Quick Little Splinter

Violations

2008-04-23T15:11:00.004+10:00

My office on campus is next to the ladies. It's a curious toilet, more a halogen-lit vestibule with a toilet behind an elaborate, heavy door suspended from a complicated-looking hinge bolted into the ceiling. It's quite nice, actually. The toilet-using ladies of my floor have come to an unspoken agreement that if you go into that toilet and find the door shut and locked, you leave and go elsewhere. It's jarring to run into someone else there, and when you do there's a lot of startled apologising and shuffling for space.

It makes sense, really. In your standard public toilet, with its rows of cubicles and wash basins, there's an anonymity in the crowd. You can go about the evacuation of bladder and bowels secure in the knowledge that there won't be someone waiting outside, or if there is there'll be enough space for you to pretend as though they aren't there. With this toilet there's no buffer zone, no bathroom cordon sanitaire. If you don't leave the vestibule as soon as you see that the toilet is occupied you'll be forced to come face to face with the previous occupant, and it's uncomfortable.

So today I was surprised to find someone did exactly that. I was there, enjoying my private time, when I heard the door to the vestibule swing open and close. I waited to hear it open again and heard nothing. I heard a handbag snap open and snap close. I heard an impatient sigh. I waited for her to leave, counting down from ten, but still she stayed.

When I summoned the courage to leave my fortress of solitude the woman stared at me blankly, an expression my girl's school-school damaged brain parsed as 'bitchface.' She had one of those Chloe padlock bags in the crook of her arm, the other hand on her hip. As she went into the toilet she checked me, ever so slightly, into the counter with her shoulder. And I stood there for a moment, flushed with rage. Then I washed my hands and used the drier just long enough to make her feel slightly uncomfortable and left, letting the door slam behind me.

Calm, in control, and quit

2008-04-03T11:38:00.002+11:00

Calm, in control, and quit

'You don't need cigarettes.'

'I like cigarettes.'

'Well, you shouldn't.'

'...'

'I didn't want to tell you this, but cigarettes have been talking behind your back.'

'I don't believe you.'

'Yeah, they have. The other day I was out and I heard those skinny white bitches talking about you. They were all like, "that foreign man is so annoying. He, like, just talks and talks and talks, and I'm all like shut up, nobody cares."'

'Who were they talking with?'

'Pot. And then pot was all, like, "yeah, and foreign man has totally put on weight."'

'Pot would never say anything like that!'

'That bitch did.'

'I don't believe you. I'ma go have a cigarette. You're a stinking liar.'

As an aside?

2008-02-19T10:43:00.002+11:00

Anyone remember the group food blog I started called 'Thus Bakes Zarathustra'? Well, I took that name to be my very own and started a second food/research blog at the beginning of the year, that's about, well, food and the things I read about in the name of my PhuD. It is called Thus Bakes Zarathustra also, and even though the 'about' blurb at the bottom if still full of faux latin nonsense there's lots of content up, so you should go visit. And comment. It's lonely over there.

You don't have to be crazy to wear a hat...

2008-02-16T13:02:00.004+11:00

I am a fair skinned blonde, and at the best of times this makes me a bit twitchy about the sun. But it's so hard to avoid the searing kiss of the radioactive sky ball, and there are so many parts of the body which are easily overlooked. For me, it's my head. I first realised I had a problem with head-burn when I went away to the coast with the foreign man earlier this year. After a walk on the beach he told me my scalp was sunburnt. 'Like, blood red,' he added. 'It's really gross.' Since then I've noticed the skin along the part is consistently a lurid pink, and I fear a dirty great melanoma is soon to emerge. Short of plastering sunscreen onto my scalp, I really must wear a hat.

The problem is hats make you look stupid and, to avoid a truly vicious scalp cancer, I'd have to find a hat I can wear everyday without wanting to kill myself. It's a rare person who can nonchalantly wear a hat and not look like, to use primary school vernacular, a try hard. Furthermore, it's a really rare woman who can pull off a hat. I mean, there are plenty of great male hat wearing role models, such as:

But hat wearing women? Not so much.

And then there are hats that are simply too awesome for me to handle.

So I'm at a loss. I don't want to come down with cancer of the head, but hats leave me cold. Anyone have any hat suggestions?

My Big Day Out, or Will Anderson is Not Funny.

