a night on the town

tonight, i'm going to wear my hair up, and a dress.

i'm going to do what i please, and talk to strangers. i'm going to leave the restaurant early and go to the bar, because i feel like spending the money i don't have on alcohol, not food. yesterday i ate nothing but chocolate. i jammed large chunks into my mouth with no regrets, and let it melt.

i'm going to wear a dress because i'm tired of being blasé, tired of being depressed. at least this gives my legs something to aim for. magnificence.

and even if i don't get there, i'm going to tell myself i don't care. and for once in my life i'm going to tell myself to believe it.

emotastic.

i'm unmotivated. depressed. failing to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

honours is getting me down this week. i spent six weeks dedicated to my last assignment - researching, forming my methodology, begging for meetings with my supervisors and making stuff up in the interim. my first supervisor is ok, he doesn't have much idea of an end point, but painstakingly feeds me minute aliquots of information i would have benefited from weeks prior. my second supervisor? we had a meeting this week. prior to that, i haven't seen or heard from her in six weeks - she's had a full teaching load. to you, i say pish. you are my supervisor and you should damn well act like one. i run the depression monopoly around here. i have an assignment on giardia - for those of you who don't know, its a parasite that likes your insides, and you find it in poo. of marsupials, among numerous other animals. and that's what some lovely researchers have spent their time doing - analysing poo. sounds just like my life. honours is a fun time. and this assignment tops it - i just can't get motivated about poo. told you i was depressed.

to top it off, i'm not happy where i'm living as i can't prove my address to get youth allowance, as my landlord (who is unfortunately an old friend) wants a tax break by not reporting my rent as income. so i can't pay my rent, but he fails to see that as a lose-lose situation. don't make your problems my problems, he says. i'm better friends with his little brother than i have been with him in years. i'm getting a job next week. call centres need to die in a burninating chemical fire.

i could have been living in a huge nerd mansion down the gold coast in wanksville - which, no, wouldn't have made me any less depressed, but there's always something heartening about being depressed whilst swanning by a marble-encrusted pool next to a bullshark-infested canal. and why am i not there? why am i such a depressive, disheartened cynic? because people can't commit.

me, my parents always taught me that if you commit to something, you have to go through with it. which is why i guess i'm still at uni, and living in a house i can't afford. the irony is... ironic. i don't know why it frustrates me so to see this ability so lacking in other people, but it makes me want to shake them. from the people who pulled out of the mansion the day we were to sign the lease so that noone got to play in the theatre room or with the huge pool table, to my supervisor who volunteered to manage an honours student, knowing full well she was already manically busy educating the ignorant. add to that the fact that she can't organise her way out of a wet paper bag - i want to shake her. and not like a polaroid picture. in a bad, bad, incarcerable way. the most exciting thing that's ever happened to her, which she bragged about at a dinner party (to which those other students were not invited - no, really? they're not on your project - they don't expect to be invited to your home, but to specifically uninvite them is just rude) is that our good prime minister k-rudd's daughter has made breakfast in her kitchen. good for her. clap clap for the handicap.

just call me a cynic.

i'm listening to missy higgins - the sound of white. she's got such a fabulous grasp of the human condition - its sad music, but it always puts me at peace. through identification of her lyrics, her music, or an almost pathological dislike of her chin cleft, she calms my storm. her emotion astounds me.

a good friend asked me on the weekend why i had 'sad eyes'. as we were out to dinner, i brushed it off. i need to have a good chat to him. he knows me too well - its scary. as it is, the majority of a block of old gold jamaica rum and raisin chocolate has made its way into my system today - a fact that makes me feel better, and the damage of which is negated by the half hour i spent on the stair master last night.

so here i sit, sad music, sad face, sad bank balance, sadly empty packet of chocolate, and tragically empty document that needs to be filled with a critique on poo. gotta love it.

lullabies and smiles

i was thinking to myself last night, as my lover sang me a lullaby from a hundred kilometres away at two in the morning - i've learned a lot.

from each friend, from each random encounter, from those i love and loved and hated, i've learned a little something, and somehow all those little things have brought me here.

