I want to tell you that I like to sing 'You Are My Sunshine' to my lamely named cat Tamson, also known as Catface and The Large Furry Fruitcake-like Object That Smothers Me In My Sleep.' Whenever I think of this I feel a little sad, either because (a) 'You Are My Sunshine' is an inherently melancholy song, and when you hit the line 'and please don't take my sunshine away' you know that the bringer of sunshine has already been taken away, (b) singing to your cat is always a little sad, or (c) I miss my cat.

As an aside, I used to sing 'At The Copacabana' to a cat I knew named Lola. She liked it. She'd trot over to me with her tail in the air as I gesticulated like a drag queen and hollered 'where music and passion are part of the fashion!' That never makes me sad.

I once made light of Delta Goodrem's cancer in a supermarket queue while Blockhead was with me. The impulse buy stand was filled with magazine after magazine crowing about 'Delta's dreadful plight' or 'Delta's brave fight' or 'Delta Delta Delta!' and too much Delta and no Jessica Simpson (secret confession: I have a total, inexplicable boner for Jessica Simpson) make Rachael go crazy. 'It's such a publicity stunt!' I fumed. 'She's not princess fucking Di! She's some scrag from Neighbours who figured out the virginal act is popular with the under thirteens! I mean, cancer is bad and all but it's so fucking tacky that they're milking it like that!'

The middle aged woman behind us, with the bristly middle aged woman short haircut and a nose like a strawberry, crossed her sweatered arms across her chest and huffed. She was going to feel sorry for Delta no matter what.

----

I'm all moved in and aside from a few mental sinus clearing pangs of homesickness it's all good. Our nearest neighbour drives a BMW and looks awfully professional but still offered to help a greasy, sweating me with my boxes and Ikea shrapnel and so on. My housemates are marvellous. They took me to the pub Saturday and bought me beer, and last night they humoured my disaster movie obsession and watched 'War of the Worlds' with me. Everyone has dogs. School, however, does not start until Wednesday, so I have an awful lot of time to kill until it does.

Packing sucks big 'ole cock. How the hell did I accumulate so much crap?

I do not naturally have a side part. Naturally my hair wants to divide itself altar boy style, a neat little bum part flanked by Farrah Fawcett (or, since I docked my hair in a fit of break up related pique, Alfalfa) style cowlicks. I am, however, a slavish follower of trends and wearer or thick rimmed glasses, so my genetic bum part had to go. Fortunately I found a skilled hairdresser who instructed me in the care and maintenence of my fringe. She showed me the thing I must do with the comb if I'm not feeling particularly Flock of Seagulls, she cut it so it covers my enormous forehead appropriately. She's more than just a hairdresser, really, she's a fringe counsellor, a side part coach, and I thank her for that. It's an effort, but I'm getting there slowly.

And I have never been more grateful than when, on waking up this morning, my hand automatically went to my head and twisted and pulled my large blonde 'fro into something a little more Sharon Tateish. I didn't even notice I was doing it. I saw a mirror later and was shocked, but pleasantly so.

As an aside, Blockhead cruelly accused me of having emo hair the other day. That is so not true. This beast is mod, motherfucker, mod.

As a further aside I've been really enjoying Shalom Auslander struggling with his not so murky past. I also would have liked to have been raised by heroin addicted prostitute nuns, but clearly the universe hates me.

I went lap swimming the other day for the first time in months. It felt good but I have no lung capacity left, each lap left me gasping. Why do I do something that makes it hard to breathe just so I can have an excuse to hold my hand to my face when I'm nervous, so I can have a gesture to punctuate time, start conversations with?

Afterwards I met up with some friends. Out of habit my heart rose to my throat when I walked to meet them because I didn't have much to say, my hair smelled of chlorine, things with some people have been strained and with others they've been fading away. Someone asked me for a cigarette. I obliged and had one myself.

(I haven't written anything for months and months. There's a lot in my head but on the page it all becomes that sad mantra, 'I haven't written anything, I haven't written anything.')

Happiness Is..

• Chocopie!
  
• A new black untuned ukelele
  
• Turning on the radio in the car after a particularly satisfying and girlie conversation to hear 'Jumpers' by Sleater-Kinney.
  
• Mostly Chocopies.

Unhappiness is..

