Ba-dump

And when he thought I wasn't looking, he starts to dance to Edge of Glory, I spotted him on the outer edges of my mirror and it was probably the cutest thing I have ever seen.

I straightened up, turned around and grinned at him. "Baby, what are you doing?"

He stops mid-motion "Uh. Nothing! I have an itch. Itchy back."

"I believe that you were just dancing to Lady Gaga"

He starts to blush and laugh. "No, I wasn't. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go be manly and play LA Noire."

I corner him "yeah you were! Do it again!"

And in that moment, it occurs to me that I love him. He's so charming and goofy and he makes my heart go ba-dump at unexpected moments. And help me God, he secretly dances to Top 40.

I don't know quite how to say this to him, those three words that I throw around so easily with other people.

He gives me an aggrieved look before throwing himself facedown on the bed: You're still grinning at me. It never happened.

And I can't say it still, my throat closes over and so I substitute instead with"I think you're the greatest".

Too Much

"Do you like your new job?"
"Meh. It's okay. It's probably temporary."
"What? You just started."
"Well it's not what I want to do."
"..... What exactly do you want?"
"I want to love the job"
"You ask for too much lady."

Goodbye Card

My work presented me with a giant goodbye card today. It's funny the things you remember about people.

Edge of Glory

Dancing around madly in my apartment to this. Toothbrush doubling up as a microphone. I fucking love it. I'M ON THE EDGE WITH YOU!

Mugs

So I am pulling myself off Facebook/LA Noire/Season 6 of Criminal Minds and a backlog of Mental Floss articles to come here and post this. Between the two of us, we spend a lot of time pulling funny faces at each other and on camera.

So if you ask where I've been working, going to interviews [sigh for the Gen Y in me], trying to get a life in this miserable weather and doing lots and lots of mugging for the camera.

Fools

"You might actually be born with the most beautiful features in the whole of the world, you might have the best intellect, you might have all of these wonderful qualities and characteristics but in make-over culture you won't be seen as perfect, you'll always be seen as someone that can be improved upon.. and I think that's the most detrimental part of make-over culture- it doesn't allow us to rest, we can never be perfect, we can never say to ourselves - I'm okay now. Once we do that, we're accused of letting ourselves go."

I don't know who this video was from but I guess it's something for you [and me] to chew upon. Should we not always be striving to better ourselves and if we don't, are we not just being complacent? But are these standards [and in particular societal beauty standards] too high? Are we reaching for something that doesn't exist and if so, does that make fools of us all?

Talking to children

[Reading out her childcare report card to me]
Mum: But she must always remember to speak to a child at their level. What does that mean?
Mush: That means you talk to the kid like an adult. You're supposed to talk to the kid like a kid.
Mum: Oh, do I?
Mush: Yeah, but don't worry -it's a very specifically Asian thing to do.
Mum: Huh. And you? How did I talk to you as a child?
Mush: Like an adult.

Actually now that I think about it, I do that a lot too- talking to toddlers and babies about definitions and concepts. You will never find me in front of a pram cooing 'it's a teddy-weddy-weddy-bear!' Maybe it's genetic.

Just smoke the damn cigarette already

And so lately everyone has been pointing out vanilla I am. And you don't have to really know me that well to know just how much I hate this. Just because I'm not snorting things up my damn nose every night and sleeping with Tom, Dick and Harry at the same time doesn't mean you should put me in this damn goody-goody box. I resent this damn box.

RR: something something drugs.
Mush: Oh that's not how it is.
RR: How would you know? As if you've ever taken drugs.
Mush: ........
RR: Look at you in all your vanillaness.
Mush: [glaring at her from my stupid nerdy glasses] Oh yeah? And how can you tell?
RR: [exasperated] You're a good girl. You just are. You never would.
Mush: I am not a good girl! (if I punch you in the head I think you would stop calling me that)
RR: There's nothing wrong with being good you know? It's okay.

RR really knows how to push my damn buttons. And of course she's right- recently I'm going out of my way to be reasonable and sensible. I'm sleeping at ten. I'm not showing up late for anything. I'm not drinking.. at all, I've turned into some sort of ghastly teetotaller. I don't throw Veruca Salt like tantrums. I mean for Og's sake- my hair is a nice nominal black colour and not the candy floss pink that I originally wanted - in short it's like I've been dialled back to minus five.

Which must be nice for my parents. I'm not so sure how I feel about this.

