IPOD
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On losing it
There are pieces of me that I love, and pieces of me that I have lost. Not too long ago I lost my future. Well, not all of it - it's not like I died and this is some Ouija transmissions or something. Rather, I just lost what I knew of my future. I knew that I wanted to go back to London and study. Simultaneously though, I realised I could neither afford it and the alternate (read main) motivation for moving to London left. Left, left, left. Left his flat, walked out the door and down to Last FM never to be seen again. Le sigh. Won't someone please just marry me already?
So its time to take stock, to look to the pieces of me that I love. And drink. It's time to form a habit or two.
I love the door to my office.
I love my dog.
Who breathes so cutely when you're drunk and bugging him, just look at that huffing.
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I love my breasts.
Love, love, love. Gimme your love of the moment. Let's share.
There are pieces of me that I love, and pieces of me that I have lost. Not too long ago I lost my future. Well, not all of it - it's not like I died and this is some Ouija transmissions or something. Rather, I just lost what I knew of my future. I knew that I wanted to go back to London and study. Simultaneously though, I realised I could neither afford it and the alternate (read main) motivation for moving to London left. Left, left, left. Left his flat, walked out the door and down to Last FM never to be seen again. Le sigh. Won't someone please just marry me already?
So its time to take stock, to look to the pieces of me that I love. And drink. It's time to form a habit or two.
I love the door to my office.
I love my dog.
Who breathes so cutely when you're drunk and bugging him, just look at that huffing.
undefined
I love my breasts.
Love, love, love. Gimme your love of the moment. Let's share.
World's grossest story
So I crushed this roach on my electricity bill. This huge roach was like there, the bill was in my hand and my shoes are so white - it was an obvious decision. Only thing was that then this bill had like squished bug on it and was pretty gross, so I threw it into my yard to rot. Only issue is that my 'yard' is a court yard so it was just kinda sitting on top of a pot plant right by the front door. I just left it there. Only on Saturday, I got scared that our electricity was gonna be cut off, so I tried to pick it up and pay the bill. But a mouse or slug or something had eaten the account number so I couldn't.
Tits.
Outgross me. I'm Australian - good luck!
(Indulge me, I need to clinge to my opulent academic ways all day, every day. The roaches keep it real)
So I crushed this roach on my electricity bill. This huge roach was like there, the bill was in my hand and my shoes are so white - it was an obvious decision. Only thing was that then this bill had like squished bug on it and was pretty gross, so I threw it into my yard to rot. Only issue is that my 'yard' is a court yard so it was just kinda sitting on top of a pot plant right by the front door. I just left it there. Only on Saturday, I got scared that our electricity was gonna be cut off, so I tried to pick it up and pay the bill. But a mouse or slug or something had eaten the account number so I couldn't.
Tits.
Outgross me. I'm Australian - good luck!
(Indulge me, I need to clinge to my opulent academic ways all day, every day. The roaches keep it real)
By definition a crush must hurt
I'm over it. I'm down with being alone forever.
I spent my Friday night wondering which of the household appliances was the most abused. I say kettle. I developed sympathy for the kettle. What's yours?
I'm over it. I'm down with being alone forever.
I spent my Friday night wondering which of the household appliances was the most abused. I say kettle. I developed sympathy for the kettle. What's yours?
Join the crap boyfriend revolution
I have a slight obsession with Big Love. I don't really have a TV but that hasn't stopped me, every Sunday I pitch up at my mum's for a weekly fix. The show is fascinating. I find the plots completely alluring, there's something about the passive tensions between lovers that intrigues me. I am beguiled.
I used to wonder why. I naively though it just tickled my fancy. However, this weekend I realised that it spoke to an awkward parallel dramatisation of my lfe. Or lived. And today, I give up. I officially throw in my towel and admit defeat. I lost.
I am no longer prepared to compete with Last fm for my lover. There's nothing I can do about being valued so little. I need to be with someone who sees some worth in me, in what I believe and what I do. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's an awesome website and having a job you love is nothing short of tits. But at the end of the day, it's a fucking collection of craftily organised 1s and 0s. I have to have faith that I am worth more than that.
