- Joy Division + pub + Monday night = awesome

- Don't leave your gym bag outside the gym where all the other bags are. Ignore the fact you've done this every day for the entire three years you've been going to that gym, just don't do it. Why? Because some cocksucker will steal your bag and, with it, your hand wraps, mouth guard, gloves, jeans, and Paul Frank special edition Pro Keds. And you will be heartbroken, so very, very heartbroken.

- A combination of Rogue Wave, Cocorosie, Madvillain and Cibo Matto makes darkroom time the happiest time of all.

- After a break up you may want to know all the gory details. The how, the why, the who, the where. The truth is you don't need to know, it won't make you feel any better to know, and thinking about such things will is only prodding at your poor shattered heart. These things are said with bitterest experience.

- Don't wear your incredibly hot and highly impractical new shoes to see a rather good band. You will become that girl standing off to the side, clinging to her jacket, looking perplexed and anxious.

Sorry for the interruption. Being the major goofus I am I totally let the domain expire, and then it took far, far too long to repropagate. But I'm back, and my brain has turned to cotton wool after sitting up implausibly hand stitching an applique onto a scarf, half watching 'Hornblower' on late night TV.

If you ever want to check out some inspired video art do it with Miss Cheney and Leon. We went to see Bill Viola on Saturday and it was ace. After a frustrating lecture and a screening of the video 'Chott el-Djerid' (there was a cool red pond; I zoned out after that) we ran giggling to the last room of the exhibit, where massive video projections of water gurgled and loomed. We were the first ones in so we ran around and around and around like two year olds, making shadow puppets on the walls, impersonating sea life and playing tips. You've got to believe me, it's the only way to experience art.

We then funnied up some sugar packets. Oh yes, we funnied them good. For about an hour four adult people sat around a table at a cafe, fighting for possession of our one pen and snorting over such comic gems as 'Sugar: the other, other, other white meat,' 'sugar: the yum dandruff,' and 'appearances can deceive - I taste like burning.'

The moral of this story is we are cool. Or, rather, we would be cool if we were still in year three.

I met some big, contented fish today, fish who can best be described as fat and living with a turtle. I sincerely hope people say that about me in the future.

'There's Rachael. She's fat and she lives with a turtle.'

And there I am, all old and round, sitting on a porch with a sleepy-eyed turtle next to me munching on some lettuce, or whatever it is turtles like to eat. The turtle I met today ate pieces of pear. She had a sweet face.

I also electrocuted myself several times, but that's boring.

- Walking through Sacramento airport on my way to the unseen place that would be my home - my green, unreal, boozy home - for the next year.
- Pulling a body wire through my sleeve and plugging in to the human version of a retractable leash for my first fencing bout.
- Strapping a bolster cushion to my head, sucking a mouthguard around my gums and stepping (or, rather, untangling myself from the ropes and then stumbling) into the boxing ring for the first time.
- Lying next to a warm, welcoming body and wondering if it was love or a mild case of stomach flu.
- Finishing year twelve without going to any kind of formal, graduation or friendly pissup, and wondering what to do with my antisocial self for the next sixty or so years.
- Staring down the barrel of my last year of uni and realising my greatest achievement in life thus far has been mastering the application of liquid eyeliner.
- Sitting in a tattoo studio in a small US college town with a collection of upper middle class high school students, a fresh hickey on my neck and an illustration of a North Atlantic cod in my hand.
- Going to school the day after my dad died, expecting nothing but wanting coherent anonymity, and finding my dad's obituary passed around my Pastoral Care class.
- Going out in a pair of pink high top sneakers with skulls - skulls! printed on the side, and wondering if anyone would come and ask to be introduced to shoes so clearly awesome.

When I heard about the girl left in the school sick bay my heart went to my knees. Being left in the school sick bay was one of my number one fears as a little tacker, and to think teachers would actually do such a thing to a kid is horrible.

Okay, as far as phobia-causing childhood traumas go, I'm sure there are worse. Dog bitings, spider scares, random pantsings, urinary problems at sleepovers, all scary stuff. But every time I went to the sick bay in primary school, every single time, I would lie there staring at the CPR poster wondering if someone would ever come check on me, or if they even bothered to call my parents or look for a bandaid. I mean, what would happen if they completely forgot about me, the school was locked and the heaters turned off? I'd be alone, all alone, staring out the window at stunted trees in implausible cages (to stop them from running away from the shadeless asphalt and Indian burns administered by cruel-eyed, merciless children) until it got too dark. I'd listen to the sound of high heels on lino to hear if the admin lady, who always had one of those bulbous pens on a cord around her neck, would come closer.

