Very Hungry Head

best line ever

2008-05-22T11:18:00.005+10:00

ok, so i know it's old now but time doth not diminish my love for Ms Beyonce. and this morning she's keeping me company with admin law and for that I'm grateful. and i ask, who else can get away with saying 'my female intuition tellin me you a dog'. Also, as some know, I love big hair. and now this photo of Beyonce is like some kind of big hair challenge. Shall we take it up E? Get some serious product and a hair dryer with the diffuser attachment? I think that's how it's done...

introducing Kiki

2008-05-13T11:51:00.006+10:00

I am a fiend for the internet right now. mainly due to the property essay that was due yesterday. particularly a fiend for sex-radical queer porn sites. I've been dragging around some US porn sites - the crash pad site intrigues me. I wish wish someone would make a site like this based in Melbourne. I really love the concept and I think my friends and i could people it with all kinds of dirty sex stories. I'm having this fantasy about hosting weekly dirty episodes, maybe from the bungalow kitchen out the back.

I would be your host, Kiki Switch. or Kiki DirtySwitch. and I would bake for my guests. Oh man, I bet I could cook up all sortsa trouble...

a sweet sad story about feeling friendly

2008-02-28T14:37:00.004+11:00

A patient arrives ten minutes late for a session. She interprets her own lateness as meaning that she didn't want to come to analysis that day. I feel anxious. This fits with her interpretation, on the assumption that I am now feeling what she has been feeling. As she continues to talk, it emerges that she left her house quite early, but then had managed to take a wrong turn along the way. I am beginning to feel friendly and sad beneath the anxiety. I say that it seems to me she very much wished to come to analysis today, as indicated by leaving early, but this wish made her quite anxious. Maybe when she feels especially friendly toward me, she bcomes afraid that her friendly feelings will be rejected. She begins to cry and, after a bit, begins to talk about how she felt she disappointed her mother.

Wolfenstein, Eugene, ‘On the Uses and Abuses of Psychoanalysis in Cultural Research’ (1991) 2(4) Free Associations 515, 517.

2008-02-14T08:26:00.002+11:00

I've decided to think of law school as a difficult shit that I have to do. I had this thought while sitting on the toilet where i had taken refuge from my essay on the United Nations. I was giving myself a little mental pep talk. 'You know you can probably finish it by the hand in time this afternoon. It's just a matter of being disciplined and keeping on writing, turgid and shit or not'. Here's to big hard logs of turgid law school shit...

2007-11-20T11:29:00.000+11:00

From Freud, on the ‘group mind’, a little something that struck me as funny and apt in this election time (although i don't necessarily agree with him at all):

‘A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated… Inclined as it itself is to all extremes, a group can only be excited by an excessive stimulus. Anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical adjustment in his arguments; he must paint in the most forcible colours, he must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again’

Freud, Sigmund 1957, ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’, in ed. John Rickman, A general selection of the works of Sigmund Freud, Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, pp. 169-209.

lime sweater wrongness & Michael Ignatieff is ugly

2007-11-14T09:49:00.000+11:00

Well friends, as I turn my fiery steed toward the beaten path to the law school, I have some good news for those of you who love a splash around the shallow end. Law school fashion reviews are coming back to blogland. I've had this one burning a whole in my mental pocket for a couple of weeks now and I hope i can do justice to it. Picture this: A young man who has that inimitable lumpy ugliness about his person that only spells one thing to me- Young Liberal Club. But worse, this young man wore khaki shorts to his knees and jammed on the ends of his stumpy little legs, the Worst Pair of Boat Shoes I Have Ever Seen. Big call i know. But these seemed to be made out of a particularly hideous shade of brown vinyl that was offensive in the way that only vinyl imitating leather really can be. That said, possibly they were in fact leather and wouldn't that just be worse- leather in the guise of vinyl pretending to be leather.

On his (rather long, possibly about to overbalance) top half, the Young Liberal wore a blue and white striped shirt. The kind with white collars and cuffs. And draped about his repulsive person, a lime coloured v-neck sweater. LIME my friends! Oh the guilty pleasure that I have wrung from this fleeting moment of standing beside this unfortunate person at the pedestrian crossing on Grattan st.

