The guy at the camping store this morning looked at me with suspicion when I asked for the cheapest, dodgiest sleeping bag they have. 'It's not going to keep you warm,' he said. 'Don't you want to have a look around?'

'No,' I said. 'I'm leaving for Falls in an hour and besides I'll be too drunk to notice the cold.'

With that optimistic note I paid $19.95 for a tightly rolled, crappy sleeping bag that shall never be so tightly rolled again, and soon I will set forth to wrestle wretchedly with tent poles, sleep in dirt, dance with friends and enjoy the outdoors. I can't wait.

I was given a reason to believe in Israel again - hot chicks with guns.

Seriously, hopefully the thumbnail clicking full size image thing will actually work because those ladies are smokin.' Children of God, indeed.

Today is Christmas. Blockhead is watching Pride and Prejudice, because our generation felt their first sensations in their underpants area when Colin Firth climbed dripping from that pond, I'm ripping Christmas CDs to share illegally with my friends (highlights include Sleater-Kinney, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Sodastream, The Rapture and enough Patsy Cline to keep me weepin' til the New Year), and my mother is sleeping off the dead turkey. All in all pretty standard. I'm missing my friends, though, because I spend 99.99% of my waking life with them and sitting around in my own house alone feels like someone has removed a hemisphere of my brain, so hopefully Miss Cheney and her good Pictish man will rescue me later on.

I wonder if you can get a gift basket of female Israeli soldiers delivered...

Sixteen Across is a collection of short stories set in Adelaide by Holly Gramazio.

I really, really enjoy short fiction, and these are definitely quite enjoyable. Take this bit from 7 down.

Matthew hates the stroller. He wants to stop on a whim and peer under low benches, he wants to pick up snails by their handles without being told off, he wants to build multistoried castles from sticks and dead leaves for them to live in. Sarah wants to be home and asleep, she wants to get out of town without stopping every thirty seconds for Matthew to pick up rubbish (yes, she'll have to say, well done, now put it in the bin; no, don't put your fingers in your mouth till we've had a chance to wash them). She wants to walk down the wrong street and find out where that music's coming from. She wants to go into the hairdresser's across the road and come out with ridiculous hair.

Via Boynton

I found myself clicking through Jeanette Winterson's website (I'm not linking to it in case her web dude goes through the referrers and is all, Jeanette, this broad over here is bitching about you, and she'll be all who in the hey now, and she'll click into my skeletons and kittens and look through my poems and be all 'hey, step off, bitch,' and I really couldn't handle being told to step off by one of my favourite authors of all time) and while Jeanette Winterson is one of my favourite authors of all time something about the tone of the whole thing irked me.

'Poetry!' She exclaims. 'Cooking! Travel! Real food, real words, real, honest, earthy sex! That's what a soul needs!'

My soul needs poetry mixed up with gossip magazines, thank you very much. Sometimes the soul is fed better by a good dose of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie gossip and half a pack of Tim Tams than it is by Dylan Thomas and persimmons.

Actually, I imagine very little is fed by a persimmon.

And quite frankly I don't have the money to travel. I'd love to just swan off to Brazil and France to see how it's hanging but I have $8.50 in the bank and a quarter of a tank of petrol. Besides, I don't like living out of a suitcase and I suspect I'm prone to DVT.

And I'd like to know where exactly she's finding all this amazing sex because... well, the internet doesn't need to know about the moist and gristly underbelly of my private life, but suffice it to say my life has been sorely lacking in earthy, randy, full-bosomed artist types.

I love you, Jeanette, but in your website you come across as a little bit cantankarous.

I used to be far more involved in this whole blogging nonsense than I am now. Really, I just keep it up out of habit, and because the internet really wouldn't be the same without my incessant whimpering. I'm probably not the best blogger, either, because I don't like revealing specific details about my life, just my vast and profound opinions. It's probably a good thing because my life consists of (1) smoking with a variety of people on a variety of front steps, porches, verandahs, in backyards and in pubs, (2) puzzling over the sewing machine at home, (3) working.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that no one informed me that Momo, of Momofreaksout fame, has a new blog. Shame! Shame on everyone!

I'm not kidding, I want to be Momo when I grow up.

She has rockin' taste in music and clothes and she works in publishing and moves overseas at the drop of a hat. Hell, I break into a cold sweat just thinking of shuffling down a state or two.

< sychophancy >

Momo has a blog and I can read about her and wonder how a person gets to be so cool.

< /sycophancy >

Whenever I'm at work I feel like Ted Kaczynski!

