If you could eat dinner with any person, dead or alive, who would it be and where would you go?

It would be with the members of the USyd Vegetarian Society, next Thursday (20 May), at Govinda's in Darlinghurst (http://www.govindas.com.au/), and you-ou-ou are invited! Ask me about details later.

General inquiries, constructive criticism, interactive stalking, open ears.

formspring.me

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/shrapper

Hey internet.

What's up? I'm restless tonight, and feel like hammering out some experiences before the worst happens (and it could! at any time! car accidents! swine flu!), but I'm not sure where my 'personal blog' lives these days. Tumblr? Here? Probably Tumblr, it's where I just reflex stream anything that entertains or moves me these days due to cbfness re: creating own content. So I starting letting my mind pour out there but then I realised that it's just banal show-and-tell "on Tuesday mummy and daddy took me on a holiday to ___ and I wore a hat and bort a pill box and [etc]" WHICH dundundun may deter my fervent followers and so like... I'm just putting it out here. Sentences with too many words in them. Mumblings of a teenager with a backache. This is where I'm at.

10 hours in the car today and I'm back in black! Somehow it's approaching 1am and I still haven't unpacked but nevermind dears. There are leftover mince pies to be nibbled and emails to be checked, everything in its place and the like.

I had told Vaanie I would blog for her, but never quite made it to a computer. That was a pity too, because the day I arrived in Canberra I was feeling so damned poetic. Really! It was unusual, born I think of hours in the car reading Dave Eggers pretty intently, feeling all affected and quasi-inspired by this early-20s mid-1990s hyperbolic tender pomo bildungsroman-y memwah [note 'memoir' is now pronounced in the manner of John Malkovich's character in Burn After Reading, that sexy drawling beast]. Canberra is actually pretty incredbile. Ask me about it some time! I will be defend it staunchly, albeit ignorantly, having spent two pleasant days there in six years.

So then it's that drowsy feeling as though you're about to start sobering up, caused by ideas from books, lethargy, shitty fast food and a weird little inland country town whose sole tourist attraction is a hulking huge submarine hull enshrined in a grassy park. Holgarth! Pit stop of the century! It was strange days.

Saw family in Tocumwal. In summary: Christmas presents = 10 or so books, Van Gogh print, hip journal, two or three sundry items, nice things from Andy inc. customised headphones!. Christmas holiday: very nice, good wine, interesting salads, catching up, cool cousins, card games, entomological and etymological appreciation. Murray River, amateur fireworks. Suchlike.
During the course all this I realised I'm having a feeble sort of epiphany atm also, of the tired old self-improvement-through-literature variety, which is embarrassing. But kinda sweet too right? Reading list since going away last Tues:

1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
2. Orlando: A Biography - Vag Woolf
3. A Room of One's Own - ditto, and consumed pretty much within the same 24 hour period!
4. Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
5. The Consolations of Philosophy - Alain de Botton

Whatever shall I stumble through next! It's a toss up between The Adrian Mole Diaries and Great Expectations really, haha. Or some more Alain de Botton [Status Anxiety] but goddamn what a dork he art. The first half of Consolations is so banal, and the second is by turns *headdesk*ing and life-changing. Questionable questionable!

Further: my newish cartilage piercings are infected againn, crusting up the metal, can anyone figure out why I keep getting more of the damn things? Nine punctures, at last count. And a curiouser obstacle: I return home to find all my Papermate Gel Roller IIs have stopped working. They still have ink and everything, they've just been lying prone for waay too long! I've stopped writing! I forget to bring my notebook places, my journal has temporal gaps intimidatingly wide so I just feel guilty and forget about it. I fear my own creativity or lack thereof (if you don't try you can't fail, right? WRONG, the two are synonymous, one way only, in that a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not necessarily an equilateral, capiche?

So anyway this blog is just to say I'm going into hibernation until New Year's Eve. I will be doing my darndest not to Tumblr (some posts in the queue for y'all though) - the past 5 days I've only been on the internet once, five minutes on Facebook, and I felt alot more... vital? by the end of that. And this is kind of a blanket ban on all interaction: There's a party tomorrow night. I'm not going. And noone ask me out for coffee or anything until January either please my darlings. There is much to do!