So... I hear by give in. I have loved being with you Matt, and you are the only person I have ever wanted to be with forever. Thank you for sharing the last couple of years with me. I will miss you dearly.
If you want to cheer me up, dear reader, just tell me how great last fm is. Currently it's my measure of worth, so make me feel a little more valuable please. Right now I just feel useless.
I have a slight obsession with Big Love. I don't really have a TV but that hasn't stopped me, every Sunday I pitch up at my mum's for a weekly fix. The show is fascinating. I find the plots completely alluring, there's something about the passive tensions between lovers that intrigues me. I am beguiled.
I used to wonder why. I naively though it just tickled my fancy. However, this weekend I realised that it spoke to an awkward parallel dramatisation of my lfe. Or lived. And today, I give up. I officially throw in my towel and admit defeat. I lost.
I am no longer prepared to compete with Last fm for my lover. There's nothing I can do about being valued so little. I need to be with someone who sees some worth in me, in what I believe and what I do. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's an awesome website and having a job you love is nothing short of tits. But at the end of the day, it's a fucking collection of craftily organised 1s and 0s. I have to have faith that I am worth more than that.
So... I hear by give in. I have loved being with you Matt, and you are the only person I have ever wanted to be with forever. Thank you for sharing the last couple of years with me. I will miss you dearly.
If you want to cheer me up, dear reader, just tell me how great last fm is. Currently it's my measure of worth, so make me feel a little more valuable please. Right now I just feel useless.
I swear it's time to get excited...
Some people say I'm cold and unemotive. I say I'm bored and apathetic. It just takes a lot to light that spark now. However, to combat the tyranny of mundane living, since my last post, I have covered 35,000 km, broken up with a jerk (and kinda got back with him) and ruined a poor virginal netgeek by using him as a "crash test dummy" to teach my hot girlfriend how to lap dance.
Sometimes life is too sweet. It's time for a gin party.
Some people say I'm cold and unemotive. I say I'm bored and apathetic. It just takes a lot to light that spark now. However, to combat the tyranny of mundane living, since my last post, I have covered 35,000 km, broken up with a jerk (and kinda got back with him) and ruined a poor virginal netgeek by using him as a "crash test dummy" to teach my hot girlfriend how to lap dance.
Sometimes life is too sweet. It's time for a gin party.
On things Heathrow cannot take
I don't know too much about my grandma. She was young, we think French, and came to Australia during WWII. They used to ship the Australian soldiers over to France to die in muddy trenches, and fill the ships with children on the return voyage to collect more muddied corpses-becoming. She would have been 15 or 16 at most, and arrived in a stupefyingly xenophobic country. There wasn't much work for teenager immigrants during the war, but you can imagine that a young French girl could make a living in a city filled with American soldiers on R and R. She had 3 children alone by the time the war was through. In what is now acknowledged as an Australian genocide against immigrants, the working class and the indigenous, my mother and her brothers were taken from her. They were part of what we call the stolen generation. My uncles were placed in different boys homes in Sydney. I don't know one of my uncles, I've never met him, but I knew my uncle Charlie for a while. Charlie became a symphony cellist, no one knows where he learnt to play music, but his career was short lived and schizophrenia eventually claimed his life; stretches of homelessness and alcoholism took what the institutions didn't. My other uncle is still alive. Survivors of the boys home he was sent to tell stories of being forced to eat meat that was so badly prepared it still had fur on it, and when they vomited, being forced to eat that too. Unsurprisingly, he still struggles with mental health problems, drug abuse and homelessness.
My mum got off easy it seems. She was handed over to a home to be looked after. For 3 or so years, she lived with a poor elderly man in Melbourne who was apparently a friend of the family, or something convoluted. It was 1952 when he finally died, almost taking my mother with him. He had been dead for a week or so by the time a neighbor, fortunately a salvation army soldier, found my six year old mother in the front yard shivering. She took her to hospital, where she discovered that her name was not in fact Susan as she had thought, but in fact a fairly French sounding name, which would explain her unusual capacity to speak French. With her new name, a badge of shame in a racist country, she was sent to a farm in rural Victoria for the next six or so years to live with what can only be described as a cunt of a family. She left school at 12 to work on the telephone switch, and as soon as she was old enough, applied to become a nurse. Studying nursing meant moving to Melbourne - out of that fucking house. Somehow she passed the entrance exam, left the house with one spare pair of socks, and moved to Melbourne.
