A post. A title. A girl with no appellatory imagination. This is their story. Or not.

I have no real justification for this post, but that I hope that it will turn out to be of rather higher quality than they have been, of late. [For really decent stuff, try the archives for April-ish, before the exams trampled all over my ramblings] The reason for this is appallingly tragic: I was going to give the address to some people, and it occurred to me that the August offerings will impress no-one.

Perhaps it is tragic that I would seek to impress my friends and aquaintance with this blather, but admitting that you have a problem is the first (and in my case only) step on the road to recovery. I'm taking the scenic route on this long trip, and plan to stop to change drivers and have lunch at Relapse, and possibly, if we're making good time, to take a pleasant little detour via Blatant Egoism mid-afternoon. I hear there's a delightful little cafe there that does a rather good macaroon. And good macaroons are so hard to find these days. Although not as difficult as a good creme brulee. Why, why I ask you, would anyone want to mess with that winning recipe? "White chocolate creme brulee"? What are they thinking? That makes it much too heavy.

In other news, I seem to have deleted the email addresses of my Latin class, and therfore can't invite them to my birthday party, unless I ask them all for their addresses. This is distressing, inasmuch as instead of sendiong a cool email casually and impersonally asking them if they'd like to drop by, I have to make something of a commotion of it. Worse, I can't just not invite them, because I mentioned it already, and said that I would send invites out.

Of course, this may itself have been an error, I'm really quite appallingly bad at juggling many social groups at once. I have enough trouble with school friends and uni friends in the same house, since y'all gravitate to different rooms.
With a slightly uncomfortable Latin class whom I don't really know that well (but would like to, they seem cool) thrown in, I feel a social disaster coming on. I guess it can't be worse than that time my cousin came to Hellena's party and then dated Mill for a month, could it? Not that that was bad per se, you understand, only deeply wierd. Can barely understand how people can bring boyfriends and similar to family reunions. Never seemed strange to me until I imagined myself in the introductory role. Would change entire interraction in strange and foreign way.

Perhaps next year, I ought to just turn 22, and skip the whole '21st party' issue? If I do that, though, I'm bound to regret it at 29. A terrible thing to be 30 while you were still in your 20s, I suspect.

Anyway, whilst I'd love to bore and confuse you further, I can see you checking your watch, (and you thought you were being so subtle, good grief, it's a little tactless, you know) and it's nearly midnight, which is usually not an issue, but I have to get up before 7, and I didn't get to bed last night until 3 ish. Plus I just had to do my nasty Ciceronian Latin translation, so perhaps we'd best call it a night. Sleep well, I'll see you soon, probably Saturday, I suppose.

Yay! Now I'm 20! Gosh.

Yay for birthdays and presents and haircuts and parties and suchlike!

Have gained a number of cool presents, not least a fondue fountain, any number of cool earrings,a staggering amount of chocolate, and a really cool pen and leatherbound book and all sorts of cool stuff.

Also, went to Glebe markets and bought shininess and a hat. Have never owned a hat which suited me before, is a great leap forward. Perhaps is because of slightly different hair? Anyway, yay!

Will post Kathryn 21st pics as soon as am able (ie, aftewr have taken some pics/gone to party).

Anyway, have a nice day, and if you're feeling sick/are Tim, I hope you get better and feel less like death warmed up shortly.

Hugs for all! *hug*

"Now she''ll be really, surprised by that ironing board cover..."

This may come as a surprise to you (ha!) but Friday is my birthday. The reason that this probably isn't a surprise to you is that I do tend rather to harp on about such things, no doubt to the considerable eventual annual chagrin of my friends, family, acquaintance, and people unfortunate enough to be on the same bus as me in August.

This is fine, looking forward to things is often half the fun of them. The problem is, looking forward to things these days (read: after about my 7th birthday) does tend to end up being more than half the fun of them. You build it up in tiny increments, and before you know it, it's here, and really pretty much like any other day. Which is highly disappointing, and leads to the "post-birthday blues", a relation of the "post-christmas blues" that wreaks the world in late December, early January.

The real problem with this is that I know this. I can see it coming, looming and ominous, like a giant beanbag full of dread, sitting grumpily and amorphously in the middle of my weekend. It's ridiculous, like it doesn't even take me seriously as an oponent anymore. Back in the day, it used to lurk in the dark alley of the post-birthday week, ready to cosh me as I passed with its halfbrick-in-a-sock of letdownness, but since it knows there's nothing I can do about it anymore, it doesn't even have the decency to bother to pretend to hide. It just lurks, smirks, and deliberately irks.

