What the fuck is wrong with America? It makes me appreciate living here, where the elections are dull and focus on interest rates and pharmaceutical benefits. Still. Christ, Americans, if you don't vote I will personally get on the plane and kick your stupid asses. While our prime minister might be the man from the Mr Sheen bottle, at least he won't make votes disappear into nowhere.

Well, at least not while anyone's looking.

Discovery #1 - Caffeine pills and Sudafed will keep you awake.

Discovery #2 - They will also make it impossible to fill out scholarship application forms. You will feel like an incapable fraud. Whether or not you're an incapable fraud doesn't matter. At some level, we're all incapable frauds. It's the frauds who can get it together to fill out application forms in full who succeed.

Discovery #3 - Nails can be bitten. Teeth can be ground. Hundreds of Grammar kids doing the HSC at the moment are doing the same. Essays, however, are not written by grinding teeth.

Discovery #4 - There is a big, big difference between being a good student and being a nerd. Still. My anth lecturer is dreamy, I don't want to hand in some lame essay which will make her think less of me.

I'm getting really tired of essays, scholarship applications and nerdliness.

'PS: There is currently of production of " Finding Nemo...On Ice!" being staged here. Is it just me, or is going to that akin to paying admission for the Sydney Fish Market?'

Cheney, I love you. Come home and bring me stories.

Clicking back through the photo directory is, well, melancholy. Photo albums have that effect. I miss my friends in the 'States. I met some of the best people I will ever know there, and it really hurts to know I may never see them again. A lot of shit happened while I was over there, a lot of nastiness and immaturity. There were also many long, beautiful nights of talking and drinking, dancing like idiots, figuring out the world. I miss it.

Where did the excitement go? I'm a premature widow. Quick, write it down before I regret it. Write tonight (new music, new essay, turning down invitations to go into Civic - for what?) before it goes away.

'Medulla' is just stunning. Yeah, I know everyone else bought it ages ago but I'm slow. Perhaps that's because, truth be told, I didn't like 'Vespertine' too much. I ran out and bought it the second it came out and now it just sits there, unlistened to. I bought 'Medulla' tonight along with some discounted Talking Heads and 'Real Gone' by Tom Waits. Should be an interesting night.

I'm shuffling around the house like a latter-day Quasimodo doing little things - laundry, dishes, making beds and putting away sewing stuff - thinking about writing. The carcass of my statistics assignment is stretched across my desk, piles of piles of notes and working in thick black ink. I'm thinking I should be writing something - letters to people in the 'States (Wini, there is a three-week old letter still being written to you - I swear to God I'll get around to it), an entry for Tom's list poem competition, a couple of short stories and a non-cringeworthy update for the poetry page. It's 10.22 and my stats assignment is due tomorrow. I haven't done any of the SPSS stuff, nor have I written up the results section. Meanwhile, I'm not a psychology student any more, and I have two assignments for gender studies and anthropology only just under control. Another day.

If I had the words to make these things clever and beautiful, I'd write them all down in neat letters and send them out to the world. It's what I do.

These things are
- the revolting axolotl I sold today
- the black-out at work, when we put up the 'closed' sign and watched the wind snatch stumpy eucalyptus trees backwards and forwards outside
- the girl who recognised me at the physiotherapist's office, slowly stretching little invisible muscles around my knee
- St Jude.

When I was still doing the web designer thing I used to write poems into the head sections of pages I was putting together. In comment tags, of course, and I took them out later. It was just what I did, I didn't have to write anything. Why do we write poems? Seriously, why? What's the attraction? Do we do it to look smart and witty and learned and so on? Do we do it to say something?

When I was in the 'States I met a whole bunch of people who wrote poems. I thought I'd get along with them because I wrote poems and they were good, and they wrote poems and they said they were good. Instead, the American college poetry thing kind of freaked me out. Out of anything, they were really indifferent to what I wrote, which is fine. They were, however, ecstatic with what they themselves wrote. I met a lot of self-proclaimed tortured artists in California - funny, given that I was in a very middle class college town. And the thing is I really didn't like what they were writing. It seemed to be all about getting wasted and being cool and trashed and fucking and falling in bitter, ephemeral love. Which is fine and all, but kinda boring. We can't all be Lou Reed 24/7, especially when you have to pay rent and study for midterms.

Thing I learned about poetry #1: It's not interesting if you're too interested in being interesting.

