At 8pm, when I was crossing the bridge between Erskineville and Newtown, there were two men heading in the opposite directing, arguing incoherently.
When I was passing them the one closest to me asked "Hey, which one of us do you think looks gay?" I realised they were both extremely inebriated and kept walking.
"No seriously!" he persisted, "which one of us looks like the gay one?" I stopped and stared at them dumbly. "I... don't -"
"If you were passing us on the street and you saw us together, which one of us would you think was a poof?"
At this moment, another guy was walking by and without slowing down he called out "She already did pass you on the street and you both look like fags to me!"

Which snapped me out of whatever weird trance I was in and I walked away. Shortly after that I walked past a guy standing on a milk crate, alternating between singing about how he goes dancing after midnight and demanding everyone around him give him money for his beautiful voice.

I both love and hate it here.

P.S.: Oxfam gave me free Palestinian olives.

A few nights ago someone in my building went crazy and was dragged off to a mental institution. Last night I accidently locked myself out of my room at 12:30a.m. and had to wait until 7a.m. to get a spare key from reception. I now know the true meaning of boredom.

I do believe this is going to be one of my favourite books in my entire lifetime.


"Tereza tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would catch her at it, every peek into the mirror had a tinge of secret vice.
It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own 'I'. She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face. She forgot that the nose was merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as a the true expression of her nature.
Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation."


"What is flirtation? One might say it is behaviour leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
...
If for some women flirting is second nature, insignificant, routine, for Tereza it had developed into an important field of research with the goal of teaching her who she was and what she was capable of. But by making it important and serious, she deprived it of its lightness, and it became forced, laboured, overdone. She disturbed the balance between promise and lack of guarantee (which when maintained, is a sign of flirtistic virtuosity); she promised too ardently, and without making it clear that the promise involved no guarantee on her part. Which is another way of saying that she gave everyone the impression of being there for the taking. But when men responded by asking for what they felt they had been promised, they met with strong resistance, and their only explanation for it was that she was deceitful and malicious."

god fucking damn it!

I totally forgot to buy tickets for RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

after years of complaining that I'd never get to see them, you wouldn't think it would have slipped my mind.

 I cannot believe this guy made the news.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc

"'You shouldn't be frightened so easily, or life is going to be too much for you.'
'I see.' She nodded humbly, listening, paying attention as if she were at a college classroom lecture.
'Are you always afraid of strangers?' he asked her.
'I guess so.' Again she nodded; this time she hung her head as if he had admonished her. And in a fashion, he had.
'Fear,' Jason said, 'can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid, you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.'
'I think I know what you mean,' Mary Anne Dominic said. 'One day, about a year ago, there was this dreadful pounding on my door, and I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in, and pretended I wasn't there because I thought somebody was trying to break in... and then later I found out that the woman upstairs had got her hand caught in the drain of her sink - she had one of those Disposall things - and a knife had gotten down into it, and she reached her hand down to get it and got caught. And it was her little boy at the door -'
'So you do know what I mean.' Jason interrupted.
'Yes. I wish I wasn't that way. I really do. But I still am.'"

"The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl'."
- Shirley Chisholm

Dear McDonald's,
You are not healthy, ethical or customer-conscious. Stop pretending like you are.

(Multigrain buns now? Approved by the heart foundation? HAHAHA!)

"I hate to say it, but I've got a feeling that jesus wasnt thinking of us on that cross.
I'm pretty sure it was more like... 'shit this hurts.'"

Reading: Sickened by Julie Gregory.

__________________________________________________

"Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirror, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tiger-like stretched marks on their sides from a burst of growth. My hipbones expand like a time-lapse flower in bloom. I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from it's tight shell. I use my finger tips to tug and pull the laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I've kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked, atrophied limbs out of its hold.
   
I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours. I need to see what my face says. What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty. I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body. Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself. My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangle and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs in my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin. I study my tiny, blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on it's own; an affirmation that I am living. I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

I look at every part of myself through the mirror., wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see. My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror, mesmerized. I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body, lean and lithe. I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

My mind is imprinted with the image of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: that I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early. My mind's eye sees me as stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse's long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes. Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

So I step back in the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees. I reach my fingers out to feel her face. My eyes cannot get over it. They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back? Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are complete opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass. I will take three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together."