Worse yet, it now flows forward past the beginning of the birthday, like some grotesquely obese person taking up an entire train seat, ruining the effect even of the enjoyment of looking forward to the birthday, like a blog post with too many similes in it.

The net effect of this is that I feel terribly unstable, oscillating between the "yay, birthday!" state, and a state of diffusely frustrated grumpiness.

This latter, I find, is always exacerbated beyond belief by the question "What do you want for your birthday?". There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this question, and I have myself been guilty of asking people. The problem is, some people know what they want, and some people hate surprises, and for such people, this question is perfect. For me, however, who has no idea what she wants, and if she did, would hate to tell you, because then there'd be no surprise, it just opens a yawning gulf of indecision.

The thing is, surprises are great. They really are. Not always, you understand, I do hate bad surprises, and I've often felt that a surprise birthday party would be a harzardous thing: someimes you look forward to going home and getting some sleep, maybe reading that new book you haven't had a chance to open, that sort of thing. I can see how, on such an evening, coming home to a house full of people in the early stages of wearing off their sobriety, drunk on a heady mix of alcohol from your liquor cabinet and their success in conspiring against you, going on about how often they thought you were on to them, how they're lucky that you're so silly and unobservant that you didn't notice their plotting, and snickering about you behind your back.... (see how the paranoia of the tired person can spiral out of control?)... one might perhaps not appreciate a surprise party.

Conversely, surprises are really a must in presents. My sisters, for instance, have for as long as I can remember begun saying "I've bought your birthday present" well before my actual birthday. Which, I feel, can really leach the mystery out of the whole thing. Is it worse, though, when someone, 2 days before your birthday says "what do you want? I'm not sure what to get you, and I haven't got anything yet."? I think so. It rather implies a lack of thought and effort. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with, for instance, a CD voucher, that staple of damn-it-what-does-that-person-want-? present buying.
The ultimate crime though, is following this with "I was thinking maybe..." and then listing present possibilities. Stab the surprise in the neck, why don't you? Now none of those things will be as nice as they would have been, unanticipated. And, if you get something else after all, the person will be disappointed, because they'd been hoping for one of those things which you lead them to believe you were getting.

Aaaargh.

And don't think that going out together to a shop and getting somethng is better. Then there's absolutely no mystery, and no wrapping paper, either. You know how much it cost to buy, and let's face it, either it's embarrassingly expensive, or you could really have afforded it yourself. So why don't I just go shopping by myself for the hell of it? Then I wouldn't be restricted to just the genre of present you were thinking and could buy whatever I wanted. I can see that it's very thoughtful and considerate and you'll-get-exactly-what-you-want-y, but really it's just a step down from voucher.

Furthermore, in my experience, much of the charm of presents is that they're often things you wouldn't buy for yourself,or things that you'd look at in the shop and be indecisive about, or things that simply wouldn't occur to you to shop for, but which, when you own it, becomes rapidly indespensible, which is especially the case with some handbags. (Kathyrn gave me one one which was great, but subsequently broke, which was completely tragic.)
I tend to be bit indecisive when shopping, (although I do believe in erring on the side of caution, and when-in-doubt-buying), so surely this would just load that indecision with weight and stress?

Gaah... I don't know. It's all so complicated.

On a lighter note, here is my favorite picture in the world:



And here is everybody's favourite stick figure, Henry:

Another post! 3rd in 24 hours! Good grief, essays must have started...

So, I have nothing interesting to impart here, but don't want that last, irrationally grumpy, post to be the top post.
Therefore, in the spirit of such things, I give you: pictures!
My sster has recently joined the Young Liberals:so here is an artist's impression of what she might look like in 10 years:


Here is a dodgy picture of me wearing my sunglasses which I keep meaning to get repaired:



Here are Cat and Hellena and Pun:



Here is Tim, whom my school friends have mostly not seen:



Here is a picture of a mouth:



Here are Sam and Bec:



Here is a faery:



Here is my sister on a swing: (if you want a copy of any of these, let me know also what sort of size you'd like)




Here is a skelington in thought:


Here is a sig that was made for me by a friend on an internet forum I used to hang out at;


And last of all, here is my current desktop wallpaper, which Is so busy that I can't find any icons, and have to search the screen if I want to open a program, but which I nonetheless rather like, having compiled it of internet avatars only yesterday:



Have a nice day. :)

Feeling thwarted (isn't that a great word?)

Today, I really wanted to go the Glebe markets, there's a pair of earing and a hair dealy that I was after, and I have a terrible suspicion that they'll be gone by next week. But I promised that I wouldn't unless I'd written 1000 words of my essay, and it's not even really started (disaster).