I also read a lot of overblown love poetry. Oh, love poetry, why does so much of it suck? We've all read it - you want, you need, you pine, you hunger, their face lights all the stars in heaven, the only thing that matters is holding you etc etc etc. It's funny to think the people love poems are written about are just, well, people. They fart. They pick their noses. They say dumb shit and break out when they get stressed. The great sacred lover, the person the poet burns for, lives for, would fucking die for could well be the checkout chick who sold you milk this morning. Does love like that really exist? When you're that passionate about someone where does the pain fit in, all the dreadful tremours of addiction? Maybe we find ourselves looking for someone to write love poetry about. The idea of love precedes the lover.

Thing I learned about poetry #2: We're loveable. We're gross. What does it feel like when you forget lyricism?

So.. that's what I'm thinking. That's what I'm putting into non-clever words.

America - if you re-elect Bush next week I'm moving to another planet.

If you saw a girl in a crude t-shirt with eleventy billion black jelly bracelets on her wrist examining her tongue at the lights, that was me. If you saw a similar girl skulking around uni with a perplexed, squinty expression, clearly focussing on something bewildering in her mouth, that was me, too. My tongue hurts. It really, really hurts, and it's not funny.
I must have bitten it, or burnt it, or received shrapnel or something. Apples burn, coffee must be at room temperature, vinegar is a torture. What the fuck happened to my mouth? I'm suckin' down gallons of Listerine but it's not helping.

Maybe I could have it amputated. Maybe I could get a prosthetic tongue to tide me over.

Ow. Owwww.. Someone kiss it better.

- Sitting outside in real live sunshine freckling my shoulders and reading 'Portnoy's Complaint.'

- Creating various hair topiaries out of my new, truly tragic haircut, which moulds itself into a David Beckhamish faux-hawk without my consent. It is stereotypical dyke haircut #3. I am attempting to undercut this with the reckless use of blood-clot red lipstick and girly bras.

- Writing, quite a bit actually. Some short stories I'm demi-happy with. I'm considering creating a new section for short stories, but I doubt anyone would read them.

- Running away from any girl-type thing I'm attracted to, because I have the social skills and confidence of a 14 year old Star Trek fan.

- Dancing like a grinning moron with my friend Jamie in loud, smoky, overcrowded clubs.

- Biting my nails.

I should probably get on with it, hey.

I really wish the term 'invert' was still in use to describe gay people. The word 'homosexual' sounds so medical. It really should be pronounced by a tweedy, disapproving British man for best effect - 'hommo-sex-yewall.' But 'invert' is friendly, weird. An 'invert' can be quirky and oddly dressed. From now on, if anyone asks me if I'm gay or straight (to be honest, no one ever does because it's rude), I will reply - "I am an invert, and damned proud."

Does anyone know of any good tattoo artists in the Melbourne area?

Usually, when I describe someone interesting or perverted I make up little details so it looks like I was paying attention. Okay, so I look a little less self-obsessed than I actually am. Usually I say they did something with their left hand or their right hand, or smiled more with the left side of their mouth, or had a lazy eye, when I never did notice which actual side of their body was strange. They were just strange.

This time I'm absolutely sure - it was his left hand which had a finger missing. To be precise, the index finger was absent. The remaining three fingers traced obsessive, ritual little circles on his woman's bare thigh.

I couldn't stop watching. She smiled at Darren Hanlon, and so did he, all the while his fingers marked their territory beneath her skirt. He was ugly, too. Old. His circling fingers were urgent and fidgety - this was his woman, damnit. Proof he could function well.

Darren Hanlon is not afraid to wear a tie with a short sleeved shirt, or ironed jeans, or an 'I *heart* New England' button on his guitar strap. Nor is he above using a banjo, or a triangle solo, or the chorus from 'Take On Me.' Darren Hanlon made me smile. I hope the man with the missing finger and his woman are good.

I had a dream last night where I gave birth to a baby named ANOVA, then became trapped in an evil maze of MRC vectors.

I hate you, statistics.

I will not rest until this novelty t-shirt is in my possession.

For various reasons I'm back on the drugs of hungry and cranky. As a result I'm walking like a normal 21 year old, and no longer have any fevers. Still, I'm hungry all the time. Constantly. There is always a great howling maw in my belly that can never be fed. And I'm a cranky, miserable bitch, too.

