The mother of my best friend from high school appeared at my elbow as I read an article about trumpeter swans in the library. While she talked I thought I'd tell her I was only in the library to read things for an article I have to write, and about my new job and how very grown up I am. I also thought that this woman, a little shorter than me but rounder, dressed in Oxfam red velvet and embroidered mesh and so on, looks like a gargoyle. Or, considering the eyeliner, Tammy Faye Baker. My best friend's mother tells me I look well. She tells me she's had her gall bladder removed. I think that Tammy Faye Baker always tells me I look well, the way you tell a mental patient they look relaxed. This must mean I look terrible.

-----

Here is a list of similes to describe Leon, Warwick and I on Warwick's bed:
A basket of puppies.
A stack of wet cordwood.
A bowl of 2 Minute Noodles without any seasoning.
Three haircuts attached to bodies strewn carelessly on a bed.

We are listening to Art of Fighting and staring at the ceiling. We look good, so we decide to take a casual Polaroid of ourselves. After five, no, six shots Warwick looks like a stuffed animal, Leon looks like a clean-cut Ramone and I look like Jack Nicholson. Our narcissism is great, yes, but productive.

Since school ended, I've been lying around my big, mouldering, increasingly mildewy pile of a house doing nothing. Less than nothing, really. I've slept a lot, watched many a nastily made daytime TV documentary (yesterday's was about baby cheetahs), occasionally dragged my bloated hide to the gym. It's been great, but I feel the time has come to actually, I don't know, do something, like the dishes, or take a crack at writing some of the stuff I need to write, or at least make a muslin of the way-cool 70s shirt dress pattern I found at Vinnies, but I don't want to do any of it. Scratch that, I don't feel like I can. Words are not my friend.

I fucking hate this cold, man.

In other news, I saw Michael from Big Brother out at Toast the other night. He was behaving a little like Barbra Streisand. What is this world coming to?

I farted out the last few hundred words yesterday, handed it in, and collapsed on the couch with TamsonCat purring into my chest. I then went out, explored the wonderful world of fibre based printing (it takes a long time and I think I lost track of one of my prints and fixed it 3 times; I look forward to seeing it turn purple or brown or, hopefully, rainbow), watched 'Saved' with the two people I would call if there was ever a dead hooker in my motel room, then drove my man Warwick home from the Phoenix. It was social interaction and I badly needed it.

Today I don't know what to do with myself. The options are as follows: clean my spotty, filthy glasses, finish five or so job applications, do something with my car full of photographic equipment, buy fabric for the craft swap I signed up for, do some laundry, read something, write something... My options are seemingly endless and, to quote a story I read in 'Fence' once, my mind is like a hummingbird - seemingly motionless, but beating its little wings furiously.

What to do, what to do!

1500 words of draft, outline, notes, whatever.
At last count, 641 words of actual essay
Read for a week. Learnt so much about how Lewis Carroll is a sick pederast fuck who photographs nude children, 19th century regulations on obscene postcards, and how moving film was invented when some guy wanted to find out whether all four feet left the ground when a horse trots.
A due date. Last Thursday.
Checked my email an obscene number of times just to make sure I still have the same five spam messages about mortgages and interest rates (honestly, whatever happend to MILF spam? Why can't you entertain me, spammer scum?)

This leaves me with... 2400 words to write. If I was to play the '10% over/under' rule, 2100 words. I'm hoping to have it done by 3pm tomorrow.

I swear to God this is purgatory. My ass hurts from little red demons poking it with pitchforks.

I wonder if I can spin that horse thing out to 300 words?

Update: It's noon the day after writing this and I'm up to 1 465 words exactly. I'm meeting a friend for coffee at 3 because I am GOING MAD FROM LACK OF SOCIAL CONTACT YEEARRGH. I'm also meant to be meeting up with some folks at the gym at 6 but I don't think I'm going to make it, as I doubt I can yank 1 200 words from betwixt my clenched buttocks by then. It's my last essay of the semester, and normally I relish big research papers like this, but right now, close to a week late, I would like to stick my head in an oven.

Another update: 8.33pm and 800/500 words to go. Christ, this thing just doesn't end. For those who are wondering how I've gone through 4 years of uni with these kind of histrionics, I'll let you know it hasn't always been like this. Normally I relish research papers, because I normally start them the day they're assigned. I find that if I traipse down to the library and get out a book or two, maybe print out a couple of journal articles, then read a few paragraphs, I'll get a taste for it. Then, after a month of nonchalent reading, I'll write the thing in a week or so. There's still a mad scramble the night before, but it's not so bad. That was when I had two super fun extra happy arts courses alongside my woeful waste-of-my-life psychology courses (starry eyed year 12 students, be warned - PSYCHOLOGY SUCKS MORE COCK THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY COMPREHEND), so I had a palatable amount of essays to write. This semester it's been a deluge. I just want it to be over.

This may be too much information, but I took one of my nipple piercings out last night. It's a big deal because I had them done a few weeks before my twentieth birthday, therefore, I have had them for over two years. I'd tried taking them out before, with two bits of wet and dry clasped around the balls for grip, but it didn't work, the fuckers wouldn't move. Last night, in an attempt to avoid my desperately overdue essay, I decided to have another crack and it came out easily. It didn't feel anywhere near as creepy as I thought it would, either. That said, it was like removing a part of my body. Feeling this little piece of metal go cold was oddly touching.