2008-02-01T09:10:00.001+11:00

By a serendipitous turn of events I found myself with a free ticket to the BDO on Monday, which made my little heart so very, very glad as all I've wanted since I was 14 was to see Bjork play.* However, that also meant that I would have to actually, y'know, go to the BDO, which I didn't want to do for the following reasons:

I do not like festivals. In fact, it would be fair to say I hate festivals. Hot sun makes me actively, whiningly miserable, I have few practical outdoors clothes, I resent port-a-loos, dislike warm, flat beer in plastic cups, and a music festival really is the worst place to actually watch music. The crowds are restless and chatty and the sound is not so good. But the worst thing about music festivals is they contain the kind of people who actually like music festivals, which is to say the kind of people who like getting drunk and sunburnt before 5pm and ruining everyone else's attempt to actually watch the fucking bands.

So I waited until an hour or so before Bjork's set before venturing out to Flemington. I dressed neatly, wore sensible shoes and held my bag high and tight across my body. When I got there it looked like a kind of refugee camp for escapees from Corey ~~Delaney~~ Worthington's last party. Fortunately, I ran into a friend of similar height and attitude, and we resolved to go straight to Bjork's stage and stay there until she came on, then leave quickly after. It took a lot of shuffling around to find the right spot, but when we did we were determined to stay.

Bjork came on with her Bjorkestra, and I went weak at the knees. When she spoke thousands doubled over, as though punched in the gut by the charisma radiating from the tiny woman. It wasn't the best of circumstances, but she was everything I'd imagined and more. I was so entranced that I didn't realise Will Anderson and (apparently) the members of Tripod were standing right next to me until the end of 'Earth Intruders,' when Will Anderson said, loudly, 'Bjork sure is weird, hey?'

And it continued. Will Anderson and Tripod kept making comments about Bjork being 'weird.' They made fun of her dancing. They made unfunny jokes about the ReactTable, saying it was Bjork's radar or something, which doesn't even make sense. I kept shooting pissy looks over my shoulder, but I reckon Mr Anderson just thought I was a bit star struck.

No. No, I wasn't. I wasn't going to let you ruin Bjork for me, Mr Anderson, but I was very, very close to peevishly asking you and your middle aged crew to use your inside voices. Honestly, you call yourself a comedian and you didn't even notice that the organ player looked like Melbourne gangland killer Carl Williams. You are not funny, and it was not appreciated.

Douche.

* The person who gave me said free ticket pointed out I mustn't be much of a fan if I hadn't bought tickets to either the BDO or the Sydney Festival side show. There's some truth in that, but also I am always, always very slow on the uptake when it comes to music.

2008 has begun

2008-01-04T14:12:00.000+11:00

I'm in my office with my feet on the desk, again, laboriously filing the contents my Readin' Folder while listening to Toto's 'Africa' because it has been in my head for days and days and must be liberated. The Readin' Folder is the lynchpin in my unnecessarily complex reading management system. The Readin' Folder contains current articles and chapters I must read and understand and comment on. They are catalogued in the world's worst Excel spreadsheet and EndNote, possibly a bad idea as I use EndNote the way your quietly senile 80 year old aunt would, entering everything in by hand. After the readings are read they are transferred into a filing cabinet and more details are inexpertly plugged in to EndNote and Excel. It is unwieldy and cumbersome, and I need to do something about my haphazard keywords, but it has come in handy in the past. I submitted an article earlier today and hope to have a draft of something done tonight.

So far, 2008 and I are getting along just fine.

2007 was a hot mess of the year, hard, crazy, but necessary. Highlights include one panic attack so intense it saw me sheepish and covered in ECG leads in the emergency room, a necessary but demoralising break up, multiple crises about whether it was the right thing to jump straight in to a PhD, three trips to Ikea, many life-sustaining dinners at the houses of my dearest friends, and a puppy.

I feel better about 2008. In the last week of December I packed up my things from my grimy sharehouse and, with a foreign man, moved them to a poky, endearing house not too far away. We are well suited. He likes to shout obvious things at people from a moving car, such as 'you're running!' or 'you're wearing a hat!' He once answered the door with a cotton bud dangling from his ear. He gives me an achey feeling beneath the eyes, like a love-induced sinus infection. And now we have a house, and white goods, and 2008, and I'm very happy. Oh, and a fuck-off huge plasma screen TV. That also makes me very happy.