Driving home tonight, butterflies of hunger fluttering in my stomach, I noticed the sky was eerily red. The fires along William Hovell Drive might have explained that. It must be backburning. It has to be. I drove past the streetlights to where it was good and black, vivid wreaths of fire around the hills. 'Idioteque' by Radiohead was playing - 'I laugh until my head comes off.'

I came home, changed into something warm, grabbed my camera and drove back.

The pictures didn't turn out.

8.15am, outside on the deck. Mum is out so I'm smoking, a pot of lethally black coffee beside me. Reading 'The Women's Room' by Marilyn French because I can and it makes me sad and angry and aware. There are dragonflies patrolling the pool, wattlebirds browsing through the blowsy camellias. Above the old neglected shed is a great tangle of flowering plant - a wisteria I grew from a seed, some yellow flower that always flowers whenever the seasons click 'round to spring, lilac, little hyacinths as unreal as plastic toys. They're in shade. If they weren't I'd go inside and get my camera to snap macro after macro of delicate, fragile spring flowers. I can still smell shower and cocoa butter on me, as well as a faint stink of fish tank from work yesterday. My left arm is stained blue to the bicep from cleaning out tanks.

9.35pm, AIS pool changing room. A swimming group is showering and getting dressed. Old women wander naked and pale, their big bodies flitting in and out of my peripheral vision like the full moon. They're talking and laughing. This lady has a scar from a caesarian section years ago, this one had a hysterectomy last year. One woman pulling on her underwear next to me has one breast. There is a puckered scar across the left side of her chest. I almost expect her to make some reference to this somehow, or at least look a little ashamed or uncomfortable. She doesn't. She pulls on a t-shirt and gets on with it.

9pm, thrashing up and down the lanes. How many hours have I clocked so far? I've been swimming regularly for over three months and I can feel it. I'm a good strong bacteria in the water. I get pensive. Nothing hurts in the pool, but I dismiss this as melodrama. There is an aquaerobics class a few lanes over. "C'mon ladies, show me some power." Catholic education ruined the word 'lady' for me. It has an unpleasant wheedling quality. "Ladies.. ladeeeess... pay attention, please." A girl in a flowered bikini eases herself into the water. I think I recognise her. I hit the end of the lane, turn, and swim away.

4pm Tuesday. I know her. I met her at that big queer ball thing. She has a Lord of the Rings related tattoo on her forearm and does drag well. I would say hi except she's talking to someone else. I slide past, invisible and quick. I'm part hermit crab - didn't you know? I can suck in every part of me that takes up space and become unnoticeable. There's a booth up the back and it's my shell - I can see you but you can't see me. An ageing American couple are arguing about their relationship. The bearded, puka-shell wearing man notices the pen in my hand and purses his lips. "Can't you see?" He shrills. "That girl over there is listening to us! Why must you make a scene?" It strikes me now that I've lost most of my energy for people. I really can't be bothered any more. I'm a tired crab.

10.35am, Sunday. "I saw James last week." "I know, he told me. He said you gave him a dirty look." "No I didn't." "He said you did." "I didn't mean to. It was a bad time. I was cranky and my knee hurt." "Your knee always hurts." "I know. It always hurts and it's always a bad time." "That's very defeatist." "I know. I like being defeated. It gives you perspective."

Today - Blockhead comes home. I'm thinking of taking her to the RSPCA to sympathise with the dogs.

Furthere evidence here.

I don't know how I feel about this, but it's cute, that little flesh jacket. Looking beyond the ethical implications it's a neat statement - what is the body if not a living flesh coat? Still. Ew.

Should drink water instead of coffee.

Should stretch at the gym instead of just walking out to the car with muscles clenching into hard, tight mass.

Should recognise that William Shatner's cover of 'Common People' might not be the greatest song in the history of, like, EVER, as I keep shrilly insisting to anyone who will listen.

Should do actual school work at the library instead of reading random books about public housing in Ghana, skin diseases in the seventeenth century and so on, even though such random reading provides great conversation at the pub about scabies and plumbing and so on.

Should attempt to grow vestigial tail in order to start conversation at pubs, parties, bus stops etc, also to make costumes at theme parties easier (ref: 'Mean Girls' - a Halloween/theme party costume consists of slutty lingerie and a tail).

Should take up mountain climbing in order to go somewhere very high to avoid the real world(tm), which is far too full of cars with diplomatic license plates, girls in ruffle butt mini skirts and cruelty to animals.

