All apologies (in one convenient post!)

You may have noticed that my reading list, at left, seems petrified in time, and that it looks like I have been reading Volume 4 of Proust for at least three months now.

It's true. I have been. For some reason it's taking me so much longer than Volumes 1 or 2 or 3 took, but that's because after I got back from India the reality hit me that I would have to start earning a living again all of a sudden. This, as you can imagine, has come as a bit of a shock, petrifying me like Volume 4 of Proust due to the terrifying recollection that earning one's living can take up a lot of one's time if you make any sort of effort at it.

Anyway, I know I've been away from not just Proust but you guys too for far too long, but I just need a bit more time to pull myself together if that's okay. I am trying to work out a way to be back here blogging every day again soon though, which, as you know, is the entire point of my existence, but life has shuffled things up for me again and it's all yes, wonderful things,* but please bear with the intermittent postings for a little while longer while I catch my breath.

In the meantime, if you really miss me that much, why not look in at my delightful new blogging gig where, for all I know, you started at in the first place to find me HERE, but where regular readers (hi Mum) may not know they can now find me twice a week—a thorn amongst the roses of my clever and brilliant colleagues whose company I have been enjoying ever so much over the past month or so.

Now, have I ever plugged my work on this thing before? Have you ever heard me do inter-blog promos? I would usually be totally against that sort of thing, but I am just trying to earn a living here. Thanks for your attention. And please remember that someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow.

Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow.

*Yes, wonderful things is the name of my gorgeous friend Miri's gorgeous blog, and also—as I only recently discovered because I am generally a total ignoramus—the words that Howard Carter exclaimed when he opened Tutenkhamen's tomb and Lord Carnarvon asked him if he could see anything.

I love it.

The Patti Smith Precedent

This is Patti Smith at 29 years old:

This is Cyndi Lauper at 31 years old:

For the last ten years, I have cuddled these images in close to my heart, because not only are they brilliant records, but they also mollify, placate and reassure a girl that's it's okay if she still hasn't released her hit debut single during her twenties, because that just means that she is totally like these women—two of the best minds of her (mum's) generation—and she is obviously just biding her time until she releases her magnum opus at some stage before she turns 32. 

This concept is known to my needy ego as The Patti Smith Precedent. (Not to be confused with The Patti Smith President, which is another fantasy I have, but it's sort of irrelevant to the current story.)

So even though I know I'll have to find some other icon to look up to if I turn 32 and still haven't released anything, I do find that thinking about Patti and Cyndi is a much better way to live than if you just focused on, say, Kate Bush, who was 19 when her first album was released:

You will shy away from ever trying to be good at anything if you think about Kate Bush too much.

Anyway, I've been writing and recording random songs for a decade now, but you must understand it's more for the fun of it, as well as an irrational, post-netball-playing-career, ersatz, aggressive female competitiveness with Patti/Cyndi/Kate, than from any sort of actual musicianship or skill. 

(Just to demonstrate the sort of aggressive female competitiveness that I developed as a result of being encouraged in Australian early childhood to play netball—and which I think has been sublimated in adulthood but is nevertheless still ever present in theories such as The Patti Smith Precedent—please allow me to go off track for a minute and present to you an entry from my diary from when I was nine years old:

You can click on it if you'd like proof that there are a few rare nine-year-olds who are inveterate good spellers, and who have the sort of grasp of homonyms [such as 'too' and 'to'] that you'd really only expect from some sort of child prodigy genius. But even if that doesn't interest you, allow me to draw your attention to the entry for March 10 anyway, which reads in painfully bad handwriting: 

Netball. Round Robin. 

The first team we played we beat them 4—0. 

I shot all the goals! 

Second team we tied 2—2. 

I shot them both. 

Went to Sarah's for the day. 

All together shot SIX GOALS!!!!!!

Looking back, I think that there is something quite brilliant about that last sentence, mostly because I've never been that good at adding up numbers since.

But this prepubescent diary entry tells me one other thing besides my mathematical abilities, and that's this—that the last thing I wanted was for the incidental details of my day at my friend Sarah's house to overshadow my sensational goal-shooting victory. So, with the canny skill of a total bitch, I hardly mention her at all. Which I think says something about my aggressive female competitiveness? But it hurts too much inside to really investigate any of my emotions too intensely as they are really pretty deep, so can we please leave it there now thanks very much.)

