They have wireless in the state library now!

WOO! YEAH!! HELLO STUDIOUS PRIVATE SCHOOL CHILDRENS AND ME, WITH MY PILE OF BOOKS, LOOKING HOPEFUL AND SOMETIMES SLEEPING A BIT, BUT ONLY A LITTLE BIT!

This all feels very moblogblackskypeberrytubespace, writing a half-arsed blog entry from a public place. The man at the desk in front of me is doing something interesting with a map and tapping purposefully at his computer, and I am full of tofu curry (I love you, DonDon) and trepidation about a rather important deadline looming, which I really don't feel entirely prepared for. This means that I am neither going out to my classmate's party or to see The Ramps and various other talented kids cavort at The Empress tonight, which sucks but such is life.

I didn't get drunk last night, but I did squeeze myself and my pretty green party dress and pretty green party shoes into a charmingly run-down kitchen full of dreadlocked, furry, natural fibre clad hippies. I was clutching a cleanskin and a handbag, they were eating vegetable soup (??), we were like the original odd couple.* It's okay, because as the party thinned out someone dug up a copy of Le Tigre's self titled album and it was on for every woman and her rottweiler/token straight male friend. Also, I discovered two of my friends burning the dried flower arrangements because they were cold. I call that thinking on your feet/honestly, what kind of person under the age of 60 has dried flower arrangements in their house?

Here are some things to look forward to:
Actually going to trivia this Tuesday (Tuesday is the deadline - someone will need to buy me beer)
The Ramps/some guy named Joe's album release at Gertrude's on the fifth of August
Codral. I'm getting kinda sick.


* If a collection of people and one other person can be considered a couple. Also, I do not like hippies.

School is back and I resent it deeply. As much as I complain about the loneliness and never-endingness of what I'm doing right now I've settled into a not-entirely-non-productive-but-still-could-be-better routine, and it was lovely during the holidays when I could just mince about the libraries and not see anyone 'cept for other thesis writing people. Now there are countless Sass & Bide clad first years running about, with those halfheartedly ironic hair ribbons the private school girls seem to be affecting. I've turned to a grumpy old woman stalking from library to library and back again, bent over books and grizzling about the youth of today.

Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with a mewling orange kitten on my way home from school. He (or she, however s/he rolls it) twined around my legs then jumped into a gap in a wall. I sat down on my heels, pushed my face into the gap and talked to the little cat while countless people wandered past. It was a meaningful social reaction.

I woke up this morning with the kind of killer hangover you never suspect you could get after three, four - oh, actually, this hangover makes an awful lot of sense. No matter. At the moment I'm healing it with lemon tea and a ginger-and-garlic-and-chilli-and-silverbeet-and-lentil-and-orange-vegetable soup I made out of odds and ends from the fridge. Both are doing wonders.

Either way, the hangover was well worth the delightful night I had last night with Toby and his gang of groupies. Miss MSKP is a thoroughly charming, rather saucy lady after my own heart, and there was much conversation about Lebanon, teenage make-out sessions, and tits (natch). I plan on actually going to trivia after Marissa dies this week, so hopefully it shall be repeated soon.

Anyone have any ideas re: what I could do with the two bunches of silverbeet stashed in the fridge before they turn to mush?

Dear Internets. I need some help with things of a material nature. First and foremost, my iPod is gone. I wasn't too attached to it, and I have a remarkable ability to lose phone/wallet/keys/journals/ridiculously crucial notebooks with nauseating regularity, so I'm not surprised. Last time I saw it I was checking off the things I would need to buy for a sewing project while removing a gym bag (small) and a bag containing The Reading and my computer (very, very, very large) from a locker, and I suspect I might have left it there. I've since called the gym and no one's handed it in, so methinks someone pocketed a rather crapulent pink mini with 'Bonjour Kitten' engraved on the back.