Taking an interest in baby birds is immature

2007-12-20T10:59:00.001+11:00

I have an office on campus in an olde worlde red brick building with a great sweep of manicured garden before it. Yesterday, as I left the building on the pretext of going to the library, but really just to stop looking at an article I hate, I noticed a woman feeding a magpie lark on the lawn. The magpie lark would take something from the woman's hand then trot over to a baby magpie lark some metres away, a screeching ball of fluff and newly sprouted flight feathers scarcely visible in the grass. The adult would feed the baby, then trot back over to the woman with the proprietorial air some birds have.

As I came and went well into the night I kept noticing the magpie lark and her baby, and it was always the same. The baby would sit in the grass and squawk and beat its stiff baby wings, and the mother would ignore it and go about important bird business, and I wanted to go over and investigate the baby bird and the magpie lark, but I didn't, because taking an interest in baby birds is immature.

.....

I have only a few hours today, a paper that must be finished in order to preserve my sanity, and my body is clenched is knotted and aching from carrying too many things and walking around too much, and wearing inappropriate shoes. It's raining. Most everyone is gone for the holidays and I have the office to myself, which is good. Last night it was so hot I didn't even bother wearing pants in the office, which is a benefit of everyone going away for a holiday I will not have. Today I am serious. Wake up, I say to the paper. Time to die.

When the alarm starts I'd written a whole entire paragraph without stopping to check Facebook or Ebay or I Can Has Cheezburger or my email or looking up another paper or deciding to get a cup of coffee or tidying my desk or calling my mum, which is something of an achievement. I'm listening to Talking Heads and have both feet on the table, either side of my computer, to ease the whiteknuckle tension in my neck. It's not until someone knocks on the door that I realise the alarm is going off in this building, not some other one. 'You've got to go,' says the woman in the 'warden' hardhat. 'The alarm's going off. Forget your computer, it's an emergency.'

There aren't many people on the lawn outside, because most people have gone on holiday, and aside from the man who is meant to fix the broken light bulb in my room, but hasn't, I haven't met anyone before. Three fire trucks go past and someone makes a comment about how much this will cost. The magpie lark is browsing through the lawn, and I am holding my computer to my chest as I'm not good at following instructions. I'm pissed. Who knows when I'll ever find that kind of focus again? I consider starting a conversation with someone, how about this heat etc, but no one else is holding a computer or anything, and this makes me feel foolish for some reason. Fuck it, I think. Immature or not, I'm going to go find that baby bird.

The baby magpie lark is half grown and squawking, with traces of yellow membrane in the corners of its beak. It has a straggly, damp, fully fledged tail and fledged wings, but the rest is baby fluff. I expect the adult to notice me approaching her baby and get defensive, like a hissing mother duck, but the adult magpie lark is indifferent and so is the baby. The baby looks me in the eye. 'Scraaaaarp,' he says, unimpressed. 'I know how you feel,' I would have replied, if talking to a baby bird wasn't crazy behaviour. The adult is in a tree, looking down on the pair of us. 'Skweeeep,' she says, and goes on with her business.

It didn't take the firefighters long to switch off the alarm, and now I am back in the office, shoes kicked off, feet on the desk, writing about a baby bird and a fire alarm. I am unfocused and envious, dreaming of blue skies and a wide green lawn, the grass beneath my feet, someone bringing me food whenever I screech.

Who's your daddy?

2007-12-13T08:44:00.000+11:00

A few months ago I was out with my Ladeez when the subject of Chloe's mother came up. 'Your mum's the business, Chloe.' I said. 'Do you think she can be my mum, too?'

'I don't see why not,' she replied charitably.

'Now I just need to find a dad.'

'Rachael,' Lala wisely interjected. 'We're all looking for a dad.'

And she's right. We, which is to say my immediate circle of ladyfriends and I, are all looking for a father in one way or another, and lately I've been thinking that surely there's a more efficient way to go about this. Can't I just contact suitable candidates with a position description and ask if they'd like a new job as my dad? Duties will include fixing things, such as unmakeable Ikea flat pack furniture, my computer, and that DVD player which never works, owning a house in a pleasant and remote location for the purpose of weekend visits, intimidation of potential romantic partners, and restoration of a water damaged sense of self worth. Here are some men who will be receiving a letter from me soon:

Actor and all round rad guy Stephen Fry, seen here holding the iPhone he will undoubtedly give me for Christmas.

Author Milan Kundera, about to say something profound, dirty or both.

Mega huge cultural studies scholar and author of Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, The Black Atlantic, and After Empire, Paul Gilroy.