from aaron, i learned the beginnings of sex, in naiive and shy baby steps. and you i thank for beginning me on a journey of discovery. from amy, i learned to listen, to value true friends, and to be humble. you i thank also, for teaching me what not to do. from elizabeth i learnt simplicity, dedication to true friendship, and the words to too many songs. thanks go to her, for innocence and patience. from rohan, sweetness, and fascination with intelligence. you, i thank for teaching me politics, maturity, and to have a good long look at myself periodically. tegan taught me to embrace my impetuosity, to explore my identity, and not to care what others think. you i thank for showing me to embrace the crazy. from adam i learnt to trust my instincts, and not to acquiesce. thank you, adam, for showing me how to better myself. from aron i learnt how to give my all to a person, and how to get it back. he taught me love, loss, regret and the meaning of true friendship. so thankyou. alex gave me a love of fast cars, and a hatred of fast men. thankyou for helping me to find myself in difficult times. from maddie i learnt to love myself, and to be beautiful. to you i give thanks for friendship. dariush taught me to be carefree, to cherish my inner child, and to find good in everyone, even after the fallout. thankyou for teaching me so much, for lullabyes, and for your family. everyone needs to learn about inlaws some time. thanks to your mother, for showing me that some people will always have issues with the unchangeable. thankyou for showing me i can't change people. to dominic reminded me to love myself, my impetuosity, my sexuality, and to be thankful for short but good times. katie, to you i give thanks and regrets, for teaching me the importance of family, and its omnipotence. christian taught me to embrace art, to experiment, to be content with what i have. my thanks to you. to liam, i thank you from the bottom of my heart, for an unlikely friendship, for teaching me patience, dedication, and laughter in the face of adversity.

from each of these and more, tiny facets of my life are forever stamped with their influence. in my life, my love, my friends, i see their influence daily.

my ridiculously intelligent, brave, dedicated, shy, second-guessing, long-eyelashed boy with a sweet inner child, a secret love of impetuosity and an appreciation for art, music, sex and love - this is the culmination of what i've learnt, who i've become. i am so lucky to have found someone who embodies my desires, my lessons learnt, my needs. so to my friends, i thank you for my happiness.

She, the interminable...

i spend my life waiting. waiting for the train, waiting on my commute – i waste three hours of every day sitting here, there, crammed in a corner of the carriage floor, speeding on to the rest of my waiting life. i’m waiting for uni to finish, waiting to graduate. waiting for the opportunity to get a job, which i will do whilst waiting to get into med school. where i will wait until i graduate. my life won’t start until i’m thirty. by which time it will be time to have children – wait nine months for them to be born, five years for them to be in primary school – maybe then i can have a real life? – then high school… then what? i’ve no idea, but i’m pretty sure that by then i’ll be waiting for retirement. from there, this waiting game makes its way into a trivial art form – waiting for the mail, for visits from my kids, for pension day, for my carer to change my colostomy bag. which, when it comes down to it, is pretty much the definition of life. get out of the intestine, into the bag. and then you get incinerated, just for being what you are.

carpe dium, its slipping away.

university for the real worlde...

there's a girl a few metres away as i sit, unnoticed by passers by. she's a big girl - not big-boned but fat. fat and wearing the short shorts so much in fashion at the moment. she sits, knees tucked, on her tiptoes, wiggling her legs from side to side and consequently her behemoth arse pseudopodes across the seat. opposite her sits a boy. a skinny boy. a Good boy. a mother's son. he eats the ravaged remains of his hot chips with a scared but happy look on his face - like an emo rabbit staring into a set of oncoming headlights. he's freshly out of highschool; a closet d&d fan with his first girlfriend. she extricates herself from the bench and starts to splodge away, her chipped toenail polish matching her too-big pink havianas. he follows, enraptured.

aah, first years.

oh, the huge manatee.

and so the saga continues. the depressive hermit escaped to a cave of someone else's hoarded, useless memories, and i have fled to an unstable but contented playhouse.

the asylum, we called it, because we gaily proclaimed our supposed insanity. an apt title, for a house that eats souls and locks them in to fester in its corrupted rooms from which few escape. we are the lucky ones, he and i, for we are stronger and better people for the testing. those who remain, however, pass on messages of apocryphal cheer as they sink deeper into the abyss.

the hippie is hardening slowly to life's realities - her needles that she fervently believes to heal others she now turns on herself to ease her pains. her last love defrauded her, and she in return repaid the favour. now she tortures herself, baiting her heart by rekindling their 'friendship'. she says it is peaceable, but i feel the tension in her words from a hundred kilometres away. she tempts herself with boys - beautiful bodies but childish souls - to avoid her own maturity. after all, that would require her to think, and for now she would much rather carouse in her self-constructed escapism.

the whore, on the other hand, is in love. the self-professed and sticky kind, reminding me of half-chewed insipidly sweet gum stuck in a stranger's hair. she blogs - i may be expecting! planned and wanted and please don't tell me i'm stupid. i roll my eyes; everyone already knew - stupidity and impending doom, both. he doesn't know yet, but the internet does. she announces their convenient abscondment to adelaide, to increase their menagerie. a child bride, playing at grown up games; ugly in clothes and masks too old for her naivety. i pity the fool. he digs deep holes. i'm glad i left my shovel behind in that house.

i find them an endless source of amusement, and grounding irony - a tragic pantomime compelling you to watch, but allowing you only boo and hiss from your seat.