Which is to say I feel like a possibly autistic mathematics professor who likes bombs!

JUST KIDDING!!

I feel very lonely and sad at work, then I txt msg my friends and they DON'T WRITE BACK and that makes me even sadder!

You think I am trying to be funny when I am ONLY HONEST!! This week I had my HEART in my THROAT most of the time and BOY IS MY THROAT SORE!!

Today a TV attacked my arm and that is true!

I am lonely but after work I don't want to see anyone! Maybe I can go out in a LARGE BROWN BOX so I can look out but people can't look in and I am also in a LARGE BROWN BOX!!

Someone VERY IMPORTANT left yesterday and I didn't think it would make me as sad as I am!

There's no way to gussy up a plea for internet help so HERE IS A KITTEN!!



I JUST SNEEZED!!

Edited to Say: HERE IS ANOTHER KITTEN!



Further edited to say: I was walking through another office when the cleaning guy, a tall, bro-ish but friendly sort who enjoys kickboxing and, uhm, kickboxing, gestured at me from behind a vase of flowers. Actually, he said 'psst' and I didn't know people said 'psst' in this day and age. 'Check this out,' he said, and pointed to a flower (some kind of spiky native) in the vase. 'Look at it up close, there's little ribbons in there. Isn't it cool?' It's true, there were.

'European flowers are nice from a distance, but natives are so much better up close. More detail.'

I wanted to hug hum, but I kept that too myself.

The row of pimples along my chin and I have a brand new tag-based obsession - Library Thing. It's Del.icio.us for your bookshelf, a literary Flickr, and it wastes hours and hours of time at work. Want to judge me? Look here. You won't see everything I have (the Patricia Cornwall years will never see the light of day), nor can you see the sassy Shauny-style colour coordination, but it's social librarying.

My pimples and I are pleased and distracted. If they had thumbs they'd be up.

My mind is on two things this morning. One is the situation in Cronulla, which has bloggers around Australia (a) wringing their pinko small-L liberal hands or (b) ignore the mobs in Sydney glassing and texting each other (to encourage more glassing) and continue writing about, like, that guy who, like, totally messaged them on MySpace, LOL ROFLMAO.

The other is my sewing machine. After my second coffee rouses me sufficiently I'm going downstairs to fix the problem I created by attempting to sew a corduroy ear onto a corduroy creature. My mum bought me this piece of textile sex as an early X-mass present so I could hopefully craft X-mass presents for others, and I must say I've found it very hard to leave my room since then.

After learning (kind of) to sew (after a fashion) on a 30 year old Singer the as-yet unnamed Janome (Janis seems like, as does Jezebel) is a revelation, a whole new world of one step buttonholes, overcasting feet and computerised stitch widths. So far I've screwed it up twice, once by sucking a goodly amount of soft wool suiting into the feed dogs (fixed) and twice by letting it inhale a wad of needle thread (erm...unfixed). Fortunately, it was bought from a local sewing store, which y'all should support because Lincraft only stocks decorative hat scarves and knurbled acrylic wool, and Spotlight is full of shrieking harpies and their young, so a sewing store seemingly staffed by other people's nannas is refreshing.

And it is, it is staffed with nannas. After fucking up Janis or Jezebel the first time I bundled her in the car in a blind panic and raced back to the store. A lady took myself and my new beloved aside and looked at me sternly through her bifocals. 'Did you think of taking off the throat plate?'

'I was scared. It's so new and shiny an-'

'You've got to do it if you're going to clean it. You need to clean it so it'll keep working. You do want it to work, don't you?'

I sat meekly by her side as she disassembled the guts of the machine with all the practised precision of a Michigan Militiaman pulling apart his rifle and contemptuously flicked out the offending fabric. I really should go back there, but I don't want them to think I'm (too much) of a moron.

I'm going to go play with my Stitch in the Ditch foot now. I don't know what it does, but it looks rather like a spade pierced Stelarc-style and suspended from a small steel pillar.

Seeing as the only people who read this here slice of the self-obsessed internet pie are friends and acquaintances, you'll probably know that I've been searching for a way to bust out of this joint for quite some time. Options have included tunneling with spoons, disguising myself as a pile of dirty laundry, convincing a lean-legged friend to seduce that lecherous warden, sneaking a metal file into me in the process, and applying to the University of Sydney

I got into the Uni of Sydney, but y'all know that. But I do not want to move to Sydney. No, turning my face into a soiled pair of underpants seems preferable, especially after the riots that made my blood run cold with shame and fear, then hot with bitter anger.