In other news, my love of Paul Gilroy, to whom I have only recently been introduced has been cemented by his comprehensive dissing of Michael Ignatieff. Our shared hatred cements my love for him. The irony of this oppositional identification really only exacerbates my determination to glean maximum joy from anyone and anything that hates on Michael Ignatieff. The fact that Ignatieff often looks like his neck is trying to make love to his chin is a bonus...

pain, embodiment, law

2007-11-02T13:55:00.000+11:00

Here's something I just encountered, which fits well with the thinking about embodiment that has been a pleasurable tangent I've been pursuing this year. Maybe a good point to be at as I turn my face back toward the shiny law building and maybe time for me to try and work out what Kristeva is on about when she casually refers to the inherent masochism of women...

I might have been destined to live a life of submission to the noble law of reason, had not an unforeseen accident - the result of an inherent defect of my own - brought about its untimely destruction. Great pain, if the imagination meddles with it ever so little, urges action, the body of a woman being the only instrument she understands. The intense pain brought about by this grinding of the molar teeth galvanised me into an infraction of the laws. For shocking power to the body may indeed by transmitted by means of electricity, but not, by such methods, reason to the brain. However, in the writhings of extreme pain I obtained proof of the exciting nature of the exertion of the muscles, multiplying to such a degree the vivid pleasure of terror in the nerves that I felt at last in possession of a body whose capacity for the experience of sensation could now be determined. Pure sensation produces the most simple knowledge. Pain, if sufficiently severe, can never be alienated: these excruciating sensations were mine alone.

Anna Gibbs, The Contract, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 12, no. 26, 1997, p. 208

loving Judith (again)

2007-10-19T12:54:00.000+10:00

I took precarious life on holidays in July and read Butler lying in the hammock on the farm and it was wonderful of course. But as I am trying to learn to be an academic and not just a casual admirer of Butler's, I have been rereading with my most critical face on. whatever. i still love her...

'For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the 'we' except by finding the way in which I am tied to 'you', by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know.'

loose ends unravel

2007-09-28T10:24:00.000+10:00

I have embarked on an analogy that has infiltrated my entire thesis, which predictably enough for something all about discursive threads, by someone with a material collection that incessantly spills out of its allotted drawers, now reads like some kind of patchwork blanket. in this (ahem) fabrication of mine, loose threads are a good thing, but back in my 'real' life, drawing to the close of my intensive thesis writing period and staring down the barrel of my last 18 months of law, i feel all unpicked, unsettled, rumpled up and not sure. I am trying to convince myself that i feel 'untimely' in the Wendy Brown sense, and it's true that i do feel all pulled taut and humming in a way that's not entirely unpleasurable. Maybe I can own this moment, this nervous energy buzzing around under my skin... should i go to Thailand this Summer!? Can i get a new job? Summer of sweat! my tomato seedlings are looking great! The apple tree is flowering and the fig tree has tiny baby figs! Are exclamation marks colonising the part of my brain that punctuates!? Why do i feel so violently happy right now?

done. kind of. badly.

2007-09-10T15:03:00.000+10:00

I emailed my first draft. just then. like 5 seconds ago. 16 000 words of bad writing, underdeveloped theoretical content and nebulous conclusions. nice one tal tal.

crunchy crunch time

2007-08-20T23:43:00.000+10:00

Will I manage to write a thesis? Did I really spend three weeks eating tropical fruit while I should have written most of my thesis? Is that grounds for an extension? Can I afford to buy new black jeans, the high waist ones at Fat!?

i was a teen poet

2007-05-31T13:45:00.001+10:00

the other night my favourite lover read the poetry i wrote and had published in voiceworks when i was 16 and 17. cringey in the most teenage way and yet there was something not so bad and a tiny bit cute about letting E see a little bit of the gawky, self-obsessed kid that i was and still am a bit.

Thinking about the fact that I used to think i could write (such teen bravado!) also set me thinking about what would have happened if i'd taken up my theatre studies place at QUT.

It nearly did my head in actually, as i sat there trying to transform 6000 words of ramble and blocks of quotes into 3000 words of political analysis... i truly couldn't remember why it was that I wasn't fluffing around at some theatre event quaffing bubbly and calling people darling.