the depressive is now merely a hermit - slowly healing his scars and learning to love himself again. nocturnal, he prowls down to work the nightshift at the local supermarket. he is happier than i've ever seen him - happier, perhaps is not the right word, but he is certainly content in his new cave.

and i? i play at house in an apartment that is still not my home. my belongings lay obfuscated at my parents', belying the pretence that i still cohabitate their home. i have no home. recently, however, the merest inklings of belonging have begun to impugn my homeless martyrdom, and whilst i still feel like a child playing at 'house', ikea and i have begun to make me a new place to belong. i too, am happy.

homeless and melancholy... (sippy cups, anyone?)

i was homeless last week, for the first time in my life. truly nowhere to call my own. that is not to say i had nowhere to go - friends will always have couches. but to feel unsettled and to live out of a bag, and to have to conquer one's own arrogance in order to ask for help (and then to deflect the inevitable probing Why?) is not a situation i would ever like to be in again. even before i moved back to my parents (and yes, it is a tragic inevitability to face when one's own independence stumbles and crashes face first into the pavement), whilst not feeling at peace in a house cohabitating with a depressive, a hippie and a whore, i had a home to call my own.

i have slept on stretchers, couches, floors, curled up in the inordinately miniscule confines of my passenger seat, but always i knew that when the storm blew itself out (and with my mother's pandering passivity it always did), my life would return to its regularly scheduled programming.

living as i am as a roaming burden on humanity, i am starting to hate trains. commuting is horrible, and whilst i am becoming an unwilling expert on the city's public transport system, i begin to understand anarchy more and more. stupid trains. stupid. all of them.

in the mean time, i take a certain satisfaction that the house i left voluntarily is finally revolting. my replacement, prewarned against his cohabitant's predatic and phagocytic nature, has demonstrated his inherent character weakness and succumbed. the remaining two moralists are in hiding, sharpening their weapons for the inevitable face-off. this is something i'd love to see, if i am still considered an ally after pulling a mussolini-style retreat.

the house i was expelled from, however, is treating its geriatric inhabitant to a display of neonatal behaviour. making a grown man write out rules for living is a strange dogma to adhere to. don't even mention afternoon naps with blankies. i'm just waiting for the sippy cups.

life is strange.

the beautiful people.

i seem to be physically attracted to singularly beautiful men. smooth skin, dimpled cheeks, a well built musculature that would make any woman swoon, although given my history, i seem to prefer them slightly on the more slender side. its their ease, their charm, their ability to fall out of bed looking stunning and be not only capable but brilliant at almost everything asked of them that sets them apart from the rest of us mere humans. i have, and continue to be, enthralled by these creatures that seem never to rumple, pimple, sweat or fail; they intrigue me. and yet i have dated them and had my heart broken. and it is only now that i realise that this failing has not been on my part but on theirs also. they too are just beautiful, perfect mortals.

the one thing that sets every boy apart, in my mind, is their eyes. i've never dated a man with any less than exquisitely beautiful eyes. i've never dated a man with eyes like anyone else i've ever met. i suppose if you gaze into them long enough, you discover an inherently unique quality in anyone's eyes, and yet those men whose eyes i've scrutinized are so different that it astounds me. a boy on the bus this morning, on the seat in front of me, stole glances at me in the reflection of the glass divider. a finely sculpted face, and wispy blonde hair to his shoulders; a miscreant adonis on a dodgy old bus. i couldn't help but smile as he asked me for the time - it was obvious he turned only to obtain a better look. and yes, i felt special.

any woman will tell you that to be appreciated by a beautiful man is a shining highlight in our day.

the man i am dating is not, by conventional means, a beautiful man. handsome, indeed, in a rugged, manly, non-stereotypical 'beautifully' attractive way. he does, however, have qualities about him so pure that i cannot describe them by any other adjective than that - beautiful. he has sea-coloured eyes fringed by almost womanly lashes and seraphim lips that i never tire of perusing. and it makes me rethink all those people i have passed over as 'un-beautiful' - to reexamine and find, underneath it all, a pearl or two that are uniquely and beautifully theirs.

it seems to me that putatively beautiful men may make us swoon and make our hearts soar in adoration, however we as women fight a continuous battle with the great iniquity of The Male Ego. and as our hearts plummet as we are left behind by these beauteously arrogant obsessions - blinded, as it were, by the ethereal light radiating, scorching from their proverbial toned buttocks, we recover slowly - atom by atom - and begin anew in our perception of the world. it is only then that we can recognise the simple beauties of mankind and separate them from the gaudy, arrogant, garish extravagance of the 'beautiful people'.

i have a man who loves me. he thinks i'm beautiful.

you may keep your adonis, your david, your romeo, your cherubian nubil of pulchritude. romeo broke my heart, adonis was a vicious, depressive manipulist and david compensated for his own beauty by trying to destroy mine.

i'll keep my lover, thankyou very much.