Everyone knows it's windy!

Just a quick one today: I did my first veil performance on Sunday and it went really well, so I thought I'd share the video.



It's from a show my teacher Zehara organised called 'Elementals'; all of the performances had to be inspired by one of the four elements, and mine was wind. Considering that I once managed to nearly garotte myself with a veil in the middle of King Street (really), I reckon I've made some good progress. Just for the record, it's an Australian band but Zehara picked the music for me, so the didj is not my fault. :) Also, look how long my hair's getting! I'm quite handy with the flat-iron these days.

While we're at it, here's another piece I did a few months back:



This one's a double-cane piece, which is... well, not many people do them. You have to be a bit ambidextrous, and apparently I am (?). It's a more traditional saidi (Egyptian folk dance with cane) piece, and I'm wearing the proper outfit, by which I mean I'm dressed as Elvis's cabana boy. I did it more recently in a more modern costume and wish I had a video of that show instead, because saidi dresses are not what you'd call flattering, but there you go.


XOXO

P.S. At 0:14 of the first video you get a quick shot of Colleen in the back row - she's all the way at the end, in the white hoodie. None of you will be in the least surprised.

An update.

(With apologies and gratitude to Anthony, who received an e-mail suspiciously similar to the text below just a few moments ago. Whatever, I'm sick and feel like a jerk for having fallen off. I'm trying to catch up, y'all.)

The Political

I saw this BBC article a couple of months ago, and I wish to god he had named the person quoted in this exchange:

A leading Republican, who was in Congress for more than 10 years, answered my question: "Who can beat Obama?" with a casual, "a mammal". Then he added sadly: "But they are all reptiles."

We're all hoping that they destroy each other and don't end up putting up someone who looks moderate enough to lure away disenchanted Dems. In the meantime, I'm usually too focused on keeping down my food anytime one of their god-awful faces is on my tele to pay much attention to what they're saying, and that's probably preserving my sanity.

The Personal

I had an interesting four-day weekend: I went to Florida to meet Colleen's family. They're in the suburbs of Tampa - which is to say, Tampa; the whole bloody city's one big suburb - and they are hardcore Republicans with Christian overtones and Tea Party inclinations. They've long since made their peace with their gay daughter, but loving her deeply and wanting a good and safe life for her somehow does not equal choosing not to vote for people who want her miserable or preferably dead. It's a conundrum.

I had been warned of their political leanings and Colleen had pleaded with me repeatedly not to get involved in any kind of political discussion with them, mostly because a) I'm obviously not going to change their minds, and b) her Dad is a... fucking fucking fuck, I've lost one of my Australian words... he likes to start trouble because he thinks it's funny... AUGH. I get really upset when that happens. I've started forgetting words and street names; I couldn't come up with the name of the Annandale a while back and I drove myself crazy with it. Stupid and unimportant, except that it isn't at all. Anyway, whatever the word is (and please post in the comments if you know what it is)*, that's what he is, so the only way to avoid getting into an ugly and unwinnable argument is to refuse to bite in the first place. But it's hard when you're pottering around in the kitchen and notice the Obama countdown clock prominently displayed on the counter, and when politics keeps coming up in conversations going on around me, and also, well, have you met me?

Fortunately I managed to keep well out of it, and it all went swimmingly and they liked me very much. But it was weird being in that environment. In some ways it felt almost disturbingly familiar - the beaches; the crazy flora I've never seen Stateside, including a bottle-brush tree in their front yard! - and in others it felt so completely unrelatable. The place has no soul, and that's a big part of it - it's all planned/gated communities and strip malls and chains, not an independent anything to be found anywhere - but the other was definitely the people. You'll hear that Southerners are much friendlier, but I don't think that's correct: it's warm, but it's automatic; it's manners, not friendliness. With the people, as with the city, there's no there there. It's dead inside. And the politics are effing terrifying. I really do fear for this country.

But I'm trying to focus on the good of the trip, which was that her family really did seem to like me. I was so fucking terrified: it's been a long time since I dated someone who cared what her family thought. It's a lot more nerve-wracking this way (even though it probably says some very good things about Colleen and the choices I'm making these days. Look at me, growing up).