Artistic everythingman David Byrne, although I should say that I find him deeply attractive, and that might be a touch confusing if he is to be my father.

Neurogastroenterologist and author of the disgusting yet oddly compelling The Second Brain, Dr Michael Gershon.

Pleasantly voiced presenter of WNYC's Radio Lab Robert Krulwich.

I'll let you know how I go with filling the position.

An open letter to Napoleon Perdis

2007-11-27T21:46:00.000+11:00

Dear Napoleon Perdis,

You can tell I've fallen off the whole 'writing things are not my thesis and cannot be presented to a room full of my drowsy peers' bandwagon when I can only summon the moral strength to write a series of sulky letters to people and things, a trope clearly stolen from McSweeneys,. However, it's late and I'm stuck in the office staring at a heart-achingly unwritten paper, and my whole body is throbbing in a way that can only be compared to the ticking sound a car makes after a long car trip, a sensation I get when I'm avoiding work, and I can't think of anything to say about fat people, but I do have a great deal to say about the ubiquitous cosmetics line. If I was being uncharitable, you could say I have a great deal to say about one fat person, not many.

I love a bit of lippie, yes I do. Lipstick is colourful, it's creamy, and the good ones come in attractive tubes of a satisfying size and weight. I read somewhere that in times of economic difficulty lipstick sales go on, and I can totally understand. At times of strife a lipstick is a reasonable bit of consumerish nonsense that doesn't require you to try on anything, and if you're lucky you get to have a chat with the counter staff, which I always enjoy.

Really, the counter staff are why you don't just pop into Priceline for some Super Lustrous and tampons. When you find the best kind of counter staff you can simply front up, gesture vaguely at your face and whimper that it needs some work, and they'll take you by the hand and bust out the testers and have a bit of fun. Indeed, the only reason I buy so much MAC is the comely, enthusiastic Lillian Gish lookalike at the Bourke Street David Jones, who once spent a full twenty minutes explaining to me how to do a pin curl when all I wanted was some concealer.

Herein lies my problem with Napoleon Perdis. In a crowded market with countless largely redundant brands continually jostling for attention, is it really wise to heavily promote this man as an expert on beauty?

Moreover, why would your small counters be staffed with women, apparently instructed to launch themselves indiscriminately at any passing customer, who largely look like this?

Of course I exaggerate. But only slightly. Honestly, are the Napoleon Perdis counter staff required to encrust themselves in bronzer, mascara, lip gloss and confusingly turquoise eyeliner? Next time you're in a David Jones or something take a look, you will see I am right. And I am also confused by their magazine ads. At a time when other schillers of lipstick and powder use the likes of Dita Von Teese and Monica motherchucking Belluci, why would you have the mildly attractive Melissa George with the expression of a woman looking for a friend in a crowded bar?

I do not get it, Napoleon Perdis, and it makes my brain hurt, and distracts me on evenings when there are other fat people more in need of my attention.

Kisses,
Rachael.

An open letter to the Sun

2007-11-18T18:00:00.000+11:00

Dear Sun, or, as you may prefer, Lord Ra, the Sky-Bound Radioactive Ball of Radiation,

Today I caught sight of myself in a shop window, and the first thing I thought was who is that short elderly woman in my clothes, and why does she look so tore up? Then I realised it was me, and, oh, how I shook my fist at you. Enough already.

Love,
Rachael's Epidermis.

Saucer of milk, table three

2007-11-10T14:39:00.000+11:00

"Hey, I saw Amber* the other day."

"Oh rly? How was she?"

"Well. Great, actually. She washed her hair. She looks really pretty with clean hair."

"I like her unwashed hair."

"I don't, it just makes her look scrappy. You know, I very nearly said to her 'wow, you look so nice with clean hair,' but for once my mental filter worked and I didn't."

"Yeah. That would have been really bitchy."

"I didn't mean it in a bitchy way. She looked great. Radiant. It made me wonder if she didn't realise that her usual unwashed, stringy hair makes her look like ass on rat."

"I think she's gorgeous, anyway."

"Meh. I wouldn't rate her. It's not just the unwashed hair thing, it's the slouching."

"Well, she's quite tall."

"It doesn't matter. Is it some hipster thing to feign some freakish lack of muscle along your spine? It drives me mental, actually."

"..."

"So don't be surprised if the next time we're out and she's there and we're all drinking I just seize her by the shoulders and do this.

