I didn't charge my iPod last night, which feels more than a little disastrous because I have a heinous amount of work to do and no music to get me through it. I need music to feel okay about homework. Last night I sat in the basement of the library merrily highlighting my way through a bunch of articles on masturbation in Victorian times while a group of bleary-eyed post grads sighed into their copies of 'A Critique of Pure Reason,' and Neil Young was in my ears and the world was okay. Today I have no music, little Gigi will have to stay at home, and my history essay seems that much more difficult.

That said, I found this through Riley Dog and it is amazing.

Morgan asks me to account for the Simpsons Page-A-Day calender tucked behind a stained Furby and a half-empty bottle of Palmers lotion. "The date isn't right," she says. "Don't you take off the pages?"

Morgan is the mop-headed niece of Ron McD, Blockhead's boyfriend. He is home for Easter, as well as Blockhead, and now his uncle and father are having tea at my dining room table with my mother, who is nervously talking non-stop. Last night our elderly, rusting freezer sparked a fire in the laundry. I slept through it, but mum, afraid for Ron McD's asthma, awoke and put out the fire, ruining the kettle in the process. Figuring we're a house of women, disinclined to do things like put up smoke detectors and hire a trailer to remove the freezer, Ron McD decided to fix it for us. He likes to fix things. He fixed the lock on the passenger's side door of my car once by filling the barrel of the lock with Araldite.

I didn't know any of them were coming until they appeared at our big, kind of crumbling French doors. I was in the living room painting little sections of Blockhead's hair with bleach. Downstairs was crowded with old newspapers, coffee mugs, discarded shoes and laundry, both clean and dirty. Mum made tea, Blockhead went to rinse out the bleach in her hair, and I was left with Morgan and her nameless little brother.

"I can make it the right day for you. It's March 28th. I can make it say March 28th."

"Thank you, Morgan. That would be a great help."

Morgan's little brother is eyeing off Shiva on my desk. "It's weird," he says, fingering the bracelet folded around Shiva's neck.

"Hey, be careful. That was my grandad's, and my friend Monkey made that bracelet."

"Your grandad's weird, and your weird if you're friends with monkeys. Hey, Itchy and Scratchy, give me that!"

Morgan clutches the calender pages protectively. "Rachael gave them to me, they're mine, you can't have them."

I'm reminded of being dragged to other people's houses when I was a kid. Ours is a strange, disconnected kind of family. If it was up to us - us being my mother, Blockhead and I - we'd never leave the house. We'd stay here forever, each doing whatever is they do, content with our own myopic little universe. I'd be in the backyard inventing post-apocalyptic worlds to gambol about in, Blockhead would be playing the piano, mum would be buried in her piles of fantasy novels written by people with quasi-Celtic pseudonyms. The only relatives we had, aside from those anonymously living in Western Australia and Canada, were my dad's mother and sister. They had heaping scads of old family friends scattered all over New South Wales, and by some quirk of obligation we'd find ourselves visiting them with depressing regularity. These friends were inevitably boozy, gossipy women and career-driven, faintly perverted men who lived in big renovated houses and always served brie and crackers. These people both scared and fascinated me. I loved to eat their grown up food and wander in their grown up houses and peer into their grown up lives, but it was always clear that we were just visiting. Sometimes they'd talk about me while I was there. My grandmother loved to concoct ways of fixing me up, whether it was my weight or my perpetually broken-out skin or my decidedly non-cute dreaminess, and she'd ask her friends for advise. I was always trying to be better, or more interesting, or at least less chubby and pimpled around my grandmother and her friends, but nothing I did ever worked. After my dad died we found no more reasons to see any of them, so we didn't.

In my room I'm wondering what I can do to entertain Ron McD's niece and nephew. I start scratching the new, flaking tattoo on my arm. Morgan looks up from bickering and asks if I have a bug bite. I show her my arm. "Hey, is your skin coming off?" She asks.

"A little bit. Not too much."

"Can I pull some off?"

I think for a moment. I think about brie and the smell of new paint and tasting little sweet sips of chardonnay. I think about my aunt pinching my belly to show her friends how much I'd grown, and the lipstick creeping into the wrinkles around my grandmother's mouth.