• "Hello, Department of Fuck Yeah and Pens Tethered to Tables. What do you want?" "Hi, I, uhm, don't think I can come up 'til the end of next week and I know I have to meet my supervisor and..." "Supervisors will be posted on the noticeboards. Why don't you go sodomise yourself with a rolled up copy of A Thousand Plateaus?" "But I'm in the 'Bra and I don't think I can make it..." "We highly recommend you speak to us before the RPP exceeds the cut off date of March the first and OPP gets down with the OG, biznatch." "Yeah, but all the O-week stuff says it's..." *sigh* "Look, I've told you all I know. What more do you want from me? You've already proved yourself lazy and unreliable. Why don't you just go get some public service job in your homeland and leave us all in peace?" *click*
  
• "You're back." "Yeah, I know, I..." "You're not meant to be back, you're meant to be in Melbourne." "Yeah, but I can't move into my new place until..." "Why are you back? I seriously thought you'd gone." "I like Canberra." "Like, seriously." "I like my friends and roundabouts."
  
• Women's clothing. All of it.

(a) I will be finally, finally buying a decent set of speakers for my computer later today, and they will be the same white JBL speakers my lad/brother/strange Freudian lover Warwick has. The store has them on hold for me and everything. I will not, however, take them out of the box until...

(b) I'll be in Victoria full time as of next week. I can't move into my new place (the barbeque one, where you can smoke in the kitchen, the cat and chickens were just too far away) 'til late next week so I'm back in the 'Bra for the time being.

(c) I had a dream nght before last about a fish that looked a little like a big salmon tail catfish 'cept it had its mouth on top of its head, running between both gills. I dreamed that this fish had somehow flipped out of the water and was flopping around in a sink full of unwashed dishes, and I had to put it in a cleanish Tupperware container and run water on it from the tap, all the while panicking about the chlorine. There were other parts of the dream, but the head-mouth fish sticks out.

I wrote a letter to a friend yesterday telling them about many things, and one of those things was the head-mouth fish dream. I even drew it for him architect style, with top and side elevations. It was then I realised that from the top my head-mouth fish looked exactly like a penis. Oh. Still, Dr Freud, sometimes a penis like fish is only a penis like fish.

(d) Canberra turns on the charm when it knows you're leaving. Last night Civic was filled with shambolic drunkards who weren't, I suspect, just taking part in the ANU pub crawl. I'm so familiar with this town the whole place feels like my living room, and while we never actually got into the pub we aimed to get into I was still filled with a sense of well-being, like when you watch kittens play with string.

Somehow I managed to come to this part of Australia with only one (1) brown cardigan, and that was misplaced at some point during the course of events on Tuesday, so I now have only a broad collection of the same Lee jeans every Dave Eggers reading girl worth her thick rimmed glasses has, impractical but cutely spotted little shirts and the odd band T-shirt. Yesterday I toddled around Fitzroy in my sister's rather gigantic white polar fleece hoodie. I caught a glimpse of myself huddled at a tram stop, cigarette dangling from a puffy white sleeve, and for a second I honestly thought I was homeless.

I considered buying a white corduroy blazer with black piping (tres Tammy Wynette gone to London) from Kinki Gerlinki, but no one told me Kinki Gerlinki sucks balls. Most of their clothes don't have sizes ('free' size my ass) and I didn't really find their range all that inspiring. Plus, I had to put my arm through a fine mesh of loose threads in the sleeve of the $90 blazer I tried on, and there were buttons missing. I truly am a nanna, but I dislike all that hype about sucky, crappily fitted, dodgily made clothes.

In other news, the shoes at Shag made me lose at least two major neurological functions. I truly love a pair of heels, honestly I do. There was a pair of ankle breakingly high green velvet stack heels with eyelets pierced through the side and a big, floppy bow threaded through that I would sell my kidneys for. Just so you know, Shag.

I think I might have some leads on a couple of houses, but I really daren't say anything in case I jinx the process. One place has the sweetest, tiniest, leg twiniest, most affectionate little cat I've ever met, and chickens (this lead to me ending a rather innocuous text conversation with a threat to send H5N1 to my friends if they don't come visit. That message wasn't replied to). The other has a barbeque, rather rad people and a pub directly across the street. I find out this weekend. If I am rejected by both I may just set up a tent on one of Melbourne Uni's green, green, green lawns and live there.

I have to write another proposal and I don't want to, you can't make me, I won't. I see this being a terrifying and self destructive pattern over the next year.