I put one hand on the shoulder of an imaginary person in front of me, and the other on an imaginary hip. I vigorously pull the imaginary sloucher upright. Lala is listening in the kitchen.
LALA
"And now for the restraining order..."

* name changed, naturally, to protect the innocent.

About Jessica

2007-11-04T11:44:00.000+11:00

(a) I rather love rolling news, as it provides the world with important news stories like this. A hippo drinks coffee! A hippo hangs out in a nice South African woman's kitchen! Hippos are deadly, but also cute and fat!

(b) I do believe that I will end up, as a middle-aged woman, massaging a hippo to sleep. I could just see it happening.

On blogging. And also my pants.

2007-10-31T16:27:00.000+11:00

I always gag a little when someone begins an apologetic post by saying 'I've been a bad blogger.' It rather implies that readers have been breathlessly waiting for your next sparkling bon mots, which, unless you're some veritable god of the internetz, like Kottke*, or my god of the internetz, no. Either way, I feel bad for not posting for a while, not because I think people are particularly invested in the regularity of my posting, more because generating post ideas is deeply embedded into my mental firmware. There are just so many things I could have written about. Like how I went away to a small, charming, corrugated house on the coast with a foreign man and ate a lot and watched a lot of Battlestar Galactica and Nip Tuck, and came back relaxed and sunburnt. Or how I got all after school special on this kid at the beach, who was cutting his forearm with a sea shell for some reason. Or how one night, while cooking dinner, Jessie turned to me and spontaneously quoted my entire wanky email signature at me. Or the exchange I had with a sparrow trapped in a building the other day, further proving that I will always look crazy in public.

But, no, I haven't summoned the energy to do anything with any of that. For once in my rather plebeian life I've had things to do, and I've been doing them with vigour, and I am glad. That does mean that when I have discretionary internet time I've preferred to spend it on my bourgeois porn of choice, currently Danish hardwood furniture. Please note that I expect crass comments on the following terms: wood, hardwood, hard, mid-century, and teak.

But now I'm breaking radio silence to talk about my new jeans. They are fine new jeans, especially considering the foul mood I was in when I bought them. I was in the worst kind of shopping mood, the kind where you're just grouchily ticking something off an overwhelming to-do list. All of my jeans decided to die in the arse (... hee) at the same time, and I hate buying jeans so very, very much. You have to try on a million different pairs, usually in some kind of big box streetwear retailer, and the lights are horrible and fluorescent and the music is irritating and you find yourself swearing off refined sugar after staring at your pillowy pale thighs in the changing room mirror over and over and over.

This jean buying experience, however, was rather painless. A kind-eyed sales assistant caught my eye as I sulkily rifled through the racks and listened patiently to my polemic about the right kind of jeans. They have to be high, I said, but not too high, and tight, but not spray-on tight, and dark. She immediately found me exactly what I needed. They are high, and dark, and very tight, yet somehow quite comfortable, and they do nice things to my arse. And I was happy.

Until I put them on this morning. Turns out my new every day jeans take a good fifteen minutes of cursing to put on. Once on they are deceptively comfortable, like the tardis, but I don't really understand how they managed to construct a pair of pants that positively require a can of WD-40 to put on yet feel roomy and comfortable once you get there.

Sigh.

Perhaps I should have gone with the sparrow anecdote.

* as an aside, I actually had to google Kottke because I had a brain fart and couldn't remember if it was .com or .org, and also gagged at the subheading of the first result. 'Get into the world of Jason Kottke, a freelance web designer and learn about design, food, weblogs, and living in New York City.' I don't necessarily have anything against the Kottke, more because I don't really read him, but, honestly, get your hand off it, sunshine. It feels like every second google ad laden, money making blog out there in bourgeois internet land is about design, food, other blogs and living in New York City.

Bad aim

2007-10-25T11:18:00.000+10:00

One cold and blustery night I was walking along Lygon St looking like an animated bowling pin, with my big coat zipped to my chin, the hood pulled over my eyes, hunched against the wind. Something soft and powdery hit the pavement near my feet and burst open. It was a bag of flour. I turned to see a car full of men with unfortunate haircuts speed away. One leaned out the window, highlights drifting in the wind.

'FUCK YOU, CUNT!'

I was puzzled. Being a good middle class girl my first thought was 'who, me? But you don't even know me! I'm not a cunt. I don't deserve a drive-by antiquing.' My second thought was 'by Angela Davis' mighty fro YOU SHALL NOT OPPRESS ME!' I mean, honestly, what kind of retarded polo shirt wearing, stupid haircut having, neckless choad would try to rob some strange woman of her dignity by throwing flour at her from a moving vehicle?