So what would i be like if i'd gone down the theatre studies path... maybe pretentious and a little bit dumb? Perhaps i have been saved from embarrassment even greater than that induced by my my voiceworks poems. But arguably this blog is pretty embarrassing already and despite multiple firm resolutions to delete myself. or at least to edit the low(est) points, here I am again.

Actually i might go now. Time to take this snotty body to bed. apologies for a rambly odd post to those random readers who might find yourselves here. Maybe I just wanted to try and write a blog post while i wasn't feeling particularly angry or depressed.

in which i make three different salsas

2007-03-19T20:56:00.000+11:00

hey random friends who read my blog, i just wanted to reassure you that i still have happy moments sometimes! like tonight, when i just ate the best nachos of my life and now i tinker around the edges of my research proposal listening to the housemates and E playing mahjong in the living room.

Three different salsas! One fresh tomato, mint and lime. A peanut, coriander and yellow tomato concoction and the third, a roasted tomatillo, garlic and chilli extravaganza. and maybe best of all, the tomatoes, mint, chillies, garlic and tomatillos all came from my very own garden.

ok, now i'm going to go eat cookies and cream ice cream.

kill kill kill

2007-03-09T14:12:00.000+11:00

it's not so far into the year but already, if i could use three words to describe how i feel now and in contemplation of the rest of the year i would say, 'very very tired'. Yes, i would squander one of my words by repeating it, but i figure it's not really squandering because the repetition of the word is productive of something i suppose. a sense of the excruciating boredom of continuing to do work that is meaningless maybe. of feeling at sea with school-world. the grind of meetings....

the gnawing hatred of socialist alternative that erupts into outright hostility and a predilection for violence on Fridays where they have taken to displaying donation buckets at the vigil crd organises. Not only that, but they've also taken to 'marking' each of the CRD people handing out vigil leaflets by some magazine wielding robo-trot teenager. Today one of their stupid little recruits tried to chat up D... 'So how did you get involved in the campaign.' Funny, cause i'd been on the verge of marching over to him and saying, 'So when did you give up the faculty for independent thought?'

Donations, my arse. I want to march over and shove their stupid buckets over their heads, press hard until they are crushed into a soggy mush on the ground, scrape them into the bucket and offer that as a bloody 'donation' to their fucking cult. The delusions of people who refer to their pissy two-bit hierarchy of an organisation as 'the power' would be hilarious if only they weren't such a parasitic pestilence, eating the fucking heart out of the genuine left who actually get involved in campaigns.

am i not revolutionary enough? (thanks Kasey)

2007-02-15T22:09:00.000+11:00

Today i checked the email address that I rarely check and sitting quietly, nestled like a little rotten egg amongst my spam, there was an email from afar. From a name i didn't want to see, addressing me as 'friends, lovers etc'.

I assume that I am 'etc'. In fact, being 'etc' makes me laugh like a crazy person. I wonder who else and if any one else is also 'etc'? With whom could i possibly share this dubious distinction? Anyway, I wanted to share the moment because i had an uncharacteristically musical response to the tune of:

Am I not revo enough
Is my heart too broken
Do I cry too much
Am I too outspoken
Don't I make you laugh
Should I try it harder
Why do you (presume that you can) see right through me

(fade to nasally whine)

Well, I'm not sure what 'it' is that Kasey is going to try harder but personally, i haven't really gotten into the glass and ceramic dildos and since uti-paranoia/actual infection I'm not sure if 'harder' is really what i can take right now.

But of course, Kasey is right. She should be concerned about whether her (so-called, sometime) friend/s think she is revo enough. Being un-revo is just such a bad look; a leftwing faux pas of mammoth proportions. I mean really, you turned down the path but pulled up a couple of miles short. And all your (so-called, sometime) friend/s can tell and are probably going to tell their housemates.

Run for cover, motherfuckers! This left-wing cred is about to blow. Someone pulled the 'radical love' pin and that shit's about to spew self-righteous, self-serving rantabulous cred-eroding crud all around this joint.

ha. anyway, I'm glad Kasey and I found eachother crawling around in the dusty, battered debris of innocent high hopes and naive stomach-wrenching love and loss. I think she's real pretty.

cooking cooking, nothing by halves

2007-02-05T15:43:00.000+11:00

Today has been like some kind of self-sufficiency nut/cooking fiend orgy. I spent the early hours being Mistress Tomato. It was hot work so i ended up topless as I sweated over taming those insubordinate tomatoes to the tune of my stakes. I tried to be stern but it's hard when they insist on looking so cute in their array of shapes and colours, round orange, mini deep red, and yellow pear shaped, not the mention the stripy ones. Then I gathered up the windfall apples and picked a big bag of soft ripe figs.

