Friday

My friend Romy said last night that for people who've left and come back again, living in Brisbane is like living in permanent nostalgia. Everything is sepia; everything is memory.

Today, it is the smell of a tree or a flower announcing that summer will be arriving shortly. My memories of this glittering chapter, before the days become unbearable, are especially vivid. I know what comes next.

The heat of summer in Brisbane, as I recall it, is so torrid and oppressive that the will towards any sort of athletics, not to mention more gentle pursuits such as conversation and enthusiasm, melts to nothing under the sun. The lazy squirting of lemon juice into a glass of water can completely break you on a blistering day if the lemon seeds dribble in too, and if you work in a coffee shop you yearn for an air-conditioned office job, which might scorch your soul but at least it will also fan your heat rash.

Only at night, when you're riding your bike along the river and your head has stopped dully thumping, can you accept that without the sweltering heat of the day, the cool air now wouldn't be anywhere near so beautiful or so precious.

Tuesday

There was an interview in The Courier Mail on the weekend with 21 year-old Jack Heath, the Canberra author of The Lab, Remote Control, and Money Run who is often compared to Matt Reilly. He explains that because his latest action-packed book has more characters in it than his previous books, he is able to, "at times, explore the human condition."

I started warming up my fingers in preparation for typing up a sardonic, mockful post, which is the sort of thing I am wont to do in response to most things that are printed in The Courier Mail. But then I looked at his website and read his answer to another question: "Which do you prefer writing . . . the mindless explosions or the character-building high-browy stuff?" He answers: "Ooh, that's a tough one ... the explosions are boring if the characters aren't developed, but even well-developed characters are boring if they never explode."

And I like this enough to just quietly leave him to it, even though he also states on his website that he is scared of living anywhere where people don't speak English, which is why he remains in Canberra.

In other news, I am off to Toowoomba this morning so I won't be around for a couple of days because I don't think they have internet there. Thank god they speak English though.

Monday

We played Trivial Pursuit in the backyard on Saturday. Batch after batch of mojitos were mixed in the kitchen and ferried down the stairs, two jugs at a time, and then swiftly taken back up the stairs for re-filling. I suspect that these drinks were a major contributing factor in my inability to remember much of what happened, although I have tried to piece things together by looking back at the photos. My reconstruction of the afternoon and evening, before I passed out a little before 9pm, goes like this.

We open on a dappled, sunlit backyard. Everyone is excited about this Game of Games, and to my delight, I discover that my guest list is well-chosen. All attendees have the collective discipline to sit in an organised and respectful fashion around a square piece of cardboard, and they even toast me as I take a photo for posterity.

Things are looking great for an afternoon jam-packed with educational fun. Except Ben, on the far right, appears to be wheelchair-bound, a la President Roosevelt in the movie Annie. (Possibly Roosevelt was wheelchair-bound in real life too, but I prefer to just get my facts solely from musicals.)

My team, the green one, starts off pretty well. Three pies already, with brown, blue, orange and pink teams also doing well. Yellow is yet to score, but it's early on and anything can happen.

Thanks to Kate's quick thinking, you can see in the photo how big a Trivial Pursuit board is in comparison to a female human hand. If you've never seen a Trivial Pursuit board in real life before, this scale would be very helpful. But watch your sleeve, Kate, there's a lot of purple dip lying about.

Did we organise the teams by hair colour? These guys weren't even a proper team, but blondes always seem to gravitate towards each other. They are obviously all thrilled to be here, the sunlight bounces off their hair magnificently, and they are welcome in my home any time.

The brunettes, on the other hand, just seem kind of angry. But they're that losing 'yellow' team. Not getting any questions correct can make you feel any number of emotions, and I have no doubt that anger is one of them.

Things were starting to get rowdy, which you do expect in a Trivial Pursuit game, but the various expressions of shock, disbelief and passive-aggressiveness exhibited here just look like trouble so early on in the game.

And now it seems that people are really starting to get distracted, a fact which is confirmed for me when Nadia turns from stormy to sultry in one click of the shutter, and begins making serious eyes at the camera. Oi! Get your eyes back on the board! Your teammates need you!

But her teammates were also sidetracked. Anna was for some reason feeding Sanna, which didn't help Stuart's concentration on the game.

