My housemate came back from the 'States today, and he brought me Reese's Pieces and cigarettes.

If this was WWII we'd be married now.

1.35am and I can see skyscrapers from my window. There's an article on orientalism and Arjun Appadurai open on my desk but it's boring as hell and I'm wondering why I keep using the only organising principle of my life, feminism - fuck, what is that even - as schtick. How many times have I used the term 'female,' 'woman,' ironically this week, with a knowing little smile? I'm a stereotype, I'm listening to Ani Di Franco, last night I leaned out my window and watched the Comm Games fireworks in the city and thought about the South African athletes a friend and I made eyes at on a tram. There's a long seam between plates of bone in my forehead and I hook my fingertips into it at night, bent over endless reading, as though if I dig far enough I can find a conclusion.

I was listening to podcasted John Safran and Father Bob today in the gym when I heard something that tipped my inner feminazi rage scales from 'mildly pissed' to 'ropable.' They were interviewing a woman who wrote a book called Defiant Birth, apparently printed by the charming intellectual atavisms at Spinifex (no porn, no sex, no red meat, but as many cats as you can chew), when Father Bob said something along the lines of 'I think everyone would agree that while abortion is a terrible thing and there are far too many abortions happening, women should still have the right to access them.'

Now, I have little issue with Father Bob saying that. After all, he's a charming, affable old Catholic priest, a breed not known for uterine friendliness. But it's a line that's been repeated over and over and over by many parties (most of them gallingly male) in the wake of the RU486 debate and now that abortion counselling thing, which I try not to think about because my eye twitches and I look crazier than I already am. 'There are too many abortions,' says John Howard, 'there are too many abortions,' says God's own wingnut Tony Abbott, 'there are too many abortions,' crow letter-to-the-editor pages the country over. We're all terribly concerned about the contents of many hypothetical women's wombs and, you know what? I'm fed up.

It's about fucking time we as a nation did something about all these scrapings of all these uteris. Take a deep breath and repeat after me:

What's the matter with your life?
Why you gotta mess with mine?
Don't keep sweatin' what I do
'cause I'm gonna be just fine - check it.

If I want to take a guy home with me tonight,
it's none of your business.
And if she wants to be a freak and sell it on the weekend,
it's none of your business.
Now you shouldn't even get into who I'm giving skins to,
it's none of your business.
So don't try to change my mind, I'll tell you one more time
it's none of your business.

Here's what I believe with my heart, soul and loins: every human being on this planet has the right - God-given, even - to be sexual. A person's sexuality isn't a matter of morality unless they start touchin' on little kids and farm animals, but that's a needless aside. Every human being on this planet also has the right to govern what happens inside their body, to be informed about what choices they have and not be judged for the choices they make. This includes women of reproductive age, Goddamnit. Is abortion a moral issue? On a personal level, yes, and you would expect adult women are fully aware of all that's involved in terminating a pregnancy. But on a public level, on a legislative level, on a provision of medical services level? No fucking way.

I'm not even going to touch the 'Defiant Birth' lady because, well, Spinifex Press and I were never going to get along after I bought my first pair of heels. But there are two implicit assumptions in the 'there are too many abortions' statement. One, abortion is something other than a highly private matter between a woman and her doctor. Two, women are clearly fools when it comes to their own bodies, their own lives and their own futures, and can't be trusted with the fresh-faced young citizens of the future. Every foetus deserves to meet us and all that jazz.

You know what? I've done a bit of picketing in my time, a bit of letter writing, a bit of petition handing out and signing. I've met few reproductive health care providers, and I can tell you for damned sure none of them would ever talk a woman into a termination she didn't want. They're not the Crazy Johns of the healthcare world, constantly trying to talk you into a more expensive plan or top of the range vacuum aspiration.

So, Spinifex Press lady, Tony Abbott and John Howard et al, I do not care a jot whether you think doctors can't be trusted to provide their own patients with the information they need about an unwanted pregnancy, or whether Australian women are going through with terminations because of the 'wrong' reasons. I know that opinions are like assholes and everybody's got one, but in the end it's none of your fucking business.

If you had to choose, which would you go for? The Canon EOS350D or the Nikon D50?

The Nikon is more squarely in my price range, and I have a Nikon body and lenses floating around somewhere, which'll work with the D50, but I've read people disparagingly describing it as a 'family photos' camera and a nice 'amateur' model, which of course makes me bristle. Amateur?! I'm no amateur! Then I remind myself just how poor my Photoshop fu is, and how I really don't know how to use those demon digital machines.