The Patriots

Didn't happen. Did not happen. Don't know what you're talking about.

XOXO

* EDIT: The word is stirrer. Which I remembered while brushing my teeth, because why not.

Enter the Confessional #4: ID Parade

(It's up to you to determine if that 'D' should be lower-case.)

Through a convoluted series of events that I won't even bother trying to explain in depth, beyond:

Equation 1
fervent homesickness + pain-in-the-ass Lawyer +
quiet Sunday evening alone in the flat =
bad televisual decisions

I have become infatuated with 'McLeod's Daughters'. It's on NetFlix - it got picked up Stateside a while back by one of those estrogen-fueled basic cable channels that usually specialises in made-for-TV movies starring the mom from 'Family Ties', and I guess it got enough of an audience to justify making it available - and last weekend it showed up at the arse-end of my recommended viewing list. On a whim I decided to have a look... and now it's five days later, I've got through 30+ episodes, and while the initial shine is starting to wear off, I'm still thoroughly enmeshed.

To make matters worse, I am also a little bit in love with Claire McLeod. Not in a TV crush way, though there is a bit of that:

Equation 2

[(butchy walk + Bonds singlets + deep voice) * covered in dirt]/

vague facial expression resemblance to The Canberran Who Shagged Me =
CATNIP

No, this is more in line with a recurring pattern of mine: wildly overidentifying with a fictional character.

I've done this for... well, most of my life, I reckon. It will usually (but not always) be a character from a book I love; this (usually-but-not-always) book will resonate with me in some objectively ridiculous fashion; and, critically, the specific character will have qualities that I desperately want for myself. I will often end up adopting some bizarre trait of that character, though it's usually something fairly minor and definitely something that isn't obviously connected to anything. This is fortunate, because it means that the manias generally pass unnoticed: I am unlikely to get whatever the current version of 'The Rachel' is, for example. It's subtler than that, assuming that the word subtle can ever be applied to me without an audible question mark at the end.

So with all that in mind, here's the chronological starter's guide to my multiple personalities:

Name: Velvet Brown

Book: National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

Trait: Crunchies

I don't remember how old I was when I read National Velvet for the first time. I got it as a gift from my aunt Franny, part of a beautiful blue leather-bound set of four totally mismatched books: National Velvet, Harriet the Spy, Catcher in the Rye, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It took me years to pick up Velvet, but when I finally did I *loved* it. I still have that copy somewhere, and it's shot to hell: pages folded down, leather cover warped, the whole thing expanded out to four times its original size from having been dropped in the bath and dried out so many times.

The Brown girls were always getting 'sweets' 'on tick'. They ate Fry's and Cadbury's chocolates by the bucketful, talking with special rapture about the chocolate-covered honeycomb Crunchie. They liked the ones that were a bit underdone so they were chewy in the middle. Totally foreign to me... until I was 13, on a layover in Shannon Airport in Ireland. It was early morning and I was hungry, but nothing appealed to me through the haze of jet lag. And then I saw the heap of shiny gold wrappers in the middle of a Cadbury's display, and I raced up to my mother and babbled inarticulately about 'Velvet's favourite'. I bought one, and I still remember the first bite: the thin layer of chocolate was sweet and creamy, and the honeycomb(esque) centre was smoky and crumbly and just amazing. An addiction was born.

Name: Nickel Smith
Book: Bingo by Rita Mae Brown
Trait: down-home Southern bitchery
NIckel Smith appears in three of Brown's books, but Bingo is the one that counts. Nickel serves as Brown's appointed voice (all of her novels feature someone who's a thinly-veiled version of herself), which means that she gets most of the good lines, including some first-class Southern sniping. Lines that have made it into heavy rotation include, '[he]'s got resonance where his brains should be', 'you look like the dogs got at you under the porch', and '[she] couldn't help being born ugly but she could have stayed home'.

Name: Mikage Sakurai
Book: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Trait: katsu-don, motherfucker

I can't remember when I first read Kitchen: I think it was when I was in college, but I'm not sure. The copy I've had for years has gone missing sometime in the last year - I lent it out and forgot to whom, as I've done many times, but this time it didn't come back to me - and I'll have to get another copy soon because it's been too long since I last read it. It's short, more of a novella than a novel, but it's full of small details that I have loved since whenever that first reading was.