And that might go a long way to explaining why I'm constantly craving cigarettes lately. I want to pick them up and twirl them in my fingers, I want to take a damn cigarette break in front of my work and not give a shit what anybody walking past thinks, I want to smell them on my hands when I lift them to my face and most of all I want to inhale. The hilarious thing is I don't smoke, not really. I am well aware that this is my self-destructive streak rising to the surface like a kraken heading for the buffet.

I guess if chaining out my window is the most rebellious thing I do in the next few months, I truly am vanilla- I'll give up and own that title.

Stop for a moment

My eyes are so wide like you reached into my head and turned on a light inside- Be Mine, David Gray.

I'm standing here on the street corner, four blocks away from my house. And I can't explain the stillness, I don't have the writing capacity to explain stillness. My feet hurt and I'm tired but that's ok. Because the world is so quiet that all I can hear is the gentle tapping on my keypad and my own footsteps in the leaves and I think that if this is as good as it gets, for five minutes, for ten, for fifteen, then that should be all I ever ask for. Momentary stillness.

Priorities, priorities.

Well see here's proof that I'm alive and eating cake. Cake with dessicated coconut so maybe not so much alive.

I guess I'll return when I have something concrete to say. At this point I feel like if I analyse my life, I'm going to find a gap and poke a hole right through it. I am that superstitious. Or maybe I'm just too old to care about everything and everyone all the time. Right now, I'm focusing quite a bit of energy on one person and I'm finding it reallly damn hard to spread myself around when [certain] friends have mental crises. And you know? that's strange to say even for me, if you call for me I'm the first one out the door for you- no questions asked and lately I have a hard time picking up the phone or even just summoning the energy to roll out of bed. [In fact, my bed is eyeing me now but so are my sink of dishes. The dishes win.]

I'm not twenty one anymore and nowhere is this more evident than my inability to give people equal time. As Coconat so eloquently put it "We're too old for this shit. And we're too old to deal with crap that's really not that important."

And so it is. I was talking to my mum about ND and she as always shoots straight from the hip.
Mum: SB once said to me that you always put your friends before him.
Me: He said that to you? Why the fk would he say that to you? When the hell? What the heck!
Mum: Are you still doing that? Maybe you should reconsider doing that.
Me: [defensive] well it's true. I don't admit that it's not true. I knew it, he knew it. It was the way things were done. Friends are forever and boyfriends are.. transient. Case in point. I'd just like to point out that if I leaned on him hard, where would I be? I'd be Wiley Coyote'd all over the ground.
Mum: Aren't you tired? Don't you just want to lean and be taken care of? Would it not make your life easier?
Me: You brought me up to be completely self-sufficient and independent. What are you asking of me?
Mum: Maybe too much for your own good.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I think I'm just in a roundabout way trying to say that my priorities are getting a total reconfiguration and I'm still in the process of trying to figure it out myself. Which is not really the reason I'm neglecting the holy moly out of this blog.

I swear I'll be good and offer you more cake pictures. Amateur cake photographs. There'll at least be a lot of those coming up

Try thinking before you speak

Betty asked for more posting, so hi Betty! *waves*

--

I was absorbed in creating a mixtape on the computer and he was sitting behind me just watching me mess around, when I noticed the time was getting close to midnight so not moving my eyes away from the screen, I felt around for his face and said absently:

You know I love you but you have to go soon.

Uhm. It took me about several beats to realise what I just said and then the room went completely silent in a death pall. Who the hell makes random love declarations two weeks in while multi-tasking? Me apparently. Oh I fail sometimes, I really do.

I swivelled around in horror and almost knocked him off the seat in the process.

"I.. uhhhh. OH MY GOD. I didn't mean that. I mean I like you a lot but that's not what I meant. I was distracted. I say that to everyone. I tell everyone I love them, it's not personal. I don't know why I said that. ..... uhhhhhhhhhh....." [smooth Mush smooth! You missed out on an incredible public relations career!] By this time I'm quite sure my face is fire engine red.

He starts to laugh, he's finding it hilarious. "Should I just pretend I didn't hear that?"

Dumbdumbdumbdumbdumb! Argh! Stupid mixtape! "But it's true. I say I love everyone." This is sounding lame even to my ears, but it's TRUE. "Forget it! It didn't happen!."

I don't even know if there's a moral to this other than: Dear God, I need to relearn when to start and stop talking.

At least I'm still making an effort to write something.

