The A-side of my soundtrack is the Mountain Goats. Only the Mountain Goats. Because I love them. Very much. And I am sort of...enamoured of John Darnielle.
You would be too, if only you would listen to my A-side.
The first time I ever heard Wild Sage was in the basement of a goth club in Stockholm. It sort of..changed my life. Start out with the Sunset Tree. And then move on to Tallahassee. You can thank me later.
Six years ago, the thought of spending another six years you know..learning and shit...seemed like a bit too much. It didn't really seem like it was going to happen.
But then leaves fall, skies change.
You lose friends, you make friends. You keep friends.
You expand your horizons little, and you contract them a little. You find out what good feels like, and then you find out what bad feels like.
You learn things, and depending on their importance, you forget things.
And then suddenly, while all this other stuff was going on, another six years passes.
And one last week becomes one last day. And then well..leaves fall, and skies change, and then you start over again.
NB. I don't remember my face being so chubbers, but selective memory can do wonders. And I was being deep, so shut up about my chubby face.
Sometimes when I am walking, and I am listening to a really good song, I feel like I am in a movie, listening to the soundtrack of my own life. It makes me feel like skipping. And singing along. Unless it's like, a really sad depressing song. Not so much skipping then.
I hope this song will be in my soundtrack. And at the rate I've been snarfing down junk food in the last three days, the visual might not be too far off either...
Peeps, holy jesus, this will all be over in 5 days and I cannot wait. Last night was bad, with a capital B A D. I cried in the car. I cried on the phone. I cried in the shower. I ate a whole pizza and then I cried because I ate a whole pizza. Etc. I was banned from ever doing a PhD because of all the crying.
Play this while you read the rest. It's a good song. I like it. It makes me feel happy.
Today is better, because it will all be over in 5 days and I ate a whole pizza last night. Today I am going to focus on comments and corrections....
And I'm going to eat brain food...
And I have visine, so even if I do cry today, no one will know.
And I'm not even going to think about the big fuck-off crack my beautiful computer has in his screen. Not even thinking about it.
I'll freely admit at this point that I am procrastinating. I got corrections back from my supervisor. Lots of them. He writes them in pencil; perhaps it stings less than red pen.
Can you believe that some bastard guys made fun of my ghetto diagrams when I did my final seminar?! But when I was going through the slides with one of my examiners, he was all like, "Oh that's a nice image," and I was like, "Yeah, those bastard guys made fun of my ghetto MS Paint skills." And he was all impressed that I made them myself. Take that bastard guys.
And my mum says my drawings are special, so take that even more! Huzzah!
You know guys, I’ve been thinking for a while that being a real estate agent in Sydney is possible the cushiest job ever.
Last week I was in the bathroom and I noticed water dripping from the ceiling. I thought it was condensation (my flat mate is liberal with the splashing), but then I put a cup underneath, and the cup filled up. So I guess it wasn’t condensation.
I called our agent.
Ellie: “Hi agent, it’s your tenant from number 2. You know, I live across the hall from you. You told me we’d have to mop up the water when the house flooded earlier this year. Yup, that 960 litres of water you wanted us to mop up. Anyway, there is water leaking through the ceiling in the bathroom next to an electrical fixture, wasn’t really sure what to do.”
Agent: “Who? What? Water? Upstairs? You’ll have to call the agent.”
Ellie: “Um.. you don’t happen to know who that is do you?”
Agent: “Yeah, it’s Generic Name.”
Ellie: (pause) “So is that the agent’s name, or like..the name of the person…?”
Agent: “It’s both. He’s just down the road. Near the post office. You’ll have to talk him.”
So I went for a walk. I walked down to the post office. Actually I walked past the post office. I walked up both sides of the street. I got someone to check the address. There was only PO box. I got hold of the guy’s phone number.
Ellie: “Hi, I live in number 2, below your tenants. You know, the ones who play the piano for 3 hours every day. She’s quite good at Mozart, I’ll give her that, but here’s the thing…there is water leaking through the roof in our bathroom.”
Other Agent: “Water? What? Who? Where? Water? Which bathroom? Like..the roof? Is it coming through the roof? Which unit?”
