Judith Butler is Lecturing in Sydney on the 18th. Seeing as I could well be around for that, who's up for some made-up words and a lot of brow furrowing?

The essay du jour asks me how poststructuralism has shaped feminist history, the kind of question you will only ever be asked at school, and you'll be expected to answer with knowledge you will never use again, ever. I'm sorely tempted to respond with 'how the fuck would I know?' but I can think of no way to stretch that out to 2 500 words. Basically it's a bunch of theoretical pissfartery, and I'm sorely tired of it. I keep seeing all these super rad NITA kids filming people's feet and welding things and rolling around in paint for their assessment and the jealousy is killing me. It's okay, though. I have three other essays to write, and one of them is for a class where we got to watch Digimon in the tutorial, and the other is on Hustler. Can I repeat that? I'm writing an essay about Hustler.

I'm in an extended brain break at the moment. In the interests of breaking brains everywhere, I would like to draw people's attention to the following websites - Post Secret and A Photo A Day, (yes, again). I'm also clicking through Learning To Love You More, and you should be, too.

Oy, what a week, filled with unwarranted emotional buttfucking and that little 'cli-click' sound as the universe cocks with fuck-with-me gun. In the interests of looking on the bright side, keeping one's mind on the positive, grey skies are gonna clear up, tomorrow! tomorrow! I love ya, tomorrow! happy faceness, and also in prolonging the agony until I have to shower and dress and go outside where, undoubtedly, midgets are hidden behind trees with golf clubs to kneecap me and dance on my twitching corpse, I am going to type up Happy Things in my Head.

- Highlighters. I can no longer leave gaps between highlighted bits when I'm reading, I have to go back and colour them in, so I now have reading bricks filled with cheerful slabs of fluorescent ink.

- My Holga is on its way! Woo! I'm thinking of experimenting with one of those b&w films that can be processed in C41. I've heard a rumour that, if you process a film to have a slight brownish or sepia tint, it's almost like a built-in filter so it does something neat to the contrast when you print it. If someone knows anything more about this (*cough*Ed*cough) let me know. I'm also considering drilling a bigger aperture into the thing. Oh, the fun that will be had...

- I just heard the postie on his coughing, hacking, spluttering postie bike. I then scampered out the front in my checkered jammies, the same red wifebeater I wore to the gym and my Don King hair to retrieve a collection of bills. Why? Twenty two years of being a gigantic child, that's why.

- I just uploaded a new photo of my friend Joe in the forest, and if this picture of Goblin Joe, Protector of the Forest doesn't make you immediately smile I don't want to know you.

- Miss Cheney, my staple friend (lit. trans: as the staple diet of people in Papua New Guinea is yams, my staple diet is Cheney. Read that however you will), for more reasons than can be listed here, but mainly for rocking the hizzouse and dropping everything to comfort me in a moment of Norma Desmond histrionics.

In order to assuage one of my many late night existential crises, (see below), I spent this afternoon clicking around employment, real estate and university websites trying on different versions of my future like so many novelty hats. Unfortunately, most employment websites do nothing but cramp my style. It's all finance and banking, H.R and I.T, government and defence, call centres and customer service. Where are all the cool jobs? Where are the positions for Professional Muses and Chick Who Brings the Vibes and Corporate Tiddlywinks Consultant? I could so do that. The real estate is even more dull. What I'm after is something like 'crew of freaked-out, zany, nattily dressed hippies seek straightman for their escapades. Must be able to impersonate aquatic life.' Instead it's all professional this and partially furnished that. Le sigh. How's a girl supposed to dream about a brave new world outside Canberra when everything insists on being so boring??

Man, these cold nights are knocking me for six. Pale skinned hobbitess I am, I usually like the cold, and when I'm out cold nights turn me into this bouncing, manic, Pollyanna positive nightmare. However, when I'm stuck inside our big, draughty pile of a house the cold is just brain-numbing. After two nights covering the spectrum of totally crap (read - skulking from pub to pub with my friend Chloe whining about how NOTHING IS EVER GOOD and WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE ME and DID THAT GUY LOOK AT ME FUNNY?! I'LL POUND HIM I WILL!!) and totally ace (read - seeing mah Monkey and mah Mattay and their foxy new Alienware computer, hanging out with Joe and my girl Cheney and their filmmaker friend, conversations at the Wig & Pen so good I totally forgot I was leaning over in my 'fuck the world, the tits are coming out' shirt, followed by good-natured cock blocking at the Phoenix), I decided on a night in on the pretense that I would do homework and wake up feeling righteous and productive. Well, surprisingly enough, I haven't been productive. I wound up watching - wait for it - The English Patient with my mum and sewing, then clicking ineffectually around the internet while the end of semester/beginning of winter/day ending with 'y' existential crisis closed steadily around me.