But this afternoon, we went breifly to Broadway. Aims: to buy a pair of stockings that I've been wanting, to buy a lipstick/gloss, to try on those shoes that I wanted. Also, try and get Catie to buy that dress she wants, and to get some Coke.

So we went to Kmart, and we search high and low, and they didn't have any stockings even remotely like the ones I wanted.

And then they'd sold out of all the lipsticks of the kind I wanted except for the really orangey ones.

And the shoes tured out to be not that nice, certainly not as nice as I'd remembered, and they were uncomfortable.

And then my shoes gave me blisters.

So we went to Coles, and they'd sold out of regular flavoured Coke in all bottle sizes. How unthinkably awful. They were restacking shelves, but only in Lime flavour. Ew.

We went to BiLo, and they had Coke, but it cost nearly twice as much as at Coles. (What's with that?).

This all makes me feel grumpy. I would cheerfully have sacrificed either the shoes or the stockings or the lipstick, but all three is entirely excessive. All that I've acheived this afternoon is to go out and not write my essay, and I have nothing whatsoever to show for it. I wish I was young enough to throw a childish and senseless tantrum, and throw things until am brought what I wanted.

And, and, I may not even get to go the Glebe markets next week, becausemy little sister, who has become increasingly grumpy of late, has Tournament of Minds. Whilst this is kind of useful, because it solved my will-I-go-skiing-for-my-birthday-weekend-or-will-I-do-the-good-friend-thing-and-skip-it-to-go-to-Kathryn's-party dilemna, it now means that not only do we definitely not get to go skiing this weekend, which would have been really great, but also, my Saturday is stuffed.

The plan had been that for a birthday present my Dad was going to take me to the markets and give me some of those things that I always see and want but can't justify buying. But instead, Alex has ToM, which means that my parents will go and stand around all day waiting for her team to do their 5 minute skit and display their little bridge. So that's pretty much skewed my day. Once a month my Dad gets a weekend where he's not on call, and when he can go out of a 20 minute range of Penrith, and in the months where someone in the family has a birthday, he takes the weekend closest to that birthday, which becomes a 'birthday weekend'. This, of course sucks for him, but incidentally means that I'll never get to do the market thing, since nextmonth is my other sister's birthday, and as if we'll go in October. Ha.

So basically my birthday present is nullified. Yay.

And I haven't even started my huge essay that I wanted to have done by now. I hate everthing. *kicks wall*

I'm filled with directionless and irrational resentment towards everything. And no-one but Cat has commented on any of my posts recently anyway. So who cares? I don't know why I'm even bothering to post this, either (a) no-one will read it, in which case it's a waste of my time, which I haven't got enough of, or (b) people will read it and tell me that I'm being selfish and of course we'll do it in October/whatever (which we won't, and anyway, by then what I want will be sold) or (c) people will read this but still not comment, so it'll be the best of both worlds, so I feel like I'm writing into a void, and no-one reads it etc. but actually everyone will just be mentally looking reproachfully at me.

hatehatehate.

AND on Thursday I went to an incredibly boring trivia thing for Sutekh, then ended up driving people home to Bondi Junction and Chatswood until ridiculously late, and it turns out that my uni friends went and had dinner together that night at Bec's place, where I've never even been, and I didn't get to go (not that they told me, you understand), while I was driven to such boredom that I folded about 100 paper cups out of bits of paper and won things like tiny plastic glow-in-the-dark zombies.

Then yesterday I didn't get to say hello to people, after I'd said that I would come back and drop in, because we had to make sure we didn't miss [the worst episode ever of] Strictly Dancing, a dull show at the best of times. And so people will be irritated with me, and the people who were like "suuure you 'll come back and say hi, you don't really like us at all" will think that they were right and resent me even more than they already did.

And I'm going to end up writing this essay on Monday evening/night, and then I'll have to get up for a 9am start, which is a tutorial which I have to write a report on, so I cna't be late, and have to be functional, and then I'll have togo to Latin, for which I haven't yet done the exercise due on Monday, and then a psych tutorial, and then I have to be functional/awake enough to give a presentation on my essay and then I have another lecture, and then, after this already big day of uni, I have to go to work for 6 hours or something, and then drive all the way home from Penrith to snatch enough sleep that I can get up for 9 am on Wednesday.

aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....................

Probably, on the whole, a good thing that no-one reads this, I guess. How depressing.
I should really get some work done, I suppose.

And in a blatant steal from Sam's brother Jez's blog...

I bring the new I-have-a-2700-word-essay-due-on-Tuesday time waster....

Google the phrase "[your first name] is" so in my case "Angela is", then post the most interesting results.