In the interests of informing the public, I will share the lessons I have learned about piercing your boobs

- Don't think of it as losing a small, cylindrical section of nipple. Think of it as gaining an orifice.
- Seat belts. Bag straps. Underwire bras. Towels with frayed bits. Pets. Strangers in clubs. These are all things which can, nay, will get caught in your boob piercing. Some people will enjoy the unexpected sensation of metal a metal barbell tugging on their nipple. Others will be nauseated. Which one are you? Have fun finding out!
- Three words - crusted up lymph. Get to know them well. Even after your decorated boobs have healed they're likely to crust up if you sleep on them funny, go for a long run, or catch them on something, which you ineivitably will.
- Cold weather will become that little bit more painful.

I'll take the other one out in a few days after it stops crusting. See? Not only does the crusting never stop, but I'm certain every person reading this finds me devastatingly attractive now.

I don't now why I didn't start his essay sooner. Victorian pornography is the cat's meow, let me tell you. I'm actually pretty disappointed with myself - it looks like I'm heading for credits-distinctions this semester, which is fairly unusual for me. I'm not necessarily a good student, but I have an obsessive little mind and I really enjoy most of my arts subjects. I'm good at reading and reading and reading for essays, thinking, obsessing, boring my friends with inane details. When I was in the 'States a girl asked me to record her voicemail message for her, because of my way-cool accent, and I ranted for two or three minutes into her phone about Japanese children and daycare. If only I could have saved some of that energy for Victorian porn and Digimon, maybe I'd have done better this semester.

Oh, well. C'est la vie.

But, yeah. Check out this quote from a book full of dirty pictures and academic writing called 'Governing Pleasure.'

'Dolly Ashford, the widow of a distributor in Paris, continued the business after her husband's death. She had materials, including obscene books and "some really hot photos," shipped to a friend, Mrs Mason of London, supposedly a respectable woman above reproach. When police opened the packages, Mrs Mason was suitably "shocked" to find such goods under her name, and no charges were brought against her."

Oh, this fills my head with such wonderful images of respectable, gloved, hatted ladies exchanging filthy pictures over supper. Or even gay porn of the type found in this book, where two men with barbershop moustaches and oiled hair fellate each other on a simulated seaside.

I have one horribly overdue essay to finish before I can seek human contact again.

Needless to say, I'm not in the 'States. I chose to cancel and I think I made the right decision. I won't discuss why here, mostly because such things are not good reading.

I'm also feverish and my knees and wrists hurt, which makes me think I'm in for another flare of that whacky lupus. I had a whole rant in my head about how I'm the worst person to have this because I never, ever remember doctor's appointments and medications and blood tests, and I only front up to my doctor when something is really, really wrong and I want it patched up, but I am tired now and need to read more about Victorian pornography.

In a week's time I will be comatose on the couch with my cat and a pile of 'Sweet Valley High' books scavenged from Vinnies. Such things are worth looking forward to.

In the interests of procrastination and maturity, I just did a Google image search for the word 'minge', and guess what came up?



DAMN! What a damn FINE piece of minge that is!

I had a dream last night where I went to the Thrift Store of Fantasies and Mischief and found, on a dusty shelf, a Lubitel TLR, one of those Rolleiflex half frame 35mm cameras, a roll of Marimekko upholstery fabric and a kitten.

Okay, my subconscious is just fuckin' with me now.

Today I have to finish a 2 500 word essay on pan-Asian popular culture, burn through a roll of film so I can develop it and make it into dainty fibre based prints to astonish my friends, spend an hour in the gym with three nerdy boys, spend two hours in another gym with more boys smacking hell out of a heavy bag and soaking my hands in the sweat of countless others, do some laundry and maybe eat.

What have I done so far? Woken up at 9am as I have done all week. Stumbled around in grey tracky dacks eating vegemite toast and drinking tea. Read 'Slash' 'cause that's what I do. And finally - finally! uploaded the new About page. There's also a new photo, even though I hate taking pictures of myself. I'm impersonating a puffer fish. Those who know me will be familiar with my impressions of aquatic life.

Excuse me, I stink. I shall go shower for the good of humanity.

for the past two weeks, the first thing I do when I wake up is make a cup of tea, sit down and read Greg Bear's 'Slant.' This is shameful because Greg Bear is the kind of author who gets a boner over lush descriptions of rich people's houses, impenetrable IT jargon and medical speak. He should be the manifestation of everything I hate but I can't stop reading his stuff. I mentally snorted 'Blood Music' in a day a few months back, and now I'm hankerin' to read 'Queen of Angels.' However, the strange thing is I can only read this kind of bland science fiction when I first wake up, and then only when I have a cup of tea in my hand.

In other news, my sister Blockhead completed her first clinical yesterday. For those who came in late, Blockhead is my younger sister, more gallingly competent in the parts of life that prevent you from being electrocuted and run over by things and so on. In this family, she's the straight man to my bumbling buffoon, the go-to girl when light bulbs need changing and cats need to be taken to the vet. Now she's living in Melbourne with her boyfriend, Ron McD. He studies teaching and she studies nursing, and their bills always get paid and their kitchen never gets cleaned.

It's strange to think of my sister as a health care provider. She's a phenomenally talented musician. She used to teach small, wide-eyed children piano in our house, and I'd do my best to stay out of the way or at least put some pants on while they were here. She tells me the school she's at has prosthetic buttocks so student nurses can practice giving enemas. Now try and get that mental image out of your head.

In other news, our Momo is leaving us. She will be missed.