The climactic scene centres around a bowl of katsu-don, a Japanese dish consisting of crumbed pork and sauteed onions over rice, with hot broth poured over it and an egg cracked over it that cooks in the broth. But I realise that my description is unflatteringly prosaic, so I'll turn it over to Yoshimoto:

This katsu-don, encountered almost by accident, was made with unusual skill, I must say. Good quality meat, excellent broth, the eggs and onions handled beautifully, the rice with just the right degree of firmness to hold up in the broth - it was flawless.

When I first read Kitchen, I had not yet had katsu-don. But it didn't matter: when I read that paragraph, katsu-don skyrocketed to the top of my comfort food list. Don't get why? Read it again, slowly. Everything you could want from comfort food is right there. It's warm, flavourful, substantial. It is perfect. I wanted it.

I didn't get the opportunity to try it for a long time, but when I did, I got lucky: I happened into the best version anywhere in Sydney. It was at Don Don ('Don x 2') on Oxford Street. I went there with my ex Thy-Anh and a few of her friends. I didn't know much about Japanese food at that point: I hate seaweed so sushi was off-limits, and I hadn't explored any other dishes. But this night they really wanted Japanese and I was assured that there would be non-sushi things for me to have, so I went along. It never even crossed my mind that katsu-don might be on the menu, but there it was. I was beside myself.

When the bowl appeared in front of me a few minutes later, I was nervous: I had wanted it for so long and had built it up to so much in my head that if it wasn't good, it would actually hurt my heart. But no, it was everything I had hoped and more. It was like this meal was custom-built for me. It was, as Yoshimoto said, flawless.

Name: Serena van der Woodsen
Book/TV show: 'Gossip Girl'
Trait: ridiculously long strands of pearls (and also perfume, kind of)

Some things fall into your lap when you really need them. Serena van der Woodsen fell into mine, courtesy of recaps of the TV show by the sublime Jacob Clifton*. I've never seen the show, and at that point I hadn't read any of the books, but Jacob's recaps stand alone in their awesomeness and familiarity with the subject is unnecessary. (He has also recapped several seasons of 'American Idol', and ditto for that.) This means that my introduction to Serena came through the recaps, and I was hooked from the fucking first.

Serena van der Woodsen is beautiful, rich, mysterious, and universally adored. She's fundamentally kind and endlessly generous, but she will exact payment out of your ass if you're stupid enough to fuck with someone she loves. She is also utterly artless and has only recently learned How to Be Places. Serena van der Woodsen, in short, does not give a fuck.

In the first season, Serena wore insane strands of pearls wrapped all around herself in complicated ways. In an attempt to channel some of her glamour and total detachment from reality, I found myself a stupidly long string of something approximating pearls at Diva and started wearing them every way I knew how. And you know, it kind of worked, if only as a total placebo. I think there are assumptions that are made about a girl with pearls wrapped 18 times around her wrist, and they were assumptions I was entirely happy to have made about me at the time. (Those assumptions may also have existed entirely in my own head. I do not care.)

I was delighted to find out subsequent to declaring Serena my hero/ Oprahesque life guru that her 'signature scent' - specially created for her, of course - is a blend of patchouli and sandalwood with other warm accents. Many of you will know that the perfume I wear was specially created for me way back when I was 15. It too is a blend of patchouli and sandalwood with other warm accents. Clearly, we are soulmates. And don't you dare accuse me of stealing it from her, because she wasn't born when I first put mine on. It is just an incredible coincidence. Also, she's fictional and has never actually been born. I'm not so crazy that I don't know that.

I've since retired the pearls, though they're always close at hand and still make the occasional appearance if needed. The perfume, of course, is still with me daily.

* TWoP was one of my favourite sites for yonks. Unfortunately, Bravo bought them a few years ago and there were a lot of unfortunate changes, including the loss of many of the best recappers and a seizure-inducing new layout. Jacob stayed on but reading anything on the site is too much like hard work, so I embarked on a ridiculous but thoroughly rewarding project of copy-and-pasting all of his recaps into Word. Should any of you want seasons 1-4 of 'Gossip Girl' or seasons 4-6 and 10 of 'American Idol', let me know in the comments. You'll thank me. True.