• reading pile exactly 30 books high, if lain cover on cover. some titles are less enticing than others and will probably be relegated to the bottom for another year or so, but nonetheless. much to be carrying on with! see epiphany.
• oodles of TV on DVD to consume over rolling hills of ironing
• I'm going to make something. not sure what yet, but There Will Be Glitter!
• I have to cook and clean while mum's away in Melbourne, work that vagina yeah
• like three potentially life-altering medical appointments to configure
• should really tart up my resume
• should REALLY get my L's
  

Happy Holidays and all that!

11:11

So. High school is World War 1. No kidding, it really is - you're not on the front line all the time, but there are days or months or years when getting up to catch the train really feels like 'going over the top'. And year 12? Everyone does their HSC in 1918. The major works and exams are Ludendorff's Operation Michael and now it's July and August and we're tearing up the counter offensives with Monash and Foch and tanks and speed and combined arms attacks all over the place.



Today I signed an armistice agreement in a railroad car in France. How fucking awesome is that right?


According to Wikipedia, some other notable events that have occured on past eleventh days of the eleventh months include:

1634 – Following pressure from Anglican bishop John Atherton, the Irish House of Commons passes "An Act for the Punishment for the Vice of Buggery". (aw shit!)
1975 – Australian constitutional crisis of 1975: Australian Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismisses the government of Gough Whitlam and commissions Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister, and announces a general election to be held in early December. (BOO. I can has my free education back now please?)
1992 – The Church of England votes to allow women to become priests. (women? as intelligent and spiritual as men? civilisation is crumblinggg)

It's the end of the beginning, and my birthday tomorrow, and everything hits at once... Two minutes silence please! Then the rest of our lives: dancing.

Joanna Newsom touring etc.

Ahh oh dear. Have been lining up an extravagant amount of concerts for someone so unemplyed this summer. Do I go do I go can I afford it (who cares) do I go? If so, who will go with me?

linkypoo - Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, Monday 18 January 2010

[Update: Waaait JENS LEKMAN is supporting on her Wollongong date. But apparently not in Sydney? What is this shit? I almost don't want to go at all out of spite!]

P.S. Also on the musical side of things - Ooh la la, Girls have sent out a new version of their beloved Lust For Life video but with more dicks, boobs and guitars. NSFW obvs. I think I might like the clean cut better though actually, for all its (irresistable, sigh) pseudo-retro pretentions and relative lack of nudity. It's just a bit funn(i)er? Or maybe because I first saw it before listening to the song a hundred thousand times so the impact was better.

Giirrlls you are so 1990s lo-fi stoned sun-brushed home-movie-as-political-statement Indian summer musty Kool Aid fresh. Zeitgeist, dayumn...

It's not like there's anyone left who doesn't read PostSecret, but really now, really.

17 days left of being 17! I'm on the edge... (Here is my secret: earlier this year I went through an [extremely short] phase where I wanted to beeee Stevie Nicks. That fluffy hair! Those whirling capes! Platform heels! It passed, of course. These things do. But I still think she's badass.)

(And isn't it cute how I'm counting these things down? It's kinda just because of the end of the HSC aka end of the world as we know it coincide right about there though. Speaking of which, where did my night go? Bothersticks!)

Fitz and Dizzyspells

I can't help but be impressed by my hard-partying neighbours. They have played 'So What' by P!ink* not twice, not thrice, but five times and counting this fine evening! That is some dedication to still being a rockstar/ having my own car, right there. I actually have to study though guys, so I'm trying to blast it out with Satie** but um, ill conceived plan because the work of Satie is generally very very quiet, like Phillip Glass you know. Phillip Glass <3s Satie. That is what I learned from Wikipedia today. Speaking of ill conceived plans though... Board of Studies, English Paper 2. WHAT WAS THAT? I had a rant prepared, fuming on the way home, "clogged with dregs of betrayal, reprisal, hatred", but I swallowed it, but suffice to say, I no longer have an academic future. My Hamlet thesis was awesome though year 11s: ask me to send it to you so you can leech off my now-unacknowledged genius and maybe it will have its moment of glory next year when the HSC won't make me cry with needlespecific questions on minor obscure features of the play. Fuuu-

Okay news update!!
1. I want to move into an apartment so I can have my own coffee table, magazine rack and doomed pot plants. Magazine racks are so hot! I love magazines lately.
2. Having a Karen O day today, as in one where I worship her. because she is queen of the living fierce and she is probably going to play a sideshow in Sydenay this summer and that will be awesome. Plus the whole Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack thing. So where I'm at right now. So me, so me...
3. Speaking of awesome, look, it's a leaping Iberian wolf! (from this wildlife photog competition)

*Does she st!ll even spell her name l!ke that, or am ! so two-thousand-and-late?

