Continuing from this, I've long wondered why it is... [REDACTED]

Well, except for this bit: As a totally unrelated aside, it would be a fine thing if you listened to Kurt Vonnegut read one of his 'God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian' essays for WNYC. The world is a poorer place without him.

Oh, my. This is turning into a bit of a pattern. I get sad, pour my emotional gutses out into the internet, re-read it, decide that, if I didn't know me, I would conclude that the author is a bit on herself, then delete it, leaving a sheepish apology in its place. In sum, something went a bit south. I feel quite ashamed, more than I would have anticipated. Ergo, internet angst.

Yeah.

Uhm.

Anyway.

While straightening my room tonight it occurred that you could read the collections of things that unconsciously accumulate in corners like entrails.* I thought this as I looked at the second shelf down in my wardrobe, which contains two swimsuits, one achingly cute but worn only to the North Melbourne pool,** several unread but whimsically photocopied zines from Mr Jo, two broken handbags, my birthday Scrabble set, an old letter, a box of those gel things you put in high heel shoes, and a poorly concealed box of condoms. I wonder what can be divined from what is, basically, my miscellaneous shelf? Why don't the swimsuits live with the towels, where most respectable swimsuits go? Why isn't that perfectly handsome Scrabble set out somewhere more public? Give it a go. What does your miscellaneous shelf say about you?


* or, if you're feeling slightly less Roman, tea leaves, or the whims of the iTunes shuffle.
** which needs an adult aquaplay lane, by the way. Fucking kids get too much play.

I most definitely will sand and stain and varnish these $60 unfinished softwood bookshelves after I've put them up. Because there will definitely come a time when I want to unload all the books, carefully arranged by colour, take out all the screws, carry the pieces down stairs, then go track down all the sandpaper and wood stain and varnish and so on at Bunnings, and then ruin my nails actually sanding all the fiddly little bits and so on. Oh, yes. I'm certain to feel like doing that one day.

Ikea just gave me a splinter.

Heh. I'm so blogging that. Splinters on Quick Little... oh, SHUT UP, brain.

Allen keys hurt your fingers after a while.

Why won't this piece do that thing with the other one? Why don't the instructions have any words? Why do I keep asking questions when no one is around to answer them?

I wonder if Kathleen Hannah has ever assembled flat pack furniture.

I wonder if JD Samson has ever assembled flat pack furniture.

OMG, JD fantasy break!!







Wow. JD fantasy breaks make everything more fun.

Something smells like feet.

Putting together these bookshelves is most definitely the most productive use for my time right now, and not at all a way to avoid the work that terrifies me in its hugeness.

I wonder if my growing, crushing sense of inadequacy will put together these shelves for me.

Am I ready to have a phillips head screwdriver in my life?

No, I am not.

Does anyone know how to do screen captures from DVDs? I need some help with a paper.

I went away to the coast and lost my new XA.

It's not particularly mature, but I'm devastated. I don't know where I could have possibly lost it, even though I know losing things is a particular skill of mine.

I'd had the light seals replaced and everything. When I opened my desk drawer to pull out the cable for my big, hulking, decidedly unloseable 350D the A11 flash was glaring balefully at me. I keep thinking about that poor, tiny, dark, fragile little camera, and how no one will love it the way I did.

I am very, very sad.

(Edit: I was remarkably hormonal when I wrote this. So hormonal that I actually called my mother in tears because I was so upset about my poor, abandoned little camera. I felt like I was Angelina Jolie and one of my astutely collected rainbow of camera-children had been somehow wrenched from me. I mention this because, for many, many years I was effectively chemically castrated by the glory of Implanon. I was on it for so long that I kind of forgot what it was like to have a functioning uterus with all the attending cramps, bleeding and inexplicable shit moods. I'm taking a break from all that progesterone now, and the old uterus is slowly settling in to her rightful place. It's still kind of a surprise to me that I get pre-menstrual at all; I still don't entirely know what to expect each month. Apparently, I can expect to get inappropriately maternal about inanimate objects.

Still.

That poor little camera.)

Gay men having sex in a gay men's sex-on-premises club? No way!

Highlights include:

"In the context of the behaviours in that venue, I think a single condom was inadequate."

"You have 30 or 40 men who were engaged in all sorts of sexual acts and it was dark and they couldn't possibly tell who they were involved with."

But I think the real prize goes to...

"It does concern me when they engage in high-risk behaviours and then return to the community, to wives or partners, be they male or female partners who are not aware."

AKA, but won't somebody please think of the children?

There are people far more qualified to criticise this little piece of blatant homophobia than I, but I've got to say the rising panic about HIV in Victoria, coupled with the news of police surveillance of HIV-positive people indicates one hell of a backslide in public attitudes. I'm more than a little concerned that Mr Bruce Atkinson has taken it upon himself to raise the alarm about a community of consenting adults doing, well, adult things.