Poor kid. Such things would really mess a person up.

A couple of months ago Miss Cheney and I were walking to my car contemplating the enormous hole now in the centre of Civic. I like the hole because it makes Canberra look more like a proper city, like Sydney, because Sydney is full of big holes and tacky buildings which must be walked past between bus stops. Cheney did not like the whole because she said heights scared her. Not because she thought she'd fall, but because she knew she'd just hop off. 'It'd be stupid,' she told me. 'Like this.' She hopped forward with with her chin pulled in to her neck and her wrists flapping, kind of like she had cerebral palsy but to say that would earn me a place in hell and, truth be told, I'd deserve it for ragging on people with broken brains.

Anyway. Somehow we decided that, if we were to ever die tragically, a bronze monument would be erected of us both hopping over an edge, wrists flapping, kind of like a really stupid Thelma and Louise. And sitting at work with nothing to do, the cleaning guys whistling in the corridor while the soporific sound of distant keystrokes floats around my ears, I started thinking about how I'll have to make Cheney re-enact her possible future death while I have a camera. Then I thought I'll have to buy batteries for my camera. Then I thought, you know who wants to know about this? The internet, that's who. My dear, sweet internet, heaving with websites on men who look like Kenny Rogers and manipulated cats.

I gotta get me some hobbies.

It was with the greatest sense of satisfaction that I lined up in the Co-Op Bookshop with all the other down-trodden people clutching their $300 biology textbook and feebly bound law summaries, my arms full of new, non-required books. I bought 'Tokyo Cancelled' by Rana Dasgupta, the new Granta (it's about factories) and that Dave Eggers one - 'How We Are Hungry.' I'm not sure I even really like Dave Eggers. I haven't read 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,' but I've read a few of his essays online and found them vaguely hectoring in tone. However, I am a huge McSweeneys fangirl, and I do side part my hair, wear thick-rimmed glasses, and I once used wadded up receipts as earplugs at a show. I think it's written down somewhere that people such as me must read Dave Eggers, so I will. At least it isn't Jonathan Safran Foer destroying masculinity. Vegan and origamist? Gosh.

I haven't had much of a chance to read 'How we are Hungry,' but 'Tokyo Cancelled' is delicious. It's about 13 people who get stranded in an unnamed airport overnight on their way to Tokyo. They tell each other stories to while away the night, and it's really just a ruse to get to these lush, fantastical, almost psychedelic tales about women who turn into buildings, tailors who never get paid by kings, and a girl who makes trees grow in her sleep. Admittedly, the first few pages where the author sets the thing up irritated me a little, because he Capitalises Things in the middle of sentences, a fairly transparent way of Generating a Sense of Child-Like Whimsy, but this is great stuff.

The latest Granta is good, too, but I really wish they'd stop pretending to be all about writing. It's all about pleasant British people telling pleasant and interesting stories. There's a cracker of an essay in there about factories in China, but my favourite is a pleasant British man talking about growing up in the shadow of the Terry's chocolate factory. It'll be handy for long bus trips and airports.

Accompanying this feast of the vaguely pretentious is the new Sufjan Stevens album, 'Come on, feel the Illinoise' (hee), 'Elk' by Inge Liljestrom and, as of Saturday, 'Skeleton Jar' by Youth Group. I went to see them play at the Green Room and they were lovely, with very interesting hair and the most worn Converse I've seen since my friend British Alex left for his homeland (he was great - a small, blinking music lover whose shoes clung to him by righteouosness alone. He's the only person I've met who could be accurately described as a lush, and he had fascinating Californian girls falling in love with him all over the place) 'Skeleton Jar' is friendly and lovely, but 'Elk' is stunning. It's big and cinematic and Inge has a hot voice and an awesome name. Phoenix is an incredible song. I've taken to staring at the ceiling and contemplating things whilst listening to this.

