My small red car - just like an egg carton, the same number of dents and everything - is being repaired by a large man with one of his front teeth missing as I speak. The accelerator was making alarming grindy noises, and was doing this thing where it didn't really speed up when I pressed on it. This has led to me stalling my car at the lights a number of fucking times. If anyone was ever wondering what the sound of immaturity is, that 'clunk - rurr rurr rurr rurr' sound of a car stalling is it.

This means I have to catch the bus to school. I hate the bus as I have major crazy person mojo. The crazy folks love me, almost as much as they love the bus, and they sure do love the bus a lot. Mmm, public transport. Where else can you get on a big metal box reeking of urine and be abused by a man in Stubbies with a Napoleon complex? Once, in my younger, license-free days, I was sitting on the bus when someone touched the middle of my back. I was wearing a tank top so one of my tattoos was exposed, and someone creepily stroked the centre of my back. I turned around to see this greasy-haired guy smirking and saying 'I like your tattoo.' If I wear a t-shirt today my only visible tattoo is the little red man on my arm, and then I can tell people that he bites after ripping out eyeballs, and then I'll be the crazy person and people will leave me alone.

I hope my small red egg carton car gets better soon. I don't like public transport.

One of the truly great things about living at home are the schedules my mother and I keep. She's one of those 'early to bed, early to rise' types, while I roll out of bed around 8.30, moan, stumble off to school or wherever else I need to be, then stay up with our big, crumbly old house entirely to myself. This means that if I want to do things like dance about to the B52's while doing the dishes like the great underpantsy, limp-wristed dorkataur that I am, I can do it, and there are no roommates to complain at me.

Oh, man, how great are the B52s? In order to impel myself through another interminable night of reading and nail-biting I dug out my crusty old copy of 'Cosmic Thing' and, boy howdy, did it ever do the trick. 'Deadbeat Club' is the new soundtrack to my life. Also heaps tops ace good - the copy of Fence that arrived today courtesy of Shauny, as well as a postcard from a person in San Francisco.

Also - interneck props to Wegglywoo, to further remind myself to keep reading her website. To be perfectly honest, when I first clicked on to Wegg's blog I kind of raised an eyebrow and clicked off because the topless girls and Thong Institute made my old girl school hackles rise. Even now, if I sense that someone would have beaten me up had we known each other in high school, I no longer want to have anything to do with them (unless I start dating them, which is an entirely more masochistic story). I can barely open a copy of 'Ralph' or 'FHM' - which I had to do recently for journalistic purposes - without snarling. But whenever I actually read Wegglywoo I'm always swallowing my bitterness, as she really is tremendously funny. Take this gem from 'Tits Out Tuesday.'

solution two is to give in to the celestial mechanics of evolution, and die.

now, this may sound a little harsh, but it is clear that your genes are not what we are looking for if we are to have a utopian world of topless women going about their daily lives as gaia intended.

you can't have a utopia full of women complaining about neck pain from their pendulous breasts.

So.. yes. Wegglywoo is good, as is mail, late nights in a cavernous house, and women in wigs singing about rock lobsters.

I want to write about this stranger's cunt angled warmly over my knee, I've been wanting to write about it all day, but now that I've sat down it's swum away from me. Now I keep thinking about my boy Leon, permanently exhausted and dreamy, outside Trinity trying to light a cigarette. He's not really a smoker, and he held it in one hand and tried to light it with the other and the wind kept blowing the flame out. I had to fight an urge to take it, light it, and hand the lipstick smeared thing back to him. The urge is either maternal or castrating or, if Freud is to be believed, a little of both, then I want to sniff that I'm a feminist and don't mythologise the phallus. Either way, this stranger's cunt, her brown (tan? taupe?) fishnet stockings (how 2001) and her denim miniskirt (how 1999) drift further and further away.

What the fuck does the universe have against my eyebrow pencils??

(to clarify - I have hair the approximate colour and texture of cooch grass, and I've taken to dyeing it brown. Chestnut, if the box is to be believed. Anyway, so it doesn't look so stupid, I've been filling in my cooch-coloured eyebrows, but every morning my eyebrow pencils disappear. My disappearing eyebrow pencils are the universe cocking the fuck-with-me gun.)