-Angela is arrested, and Ken thinks it's time he and Deirdre got married.

-Angela is flawless

-ANGELA is a gem, and it's full of help

-Angela is mentally handicapped, her intellect is that of a ten or eleven year old

-Angela is an angel who's job it is to hunt various beings of evil

-Angela is being framed

-Angela is the attractive but hard-bitten wife of an ageing Mafioso

-Angela is kind and good; Diabola is hateful and wicked.

-Angela is lying in bed like a sack of nothing, so what would she know?

-Angela is often late for school, and sometimes just disappears during class

-Angela is perfectly able to speak [and how...]

-Angela is up bright andearly every morning [HA! ahahhahaha....]

-Angela is terrified. What’s wrong with the world?

-Angela is a "non-notable person"

-Angela is a hunter; one of few angels that have been granted permits to huntHellspawns as part of Heaven's cold war with Hell

-Angela is hypoglycemic, and she mustget her some chocolate.

-Angela is not a person

-Angela is the hapless victim

So there you go.

I missed Butterfingers last week, but still, sometimes ' I <3 Work' -Wierd, eh?

My Dad tells me that I'm letting the side down, having not posted since that thing a week or so, which wasn't, to be honest, all that interesting. (As an aside, if you're after "all that interesting" what on earth are you doing here? Try www.satirewire.com perhaps).

This evening, work was fun. (!) Dad was running pretty late, and had to go out for an operation. So one of our charming patients went out to get some petrol and came back with Smarties for me. Yay! so we were all sitting in the waiting room drinking coffee and herbal tea and discussing how dodgy Love Song Dedications is, and listening to Whitlams CDs. And then we had to reschedule a couple of people to tomorrow because of him having to go to the hospital to do an operation of unknown duration, and one of the patients on the phone told me that I was "an absolute gem, and Dr. P. should definitely know the value of his staff" Which is, as you will gather from the inverted commas, a direct quote. And then we discussed toffee apples for a while.

In other news, it turns out that I've been misfiling the accounting for the last year and half, but I've realised now, and that's the important thing, and spent and instructive hour fixing that little problem. Am unutterably lucky that it was me who realised this, and not one of the other secretaries.

Note to self: investigative accountancy is not your forte. Keep your day job.

(And now to take a moment to say "unutterably" a few more times... unutterably unutterably unutterably unutterably unutterably unutterably . Jeah.)

Also, I did a tut presentation today for abnormal psychology, and yay for Powerpoint for diminishing the workload and increasing the apparent professionalism of such things tenfold. But un-yay for the tutor asking me a bunch of confusing questions afterwards.

Also non-yay for the slight brokenness of my earrings, but equally, yay for my having found the earrings at all, having completely forgotten their existance. Perhaps I need one of those earring board thingies. A greeeaaaat big one, to fit all my ultra-dangly ones.

Also, was in the QVB the other day, and saw a necklace which may or may not be as cool as I now remember it being. Will therefore go and visit it in a few days, before getting seriously stuck into my Ancient history paper (gaaah for 2500 words on subjects I have no knowlege of), the sources for which I efficiently copied and borrowed last week, but the books for which are due back on Friday.

Interesting thought: how would it be if, instead of writing a prizewinnning novel from scratch, I just publish my blog in volume form, under the title 'Serengetti Yaks' or similar?

Did you know that The Whitlams are bringing out a mini-album in October? And a normal one in April? Yay!

And finally: Birthday countdown: B - 10 days
Party is at P- slightly more than a fortnight. The 3rd, people, be there.

Have decided to become a world famous author this week

Have a brilliant plan: will become a highly successful, world acclaimed, prize winning, obscenely wealthy author beloved the world over in manner of J K Rowling and similar. I know it will be great, as I have a great openning sentence, although no idea as to actual content/characters/subject/plot etc.

Here's my first sentence:

"There are no yaks in the Serengeti."

Which is just excellent, I think. Am thinking of having the second sentence being

"Rose wished the same could be said of her kitchen."

Not sure where it's going from there, or why there's a yak there, but I think that there's definite potential there. Will try to work the phrase "eyed her balefully" into the next sentence.

Also, am modern poet of great quality already, check out my new poem, I call it "culture":

Ahem...

"Toasters.
Toasters in the
Darkness."

Deep isn't it?

I tell you, I don't know why I'm not famous already.

Also: a clip of Harry Potter being spoiled for Tom Hanks. Poor guy, just like all those SMH readers. (Stupid SMH)
(watch out, obviously there're SPOILERS)
http://hankspotter.ytmnd.com/