Name: Claire McLeod
TV show: 'McLeod's Daughters'
Trait: silver star necklace

This is the one I'm most embarrassed about, with good reason. First of all, it's the one I'm wearing at the moment, so talking about it makes me feel way more exposed than any of the others do. More importantly, though, it's embarrassing because it means admitting that I watched 'McLeod's Fucking Daughters'. I say 'watched' because in the weeks since I started writing this post, I finished the first three seasons and have officially given it up. I knew that Claire got killed off at the end of the third season and I promised myself that I would chuck it once that happened; fortunately, the show had become so ridiculous by then that it wasn't hard to stop. How ridiculous? Well, in a single third-season episode, Claire gave birth to her ex-boyfriend-who-was-still-married-but-didn't-tell-her's baby (and of course she'd told her ex that the baby wasn't his because... well, why not?) alone in the North Paddock, where she was found by her half-sister Tess thanks to the guidance of a faerie-folk-ish six-year-old... though Tess shouldn't have been out walking by herself because she'd just been rescued from near-drowning in a silo of organic wheat (that shit is like quicksand, but of course Tess didn't know that because she's from the city) and had aspirated some grain, which is a fucking problem that would land you in hospital for a stretch if you had any sense or didn't exist only on a crappy Australian bush drama.

This is not even the full story.

Anyway. I am comfortably in remission from 'McLeod's' now, but the necklace remains. Some of you may have seen it at some point; I got it very shortly before leaving Australia, at the same silver shop on King St. where my going-away ring and bracelet came from. It's very plain, just a small silver star on a short black rubber cord. It sits right below my throat and is exactly the right length for playing with while lost in thought... just the way Claire's always playing with the gold horseshoe necklace that her father gave her. (BEFORE HE DIED.)

I don't want to think the only reason I put it on for the first time in months was because I wanted to emulate the way a soapie character fiddles with her accessories; that would be unspeakably pathetic. I was having a particularly rough spot of homesickness, which may have made me reach for the necklace in the first place. I bought it as a souvenir for myself, so that makes some kind of sense. But I can't deny the coincidence of the timing, or of my sudden interest in touching it all the damn time.

In my defense, I will say that Claire is fucking awesome: tough, capable, take-no-bullshit, and with a core of pure red fury. She's stuck in a craptastic show for sure, and there are plenty of moments when the plots and dialogue go from eye-rollingly goofy to full-on ridiculous; but Lisa Chappell knows the heart and soul of her character, and even in the most maudlin situations manages to make Claire's reactions seem honest and consistent. (And her Kiwi accent only breaks through sometimes! That's acting.)

Claire's a bit of an exception: the other characters all come from books or TV shows I revisited over and over and over, while I cannot imagine ever wanting to watch 'McLeod's Daughters' again. But Claire had an impact on me and I'd be lying if I said she didn't. I'm wearing the necklace right now, for christ's sake... though I hope to have moved on by the next time I see anyone who reads this. It's embarrassing enough.


XOXO

Works in Progress

I've been working on a big post for a couple of weeks, but because work and Other Things are keeping me quite busy at the moment it's blowing out into a project with no clear end in site, so I've decided to put up a little something in the meantime.

Thanksgiving was last Thursday, and I missed you guys a lot. As nice as it is to have it with my family (and not to have to cook two bloody turkeys and my weight in stuffing), it will never be as fun as it is in Sydney. The warm weather, the franticness (franticity?), the running all over Erskineville with half-cooked birds because my oven died in the ass... they were fucking good times.

Anyway, a couple of people e-mailed me saying that at this time of year they missed my pumpkin pie. I figured that this at least is something I could provide from the other side of the world, so long as you-all promise not to miss me any less because you can make it without me. :)


XOXO

Best Pumpkin Pie
(Cook’s Illustrated)

2 cups (16 oz/4.4 kg) butternut pumpkin puree*
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup double cream
2/3 cup milk
4 large eggs

Preheat oven to 400˚F (205˚C). Blind-bake pie crust in pie pan for 5-10 minutes or until just a touch golden.

