At the risk of getting boring before I’ve even started to get interesting, I had the best dinner ever tonight: homemade roasted vegetable pizza. The kind that grow in the ground I mean; I haven’t taken to eating retarded people, at least not on a regular basis.

But it was so great! While the veggies were roasting, I fingerpainted the tomato paste onto my pita bread. Talk about your fulfilling meals! And then, when it was finally ready, oh man! It was like there was a vegetable party in my mouth, and all the vegetables were invited, and no one told them that the Vegetable Charles Manson would be coming too. I almost felt like a real chef or something, especially in the bit where I have no money and a serious caffeine problem. Which would be everyday life, I guess.

Also today, I tried to make Deirdre be a beat poet for my amusement. It could have been so grand; I even started clicking my fingers and humming for her, and when she complained about her lack of beret I suggested she put a plastic bag over her head. Improvisation, yeah! Now that I think about it, it might also have worked better if I’d given her an actual poem to read, rather than just the list of ingredients on the cat food box. The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who indulge in fearless speculation as to the nature of the mysterious-sounding ‘poultry by-product’.

Yes, I know, it’s been too long. I wish I could say that the last nearly-two-weeks have been taken up by the fast life. In fact, I could very well say that; the problem would be that someone who sees me frequently, like my boyfriend or one of my housemates, would come along and read this and post a comment along the lines of “Aimee, the most exciting thing you’ve done recently is stand around in the kitchen making up haikus about the state of the house and Stuart’s perceived personality flaws”. Sadly enough, it’s true. Also: “Stuart is bossy/Sometimes annoyingly so/But he puts out good”. That’s the only one I can remember.

One of the major highlights recently has been finding out through my referral stats that someone found this page while trying to find out why their milkshake doesn’t bring all the boys to the yard. I don’t know who you are, but I hope you found the answer to your question, although I’m sure you didn’t find it here. Perhaps you should let me know, as I am also having problems with my milkshake’s ability to bring the boys (or in my case, boy) to the yard. It is a question I feel we must ask ourselves. Bron reckons it has a lot to do with lactose intolerance. It is certainly a conundrum for our times.

A couple of days ago, Alison was doing her laundry, and discovered that a manky pair of jocks had gotten tangled up with her own clothes. Understandably grossed out, she assumed they belonged to Stuart (the only man-type person who’s ever around our house long enough to take his undies off), and delicately placed them on the clothes horse in the lounge room.

Deirdre pointed them out to me last night, and that’s where the whole mystery started. They are patently not Stuart’s underpants. Quite apart from the fact that they’re the wrong style, size and colour, I would have have seen them before if they were Stu’s. And I can honestly state that I have never seen these underpants before in my life. A quick housemate poll revealed that no one had ever seen them before, nor did anyone have any clue about where they might have come from.

We’re all a little creeped out, which I think is understandable. Apart from Stu, there are no regular male guests at Castle Anthrax, and certainly none who leave their revolting, stretched, ugly-patterned and generally skanky-looking undergarments around. The last guy who lived here moved out about six months ago, and I don’t want to think about his underpants at all in any way (crap, now I’m doing just that). This case begs many questions: how did the underpants get in our laundry? Whose are they? How long have they been skulking around, waiting to be discovered? And do we really want the answers to these questions, anyway?

UPDATE (26/04): The Jocks of Mystery and Suspense (well not really, I just thought the ’suspense’ bit sounded good) are still in the lounge room. Alison, in a moment of interior decoration fervour, has pinned them to the large screen which rests against one of the walls. They serve as an eternal reminder of creepiness, and shall do so until someone gets over their heebie-jeebies enough to take them down, or possibly until the cat dive-bombs them and knocks them to the floor.
Alison and I decided that they have been spat back into this universe from the one where all the socks go, and that they must have spent a fair bit of time there, considering we’ve had this washing machine for some months now. This would mean that they belong to someone who owned the machine before us, most likely a member of Titian’s extended family I think. As yet, there are no plans to reunite them with their owner.
Thank you all for your concern.

Today at the supermarket, I noticed I was attracting admiring glances as I unloaded my basket, which contained nothing but a loaf of super-healthy grainy-style bread and fruit and vegetables. I could see people thinking “my! That young lady certainly has a healthy diet!” Of course, what they didn’t know is that for the past few days, my diet has consisted of rice noodles and chocolate.

Which allows me to segue neatly (neatly in a parallel universe, I mean) into talking about my Easter.

Considering I had a couple of days off, and Stu also had a couple of days off, we (by which I mean, I) decided to head off back to Gippsland and appease my immediate family’s cries of “you never come and visit!”. It went better than I expected. My family is pretty dysfunctional, and I always expect the worst, even though they’re lovely people. I seem to have a complex about them embarrassing me somehow, which isn’t particularly fair to them, especially given that it’s probably a hangover from the days when my hair and fingernails were black to match my SOUL and let’s face it, I was probably far more embarrassing then (to all concerned) than they could ever hope to be.

