My thesis is handed in. All sixty freakin’ pages and exuberant use of semicolons of it. I can’t quite adjust to not having to work on it anymore. I keep getting spontaneous attacks of the guilts, thinking I should be doing something more productive than lounging around on the couch drinking beer and catching up on my brain candy reading. But it’s over! Ha!

That was just over a week ago. After getting my thesis bound at the Uni publications desk, staffed by none other than my awesome, spunky and devastatingly witty friend Mairghread, I trotted up to the seventh floor of the Menzies building to hand it in, only to discover that the office was closed for lunch. So to kill time, I spent some time and money at the bookshop, then paid a surprise visit to my supervisor to show her the finished product, prancing into her office and presenting one of the copies to her in a manner not unlike that of a proud cat presenting its human with its latest small deceased rodent. Eventually the handing in and signing of the official forms occurred, which took all of about thirty seconds. All that buildup and anticipation for something that turned out to be not very exciting and over very quickly; it was like I’d gotten back together with my first boyfriend or something.

Once that was all over, I drove to Stuart’s to pick him up for our little sojourn to the Macdeon Ranges. Bushwalking was done, good food was eaten, sins against God were committed. It was beautifully relaxing, except for the part where Stuart chased a gigantic huntsman spider into bed with me. He claims it was an accident and that he was actually trying to catch it (which he eventually did), but I can’t help but wonder if it was his passive-aggressive way of informing me that a threesome is out of the question.

Now I am trying to make my brain realise that a) it really is allowed to relax and b) some creative writing would be a nice thing to achieve. Yesterday’s sterling effort of standing in a wading pool and drinking dangerously alcoholic punch at a Cup Day barbecue was a good one, although it has to be said that it didn’t do much for the creativity.

I’m freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I’m no longer a scummy Uni student!

Unless I get into the postgrad course I’ve applied to do next year. In which case, I retract the previous two sentences. Punishment, meet the Glutton. Stacks on!

So, I have emailed my thesis supervisor the pretty-much-final draft of my thesis. It’s the last time she’ll look at it, which has to come as some sort of a relief for her. It’s kind of hard to believe that something that’s been part of my life and my headspace for so long is coming to its end. Hard to believe how different my life was a year and a half ago when I started Honours. Hard to believe how much I’ve changed, and what I’ve learned over that time. Hard to think about the fact that Bec and I would have been graduating together without getting a lump in my throat.

Although it’s driven me to distraction, not to mention tears, on many occasions, I’m so glad I’ve stuck with it. I’ve learned a lot, not only about my subject matter (speaking of which, I think I’m going to lay off reading anything about incest for a while after this next week is over), but all sorts of jolly intangibles that have taught me about who I am and how I work. It’s given me a greater sense of discipline about my writing, and has forced me to find the time to focus on my more creative work - an important lesson, because as anyone who writes knows, it can be so easy to deprioritise your creative life when big things start happening.

I’m seeing my supervisor later on today, when she’s had a chance to read it all. I’m hoping there’s no major reconstruction work that needs to be done that we’ve both somehow missed up until now. I’m also fervently hoping that she doesn’t say anything like “Aimee, some of these latest changes read like they’ve been made at the last minute by someone operating on very little sleep and possibly under the influence of alcohol.” Because if she does, I am honest to a fault, and will be forced to admit that I was up until all hours last night, making merry at Gurlesque, and pole-dancing and shaking appropriate bits of my anatomy to Peaches’ “Shake Yer Dix”.

Which I feel would perhaps not be overly beneficial to our professional student/teacher relationship.

Today I experienced what it feels like to think you’ve accidentally deleted the final draft of one of your thesis chapters.

I think the feeling can be described as “your heart dropping into your stomach, which is being pounded by sledgehammers”.

And now that I’ve experienced it, I never want to have that feeling again.

It was especially galling considering I’m a compulsive backer-upperer. For twenty heart-stopping minutes I thought I was going to have to retype the chapter in its 8500 word entirety from my hard copy nearest-to-done draft. Which I don’t really have time to do, given that I have to hand it in to my supervisor on Monday, and the whole thing is due Monday week (yes, 24th of October, not the end of September as I was mistakenly and heart-attack-inducingly told earlier).

Fortunately, it was purely a file-naming error on my part. And I found a backup anyway. But dear GOD that was frightening. My thesis is due in ten days. TEN DAYS! Eeek!