Process first 7 ingredients in a food processor fitted with steel blade for 1 minute.

Transfer pumpkin mixture to a 3-quart heavy-bottomed saucepan; bring it to a sputtering simmer over medium-high heat. Cook pumpkin, stirring constantly, until thick and shiny, about 5 minutes.

When crust is done, whisk heavy cream and milk into pumpkin and bring to a bare simmer. Process eggs in food processor until whites and yolks are mixed (about 5 seconds). With motor running, slowly pour about half of hot pumpkin mixture through feed tube. Stop machine and scrape in remaining pumpkin. Process 30 seconds longer.

Immediately pour warm filling into hot pie shell. (Ladle any excess filling into pie after it has baked for 5 minutes or so — by this time filling will have settled.) Bake until filling is puffed, dry-looking, and lightly cracked around edges, and center wiggles like gelatin when pie is gently shaken, about 25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for at least 1 hour, and serve with homemade whipped cream (not ice cream - it doesn't seem to work well).

*To make butternut puree:
Peel and cube fresh butternut. Boil in lightly-salted water until soft but not breaking down. Drain off water, then mash or blend pumpkin until very smooth (it should look like baby food). Do NOT add any additional salt or other ingredients, as that will stuff up the rest of the recipe.

Another two fucking months?!

I clearly don't understand how time works. That's the only excuse I can come up with.

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes! Spain was awesome, and I would recommend Barcelona as a birthday destination to anyone. The weather was spectacular, the food defies description, and the architecture would break your heart. I'm planning a return trip very soon.

I also had a pre- and post-birthday presents in the forms of Paul's visit at the start of September and Rob and Irena's visit at the end. My friends are besotted with my Australian guests, and I strongly encourage you all to keep coming and besotting them.

Apart from all of the excitement, things here are going... well, they're going. I'm still really struggling to find my niche. It's bloody hard trying to settle into a new life at this age and by myself. I actually think it would have been easier if I'd gone somewhere entirely new, because it's really easy to be complacent here when I know the city so well. It wouldn't have been at all feasible, of course - I needed the material support that people in Boston could offer me - but it's deceptively hard because I feel like it should have been easier to settle back into somewhere I know, when in fact I've lived my entire adult life elsewhere and I don't have the slightest idea how anything works, but I also don't have any obvious markers of foreign-ness so people expect me to get it. It's... I don't know. It's not easy.

On the other hand, though, I'm really trying not to dwell too much on this stuff. It's hard, as I have a dwelling-oriented brain and not nearly enough to occupy/distract it at the moment, but I'm trying to do some power-of-positive-thinking things. Like, I've decided to allow myself to spend up to $15/week on nice, (usually) tropical flowers for the house. They make me happy, and happy is worth $15. And I'm trying to find something beautiful in every situation - like, actively looking for it. Right now I'm at my desk at work, so there's not much immediately in front of me (except a bottle of mannequin lubricant, which is... I mean, I have the *most* ridiculous job), but I'm able to find something in most places, and that seems to help. I at least feel like I'm trying, so that's good.

Things with The Lawyer are officially off again. It's... guys, it's rough, I'm not going to lie. Paul met her, and Rob and Irena met both her and The Chef; the verdict is that she's great (true), and The Chef is great (true), and... and I need to meet someone who is neither of them, because both situations are fundamentally busted (entirely, completely, 100% true).

I think a big part of this is that I need to meet new people full stop - I need to broaden my friend base - but it is bloody hard to do that at this age and in this situation. I've met a couple of people I like at work, but no one I want to pursue as an Outside Friend; and I love my belly dancing crew but most of them live outside of Boston (well outside) and aren't really viable options. If I were the sort of person who liked playing sports or going to bars to socialise with people I don't know? I'd be golden. However, I am neither of those people and I like neither of those things - in fact, both send waves of panic through me. So... seriously, what else? Please, suggestions. I need to find a way in.


XOXO

Enter the Confessional #3: But I've got a really good personality!

Wow. So I'm doing really well with that 'keeping to a weekly schedule' thing, huh?