TO CONTINUE:

To demonstrate to you how effortless songwriting used to be, here's a song my friends Hannah and Gill and I wrote when we were 24:

Look how simple it is! We didn't even have to write down any chords because we knew so few, so it was pretty obvious what they were gonna be.

And singing was a cinch, too! Here are some scrawlings from my singing notebook:

I have no idea what that means anymore, but feel free to call it ART if you like. I do.

Anyway, now that I've been back in Melbourne for a bit I've been trying to write songs again and I can confidently say that it's the hardest thing I've ever done. Suddenly, throwing a 'sinister/random bit' onto the end of a 'nice bit' and then doing a 'cabaret' bit doesn't cut it. 'Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya' isn't working anymore for me either, as now I prefer my lyrics to be in English, although sometimes I throw in some French as it can lend a nice flavour to some of the jauntier tunes.

IN SUMMARY: 

I turn 30 next March, supposing I make it, and I've had this idea in my head since I was about 20 that I must release a debut single while I'm still 29, because of The Patti Smith Precedent. Otherwise I'm STUPID and WORTHLESS and it's no wonder I don't have a boyfriend, because everyone knows that men don't want to sleep with you unless you have at least one hit debut single to your name. (Although I have to say that I don't want to sleep with them either unless they have at least one hit debut single to their name, so I guess fair is fair.)

But anyway, with only a few hours in the studio tomorrow, and just two songs written (both of them 1 minute 15 seconds long), I have to wonder if I am well and truly retarded to imagine I can create a 'Piss Factory' or a 'Time after Time' on a Monday afternoon in Northcote with little to no preparation. I don't even have any money to get there on the tram! All my courageous intentions, inspired by years and years of thinking about The Patti Smith Precedent, seem utterly doomed to fail. 

PEP TALK:

I decide to chat to some friends to get some songwriting advice before I choke in my sleep on the terrifying realisation that I am just hours away from becoming, once again, an enormous disappointment to myself.

'Excuse me, but how do you write a song?' I ask Melbourne recording dude, Jack Farley, seated at left.

'I have no idea,' he replies. 'I think it's really hard. That's why I'm a recording dude and not a songwriter.' 

Which is the exact sort of answer you get when you ask a Melbourne recording dude and not a Melbourne songwriter. So then I decided to ask a Melbourne songwriter.

'Excuse me, but how do you write a song? I ask Melbourne songwriter, Craig Dermody, seated at right.

'You just have heaps of shit stuff happen to you and then you think about it while you've got a guitar in your hands,' he says.

EPIPHANY:

Craig's words make so much sense to me! 

So please—if you will—think of me tomorrow afternoon. You can rely on the fact that I will be cradling a borrowed guitar and brooding very intently over the one or two netball goals I tragically didn't shoot when I was a nine-year-old, all in the name of the noble art of Songwriting.

Ridiculous things I haven't been able to stop talking about nonstop recently, often (but not always) under the influence of alcohol

I had forgotten how attacked you get on Swanston Street by people trying to make you do surveys. The other day, a woman with a clipboard jumped in front of me and squealed: 'So, if you could be any superhero in the world, who would you be?!' Then on the next block a schoolgirl came up to me while I was waiting at the lights and asked me to fill out a survey about what I like to eat on my lunchbreak. Then a hyper-exuberant guy stopped me at the very next corner and asked me what my favourite animal was and whether I had time for the environment.

The way I deal with this is I tense up and take a deep breath in and fix my steely stare on a vague point in the distance to stop me from getting dizzy, just as if I'm about to do 32 fouettés en tournant:



And I just keep walking.

The reason I mention this is because it feels like all these people are trying to find out exactly what a 29-year-old redhead thinks and feels and needs and wants, and it should almost be quite flattering except it never is because they actually block my path and I hate them for it because I like to walk quickly and with purpose down all streets, but most particularly down Swanston Street.

So here's a heads up about what I've been talking about and thinking about for the past fortnight in Melbourne, and if the Swanston Street surveying society is serious about wanting to know more about me they should take good note of these points and then get out of my way quicksmart, because the thing about fouettés is that they can really hurt if you get one right in the face.

1. Adult Behaviour

I seem to be getting drunk and talking incessantly about this thing called Adult Behaviour lately, which seems appropriately ironic because one of the tenets of Adult Behaviour must surely be to not get drunk and bore people, but there you go. I have no idea what Adult Behaviour actually entails, but I am quite proud of coining the term and the idea of it is most alluring to me.

