My brain, she has gone dry for things to write about, but I will say this. I saw a Chinese hairless dog in a Coogee sweater the other day, and I loved it.

The possum was not well. I noticed her (I do not believe in calling animals 'it' and, besides, gender is but a cultural construct) when I was walking home through the underground carpark in Melbourne Uni, my favourite place because it smells like cold concrete and during the day I like to think it's where the cars go to nest. The possum was a ball of fur, her head between her legs, crouched beneath a parked car. I gingerly touched her back but she didn't move.

'What is it?' Asked one of the maintenance guys, getting out of his car.

'A possum. I don't think she should be here.'

'It looks pretty sick. Are you good with animals?'

'Not so much I'd want to get a parasite.' I was lying. All I wanted to do was pick her up and carry her outside and put her somewhere comfortable and car-free, a place where she could leave this vale of tears in peace, but for some reason I didn't want to look to enthusiastic. I always do that, ignore cats on the street and dogs tied outside shops when I'm with other people, in case I betray a juvenile eagerness.

'Well, perhaps you can call security.'

'Perhaps.' I went to walk away, but changed my mind. I couldn't just leave her there, it was unfair and undignified. 'Fuck it. I'll wrap her up in my cardigan or something.'

The man shrugged. 'I wish I could help you but I'm a total coward with animals.'

I wrapped my cardigan around my hands and gently, gently nudged the possum around to face us. Her eyes were streaming with something brown and viscous.

'Oh, dear,' I said, queasy. 'A sick possum is one thing, a gooey sick possum is another.'

'I'll call security.' The man left for a little room cut into the carpark wall, humming with fluoro lights.

I wondered, for a moment, if I should stay or go. The possum's head had once again sunk to the ground, her paws covering her eyes. Her body kept sinking forwards then jerking back, as though she was trying to stay awake. I was reminded of the time I saw someone faint in the library foyer. No one noticed except for this guy's friend, who called out with a strangled, too-high voice for an ambulance. Everyone stood around dumbfounded, including me, and I imagine everyone was thinking the same thing. What should I do? Should I do anything? Should I stay here or should I accept that I'm useless and go about my business? Surely someone else knows what to do. Eventually I went upstairs, feeling a prickle of guilt for being so callous.

The maintenance guy came back with a broom and a bucket. 'I'll put it in the office,' he said, 'so she's safe until someone can pick her up.' Together we scooped the possum into the bucket. She hardly seemed to notice; she just wound her tail around the bucket handle, a reflex.

I wished the maintenance man well and went to the library, and now I'm here writing this, and the possum is in a cold bucket breathing her last, and the maintenance man is with her, and I am feeling guilty for being so callous.

It is morning. A woman stumbles groggily into her living room, mascara smeared down her cheeks, hair a greasy mess. As her eyes regain their ability to focus she sees a dishevelled man asleep in a corner. Beside him is a vast, foamy, mucousy mass.

WOMAN
Oh God. What happened last night?

MAN (waking)
Hey, baby.

WOMAN
Oh no. Oh no, no, no. Please tell me we didn't.

MAN
It was amazing.

WOMAN
No, no way am I ready for this. What the hell happened?

MAN
Don't you remember? After you asked me back for coffee, and we were making out, and things were getting pretty hot...

WOMAN
I don't need a fucking diagram.

MAN
Well, I got up and made this bubble nest in this safe, warm corner. And then I took off all my clothes and did that dance for you, and you were totally turned on.

WOMAN
I think I'm going to be sick.

MAN
Then you told me to 'take you now,' so I wrapped myself around you and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until you released your eggs, and as they fell I caught them one by one and put them into the nest.

WOMAN
I am actually going to be sick.

MAN
Then you left the room and I deposited my sperm.

WOMAN
Leave. Leave now. Oh God, I need a bucket. And a bacon and egg roll. And a mop to clean up this fucking mess.

MAN
I think we should send them to Steiner school when they get big.

I am rather aroused by the woman at the beginning of Le Tigre's 'Dyke March' who says 'I like going to the Dyke March because I like to be surrounded with, ah... women.'

Just goes to show you can take the girl out of organised feminist activism but you can't take the feminist activist out of the girl.

In other news I now know what to tell people when they ask me what my thesis is about.

Dear Coke Zero,
There are some things you need to know about my upbringing, Coke Zero. I had one of those fruit-is-nature's-candy mothers. Actually, let me rephrase that. My mother came of age in the 70s, a time of macrame owls, burnt orange and virulently horrible food. Hers was a generation that discovered 'ethnic' cooking, dietary fibre, the hors d'oeuvre, miniature gherkins, cauliflower cheese and how a 1950s diet of steak, salt and butterfat might just give you a coronary. Still. She grew up in rural Western Australia, CWA territory, and retained certain ideas about what a wholesome diet for a growing child might be.

As a result my sister and I were raised on thoroughly middle-class diet of polite culinary adventurousness tempered with provincial common sense. When I was very small I didn't like to eat, well, anything, and I have vivid memories of my mother forcing me to drink egg flips, a drink made with, get this, raw egg, in order to get some healthful protein into me. When we were allowed soft drinks my mother would carefully decant a few mouthfuls into a glass, and we weren't allowed more than one. There are at least two effects of such an upbringing. Firstly, when no one's looking, I revert to a kind of orange-hued, roughage-filled Margaret Fulton type of cookery just to appease my inner child. Secondly, I never really developed a taste for Coke.

It wasn't a conscious thing, it just never struck me as a beverage option. Whenever I did drink Coke, or Pepsi, or Fanta, or whatever, it'd make my stomach hurt and teeth ache. It just wasn't my thing

Which is why it's so strange, Coke Zero, that now, when I'm at my quiet, two days a week office job, I can't get enough of you. It started a few months back when I felt particularly wrecked on a Sunday morning. I knew there was a particularly elderly vending machine in the basement, but had paid it no mind. Suddenly I realised that vending machine contained vital caffeine. From there, an obsession began. Suddenly, Coke Zero, I can't get through my few hours in the office without you. As soon as I sit at my desk I begin to crave your bubbling, acid sweetness. But only in the office, nowhere else. When I'm not at work I don't even think about you. It's almost like I'm some kind of beverage sex tourist, using a temporary change of location to indulge my secret, illicit urges.

I don't get it, Coke Zero. I'm a non-Coke drinking, nice, rather WASPish girl most of the time. Why do you have to taunt me like this? Why do you have to tarnish my phenylaline-free insides? Why you gotta hurt me so good, Coke Zero?

Yours in secrecy,
Rachael.

When I was last in Canberra Miss Alice asked for closure on this entry, where I put way too much thought into the way I smell. Well, Alice, the choice has been made and my bank account is considerably leaner. Here it is carefully merchandised on my mantelpiece next to my dessicated emo lemon and a book on kittens.



The winner is Tom Ford's Black Orchid. Yes, I know it wasn't one of the original contenders, but it smells so very, very good. When I first tried it I nearly sniffed the skin off my wrist, it's so addictive.

I first tried it the other day when I went on my bi-annual pilgrimage to get more concealer, which is really an excuse to get the MAC lady to make my face somehow better than it usually is. Really, I just liked the bottle, which reminded me of my mother in a pleasant way. Firstly, my mum is a lifelong user of Youth Dew, which comes in a wasp-waisted, fluted glass bottle. Secondly, my mum was hot stuff back in the day. She looked like a military Nana Mouskouri, all high cheekbones, long black hair and ruthlessly tailored RAAF blue.* Going on the bottle alone I concluded that this would be the type of perfume my mum would have gone for in her youth, and in honour of her I gave it a red hot go.

Judging by the bottle I expected it to be a sprawling, heady, dizzyingly 70s sort of scent. You know, the kind of fragrance to fuck Bebe Buell to, or perhaps just do line after line of coke. While the scent has a definite retro vibe it's not quite as Studio 54 as I first hoped. It's far more wearable than that. Actually, it smells as though two of my all-time favourite scents, Mitsouko and V&R Flower Bomb, had a baby. A sexy sex baby, that is. The drydown has the same chypre-spiked fleshiness of the Mitz, which soon settles into an oozing, Flower Bomb-like sweetness. It's like a version of Flower Bomb that has forgotten to wear underwear.**

Anyway, I suspect I am reading far too much into a bottle of stinky water, but you know what? Deep down, in my heart of hearts, I am a very superficial girl who simply likes pretty things. At least now I'm a nice-smelling superficial girl.


* My father, on the other hand, looked like Rutger Hauer. Sadly, I do not look at all like my mother.



Sigh.

** I vacillated for a long time about the appropriate word to use here, and concluded that the word 'panties' made me feel like a sex offender, and the word 'knickers' made me feel like a British sex offender. At the time of writing I am neither, so underwear it is. It still looks clunky to me. In the words of Mates of State, everyone needs an editor.

I saw a dog with a peg leg yesterday.

Perhaps I should be clearer. I was running late for work yesterday morning, 'yesterday' being a Sunday and 'work' starting at 9am every Sunday. I hadn't showered and I was still in last night's clothes and eyeliner but, you know what? I really like early Sunday mornings. I like how, in my increasingly hipster infested corner of the city, the only people up are the dog walkers, the middle-aged cafe-dwelling paper readers, the men from the boarding houses on their benches with their brown paper bags. I like how Sunday mornings always smell like wet concrete. I even kind of like the idea of six quiet hours in a quiet office, where I have no particularly challenging responsibilities and I am not required to wear shoes.

So, despite my mascara crusted eyes, unwashed hair and vaguely inappropriate clothes I was in exactly the kind of mood you would want to be in to meet a dog with a peg leg.

She was a miniature schnauzer and she was sitting on the kerb, presumably waiting for her owner to come back with the paper and a coffee. She wore a little coat. Her left front paw was made of metal and rubber, as though someone had hacked off the leg of a zimmer frame and lashed it to the dog. I tried not to stare.

Yes, this blog has devolved into a collection of the YouTube clips that have me chuckling to myself in the library. It's not like I haven't tried to write something more substantial. It's just that in the past few weeks I've been trying to make more of myself as a 'writer,' and whenever that happens I get horrendously self conscious and word constipated. I've drafted several entries in clunky, Little Lord Fauntleroy-ish tones on some article from Saturday's Age on the increase of children admitted to hospital for eating disorders (my razor-sharp analysis - no shit, sherlock), my carefully honed ability to say embarassing things loudly in bars right when the glassie comes, and my girl Jessie's birthday. Sensibly, I decided to keep these off the public record.

In the meantime I'll continue to have dirty thoughts about Samantha Bee. Please watch to the very end. Also, this video will be funnier if you are familiar with that ottoman humping video. I assume, of course, you are. Might as well watch it again, just to be sure.



As an aside, I finally met the delightful Momo last night. She is sweet and has lovely hair. Blogging old school 4eva.