Yes, that's a copy of 'Barely Legal.' Why do you ask?

I came back to Canberra (and, by extension, my mobile phone and email) to find a fuckton of Pride Week forum stuff impatiently waiting. For various reasons I'm developing a forum for ANU's Pride Week in May and I'm just shitting myself. I've done stuff like this before, but never in front of 200 people I actually know and care about. I'm getting major gay activist burnout. On top of that, we're trying to make a short documentary for the beginning of the forum, and that is taking so very much emailing and phone-calling and I would rather curl into the foetal position under my bed and whimper.

Still. At least I got four days of cows, bushland, porno, good food, good friends and a lot of music swapping. Mustn't grumble, really.

Has the world suddenly gone conservative without me noticing? Has condescending intolerance completely wiped out acceptance and understanding? And why is it that feminism continues to be a dirty word?

Okay, so I'm cranky. My patience officially ran out this afternoon as I flicked through the Saturday artsy supplement in the Canberra Times and came across a review of the book 'Sperm Wars' by Dr. Tom Frame. I should have known that I'd be deeply irritated after the haughty opening paragraph where Dr. Frame describes himself as an 'adult adoptee' who resigned from an ethics committee because he could not 'morally condone' certain forms of reproductive technology. Turns out Dr. Frame really can't stand the idea that babies could be born without a father.

This kind of thing catches in my throat like a pill swallowed dry because, after seven or so years of identifying as a loud, irrational, opinionated, reactionary feminist my views have changed significantly. I don't have a problem with babies being born without fathers because I think there is something wrong with fathers and, by extension, men. I don't hate men, I don't blame men, I don't have some great throbbing castration complex swilling about in my pretty little head. I do, however, take issue with people like Dr. Tom Frame arguing that '[i]t is fanciful to claim that women can pass on to children what a father would have contributed or that more distant male family members or friends can perform the task.' I also resent it when one of his key criticisms of the authors of the book is that they 'assert that a family is whatever they say it is.' Because Dr. Tom Frame wouldn't be trying to restrict the category 'family' to whatever he says it is, wouldn't he?

My real question is, what exactly is it that fathers can give children that mothers can? The obvious inverse of this question is, what is it that mothers can give to children that fathers can't? Obviously, Dr. Tom Frame would kick up an awful fuss if gay men were parents, too. I believe, as a dissenting family-destroying whore of Babylon rug-munching feminist, that families have been and continue to be many things. By implying that non-nuclear families without mum, dad, dog and 2.3 kids are harmful to children and detrimental society Dr. Tom Frame is insulting the many, many families who don't fit his model. This would include single parent families of all varieties, as well as those dykes and faggots messing around with the building blocks of society. By asking 'should our society provide someone... or a service... to undertake an activity that a majority in our society believes is either generally unwise or definitely wrong?' he's assuming that the majority of society agree with him, and I doubt that is the case.

Dr. Tom Frame, do same sex couples have what it takes to have children? Well, what does it take to have children? Must children be indoctrinated with stereotypical ideas of sex, gender and family from the time they are born? Do children have some congenital need for a matched pair of parents to give them the right idea of things? Or do kids just need safety, security and love, the freedom to be nurtured and accepted for who and what they are? More importantly, do those families not fitting into Dr. Tom Frame's neat nuclear model deserve acceptance and support from society?

In short: Fuck you, Dr. Tom Frame.

My birthday has bitten me on the arse. I'm not prepared for it. I would like a packet of photographic paper (resin coated, natch, pearl rather than glossy, Ilford by preference or whatever's cheapest), a press pack of HP5 400, 'cause it always works in my ham fists, and a subscription to Fence. Actually, the photo paper alone would be more than enough, because the rather narrow packet permanently on the floor of my car is looking a little shabby.

TamsonCat only wishes that I continue producing a degree of body heat, and allow her to continue coiling up like a mollusc in my lap while I do the morning emails. She glares up at me with green eyes set in a furry cartoon face (halfway between Pikachu and TinTin), while I rack my brain for clever, entertaining things to say about hair products and the media.

I no longer go to the gym to ensmallen my ass; I go to watch the O.C. Or Desperate Housewives.