While she was studying they found a slight hearing problem. She was sent for surgery to correct it. After a day or two in recovery, she was sent back to the farm to recover with her 'family' for another week. The doctors told her to stay as still and stationary as possible to let the bones in her inner ear heal. Her 'father' collected her in a loaded semi-trailer and made her sit on the seat above the engine block for the four hour drive home. She then completed the rest of her nursing training with a complete loss of hearing in one ear and only partial hearing in the other. Until they dramatically improved hearing aids in the early '90s, I used to sign with my mum.
She finished nursing and got out of the country as quickly as possible. This kinda helped her a lot on the long run, along with incredible intelligence, sheer determination, years of nursing in London and Europe eventually meant when she did come home, she was running hospital wards. Within a year or two, she fell in love with a jerk and had my brother to him. My dad didn't want anything to do with him, so she raised him alone on a nurses wage for two years. She got his crib on hard rubbish day and she bought a one bedroom flat down by the wharves (long before that was trendy). When my brother was two my dad decided to grow a soul and they got married. They had me pretty much straight away, and things were good for the next six years. I guess you can only pretend to have a soul for so long though, 'cause when I was seven or so my dad left. The house they'd bought together was in his name as were both cars, as things generally were in the '80s, so he decided to sell everything and use the money to move in with his secretary. Six months later child maintenance laws were introduced in my home state, but not retrospectively. My dad told my mother to 'imagine how we'd survive if we were in Africa'. Sometimes I think this is the luckiest break I ever got, I never had to see that jerk again.
My mum, my brother and I moved around a bit for a few years after that. For a few months we couch surfed with friends, before we eventually moved into a space above a nursing home my mum was nursing at. I say space, since it wasn't really a house - it didn't have a kitchen or bathroom, and when the nursing home tried to work out how much rent to charge, the department of housing told us it was uninhabitable. We lived there for two years, while my mum bought another car and saved enough to buy a house.
In 1994 we moved an hour and a half out of the city, to a satellite city called Dandenong. It's a very industrial city, plagued with unemployment and crime, but we could afford a 3 bedroom house there. When I enrolled in the local school that summer we realised pretty quickly that I wouldn't survive five years in any local high school. For a start, my stupidly ethnic name was killer, I was smart and a lot smaller than everyone else. After a year punctuated by fear-related, parent-sponsored truancy, I applied for a scholarship. I was always a bright kid and it was either this or leave school. Luckily for me, I got an Acer scholarship. It meant the government would pay for me to go to any school in the state. I chose a rural school about another hour away from my house, the girls there seemed a lot nicer and I was kinda traumatised at that point.
A decade later, today even, I went to the London School of Economics to ask about summer entrance to their PhD programme. Sometimes, when I look at how far my family has moved through 3 generations, I can't help but grin.
I don't know too much about my grandma. She was young, we think French, and came to Australia during WWII. They used to ship the Australian soldiers over to France to die in muddy trenches, and fill the ships with children on the return voyage to collect more muddied corpses-becoming. She would have been 15 or 16 at most, and arrived in a stupefyingly xenophobic country. There wasn't much work for teenager immigrants during the war, but you can imagine that a young French girl could make a living in a city filled with American soldiers on R and R. She had 3 children alone by the time the war was through. In what is now acknowledged as an Australian genocide against immigrants, the working class and the indigenous, my mother and her brothers were taken from her. They were part of what we call the stolen generation. My uncles were placed in different boys homes in Sydney. I don't know one of my uncles, I've never met him, but I knew my uncle Charlie for a while. Charlie became a symphony cellist, no one knows where he learnt to play music, but his career was short lived and schizophrenia eventually claimed his life; stretches of homelessness and alcoholism took what the institutions didn't. My other uncle is still alive. Survivors of the boys home he was sent to tell stories of being forced to eat meat that was so badly prepared it still had fur on it, and when they vomited, being forced to eat that too. Unsurprisingly, he still struggles with mental health problems, drug abuse and homelessness.