I was a bit unimaginative with the apples and stewed them to put on my muesli in the mornings. But the figs, i made into jam, which is a spiced(gingery) and delicious. Then, even though it's sweltering today and i really should have gone and sat under a tree with Michael Ingatieff (well, his book actually), I decided today would be a good day to bake sweet treats. I cooked a container of the blackberries from out the back into a semolina cake and grated up a couple of the innumerable zucchinis that were starting to fill the vegie drawer into a moist banana cake. I'm looking forward to taking that one for lunch actually, for when Michael and I really do get down to business.

Reading whole books with which i fundamentally disagree is a new thing for me. I used to try to keep it to journal articles and sometimes i still get confused reading Mr Michael's 'The Lesser Evil' where be basically posits that it's ok for a democracy to temporarily suspend civil and maybe human rights (it's a blurry line) in order to protect the majority from the perils of terrorism. I get confused because Mr Michael doesn't even reference the position that I'm trying to build. He identifies two positions- the civil libertarian, the one who won't tolerate extreme policing/torture/etc because it betrays the very spirit of democracy the govt. purports to protect, then there's the majority, for whom temporary suspension of normal liberties is palatable in the face of genuine and urgent threats to 'our way of life.' This juxtaposition of the ethical stickler versus the realist fails entirely to engage with the possibility that there might be alternative ideological theories and/or ethical codes that object to government tyranny, let alone that most people are not in any kind of position to gauge what genuine 'threat' actually exists.

boring Michael, no wonder I chose to swelter in my kitchen today.

hello mr zucchini head

2007-01-24T13:51:00.000+11:00

me and my garden are very happy together at the moment. Last night i went to the extent of claiming that if i was never allowed to leave home again but could garden all day i wouldn't have any regrets. I think the truth of that claim would depend on whether i was allowed to have mail and visitors.

Over the last two days I've been planting my brassicas and root vegetables for the Winter so i'm feeling very organised and on top of things. It's always the way when you have just tucked the little seeds into the dirt. The real struggle begins in a week or so when the darlings pop their delicate little heads up. I'm still amazed at some of the plants in my garden which are so massive and hardy now but I remember how it seemed like i would barely be able to save even one seedling from the ravages of slugs and pecking birds and extreme sun. Our slug issues are much more under control since Dan made it is his daily mission to hunt the little bastards out and provide Vera with her daily feast of slug flesh.

This little sun-filled gardening sojourn feels like some kind of last minute reprieve before honours year swamps me. I'm taking deep breaths and hoping I won't go under.

nerdcore

2006-12-13T15:46:00.000+11:00

passing. it may be politically fraught if you're a tranny but when you're a reluctant law student it's the best thing ever. ev-ah. below is the life and times of nerdcore tal:

still loving, still fighting

2006-12-04T14:19:00.000+11:00

ps. i'm still alive and i still want to do that zine. watch for a zines and whisky night at the ranch. now THAT is my idea of a good time.

momentous desire

2006-10-30T19:15:00.000+11:00

so i've decided my next project for genderschmender is to coordinate a writing project. i have been throwing around ideas. what i've been fascinated by lately is the slippery nature of desire. the way some small details can transform a situation, my sense of self and others... the way desire can suddenly be there, where nothing was before. it really sneaks up on me sometimes, particularly when i'm listening to E read aloud, curled under her arm, my body absolutely flaccid with fatigue, and then something creeps up, heats up... maybe it's also relevant to E's creeping crouching jungle tiger theory. i remember also a moment in yr 12, sitting in economics behind this boy called Andrew Skyring. He was so skinny and his head was down and the vertebrae were visible under his pale neck skin where his long hair had fallen to the side. i wanted to fuck that boy so badly. right there. biting his fragile boy body. it was like that again when another long-haired thin boy, Eden, walked toward me in the morning sun after i'd had sex with him the night before, his first time, and his hair and skin kind of glowed.

