The kids are all back at school now with their superfluous belts, heart-rending tanorexia, wee Mischa Barton vests and baffling Edith Wharton hair. I use the gym on campus and, frankly, resent the intrusion. Fortunately, I also don't envy those in their clean new outfits trotting off to class. I'm vaguely aware that at some point this week I will start on this big thing called a PhD (which could well turn into a masters if I get truly sick of it), but I'm don't know exactly when, or how, or even, really, why. It only just occurred to me that I could have a crack at signing in to my uni email, and when I did I discovered countless emails about various orientation activities of which I had been blithely unaware. Needless to say, those orientation activities have been and gone. There are a few reading groups I could go along to, but I'm strangely nervous that reading groups are not what the coolsie kids do in graduate school.

I have a sinking feeling. I foresee afternoons spent fidgeting in rooms filled with the fug of stale coffee and old carpet, listening to people talk about theories and research and things I have no interest in. If Marilyn French and Margaret Atwood are to be believed there will be beardy men in cardigans, though I get the feeling the beardy men have all gone in pointy end of the humanities, replaced by po-faced lesbians and media obsessed Catherine Lumby types.

Oh well. C'est la vie. At least I start this year, I mean properly start the year, with a painful, throbbingly infected lip piercing.

Oh, 2007, you crazy, messed up scamp of a year.

One little horseshoe crab scrabbling frantically at the glass of an aquarium will fuck up your dreams for days.

For someone who can't board an aircraft without a bottle of Xanax and someone to hold my clammy, terrified hand, I'm awfully judgemental of others with irrational fears of their own, i.e. moths. However, I contend that a moth is simply a butterfly with a PR problem, but an aircraft will honestly, legitimately kill you. Huh. I guess that's still kind of judgemental, hey?

Barack Obama has sass. And cheekbones. Such cheekbones. And that smile!



OBAMA.

(a) Begins with a band of fine companions, a pleasant breeze, a nice bar and a party to go to.

(b) It's possible to drink, comparatively, very little and still become absolutely, embarrassingly shitfaced.

(c) In the morning there is a moment when the lovely, blank sensation of drifting from sleep to wakefulness gives way to horror as you remember the night before.

(d) On the way to work in the morning you feel less like a regular girl and more like a homeless person as you are caked with bitter drunk-sweat and your stomach groans with a mixture of shame, nausea and hastily swallowed vitamins.

(e) In the afternoon you're a stain on the couch, your still sweating and now feverish body crumpled into an old and yellowed doona. Two of the finest souls you know bring you pie and force you to drink water. Sunday is hard and aimless, but it was, after all, such a very, very large weekend.

Why, you're coming to the Rob Roy to see these crazy kids:



(note: there is also a tiny and fetching lady with a bass, not pictured) launch their single with the aid of these gents:



and also some other people I don't know yet. Door opens at 8.30! Entry $10! We'll all have a grand old time!

So at 5am this morning, four hours after falling asleep, I sit bolt upright in bed and realise that I'm not going back to sleep. I just had a big, cinematic dream sprawling through dodgy Vietnamese night clubs, Cambodian jungles and Korean convenience stores where I suffered a heartbreaking disappointment. In dreamland I was sobbing into a refrigerator cabinet full of shrinkwrapped fish when I woke up. I crept downstairs and coiled on the couch in my Peter Alexander dachshund PJs and read Barry Glassner's 'The Gospel of Food' until I had to go to work at nine.

All day I feel like an elderly woman. I don't hear when people at work speak to me.

Seriously, what the fuck am I doing?



In my room there's a pile of clean socks migrating from bed to desk chair. When I go to bed the socks go to the chair, and when I wake up and check my email and Flickr they go to the bed again. The downstairs ironing board has been upstairs for week, and clothes, clean, dirty or whatever, form sedimentary layers on top of it. The ironing board is like laundry sandstone. I wanted to read Giddens' 'Self and Modernity' over the break, but every time I open it up my eyes glaze over and I end up reading 'NW' instead.

Technically, I start my PhD at the end of the month. I have to set up my uni email, and pick up a new student card, and do all that junk. I have to get EndNote to speak to Word and figure out how to connect it to Jstor and ProQuest and whatnot. I have to get together the beginnings of a bibliography to show my supervisor in a couple of weeks.



I need to find a bigger word than 'unprepared' to describe my present state.

'Depressive' comes to mind. So does 'wilting Victorian hysteric.' Or, worst of all, 'Winona Ryder.'



Ew.

What am I doing? Where am I going? What happened to the sassy feministick hellcat everyone knows and loves? When, oh when, will I at least summon on the energy to put on a bra?

Obviously, these are rhetorical questions.



Obviously, I've just got to find some reserve of determination, read what needs reading, install what needs installing, and find a way to sleep the whole night through. Pull oneself together, etc.

Also I, like, totally have my period.

Hey, I am Janeane Garofalo.

This morning as my waxer, a small, brisk Maltese woman, ushered me into the cubicle where she plies her trade she stopped me and scrutinised my face closely. 'We're going to do the eyebrows, yeah?' she asked me, tho it was scarcely a question.

It should be noted here that the area she was to deforest was decidedly not near my face, but I meekly agreed. After all, I'd been looking at my eyebrows for months, musing that something must be done about them. It's probably a good sign that my brisk Maltese waxer was so dedicated to the art of hair removal that she reflexively noticed what parts her clients were in need of a good tweeze.

But still.