My mum got off easy it seems. She was handed over to a home to be looked after. For 3 or so years, she lived with a poor elderly man in Melbourne who was apparently a friend of the family, or something convoluted. It was 1952 when he finally died, almost taking my mother with him. He had been dead for a week or so by the time a neighbor, fortunately a salvation army soldier, found my six year old mother in the front yard shivering. She took her to hospital, where she discovered that her name was not in fact Susan as she had thought, but in fact a fairly French sounding name, which would explain her unusual capacity to speak French. With her new name, a badge of shame in a racist country, she was sent to a farm in rural Victoria for the next six or so years to live with what can only be described as a cunt of a family. She left school at 12 to work on the telephone switch, and as soon as she was old enough, applied to become a nurse. Studying nursing meant moving to Melbourne - out of that fucking house. Somehow she passed the entrance exam, left the house with one spare pair of socks, and moved to Melbourne.
While she was studying they found a slight hearing problem. She was sent for surgery to correct it. After a day or two in recovery, she was sent back to the farm to recover with her 'family' for another week. The doctors told her to stay as still and stationary as possible to let the bones in her inner ear heal. Her 'father' collected her in a loaded semi-trailer and made her sit on the seat above the engine block for the four hour drive home. She then completed the rest of her nursing training with a complete loss of hearing in one ear and only partial hearing in the other. Until they dramatically improved hearing aids in the early '90s, I used to sign with my mum.
She finished nursing and got out of the country as quickly as possible. This kinda helped her a lot on the long run, along with incredible intelligence, sheer determination, years of nursing in London and Europe eventually meant when she did come home, she was running hospital wards. Within a year or two, she fell in love with a jerk and had my brother to him. My dad didn't want anything to do with him, so she raised him alone on a nurses wage for two years. She got his crib on hard rubbish day and she bought a one bedroom flat down by the wharves (long before that was trendy). When my brother was two my dad decided to grow a soul and they got married. They had me pretty much straight away, and things were good for the next six years. I guess you can only pretend to have a soul for so long though, 'cause when I was seven or so my dad left. The house they'd bought together was in his name as were both cars, as things generally were in the '80s, so he decided to sell everything and use the money to move in with his secretary. Six months later child maintenance laws were introduced in my home state, but not retrospectively. My dad told my mother to 'imagine how we'd survive if we were in Africa'. Sometimes I think this is the luckiest break I ever got, I never had to see that jerk again.
My mum, my brother and I moved around a bit for a few years after that. For a few months we couch surfed with friends, before we eventually moved into a space above a nursing home my mum was nursing at. I say space, since it wasn't really a house - it didn't have a kitchen or bathroom, and when the nursing home tried to work out how much rent to charge, the department of housing told us it was uninhabitable. We lived there for two years, while my mum bought another car and saved enough to buy a house.
In 1994 we moved an hour and a half out of the city, to a satellite city called Dandenong. It's a very industrial city, plagued with unemployment and crime, but we could afford a 3 bedroom house there. When I enrolled in the local school that summer we realised pretty quickly that I wouldn't survive five years in any local high school. For a start, my stupidly ethnic name was killer, I was smart and a lot smaller than everyone else. After a year punctuated by fear-related, parent-sponsored truancy, I applied for a scholarship. I was always a bright kid and it was either this or leave school. Luckily for me, I got an Acer scholarship. It meant the government would pay for me to go to any school in the state. I chose a rural school about another hour away from my house, the girls there seemed a lot nicer and I was kinda traumatised at that point.
A decade later, today even, I went to the London School of Economics to ask about summer entrance to their PhD programme. Sometimes, when I look at how far my family has moved through 3 generations, I can't help but grin.
On London, the emphasiser.
Every love affair I've ever had has ended at Heathrow airport. Which is funny, 'cause I live 19,000 km away. Still, in that one square kilometre of space, so geographically removed from everything I love, everything I have ever loved has fallen apart. I can geographically pin point heart ache. I guess it's not that bad, every other place on earth feels safe then. Every other space, every other place is filled with memories of love, feelings of softness and the experience of human kindness. Heathrow is the concentrate of despair. Convenient that it's a concentrate; fits right in my hand luggage (so long as it's less than 100ml of liquid mind, otherwise I gotta stow that baggage away).