I also think these moments of desire are caught up with gender. certainly for me. The way gender can shift, even moment by moment. Moments of ambiguity, moments where breasts are unbound and suddenly soft, where hard chests bud, moments where binding shows under shirts, where voices suddenly drop, where sun catches new facial hair, when putting on a wig can transform the way i walk and talk. surely people have moments they want to write about...

i have been wondering about a working title... 'moments in desire' 'momentous desire' 'moments in body and desire'? hmmm.

shifting currents & dead chickens

2006-10-02T10:17:00.000+10:00

Something is going on in my head. and my stomach. and my chest. Kind of uncomfortable shifting. like my emotional state is composed of seismic plates. Is that what they're called? Those massive plates of earth that groan and shift and cause tidal waves that engulf whole islands and cities? I feel restless and sad. but not really sad, just kind of frustrated and unmotivated. kind of watching myself fail law from a distance. not caring most of the time. devastated when i do engage. I think the feeling could be called 'lost'. Politically and emotionally. After casting myself adrift from uni politics, i feel like i'm wading through this political landscape that is just so unformed, barely cognisant of itself and it's hard to know where to turn or how i fit in. I think the advantage of student politics is that there is a basic calendar that gives some structure and immediate objectives.

Beyond that, i feel like everyone is as lost as me. and I find myself yearning for some kind of political mentor. an organisational structure that will take me in and nourish me and push me out of the nest stronger and with a clue about what i'm meant to be doing. maybe buffer me from the intense and pointless antagonism between leftist cliques. oh maybe i'm just yearning for a clique of my own.

I guess what i'm saying is that after doing my time in the little student politics hot pot, i've emerged to realise that I have not been equipped. I've read more Marx & Lenin than Bakunin. I find the anarchisty cliques the toughest to engage with. I feel battered and damaged by cynicism. I feel tired of being patronised by people who think being hopeful for something better is naive beyond belief. I feel jaded by people who think this is all there can be. Most of all though, i think i feel let down by my own finite political energy and passion. My own failure to be the brilliant, well read visionary that I want in my life.

and Venus died. in a tiny fitting bundle of grey feathers.

am i a loser?

2006-09-10T20:13:00.000+10:00

i guess the toilet wall is really the proper forum to ask this kind of question. But then I would have to ask, 'am i a looser?'

The reason i have to ask this is because despite many vehement representations that i am totally ok with having shithouse law marks, I am spending the mid semester break studying every day. It's true that it's only day two today and I have also checked myspace about six million times, but that does not change the fact that my major activity is pegged 'studying contract law'. So now i wonder, 'am i really a law dork. Do i stand for everything that i hate?'

Also, i bought a white denim mini skirt at Hunter Gatherer. Oh. My. God.

never though i'd love a ging-er

2006-09-05T13:21:00.000+10:00

here's the little eunuch. that shaved patch on his leg will grow back apparently. however, i think it looks tuff. giuseppe joe is my man even if he ain't got no balls.

gingeriffic giuseppe joe

2006-08-29T09:58:00.000+10:00

I have a new friend and he doesn't even make me sneeze much! Does that make it meant to be? Are Giuseppe Joe and I fated to love and adore eachother? I think so. I wish he didn't want to sleep on my face all the time but this is a minor drawback in the game of unconditional love that we've embarked on.

democracy reaches new golden heights

2006-08-22T12:58:00.000+10:00

Blonde lady of sequin dress fame strikes again! Would you vote for this golden woman? It's election time at Law School and i was really thrilled in crim class when this young lady walked in and announced that she wanted to give me MORE! It begs the question of course, how can she give me MORE when she has already given me so many hours of sniggering entertainment merely by donning a golden sequinned dress. But it appears that if i would just vote for her for president she would do her very best to deliver MORE to me. no real indication of MORE what, but i'm not concerned about that at all. We're talking about a very hard working young woman, committing countless hours to organise that most excellent institution of the LSS PTN. being the 'Pleasant Thursday Night' where, upon display of your LSS key ring and payment of only $10 you can drink truck-loads of beer or sparkling wine and participate in heterosexual mating rituals. Do you think she could arrange a homo equivalent for me? I mean, if she gave a damn about equality she would concerned that good middleclass homosexuals are being excluded from this opportunity to 'network' with other likeminded and upwardly mobile young things. shame golden woman. I am so not going to vote for her. ps. do you think her long golden locks are tickling her breasts!?