Not that I don't believe in the restorative powers of a night of nanna-hood, mind. One of the great benefits of living at home is that, when everything is too hard and the world hates me, I can stay in with my mum and drink tea and eat toast and sew things. Fortunately, this happens pretty rarely, but I'm seriously growing out of my life. The past four years have been school punctuated by the soul-diminishing drudgery that is casual work, and only now have I had enough. And I still have another year of honours to go, which I am so very, very ambivalent about. The whole point of it is to get a first so I can graduate from a HECS debt to a PELS debt. In short, I've got to go balls-to-the-wall for honours, so it's probably not the best idea for me to get another job and keep working. So, I'm facing the prospect of another financially dead year while I fritter away my youth on higher education. Which I want to do. Really. Kind of. Can I answer this question later?

I'm fed up. I've had enough of Canberra. I've had enough of being a student. I've had enough of living at home, and I've had enough of being $800 short of getting the government to foot the bill for me to move out.

Wow, that got surprisingly sulky.

Cleatus the Foetus, the portable hard drive containing my backups and all my Mp3s (found)
The Baby Mac's AC adaptor (found)
A very overdue copy of Stone Butch Blues (found)
The knee-length jeans that make me feel like a way-cool 1950s teen off to a sockhop. I docked them off at the knees myself (not bloody found)
My schmick new hand made wallet (found; unfortunately Leon twisted his ankle in the process and wound up in hospital)
My incredibly dog eared copy of the Pillow Book (found, thank Christ, it's my literary security blanket)
< emo>Self respect and dignity (not found. Excuse me, I'll be the one in the corner staring at my shoes through thick rimmed glasses, quietly listening to Bright Eyes)
Car keys (found)
Car keys (lost)
Gym ID (found)
Gym ID (lost)
Gym ID, car keys and an apple so wizened it actually donned a small red cap and sat there smoking a corn cob pipe, its little anthropomorphic twig arms crossed across its wrinkled apple chest (found)
The cable that enables me to recharge Gigi the iPod (yes, I name everything, and no, I haven't found it)
The lens cap for my Olympus (still lost, but easily replaced by stealing a lens cap from someone else's camera, heh heh heh)
A sense of humour coherent to those not living inside my head (lost, heh, sauerkraut! Broccoli! pancake batter! I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN)
The silver St Jude medallion I wear always to appease my atavistic Catholicism (found; I swear, he was behind the couch)
Faith in the Canberra gay/lesbian/chick-making-out-with-other-chick-as-party-trick community (lost, unlikely to be found)

In the words of my former housemate, 'Christ, Rachael, things just leave you.'

Thank you, U.S Consular Services, for taking at least three years off my life through your RELENTLESS INSANE RED TAPE ARRRGH!! I had dreams where I was back in the scary hermetically sealed U.S Consulate in Sydney (yeah, that's right, SYDNEY, even though the goddamn EMBASSY is in CANBERRA) with the pretty view of the harbour and the security guards and the lumpen high-school-quarterback type who, behind an inch of polycarbonate, conducted that bizaare visa interview and... ARRRGH!!

It's okay, though. After a quick call to the Visa Help Line ($2.50 a minute for fantasies, or just listen in) I found out I don't need to get another visa, that visa waiver program where you struggle to fill out an I-94 on your tray table on the way over covers my ass.

Out of interest, I briefly glanced at the website of the Australian counterpart of the U.S Consulate. The website was nicely designed, pleasant to look at, and you can apply for visas online and they cost you AUD$20. What?? Even your basic tourist visa to the U.S costs at the very, very least USD$100.

So, yeah. I'm going to the 'States in June. Again. I absolutely cannot wait to see my friends again. Still. It feels like a high falutin' trip to Melbourne or Perth at the moment, plus customs officers and security removing crochet hooks and tweezers from my carry on luggage.