Yesterday I sewed three wallets and they are all lumpen and cute. I'll buy batteries for that other camera I have so I can take photos and put those photos online for other people to look at.

Making the bed with TamsonCat, I was struck that (dude who wrote nasty stuff about me) would think what I was doing was absolutely unbearable. Sitting at my desk reading and making frantic notes, he'd think I was a self-righteous poseur. Talking to my fish, having dinner with my friends, slumping on the couch watching Futurama, there he was reminding me what an incredible pain in the ass I am. Uninteresting, too talkative, too opinionated.... eugh.

So I spent this morning in a state of paralysis, smoking cigarettes in early-morning sunlight until my head throbbed, idly flicking through 'The Maiden Tribute.' I was thinking about all the mistakes I'd unwittingly made to make people think I was an absolute fuckstick. It's like hearing your voice recorded; all you can hear is the sibilant 's' or faint fossilized lisp and you want to run and hide and never speak again because how could people let you even upen your mouth with a voice like that?

Maybe that's why sensitive people are sensitive, they allow the disembodied voices of other people, real or imagined, to enter their head and audit their every move. I wish I could neatly excise them, or slash them in two with a machete like that guy in 'I *heart* Huckabees.' But I have no easy answers. Instead I'm going to read the photocopied wad of Hegel one of my lecturers slapped me with, despite my own hipsterish Greek chorus chanting 'dilettante!'

Because I don't think I can use 'Woody Allenish ball of neuroses' as grounds for extension.

It's Sunday and, predictably, I'm wending my way through yet another circuitously phrased essay question. This one is on sexual difference and whatnot, which sounds easy enough (and, trust me, I'm sorely tempted to answer with 'boys have a penis and girls have a vagina') but it's for a philosophy class and I know the answer will involve the word 'phallus' somehow. Man, the question even asks you to 'discuss two examples of sexual difference.' Perhaps I could mention boobs, and how most of my male friends don't entirely have them.

But, yeah... how heaps tops ace is Gayle Rubin? When I'm highlighting my way through my readings for school, the ones which are really cool inspire the Kathleen Hannah response, i.e., I'm sitting there saying 'FUCK YEAH!' in my head. Ms Rubin definitely provokes the Kathleen Hannah response. To quote:

'It would be in the interests of the smooth and continuous operations of such a [system of gender] if the woman in question did not have too many ideas of her own about whom she might want to sleep with. From the standpoint of the system, the preferred female sexuality would be one which responded to the desire of others, rather than the one which actively desired and sought a response.'

That was on page 47 of her essay 'The Traffic of Women.'

I'm actually really enjoying my classes this semester. I'm taking two history classes, and I love it because history students are great at cultivating eccentricities. There's this one man in one of my tutorials, who I call the Theory Gnome. He has a long, thick beard and knows many wonderful things about drug addicts in Sweden, pre-modern Chrstian cults, Victorian child prostitutes and the Salvation Army.

As a sidenote - I just clicked on to this, found through CultureCat, and it very much deserves to be read.

In yet another oddly appropriate tangent, today I stumbled across something very nasty that someone had written about me. To be honest, I'm still a little shaken up about it, hence the rather manic post (I'm a chronic nervous talker). You can't expect people to like you all the time. Actually, for most of us you can pretty much guarantee that there's someone out there who thinks you're a complete fuckstick. But the problem with the internet is that people can post their opinions of other people online, and they seriously don't expect other people to read it. So, yeah... I'm at an uneasy peace with being an opinionated cunt, but it feels really shitty to see someone else say that. It made me think about stuff I might have written online that could upset people.

With the notable exception of Nerida Matthei. Cuntflap.

I've taken to listening to ABC News Radio while reading for school, partly because their soothing, adult voices make me focus, partly because the radio in the living room is quite ancient and changing the station is beyond me. This morning I heard that there are feral turtles loose in New South Wales. The news lady said they had come into Australia as part of an 'illegal terrrapin trade.' Dude, when I finally blow this backwater burg and begin my career as a Bad A$$ MC, I so want to be called Illegal Terrapin. 'Cause all the ladies want Illegal Terrapin.