It would be easy to blame my extended fail on a long list of recent events, so that's exactly what I'm going to do. Some of them are easy to discuss in a public forum: Thanksgiving, moving house, busy time at work, lead-up to Christmas, etc. etc. etc. Others are more complicated and more personal, and have involved an intense mix of joy and pain (and sunshine and rain, sing it all god's children...) and fear and triggering and triggering and triggering. I'm dating a couple of girls, one of whom is awesome and good to me, and the other of whom I actually like - and you all know me well enough to know what that means. I'm settling into a life here that after only a handful of months is already uncomfortably rife with overlaps and I'm making decisions that aren't always good. I'm broke, of course. And I'm going to rot my teeth out with candy canes if I don't slow my roll.

Returning to the topic of moving, it's been... hard. The physical move itself wasn't too bad, but this was the first time in many years that I've packed up my room in my parents' house and not been taking it all to Sydney. I've been dreaming of home a lot lately and I know it's just my brain trying to sort through things and move on, but it's exhausting and it's starting to wear me down. I never thought I'd be living in an apartment in Boston. It's a great apartment, and I have a great new flattie named Karen, and it's in an area that I don't know so it feels new. All good. But I can't help but think back to this time last year, when my life finally felt like it was coming together again after far too long - job I liked, house I liked, friends I loved, new prospects on the horizon - and then how quickly it all got pulled out from under me, and how much I lost in the process. And that's happened too many times in the last few years, that thing of going, '...finally.' right before having my whole life go tits-up, for me to be able to even begin to believe that good things may be on the horizon. Which is all apart from the fact that I still struggle to see Boston itself as a good thing. It was the right thing, I know that, but it doesn't feel like a good thing. So there's that to contend with.

On a less fraught note, my bed is cursed. I'm not sure what the hell is behind this, but it's one damn thing after another: first, the queen-size mattress and boxspring arrived as scheduled, but the boxspring didn't fit up the stairs. They took it back and advised me to order a split queen, which I did... but no one told me I had to order two of them, because for some reason they sell the halves individually at Sears (Flattie Karen said she was going to go by there and ask for one leg of pants), and none of the three people I discussed my order with saw fit to clarify it with me. And so a week later - this past Saturday - the delivery men arrived with one half of a boxspring. And when I called Sears to give them a piece of my mind, they put me on hold for 20 minutes and then asked me to call back later because their systems were down. No, really.

At this point I decided to just get a cheaper set from the furniture place downstairs, and that arrived yesterday without incident. And having the boxspring meant that the bed was high enough off the ground for me to put my brand-new, custom-designed, hand-painted doona cover on without it dangling onto the floor. So I did, only to discover that the lovely cherry-blossom detail that was meant to have bright red flowers instead had anaemic red-pink ones, which is... not what I wanted. And kind of icky. And has prompted Flattie Karen to start calling me 'Salmon'. So now I'm trying to organize a return on a custom item, which is always a joy. I also still have a stray half-boxspring lying around my room because I'm trying to arrange the return of that to Sears, but they seem unwilling to get in touch with me about it. Oh, and my actual bed frame, which I thought was being delivered at the end of this week, won't be here until sometime next week, or possibly after due to the holidays.

[Sigh.]

I mean, all I can do at this point is laugh, but it's beyond ridiculous. The rest of the move has gone pretty smoothly, and I do have furniture (and credit card debt) thanks to the proud Scandinavian meatball merchants at Ikea, but the fact that the main feature of my room is unlikely to be sorted within the first month of my living here is starting to bug me. I will say that the mattress is amazingly comfortable, though, so I'm lucky there. And half expecting it to spontaneously combust in the night, or possibly be harboring Julian Assange without my knowledge.

In better news, the dancing's going well. It's been a busy few weeks, but now I've got two shows down and only one more to go - but the remaining one is the biggest and scariest one. I'm doing a fusion number with a dagger; it's to a song called 'Dr Sin' by Chasing Shadows (highly recommended), and my character is an assassin. It's a bit martial-artsy and a bit tribal and entirely fueled by my latent rage issues, but it seems to be going over pretty well so far, apart from how I almost took out an audience member a couple of weeks ago when my dagger slipped from my hand and went shooting out into the audience. First time I've ever dropped it, let alone flung it, and of course it happened at a show. Luckily no one was hurt, but the event has already passed into legend and my teacher is never ever going to let me live it down, not that I can blame her for that.