Sitting up last night hand finishing a buttonhole (aka procrastisewing), I had the misfortune to catch the beginning of the new Big Brother. I wish I could say I'm one of those people who don't watch TV, never watch TV, are always outside in the sunshine with the twittering birds and the righteousness and whatnot, but I'm not. My life stops for Oz, because where else is a girl supposed to get her fix of prison rapes and shankin's? Also, how else are you meant to occupy the fidgety, toddlerish parts of your brain when you're sewing something? Last night it was rather bad, though, because buttonholes are notoriously tricky and every person in this years Big Brother makes me hate. Let me reiterate - Big Brother makes me haaaaaaaaaate. Seriously, it's like they've gone out to Mooseheads (lit. trans. for non-Canberrans - the big, noisy hang out for ADFA cadets, rugbyheads and other boys with roofies in their pockets and girls shivering in Supre skirts and silly, brittle high heels) with a big butterfly net and caught the most contemptable, the most stupid, the most slutty and crammed them into one house. The second these broads stumbled into the house they started asking each other, in that shrill, Supre girl voice, if they were single. And there I was cursing at my rat paw hands and the needle in my fingers and the girls on screen and TamsonCat attempting to dig her way through my belly and, to copy shamelessly from Sars, HAAAAAATE!

It's okay, though. I've at the computer writing since 9am to the sounds of Missy Elliot, so I'm feeling appropriately productive. I'm mailing two now-finished wallets to a couple of lucky ladies in Canada and the US, and I fully intend on wasting a couple of hours in the darkroom later on. So it's all good, even if the world is being taken over by evil nasty skanks.

My nights are becoming depressingly routine. Somehow, without realising it, it's midnight and this wave of panic rises up in my gut and I think I've gotta do something to make today worthwhile before I go to bed. What could I possibly do to make today not wasted? This day, being Wednesday, I achieved the following:

- Rolled out of bed and into school where, in a sweaty, nauseating rush I finished a tutorial presentation then, uhm, presented aforementioned tutorial presentation. The presentation was basically 'Why Rachael Loves Foucault and Wants to Have His Babies if He'd Come Back From The Grave and Let Her.' Prior to this I had a tutorial for History of Western Sexuality, a class I love long time, and shamed myself by totally not knowing what the adorable china-doll tutor was talking about and only doing half of one of the readings.

- Wasted time to-ing and fro-ing about campus until I had to go to the gym to meet with my Weight Training Posse. Lifted large weights repeatedly in a variety of comical positions. Developed jelly of the shoulder and twitching of the right buttock. Rather annoying.

- Slumped in the student association office, careful to undo any healthful affect of gym time with the administration of jelly babies. In so doing I blatantly, unabashedly abused couches provided by students' money to further the time of those FILTHY, SELF-SERVING STUDENT POLITICIANS, like the women's officer who works for approximately 15c an hour THE MONEY GRUBBING BITCH!!

- Dragged complaining ass to yet another tutorial. A friend commented that I looked tired. I responded by pitching face first into my open reading brick, smearing highlighter ink onto myself in the process.

- Went to have hair cut by new hairdressing main squeeze. Read Cosmo. Snorted salon-issue flat white. Discussed important things like whether white streaks in my infant fringe would be, like, way too much.

- Hauled ass to Johns' college, aka the homophobic rugbyhead college, for some form of meeting with the sexuality officers. Realized when I got there that I was invited out of politeness. Sat in a corner occasionally spouting Ranting Femmo Bullshit, because after four years of putt(ing) words i(n) paren(theses) and mainlining feminist theory I'M ENTITLED TO, DAMNIT. Quietly ruminated on the thought that I know nothing about the real world, am irrelevent, and will never amount to much. Resolved this by bleating for reassurance every so often.

- Drove Blouse Wearin' Chardonnay Swillin' Bleedin' Heart Elite comrades home.

- Came home, ate, slumped on couch, pissed away time with New Scientist and some high falutin' documentary on the Archibald Prize. Ruminated on the thought that this is the way retired nannas with nothing better to do spend their time. Contemplate calling people and asking, in a shrill, whining voice, to hang out. Realize that this would involve showering and putting on clothes not stained by a terrible hair dye incident. Stay in.

- Decide to tell the entire internet about the celestial brainfart that is my life.

- Find three missed calls on my phone. Feel inexplicably harrassed.

What I have not done: The reading, highlighting, more reading and additional highlighting that constitutes my university education. Any form of work on any essay (there are four now, adding up to 10 000 words in total, all of them research papers, all due in less than a month). Any kind of photo editing or uploading. Any kind of emailing of writing samples and article pitches to any kind of publication.

Do I go to bed with my to-do list tugging at my sleeve?

Think I will, actually.

'Night, all.