Anyway, what do you think? Am I just being a bit humourless here?

Oh, joy of wondrous joys...

2007-10-19T12:40:00.000+10:00

Charlie Brookers, 'My Super Sweet Sixteen' and 'America's Next Top Model' all in one video. I could cry with happiness, I could.

Speaking of tears, you must watch Rich's video recap of ANTM for reals. I made a foreign man watch this the other night attempt to make him truly understand who I am as a person. The foreign man kept asking me who Tyra Banks was, and I thought he was asking what exactly ANTM is, and I kept breathlessly explaining that ANTM was the reason television was invented, and they have bitches crying and blank-faced mall rats with sequins glued all over their faces and Miss Jay Alexander and, best of all, TYRA, and to know ANTM is to love ANTM and, by extension, to know and love me. Then I slowly realised that the foreign man, who is American no less, truly didn't know who Tyra Banks is, and I've got to say I was rather horrified.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Just get some of that beautiful regalness into you.

Yoga is not so bad

2007-10-18T09:22:00.000+10:00

I started going to the gym, and learning how to weight train, when I was a teenager. I was a very antagonistic teenager, and if I was going to go to the gym then, by gum, I wanted to do what none of my peers were doing, which is why I was drawn to the free weights room. I wanted none of your girly classes and complaints about bulking up; I wanted to lift heavy shit, and I wanted to be belligerent about it. Moreover, to begin with I didn't even bother to train my legs. Girls were concerned with their legs, I thought. I wanted to pump my guns like a dude.

I mention this to give an idea of what my exercise philosophy has long been. I became a bit less set in my ways after drinking the strength and flexibility koolaid at ANU, but still. Still I sneered at the ladies trotting off to their Les Mills yoga classes, mats tucked under their arms. Still I snorted at claims you could 'lengthen' muscles,* apparently in opposition to nasty, 'bulking' weight training. Still I scowled at stretching of any kind, which is possibly why I'm about as elastic as [please to insert clever, chortle-inducing simile about flexibility here, as apparently I'm just not up to it this morning. For reals, her is a list of similes I have considered using: 'about as elastic as Jim Waley on a cold morning/Paula Abdul's boobs/Tyra Banks' weave.' Aren't you now glad I used a little restraint and left it up to you, the reader?]

Aside from my rather ornery disposition towards exercise, which has left me strong but inflexible, I'm also rather the anxious person. In the past month or so it's become clear to me that living in a perpetual state of tensed, cringing anxiety is no longer cute, and something must be done. As I am not the type to sit still for any length of time meditation was out, I decided to give yoga a red hot go. And, you know what? It's not so bad.

I found an agreeable studio in the city that is so very feminine one ovulates immediately upon entry, rather confusing the male clients. There are stacks of new, imported ladymags in the waiting area and Aesop products in the bathroom. The instructor is robust, blonde and freckled, and sounds like a BBC foreign correspondant. Best of all, I've learned that yoga is actually rather obscene. You're often told to grasp great handfuls of buttock flesh and pull them out of the way, and I defy anyone not to giggle at the term 'downward dog.' Goodness knows I appreciate any group activity where, at the beginning, you're repeatedly asked to tell the group if you're menstruating or not.

So, in conclusion, I am a pill. Ladyish fitness activities are most satisfying in their own way, especially when a handsome British woman instructs you to manipulate your own buttocks.

* however, I reiterate, you cannot make muscles longer. It just doesn't happen. Stop saying you make muscles longer, pilates. It truly does hurt me on the inside.

How to get me to sleep with you: a guide for hopeful candidates

2007-10-16T09:25:00.000+10:00

Come back from the overseas bearing a stack of those speckled American 'Secret World of Alex Mack' notebooks I'm so obsessed with, the penis bone of a fox in a charmingly labelled test tube, and photographs of yourself on a mobility scooter at Disneyland.

As an aside, I photographed these on a fresh copy of Harper's that had just arrived in the mail. The same person bought me a subscription for my birthday. Now that's the way to get, as the kids say, mad pussy.

NORR!

2007-10-12T12:30:00.000+10:00

The polar bear and the husky are playing! They are friends! For the love of little fishes you must watch this slideshow about the bear and husky playing together!