I feel so dirty for even contemplating this.

It was clicking through Daniel Boud's website that made me realise I missed taking quick, good photos and sharing them with the world. Don't get me wrong. I love film with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, and I'll still be tossing out grainy, distorted images from my growing collection of op shop krappies. I just want to take photos, of any kind, anywhere.

'It is no accident that corporate boardrooms remain largely male, despite two generations of gender-neutral ideology. ''Men," Mansfield writes, ''have the highest offices, the leading reputations; they make the discoveries, conceive the theories, win the prizes, start the companies, score the touchdowns." Nor should it surprise that women are losing the housework battles. ''Manly men," he writes, ''disdain women's work.''

Oh, glory be! From the same ridiculously prestigious institution that spawned Lawrence Summers comes yet another besuited, white, wrinkled manly man's man, here to tell the ladies to chill, baby, let the fellas take care of the wars and the work and the world, all you have to do is bring a plate.

How remarkable that these men, all snug and comfortable in their white male heterosexual privilege, can tell us (by us I mean the ladies and the fags, yeah), in calm, empirically sound, rational voices, just why we should keep our heads down and accept 'nature.'

And he's right, you know. There's no reason to get huffy or shrill or emotional. I mean, you wouldn't want to get all angry and red in the face now, would you? The vastly complex social, cultural, political and economic reasons why women aren't in the top spots in academia and so on can easily be condensed into three glib 'hypotheses.' And, you know, that isn't deeply insulting and troubling at all. 'Different availability of aptitude at the high end? Sure, why the fuck not?

Oh thank you, Mr Mansfield, and all your scrotal, sweaty, lantern jawed, strong, tumescent manly men. It's good to know that you're always there to put a lady back in her place.

Cockhead.

I'm wandering around holding a teacup of warm, salty water to my face. I have to keep my lower lip submerged in it for at least five minutes. I tried to eat a piece of bread but failed horribly and I'm hungry. Smoking is difficult, and it feels weird to close my mouth, so when I'm not holding a teacup to my face my mouth hangs open a little, as though I were a retard or suffered a chronic orthodontic problem.

God, I'm sexy.

Addendum: Oh God. This morning's cheap coffee has taught me that I can't drink from a standard, regular, God-fearing cup without (a) half of it dribbling down my face or (b) painfully wrenching aside the ball in the centre of my lip. Walking to work I tried tilting my head, drinking from the side of my mouth, drinking from the other side, but no dice. I'm either going to have to use straws and look like an obsessive compulsive, or learn the art of the layback and look like an escapee from a junior rugby camp. It is also rather hard to eat. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective.

There are times when I think random in iTunes isn't entirely random. I've fallen into the pleasant little habit of doing some class reading for half an hour or so before bed, usually with low light, a cup of tea and appropriate music. Lately I've been leaning heavily in Andrew Bird, Little Wings, Jose Gonzalez, the grin-inducingly wonderful Jens Lekman and Holly Throsby. Tonight I thought fuckit, let's see what random will do for me. Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Public Enemy, Jean Grae and DJ Shadow came up in quick succession. Is my computer trying to tell me not to be so very sentimental? Is Macbain trying to snap me back to a funkier reality? Who knows, really.

I have a tendency lately to find things on the interweb and email/text message/write a short note on a scroll of parchment and attach it to the leg of a finely-bred carrier pigeon with some silk ribbon whoever's around to tell them about it. Then I think fuckit, I have a fucken domain, I can tell the whole wide world about anything that's occupying my pretty little head and nobody can stop me, not you, not the president, and certainly not those meddling kids!

With that in mind, I give you a cat in a trenchcoat. Melt.

I really want to sex Natalie Portman after watching her gangsta rap, and so will you.

Via Jessculture.

Yesterday I walked into a pole with enough force to bruise my eyebrow. My glasses went clattering to the ground and my eye watered for a good half hour.

On a tram that night mah sista Chloe pointed out a large, greenish, Gigerish spider on my knee. I squealed 'ohmigod!' and leapt to my feet. A tramful of Commonwealth Games goers looked at me with bewilderment.

I got home later and joined a group of lovely ladies in the living room for goon and Weezer. I went to light a cigarette with the stove lighter thing (we had nothing else). Everyone watched politely as I managed to deeply scar the side of the cigarette, about halfway down, but didn't actually light it. It took me around three tries and the cigarette was so mangled it didn't fulfill its destiny of giving me cancer. It was... a special day.

