Gee, being one of the longterm unemployed sure is a giggle.

So today is just like every other day I've had for the past few months. At first I start out all optimistic and dreamy about my future and then whomp, there goes the day and I've applied for another 15 jobs and it all seems too bleak, too bleak. It's only 2:30 as I start to write this but that's not the issue, it's that I'm completely and totally unmotivated to do anything that I should want to. It's a strange thing, because I've become addicted to all of the modern technological amenities that make a full life easier, without actually having a full life.

Before I just used to cruise along with my friends and find things to do with my life based on the incessant call of my mobile. Then, tragically, fiscal responsibility and the inability to keep up with it all. So now I spend the day looking at photos of people who I wish I was, rather than actually taking steps to achieve anything at all. You have to wonder what's making me so damn unhappy. The worst thing is that I can't even afford to see my GP to get a referral to a new psych. Trouble.

I weigh 90 kilos now, which is something I'm thoroughly miserable about. I think it's a new low for modern times.

And when I strip away all of the layers of impossibility it all comes down to a single, shiny, pointy brass tack. I want to make people happy with what I do, and I want to make me happy, I just seem to be at a bit of a low ebb in terms of winning that race.

A Quiet Resurrection (Of Sorts)

It's a strange thing. That when I started my relationship, I stopped writing. I think that I must have felt as though I was cheating on him with my journal. Now, of course, I know better. I've learnt that a mutinous thought is just that; a thought, and that we must move on regardless. And writing was the thing that reminded me of the pace. I could look back and see how much had been, how much I'd missed, and what was waiting to be grabbed.

I think I've slipped into a world which lacks a temporal framework. Since I saw you last, I've quit a 'good' graduate job (which was, in fact, very good for other people and I wish them all the best) to see what's going on in my crazy noggin. It turns out I wasn't very well. And it also turns out that my ugly habit of attempting to please everyone at once reared its form just in time for me to forget myself. So here we are, at the very start. Trying to remember. And then I think I might try to get myself some structure, and write something sustained. A long-term aspiration which has been in the long-term too-hard-basket for too long, methinks. So nothing crazy, just baby steps. And a reminder of all of the things that have happened since I lost my creative mojo.

- The Americans have a black President
- The Iranians have exactly the same guy
- We have a man with a tongue like a lizard as our Prime Minister
- Leigh Sales has mostly replaced Tony Jones as host of Lateline (critical importance)
- My dog died, and my mother overcomphensated by getting me two Collies.


Let's see how we go, then.

Creative Writing Exercises

These are all from semester one this year, from the creative writing class I dropped (because I thought it was trite and uninteresting. Yes, I am exactly that pretentious). None of the titles are mine (though I invented a lot of the subtitles), they came from the text book. I had to write the responses. And I did my very best. I hope you like them. If you don't, then that's swell too.

5/3/07 Response to a painting
She leant and grasped at the place where no child would scream, and the drought was inside her, though the roof of the world had split and spilled around her. Cracked earth in her belly contracted and swelled with a low, dull ache. Her mouth closed against the tempest, she turns her back to it and gulps below the blackness of cloud.

He sat smothered by a tyranny of water. The holes in the river whispered with open mouths of sanctuary. An offer of stillness. He opened his arms and held the rain.

What was breaking had broken. All lost. They kept on.

Loving Hitler
A symphony for Eva Braun definitely not composed by Wagner

Oh Eva
Will you ever
Notice Me?

I would do
Anything
for your pleasure.

I will give you
coloured jewels
or a country
maybe Poland

Oh Eva
Will you Ever
Notice me?

I would annex
I would solve
who needs friends
when you have genocides like there?
and you
I would have you
Oh, Eva.

Woman to Man
if you can call us those

Where are you, pretty thing
your head in bowls of Roses
your presence so slight
I fear you'll float away

Talk of tying down
could only push you further
from the ground
from my arms
into wispy clouds of vague

Your parallel a shadow
a quiet nighttime walk
with you and your ghosts
a stroll with memory
cooled by time

You asked if you could hold me
you didn't say how long.


A Child's Essay about the Sea
The sea is vast. Vast means almost endless, I think, and endless is the biggest kind of big there is. Bigger than huger than giant. That's the sea. I walked into it once, the almost endless sea. A strange thing happened, thought, the water lapped at my ankled like a tongue, and my feet began to sink. I stared out at the sea for a very long time, and I thought of what would happen if I stayed. I wondered if the sea was trying to swallow me because it was lonely. It wants us all. It wants us all inside it, I should think.

I thought of it a little. I thought of joining the sea. Of sunken ships and giant squid and smiling sharks. So then I believed that there may be no room for me there, and that it may be trying to trick me. The sea is as full as it is empty, and it is vast.