Should hang out laundry instead of throwing it carelessly into the energy-consuming drier.

Should resolve frustrated Oedipal complex by going back in time and bludgeoning Freud with a volume of "The History of Sexuality."

Should have the word 'should' lasered out of my brain permanently.

The tree fluff is falling. I've only half-heartedly begun studying for exams, so I'm fucked. It's the rule. Once the fluff falls all bets are off for exams. I told the nurse this today, modifying the language, of course. She'd asked me if the weather was nice outside. I guess she hadn't been out of the great brick monolith of Canberra Hospital for a while. A few people asked me the same question while I waiting for the lift, waiting in the waiting room, waiting for the rheumatologist to arrive trailing interns like baby ducks, waiting for nurses, waiting for lab results, waiting at the pharmacy. I took care of things today and it was exhausting, hobbling up and down those broad, dim corridors doing my medical chores.

God, I hate hospitals. They're always populated with the elderly and the chronically ill, a few kiddies with broken wrists, bored families visiting fallen grandmothers. If you're just walking around you don't see the really sick people, just the repeat offenders. People trapped in their own old, sick skin and layers of patronising medical bureaucracy, that kind of thing. The old people, the chronically ill, they look so sad. So invisible. They get tended to and patched up and written about but you can tell no one has looked at them, really looked at them, in a long time. They appear beside you in waiting rooms, all yellowish and pickled, quietly desperate to be noticed. "Is the weather nice outside, love? What are you in here for?"

And then there are all the clean, smug young doctors cruising around with their clipboards and staff passes. I never trust anyone who wants to be a doctor. I think they get off on being the powerful ones, above all the guts and pathos. Never trust a profession which attempts to control society through reified disease-language and artificial categories of pathology, that's my motto.

I have it easy, really. I walk a little funny and people ask me about it, jokes are cracked, life goes on. But it's coming, isn't it? Dressing gowns and hospital wristbands and wondering about outside weather. That's the problem with hospitals - they hit you upside the head with your own neatly-packaged morbidity. What happens when you get too old for people to see you?

Better not think about that. The fluff is falling. Better attack that pile of textbooks.

Whoever thought the cliche 'plenty more fish in the sea' functions as any kind of comfort is badly, badly deluded. God, what an awful thing to tell someone. 'Plenty more fish in the sea' - what the fuck are you supposed to do with that? There might be plenty of fish but who's to say any of those fish will like you, or that you'll like them? What if those fish are ugly, or stupid, or bigoted, or have bad taste in music or psoriasis or whatever? What if you find nothing to say to those fish, can't even look an attractive fish in the eye because you're afraid they'll click their tongues and say "you, my dear cod, are nothing but a frightened little girl in dirty Dunlop Volleys playing at being an adult"?

And what happens when you do find a seemingly appropriate fish. What then? What if that fish turns out to be dull, or has a glaringly unresolved Oedipal complex, or something like that? What if you like that fish more than they like you, and every time you see them all you can feel is the ache of your soon-to-be-broken heart? What if you don't like the fish but are to cowardly to get rid of them, and keep waking up to that galling shit eating grin morning after morning? What if, insecure in your attractiveness or sexuality or whatever, you jump drunkenly from fish to fish, all different varieties - male, female, guppy, swordfish - and wake up one night in a cold sweat wondering if you're pregnant or clapped out or some variety of the two? What happens when you realise that, in all this fish jumping, you might be nothing more than a desperate slut? What then?

No. Lousy fish. The best thing to say is "There are many things in this world which are constant - cats, coffee, rosellas, cigarettes, coffee, fat children, thunderstorms, magpies. You should focus on them. The fish will look after themselves."

When I was younger, just starting high school, Sascha and I used to go walking in the morning. We'd walk up the street, down another street, weave in and out of the cul-de-sacs and crescents making up my suburb, through an alleyway, into the primary school my sister went to. When we got to the school I'd let Sascha off the lead and she'd run while I watched the sun rise higher in the surreal morning sky. That was my favourite part of the day. We went to different places - the football field a suburb over, the farming land turned national park that burnt a year ago, underpasses and hidden paths alongside Belconnen Way - but the school oval was my favourite. Sascha liked anywhere where she could run on her ever young, ever strong puppy legs, her good limber German Shepherd legs, wet dog tongue rolling out of her mouth.

