If that doesn't make your heart glad, I don't know what will.

To the vector go the spoils. ROFL.

A possible downside of having a blog for over three years is you can look back and see how much you've changed, and how, sometimes, that change isn't for the better. It's a bright, cold and lovely day and I'm sitting in my room considering my research. Truth be told, I've done very little of it. I'm excited by the possibilities but intimidated by the process, if that makes sense.

So far today I have cleaned the bathroom, made my bed, had some breakfast, reviewed Friday night and came to some helpful conclusions (The Ramps launch was spectacular, but the Spanish Club were mean for turning the lights on in the middle of the set to get everyone to leave; Mel is, again, a delight; it is unwise to share one's revenge fantasies, especially when said fantasies involve glassing). I've read through some of my archives and sighed. I've wondered why I don't write poems anymore, and concluded that perhaps that's a sad side effect of growing up. I've opened several databases and seriously considered actually using them. I spoke to someone on the phone, and they called me on using material I think up for the internetz in conversation. We were talking and I opined that all I do now is think up ever more elaborate ontological Rube Goldberg devices. Truth is, that term is part of a blog entry I've been thinking up for days, an extended whine about working in the humanities, of the indignity of churning through words and books to make more words and books when there are engineering students out there making cute, ping pong ball hurling machines out of mousetraps, but now it strikes me as kind of redundant. I think up blog entries all the time, but mostly use them to sound like an irritating clever clogs when I'm talking to people. This is an unattractive habit.

How did it get to be one o'clock already? A whole day has already half happened. I must fold laundry, as rummaging through a laundry basket for underwear every morning is not the most dignified way to start the day. I must somehow read chapters of Michael Warner and Anthony Giddens. I must go to training and smack hell out of some large bags.

More later.

So there was a blackout last Friday. It was rad. I came home and found the entire suburb in darkness. If the rest of the city lights weren't blazing, turning the night sky a sickly fanta orange, the darkness would have made the inner north seem positively rural. It was also reassuring to learn that, while the VIDRL has two big-ass holes in its roof, possibly leaking invisible and deadly clouds of hideously infectious disease, they at least have a back up generator to hold the anthrax and flesh-eating virus at bay.

Of course, the cover of darkness does make it easier for people to break into your house. This house seems to attract odd break ins. Once, a large and smelly man wandered in the back door and began chatting to my (then) housemate in the living room, before attempting to go upstairs to see what was going on there. My housemate stopped him by saying 'don't bother, there's only women up there.' And they say chivalry is dead. Another time someone snuck in the front door, crept into the kitchen and stole two wallets from the bench while everyone, including Chloe, the Jess and I were in the house. We know for sure the wallets were stolen because later that night they appeared on Chloe's doorstep, sans cash and cards. Then there are all the syringes we find in our poxy little yard, but that is neither here nor there.

Anyway. On the night of the blackout one of my housemates told me that, when he came home, all the sofa cushions were neatly piled in the corridor outside the living room. Now, we have all the stuff a collection of impulsive 20-ish people who are careless with their disposable income can be expected to have, but none of it was gone. The Foxtel decoder, AKA my lover, was inexplicably pushed off the top of the TV, but that looked to be it. It's far fetched to think someone might break into the house, rearrange the sofa cushions and then leave, but I've come to believe nothing is impossible. At least nothing was taken.

Or so it seems. The next morning I discovered a bottle of prescription pills missing from my room. If they were xanax or vicodin or valium I could understand, but they were a very boring, very common, very geriatric blood pressure drug. If you took a whole bunch of them I imagine you might get a touch dizzy, but that's it. I searched everywhere and came up empty. It's more irritating than anything else. Like, waiting around at the chemist is kind of a pain. I'd really like to know what kind of punk-ass criminals we have around here, wasting a perfectly good blackout to nick the equivalent of their nanna's pills.

Also, I am an old, old, old woman.

Edit: OMFG gayest post EVER. My list of 'things to never share with the internet' now includes my taste for overpriced psychiatric services of dubious merit, blogging about procrastination, pelvic exams and body hair removal.