"Of course you can pull some off, Morgan. Try and get an inky bit."

It is my birthday in April, and a new Decemberists album will be released soon.

...

I'm just sayin'.

I’ve been trying tow rite about the retarded kids who come into work sometimes. Its hard. I keep stopping, looking back, deleting and reshuffling until it all seems so very, very hard and I walk away. Its not such a complicated story. The retarded kids come in with their teachers to look at the fish. I keep out of their way, not because they’re any trouble but because I know I’d say something insensitive, like call them retarded. This one time I had to move a big fish from a pond on the floor into a tank. I thought the kids would be interested so I asked one of the teachers if they’d like to watch. She said they would, and all these kids gathered around me with my big black net. Now here I’m searching for a nice detail. I think about mentioning my crappy haircut, the soft, strange faces of the kids, the sweet smell of them, not quite like normal kids. It all sounds so false, so contrived, so I give up. I leave the kids around the plastic pond, and their teachers, weary and faintly indifferent, and I leave me with my bad hair cut and my big black net. I’m wondering what to do with the lot of them. In real life I caught the big fish and moved him, and those kids were so impressed. I don’t know what impressed them, or why they looked so happy, but seeing that big old fish pulled out into real daylight, the slimy aquatic power of him straining against the net clearly made their day. And in real life I realised that this may be the high point of my life and I may never feel so impressive again. Like, I might finish my degree and go on to do a PhD, or I might get published or climb a mountain or go to Iceland or do all of those things you think about doing, but it will never quite top catching a fish in front of a group of retarded kids. But I can’t make it sound good, it’s always a little awkward, so the retarded kids are left there, suspended forever.

I simply have no willpower. This thought is sitting upon my shoulders like a mid-sized sumo wrestler, and it has been since my strength and flexibility class five hours ago. I love strength and flex inasmuch as it makes me feel sick and sore. All that is redeemed by Joe, the instructor, who wore a Megatokyo shirt last week and a Rio Tinto Science Olympiad shirt this week. He shows me in no uncertain terms how my half-assed way of hauling weights around the gym is, well, crap. If you let your elbow drift during a bicep curl he wedges his hand between your arm and your body so you have to do the full exercise from wherever you let your elbow drift to, making the whole thing infinitely more painful than it needs to be. You're meant to work until failure, that is, you're meant to keep going until your body squeals 'uncle' and gives up. I rarely get to that point. It hurts and I feel stupid and I quit way before I should.

Now I'm sitting at my desk trying to homeworky sexuality department do goody stuff, and while I could hook into the coffee, pull an all nighter and get it all done, I don't want to. I want to take my swollen, fevered head to bead and think about it tomorrow.

As far as dreams go, the one I had last night was one twisted baroque motherfucker featuring close to the entire cast of characters from my life over the past six months. Damn. I'm still heroically sketchy at 10.18am contemplating my equally baroque to do list for today. All I have to do is improve the script for a forum I'm facilitating (behold, the femmo theory nerd cometh) about queers on campus, finish reading a fuck-off huge textbook for an essay, get through my tutorial reading, approach the gutwrenchingly scary tower of scholarship applications on my desk and clean my fishtank. It doesn't sound like much, but all I'm good for this morning is lying face-down on my bed while TamsonCat gently boxes my ears.

Have you ever bought a really awesome pair of shoes, and you're all "these shoes are totally awesome, everyone's going to be coming up to me and saying 'dude, where did you get those awesome shoes?' and I'll be all 'the fates wanted me to have them' and they'll be 'yeah, you're so cool, I want to be your friend' and you'll be 'yeah? join the line'"? I got another tattoo on Saturday. It's my sixth, but it feels like a big deal because it's my most visible. I was expecting people at work and at the gym and whatnot to, like, notice, but they didn't. I mean, Bosslady at work asked if I had a rash, but that was about it. It's kind of depressing. I think it's a cool tattoo, and I like it, but what must a girl do for a little validation?