There once was this blogger who used to WRITE give or take three times a week.. and then one day she just ran out of things to talk about. Completely flat. What the heck happened? She was probably too busy posing in front of mirrors. Probably. I'm not trying to show off my new jacket or anything.

Jumping off that cliff

So it turns out I actually had some sort of undiagnosed tuberculosis and then I lost my voice completely. Not so good for me, possibly good for everyone else.

--

I've been thinking a bit about whether I should talk about this- because possibly too early, too soon and probably I have a feelling I'm not going to portray myself too well in this post- so avert your eyes.

So there's this new person in my life, we'll call him ND and because I [am/was?] on a sabbatical, I was extremely reticent about going out with him.. well he doesn't know that. It really isn't you, it's me!

And so in hindsight, I started making excuses to myself and to my friends about why I shouldn't do this.

a) Firstly, he's not my ordinary type and when I say not my type- I don't know if you've noticed but since I quit with SB, my type has been precocious party boys. I figure if you lined up Coffee, R6 and DS against a wall and measured liver function, there would not be a working liver among them. I apparently like my men on pre-destined dialysis drips.

b) I let a random stranger press my buttons. Who listens to random strangers? Me.

c) He's too good for me. And when I say too good for me, I don't mean as in he's punching below his weight, I mean as in [following on from the whole type thing] he's a good guy. He doesn't drink much, he doesn't smoke, the guy doesn't even drink coffee. And me? Have you met me? If you flicked holy water on me, I might explode into a pile of ashes. Where can a relationship go with such uneven levels? an exorcism?

You know how I always mention that I have really good friends and they're good because truly they never sugar coat anything and they're not afraid to bitchslap the holy crap out of me when they know I'm being a fuck up. So here is what Ms Smith said to all of that [paraphrasing]:

"What are you saying?! You're not going to date him because he's good. You won't take a chance on him because he's not a party boy. You would rather date someone who just goes out and messes around all weekend and doesn't call you when they're supposed to than someone who doesn't. Isn't he good and kind and nice? How is the whole dating party boys thing working out for you anyway? "

"......Fantastically."

The thing is that you may think someone is good and kind and nice and then they may turn around and throw you under a bus anyway. I honestly think that I'm really not emotionally prepared enough to go for another round of relationship roadkill. But that whole conversation really made me stop and think about what the heck I'm doing. How I'm letting my commitmentphobia run the show, how I might be letting go of someone genuinely good because I don't want to dump my hand in the water and so what if this one throws me under too? What can possibly be the worst that can happen? I'll be here in three months time feeling mopey and stupid and blogging about it but I'll get over it. Eventually. I really suck at getting over things as we all know.

So we're dating. I really like him and we talk about obscure history and he really makes me laugh, so here's to closing my eyes and jumping off that cliff. I am ridiculously petrified.

It was only just a dream.

[Yeah yeah I just gave one of the least deserving artists in the world a shoutout.]

Errr.. I'm just going to talk about this dream that I had this morning, it really bothered me and I'm going to start navel gazing about it [but I'm going to cover the names again so that my friends don't start hammering me about my demented subconscious tomorrow if they get past the 2nd paragraph.] so feel free to tune out in 5, 4, 3, 2....

--

So I wake up in the dream [yeah I woke up in the dream- how fricking weird is that? It's a bit backwards] and I'm discombobulated, I'm in a bed in my aunty's house and ☼ is standing over at the end of the bed and he's smiling. I think he says "Wakey wakey."
I'm confused and I look at him, "What are you doing here?"
He laughs and says "Why wouldn't I be here, we're in a relationship!"
And now I'm completely baffled, "uhhhh.... we are?" (no-one's told me that! What the hell!)
He smiles again, "Sure." and then he crosses the room, leans over the bed and kisses me. On the mouth. It's one helluva kiss and when he finishes up.. ummm.. okay I'm convinced! That works for me!
But maybe I should get out of bed yeah? So I swing out of bed and my foot kicks this make-up palette, I pick it up and open it and it crumbles everywhere. I have make-up all over my hands and I've made a mess. I put the palette back on the floor and when I look up he's gone. I figure ☼ went off to another part of the house, I have no idea.

I would look for him but I'm distracted by noise coming from the window. I walk to the window and I can see that the house next door is having a party and ◙ is standing right in my view. I'm not sure if he can see me looking but the next thing I know, his girlfriend runs up to him in this ridiculously beautiful blue dress, wraps her arms around his neck and gives him a hug. And the dress. It's cornflower blue with ruffle straps, a fitted bodice and a flared skirt and she's not beautiful but the dress makes her beautiful if you know what I mean.