Ellie: “Yup. Like I just said, I’m in unit 2, it’s coming from unit 4. The main bathroom. Next to an electrical fitting.”
Other Agent: (pause) “...How much water?”
Needless to say, 5 days later, the water is still dripping.
An earlier post reminded me of something that had been deep in my memory banks.
On Gotland, we found a candy store. It sold raspberry licorice and other yummy things. It sold multicoloured marshmallows, which I do believe were actually tastier than any other marshmallow I've eaten. Ever.
They weren't as sweet, but they were softer. And fluffier. They actually tasted like soft fluffy pastel cartoon clouds, I had Homer-Simpson-in-chocolate-land flashbacks (but marshmallows, not chocolate).
What I would give to be sitting by the Baltic, with the 10pm sunset, eating a Swedish multicoloured marshmallow.
Things look a little different I guess. I am still tweaking and there are some slight problems with those 4 buttons up the top there (they don't work..oops)
Here are some bunnies eating to tide you over until I have time (ie. my thesis guilt complex has lessened and/or I have handed in my completed thesis and/or actually finished my discussion) to continue twinkering. That's a cross between tinkering and tweaking, in case you didn't know.
I think I made it worse. I have to go and write my thesis now. I'm up to 50 pages. 12,000 something words. My neck hurts but my guilty procrastinatory conscience hurts more.
It's too late at night to be tinkering. But you see, this blog template has been raising my shackles. It's just too. narrow. So I changed it... but now things look a little bit off. And my thesis guilt means that I don't right spending a few hours playing fixities. Actually, I'm thinking, and have been for some time, that it might be time to move into custom-template land. So many pretty colours and fonts.
So please, for now don't mind the strangeness, just let it wash over you. It's me, after all.
Last night I had a bit of an episode. I had been struggling all day with Word formatting, which apparently has a mind of its own. Finally, a heady combination of desperation, hayfever tablets, and red wine got to me. Like...there were tears. Lots of them. And snot, a lotta snot. Everywhere.
Word keeps crashing. Excel keeps crashing. Captions keep turning into text boxes. I simply Cannot Take It Any Longer.
My thesis is standing at about 11,000 words, 42 pages, 1579 lines. When it is all over, I hope you'll still be around. I even have a list of things to write about, so I'll be sad if I come back and my only 2 readers have gone. Hello Mum, hello Rob. Please stick around and check back in after 12pm October 29.
Otherwise I'll be as sad and dejected as this lonely pair of shoes....
...and things are shit enough right now without me feeling like an old shoe.
I used to have my stuff in communal parts of the kitchen but I stopped doing that when I noticed 1 day later that my non-stick pans had been violated with forks, my plastic rice paddle (plastic you know..so it doesn't DAMAGE THE NON-STICK RICE POT) was being used to stir hot yellow things, and mysteriously all my knives and forks are disappearing. Which is ironic when you consider the damage they have done to my rice pot.
I was pretty annoyed when I realised I was being charged for an equal share of my flatmate's STD phonecalls. I was pretty annoyed when my toilet paper all got used up because we had run out of paper towel and nobody else uses plates. I was pretty annoyed when my laundry detergent disappeared. I was pretty annoyed when I realised all these things in light of the fact that I get charged "$2.50 rent tax" every month because my flatmate never worked out how to use direct debit, and now he is charging me for phonecalls when the phone belongs to me and I earn approximately $55,000 AUD less than he does per annum. I was pretty annoyed when I realised that he smokes inside and leaves his dirty stinking cancer laden ashtray filth in the kitchen garbage.
But now I am really annoyed because I went into the kitchen, and a pizza has been cooked on my only oven tray. The oven tray that I had moved into my cupboard because when it was in the other cupboard people kept using it and putting it back with cheese still cooked on to it.
I am really. absolutely. fuming. now. Especially because I realised when I was looking in my cupboard just now that ALL MY SOY SAUCE IS GONE. Dirty fucking thieves. When you earn 80 grand a year it is JUST NOT COOL TO STEAL FOOD FROM OTHER PEOPLE.
In search of the sublime and the ridiculous. Mostly the ridiculous. Lover of bunnies and dogs. All of the dogs. And all of the food, too (but not food for dogs or bunnies).