And looking for a place to live sucks cock, even though I've only been at it for a few days. I already miss the kids back home tremendously. There's a dent in my thigh from the Melways.

If any of y'all need a housemate and you're in the appropriate area for the love of little fishes leave a comment or somethin.'

I'm bored at work, so I finally clicked on the banner on David Byrne's site, the one where he's holding a brick. HOLY JEBUS MARY BOUNCING ON A POGO STICK SINGIN' PATSY CLINE. I need to drum me up some cash so I can spend a few days doing nothing but listen to remastered Talking Heads albums packaged in a brick. A brick! A white plastic brick!

Speaking of music, Deerhoof are playing at the Northcote Social Club next Friday, and I'll be there to jump about and listen to songs about pandas, cloning and ducks (come see the). Also, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy is playing on the 16th, and very far away in April the Mountain Goats will be appearing at a venue I can't remember. These things make me feel more comfortable about blowing the Canberran popsicle stand.

When I look at fat people I think how irresponsible. When people are fat they put themselves at risk of heart disease, diabetes, joint disease and all other kinds of inconvenient, expensive things. They then trundle off to the doctor and waste millions of dollars of public money having their lardy, unattractive bodies tended to. Honestly. The sheer bloody rudeness of some people.

After I think that I like to have a cigarette. You know. To calm my nerves.

The bobbin tension on my sewing machine is all hinky. I blame fat people for that, too.

Today is my last day at my Canberra job. For six months I showed up there for five and a half, six hours a day, five days a week, all of which I promptly forgot the moment I left the building. I think the air conditioning had something to do with it.

It's been a good job. It paid for MacBain, half a tattoo, a whole bunch of those high-end shampoos I consume with the Freudian zeal Imelda Marcos brought to shoes, and many, many, many cigarettes. I like jobs where you can learn things. I learnt in my old job that the way to get babies out of the mouth of a mouth brooding fish is to hold it up by the tail over a bucket and squeeze its cheeks. I learnt in this job that Tasmanian Devils get a kind of infectious cancer, where the tumours are friable and crumbly, so when the devils get in fights and one bites the other the tumour breaks off in its mouth and burrows in, starting a new tumour.

The other thing about Sydney that I didn't tell the internet about is that I met a giant cuttlefish at Sydney Aquarium. He was beautiful and brown, and kept touching the glass delicately with his tentacles. I had brief, powerful fantasies of diving into the tank, tucking the cuttlefish under my arm and making a break for it. I'd sprint out to Darling Harbour, dive into the water and the cuttlefish and I would drink rum and carouse under the sea. I still want to do that. I get the feeling he'd be up for it.

I'm shit scared about moving to Melbourne, but don't tell anyone.

I picked up some photos I took at and around Sleater-Kinney with another krappy disposable today, and two things came to mind. (1) The $2 C-41 process b&w cam I bought was, in fact, loaded with Ilford XP2 rather than, say, United Foto Company Ultra Sharp Philm. Moreover, the negatives are actually quite dense; even the underexposed ones the minilab refused to print could be salvaged with some darkroom trickery and persistance.* (2) Before Sleater-Kinney we drank a cheap carbonated wine product (may contain eggs and traces of fish) in an alleyway between two brothels, and I neglected to tell the internet about it.

We saw clients go into the brothels, too. The first guy smiled at us and walked confidently in. We later saw him walk grumpily past the Gaelic Club, hands deep in his pockets. I can only conclude that that particular brothel just wasn't the best. The other guy hid behind a car until we left. Pansy.

(I... really can't get my blog on lately. I leave Canberra this weekend and my mind is on other things. However, there will be some downing of hos [hodown, get it?] this Saturday, so if you're in town and interested comment or email or leave me a love note in the sky)

*As a nerdy aside, the first roll I put through the Holga was XP2, because I didn't trust myself processing medium format film. I... didn't dig it. They had a brownish hue (actually, so do the 35mm negs discussed above) that made contrast hinky when I was printing them. And now, a few months later, they're disturbingly purplish. So, yeah, XP2 is good if you wanted to get b&w prints done at a minilab (that said, I wasn't thrilled with the whacky sepia-ish tone the colour chemistry gave the prints), but if you do it the old fashioned way I'd give it a miss.

Also, it turns out processing medium format film is really, really easy, easier even than 35mm because there isn't as much film to push onto the spiral. You live and learn.

**Sometimes I read about old photographic processes, dageurrotypes and the like, and touch myself.