He leans down to kiss her and as he does, he opens his eyes and looks at me. He knew I was there the entire time and he still did it. The intent and malice of it takes my breath away and I'm upset, I'm hurt, I'm jealous and most absurdly of all I covet her dress.

I run out of the house barefoot [the make-up is still on my hands] and I make my way to the nearest comic book store where I hide behind the counter and try to bury myself in comic books.

--
You don't really need a psychoanalyst with a specialisation in ridiculously obvious metaphors to see where my head's at.

All downhill from here

She said on the phone, "I was thinking this morning- have we reached a pinnacle where we're so disillusioned that we're not even impressed with nice guys and goodness anymore."
I think she might be right.

I just wanted to show off my glasses. And the view. And talk about the song.

"And if you feel just like a tourist in the city you were born/
Then it's time to go/
And to find your destination/
There's so many different places to call home

Sometimes the best intentions are in need of redemption/
Would you agree?"
-You are a Tourist- Death Cab for Cutie

Seriously Ben Gibbard speaks to me in a way no other songwriter can. Loving this to death.

Take one feminist and stir. Stir damn well.

and so I had a huge fight with my parents this week and I was very much snuffly and upset when I answered the phone.

Fark, I know she has the best intentions and loves me very much but sometimes I look at her and wonder how we stay friends if we truly don't understand each other.

Me: *snuffle snuffle*
Her: I know you don't listen but listen to this. I think you're much happier when you're with someone.
Me: Say what now? I don't know if you're advocating what I think you're advocating.
Her: Just find someone and be happy
Me: ..............................................................................................

There. That. We're from different planets. Look I get where's she coming from. Having a partner would make life easier. I'd be doing less heavy lifting for one. Money would be free-er. And my parents would be less worried that they're going to leave me alone on the planet. But I chose to walk away from all that. I very methodically walked away from marriage and a walk-in closet (I still dream of walk-in closets) knowing that none of it was going to be easy and truly if you've been following this blog even somewhat, you'd know that breakup was and will always be one of the defining moments of my life.

And I guess as my friend or even as a damn random acquaintance, you'd know just how highly I prize my independence. I don't need a partner to be happy. If they come by and ake me happy then bonus! But I won't place my happiness on their shoulders. Some people are just not happy unless they are in a relationship and that's fine, she's clearly one of those people.

And we've come around full circle because truly I don't know why she said it when it really has nothing to do with the fight I had with my parents!

The Neighbourhood Bulletin

Amended (With photos!)
I swore I wasn't going to come on the internet tonight because I'm just a tiny bit feeling like I have tuberculosis, but do you see this?




That's an entirely full bulletin board full of passive-aggressive notes [from four different neighbours!] about dog poop. I am going to go take a better picture later on because I didn't want to hang around too long and have people think that I'm a dog-hater.

But as I was readng it in fascination, some [fairly okay looking!] guy poppped up behind me and said "Oh haha. Haven't you seen that?"
And I was "No! This is crazy! That's so funny! Don't mind me I'm just going to take a picture to document. (click) Are you new here? I haven't seen you around"
"I've been here for two years, my name is Alex."
"I'm Mush and I live upstairs. I've been here two years as well."
"The people in this building are always complaining! Last week it was something about books."
"Oh. Really. Odd."**
He turns to leave and says "It's nice to meet you Mush!" then he winks at me and gestures towards the board, "Don't get involved."

Okay well he's pretty nice and the neighbour that calls me Tiger is pretty nice, but the rest of them and I'll repeat for the record. Again. My neighbours are fucking crazy. I'm starting to think that the building is built on some sort of Indian burial ground, it's cursed and it's all going to drive us eventually all mad. I would not be that surprised.

**I wasn't complaining. I thought it was a valid question!

Life is absurd.

As I sit here thumping my head against the desk. Struggling, struggling, struggling. The pornstar next door is screaming and getting it on. It's really hard to be openly miserable and sorry for yourself when ten metres away you can hear her having this ridiculously long orgasm.

Advice for the neurotic

So I'm fretting [and I never normally fret because as you know my forté is venting.] and finally she says: You really should stop analysing your eggs before they hatch

And she's right. You know and I know that I'm going to have to stop being so Charlie Brown with everything.

because everybody knows how that ends. Not well.