Flight of the Dorkataur

2007-10-08T09:02:00.000+10:00

Scene: A university-related trivia event. RACHAEL goes to ask her friend something. Her friend is with someone RACHAEL swears she's met before.

THE FRIEND
Rachael, meet Girl.

RACHAEL
I think we've met before.

GIRL
Really? I don't remember you.

RACHAEL
No, I swear we have.

THE FRIEND
Well, you are both enrolled at the same university.

RACHAEL
(well-natured chuckle)
Oh, I suppose that must be it.

GIRL
Yeah. Right. Maybe.

RACHAEL and GIRL and THE FRIEND return to their respective tables to battle it out for trivia supremacy. While workshopping various team names with her team mates through word association (i.e., one person says a word, then the other free-associates to come up with a suitable name. For instance, if one says 'pants' the other says something like 'dirty') RACHAEL has an uncharacteristic lapse of memory, which is to say she actually remembers where she met GIRL. Anticipating a mild but friendly exchange RACHAEL wanders over to GIRL's table.

RACHAEL
Hey, I know where we met now.

GIRL
Oh, right.

RACHAEL
We met at that bar that time. You know. That time. And you were giving someone advice about their relationship.

GIRL
I don't remember that.

RACHAEL
Oh. Okay.

GIRL
I don't remember you.

RACHAEL
Oh. It's just, like, I don't ever remember anything, like, ever.

GIRL
...

RACHAEL
Serious. I have a memory like a goldfish. So this is kind of uncharacteristic for me.

GIRL
...

RACHAEL
Okay. Right. Well. I'll go sit down then, shall I?

GIRL
Yeah. You do that.

RACHAEL returns to her table, ears burning, where she comforts herself with cheap, metallic tasting red wine. Eventually people run out of beer and she volunteers to get more from the kitchen. The floor is tiled and wet, and RACHAEL is wearing endearingly zebra striped but impractical shoes. She promptly falls arse over tit. Looking up, she realises the kitchen is directly in front of GIRL's table full of tight pants wearing hipsters.

RACHAEL
Oh, for fuck's.

Postscript: We won the shit out of some trivia that night, so it's all good.

On Sunscreen, or Vindication is Mine

2007-10-01T15:38:00.000+10:00

Anyone who is around me for more than five seconds knows that I am positively evangelical about sunscreen. This may be because I suffered the kind of industrial strength acne in my teenage years that required not one, but two courses of Roaccutane, leaving my skin painfully photosensitve, or it may be because I'm abalone pale, but I do not fathom how anyone could just 'not wear' sunscreen. Sun damaged skin looks horrible, blotchy, red and angry, and I go to many lengths to avoid it. The first thing I do after I shower is coat myself thoroughly in the stuff, the Cancer Council's Everyday lotion on everything below my shoulders, Olay's light SPF 30 on everything above, and even then I feel guilty if I don't reapply throughotu the day. The sun will fuck up your skin for reals, and I just can't understand why anyone wouldn't take a few seconds to protect themselves. Yet still. Still. I see my friends take their beautiful, young, not-yet-ruined skin out with naked, with no micronised titanium or avobenzone to shield themselves from the big ball of radiation in the sky, and it breaks my overly-controlling heart, it really does.

So you can understand that, when I read Natalie Angier's article on skin I felt oddly vindicated.

As I survey the sharp tan lines and flaking faces that surround me, I see that I am hardly alone. When it comes to how we treat our birthday suits, it seems, we are like 2-year-olds: more concerned with the wrapping and ribbons than with the present itself. We spend billions of dollars a year on makeup and skin-care products, yet we’re slipshod about the one measure that dermatologists emphasize is essential for the long-term health, strength and bounce of our skin: guarding it against ultraviolet radiation.

That means applying full-spectrum sunscreen every day of the year, and by the gob, not the gossamer, and reapplying it later even if you’re in a bad mood and don’t feel like it. It also means skipping the tanning salons, forever decoupling the words “fit” and “tanned,” and retreating from the fiercest light of midday, back to a shady oasis, where you can contemplate the complexity, multidexterity and deep beauty of the organ called skin.

Word.

A conversation

2007-09-25T22:54:00.000+10:00

ME
[something vague about work, referring to my thesis]

STUART
Hey, you can't call your thesis work. That's fun.

ME
Oh rly? Why is that?

STUART
Because you don't need to do it. You don't have anyone screaming down the phone at you, 'Kendrick! Get me this thesis by four o'clock or you're fired!'