There is a fish at work that looks like a crouton. Seriously. It's called a cowfish and it's small and yellow and ruffles, bewildered, about its tank with pursed lips and a non-existent tail. When its quiet I watch it and it watches me, each pondering the mystery of the other. I'm wondering what it's like to be a little square fish transported, for no apparent reason, to the bitter oxyacetylene brightness of Canberra, and I think its wondering what this blobby pink shape behind the glass is.

Needless to say, the crouton-fish is making life bearable this week. That and my Thursday tutorial for a Very Mediocre Class starring the entire ANU women's collective. One of the problems with this Very Mediocre Class is the puffy-haired Belgian lecturer's failure to grasp feminist theory. Just a hint - if you're going to teach a class listed as a compulsory gender studies cognate course, and will therefore be populated with rabid, gender-fucking fourth years, crack a copy of the Second Sex, whydontcha? Moreover, in one of hte first lectures this lady said Andrea Dworkin wrote the SCUM Manifesto, which she definitely did not, Valerie Solanas did and Valerie Solanas is cool.

In other news - we're Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again. Word.

TamsonCat is perched on my desk intently watching Dweezil and MoonUnit. Every now and then she reaches out and gently slaps the cover glass. The fish pay her no mind.

I don't know why I feel so ashamed for enjoying Dweezil and MoonUnit so much. I guess, in some dark corner of my mind, the part obsessed with Nicole Kidman and Lee Lin Chin, I'm worried people from work might see it and think I'm even more of a limp wristed dorkataur. So, I'm coming out - I have a teeny, low-fi goldfish tank on my desk. It is full of plants and two fat, stupid goldfish who amble around contentedly doing the same thing day after day after day. And when TamsonCat sits beside it, watching it with all the interest of a fish-munching predatrix, my heart does swell and swell and I am happy.

Also making me happy - hardcore Morris dancers.

This Cat and Girl is the story of my happy(ish) little life.

Okay, here's the plan. I find a way to excuse myself from everything for four days. I pack my car with my camera, a press pack of film, a bunch of books, a few scrappy exercise books, my pen and some ink cartridges, a ton of CDs, my little stereo, some clothes and my hideous navy blue swimsuit which is not to be seen in public. I find somewhere on the coast. I've only really been to the coast a couple of times so I'm not sure where, it would have to be just off the Clyde and not too difficult to find. I find a little tiny cheap cabin, one of those caravan park things would do. And I sit. And sleep. And walk. And swim. And take photographs. And write stuff. And read and read and read.

It's not going to happen for a while, but a girl can dream, can't she?

"Hey, this might sound like a weird question - no, never mind."
"I like weird questions. What you after?"
"Well, I'm not gay or anything -"
"Wouldn't really matter if you were."
"I mean, my boyfriend keeps telling me I have a gay side, and I'm all like 'no way' and he's all 'it's totally hot.'"
"Guys can think that sometimes."
"Yeah, but, I'm not and I don't think I have a gay side, but you're looking really good tonight."
"Thanks, dude."
"Do you dress like that all the time? Please tell me you dress like that all the time."
I am wearing a too-small boy's school shirt, a tie, buttons bought from a Japanese store (one says, simply, 'yes' and the other has a bitch-ass Japanese punk girl screaming), and cocksucking red lipstick. I look the love child of Blondie and Angus Young.
"Well.. I dress like this some of the time. Mostly it's just novelty shirts and jeans."
"You should totally dress like that all the time. It's hot."
"Thanks."
At that point I delicately remove her hand from my shoulder and walk away.

My mum found my porn. Okay, this is lessened by a few extenuating circumstances. (1) I'm a female 21 year old gender studies major, therefore not really in the demographic for gross pervy teenage boyness, (2) the porn in question is by female porn pioneer Candida Royale and I actually bought it, I shit you not, for research and (3) mum heard me talk about aforementioned research paper for weeks and weeks and weeks because, when I'm writing a paper I can talk about nothing else. I kind of wish it was gross horny teen goat porn bought for non-research purposes, because that would mean I'm less of an asexual nerd than I already am.

So, yeah.

In other news, Jeremy makes hernias sound, well, fun.