So forgive me if travelling through that square mile of despair to see my boy is a harrowing experience. Perhaps I'll buy some duty free in the departure lounge...
Sometimes I miss myself. I miss parts of myself long lost, often long rejected.
Every love affair I've ever had has ended at Heathrow airport. Which is funny, 'cause I live 19,000 km away. Still, in that one square kilometre of space, so geographically removed from everything I love, everything I have ever loved has fallen apart. I can geographically pin point heart ache. I guess it's not that bad, every other place on earth feels safe then. Every other space, every other place is filled with memories of love, feelings of softness and the experience of human kindness. Heathrow is the concentrate of despair. Convenient that it's a concentrate; fits right in my hand luggage (so long as it's less than 100ml of liquid mind, otherwise I gotta stow that baggage away).
So forgive me if travelling through that square mile of despair to see my boy is a harrowing experience. Perhaps I'll buy some duty free in the departure lounge...
Sometimes I miss myself. I miss parts of myself long lost, often long rejected.
On London, the emphasiser.
Every love affair I've ever had has ended at Heathrow airport. Which is funny, 'cause I live 19,000 km away. Still, in that one square kilometre of space, so geographically removed from everything I love, everything I have ever loved has fallen apart. I can geographically pin point heart ache. I guess it's not that bad, every other place on earth feels safe then. Every other space, every other place is filled with memories of love, feelings of softness and the experience of human kindness. Heathrow is the concentrate of despair. Convenient that it's a concentrate; fits right in my hand luggage (so long as it's less than 100ml of liquid mind, otherwise I gotta stow that baggage away).
So forgive me if travelling through that square mile of despair to see my boy is a harrowing experience. Perhaps I'll buy some duty free in the departure lounge...
Sometimes I miss myself. I miss parts of myself long lost, often long rejected.
Every love affair I've ever had has ended at Heathrow airport. Which is funny, 'cause I live 19,000 km away. Still, in that one square kilometre of space, so geographically removed from everything I love, everything I have ever loved has fallen apart. I can geographically pin point heart ache. I guess it's not that bad, every other place on earth feels safe then. Every other space, every other place is filled with memories of love, feelings of softness and the experience of human kindness. Heathrow is the concentrate of despair. Convenient that it's a concentrate; fits right in my hand luggage (so long as it's less than 100ml of liquid mind, otherwise I gotta stow that baggage away).
So forgive me if travelling through that square mile of despair to see my boy is a harrowing experience. Perhaps I'll buy some duty free in the departure lounge...
Sometimes I miss myself. I miss parts of myself long lost, often long rejected.
Vent-o-blog
In a world where friends and increasingly family recede, the specialisation of "self" reigns sovereign. I talk to doctors about that itch, therapists about that twitch, trainers about that ass. I've found myself on the verge of outsourcing my being. If nothing else, I'm suppose I'm positively supporting the social economics of (personal) growth. So why can't I have in on the action? Why can't I capitalise on my own pathetic inability to live without expert opinions validating my every thought?
Enter 1900-Vent-o-matic. I have a new life plan. Fuck academia, fuck NGOs. I am totally starting my own 1900 phone line. For $3.95/minute, people can call me and vent. I found my calling in life, to professionally bitch about people and situations I know nothing about. So go on, prime me, prepare me, gimme your worst vent... Vent-o-blog!
In a world where friends and increasingly family recede, the specialisation of "self" reigns sovereign. I talk to doctors about that itch, therapists about that twitch, trainers about that ass. I've found myself on the verge of outsourcing my being. If nothing else, I'm suppose I'm positively supporting the social economics of (personal) growth. So why can't I have in on the action? Why can't I capitalise on my own pathetic inability to live without expert opinions validating my every thought?
Enter 1900-Vent-o-matic. I have a new life plan. Fuck academia, fuck NGOs. I am totally starting my own 1900 phone line. For $3.95/minute, people can call me and vent. I found my calling in life, to professionally bitch about people and situations I know nothing about. So go on, prime me, prepare me, gimme your worst vent... Vent-o-blog!
JULY 2007
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