wombat

2006-08-14T08:41:00.000+10:00

i went to wilson's prom and got a new boyfriend, beach freddy.

tear-shaped pieces of me

2006-08-07T14:55:00.000+10:00

i didn't go to school today so i can't tell you what the first ladies of law are wearing on this Monday. ballet-style flats i imagine though. so cute but casual. Perhaps a long cardigan tied at the waist in a soft pale grey. so chic. The reason i didn't go to school is because i woke in some kind of malaise and then my phone rang and my mood found reason. and now all the world looks so different, seen through the little salty water smudges on my glasses. and now i am going to do washing, ring IKEA and make them send me the missing pieces for my shelves, take down photographs and change my passwords.

missives from the reserve section

2006-08-01T10:29:00.000+10:00

so i'm back at school and i reckon, apart from short interludes to keep y'all up to date with the ranch's pack of chickens, perhaps i'm going to turn this into stories from the front line: one boyish little lady taking on the law school. So let me set the scene for you. Every day of my life that i spend at law school I go to the toilet and frighten small blonde and rexy law ladies who stare at me with frightened eyes. Behind the lashings of mascara i see something that looks frighteningly like mental cognition. It goes something like this, 'ohmigod. that's totally a man in the lay-dees! oh, that's just rude. no wait... *click click click. some cogs turn slowly* heey, that's not a man. ohmigod, what the fuck is that chick wearing. ew. she totally needs to get some make-up and tuck some tight jeans into brown leather prada knee-high boots and carry a darling little chanel bag. and wear a pretty top with a little belt around her waist. oh, she could look so much cuter then. yeah *agrees with self in head* that would be heaps better and i wouldn't think she was a man in the lay-dees then either. oh hey, thinking of looking totally cute. god, i still can barely believe how fucking cute i looked when i wore that sequined dress to the law ball. Check it out!

Of course, it's not that my fellow law ladies only think about how it's practically illegal for them to look that hot. No, we have been grappling with some pretty serious issues this last week. In fact, I haven't thought this much about abusive men and battered women's syndrome since i was 16 and we left my stepfather to live in a women's shelter for three months. Nor have I been this close to actual violence myself for some time. Of course if i had throttled the woman behind me in crim the other day, that would have been more ordinary assault than domestic violence. Could i plead insanity? 'Sorry, your honour, i was driven insane by the mere random recollection of that sequinned dress in the law ball photographs.'

2006-07-18T17:11:00.000+10:00

i had an optometrist appointment this morning cause i'm getting new glasses. however i'm quite concerned that i got my eyes tested before i'd had a coffee. was i more bleary eyed than usual? also, he didn't seem as thorough as the nice man who tested my eyes in st kilda two years ago. shit man. also, another frightening thing happened this morning. i was eating esther's marmalade with sour cream on rye bread. which was odd but perhaps not totally frightening. then i wrote about this on charlotte's myspace and then about an hour later, esther texted me to inform she had heard about my eating of the sour cream with mandarin marmalade from her workmate. this freaks me out. this makes me think i need to tell the interweb less stuff about me. also, i wrote somewhere, i think on myspace that i was hungry for violent penetration and later thought better of this, but now i can't remember, or find where i wrote this and thus have been prevented from removing said, slightly, overly, intimate information about my sexual desire. eek. i hate the interweb.

vale valerie

2006-07-10T18:18:00.000+10:00

for those of you in ignorance, two weeks ago I had three chickens. now I have two. and what happened in between? valerie died, that's what. and i apologise for not telling you sooner. I am so sorry and have been soundly admonished regarding this matter by shannon. valerie was a small stripy pullet, not quite point of lay and she was mark's favourite. Personally, i felt fairly ambivalent about her big yellow feet and legs but i did like her stripy feathers. I guess the most important thing you should know about Valerie is that she had pluck. she was a plucky little chicken who pulled through some hard times, specifically, the time her eyes were all swollen and weeping puss and i had to ride to lort smith with her in my pannier bags. poor little muffin was so sick she barely cared about having anti-biotics squirted down her throat. Then she grew stronger and started to object to the antibiotics but dan and i barely cared she was being a stroppy little so and so. we were just glad she was getting better. but not better enough. sadly, valerie's immune system must have been depleted because she developed a sniffle and woke up dead one morning. stiff and cold in the hay. the end.