I just made the text on the webpage I was looking at (Tomato Nation, natch) bigger so I could see it without squinting. And I'm wearing my glasses. And the other day my weight training instructor told me I 'carry a lot of tension' in my neck, and I was all, I know, I grind my teeth until they're little bitty stubs. I can feel myself getting more geriatric by the second, and I'm still 22.

I'm in the NLA with a stack of stern-faced books on history, feminism and post-structuralism (WHAT WHAT!!). Yesterday, when I was here with the same stack of stern-faced books because Lord knows I can't bear to part with them, some guy was looking at porn on one of the library computers. Like, honest to God hardcore pr0n. Out of the corner of my eye I honestly thought he might have been looking at pictures of surgery, or meat, or something, and I guess in a way he was. Anyway, I kept walking past this guy, giving him a quizzical look every time, but I didn't know what to do. I could have whispered it to one of the behind-the-desk trolls, but I could see them apprehending him and him getting all embarrassed and flustered and defending his innocence and I didn't want to create a scene, there was a group of three twelve year old girls Googling their homework on the other side of him. But, still, looking at porn in the National Library is pretty farkin' tacky, man. You've got to be fairly desperate for a fix of Pounding, More Pounding, Further Pounding and An Addendum to Pounding to look for it in a building best known for containing a book bound in human skin. He left before I summoned the courage to tell someone, which is probably for the best. But, yeah. Come on, dude, leave it at home.

Darren Hanlon was adorable, witty and, uhm, adorable. Bron and I decided to take him home in a cardboard box with air holes poked in the lid. The banner people were there and undies were thrown on stage. However, the best part was being in a room full of people all falling in love with Holly Throsby. Le sigh. She wore a blue dress, clearly recognisable as a former WAAF dress, red stockings and Blundstones. She sang in a sweet, quavering voice and kept blinking hair out of her eyes. In short, she was the embodiment of one of the Three Types of Girl who make my tummy squishy. I love her and I will marry her and she will be my wife and we'll have scones for tea every day.

Edited to say: Architecture in Helsinki are playing this Thursday at the ANU Bar. Who's up for it? If it's cheap I'm going, but only if it is very inexpensive on account of the brokeness.

For my birthday the venerable Miss Chloe gave me a Sonic Youth starter pack, and what an ace idea that was. I'd once mentioned to her I'd never really listened to much Sonic Youth, even though I knew I should. Now I'm thoroughly addicted, to the idea as well as the music. I wonder if I could introduce anyone else to really good music they haven't really had the chance to listen to? I would like to extend my services for Bjork, my musical lover since I was fourteen, Art of Fighting and, aw hell, why not include the Decemberists, in Australia at least.

I haven't posted in a while, and I have a very good reason. We recently obtained a Senseo, and, as a result, I've been sucking caffeine until my eyes roll back in my head and I can see through the fabric of space and time. I've been looking after Senseo, too. Every time I make another rich, delicious cup of crack - I mean, coffee - I take out the little pod holder (ISN'T IT DARLING??) and rinse it and hold it up to the light to make sure the hole isn't clogged. I flush Senseo once a week, I take out the Outflow Assembly and wash it in soapy water per the instructions, I remove the drip-filled drip tray regularly. What need have I for friends when I have Senseo, the machine that needs me as much as I need her delicious, delicious machine juice? Ah, but Senseo is a fickle mistress. Lately I've been noticing that she is producing less of that vital liquid that keeps me standing and thinking and writing the MANY MANY ESSAYS CLINGING TO MY BACK LIKE SO MANY ESSAY-CRAZED MONKEYS. I've tried everything, I've disassembled and reassembled the Outflow Assembly, flushed her many times, carefully wiped out the rim of the Flavour Seal. But still, there is less coffee in my adorable little SENSEO brand cup, which came in the bonus Senseo gift pack - retail value of $40, yours for absolutely nothing! This morning as I gazed, disappointed, into yet another too-small cup of Senseo drippings I found myself looking for the Phillips Customer Care number. At 8.30am I was going to call the poor, sleep-deprived schlub working in the call centre and ask why my precious, I mean, my Senseo was producing less coffee, and then that person would have to pretend like they care and I'd be able to hear the strain in their voice as they think why, why does our society make people like this possible? Why didn't I stay in school and get that massage therapy diploma?

So, yeah, I didn't call the Phillips Customer Care hotline, but I do think I'll curl up on the kitchen bench with Senseo tonight and sing her sweet lullabyes so she feels more regular in the morning.