attempt to actually watch the fucking bands.

So I waited until an hour or so before Bjork's set before venturing out to Flemington. I dressed neatly, wore sensible shoes and held my bag high and tight across my body. When I got there it looked like a kind of refugee camp for escapees from Corey Delaney Worthington's last party. Fortunately, I ran into a friend of similar height and attitude, and we resolved to go straight to Bjork's stage and stay there until she came on, then leave quickly after. It took a lot of shuffling around to find the right spot, but when we did we were determined to stay.

Bjork came on with her Bjorkestra, and I went weak at the knees. When she spoke thousands doubled over, as though punched in the gut by the charisma radiating from the tiny woman. It wasn't the best of circumstances, but she was everything I'd imagined and more. I was so entranced that I didn't realise Will Anderson and (apparently) the members of Tripod were standing right next to me until the end of 'Earth Intruders,' when Will Anderson said, loudly, 'Bjork sure is weird, hey?'

And it continued. Will Anderson and Tripod kept making comments about Bjork being 'weird.' They made fun of her dancing. They made unfunny jokes about the ReactTable, saying it was Bjork's radar or something, which doesn't even make sense. I kept shooting pissy looks over my shoulder, but I reckon Mr Anderson just thought I was a bit star struck.

No. No, I wasn't. I wasn't going to let you ruin Bjork for me, Mr Anderson, but I was very, very close to peevishly asking you and your middle aged crew to use your inside voices. Honestly, you call yourself a comedian and you didn't even notice that the organ player looked like Melbourne gangland killer Carl Williams. You are not funny, and it was not appreciated.

Douche.


* The person who gave me said free ticket pointed out I mustn't be much of a fan if I hadn't bought tickets to either the BDO or the Sydney Festival side show. There's some truth in that, but also I am always, always very slow on the uptake when it comes to music.

I'm in my office with my feet on the desk, again, laboriously filing the contents my Readin' Folder while listening to Toto's 'Africa' because it has been in my head for days and days and must be liberated. The Readin' Folder is the lynchpin in my unnecessarily complex reading management system. The Readin' Folder contains current articles and chapters I must read and understand and comment on. They are catalogued in the world's worst Excel spreadsheet and EndNote, possibly a bad idea as I use EndNote the way your quietly senile 80 year old aunt would, entering everything in by hand. After the readings are read they are transferred into a filing cabinet and more details are inexpertly plugged in to EndNote and Excel. It is unwieldy and cumbersome, and I need to do something about my haphazard keywords, but it has come in handy in the past. I submitted an article earlier today and hope to have a draft of something done tonight.

So far, 2008 and I are getting along just fine.

2007 was a hot mess of the year, hard, crazy, but necessary. Highlights include one panic attack so intense it saw me sheepish and covered in ECG leads in the emergency room, a necessary but demoralising break up, multiple crises about whether it was the right thing to jump straight in to a PhD, three trips to Ikea, many life-sustaining dinners at the houses of my dearest friends, and a puppy.

I feel better about 2008. In the last week of December I packed up my things from my grimy sharehouse and, with a foreign man, moved them to a poky, endearing house not too far away. We are well suited. He likes to shout obvious things at people from a moving car, such as 'you're running!' or 'you're wearing a hat!' He once answered the door with a cotton bud dangling from his ear. He gives me an achey feeling beneath the eyes, like a love-induced sinus infection. And now we have a house, and white goods, and 2008, and I'm very happy. Oh, and a fuck-off huge plasma screen TV. That also makes me very happy.

I have an office on campus in an olde worlde red brick building with a great sweep of manicured garden before it. Yesterday, as I left the building on the pretext of going to the library, but really just to stop looking at an article I hate, I noticed a woman feeding a magpie lark on the lawn. The magpie lark would take something from the woman's hand then trot over to a baby magpie lark some metres away, a screeching ball of fluff and newly sprouted flight feathers scarcely visible in the grass. The adult would feed the baby, then trot back over to the woman with the proprietorial air some birds have.

As I came and went well into the night I kept noticing the magpie lark and her baby, and it was always the same. The baby would sit in the grass and squawk and beat its stiff baby wings, and the mother would ignore it and go about important bird business, and I wanted to go over and investigate the baby bird and the magpie lark, but I didn't, because taking an interest in baby birds is immature.

.....

I have only a few hours today, a paper that must be finished in order to preserve my sanity, and my body is clenched is knotted and aching from carrying too many things and walking around too much, and wearing inappropriate shoes. It's raining. Most everyone is gone for the holidays and I have the office to myself, which is good. Last night it was so hot I didn't even bother wearing pants in the office, which is a benefit of everyone going away for a holiday I will not have. Today I am serious. Wake up, I say to the paper. Time to die.

When the alarm starts I'd written a whole entire paragraph without stopping to check Facebook or Ebay or I Can Has Cheezburger or my email or looking up another paper or deciding to get a cup of coffee or tidying my desk or calling my mum, which is something of an achievement. I'm listening to Talking Heads and have both feet on the table, either side of my computer, to ease the whiteknuckle tension in my neck. It's not until someone knocks on the door that I realise the alarm is going off in this building, not some other one. 'You've got to go,' says the woman in the 'warden' hardhat. 'The alarm's going off. Forget your computer, it's an emergency.'

There aren't many people on the lawn outside, because most people have gone on holiday, and aside from the man who is meant to fix the broken light bulb in my room, but hasn't, I haven't met anyone before. Three fire trucks go past and someone makes a comment about how much this will cost. The magpie lark is browsing through the lawn, and I am holding my computer to my chest as I'm not good at following instructions. I'm pissed. Who knows when I'll ever find that kind of focus again? I consider starting a conversation with someone, how about this heat etc, but no one else is holding a computer or anything, and this makes me feel foolish for some reason. Fuck it, I think. Immature or not, I'm going to go find that baby bird.

The baby magpie lark is half grown and squawking, with traces of yellow membrane in the corners of its beak. It has a straggly, damp, fully fledged tail and fledged wings, but the rest is baby fluff. I expect the adult to notice me approaching her baby and get defensive, like a hissing mother duck, but the adult magpie lark is indifferent and so is the baby. The baby looks me in the eye. 'Scraaaaarp,' he says, unimpressed. 'I know how you feel,' I would have replied, if talking to a baby bird wasn't crazy behaviour. The adult is in a tree, looking down on the pair of us. 'Skweeeep,' she says, and goes on with her business.

It didn't take the firefighters long to switch off the alarm, and now I am back in the office, shoes kicked off, feet on the desk, writing about a baby bird and a fire alarm. I am unfocused and envious, dreaming of blue skies and a wide green lawn, the grass beneath my feet, someone bringing me food whenever I screech.