a tyrant called oestrogen

2006-06-28T20:22:00.000+10:00

perhaps it isn't oestrogen. perhaps it's a potent cocktail of hormones. whatever it is, i can't even begin to convey how distressed i am by this sensation of being an irrational woman. What do you do with an emotional state that you suffer but also analyse in light of years of hindsight earned after similar debilitating attacks of pre-menstrual angst? Does the knowledge that you're going to feel better in about four days make what you're feeling in the moment less 'real'? You know how they say not to grocery shop while you're hungry, should i try not to think anything at all about my personal relationships until after i bleed? Should i just write off anything that i think or feel in the next four days, looking forward to resuming sanity in the aftermath?

how (not?) to negotiate your love/sex/relationship-life

2006-06-25T13:23:00.000+10:00

me: hey hot stuff, I have been terribly slack today so I have lots of study still to do... was going to ask you over otherwise but fear now that I will not be fun at all....

lover: hmmm... the not fun-ness of being too slack eh?

me: so why would i bother to message you such a strangely convoluted and ultimately negative statement!? um, i think i was wondering if you would like to come over for dinner anyway and maybe bring your book for when/if i need to read more law...

lover: ah i see...

me: oh, i really am an idiot aren't i!?

lover: no you really are terribly endearing with your negative contradictory urges
what happened to your date...if i may ask?

me: oh i was meant to have gotten back to her to confirm i think... but i didn't and she made other plans.

lover: oh. not playing keen enough eh?.... anyway, i reckon i'm gonna go home and do some cooking.. watch a video... but maybe i'll come over later?

me: mmm. yeah, i also said i'd be home tonight for a phone date with xxxx so I really am being rather silly. but um...

i mean, yes, you would be welcome to come over later but there's the fact of the phone date and i'm not sure when that was for... after soccer some time.

lover: hey you're really sending some clear signals here!

me: i know!!! why am i such a dork? I mean, i'd like to see you and i will probably not be busy studying if you come over later but there's the chance that xxxx will call. is that so complicated?

lover: mmm... no i think i can handle that. so if i go home... do what i need to do, see how i feel and then probably come over.. is that cool? and i mean coming over with the understanding that xxxx may call and i will get to read my book or something... !

me: yes, and that would be a well-negotiated evening i suppose.

lover: yes, a hilariously well negotiated evening.
ok i better do me some work. love ya spunk xxx

me: bye lover xxxxxx

Lover is busy. You may be interrupting.

sniffle

2006-06-21T18:00:00.000+10:00

i fell off my bike. and took the scab off the knee that i grazed when i fell over at netball practice. and then i nearly fell over walking up the stairs at trades hall. maybe i have a brain tumour? and now I have mooched at home all day, moaning when i have to bend my knee and wiping the little crusty trail of liquid that keeps leaking down my leg. On the up side, the friendly lady at the chemist near Esther's was sweet and kind to me, which is exactly what i want in a chemist lady, and gave me those second skin dressing things. Which are soft and clear so I can watch my weeping, pulpy, bloody knee all day long. if i so desire. and i do.

2006-06-20T00:18:00.000+10:00

Last night I was a disappointment to this great sporting nation. Despite staying up all night, with Mark and Dan in the lounge room watching the soccer, I elected instead to read 'Valencia', a novel set in leso mid 90s San Francisco. I started at 2am and finished about 5.30 am, with barely a toilet break. Wish I had that kind of stamina for reading about law. Not that surprising though, given how fascinatingly, hideously, hilariously, familiar the whole story and characters were. Drunk dykes making out and breaking up. Anti-capitalist queers decked out in ink and glitter.