I must give a shoutout to Stu here, however, who rang me after I sent him a my-life-is-over kind of text message, and offered to retype it for me while I worked on the other chapter. I will be downloading Salt N Peppa’s “Whatta Man” just so I can do an interpretive dance to it just for him.

I had just enough time to finish both my heart attack and my coffee before I had to come to work today. And might I add, listening to Tori Amos songs about miscarriage while already in a tearful and fraught state of mind? Soooo not a good idea.

I have a headache, and it’s all Kate Holden’s fault.

Despite the fact that I work on Saturdays, I was up until all hours last night, until I finally finished Holden’s recently published memoir, In My Skin. If you live in Australia and have been paying any attention at all to the literary bits of the media, you’ll know that In My Skin is about Holden’s battle with heroin addiction, and her experiences working as a prostitute on the streets of St Kilda and, later, in brothels around Melbourne.
I went to the chat event/book signing Readings held for her on Wednesday night, and was treated to a lively and interesting discussion. I also got my copy of the book signed, because I am a fangirl like that, and yammered at her for a while in my usual awkward yet over-enthusiastic way. It turns out (and I did actually know this before I met her), that we share an Internet friend; that would be Melissa, whom I like to refer to as my evil Floridian twin. Small freakin’ Internet.
Anyway, I know there’s been a lot of publicity and good stuff said about In My Skin, and I’m going to add to it. It’s a beautifully written book that doesn’t flinch away from its subject matter. In doing so, it can be quite confronting, but also enlightening. The desciptions of heroin and Holden’s descent into addiction are mesmerising. Several years ago I lost someone I cared about deeply to an overdose; it wasn’t completely unexpected after the repeated unsuccessful attempts at rehabilitation and the jail time for the B&E he’d taken up to support his addiction, but it still came as a shock. I understood he was addicted and had little control over it, but I’ve never understood fully the choices he made, how he could keep edging further and further into the abyss even as everyone who cared about him tried to pull him out. I still can’t say I fully understand, and while I’ve learned to deal with the grief I doubt I ever will, but Holden’s descriptions of use and addiction spoke to me in a way that glamourous images of drug use haven’t. I feel like, through reading In My Skin, I’ve finally got a little more of a sense of understanding and closure regarding my friend. It’s kind of nice, if you want to use “nice” as a synonym for “tears my heart out”. Which I do.
I’ve read a few memoirs penned by women in the sex industry (primarily but not solely prostitution memoirs), and Holden handles her subject matter with more grace and less apology than many. She comes across as honest and likeable, two rather good things for a autobiographer to be, and was like that in person, too. I am smitten. Told you I’m a fangirl.
So anyway, you’ve probably read a lot about how good this book is by now, and I am going confirm that by saying: buy ten zillion copies because it’s a great book and Kate Holden is really nice and stuff.
Oh yeah, you sure can tell I’ve been learning me how to English all these years, can’t you? Thank your lucky stars I’m not planning on pursuing a career as a literary critic.

Like when instead of dropping your friendly effervescent tab into the glass of water you’ve just poured, you accidentally drop it into your housemate’s half-full wine glass from the night before.

I think it’s fairly safe to say I’m not a morning person.

I didn’t end up being in Bnews. I ended up, instead, in the Melbourne Star, Bnews’s sibling publication. On the front page. Actually not looking too shabby; my boss said I looked like a “mischievous elf, in a smutty way” (I think that was a compliment), and my friend Chris is calling me the “lesbian newspaper covergirl”. Which is almost as good as being the lesbian newspaper page 3 girl.

Today I found out that I’ve won an erotic fiction competition, which is exciting. I won’t say which one because it hasn’t been formally announced yet, but I’m very pleased. Today has been a real red-letter day. Actually, since the story in question features a lot of spanking, maybe that should be a red-bottom day.

Also, today something happened that has the potentially to be really, really amazing, but I can’t talk about that because nothing has been confirmed yet, and won’t be for a while even if it goes ahead. Plus I’m the kind of person who not only declines to count chickens before they’re hatched, but also waits until they’re fully grown, dead and on my dinner plate.

And if you think it’s annoying when bloggers do the blogging equivalent of jumping up and down shrieking “I have a secret!”, try keeping the secret.