** Don't call me pretentious or I'll sic minimalism on you. Not sure how that would work, but you don't wanna risk finding out right?

V.ii

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

In honour of impeding affluence: Erised

I'm whiling away my time making object lust lists. Partly because in a month and a bit HSC is over and we're going on a job hunt! (We're going on a job hunt!) We're gonna catch a big one (We're actually gonna catch a poorlypaid casualposition but hey!) I'm not scared! I'm-not-scared!

But not really because of that. Tackily, in a similar time frame I turn 18 and people keep asking me that impossible question, "What do you want?" to which I must honestly answer thusly. I got everything I need. But if you insist, please don't fill my desk drawers with cutesy, grammatically incorrect Azn stationery. They're already fairly bursting with such fruits of my junior years at a selective girls' high. I'd much rather...

1. your favourite book
   
2. Moleskine soft cover pocket-sized daily diary (oh fuuu- I'm a wanker. A converted converted wanker...) (D:) (whatever, they're nicely designed. a no-name brand daily diary of a similar size, appearance and function will of course suffice)
   
3. an analog camerah (my SLR's shutter function has ceased to do so)
   
4. Polaroid? lomo? Demekin fisheye 110? something photographically fun...
   
5. Agyness Deyn


6. band tshirts! Next year I'm making new friends by o n l y ever wearing band tshirts, so efficient in delineating tastes and preferences that we'll barely need to talk! Leaving so much time for other, better things... (Personal branding FTW. Webcomic shirts are also good for this sort of thing.)


7. shooting stars, unicorns, hash brownies, whatnot...


8. a dictionary of quotations (to wean me off Tumblr)


9. a wicked hat stand/coat rack. Captain Hook.
   
10. a vegan cookbook: two New Years resolutions with one tome! (them being to live mindfully and learn to do basic stuff for myself)


11. an extravagntly mystical and beautiful incense holder
    
12. cream or brown headphones. Like these darling retro panasonic ones, but available in Aus :(


13. gypsy jewellery
    
14. magic stockings or scarlet socks


15. braces (pants braces, but preferably teeth braces because people wivvem are sooo cute! but I hear they're also expensive and painful, so maybe not)


16. gin/red wine/butterscotch schnapps


17. the gift of knowledge
    
18. nothing
    

And yet it stands: no matter how hard I hoard curiousities, complete collections, and vigorously Improve My Existence with Lifestyle Products™, I will still die alone. Ah, the incontrovertible! Breathe it in now, breathe it in!

P.S. "I see myself holding a pair of thick, woolen socks." Harry stared.

The Thought-Fox

Here's a poem by Ted Hughes. It's about writing a poem, or maybe rewriting essays and notes once accessible from a wayward USB, minus the misery that entails though. God I feel so uninspired & disconnected... Accio perspective. But fuck this year.


I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Countdowns:

18 days until HSC begins

40 days until it's over & I turn 18

then formals

then schoolies

then sanity?

So you walk that way, I'll walk this way

The future hangs over our heads
And it moves with each current event
Until it falls around like a cold, steady rain
Just stay in when it's looking this way

-Bright Eyes, Landlocked Blues

We graduate this week! I know I'm leaving, but I don't know where to...

I need Tumblr back for things like this. Random media sharrin. A couple more months yar.

I also need to smile smile smile! At least Devendra Banhart was once a senior high (to use the American) loser too:



Ooh look we both have awkwardly short hair, stupid knitwear and an interest in curious quotes. The girl on his right has an unattributed Wilde quote under her picture. The boy on his left has rosy cheeks bordering on fatal-fever territory. I have a tummy ache and school-centred anxiety. Oh I wish I had a suntan, I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine!

"Well, I think the way you feel as a teenager stays with you, forever. I really believe that. And we try to change and we hope that we change, but we don't really in big ways, in serious ways. I think the personality is formed at that time, for the good and for the bad. ... We all want to grow up and move on and appear to be different to people. And we want people to see us in a different way. But, I don't know, I think the personality is very, very strongly cemented, and we just bear whatever shortcomings we have and learn to live with it."