I think somewhere along the line, I picked up other people’s confusion about the arrangement of my family, and that morphed into shame. See, my mum has been married twice. My sisters were begat (man, I love that word) with her first husband, and I with her second. Which technically makes them my half-sisters, a distinction that has never been important in the family, perhaps partly because it has never influenced how much we stir each other up. So, Mum married once, had two kids, divorced (this is back in the mid-70s, when being a divorced single mother in a small country town wasn’t exactly a bucket of laughs), met the man she’d go on to beget me with some years later, and got married. Then that marriage died too, although they’ve never gotten around to getting divorced, and it’s now more than a decade later. Have you got all that? I’ve tried to explain it to a couple of people at work, but they just look confused. Public library employees are no good at maths.

So, you have a shambolic arrangement with parts of your immediate family not talking to other parts, and sometimes you get to thinking it would be easier to prentend you’re an orphan. Another small potential problem has always been that my parents are what you might call “interesting” people. I used to tell anyone who asked my lineage that I’m “part starving artist and part white trash”. My mother has always been a little on the boho side, and in recent years has adopted that curious blend of old-school religion and New Age spirituality that seems to be common among middle-aged women. People on my mum’s side of the family tend to be artistically brilliant and highly-strung, and are prone to having nervous breakdowns they never recover from and/or dying in abject poverty, their talents undiscovered. My dad is your classic wrong-side-of-the-tracks, working class, bar-brawlin’ boy, forced by his father to leave school at fifteen and undertake an apprenticeship despite his enjoyment of school and academic brilliance. He was raised to hate poofters and uppity women what didn’t know their place, but the message somehow got muddled up and he ended up a proud father of a girl, a feminist, and a gay-rights advocate. As you can probably tell, that side of the family are prone to having children out of wedlock, belting each other around, and gambling away child support funds.

So anyway, to get back on topic, I’ve been known to get a bit stressed about my family at times. Despite the fact that we’ve been together for a few years now, Stu has still only met them all a handful of times. Fortunately, everything went well over Friday and Saturday. I won’t regale you all with endless tales about my niece and nephew (although believe me, I could. Especially since I totally have Myles on my side against his father). It was lovely to see everyone, and to spend time in Gippsland now that it’s started to get fondly fuzzy in my mind rather than nastily real. The biscuits I made in lieu of buying Easter eggs went down well. I made a point of giving everyone extra in case they felt like being generous, but no one offered me so much as a crumb! Bastards!

I think Stu is starting to get more comfortable around my family too, which is nice. It’s sweet watching him try to impress them; to bond with the kids, to chat with my mum, joke with my dad, and not get caught really obviously starting at my breasts. It’s nice that he makes the effort too; there’s a significant reduction in the amount of leering that goes on when my family are around. Saturday afternoon was spent with me reading and various other activities, and Stu and Dad fiddling with my car. I guess given that very few people who are reading this know Stu, let alone my Dad, I can’t really convey the hilarity of this event very well. Believe me, it’s funny. Neither of them are what you would call car men, but they spent a few hours fixing things up and cleaning it, and then took it for a drive to make sure everything was working as it should. It got to the point where I started to wonder if, should I wander out to the garage for one of my periodic inspections, whether I would find my modest little Hyundai sedan sporting some fully sick mag wheels.

We came home on Saturday because I had to work on Sunday (fortunately just processing returns and shelving, none of that dealing with the public crap). The drive was lovely and went too quickly because we got into some D&Ms that weren’t about porn and boobies (yeah, that happens occasionally). I felt relaxed, happy and refreshed, an effect that has been totally ruined by returning to pressing homework, rent-paying work (I never ceased to be amazed by the number of people who will yell until they’re blue in the face and insult me personally because I have had the gall to inform them they have an eighty cent fine owing on their card), and the ever present Question of Our Ages: Holy shit what the fuck am I going to do with my life once I finish Uni?

Things you should never have to explain to your beloved:

“I wasn’t being epileptic, I was being sexy.”

Apparently, my milkshake does not bring all the boys to the yard.

The folks over at Going Down Swinging, one of the awesome-est annual anthologies around (which has been going strong since Cocky was an egg and before your correspondent’s parents had even met) are seeking your submissions of short fiction, poetry, comics and spoken word from now until the end of June. Going Down Swinging is a fantastic, eclectic read and a spiffy feather for any writer to have in their cap. Plus, it’s the only literary anthology that cares enough to remind its potential contributors of the importance of a healthy diet.

Check out the submission guidelines here.

I need some suggestions for a costume I could wear to a Halloween in May party I’ll be going to. Preferably suggestions for costumes that would necessitate the wearing of a black leather corset. I bought the damn thing nearly two years ago and I think I’ve worn it once, even though I absolutely adore it and even though at said party it resulted in people following me around from a safe distance (I would also say it got me laid, but I think that has less to do with the power of the corset than the fact that Stuart is a big dirty man-whore). Unfortunately, my life just doesn’t seem to have many occasions where I could feasibly wear it. This may not have been the case once, but I’m a boring lass these days.