However, Jens Lekman last night made me grin like a fool, as did the kids from Architecture in Helsinki who accompanied him. 'Pocketful of Money' is my new favourite song.

Somehow, over the past two weeks I've become a morning person. I don't know how the hell this happened, but it has. Every day I leap out of bed to the sound of the alarm, shower and twirl tra-la-laing out into the big wide world. Good morning, morning! I trill as I say hello to the neighbour's cat and the rather improbable robin settled on my index finger. Good morning, progressive Anglican church with the trendy female pastor and dangerously spiky fence! Good morning, high pressure hose men here to sanitise the city! I'm so full of joie de vivre and optimism that it's inevitable that around midday I collapse into a deep, Livejournally funk, where all I want to do is moon around checking my email constantly and sending morose, Emily Dickinsonish text messages to friends back in Canberra.

Frankly, having two different personalities in the same head is more than a little tiresome. Insert glib ending here, personality #2 is having a bit of a sulk.

There's a car down the street with a bumper sticker, and that bumper sticker is all I've been able to think about all afternoon. It is a Jesus fish with 'and chips' written inside the fish. I don't understand. Is this pro Christian? Anti evolution? Pro evolution? Pro chips?

For the next couple of days I'm doing all the swimming in public pools, eating of biteables (aka the best vege burgers in the world from a place down the street, large sushi rolls, cake), and wearing of lipstick that I can 'cause I'll have to take a break from it for a while. This is because...

(a) God and I had a little talk the other night and, well, I've been Called so I'm off to a convent in Peru;

(b) I'm going on a makeup free hunger strike because of the shithouse Oscars;

(c) I'm a poseurish loser and I'm doing what all poseurish losers do.

I'm also not allowed to make out feverishly to the sounds of Patsy Cline, or to any sounds, really, but that's neither here nor there.

When the seasons start to change, ie when the temperature perceptibly and consistently drops a little, cardiganless women everywhere salute the world with their nipples and the wind picks up just enough to inflate your hair into a perfect sphere, I get a cold. It's always the same cold. Someone removes the top of my head and fills my bronchial tubes with phlegm, a kind of clammy, wettish fever turns me a delightful shade of radish and I sound like a lifelong glue sniffer. Frankly, a change of seasons just wouldn't be the same if I didn't get sick, but it does make you look a little ludicrous when you go to buy new running shoes and a sensible, lap swimming swimsuit.

I had a little diatribe here about how reading so much about so many permutations of fat (fat, phat, fat kids, fat porn, fat admirer, fat activist, good fat, bad fat, fat clothes, fat cat, lather, rinse, repeat) have turned my rather substantial issues with my body and with, well, fat up to eleven, but there comes a time when you have to realise that the internet doesn't care about your ass.

However, one thing has been sticking in my mind. I read a fantastic essay by a fat activist (I don't have it with me and my brain is slowly microwaving in my skull, so the name escapes me) who said, to paraphrase badly, skinny people feel threatened and are resentful of fat activists. A lot of skinny people, she said, feel like they've sacrificed a lot, an awful lot, so they won't get fat, and to see fat people with different priorities or who just plain don't care is something of a slap in the face.

This struck me because only weeks ago I was having a demi-ironic conversation with a friend about a girl I knew who was bigger than me but, in many threatening ways, just plain better and possibly happier. 'Doesn't she understand?' I howled, 'I'm in the gym every fucking day! Doesn't that earn me something?'

I was, for the record, half trying to be funny, but it does make me wonder what I'm so threatened by and what exactly hours in the gym is meant to earn me.


p.s: I'll actually get quite crabby if people comment dismissively about the fat stuff. Fo real.

I think it's important to have priorities, to think about what really matters in this life and put those things above all others, regardless of the circumstances. That's why I'm glad that, despite my swayingly boozy state in a sticky-floored, urine-scented bar last night, I still did not apply the first lip gloss I found in my bag as I knew it would clash with what I was wearing.

That, ladies, is feminism in action.

I just Googled the word 'etiology.' It should be noted that in the course of my poncy arts degree I have taken at least three (3) classes on various permutations of psychoanalysis, so I should fucken know that shit already.

In other news, one of my lecturers looks like a younger, dykier version of Lee Lin Chin. I am in love.