I think you can basically call anything Adult Behaviour if it seems responsible—this includes eating breakfast, owning nailpolish remover or using contraception. Although even not using contraception can be called Adult Behaviour if you look at it in a certain way, because by not using contraception you might have a baby, which is surely one of the most Adult things you can possibly ever do besides rolling over your super. For me right now, Adult Behaviour can best be described by a cryptic ratio of 8:3—stop at eight whiskeys and try to be in bed by 3 am.

2. Xylitol

I had never eaten chewing gum in my life until my friend Ben told me about Extra Professional and how it is the only chewing gum in Australia that contains xylitol, which is some kind of plant substance that was first derived from birch trees in Finland, and which is amazingly good for your teeth if you chew it after eating.

This conversation came about because my Finnish friend Sanna pulled some Finnish chewing gum out of her bag and Ben asked her if she'd ever had a hole in her teeth, and she said, Of course not, I'm Finnish. Have you ever seen a Finnish person who has bad teeth? And Ben said, No, and Sanna said, Well, that's because in our culture we chew xylitol after every meal, you fool! And then she ran off to play a game of tennis with Liz Smylie.



Don't forget, you really have to make sure it is the Professional brand, and not the other sort though. Apparently I can get very insistent about this detail.

3. Peace with my relationship to the internet

When people ask me what I did in India, all I've got for them is: 'I made peace with my relationship to the internet.'

This sounds like a vague and abstract notion, I know, and even when I have pickled my brain beyond the valley of the dolls I still have enough clarity to understand that these words don't really make sense and that they sound like the thoughts of a stark raving madwoman/hippie. And so I then feel compelled to go into a massive monologue about how, You know, it's really important to understand where you fit into the greater scheme of things online, and that you really need to reach a place of peace with things like Twitter and Facebook, et al, but you would be a fool to turn your back on them, especially if you are a writer, because the internet is a GREAT MYSTERY and IT IS IN OUR HANDS TO SCULPT IT INTO WHATEVER WE WANT IT TO BE!

And when I've been repeating myself over and over ad nauseum, and non-smokers are starting to chainsmoke out of sheer desperation, and atheists are turning to God for the exact same reason, and people with normally perfectly good music taste have started humming 'She Will Be Loved' by Maroon 5 just to block out the babbling, I topple face-first into the gutter, which I KNOW is not very Adult of me but whatever, and everyone heaves a sigh of relief.

But then, in the morning, all I have to do is eat breakfast and then go out and buy nailpolish remover, and suddenly, without really even trying, I'm an Adult again.

POST SCRIPT: If you've been blessed with my company lately and you think I've missed out on mentioning a topic here that I've been crapping on incessantly about over the past fortnight—WHY NOT ADD IT BELOW?! I know there's heaps more things I've had a bibulous obsession with talking about, I just honestly can't remember what any of them were.

How are you guys doing?

I'm feeling a little frazzled and freaked out myself, thanks for asking. So does anyone mind terribly if I just try to calm down in my own special way, which tonight, for some reason, means posting all these old clips that everyone's already seen, in a row like this down the page, and just quietly watching them on repeat until things start to look up? Is that okay with everybody? And then maybe can we agree to meet back here in a couple of days when I have my head back on straight and I've recovered from one of the biggest battles of my young life, namely, an entire week of inexplicable technological crashes and smashes and absolute failings, which I barely have the tech savvy or skills or emotional capability to cope with and which, as a result, I actually thought I would definitely die from this week?

So perhaps when we meet back here later on we can discuss all this in a far more civilised and calm manner and really just make the most of our lives together, because when you spend twelve hours writing one thing and then you lose it because your computer crashes, you start to realise that there's really not that much time to do anything as properly or as well or as good as you want to, and you just have to learn to be cool with that concept and try to get on with your life.

So, is this alright? Will you promise to come back? DON'T WORRY, I KNOW HOW YOU'RE FEELING! I MISS ME TOO! I can't wait to see you back here soon. Honestly. But I know we are all going to be totally okay. It helps, I think, to know that Natty and Rashida love us—all of us—unconditionally.

NATALIE PORTMAN & RASHIDA JONES Speak Out from Natalie Portman

NATALIE PORTMAN & RASHIDA JONES Speak Out Once More from Natalie Portman

NATALIE PORTMAN & RASHIDA JONES Speak Out Again from Natalie Portman

Opera: Touching breasts; touching hearts

I sometimes fancy myself as a bit of a 'marketing' person, because I really think I have an affinity for this special art—marketing the unmarketable, promoting the unpromotable, and profiting off the unprofitable. Opera is a good example of the sort of elite, 'high-art niche product' I'm talking about, which I think I would be fantastic at marketing to more mainstream audiences. If I worked at Opera Australia, for example, what I'd do for their January/February 2010 marketing campaign is I'd juxtapose this image from Manon Lescaut:

With this image of Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson at the Superbowl in 2004:

And wordlessly, with just the power of the images alone, what it would say to contemporary audiences is that opera is really just like a Superbowl halftime show if you think about it right. And then I would watch ticket sales skyrocket.