This afternoon I went back over the path I used to take with Sascha. The houses had changed - some had been repainted, there were different cars in the drive way - and they've removed the tan bark around the playgrounds at the school. Spring has landed and it's infectious, spilling out in fragile new flowers, new weeds breaking up the pavement. Back at home Sascha was being put to sleep in the living room. She hadn't been out walking, with me or anyone, for at least two years. It was her time, or at least that was what the vet said. I don't think Sascha gave much thought to her time. Before I left I held her head between my hands, whispered into her ears, searched her eyes for any sign that she wasn't ready to die. I couldn't see anything.

Now I feel hard. Spring has landed and it's infectious, why is it so many things are dying?

The DHL guy who services (hee, service) the campus fascinates me. He has gauged ears and greasy, black shock of hair over his forehead, in the manner of hardcore boys the world over. He always wears those dreadful Oakley sunglasses, and the standard bright yellow DHL shirt. His face, though - what you can see of it - is rosy, blushing. His lower lip droops wetly. Take away the rudimentary grasp of hardcore style and the Oakleys and he'd be a pouting Victorian figurine. I find this touching, for some reason.

Yesterday my right foot and ankle went completely numb. They still are. When I got out of bed I fell flat on my face. This would have been funny if someone other than the cat had been around.

Rebecca's hair is long, blonde, crispy straight. Rebecca's hair is bleached almost to the root. It looks rough, brittle. Rebecca wore a strapless dress of the type favoured by strippers everywhere, the kind that squeezed big fake boobs just right, just enough to make them look plastic and appetizing. Rebecca is drinking a pre-mixed Mudslide out of a bottle, Marlboro drooping from her other hand. When she smiled I could see her teeth were twisted.

"I tell you what, these bastards, them inside, they don't know what they're talking about." Unsurprisingly, Rebecca sounds drunk. "I am Rebecca. I am twenty eight years old. I am what I am."

Rebecca's nine year old daughter giggled.

"She lies. She's twenty seven." Rebecca rolls her eyes.

"I'm twenty eight next month. Same difference." She takes a long drag on her cigarette. "Can you give me back my snake?"

Rebecca's daughter is wearing her school uniform - tracksuit pants with elastic around the ankle, forest green jumper - and a caver's light strapped around her head. She has tucked the head of a long, stuffed snake into her pants. This is her tail.

"Muuuum." She whines. "How else will people know I'm naughty?"

It's 10.30, somewhere in Duffy. A 'naughty or nice' theme party. I feel sorry for the guys - all the girls have to do is bust out their sluttiest kit and they're set. I eschewed the Green Dress of Wonder and Excitement in favour of Doc Martens and a hentai-short skirt, as my knee is the size of a ripe melon and walking is a little difficult. Propped against the railing outside Brent's house, with Rebecca and her daughter, a giggling fag and his hag, I'm glad I didn't dress up too much. The really girly stuff, the high heels and dresses and lingerie and lipstick, look fine in your bedroom or in the pages of a magazine. Once you wander out to someone's party or the street or some shithouse nightclub things look a little different. The real world blunts the glamour, makes it seem more contrived, more desperate. Maybe that's why Rebecca looks so worn - the lighting is all wrong.

Then again, Rebecca's cool. She's hot. She takes no shit. I know this because she told me so.

"Tell you what, I take no shit. I don't give a fuck about what any of them bastards think. You know, society, the government, all that, I don't give a fuck. People look at me funny because I swear in front of me kids. Me kids know a swear word is just a word, it doesn't mean anything. I'm just me. I'm Rebecca. I am what I am."

The chinless queer in the borrowed Merici shirt and St Eddies tie interrupts.

"So, how do you know these people?"

"I know Brent. From fencing."

"Ohmigod, fencing. That's, like, so hot right now."

That's when I go inside.

I've been plodding my way through a rather large term paper on the sociomedical construction of transsexuality (lit. trans. - which came first, the fake vagina [or inverted man pouch] or the desire for a fake vagina?). It's due in four weeks, but, being the nerd I am I've already read and written enough to come up with a hefty outline. As a result of this hefty reading I have had Aerosmith's 'Dude Looks Like a Lady' stuck in my head for weeks. It will not. Get. Out. It's what my brain returns to whenever I'm not thinking of much, my default state. Not the most dignified default state, really.

If you ever come across me wandering around, looking vacant, rest assured. I am thinking of something. "Da na, da na... Duuude looks like a lay-day..."