On a whim I sent off an application to the University of Melbourne just to see what would happen. Rejection, I imagined, but I had to try. Mention Melbourne to any born-and-bred Canberran and their eyes will go misty. Melbourne is the promised land, with buildings older than 30 years, decent pubs and streets teeming with thrift store clad lovelies. Besides, 'Four Seasons In One Day' is my favourite Crowded House song.

Imagine my surprise when I came home the other day to find a thick envelope with the Uni of Melbourne crest on it. Thick! Thick with documents! Documents of acceptance! I made a noise not unlike an infant magpie discovering a lawn full of nightcrawlers. They like me! They really like me!

That's a very long winded way to say I'm fucking off. Come February I'm joining the annual migration south with nothing but a few boxes of books and a suitcase full of dreams. Even better, it looks like a couple of my very favouritest people are coming with me. Suffice to say I'm rubbery with joy.

But still apoplectic with rage. Fuckin' Sydney.

We were walking past Sportsgirl when Cheney became incensed about their 'Girl from Ipanema' window display. 'The girl from Ipanema is blonde,' she fumed. 'It's a big deal. You have to be blonde to enter the girl from Ipanema pageant in Brazil.'

There are numerous reasons to appreciate this statement.

1. It involves becoming angry at store window displays, something I do frequently and with a gusto that embarrasses all concerned.

2. Miss Cheney knew the girl from Ipanema was blonde.

3. She was also aware there was a girl from Ipanema pageant.

4. Moreover, she was aware of the internal politics of the event.

I *heart* my lady friends.

I can't decide if this makes me happy or sad.

Sad: Giving large talking dolls to comfort the isolated elderly is sad.

Happy: The doll wants cheese.

Sad: An image of a small, wizened, dressing-gown clad Japanese nanna, hair thinning, socks on her feet sitting across a dining table from a large doll staring glassily into space is lodged in my brain.

Happy: 'I had a dream. I ate a potato. And I was studying at school.'

Sad: 'Why are bunnies eyes red?' Why, talking, Yumel my-family-finds-me-an-unpleasant burden doll, that's because some bunnies
are albino and have no melanin in their eyes, thus giving them the appearance of redness when in fact their family finds them an unpleasant burden to be infantilized with a large talking doll.

Happy: We are one step closer to being overcome by the Borg.

Sad: 'It's strange that fish can live in the ocean.' No, it's really not.

Happy: 'The sky is so good and big.' Yes it is.

Sad: 'It’s strange that sometimes you cry when you are laughing.' I'm not laughing, doll, I'm sobbing big, bitter tears of pain and regret as I've fallen down and shattered my sugar glass delicate hip and no one will come to help me as they've left me here with a fucking doll.

I'm at work in a curious good mood. Not even Yumel the Doll of Loneliness and earlier insults to my hair are bringing me down. I'm wondering if someone spiked the Bushells in the tea room.

Well, that kills the fun in that.

I'm not going to lie, I went tingly when I saw the trailer for Narnia. I loved Narnia as a kid, oblivious to any Christian overtones. When Aslan came on screen I had to suppress a squeal ('kay, totally didn't suppress, but we were there to see 'Harry Potter' and a hundred kids charging up and down the aisles hepped up on sugar and vomiting in excitement hardly minded) of joy. I make fun of the Narnia-type Christianity, but being only a nominal Catholic I find it hard to wring my hands over the rise of Republican righteousness from a religious angle.

Republicans can eat me, I want to see the White Witch and eat Turkish delight.

As an aside, do comments expire with the Haloscan free account? Because I had a rather vain click through my archives and all of my comments are gone. Gone! I must say I feel rather sad about that. I live for my internet validation, people!

In other news, I *heart* my ladies.

• Contemporary politics
  
• Apathy (emotion)
  
• Local bands
  
• Burning the roof of your mouth on too-hot soup
  
• Faded turquoisey blue as used by popular young women's clothing franchises
  
• Restaurants
  
• Cats (concept)
  
• Sewing machines
  
• The evil, nose pinkening menace of sunlight.
  

I reached in my brain looking for ideas came up with nothin.' Sure did a lot of X-mass shopping this morning, though. Last night I was woken by a car honking its horn outside the house I was sleeping in. Turns out it was my friend's arse, as he was making out rather furiously with the driver of said car.

Internet gossip is a glorious thing, but I'm more amused by the two year old humour in being awakened by someone's arse tooting.