My mother calls me about four times a day. This is a sad reality of my life. I would ask her to stop calling so much but this would result in a barrage of "I'm sorry about caring for you, I'm sorry about wondering when you'll be home for dinner, I'm sorry I'm such a terrible mother, you don't love me! This world is so cruel!" I really don't have the patience for that, despite being an adult who doesn't really eat dinner because I'm rarely at home.

Anyway. My mother calls me a lot. However, the one time I need her to call me back she's disappeared of the face of the earth. Goddamnit, (s)mother! You'll call me twice during a lecture to ask when I'll be home but you won't call back when I've lost my keys and, as a result, find myself trapped on campus! Well, not trapped. I could catch a bus home, but Canberra buses are like that cat bus thing in 'My Neighbour Totoro.' They're damp and furry and kinda crazy. Part of the reason why I'm so pissy at being on campus is that I'm a little sick at the moment, and an Action bus populated with school children, the elderly and unshowered mental patients is not an enticing idea.

Stupid keys. Stupid non-voice activated car.

If this was the eighteenth century - as, indeed, certain parts of my brain believe it to be - I would probably be burnt at the stake. Not for some rare, despised women's wisdom, but for intolerable supersition. Magic as a way to bypass the every day, that sort of thing.

Have you ever looked at the Rider-Waite deck? What a nutty world in these cards, all these little people existing as archetypes against a perfectly level horizon. None of the naked women - and there are a few - have pubic hair, and everyone has the type of nose you'd expect on a Roman statue, if all their noses hadn't been broken off centuries ago. I wonder if anyone's told them that they're signs? What about the dude with the ten swords sticking out of his back? How would he feel to be told that he's not really dying, and those swords don't really hurt, he just represents a certain martyred mentality the reader needs to overcome. Or those people falling from the burning Tower? They sure as hell look scared, but don't worry, they represent a Change or Revelation, so the ground won't hurt when they hit it. I imagine they'll just dust off their pseudo-medieval clothes, climb back up the tower, and jump off again.

Okay, I'm really going to my stats lecture now. For real. Yes. Lecture. Not thinking about people in cards.

Did you know that Leonard Nimoy is a nude photographer? Is that equal to or greater than William Shatner's spoken word albums and movie written entirely in Esperanto?

I do not like statistics, but I do appreciate having a clear-cut answer. I've never had that before at uni. Actually, no, that's not true. I took one class on brains and such. It had clear cut answers, of a sort. It was taught by a woman with a very thick Czech accent. She kept on talking about 'zee mawnkey brenns.' Her accent was one of the few interesting parts of the class. The other interesting part of that class was the brain dissections. We got to dissect sheep brains preserved in alcohol. This gave them the texture and colour of a supermarket mushroom. There are all kinds of gaps and folds inside the brain, places for the yellow juice our brains float in to permeate. These gaps and folds make for a nifty hand puppet if you're kind of twisted like me.

Now that I think of it, I've taken two other classes where the answer could be either 'yes' or 'no,' not 'maybe' or 'if you approach it this way, possibly.' One of those was a class on human learning and memory taught by a fragile elderly man, the other was a class on perception. The guy who taught the class on perception did research on balance and nausea. He put people into various apparatuses (apparatusii?) designed to make them feel sick and unbalanced. He was the kind of guy who would do that. Both were very good classes, actually. I've remembered that stereopsis is a cue to distance, and that, as blood alcohol rises, so too does the ability to concentrate. I learned all about the jerkiness of eyes and how emotions are encoded in long-term memories, making it difficult to remember happy things when you're in a sad mood.

All of that is useless as I'm no longer doing a psych degree. I just don't have it in me to raise monkeys on wire mothers, or give rats electric shocks, or put earnest young college students into fake prisons, or put babies into Skinner boxes. I'm still doing psych stats, though. Potential psychology students of the world - statistics does not make sense. Why do you do an ANOVA? Why do you care about sums of squares? How can you figure out the population mean based on the sample mean? I can't tell you. My avuncular, bleached-blonde professor sure as hell won't. You do it because it'll let you pass the exam, that's why.

In short - today I used my calculator to do something other than write 'boobs' or 'coco pops' and I'm a little surprised with myself. Still don't like stats, though.

It is indeed a glorious day when your $5 Cub Scout shirt no longer smells like death and Salvation Army bargain bin. It is also a glorious day when an army of anthrax-infected monkeys wreaks bloody vengeance upon your enemies, but my only enemies are people who allow their four year old children to swim in the same lane as me, and that could get a little messy.

"You see, what I really need is a group of midgets following me around everywhere."
"An entourage?"
"Exactly. An entourage. An entourage of midgets wearing tutus."
"They'd better be pink tutus."
"Naturally. I could call them to me at any time of the day. Come, Pogo! Topsy! FiFi! Come to me, my undersized friends!"
"I'll bet they're all cranky. Midgets with names like 'Topsy' always bite."
"Cranky and territorial."
"Cranky, territorial and highly educated."
"Pogo is a Rhodes scholar."
"FiFi has a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering from RMIT."
"Topsy has a law degree from Harvard."
"Still, I imagine the turnover of midgets would be pretty high."
"Yeah. Midgets wear out quickly. You'd need a standby crew in case of emergencies."
"Where do you find a steady supply of cranky, territorial, overqualified midgets?"
"Ivy League schools, of course. Or the University of Melbourne."
"Sheila Jeffreys teaches there."
"Exactly."

I just made 20 of the most demented, cracked-out crepes you could imagine. I used a Martha Stewart recipe, too. When I came back to Australia over Christmas some of my friends gave me a huge Martha Stewart cookbook, so I could periodically liberate recipes from her bourgeois clutches. Her cookie recipes are okay, the rest of them suck cock.

Moral of the story: Crepes are difficult. So is ravioli and comedy.

What the fuck am I doing?

Oh yeah. Ricocheting around the house like a pinball ticking things off my meagre to-do list. I am cooking dinner for 20 people tomorrow, a going away thing for Cheney which has kind of ballooned to the point where actual organisation is necessary. The house isn't messy, but it looks like we live in it, and I don't want people to know we're the type of people who will leave an outsize squeegee on the kitchen counter for three weeks before thinking of putting it away. I am soaking chick peas (the trick is to add flour and salt and bicarb to the soaking water and fork them through every now and then; they take about a day to soak properly but they taste really good with a lot of garlic). I need to buy walnut oil and capsicums. Statistics and anthropology stuff need doing, but I'll put that from my mind for now.

Michelle from the 'States sent me a postcard from Texas. It has a longhorn cow on it. I'll add it to the wall of postcards in my bedroom.

There's a big cut down my inner thigh. My own fault, I've been parrying into my legs lately. It's a good enough tactic if you want to win a bout - your opponent's hit won't count if it lands painfully in your groin, and if your riposte lands in time the hit's yours - but it does mean my legs are healthily torn up. The people at the gym gave me the biggest band-aid I've ever seen to stop the cut from sticking to my pants. The only problem was the glue from the band aid didn't come off my skin, it stayed, in two thick stripes down my leg. When I went swimming I peeled off my jeans to find two big blue stripes flanking a long scab. I think no one noticed.

I need to buy pears and butter. I need to fix up the template on the poetry page and figure out what the hell I'm going to do with this big fat backlog of photos. Must ricochet around like a demented pinball.

More later.