Still. Today I get to give a seminar on masturbation, boarding schools, Victorian child prostitutes and the white slave trade. I love my useless degree.

In other news - Infinite Cat makes me believe in the power of wasting time.

1. After a couple of months living nicotine free (not because of any force of willpower, more because you're poor and keep seeing shiny things not made by Benson & Hedges) you break down and buy a pack of smokes so you can have something to do with your hands at the Scary Lesbian Bar where you know you will be far too manic, nervous and hyperactive for anyone's good. To your surprise, the cigarette headspin has returned. In a Proustian moment, so to does sitting behind the dumpsters in a polyester dress bitching about Duke of Edinburgh and whatnot. Moreover, you also have an irresistable desire to comment on aforementioned headspin.

2. Between panicking about essays and avoiding essays on campus you decide to buy a vegetarian facsimile of a sausage roll and a bottle of Fanta. Not that you like either of those things, but taking them outside onto the grass on the quad gives you a sense of irresponsible freedom. Its as though there's a mixed disco coming up in the basketball courts of St Edmunds, your best friend has the new issue of 'Dolly,' and you totally don't have P.E that day.

3. Flicking through the patterns at Spotlight to find the right kicky, idiot-simple pattern for an A-line skirt to craft out of a pair of old orange-and-brown curtains from Vinnies, you see a Very Easy, Very Vogue pattern for a bastardized cheong sam and think that it would make, like, the coolest formal dress ever.

4. When you encounter your best friend from year 10 in a pub (you - savagely reconstructed t-shirt bearing the slogan 'my name is MC Menses and my flow be fresh,' jeans cut off at the knee and hemmed with pink thread, faux-converse shoes bought because they're pink and have skulls on them. She - navy blue air hostess dress from the 60s, knee socks, patent leather Mary Janes), you immediately congratulate each other on how much cooler you are than any of the girls who were in Rock Eisteddford, and how free-thinking and interesting you are. You conclude that you both still fucking hate Nerida Matthei, queen of the tanned, blonde, eating disordered cool kids.

5. There are many reasons why you swoon over your history tutor, but foremost are her Doc Martens, because you remember getting your first pair of Docs and feeling so fucking cool and alternative you could barely stand it, but they wouldn't let you wear them to school because they weren't part of the uniform, and you cried and cried and cried on the inside, and wrote something about how Mrs Mahoney was a fat slut on a toilet door.

There are many reasons to like Aussie MC Macromantics. However, none are greater than the line in her song Who Ha which says "spin 'til ya spew, may the force be with you."

I have my next Woroni article sitting in an open window and, while I've long been disavowed of any belief that Woroni is particularly challenging or difficult, I'm not looking at it. My face feels really flushed and hot from the central heating, and I'm mainly thinking about that. I just got off the phone after talking to the girl, and the article must be written. Its on sex, and how we should all just put our pants on and get on with our lives. But, mainly, it's all about my hot face.

Uh... okay..

Checking referrers is surely one of the great masturbatory joys of the internet, but mine has been hijacked recently. Instead of the usual smattering of Canberra bloggers, poetry bloggers and the odd livejournal photo link (thanks a bunch, you bandwidth-eating asswipes), it's been all Mexican pharmacies, Viagra for women and online poker. I'm suddenly seeing the Google searches for all of the above, so I better say something interesting - bumhole, teen slut, eye poking wonderment. Moreover, a quick whois reveals that my domain has been blacklisted for spam. I clicked onto one of the spam referrers and ctrl+fed the source code and couldn't find my URL anywhere, so this makes me think there's some kind of evil referrer spam conspiracy designed to exploit narcissism. Which sucks, because I find a lot of good reading material through my referrer logs. Lately it's been Lost Hog. Tooth Paste for Dinner is also heaps tops ace, but I didn't find that through my referrer log, unfortunately. I found that when a party kickback thing at mah boy Warwick's place ended with everyone showing each other their favourite websites. I showed everyone McSweeney's because I'm obsessed, and also because this latest list makes me feel oddly vindicated (probably because the last poem I wrote also did not contain the word 'vagina.')

Speaking of poems, here is a poem composed by Google for me.

eye
in
vessel
popped
blood
horny
sonatas
teen
sinestra
dexter
babelicious