The End

So that's them.

And it made me think that I want a lover with a soul like the bottom of the ocean. Cool, and dark and still. And occasionally visited by James Cameron.

Any writer who doesn't give big ups to Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce can bite me. Hard.

So I just rewatched Moulin Rouge for about the millionth time just now with my mum. She'd never really seen it the whole way through but I think she liked it. The main thing I want to share is that I watched it with fresh eyes, because it's been a while since I came upon something I was once so obsessed with and seen it completely anew. Essentially, when you break it down, the whole thing is pure, unambiguous, innuendo-packed pantomime. And quite a good one.

But then, it's a world not only of heightened reality, but also of emotion. So when, at the conclusion, he brings it crashing back to realism, that's what shatters you. THAT's the thing. And it's the contrast that catches you unawares.

The more you watch the more you learn.

Currently working on an idea about a hyperreal sitcom.

Also, am applying for honours. Don't expect to get it, but why the fuck not.

So that's that. Hope you're well.

Radio. Radio. And somebody get Stephen Curry's Logie engraved.

Hello, newsfans. The blog's back. With a stronger, more professional focus on media, entertainment and the arts. Because that's the gig I'm going for in general. You know. I've got to cultivate a 'personality'. Which is all bullshit anyway, because Fifi Box still manages to cut a cheque every week. Horsey fool.

So. Here's the roundup.


The King

Was actually quite good. Four stars.


Culinary Discoveries

Tomatoes don't count as any form of points on Weight Watchers. Jackpot!

Radioooo!
I might be doing Wednesday overdrive on 2SER. Ooooh. My own show! Or the Fourth Estate. Which is paid. Which now means I have to cobble together a Media CV. Gagh! No experience!!!

That is all.

A very fucking average Friday

Okay, so I've stopped importing the feed from this blog to facebook, so there'll be about two people reading. For releasing my intergalactic wrath upon you, I apologise.

I'm so incredibly tired of being gullible, trusting and soft. I know that by next week I will have gone back to embracing my naîviety, and being the all-singing, all-dancing child of peace and hope and artistic justice that you don't know-and-love, but sometimes it's just like you get home and all there is left under you, between your bottom and the great big fucking hole in the earth beneath us is a very thin net of steel wool, and you're like a baby on a bassinet above the chasm. You've got to realise that the fibres are quietly snapping with every single bounce.

I'm tired of living alone and being alone and being so blasé about it to everyone like it doesn't matter at all. Yes, the freedom, yes, the city, yes, my friends. But there's never anyone waiting to tell me that everything won't be okay, but that they'll be there regardless. And no, I don't mean that I hate being single. I don't care about not having sex or intimacy or any of that, it's immaterial when you're standing in the living room on your own and there's no-one to talk to or touch or even just be silent with.

I'm tired of investing and believing and having ideas and notions and of creating creating creating and not a single person understanding. It's like my mind is formatted to betamax. Every word I write is Esperanto. And I feel stupid, all the time, because when I speak, everyone just looks confused. Am I really in abstract?

And I'm tired of making plans, and knowing that this degree is in essence one big plan, and of knowing that I having not one iota of control over any of it. I hate not having faith in anything, not humanity, not God, not the Pope, not fashion, not love, not movies, not power, not structure, not beauty, not function, not even words. And I resent my inability to peel myself from this self-indulgent rabble and move on because once upon a time it wasn't about being happy it was about surviving and that's how you came to be happy, by not being killed in a war or catching the pox.



and most of all I'm tired of screaming into the internet, like it's a universe in a brown paper bag and hoping that somebody hears.

A really normal Monday.

So yeah. I hate bloggers who blog about their cat and what they ate for breakfast last Friday, even though I really am that person, sans cat. So I'll keep it not only abridged, but also aConcorded or aspeedoflighted.

I've started a new LJ for creative writing but I'm having and y'all can bugger off if you think I'm giving you the URL because you'll pick on me.

I went to the gym today. I will also go tomorrow. I practised for radio. That was pretty rad. Then I had a production meeting, plucked Aaron's eyebrows and made a stir-fry. I couldn't finish the rice so it's in the fridge.


It makes me really sad that I look nothing like my grandmother.

I had a nightmare the other night that there was someone making earthquakes. They were starting them at uni and it shook my house. I was up against a wall, bracing myself and sitting on the floor with my feet on the opposite wall. I think I was in a kitchen, possibly not my own. The rose in a jar that my mother gave my grandmother, in the dream, shattered. But I didn't see it happen. I just walked into my bedroom, and it was open on the floor. The rose and all the other flowers and foliage had browned, and lay on the glass, which was glittering, a little sinister, a little sad.

Then, like in all the best stories, Alice wakes up.