- Whatever shall we do with you Morrissey?

No, this.

I'm going to overcome uncoordination in a few weeks and just do what they're doing. Like everywhere. Swish, swish...

© 1971, Mary Sue Ader-Andersen

This.

Guys today is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Amiens!

So it was like, "the black day of the German Army" --> Hundred Days Offensive --> Armistice!! More or less. Woohoo?

Let us celebrate with a whimsical drawing from this guy who I'm digging like a fertile art garden lately:

Ah, but General Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff is not amused!





Sorry General Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff... Also, Monash has a freaking throne. What a neat guy. This is seriously the pinnacle of my weekend.

The amusements of my outrageously long day:

1. Instead of the terrible cartoon I drew in society today trying to explain the shining brilliance of this picture, behold the glorious glorious original:


2. In confirmation that I am just a fan of Prussia, as people keep questioning my pseudo-nationalism: (Like all day today. Like, three times. Question it not ye impure of blood!) So Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia, was no fan of coffee. In 1777, he declared: "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects… Everybody is using coffee. If possible, this must be prevented. My people must drink beer."

"He himself had been brought up on the old beer soup and reasoned that if beer soup was good enough for the monarch, it was good enough for his subjects." (The world of caffeine by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer)

We Prussians have come a long way since then, and indeed submerged ourselves in the world of caffeine thanks to many sleepless nights spent doing modern history homework and planning a socialist revolution. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin!

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture,
or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so
temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an
insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Mao surely has some Prussian blood in him yet (although he needs some more exclamation marks in there. Just imagine the exclamation marks kay! There, that was one. You can shuffle it around for greater effect if you want.) We will nationalise healthcare and heiresses, and the only class will be modern history class. Get it my friends? That was a pun! Dyslexic on fire...

1 2 Crush On You

Let's build a little house that we could live in, or a ridiculous apartment to be featured in The Selby, and cut each other's hair.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768)

This man is my hero tonight, as I sit battling ancient history notes in a fluffy dressing gown and silly hat, for several reasons in addition to this shared experience:

1. The padre of modern archaeology and art history who "showed that it was possible to understand ancient cultures through their artefacts, and introduced order, system and knowledge into archaeology". What about Karl Weber? What ABOUT Karl Weber? He had his moments sure, but lots of the Pompeii stuff under Weber was messy and damaging anyway and JJ was cuter.


2. Also totally queer.


3. And Prussian!

You go Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

My god I am a genius!

I just realised why my impulsively short haircut since a few days ago is so awesome - It mimics the shape of my childhood mushroom beret/squishy Rad Rags hat! I'll never have to wear it again! (Unless it's super cold, but still, accessory efficiency is these GFC'n times.)

...Yeah, ceci n'est pas un blog actually. I'm just bemoaning the lack of social networking sites in my life, but also kinda of celebrating them. It's fun- got bored today, so I read a book! Quaint, huh? Nonetheless, absence of Twitter makes my head full of Twitter-sized thoughts that scream around inside it, wings thrashing hopelessly etc etc, and the urge to purge online is occasionally like crippling. Quite a habit to kick. Tumblr patches please? (No, just... no.) Draconian measures are all Bodhi responds to these days though. They've mostly stopped me from hiccupping up random complaints into the ether, like, say, "Shit my PIP is now 10 925 words of repetitive waffle, unformatted quotes and resource lists." But hey, operative word mostly!

So, positive affirmation time: I am going to do so much work tomorrow. So much. I'm going to finish like two major works and do heaps of other stuff, and still have time for yoga and walking and personal hygiene and absorbing the new Sarah Blasko album. I won't be tired despite impending late night and I won't be paralysed by stress. It'll be totally wunderbar, I promise.

To make this entry worth your while, here are some nostalgic action shots circa last last summer. I'm not a summer person at all, but it does feel good to remove all my pairs of socks every now and then, and also one must be actually madly psyched for this summer above everything else in future life, ever. *Alice Cooper growl* "Schooool's been blooown to pieeeces!" Collective chin up my year twelve lovers, happiness is just around the corner. Hey now hey now, hear what I say now, we'll be there for you...

Oh L. Cohen,

"The future is already here, and it's always been bleak. The whole place looks like a butcher's shop. Probably always did."