Things that happened today

1. I didn't have my headphones properly stuck into my computer so I accidentally blasted the special NO TALKING section of the library with at least two verses of 'I Got You Babe'.

2. I turned my phone off so as not to further annoy the other patrons in the special NO TALKING section of the library, and then I discovered, to my great distress, that I could never turn it back on again. 

3. I spent two hours waiting for service in the Nokia Care Centre before being told it can't be fixed because I bought it in Thailand.

4. I spent half an hour in line at Australia Post to buy a $49 replacement phone that is so shit I can't even write a literate text message on it. 

5. My pride was wounded because being literate in text messages is a major part of who I am.

6. When I put my old SIM card into the new handset I realised that I'd lost every single phone number and text message I've ever received because everything was saved to the old phone, not to the SIM card.

7. I then remembered that in the past month I've received some of the most beautiful and brilliant text messages of my entire life. AND NOW THEY ARE ALL GONE. 

8. To top it all off, I blame Sonny and Cher for everything, which makes me feel just terrible because they're such lovely and outstanding people in the main and it's just that people who are cramming for exams in the State Library don't really appreciate them, which I think is such a shame because if they did none of this would ever have happened.

Look. This is the last time I am going to ever speak about this today or ever again in my entire life. I know stuff like this happens to everyone. But I treasure texts like I treasure dresses, and even when they are old and out-of-date they still mean so much to me. So if you've ever sent me any sort of brilliant text message at any time in your entire life, PLEASE RESEND IT. 

Melbourne, by the way, is going great.

An ambitious young woman, determined to build a career in TV journalism, gets good advice from her first boss, and they fall in love

This blog has just been a bit too cutesy ever since I got back from India and moved back in with my family. Tales about feeding raw meat to baby magpies? Photos of my adorable three-year-old niece sitting in a cardboard box while I recline on a barge comprised entirely of the second series of Popular Penguins? Anecdotes about the local video shop? Some days I feel like I am Karen from Wisconsin and the only thing missing is my ragamuffin toddler twins, Brodie and Joshua, and their bossy big sister, Madeleine, who is 'five-going-on-25' if you ask her dad, Lance. Something has to change or I fear I'm going to lose the base core of my readers, all five of you, because I know you all expect something just a bit more sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll from me.

Anyway, if I learnt anything from watching Michelle Pfeiffer as Sally 'Tally' Atwater in 1996's Up Close and Personal, written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, it's that you sometimes have to move to Philadelphia to become a famous television reporter. (SEE SUBJECT LINE OF THIS POST FOR QUICK SUMMARY OF THAT FILM.) So I'm going to do just that. When I get a visa.

So while I wait to hear back about whether or not I've lost the US green card lottery for the fourth year in a row, I'm going to bide my time by travelling down to Melbourne tomorrow (which is sort of like Philly anyway, but without the free wi-fi or the Bruce Springsteen song), so I can hunt down some stories that are more sizzling and relevant to your youthful lifestyles.

Posting may be intermittent, because, frankly, I have a lot to do over the next four weeks, but I promise I'll try to raise things up a notch and come back to you every few days with some totally sordid tales about all my friends' lives, who three years ago seemed to quite literally incarnate the philosophy of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but whom I have to admit now all seem to have moved out to Coburg and started brilliant cooking and gardening blogs. Which I suppose is what happens around the time you get to be almost thirty and you're still not a famous television reporter (I told you guys you should have fallen in love with your first boss; see above).

But anyway, whatever it takes, I can tell you that from here on in there's going to be fewer photos of me feeding raw meat to baby magpies and sitting in a barge comprised of the entire second series of Popular Penguins, and more photos of me feeding raw meat to hot, naked, bearded men who are snorting cocaine off each other's stomachs while sitting in barge comprised of the entire second series of Popular Penguins and occasionally jumping overboard into a sea of whiskey and vomit and wading over to the kitchen to check on the freshly-harvested rainbow chard they have roasting in the oven. This is my solemn promise to you.