Of course, I could make the effort to find reasons and occasions to wear the corset. I could wear it to Uni and prevent myself from slouching in my seat during boring lectures. I could wear it to work for interesting results/reactions and a greater sense of authoritarianism (’Naughty boy! Bring your books back on time!’ ‘Yes, Mistress.’). I could wear it around the house, where it would look absolutely stunning combined with my baggy old trackies and fluffy blue slippers.

So, yeah. Stuart’s sister is throwing a party and while I doubt we’ll be there long (what with him muttering darkly about escaping to my house after putting in a brief appearance), I’d still like to make an effort. And any effort that potentially involves me trotting around in Old Blacky is worth making, I feel. Even if it is at my boyfriend’s parents’ house. Which sounds really rather wrong.

Titian moved out of our house on the weekend. Her stay was only ever temporary anyway, while her bungalow at her parents’ house got rebuilt after she “accidentally” burned it down (it’s amazing what people will do for the chance to live with us). I’m really sad she’s gone, as she was great fun to live with and to accidentally traumatise (plus, the look on her face each time one of us said something that would scar her indeliably was just so cute!). Also, it meant I had to give back her comics. Seriously, though, she was great to live with, and we’ll miss her a lot.

In the meantime, Deirdre’s sister Alison, who is also very good people, has moved into Titian’s old room. Unfortunately, I don’t think she’s as easily corruptible as Titian (having lived with Deirdre for a good chunk of her life already), but I guess we can only try.

In other ‘my weekend’ news (because really, nothing interesting has happened so far this week unless you happen to find detailed accounts of me skulking in the library at Uni until all hours of the night titillating), Stuart and I caught up with Ms Liah and her boy on Saturday night, and we went to see Sista She’s Comedy Fest act. They were really good; their songs were fantastic, their performances excellent. I guess my only criticism is that at times their banter seemed a little forced, and they didn’t always seem to engage the audience. My only real gripe is that they weren’t selling any CDs, grrr. But it was great to see them after singing along to ‘What R Yooze Girlz Doin?’ for so long.
On Sunday night, we hung out together again, for Liah’s birthday. She decided to make it a gangland-themed night, so we had dinner at the restaurant in Carlton where that guy was assassinated recently, and then the plan was to go back to Liah’s and watch The Godfather. Best sick birthday celebration idea ever!
I had to pass on the movie, what with having a meeting with a tutor the next day for an essay I was supposed to have started. I had a really good time at dinner though. I didn’t know many of Liah’s friends who were there, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem at all. Madonna was wrong: music doesn’t bring the people together, toilet humour does.

Whilst using one of the catalogues in the library at Uni today, I overheard a cnversation going on between two girls sharing the terminal next to me. They were trying to look something up and by the sounds of things weren’t having too much luck. I’m guessing they were first-years by their apparent confusion about using the catalogue, and also what little I was able to garner from their conversation about what their assignment was about. Also, I’ve noticed that it’s mostly just first years who tend to do everything in groups; I think this stems from the widely-held high school paranoia that if you’re seen without friends around you, people are going to assume you don’t have any friends, and it’s terrible to have complete strangers think bad things about you. Usually by second year, people have realised that no one’s really paying any attention to them, they’ve stopped worrying about looking like they don’t have any friends, and they’ve stopped giving a fuck. If they’re anything like me, they’ve even graduated to being consciously antisocial.

‘I know “ecstasy” has some other meaning besides, like, drugs,’ the blonde one said, biting her lip. ‘I’m pretty sure. I just can’t remember what it is.’
Her shorter, dark-haired friend typed something, then shook her head in annoyance. ‘I’m just not getting anything.’
‘That’s stuuuuupid,’ whined the blonde. ‘How are we supposed to write an essay on something if there’s no resources for it? That’s not fair!’

This is funny until you realise that heaps of school-leavers missed out on getting into Uni this year.

Sad news for fans of good dirty Australian rock’n'roll as stalwarts Warped call it a day.

I’ve only seen Warped live once, at a PBS benefit. They put on a fantastic, high-energy performance, even if bass guitarist Brettthereberock did nearly keep belting Stu in the face with the pointy end of his guitar because we were right up the front and he kept coming right up the front of the stage and we couldn’t really step backwards or dodge because the crowd was packed in tight. Apart from the look of terror periodically crossing Stu’s face at the prospect of losing some teeth, it was a really great night. Warped will be sorely missed (except maybe by Stu’s teeth).

Oh, and don’t laugh at me just because I don’t know what the pointy bit at the end of a bass guitar is called, arseholes. I’m not a musician, I just fellate them in the hopes of improving my sense of self-worth.