Pause

CHLOE
Well, I know what I'm doing to Rachael on Monday.

Crying on a tram like a chump

2007-09-23T10:19:00.000+10:00

So last night I was on a tram somewhere, contentedly listening to Radio Lab with my big coat zipped to my chin, when I noticed the little girl pinch her lower lip. She was about twelve or thirteen, sitting diagonally across from me with her dad. She was pretty, but she'd clearly hit the puppy fat stage hard and I felt for her, because being a teenage girl sucks big, hairy balls. She kept catching my eye and pinching her lower lip, and I could tell she and her dad were talking about my lip piercing, which happens sometimes. She pinched her earlobe, then her nose, and while I couldn't hear what they were saying I could tell they were talking about piercings. And she looked relaxed and happy, and her dad looked relaxed and happy, and they were talking quietly, easy and engaged, and then I choked up.

Here's the thing: in times of hormonal normalcy I'm not an especially tearful person. Don't get me wrong, when my uterus gets premenstrual ideas anything will get me going, including, memorably, the Tyra Banks Show, but normally I don't cry very easily. Since implanon has, happily, made me quite barren PMS is no longer an issue.

Here's the other thing: high school was very, very hard for me. It is for many people, but I was an unlikeable introvert with bad acne at a famously catty girls' school. I didn't make it easy for myself. Then, within the space of about 18 months I had to deal with my mother becoming ill with a brain tumour, Rock Eisteddford, my father's death and one hell of an awkward phase. I don't mean to be self-pitying, whatever doesn't kill you etc, but it was a tough time, and on a certain level I never got over it.

So there I was, looking at this girl and her dad, and my eyes welled up. Oh, shit, I thought. Why must I always make a complete arse of myself on public transport? I remembered the time, long ago during the Commonwealth Games, when Chloe told me I had a spider on my knee. I did, and I immediately leapt to my feet, swiping at my knees, squealing 'Get it off! Get it off!' I looked up to see a tram full of grey-haired, horrified Games goers. 'It's okay,' I said loudly. 'I'm not schizophrenic.'

But, you know, when you try not to spontaneously cry on a tram like some kind of overly sentimental crazy person you immediately will, and as big, dumb tears rolled down my cheeks I turned pointedly to the window and tried to wipe them away. When I glanced back up the little girl was looking at me, shame-faced. She must have thought I was crying because they were pointing at my lip piercing. I wanted to get up and tell her it's okay, it's just that I have no dad and I was an awkward teenager, too, and you never get over these things and sometimes they make you cry on a tram like an idiot, but that would have been crazy.

Instead I got off at the next stop and stood there for a moment, feeling the cold night air on my wet cheeks and burning eyes. I took a deep breath and let my old, stale grief speed off down the street with the tram. Then I walked to where I was going, and it only took me a little longer, and when I got there I was fine.

Possible uncomfortable puns on the name of Capers, the baby otter

2007-09-19T14:43:00.000+10:00

Boy, I'd sure like to have that in a roasted potato salad with a mustard vinaigrette and perhaps some chopped cornichons.

I bet that'd go down well with some smoked salmon and cream cheese.

You best believe I'd eat that one with feta and grilled eggplant.

Man, that sure does look like a small berry pickled in vinegar.

Things that give me a stomach ache (recently discovered)

2007-09-17T18:39:00.000+10:00

Continental Cup-A-Soup.

Apples on an empty stomach.

Real estate uncertainty.

Too much illicit office Coke.

A short, sharp blow between the knuckles with a sword.

Rooibos tea.

Unfolded laundry.

That Weight Watchers ad they're showing in cinemas, that opens with pleasantly nostalgic stock photos of well-fed, 1950s-ish Australians getting melanomas on the beach, then reels through a familiar, PSA-style litany of statistics on the fattening of our collective arses, illustrated with kids lounging on the sofa, chubby hands poised over overloaded plates, a fat gut laid out in a surgical theatre stuck through with trochars, presumably placing a lap band. Then we learn that we're all to adopt a 'Weight Watchers lifestyle' if we're to save the motherland.

Text messages from the overseas about Matthew Barney, goldfish and dog-shaped soap.

Eating too quickly

Housekeeping

2007-09-05T14:46:00.001+10:00

Could those involved with Thus Bakes Zarathustra email me at rachaelster AT gmail DOT com tout suite as I need to consult with you on something and cannot for the life of me find the original emails THANKING YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE.