Remember that Australian mix I made? Well the words that went with it are now printed up nicely in DrunkenWerewolf. If you’re from the UK you can grab a copy for free at local stockists; international readers and the terminally lazy can purchase them here (the price only covers postage). Validation, hurray!

There’s something to be said about watching sunshowers from an office cubicle. The sunlight washes out and sets the crowns of eucalyptus trees glowing, and the rain is so soft it’s like the individual drops are dancing in the breeze. From my spot at a fourth-storey window I feel as if I’m looking down a very airy waterfall, while the resulting mist fades from view somewhere in the middle distance. It’s all very pretty and poetic, but when I try to take a picture on my phone it turns into a shot of what’s really there—nothing but a bunch of wet trees.

A study in second-hand transactions

I’m waiting in line at my local op shop when a woman walks in and pushes her way to the register. She is wearing a track suit and a purple silk scarf and an irate expression, and demands to exchange a black bag she recently purchased.

The grandma-type behind the counter rolls her eyes and makes the necessary arrangements. Meanwhile the woman wanders further into the store and returns with a fluffy handmade toy and a hat. “Be careful with this,” she warns, “it might fall apart if you pull too hard. Where’s Ted? I want Ted to serve me!”

A man (Ted?) turns at his name. The woman says earnestly, “I had to buy a new bag because I got toothpaste all over it. So I bought this one, but now I’m changing it for something else.” Ted smiles benevolently at her. She flushes.

They bag the items; it turns out she has a dollar credit after the exchange is complete. “I have another dollar,” the woman announces, “I can buy something else now for two dollars. You can’t buy a lot with a dollar these days.”

Everyone else in line is making eye contact and smiling awkwardly at each other. Random points of human connection! We bond over someone else’s idiosyncracies.

When the woman returns she’s holding a bright pink handbag. “I want this instead,” she says. “It’s six dollars like the other bag so it all works out. Ted? Ted, you need to serve me…”

The grandma-type quickly serves me while the counter’s clear. “That’s the second time she’s done that today,” she grumbles. “Comes in every week, changing her mind this and that, she’s such a nuisance.”

“I guess it makes your day more interesting,” I say, then feel a sense of disquiet. What if this woman only wants an excuse to talk to someone? Pacing the aisles and making a fuss is her way of human interaction. Instead of sympathy we derive amusement: her loneliness is our entertainment. It almost feels like schadenfreude.

olfactory girl

If fortune blew ill and stripped me of my sight and my hearing, I would not complain as long as I still had my sense of smell. I would use my memory bank of scents and places to identify where I am. Tea leaves and shoe polish: standing by my bedroom door. Evergreen shrubbery so sharp I sneeze: midnight on the driveway, waiting for moonflowers to bloom. Cigarette smoke and asphalt means the warm press of rain on Emma’s front porch. Glebe is patchouli and Stanmore is house paint and Chinatown smells like a festival. The city centre is wafting decay, urine puddles and unwashed feet and—tucked away like a secret—the ripe note of the fish markets. I have Sydney all mapped out and I could pace its streets and know where I am by the smell and they are all the wrong smells, these are the wrong streets.

A term I learnt last year was proprioception: knowing where you are in the world, where your body stops and everything else begins. And a related term: displacement. I know where I am and I know where things begin. A passing breeze bears your perfume, my insides twist and my mind goes wandering. I could leave this sinking city and walk the highways (dried grass and exhaust fumes) until I reach yours. The smells of Canberra would not distract me: I’d find you and I’d lean in close and take a deep breath, and my heart would say welcome home. I would give up everything just for that moment.

"I'm sure I've got a novel in me"

You’re never going to get it out if you keep finding reasons why you can’t write it.

• Uni - two days a week
• Study - two days a week
• Work - three days a week
• Internship - one day a week
• Hackwork - two days a week
• Peopletime (all) + gigs - three days a week

According to this schedule I’m putting 13 days of work into the time it takes a physical week to play out. I could say to myself “Oh this is too much, I’ll get around to it when I’m less busy” and then the holidays will arrive and you will find something else to distract you, you will never get around to it. This is why you should start right now. Pull yourself together, find your balance, learn the tricks to save time and take every opportunity given to you. I may not sleep this semester, I may have half an hour each week in which to write, but I’m damn well going to use it.

At some point this internet friend turned to me and said “please don’t tell anyone about this.” I promised not to tell, but I cannot remember what it was I promised not to tell. This may have had to do with my time in the bar soon afterwards. I am pretty sure it was not about perving up Natalie Portman’s costume dress, but if it is and he finds out about my recount, I am not sure we will be internet friends anymore, or real life friends for that matter. I am maybe not a good friend.

Something else that is not a good friend: bars. One long drink this summer afternoon and I feel sleepy, I wish Kate were here so I can lie in her lap and feel safe. Because she is in my thoughts and because the conversation is taking an appropriately musical turn, I mention her and her handy way with tour promoters. “You should marry her,” someone says, and “If only it were legal,” I say, and then I do not want to think anymore because it took forever to get to this point and I will leave her soon and I do not want to lose this.

Internet people are more interesting than the ones I know in real life. The one I meet today happens to also attend my uni. I fidget with greenery and it is a rude habit but that is okay, he drinks so much coffee his curls constantly shake. “I once saw up Natalie Portman’s dress,” he says. What? Work experience on the Star Wars sets at fifteen, it seems: he hid under the stairs where she stood, she wore white knickers that plainly weren’t designed for zero gravity situations. Okay. He does not have crushes apart from Natalie Portman: no girl will ever compare to the vaginal crease (!) he witnessed that day for purely masturbatory purposes. He prefers girls with brains and brown hair (Portman is a Harvard graduate; he once used his student login to scour online journals for her work on frontal lobe psychology, where it resides in pdf form on his hard drive). I tell him there are studies that show your mother’s eye colour will dictate the eye colour of the women a man will find attractive. He solemnly promises to revisit his ex-girlfriends and verify this claim, in fact he is about to meet one that very afternoon. It all feels like a scenario from High Fidelity. I wait for him to start talking about the perfect construction of a mixtape, and for someone to fall out of love.

I ate blueberries during my internship, because they cost four dollars for a double handful and because they rate low on the glycaemic index scale and because it was fruit, all signs of a sensible food choice. They burst like miniature water balloons. They held a gritty aftertaste. Proper office workers hid chocolate in their carrel desks, but I felt very adult with my healthy snack and so I smiled a lot and talked a lot and laughed as I worked through reams of data entry. I did not know why everyone looked strangely at me until the end of the day, when I realised the blueberries had stained my teeth and my lips a deep shade of indigo. I looked like a child who tore apart showbags for the Sam Blue gumballs. I looked like Violet Beauregarde, too engrossed in an ideal to take proper heed (growing pains). I did not look like a grown up. I probably never will look like a grown up, so long as I take these signs of adulthood and completely misinterpret them. Next week I will eat chocolate.

Everyone I know is conducting some form of a long-distance relationship. My girlfriend lives in another city. Your girlfriend lives in another country. Your best friend is crusading her way through the African interior. The girl you secretly love will leave these shores. The boy who hurt you in Greenwich Mean Time won’t stop now that he’s keeping Eastern Standard Time again. The scars your father left stretch twenty years back and from halfway around the world. distance equals speed multiplied by time has not erased that.

Scraping the inside of your heart: that’s what this focussed kind of loneliness feels like.

a third-party tumblrsite idea

A white page with giant helvetica text and a formbox: it says “PUT YR TUMBLR NAME HERE” and then you press “BAM” and it returns with a tag cloud of all the people you follow, the larger the name the more you’ve reblogged them. Then another formbox shows up: it says “NOW PUT YR FRIEND’S TUMBLR NAME HERE” and then you press “BAM” and it returns with another tag cloud of the people they follow. Here’s the exciting thing: thanks to the power of mysterious coding your tag clouds merge like a venn diagram so you can see which users you have in common, and also the content/people whose tumblrs will get high coverage, all in one fell swoop! It’s a pre-emptive tool to screen out/not follow the users who reblog the stuff you can’t stand.

Someone get on this please. The site doesn’t need to be practical, it just has to use helvetica to keep the design kids happy.

the way we sleep with strangers

Riding on vehicles built for long journeys (viz. planes and bus coaches) you will notice how the cramped conditions force those who try to nap into awkward contortions: shoulders hunched, feet splayed, heads lolling to one side or the other. Sometimes there are happy moments where two strangers, dozing, tilt their heads towards each other and with their curved bodies form the backbone of an elongated heart. Inevitably they will bang their heads against each other and, startled, apologise for the accidental intimacy. It’s the most distant kind of love there is.

prufrock got nothin' on me.

Today (yesterday) I sent you a message that simply read

Soup weather

From there the conversation wandered down the well-worn path that old friends fall into, like the grooves of a favourite record. Except it’s more than that; beyond the grocery list of topics (bad food, prop 8, yenta relations) runs a thread of tension that frays in my weaker moments. Things I really wanted to say to you: my hands are cold without your hands, hot chocolate from San Churro (‘for lovers’) was a mistake, how are we to continue like thislike this. All this I wanted you to know in the space of two words.

Trawling round wet empty streets with a wet empty head, I’m left with abstract terms that are too wide too big and say too little, even Simon Armitage cannot cut through it

carry your heart like an egg on a spoon, be fleet through the concourse, primed for that point in time when the world goes bust

How does that convey the hidden excitement, long stretch of silence, waitingwaiting brief flurries of activity and the sink back into daily troughs that my life turned into the moment you said yes? The tyranny of distance is not just the isolation, it’s that in your absence I turn to the universal gestures of loneliness

I want to curl up in bed with you I want you to be perfect I want my dreams to come true we could write our own endings I want you to complete me

Everything that sleets through lonely hearts online around the world. Like them. It’s too easy to build an imprecise memory to hold on to. But vague abstracts will never better the way you speak six languages and know music facts from fifteen years ago and put up with my spack attacks and habit of talking to strangers on public transport. If you save me, you’re only saving me from crack addicts in wheelchairs or from old white men with yellow fever. You’re probably more Asian than I am and you don’t mind my non sequiturs or if I sing wildly off-key in the middle of the street. I forget to eat lunch now because you’re never hungry during the day so instead we hide in bookstores and hunt down the resident cats.

If you laugh at my love for children’s television programmes and manic teapot-buying and the weird way I sneeze, it’s okay because I get to laugh at your emo band love and your hair angst and your constant nosebleeds, and then I’ll hand you a tissue and that’s how you know I mean it. When we kiss my hair ends up in your mouth and when you rest your hand at the small of my back I sometimes forget to breathe. Real things. Little things that paper the inside of my ribcage so thickly if ever ee cummings said to me hey I’d like you to put this into practice

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;

Would you mind? I’d say sure, there’s not much room in here but if we press them up close we’ll fit tight and beat in time, so slow. If I could fold up the distance between us I would, I’d step out my house and land on your doorstep and say hi to your cat with spindly legs and take your hand and curl up to you, tuck your knees and elbows in, and breathe.

But I can’t do that, not really, and anyway we are (you are) too sensible to fly into wicked flights of fancy, it’s what I like about you. You are not perfect, but neither am I, and I can’t think of anything better than that. We won’t complete each other but we might grow together, we don’t know what we’re doing but it won’t stop us from trying. And I’ll still get cranky when you’re not here to tell me to grow up, I’ll keep booking bus rides to see you, even if it’s at six-monthly intervals and the thought of not having this gut-wrenches more than the inconvenience. It’s the only thing I can do. So, shh.

In which I gently riff on This Recording's format

but not really. Mostly I want to point out a trend that hasn’t flown under the radar so much as it’s faded into the foreground of inevitability: Asian couples wearing matching shirts!

According to the internets, Korean/Japanese/Chinese/lots of city centres have sprouted masses of colour-coordinated pairs engaged in a silent battle to see who can declare their love the loudest. Kind of like bull pigeons fluffing up their feathers to shimmy up the ladybirds, except it seems the wimmin are takin’ charge.

Apparently it’s not just what you wear, but how and why you wear it:

A Korean once told me that it’s a test from the girl in the relationship. If the guy doesn’t wear it then that means he doesn’t love her. SO the poor guy is trapped into wearing something he probably does not want to wear. I heard another story once where a couple was witnessed at an airport and a woman broke into hysterics because the man was not sitting on the right side of her so their t-shirts could make sense.

For some observers, this phenomenon can be disconcerting:

Nothing screams, “We’re pathetic!” to me more than matching outfits. One couple set could have used a proof reader too. They had matching shirts varied by gender that said, “He (She) loves the Cock”. If only I had a picture! What a terrible outfit, particularly for the man, “loving Cock”.

What a terrible insinuation, perhaps they knew exactly what the shirt said and were wearing it to mess with your mind. Korea’s youth: subverting heteronormative processes one underestimation at a time.

But I digress. Haters gonna hate but this trend isn’t going away. ‘Frankfurt style adviser Andreas Rose’ says that couples do this to identify with each other, to present themselves as a unit and to reinforce their togetherness visually. He also says, very seriously, “Outside observers generally judge couples in matching clothes negatively and consider them to be silly and ridiculous.”

YOUR FACE is silly and ridiculous. Posh’n’Becks gonna whup yo ass.

Arlene provides some revealing insight into the Matching Couple’s thought process:

Me and my boyfriend (long back) does that too. we may not wear the same design but of same color. And if not at least our clothes match. Like before going to churhc, we plan our clothes the night before and we agree on what to wear.

(I wonder if he’s really okay with that.)

Seeing how Australia is ringed on all sides with Asian countries this trend was bound to trickle down to us backwater bohemians. Thanks to the tireless efforts of international Business/Accounting students, it has! Local stockists aren’t spruiking out the matching shirts just yet, but don’t underestimate the ingenuity of couples (young girls) in love. I see you ladies with your university gym tees dragging your young men about, and I see his matching Bathing Ape shirts as well. How you manage to co-ordinate that precise shade of columbia blue I have no idea, that’s some serious skills I ought to pick up on

This is the last time I conduct an internet search crawl while drunk, why did no one stop me from posting the findings

Sometimes the only cure for discontent is to take a daytrip and explore the untidy side of town. Strengthen your ties with local business owners! They’ll offer you zatar pizza for $1.50 and tell you which brands of dolmades to buy. Cheap meals afford an acceptable amount of smug satisfaction, especially when it’s as large and round as a bicycle wheel. I should know, I measured it against the one a nearby man held while waiting for a train to arrive. He smirked at the zatar smears on my knees, or maybe because I fed the birds (sparrows hammering at crusts: worth the dollar fifty). Whatever mister, you can’t talk, what good is that helmet and wheel to you when you have to catch public transport like the rest of us.