If you’re feeling all stalky-like, a new issue of Bnews comes out tomorrow, complete with an interview with me where I talk about judging the Bliss erotica competition and the state of erotic fiction in Australia today. What seemed delightfully witty and incisive when I was chatting to the lovely interviewer will no doubt make me look like a complete fucking wanker in print.

Also there’ll be a photograph but I’d like you to pretend you didn’t see it. I am not so photogenic. I don’t know what it is; I’m relatively normal-looking in real life, but in photos I always turn out looking more than a little, well, special. Sometimes, in particularly great photos, I look special AND like I’m miming a sex act. Even when I’m not.

I have completely managed to avoid calling anyone “cunt eyes” today. Out loud, anyway.

Which considering that today has consisted of dealing with some choice examples of humanity, bashing out a media release after realising what I wrote last week was utter pigshite, and working on the chapter of my thesis that’s due in final draft form TOMORROW, is quite amazing really. Especially since in some cases, it was so richly deserved.

Motherfuckers can order their own freakin’ books from slackarsed distributors if they’re that damn sure they can do it better than my company. You try dealing with a distributor who “forgets” to send you your urgent shipment of books. For a month.

You’d think people would have learned not to fuck with me by now, given my Mafia connections. Even if by “Mafia”, I mean “my Uncle Wayne with a crowbar”.

Today I’ve had the fortune of discovering Bitch PhD, and have been wishing I’d found her a lot sooner. Her writing makes me make little excited noises in the back of my throat, which is a nice reaction to have.

In particular, this entry touched me, to the point where I got a little bit teary, because underneath my sardonic, cellulite-ridden outer shell beats the heart of someone who just loves hearing stories about random acts of kindness. And now my cover is blown.

It reminded me of an experience of kindness I had last December. Late last year was a bad time for me, most notably because of my friend Bec’s death, but also because I was job hunting and house hunting and trying to deal with a bad bout of depression that had already been hanging around for a few months by then.

The job situation looked to be sorting itself out. I’d been offered a permanent part-time position at the shop where I now work, and was interviewing for a casual position with a major book retailer who shall remain nameless. I let Book Retailer know that I’d been offered another position that would require me to work Friday and Saturday, so they knew where I was coming from if they hired me. They were cool with this, and hired me anyway. I was elated.
Then they started trying to give me shifts on Fridays and Saturdays. Annoyed, but determined to not be a pain in the arse, and thinking that they probably needed to train me on those days for a reason, I rearranged shifts at my other new job, where I was still undergoing training, so I could appease Book Retailer.
Training came to an end, and they gave me my roster for the next month. It included at least one Friday or Saturday a week. I felt a bit worried at this point, as the woman I’d informed of my other employment status was my new manager. I brought up my other job again. She looked annoyed but agreed to swap my shifts over grudgingly. I’d made myself available for the other five days of the week, and had understood that they knew of my other employment commitments when they hired me, so I was feeling a little annoyed yet again by this point, but still trying to be helpful. Then she tried to guilt trip me out of taking a weekend away that had been planned and paid for months in advance - Stuart’s and my mostly-annual pilgrimage to the Meredith Music Festival. I thought about not going and staying home and working, but it had been planned for a long time, I didn’t want to disappoint Stu, and I realised that if I stayed, I wouldn’t be making enough money to cover the cost of my (non-refundable, as far as I knew) ticket anyway. I apologised profusely and assured her that I had no other upcoming commitments. The guilt trip was working.

Then came the news about Bec. As soon as I was able to function mentally again and knew the date of the funeral, I rang to talk to my manager because the funeral was on a Saturday and, you guessed it, it was yet another Saturday that they’d rostered me on (fortunately one that my other job didn’t need me for, in this case). I offered to work as many other shifts as they needed me for, in exchange for being able to attend my close friend’s funeral. The manager grudgingly agreed. “We need you to come in today or tomorrow,” she said, “there’s some paperwork you didn’t fill out properly.”