I haven't really listened to much of Mr Stevens. I think I've heard him in a few friend's cars, and I've definitely made out to his delicate folksy voice a few times. I bought it after hearing, uhm, you know, that song, I think it's called Casimir Pulaski Day on the radio, a song which now strikes me as painfully smurfy. Fortunately, the rest of it is fantastic. The Black Hawk War is just beautiful. I don't see myself listening to it too much, though. It's a touch Dave Eggerish - that is, a little too pleased with itself.

All this is good, but rather softcock. It's fortunate Roots Manuva is coming to ANU soon, and may I say, squee. Gravel voiced British MCs are so farkin' hot. You should totally come with me to witness the fitness.

I have a new arrival. His name is MacBain. I'm writing this on him now. He's a 14" iBook with a little extra RAM for spice, and I waited for the product update, so if I was to drop him now he'd turn his hard drive off, and if I wanted to scroll through something I could do it with two fingers. Rather saucy, if you ask me.

When I first opened him he asked if I wanted to copy the guts of Baby Mac (now retired), and I said yes, but now I'm a little disappointed. All the accumulated digital cruft from Baby Mac is now on MacBain, and I was kind of hoping for tabula rasa. It beats transferring all the files and settings you need, I guess, but when I opened Safari all my bookmarks were staring at me, defying my attempts to transfer everything to del.icio.us. Ah, well.

New hardware is such a thrill. I bought new powerboards and cleaned out my office. I even cleaned the printer. MacBain is beautiful and clean and new and I plan to keep him that way. I'm typing on one of those keyboard condoms now, very Howard Hughes, but if it prevents every bit of oil, grease, dirt, cat hair and food from finding its way between the keys I surely don't mind.

All I need to do is figure out how to make it say things in alarm. Whenever something went wrong Baby Mac would pipe up with 'Help! She's touching my special area!' I figure the appropriate thing for MacBain to say is 'ah, Maria, my mighty heart is breaking.'

Smooth.

1am? When I get word constipated I sound like Little Lord Fauntleroy, which is bad because in real life I'm like a hyperactive primary school child at a sleepover. I cuss until my mouth turns black and never quite get over the novelty of dirty words. I say 'cunt' a lot, and am always surprised when people recoil in horror at what is apparently the uber-cuss. A lady I worked with (she showed miniature horses [I will offend someone, but people who show animals are universally neurotic, obsessive and highly, highly weird - it's enough to make you haunt dog shows everywhere] and thought pregnant women were gross and should stay at home) was always shocked whenever I said 'cunt.' 'I have to be really, really angry to use the c-word,' she said, 'and even then I don't like it.'

I've been up for an hour or so knocking off a couple of pieces two whole days before the deadline. I'm so virtuous I make myself nauseous. Such things are always good for clearing the writerly bowels and now I just want to spread words like chocolate eggs on easter. Refrigerator, yoyo, pangolin, mauve, saddle shoe. For some reason I keep thinking of this unfunny anecdote about how I waved to a ginger boy in the gym. I thought he was my marvellously gay friend Dave, who is quite the buff boy but abalone pale like me and red haired. I saw a boy just like him on the old elliptical trainer and I saluted at him in this dicky way and he just looked confused. To hide my embarrassment I seriously considered going up to him and saying all ginger boys look alike, and he should be used to strangers waving and smiling and saying 'hey, periodhead!' by now.

I've been meaning to send some do-gooderish emails soliciting entries for a gay and lesbian literary festival for a long time. I should have sent them weeks ago, but they've reached the stage where even typing in the email address is an admission of my chronic lack of responsibility. I think I might prod the cats until the swat at my eyes instead.

I had spent a great Saturday night with friends glaring down Sportsgirl-clad clones in a bar, inviting a group of delightfully foppish lesbians to share our couch while we talked about the craziness that is finishing uni, reading interesting things aloud to each other, then going to Mr Thom and Miss Alice's to play Scattergories. I've never played Scattergories before, being of the quiet belief that board games shouldn't be played in polite company, but it was fun. You learn a lot about people. Jamie found a multitude of ways to refer to weed, meaning pot, meaning Mary Jane (I love you) and obscure bits of Chinese trivia. Miss Cheney made the keen observation that goats, like grass and geraniums, also grow. Francis (meaning Frank) insisted that he was afraid of igloos. And I discovered a nanna side to me I barely though existed. My world was filled with mauve, with cardigans, with tea and with baps, a Scottish breakfast food starting with 'b.' It's official, my future is clear and it's filled with lavender, British historical dramas and sensible shoes.