Dear Student,

You are late. Again. I would not be so fussed by this except that you're never late for any discernible reason. It just happened. I would also not be terribly fussed by this, except that you then linger into the next student's lesson, taking your time removing your presence (let me be clear, you're welcome to stay as long as you like, but no-one should notice you) and generally hanging about. I'm beginning to understand why you were late.

What I would like to tell you: It's rude. Please stop. Schedule a later lesson time, plan to leave your home five minutes earlier, pack your stuff in the morning before you leave the house. Pack it on Sunday night, since I know you're not a morning person and you don't practice before school. If I was your parent I would ask you to pay for every minute of lesson time you DON'T receive because you found something more important to do on the way. Ooh, you're here. That'll be $10.

I think the universe is sabotaging me.

No, really. It's cold, wet, I spend a disproportionate amount of time sleeping (the pug has taken to gazing at me suspiciously on the rare occasions that I am in the house and awake, as if I might suddenly fall upon her in a dead slumber).

Clearly there's something very wrong when your PET believes your normal state is one of repose. It's been a dead week, shot down by general malaise and the tendency of my life to roll along juggernaut-like regardless of my participation. Take this morning: Chai will make EVERYTHING better, thinks brilliant little me. Ah, no, it really won't when its BLAZING hot and in an effort to drown the bitter, foul taste of a vile herbal tonic I burn my mouth - thoroughly. Gah.

About the only thing I CAN do is tell you all to read Steve Toltz's A fraction of the whole, which was just as good on my second read, and Justin Cronin's The Passage, which I THOUGHT was going to be a godawful Stephanie-Meyer-esque vampire saga but thankfully took a post-apocalyptic turn for the better. Despite his unwieldy name (JustIN CronIN? What WERE his parents thinking?) the prose is good. One humorous spelling error: twice the word "wretch" for "retch" (as in, about to throw up). Incongruous where it occurred and still has me wondering about the general English skills of most editors (oh, I've found some SUBLIME errors lately). So.

Go and buy yourself two very different books and cuddle up.

This week...

I've been using Twitter to find new penpals. Well, not quite, but I did ask who would like a pretty card in the mail, and quite a lot of people took me up on it, avowing their love of letterbox surprises and pretty things in general.

 It tickles me that I'm using the fastest communication to support the slowest; I check my email and twitter several times a day (oh, the vagaries of an iphone) but nothing is quite the same as pulling a personally addressed envelope from the mail. It's grounding in a way that all this electronic communication is so much fairyfloss. Hit the delete button and it's gone, might never have existed. This envelope in my hands? Just to walk to the bin requires my active engagement, participation with measurable action.

Writing, like so many other things, is a luxury. Like slow food, like handmade gifts, like learning a new skill and practising it (not just going to a six week course and then forgetting the whole shebang) until it becomes familiar. How terribly ironic that in a world full of devices to make life easier and faster we have lost the time to go slow.

I'm struggling a little with the parameters of time while living by myself (although the pug's constant harassment for food means I can never fall too far off balance. I go to sleep too late, wake up untethered and not knowing whether I really have slept at all. I suspect I may be nocturnal and merely participating in this "let's all be awake during daylight" merely out of habit.

What do you do to ground yourself?

Imbecilic behaviour pt.II

Dear Guy in Gloria Jean’s.

You’re inside. Thoroughly inside, esconced in ‘mood lighting’ and an ambient, ‘warm’ color scheme of latte and burgundy. Outside it is overcast and has been raining heavily. You may have needed the leather jacket out there, but in here nothing can excuse the pretentious git sunglasses covering half your face.

P.S. I hate spammers. Particularly when they leave irrelevant and moronic advertisements on every post I’ve put up in the last, oh, month?

Removed now, after much whinging, moaning, and tabbing back and forth on my part. Bastards.

P.P.S. What I DO love is finding this season’s shoes in Savers. For 12.99. And then discovering that despite their tagged size (8) and my nominal shoe size (9) they FIT. Happy Cinderella moment, or it would have been had the two blue-rinse ladies behind me been bluebirds, the said shoes glass slippers instead of wooden-soled wedges…and my baby-blue Levis  a ballgown. There’s just something so inescapably WHOLESOME about faded Levis. I’ll probably cry a little when they get to the stage of whorishly threadbare as opposed to pleasantly scuffed and washed to flannelette softness, but for now they’re perfect.  

No, you don’t get photos. We’ve been over this.

(a) I have no idea about lighting, composition, and generally what makes a ‘good’ photo

(b) With only myself around and no tripod, it’s freaking difficult to take a photo of anything on my body, and I assure you it’s far, FAR too cold to remove any clothing just so it can be photographed and added to a blog five people a month read.

(c) I’m lazy. 

Just go and stroke your favorite flannelette pj pants (DON'T try to tell me you're too cool to own any, I won't believe you and will laugh uproariously) while picturing the best jeans you've ever owned. Yeah. Feels like that. See? Much better than a photo of some random patch of denim. 

