Gah.

I am wavering between being totally infuriated and snickeringly amused by the Age blogs at the moment. Ask Sam, previously Fucking Sam in the City (adjective and emphasis mine), is one of the most socially regressive, sexist, coy, badly-written Cosmo knock-offs out there at the moment, and I cannot tear myself away. It’s like a [...]

A certain kind of nothing.

I cut my hair close and dyed it red the other day. There’s a soft spot at the back of my neck from moments of forced intimacy with the lip of a hairdresser’s sink. I catch my reflection and don’t recognize myself. I kind of like it.
Somehow “a soft strawberry blonde” transmuted in the salon [...]

Not so much.

On the tram coming home tonight, things were relatively quiet. Students disembarked along Lygon St, little old men met their wives, office workers gossiped tipsily after staff drinks. People listened to their iPods or read books.
At the corner of Lygon and Blyth, a middle-aged man got on and sat in the aisle opposite me. Overweight [...]

Something strange, in the neighbourhood…

I was washing the dishes just now when Pat called out from the backyard, “I think I can hear a marching band!”
I went out to join him, only to hear the faint drone of a tuba cutting through the mower-noise from next door. Then – a whole cacophony of brass, wafting in with the breeze. [...]

Soft in the head.

I think I’m a little bit in love with the world at the moment. That, or I’ve gone a bit soft in the head. Things seem crisper all of a sudden. Cleaner. I walked to work this morning with thin sunshine dripping around me into cracks into the footpath, breathing out and watching my breath [...]

Let’s procrastinate!

Oh my gosh. I just sat down to edit fifteen pages of poetry, and somehow – you know, totally unintentionally – kind of accidentally turned the tv on. And now I remember why I try to avoid tv, because already I’ve been rendered slack-jawed and glassy-eyed by Victoria Beckham’s new show. Forty-three minutes in, and [...]

Face… hooked?

I’ve only been on Facebook for a week and already I feel slightly seedy, unwashed, like an old man in an anorak hanging around a children’s soccer game. The stalkerly aspects of that site are outstanding. It’s like they’ve taken the inherent voyeurism and desperation of the internet and upped it by a factor of… [...]

Oh. Rats.

I saw a rat scurry across the kitchen the other night, and I am slightly hesitant now to wander around in the dark. I feel anxious to point out two things here: 1) our house is old and full of holes and we keep a sanitary kitchen, it’s just that rats can get in through [...]

From the Byron Shire Echo (via my backpack):

‘Lean and posey, like a ferret, Mungo gets the Archibald treatment from 30 artists as part of FEHVA at the A and I Hall in Bangalow. Here Camilla Connolly layers oil onto her piece while Ariel Schlesinger’s blue Mungo looks on. The Mungo portrait prize is sponsored by the Byron Bay Writers Festival. See another [...]

Home.

Twelve hours on a bus later, and I’m home. The streets are slightly colder, but they’re my streets. I went straight from the station to pizza and beer with the kids. My room still smells the same. It’s nice to be back.
The bus trip was only moderately horrific – it would have been quite pleasant [...]