Stay tuned for more pictures of Bearded Men I Find Attractive, ear, nose and throat hilarity, and ham fisted attempts to make the internet stroke my hair and tell me I'm pretty.

Also: Hee.

So. Unfortunately, my birthday is next month. Without fail my birthdays always suck ass, so this year I think I'm going to run away from it. All I want to do is rent a car, gather a collection of fine companions and drive away to somewhere coastal. But, as I am new(ish) to this state, I have no idea as to where, exactly, I could go.

I require the following:

- Some form of cheerful yet very cheap B&B/brightly seedy motel.

- A secluded beach with rockpools. Many, many rockpools.

- Op shops by the dozen/any kind of CWA store where you can buy jams crowned with doilies.

- An agreeable pub.

- Somewhere not too gentrified.

- Somewhere that isn't too far away.

Any suggestions?

Apropos of nothing, the library smells like fart tonight.

One of the first times I properly hung out with Mel was at a conference where she and a friend politely listened to me spew forth my unfortunate tale of tonsil stones. I think the conversation started with internet sub cultures, and for some reason my brain found it necessary to regurgitate the many shameful nights spent trawling Google and the seedier bulletin boards searching for answers to these strange little nuggets that flew, unexpectedly, from the depths of my sinus into an unsuspecting outside world.

For those of you who don't know, your tonsils are basically there to catch all the crap you inhale before they reach more delicate parts of your body. Some people out there have particularly deep tonsil folds or, as I discovered in my many late nights hunched over Google, tonsil crypts. Stuff builds up and up in these folds to create the tonsil stone, a waxy, heroically stinky little nugget that looks like a piece of cauliflower. They have a tendency to dislodge when you sneeze or cough and come flying out into your hand. They are incredibly gross. They reek of the worst bad breath you could ever imagine.

There have been other times when tonsil stones have gotten me into trouble. One time, in the library, I sneezed and a quite large tonsil stone flew between my fingers and landed in the open pages of this girl's book. I attempted to reach out and swipe the little nugget of deathstink without her noticing, but I failed. She picked up her books and walked away.

Another time I was swimming laps when I felt the urge to sneeze, and a tonsil stone the size of a pencil eraser shot into the water and bobbed away. I suppose there have been worse things in the Melbourne Uni pool, but still.

Chloe's wanted to see my tonsil stones ever since I told her about them. One night we were out with some friends when I sneezed up a wee stone, no more than a stonelet. I pulled Chloe aside with an urgency usually reserved for conversations like 'OMG I totally cannot believe she came!' and 'Did you know he has scabies?' She was thrilled to see her first tonsil stone, and nauseated by the tonsil stone stench.

I believe we're closer now because of it.

Please come home.

Love Rachael.
Age 23.

An addendum from my bloated and tormented subconscious.
Dear glasses.

WHY MUST EVERYONE ABANDON ME ETC? I am mooning over pictures of us together in better times.







I'm so processing this with my therapist next week.

Love Rachael's boundary issues.

(p.s: mother...)

My best story is the tale of how I came to have a North Atlantic cod poorly tattooed on the right side of my ribs. I've told it so often it feels like it didn't happen to me, but it did. I have the ugly cod to prove it. As I've mentioned before, when I was living in the US I was seeing this girl who I was very much in love with, achingly so. I was so consumed in her that I didn't notice some very substantial problems both with her as a person and us as an over-earnest college dyke couple, so when she suggested we get related tattoos I didn't think twice. We decided to get a fish and a bird a la Tom Waits. She got a beautiful, bright, soaring bird, and I got, well, a fish. A very badly tattooed fish, I hasten to add.

She can say she got that bird for whatever reason. Because she likes it, because swallows are totally in, because birds are, like, free and she's a totally free spirit. I have a grey, two dimensional, rather pensive looking fish, now overfished into oblivion. It will always be associated with her. Considering how badly the relationship ended, this isn't a good thing.

When I came back to Australia I cut off my then long, blonde hair, dyed it red, lifted weights until my shoulders were square, and had the words 'so it goes' tattooed beneath my poor, sad, ugly little fish. In the book 'Slaughterhouse Five,' which is about the second world war, whenever anything dies Kurt Vonnegut responds with the refrain 'so it goes.' I find those words comforting.


Yesterday, during a quiet hour at work, two of my co-workers were talking in hushed voices about their husbands and families. Both of them were in their mid 30s, with children and dogs and houses, the kind of place you kind of, against your better judgement, half-expect to end up. Both of these women were so deeply angry and sad. One felt she couldn't say anything critical or her partner would respond by (a) dismissing her and (b) telling her to seek help for her 'anger problem.' The other was fed up with always being the bad guy, getting the kids off to school, sorting out the bills, cleaning the house, while her partner got to come home and play with everyone and be the good guy. One was unnerved by how her four year old son and her partner would have 'boys night,' where she was excluded, further underscoring how neither of them took her seriously.

Little stuff, but their unhappiness was deep and palpable. At first I thought to myself that that couldn't happen to me. Then I remembered, with a jolt, that I never thought I'd end up with a dreadful tattoo of a fish. I was filled with a heavy sense of inevitability. It's amazing how quickly love can turn you into someone you didn't want to be.


Lately I've been thinking of getting another tattoo, some words from the Great Gatsby. I can't find the exact quote right now, but it was something like 'there is only the loved and the loving, the busy and the tired.' A neat little aphorism, but one of those things that seem so true it aches. Which one are you? Which have you been? What's next?


Yesterday, as I sat in a cafe with a table hopefully full of books, pens and blank paper, a mother's group came in. They all had sweetly dressed little girls; the mothers wore pastels. These women talked to their children in sickly, cooing voices, pushing prosciutto and artichoke hearts into fat, childish hands. They spoke to each other about their kid's eating patterns, nice places to go to the movies, child care and toilet training. I had to leave, the lot of them made me feel sick. It's not very understanding, plenty of mothers aren't so nauseatingly domesticated, but I wanted to scream haven't you got anything better to do? Again I felt that rising sense of inevitability. What if these women had something better to do, one time, before this seemed like a better option? What about the men? Do they ever sit cooing in cafes with their sticky, tumbling children discussing nappies and tights for toilet training? I felt as though everything was full of such disappointment and quiet frustration. I felt heavy and sad.


The other day a months long on-and-off involvement turned itself resolutely off. My heart won't rise to my throat when I get a new email, I won't be acutely aware of the silence of my phone. He's sleeping with someone else. I didn't take it well.

I feel very tired.

A few weeks ago my girl Cheney, the traitorous wench, took off for a whole new life in Taiwan with her partner, Jamie. Cheney is in Canberra and I am not in Canberra, so while I knew she had gone the reality that Australia is now Cheney-less didn't sink in until she sent the first email from her new country, and then I felt very sad. It's a good thing Miss Cheney sends the best travel emails of anyone I know, otherwise I'd be positively morose(r).

However, the thing I find the most enjoyable about Taiwan so far is the garbage trucks. This is because they play "Greensleeves". It took Jamie and I a long time to figure out why there seemed to be ice-cream vans roaming around at about 10pm each night. Fortunately, we were told that the song was a notice to residents to rush out and throw their garbage in, before we ran after it requesting choc-tops.

In our apartment complex, there is even a little song played over the P.A system reminding us to get our garbage ready, before "Greensleeves" even starts up.

This fact, I feel, gives a pretty good idea of the kind of place Taiwan is.

See what I mean?

It was also the good lady Chloe's birthday this week, and I must send major respect to my best friend.* Chloe and I came to the sprawling metropolis of Melbourne at roughly the same time and we now live around the corner from each other, and I can't think of anyone better to move to a scary new city with. Chloe is part bogan, part nanna, part feminist theory slut, part music nerd, part American, part Australian, part many things. She is the junkie whisperer, capable of disarming any angry meth addict or surly drunk. We've seen each other through some major craziness in the past year, from grade-A shithead boys to various academic clusterfucks, and I don't know where I'd be without her. Happy birthday, Chlo. Here are some e-gifts for you:


Robert DeNiro, thinking deeply about...


... puppies. Puppies delivered in the arms of....


... JD Samson (seen here with Tracy of Tracy and the Plastics)

* in this city? Is there a statute of limitations on how many best friends you can have, or did such things expire in primary school