I went in the next day to fix up my paperwork, and to hear the lovely news that they had decided to fire me, because I was “unreliable”. Because giving them advance notice of my availability before they had even agreed to hire me, and daring to keep a commitment I’d made several months in advance are both obvious indicators that I don’t take employment seriously and don’t really want to work. Needing a day off to go to a funeral is pure self-indulgence, especially when the guy who started at the same time as me and knew the friend in question also doesn’t need the day off to go (I wish I was making that last part up, but the guy really did know Bec, but wasn’t going to her funeral, and the manager tried to use this against me, again to guilt trip me). Despite the fact that I’ve been praised for my diligence and hard work and good attitude in every other job I’ve ever held (with the possible exception of the babysitting gig where I used Barbie’s clothes and a Ken doll to educate my charges about transvestism), Book Retailer obviously had the real, true perspective of what I really was: a no-good bludger who wouldn’t know how to be grateful for a job being thrown her way in a million years.

Yes, actually, I am still bitter. How can you tell?

Anyway, that was rather long-winded, so I’ll get to the nice(r) part. After I was fired, I stayed in the office a while to fix up the form I’d filled out. I went into a kind of daze, not thinking about anything at all. I walked out of the shop and into the busy street, and feeling started to come back. Right, I thought, I can handle this.
And then I burst into tears.
I raced across the road and sat on the steps of the building opposite my now-former workplace, and cried and cried and cried. The only other time I’d cried in public before was not long before that; I’d been Christmas shopping in a suburban shopping centre when I’d gotten the news about Bec, and ran the long, circuitous route to get outside, crying and hyperventilating as I went.
This time, as last time, I didn’t care who saw, even though I am normally very private about things like crying. It didn’t matter anyway; no one stopped, no one even looked my way.
Eventually, though, I heard “Excuse me, Miss, is there anything I can do to help you?” and twigged that the speaker was talking to me. I looked up into the face of an elderly man and tried to choke back more sobs.
“Not really, but thank you,” I said.
He asked what was wrong, so I gave him the condensed version. He looked incensed, and sat down beside me and we had a long chat. He railed against the continued casualisation of the workforce and the government’s determination to strip lower-income workers of their rights (his words, not mine). He talked about his son’s employment status (with a major furniture retailer, which by the sounds of it doesn’t live up to their name when it comes to how they treat their employees). He commiserated about Bec in a way that didn’t sound forced or false despite the fact that a blotchy-faced young stranger was now unstoppably pouring out her story to him. As mentioned before, I’m normally a very private person when it comes to how things affect me emotionally, but this man, Dave, made me feel like I could talk to him, and listened carefully to everything I had to say.

When I was feeling a bit better, and grief and rage were giving way to embarrassment, we parted ways. But not before he gave me a homemade business card with his and his wife’s names and address and phone number on it, and told me that if I ever needed to talk to someone, to not hesitate to call him. He patted my shoulder and smiled at me and left.

I misplaced the card when I moved a couple of weeks later, but I still write Dave thank you letters in my head. What he did that day truly touched me and helped me in a very bleak moment when I wasn’t believing there was much good in anyone. If I ever find it again, I’ll write him one for real.

Briefly:

The Good: Discovered yesterday that I received an HD for my major essay for Literary Theory last semester, which was a lovely surprise, considering I thought I was absolutely shit at the subject and that my essay was crap, even though I busted arse getting it done. However, I am more than happy to defer to the better judgement of someone else when they think nicer things about me than I do.

The Bad: Also yesterday, I found out that my all-time favourite professor, the man who has been a fabulous mentor and enthusiastic supporter of my endeavors for years, has cancer. Fortunately the doctors caught it early and he’s undergoing chemotherapy at the moment, so hopefully he’ll make a complete recovery. It’s a shock when someone you know who’s normally so healthy and energetic has something like this happen to them; a reminder of human frailty, which is something I, for one, don’t particularly like being reminded of. I’m thinking of him a lot and trying to compose a letter that doesn’t sound mawkish and stupid. It’s not so successful so far.

The Ugh: My thesis is actually due two weeks earlier than the date I was originally told it was, making it due at the end of September. On one hand this is good because the end is in sight finally and I have something to work for, but on the other hand I kind of need those extra two weeks. Oh well. We’ll see how I go.

Updates may be even more sporadic than usual as I focus on slaying the Thesis Beast, but then again I might kick into procrastination mode and finish those long entries that are currently saved as drafts in Movable Type. Who knows. If only ridding myself of Thesis Beast was as simple as my nephew’s method of ridding himself of Daddymonster: I would dearly love to hide under a table for a while (taking a much larger companion with me, natch), then jump out screaming “RAHHHH!” and run away, and still get first class honours for my efforts.