So that's me. For now. I won't do anything so stupid as to promise another post between now and February, but I'll see what I can do.

XOXO

Alors, ma petite, vous êtes un cochon.

Many of you will have heard me rant about Canada. The rants aren't serious; I'm either suggesting they're a nation of nice-but-boring types (because they're too polite) or a nation of serial killers (because they're too polite), but underneath it all I have a lot of respect for them, what with their enlightened approach to socialised health care, human rights, and thermal underwear. But I'd never been. It didn't really interest me - most of North America doesn't really interest me - and apart from Lynley and Suze's wedding, which I had to miss for budgetary reasons, there was no great event pulling me across the border.

Enter Lynne and Laura.

Thanks to these fine ladies' intervention, I can say with certainty (and minimal ranting) that Montréal is awesome. I loved the Frenchiness of it, the pointy noses and pointy architecture set against a version of the language so old as to be all rounded edges. I loved the history and the pretty sunsets, the baked goods, the debaculous Habitat '67 that ruins an otherwise gorgeous view across the river. I loved their way with offal and their adorable 12-year-olds (of course I loved their adorable 12-years-olds, and for real, I have got some kind of problem and I need help). If it weren't for their weather, I'd seriously consider it.

Having two mad Australians to run around with helped as well. By the end of our three days there, Laura was able to say that she didn't speak French (or at least, make an interesting enough stab at it that they quickly got the point) and Lynne had more or less stopped driving us into oncoming traffic. Fortunately, each was quite strong where the other struggled, so I feel confident that they'll make it through Québec City intact. Me, I contributed little to the proceedings apart from a patchy high school-French vocabulary and an occasional plaintive murmur of 'you're drifting to the right again pull left pull left pull left [sob]' from the back seat. Oh, and I got to tell an 'ugly American' type to fuck off, loudly and in the middle of the street. Always satisfying.

Thanks for a great trip, girls. I'm going to cook my ass off for you on Thursday. :)

Enter the Confessional 2: Angry Girl Music of Any Persuasion

Using music to hurt people. It's easy, it's a weapon. Mandy did it: when she didn't think the crowd was worth much, she'd telegraph that by playing her most commercial tracks (and bear in mind that in this context, 'commercial' would be more correctly spelled with a silent '-unt' after the first letter). I remember one night at Slide she played that fucking Sneaky Sound System song three times in one set, just to make the point... well, and because Micky particularly hated it. I remember Micky shaking her head and grinning just a little bit more each time. I remember laughing.

I once saw Armand van Helden do it too, in Boston, too many years ago to count. I was standing behind the DJ booth, watching while he played, and his disdain for the crowd was palpable. I don't know what we'd done to offend him, but whatever it was, he took it out on us for the full two hours, striking the final blow with Stardust's 'Music Sounds Better'. He knew this track would go over big, and fuck, did he resent us for it. It was all over his face and all over his hands as they moved across the decks, even going so far as to cut it for a few bars in that bit where the music drops out and it's just the chorus, to catch every single person in the capacity crowd belting out the lyrics. Except that it backfired: the moment was so perfect - strangers in harmony, lasers going mental, manic thronging bliss - that instead of showing us what commercial losers we all were, he showed himself up as a complete twat.

(Interestingly, I saw Paul Oakenfold at the same club two weeks later, and although he was by every measure a bigger deal than Armand van Helden - more skilled, more established, heaps more respected - he sang and danced along with his tracks like a teenager and generally looked to be having the time of his life, and the night was infinitely better for it. There's a lesson to be learned there.)

I do it too, but the battles I fight are mostly in my own head. 'Paper Planes' by M.I.A., that's a big one. I can't hear it without recalling the days/weeks/months when the lyrics of anger and explosions pushed a very particular button for me. 'Bulletproof' by La Roux, that's another one that carries a few connotations, some from the same time as 'Paper Planes', some from earlier. And 'Leaving Home' by Jebediah. Every angry teenager's wet dream of a rebellion song, to the point that I've integrated it into my own memories from years before I heard it. Ev, Amy and Kat used it as the themesong to a roadtrip they took years before I met them, a roadtrip to which I came no closer than seeing a single photo of the three of them at a waterfall, and yet in my head I'm there, in the back seat of Aims's little car, cheering along with a chorus I wouldn't learn for several years to come.