I'm giving it a couple of days to emerge, then I'm buying a new one. It has to be done. I must listen to my security blanket album while I work. This album changes every fortnight or so, quite against my will, but I must listen to it and I'm usually hunkered down in a library when I work, ergo, iPod. Also, going to the gym isn't the same without my I Don't Think You're Ready For This Increasingly Firm Jelly Megamix, and there's nothing like running and listening to podcasts of Phillip Adams and NPR (... shaddup).

But which should I get? The nano appeals because of its smallness and, while I ostensibly hate those iPod armbands, they do strike me as awful handy in the gym. However, I download podcasts like a madwoman, and my 6 gig mini was still, frustratingly, too small. The big 30g iPod is more expensive but roomier, however it is also bigger and possibly more awkward to use in the gym. What's your opinion, Internet? How should I waste my tax return?

Actually, I already know how I'm spending most of my tax return, but that's beside the point.

Also, my new printer arrives on Monday. That I actually rather need because I do an obscene amount of printing and my shitty little Canon didn't hold out. I feel bad just turfing the old one out with the garbage. Any suggestions for mroe environmentally friendly disposal options?

I have been down a hobbit hole, living a quiet bachelor's life of reading, occasional writing and library-bound scurrying. Here are some dot points.

• Sunlight! Real honest-to-God cancer causing UV light! Yesterday I wanted to lie out on the road like a lizard and soak it up. I wanted to stick my tongue out to passers by and remain still and sluggish until I warmed up. I didn't actually do that, but I should have.
  
• Everyone has gone this weekend. My Melbourne Crew have fucked off to Byron for Splendour, and the ACT Massive have mostly gone back to, well, the ACT. It's okay, though. I've bunkered down with piles of work and a collection of DVDs. However...
  
• Don't watch David Cronenberg before bed. Don't. I watched 'Videodrome' last night, and I have 'The Brood' and 'Dead Ringers' to get through this weekend. Ack.
  
• I think all us thesis-bound people should organise a trip to the aquarium soon so we can sit in the jellyfish room and not think. Bonus points if someone could sneak in a hip flask.
  

The jellyfish, they are calling...

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I avoided the whole Nikki phenomenon, as British people shit me (I am racism), but I caved in while procrastinating. Oh. My. Word. The women is like performance art. She's like Man Ray and Joseph Beuys and Laurie Anderson in one blonde, girlishly English shell.

One day I will smell someone's BO on me and realise it's love, too.

I think it's fair to say that I have no idea what I am doing.

I also feel like a fat little sausage. One of these is easier to fix than the other.

Ah, fuckit. It's just you and me, pack of Tim Tams and crippling fear of failure.

My favourite ad at the moment is the Telstra ad where the CGI penguin is dancing to the trance music. Seriously, whenever it's on I lose my shit. 'That's the penguin!' I say to all and sundry. 'THE PENGUIN IS DANCING THAT'S THE DANCING PENGUIN OHMIGOD I LOVE THAT PENGUIN SO MUCH!' Then I dance just like the penguin.

Imagine my joy when I discovered that the dancing penguin is REAL.

Aside from posting some food to TBZ I've been a bit silent on the interwebs lately. At the moment it's just me, my uterus, my existential crisis and a box of charity lamingtons.* The uterus provides the hormones, the crisis provides the ennui, and all of them mean I've done doodly squat since Thursday. Actually, that's not true. There have been adventures with the SuperLadyFriends that have given us all cause to use the phrase 'choke out a bitch' a number of times. And I think I saw Ms Fits at Ding Dong, but I was too shy/preoccupied with choking out bitches to go and say hi.


* Lamingtons may be metaphorical.

I was in the basement of one of the libraries on campus, which I like (the basement, that is, not the campus) because it is still and silent and full of old, crumbly books in Cyrillic and Arabic and whatnot. I was down there and I was wandering aimlessly through the stacks and decided to get a noseful of comforting old book must, like grandma but with less lavender. So I was standing there with my nose pressed to the spine of an 80 year old 'Annales' from some French Museum when I heard a woman clear her throat. I looked up and she frowned at me. She musta thought I was some kind of sex pre-vert because it kinda looked like I was making out with the book, but no matter. I blushed and went my way.