Guess it was a bit more Sydney than Melbourne, but i was still seeing all my friends, lovers and ex-friends and lovers in that book. Maybe that was what kept my eyes glued to the pages, despite the ducted dry heat being a bit vicious on the eyeballs. It wasn't till half way that i think i admitted that I was trying to deduce some kind of encoded meaning and direction from the book, like it was some kind of parable. Does recognising derivative and repetitive patterns of behaviour, across time and people, count as any kind of epiphany? If so, it was a mixed bag kind of epiphany. Kind of nice to feel like other people have made even bigger fools of themselves, kind of depressing to realise you're repeating mistakes made by millions before you. I must stop looking for easy answers i think. particulary since i don't think there are any easy answers when you've already opted out of the kind of relationships that are sanctified by the mainstream. *earnest moment over* the other meaningful lesson i drew from Valencia is that i definitely need to take more drugs and that if i can do that, i will have more fun and be hotter.

the blues and me*

2006-06-08T17:50:00.000+10:00

so I have begun to read Stone Butch Blues, which i am amazed and ashamed to admit I have never read before. What a tremendous book! I don't think i've ever described a book as 'tremendous' before, it's a bit of a weighty adjective. Shannon says that it changed her life but she only finished reading it last week so I don't feel like there's been that much of her life to change. Not that i doubt her word of course and she was talking about getting a three-piece suit but really, who doesn't want a three piece suit?

*yes, i may have alluded to this on Shannon's blog but I just wanted to confirm, last night, on a grammar website, i was led to believe that where we have been taught to say, for example, 'shannon and i are very cute on our matching red bicycles', it is more correct to say, 'Shannon and me are very cute on our matching red bicycles.' Can it be true? Oh Mark, why aren't you home to confer with me on this crucial issue!?

2006-05-28T15:59:00.000+10:00

So is this the chest I want one day? I have been thinking about my body for a long time now, in an abstracted, slightly disassociated way. I think that I treat it like a doll-body and of course, that is my privilege. Not everyone has the shape of body that they can manipulate in the way that I do but at the same time, perhaps I would like to create something more from the flesh that I have?

I have been taking study breaks while I work on my take-home exam which involve a site called 'xxboys', where i got this photo. It's a photography project by a French transboy called, Kael. The blurbs by some of the boys are really progressive and simultaneously critique the project- the trans freak body as an erotic exotic... the relative absence of black faces/bodies. There are also a couple which discuss the process of becoming something feared, from whom little old ladies protect their handbag, a black man.

Mmm. and at the same time as I envy and perve on these bodies, a conversation I had with a friend a while ago, rattles around the back of mind. about infatuation with masculinity. about the way a trans identity might become another rejection of the beauty and the kinds of masculinity that inhabit the bodies of women. Wondering to what extent my desire to have my breasts removed derives from my discomfort with the parts of my body that jiggle and flop and fail to conform to taut, toned standards of beauty. But shouldn't it be a person's prerogative to tamper with the vehicle they're in, to modify and adorn? I'm just not that wrapped up in breasts, overlaid as they are with so much cultural baggage. milk machines, symbols of feminine mystique. Floppy symbols of my body becoming slow and heavy in adolescence. Off with them I say!

say no to me, i'm gagging for it.

2006-04-19T21:35:00.000+10:00

well, because i haven't really told anyone that I'm writing this I figure I can confess something in the abstract. I am perverse, not just perverted. and when women say they're not going to sleep with me, it seems like that's when I really do become totally and utterly obsessed... with making them sleep with me of course.
------
and to think that i saved that gem above as a draft! In hindsight, I would like to say every word I typed is pure gold and absolutely true. In other news, also below the belt, I think I may have to begin the calendar-tracking of my bleeding in relation to libido. In fact, now I wonder if it was the rejection that turned me on, or was it about one month ago that I first started writing this!? Take note, all ye who would fuck me, many as you are, I'm sure- get me on the week beginning the 20th or thereabouts. (That last sentence is a grammatical nightmare!) But to return to my long-frustrated plan... the idea is to record the state of my libido on each little calendar square, perhaps with a little pictogram of my face? I fully expect a patten to emerge to confirm all my sneaking suspicions that, in fact I am just a disgusting biological mass of squirting bodily fluids, completely at the mercy of fluctuating hormonal levels. I'm a walking womb! Oh, I think I need to shower.

a debacle and a half

2006-04-12T21:26:00.000+10:00

so i started this silliness because i wanted to post a comment on Tom Cho's blog. but now i doubt i can go back. perhaps i will overcome my shyness in a moment and think of something worthy of interweb fame... but right now i'm going to clean up the mess I made in the kitchen and try and pretend like i didn't just eat most of a cheap packet of little easter eggs... somebody said today, 'happy man on a stick day' and i liked that a lot.