I guess it's not new, then, the way time gets lost in my head. The second half of 2008 doesn't exist for me. Much of early 2009 is a blur too, but late 2008, I honestly could not swear to anything that happened. It's gone, vanished. And I realised last week that the same thing has happened over the last six months: September 8th marked six months since I left Sydney, and I have no idea how that happened. I cannot account for the time, or the things I've done, or most of the people I've met. All I know is that I must be nearing the statute of limitations on the phrase 'just moved back from Australia', yet to me it feels as fresh as a torn fingernail. I still say 'heaps' and flatten my short 'a' sounds; I still write 's' instead of 'z' and say zed instead of zee; I've recently offered a chef I've never met in person very, very dirty sex in exchange for recreating the laksa I miss to the core of my being.

I don't know how to stop being the person I've been for the last 11 years. It's more than I can get my head around.

File under 'things that shouldn't be this complicated but have decided to be anyway'

I've finally broken down and signed up to a two-year mobile contract. I had been on a pre-paid thing with Virgin, who are very much a third-party carrier here (Caitlin: 'Ohhh, you're the one.'), but the phone was dodgy as fuck and the service was spotty, so when I learned that my work has a deal with Verizon, a major carrier, that meant that I could get a two-year contract and a great phone for only $15 more a month than what I'd been paying with Virgin AND keep my phone number, I was in.

Oh, silly girl. As if it could be that easy.

Something's gone wrong somewhere along the way that means that my new phone is screening my texts and phone calls without my consent. Not consistently, mind: I'll get one text from someone and then not hear from them again for 24 hours, in which time I have of course decided that I have mortally offended them and they now hate me, but I don't want to get in touch because I don't want to be pushy. And then my brain goes in circles for the next several hours until it explodes into a million fleshy pieces and I'm weeping into a bag of Nutter Butters. (Bad enough when it's real people; you should see what happens when Wil Anderson's Twitter feed mysteriously disappears.)

Why yes, I *am* looking for a therapist! Funny you should ask.

[sigh] Yes, I really am. Things have been increasingly rough the last few weeks. I think what's happened is that now that I don't have the worry of job-searching, everything else has come banging to the front of my head. And not to sound self-pitying, but there's a fair bit of everything else to process. I'd suspected that I was dealing a bit too well with the move, and that there might be a crash coming eventually; the small mercy here is that the crash waited until my health insurance kicked in and I could afford to see someone. So now I'm in the process of trying to find that someone, which is a bit tricky because the only recommendations I've been able to get so far have been for people who don't accept my health insurance. But I found a few on my own who look promising, so cross fingers one of them will work out.

In other news, I have just re-read all of Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree series (collections of his book reviews for The Believer, McSweeney Press' monthly magazine), which has inspired me to start doing my own monthly book reviews. I like his format, wherein he lists the books he's bought and the books he's read in that month, so I'm stealing that. Unlike him, however, I am not restrained by The Believer's policy of not permitting negative criticism, so if I read something I don't like, I will absolutely tell you about it. I expect to have the first of these up by the end of the month.

Finally, a last note on my mobile: My old Virgin phone wasn't great with international texts because my receipt (or not) of them would depend on how much random cash was floating around in my account. I've learned that some people did text me and I never got them; if at some point you did text me and didn't hear back, that's what happened. This should be different now because those texts will be added to my bill rather than debited from my account, but given the way my first three days with my new phone have gone I'm not overly confident. So I guess what I'm saying is that e-mails are still and always the best way to reach me, and also there's a bunch of you I haven't heard from in ages and I miss terribly, so if you're feeling so inclined please drop me a line, or even just a comment. I don't care if it's the most boring stuff about your day, I just like to know you're out there. xoxo

Onya Dahhhhhhhlin'!

Up the workers... especially you, Erin. :)