Later, when I got up to go wee, I saw the woman standing in the stacks, her face pressed against the leathery spines. We exchanged looks. Maybe I've started a trend.

I got my Alan Jones paper back in the mail today and squeeeeee! I already knew I was going to get a good mark as my supervisor was also the lady marking the paper and she told me she liked it, but she wrote down ever so many lovely comments and my ego is now turned up to eleven. I've already submitted an abstract of the paper to a conference in November, and I have all these ideas swirling around my head about how I can rework the paper to publish it. I also feel much, much more confident about the methodology I'll be using for the A Current Affair/Today Tonight chapter in my thesis. Indeed, after receiving my paper this morning (and shoving it under my bewildered housemate's nose, and bouncing about like a gummi bear) I took to the task with renewed vigour, scouring websites, TV guides, calling and emailing.

It's funny, just last night I was bent over piles of books and articles, my head swimming with nausea, reading and re-reading and re-reading the same sentence until it made sense, and contemplating a career as a stevedore.* Now I'm imagining myself as a talking head on some ABC or SBS panel show opining about Australian yellow journalism. Hell, maybe they'd even let me bitch slap Catherine Lumby.



*I don't know what a stevedore does, but it sounds cool and it also sounds like the kind of job where you'd get totally awesome arm muscles, so i'd be down for it.

**THUS BAKES ZARATHUSTRA RULES! Go read it! I COMMAND YOU!

*** iTunes just gave me a Proust moment by playing the G-Unit remix of 'Work It.' I once presented a workshop on Tolerance and The Gays, where a very tall pillow-biting man and I danced frenetically to this song as though we were trying to pay rent. It is truly a great song. Call before you come so I can shave my cho-cha, indeed.

I LOVE AMY SEDARIS

AVC: What did you say about astrology?

AS: I said, "I don't know anything." I mean, I have a friend whose mother is an astrologist, and I'm friends with her two daughters, but I don't know anything about astrology. I know that crabs are sensitive on the inside but hard on the outside, and that in relationships it's hard for them to let go because they have pinchers and they collect a lot of antiques. But I go, "That's all I know about crabs." [Laughs.] "They feed off the bottom of the ocean, man. They're scum." You know, it's like a Cancer wouldn't be good to go out with an Aries, because you wouldn't find a ram on the beach any more than you'd find a crab up on the mountaintop. I like to think of astrology like that. I like to put 'em in situations.

If you have not seen 'Strangers with Candy' YOU HAVE NOT LIVED.

As an aside, Thus Bake Zarathustra is now up and running. If you would like to take part comment with your email address and start talking about the cooking and food making you get up to. Huzzah!

I've been a bad and neglectful blogger considering the copious comments on the food blog entry. I've been off being gay this week,** but I'm back now and we can get this show on the road.

Here is a list of possible names for our food blogstravaganza:
Food and Other Shit (Jobe)
Stuffed (Zoe)
Fingerlicking Good (DOK)
The Will to Carbohydrates (ME I'M RAD!!!!)
Grillness and Metaphor (MIR!!!!)
Eat Drink Man Woman (MSKP)
Thus Bake Zarathustra (Mat)
Bean and Nothingness (also Mat)
Homage to Canelloni (additional Matness)
The Will to Chowder (methinks Mat is a bit of a smartass)
Ecce Hommus (I don't even get that one, Mat)

I'm leaning towards Thus Bake Zarathustra, but what do you guys think? Let's be democratic, shall we?

Oh, I've also been distracted by going to Savers in Frankston and stocking up on ladies' things, like this beautiful, beautiful, hella tight long hippie dress. Lookit!



And look at the pretty butterflies!



And this hand embroidered (also hella tight) slip.



Oh, and this beautifully illustrated board book, now proudly displayed on the mantel above my bed.



* Reference to a song on the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack. If you get that I'll make you dinner/sex you up good.

** Gay: lit. trans. schmoopy.