Hello, I'm an imbecile, aka Australian.

It’s gotten to the stage where I take great pleasure in reading the Herald Sun just to rant about the moronic content/commentary/drivel passing for articles/lack of style/you get the picture.

On Sunday I was blessed (and this was after a cursory glance) with two golden opportunities.

Not only was Catherine Lambert’s usual laughably pathetic attempt at finding a vaguely fashionable person to photograph and deconstruct up (or down) to par, but Eddie MacGuire chose to address the Victorian public with no little disregard for the coventions of written English. Sentence 1: incomplete. Sentence 2: incomplete. Sentence 3: punctuation would have helped. Sentence 4: I forget, but there was something wrong with it, because my outrage was squarely centred on the fact that a Year 9 student should (although given the state of our education system, may not) be able to produce four coherent sentences.

Fair enough, Eddie’s an everyman, so maybe it’s to his benefit to be semi-illiterate. I wouldn’t know, being one of the minority holding a postgraduate qualification. I’m not even meant to be reading the Herald-Sun; I should be supporting The Age or The Australian along with my university-educated peers.

It’s distressingly easy to see why people are becoming dumber; the public sphere expects so little of us – and so we get condescension ladled out in spoonfuls; SHOCK! Our weekly shopping is getting more expensive! A. Buy home brands (because that solves the problem of raw material and production costs rising, DER.) SHOCK! Our kids are getting fatter! A. Boost their self-esteem, because all that emotional eating is destroying them (not what you put in your trolley or what they’re bullied into wanting by advertising, another dissertation altogether). SHOCK! Australian public growing more stupid! A. Yeah, no, like really?

On a more distressing note, this is my 200th blog post. Two hundred posts and I've still got things to gripe about. Wow. I suppose I should come up with some fantastic giveaway or way of compelling people to come out of the woodwork, leave comments, pander to my ego, etc, but this requires more thought than I'm capable of on a Monday night, hacking and sneezing my way toward bedtime. Help me. 

Open letter to the patrons of the pub. Sorry, ONE patron of the pub.

Dear girl wearing a maxidress,

The dance floor is for dancing. The bar is for drinking. So are all those tables.

There is a reason people with full glasses lurk at said tables and not upon the dance floor, let alone attempt any movement which may be construed as dancing.

The reason is in your hand, and is rapidly getting emptier. I am rapidly getting wetter.
Not in a good way.

The guy you are 'dancing' with (where dancing may be read as lunging back and forth toward each other in some vague attempt at rhythmic coordination) is correct. Put down the beer glass and then, sure, continue to endanger your own wellbeing by gyrating/lunging/mashing other people's toes in your determined pursuit of "I'm the cool girl who can drink a beer AND dance".

Flinging your hair around will not help. You will only scare off your potential boyfriend by lashing him violently across the face, first with your hair and then your spilt beer.

Oh.
Oh, well done.
No, really.
I mean, it takes skill to drop a glass of beer among enthusiastically dancing people in a pub, in FRANKSTON, and NOT get punched in the face. Did you have to drop the actual glass as well? Next time? Just the beer, thanks. At least that evaporates.

Bronchitis is fun when you...

Loves: a quiet night at home where I can bust out my sewing machine and the stash from the cupboard and get all crafty. Last time I did this I wound up sewing darts in the back of a dress at 1a.m., (Cue my mother: "Will anyone REALLY notice if they're a centimetre off?" Me: "I will.") but it was TOTALLY worth it.

A couple metres of sunshiny red poplin became a sweet A-line dress courtesy of a 1979 Vogue pattern, a lot of cursing (a good quick-unpick is the BEST investment the would-be seamstress will EVER make), and a patient boy trying hard to understand why THAT shade of blue bias binding was not exactly the right shade of cerulean.

Tonight I've been a bit more snippy than sewy, but now I have a decadent watermelony scarf which fringes and drapes like no-one's business. Best color EVER. You have to close your eyes and imagine the coral-ly pink of fresh watermelon at this point, because I'm too lazy to find my camera and post a photo. I'm just not into all that visual biz.  (And thanks, Lady Smaggle, for the inspiration!)

I have used up some of my stash of metal-toothed zips with happy results; my good ol' Sass & Bides are now skinny Zipporas with zippity-doo-dah awesome. (I've got to stop eating choc-chip cookies, they're making me a LITTLE loopy.) Should really go and tidy up now... entirely the boring part. Perhaps I could just sew one more thing first....

P.S. All you people reading this and giggling at my sugar-fuelled hysteria (oh god, Jonathan Coulton's version of "Baby Got Back" just hit out stereo. Don't even ask.) ... what? Oh yeah. All you people reading this and snickering are complete bastards. Unless you leave me a little something in the comments box. Then you're wonderful.