Also, Mr Atkinso has really creepy hair. The kind of hair that would '[publish] a book of erotic poetry that contained works entitled One Night Stand, Making Love and Tabletop Dancer.'



Get out of it, you perve.

Chloe and Jissie banded together to get me a reproduction of the original 1950s Scrabble set, complete with wooden tiles. I have now declared it on for young and old on the floor of our living room, if the floor of our living room wasn't currently populated with several friends of my roommate sleeping off the night before. Many wonderful people came out to Prudence, and while I let myself become distracted for part of the night it was still a fine way to spend an evening.

In a fit of misguided productivity this morning I cleaned my cesspit of a room, vacuumed the floor and finally, finally photographed at least some of my cameras for Flickr. My new phallus, courtesy of my mother, certainly made this task a lot easier. If you're interested you can find my glass menagerie here.

YOU UTTER SHIT

I will celebrate by getting into bed with Milan Kundera and falling asleep, probably with him pressed to my face.* Tomorrow morning I will hang my washing out to dry and go get eggs benedict, accompanied only by a copy of NW and a (sadly decaffeinated) latte because my friends cruelly insist on working on a weekday and I am not getting up before 8am. Then I will alternately sob into my ethics application and stare at my fish until it's time for training.

I've got to say, I can think of worse ways to spend a day.

We're going for drinks Thursday night, tho the only people who read this already know me so you're probably coming. At least I hope so. If you think you should be one of those people do let me know.

Oh dear.

In half an hour I will be 24.

We're into the mid-twenties, people.


* That's what she said.

Okay, so I might be boring people a little with my slavish love for Charlie Brookers at the moment, but his take on hectoring 'edutainment' reality shows, where fat adults and kids are variously humiliated, lectured, made to cry and forced to run on camera is so on the money I can't think of anything clever to say about how on the money it is. I don't think I've mentioned it in blogland before, but the research I do when nothing good is on Foxtel and I don't entirely feel like a nap is on obesity discourse in Australia, so making fat children cry is possibly my one area of expertise, and in this clip he neatly articulates many of the problems with the genre.

Now, I've got to tell you, researching obesity in the beturtlenecked ivory tower of the humanities is hard, mostly because people will ask you what you're studying, and you'll tell them, and the ensuing elliptical conversation will make your head ache with frustration. It's just so hard to convey in a non-wanky way that fat itself is not the issue; I don't know if rates of obesity are skyrocketing, if it is a 'huge national problem' or not, if it is so very detrimental to peoples' health, nor do I particularly care. What I'm interested in is all this pearl-clutching and finger-wagging re: the eating and exercise habits of other people, and the poor little fuckers on shows like 'Honey We're Killing The Kids' (and, I've got to say, in growing amounts of Australian primary schools) are on the nasty receiving end.

Fat is an interesting thing to think about, because, obese or not, we all have a relationship with fat. For better or worse fat food is delicious, comforting, perhaps a touch lascivious, and the rather mysterious transformation of that food into our much-maligned arses, stomachs and thighs is described and thought about using a range of metaphors and similes that are, in their underexamined way, a bit fascinating. It seems to me that why fat is so horrifying, particularly amongst underprivileged groups like children, women and racialised minorities, really needs to be unpacked and criticised before Jamie Oliver goes running about school yards wrenching Coke cans out of childish hands.

An excellent criticism of the burgeoning health/fat/food discourse is Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food. It's fitting that Glassner wrote the equally timely and entertaining The Culture of Fear, because the connection between the overdetermination of nutrition and health as signs of both national belonging and moral 'goodness' and [CULTURAL STUDIES WANK REDACTED] people shouldn't be afraid of their own fat asses. Glassner declares only on that he has not come to praise food, nor condemn it, more to comment on the hysteria surrounding food in our risk-obsessed times. He criticises those who adhere to what he calls 'the gospel of naught,' where food is judged by what it lacks rather than, I don't know, its ability to nourish your body, and those foods most lacking in calories, fat, salt, sugar, trans-fats, corn syrup and so on are judged morally superior to all others. He speaks to food chemists (hey, did you know that the vanilla flavour in your ice cream came from wood pulp?), organic farmers, fast food workers and celebrity chefs in his sprawling account of food in America. He doesn't judge, but he does ask why food and exercise habits alone are, increasingly, blamed for poor health amongst the working classes.

Actually, I heard recently that a British reality show has plans to bring a collection of fat (and, in all likelihood, profoundly annoying) British kids out to the Australian bush, where they'll be sent out hunting for food with Aboriginal people. Even with my voracious appetite for reality TV, the idea is quite enough to put me off my lunch. That was a pun. I want a sandwich.

Edited to say: You should know that I started this entry yesterday in a fit of enthusiasm, and quite liked where it was heading until I had to leave before finishing, which is shithouse because I can never come back to a blog entry, ever, as the rather shithouse end of this post attests. I tried my best. I swear, on my better days I have some rather clever things to say about obesity and citizenship and power and political economy and shit. Anyway, I'll stick up this lengthy quote by Dr Samantha Murray, who is either at Macquarie or Sydney University right now, because it is very good and quite on the money, also, but perhaps a bit less funny than Mr Brookers.

As members of Western society, we presume we know the histories of all fat bodies, particularly those of fat women; we believe we know their desires (which must be out of control) and their will (which must be weak). This constant 'silent presumption' in knowing certain bodies reifies the culture of knowingness. We read a fat body on the street, and believe we ‘know’ its 'truth': just some of the characteristics we have come to assume define fatness are laziness, gluttony, poor personal hygiene, and a lack of fortitude...

There is a 'suspended animation', an impermanence of living the fat body. The act of living fat is itself an act of defiance, an eschewal of discursive modes of bodily being. Seemingly, the fat body exists as a deviant, perverse form of embodiment and, in order to be accorded personhood, is expected to engage in a continual process of transformation, of becoming and, indeed, unbecoming. The process of transformation entails a constant disavowal of one's own flesh. The fat body can only exist (however uncomfortably) as a body aware of its own necessary impermanence. Consequently, in experiencing my fat body there is a sense of suspension, of deferral, of hiatus. One is waiting to become 'thin', to become 'sexual', waiting to become.

Word.

I don't care about ramekins.

I thought I'd spell this out as, based on our conversation, you seemed to be under the impression that I'm some kind of ramekin afficionado. Ramekin fan, if you will. Little else can explain your sustained and exhaustive ramekin interrogation, where you took my little ramekin-related comment and ran with it. On and on you went - what is a ramekin, why is a ramekin different to a bowl, are there different sizes, are you sure there are different sizes, why do these ones look the way they do, why do they have little handles, why are there holes in the little handles. On and on and on, and I answered your questions even though I was clearly occupied by making a rather fussy ramekin-bound pudding for myself and my friends.

Now, either you're just truly fascinated by new varieties of oven proof bakeware, or - and I suspect this is the case - you were just being a bit of a shit. There was something in your tone, something in the way you kept repeating 'oh, but, ramekin is such a specific term, like it must be a name for something really specific,' that implied you were taking the piss in a rather nasty way. As though you were saying the term 'ramekin' is needlessly poncy, like saying 'garage' when 'car hole' will suffice. As though you were sneering at me, my individual puddings, and my hopelessly bourgeois cookware.

Well, I'm sorry. Many cooking utensils have unavoidably wanky names. 'Springform tin' sounds a little Margaret Fulton, but what else are you supposed to call it? That cake tin that, like, opens and shit? We had ramekins when I was a kid. We ate ice cream out of them because they were conveniently small. It's not my fault that you had some kind of meagre, ramekin-less childhood.

I don't care about ramekins. I really don't. Call them what you like. Just let me make my pretentious little puddings in peace. Oh, and as an aside, they were heaps yum. Wanker.

I used to be one of those people who slept very well in virtually any context. I flaunted my sleep-skills all over town - in libraries, on buses, trams, trains, in secluded corners of bars, even the odd movie theatre. That is until the end of last year when, suddenly, for reasons too tedious to disclose here, sleep became a bit scary. Then I became a neurotic sleeper. Some nights I worked myself into such a panic about actually falling asleep that I spent the entire night awake, wrapped in a doona on the couch, watching BBC World and grinding my teeth.

It's been better lately, but still. Sleepless nights on your own are truly, truly wretched. Sometimes I think I could set up a matchmaking service where people can find other people to just hold them at night, but, firstly, that's a little creepy and, secondly, I digress. Every now and then falling asleep is a little much for me, so I spend the night trawling through the internet for things to keep me entertained until I get too tired to stay awake.

And, sometimes, when I find things like the Helsinki Complaints Choir, I think that isn't such a bad thing.

Oh, but I can't wait for Big Brother to start again. Verrily, my ass groove in the couch shall deepen, and all my conversations will be peppered with references to the antics of a collection of imbecile bogans who, ordinarily, I would not piss on if they were ablaze. I hope the blogging world is still as Big Brother mad as ever. Bring it on, I say.

Also, a friend emailed me a clip of Charlie Booker, and do you think I've done a single bit of work since? No, I have not. Mr Booker has now joined the ranks of my fake boyfriends. I have a very full life, truly, I do.

Graduate school isn't what I expected it to be.

Then again, upon reflection, I didn't really expect anything. Perhaps I thought I'd be issued a tweed jacket with leather patches upon admission. Or that I'd become instantly wiser and more erudite.

I spent tonight watching Mythbusters and picking my toenails, :. the latter has not happened.

This is disappointing as it was one of my adulthood key performance indicators. You know. Up there with taking out an insurance policy (of any kind), dinner parties with real wine glasses where everyone has a chair, and furniture with new upholstery.

Oh well.

It's just lonelier than I thought, is all.

... why must the goldfish be in the deep fryer?