And that was when I looked around and suddenly realised that everyone had gotten distracted.

On another day, this would have made me temperamental and teary, as I am unnaturally passionate about Trivial Pursuit and am normally focused on winning it. But it seems that this time I was so busy drinking mojitos that I wasn't focused on anything else except ensuring that Martika's Love Thy Will Be Done was played at maximum volume and pretending in my head I was Stevie Nicks. Which just shows how unabashedly un-focused I was, as you don't play Martika and dance like Stevie Nicks if you are concentrating on what you are doing.

Although I remember nothing of what happened after about 5pm, I heard that a few hours later, after darkness had fallen and the game had turned into a veritable snake pit of cheats and liars, Clare took the board away, thus ending the game. There were no winners. Like all depraved boardgame parties and grand empires of yore, our game of Trivial Pursuit had simply deteriorated. Fallen.

Friday

I woke up just now with the word 'irascible' prowling through my head. It seems like such a heady, aggressive word to have on one's mind at the moment of waking. What sort of furious slumber could have wrenched a word like this from the depths of my soul and brought it back to waking life? One that knows it has to get up and work a colourless, mundane job for eight hours, I reckon.

I'm sure I've never even used the word in real life before, although you can of course bet your bottom dollar that over the course of today I will be trying to make three sentences using the word correctly. This way, all the things that usually make me irascible will instead have the proud patina of accomplishment - the pursuit of which is, after all, sometimes the only way to get through such a day, especially for someone as needy of achievement as I.

Having already used the word once here, I now have only two sentences left to construct over the entire day, which should easily get me through to 5pm. My usual rate is one good sentence per week, if that, so today is already becoming a bigger and more exciting challenge than I ever would have predicted a day full of moronic data entry tasks could ever pose to a woman with my intelligence.

Thursday

We all trotted off to see David Sedaris last night. Like, the whole of Brisbane did. You get a guy like that in town and everything else is cancelled for the night. Shops were closed and the streets were deserted, which is what happens every night in Brisbane after 6pm, but this time it felt reasonable.

When we got there, the Irish Club was packed. Ben’s eyes lit up and he turned to me. “Hey! A book event like this is a great place to pick someone up if you’re single! Lorelei?”

I have become a project for my caring friends. As an example: on Saturday night, we played Scrabble, but the game soon metamorphosed into Scraggle. This is where Ben trawls through his Facebook friends, and with his guidance we look for people – I guess you could call them scrags if you are as crass and hilarious as we are after a drop or two of champagne – whom I could possibly pursue around town if I felt so inclined.

Anyway, Scraggle turned out to be a bit futile and we should have stuck to Scrabble, because it turned out that as Ben pointed to each photo he realized that he is only friends with fine, upstanding citizens, but more than that, they are all either gay or married. No scrags. (May I just clarify that I don't even understand how we started using this word, as I have never used it to describe anyone, male or female, before. But I hardly ever lose at Scrabble either and that also happened the same night, which leads me to the conclusion that sometimes you just have to get out of character for a few hours.)

But back to Sedaris. Without too many people noticing at first, he had majestically appeared a few minutes before schedule, floating in on some sort of cloud, and was now signing things for some people in the front row. More and more people were noticing and started slithering up to him with eight or so of his books hugged tightly to their chests, wanting a pre-show signing before he had even gotten up and uttered a word.

On the front wall loomed a huge painting of St Patrick, with snakes raging at his feet. I kept looking from St Patrick to Sedaris, pondering the story of St Patrick banishing the snakes out of Ireland, and yet here we had Sedaris, on the other hand, who gazed beatifically at all the snakes writhing at his feet, but instead of banishing them he welcomed them , with sparkling smile and pen at the ready. This in my mind beat the more-established St Patrick fair and square as Best Saint of the night, if anyone was judging. (And I’m always judging.)

I felt an elbow nudge me. This time, Anna, on my right, came in to bat for me in the struggle formerly known as Scraggle. “What about him?” She pointed to one of these guys who had gotten out of his seat and was now waiting to get his book signed. She was stage-whispering theatrically: “I know for a fact he’s also gonna be at Burroughs and Rakoff.”

Thus, a far more civilised strategy than Scraggle starts to emerge, and thank god for that.

Wednesday

I have been thinking of cooking Imam Bayildi for a while now. I used to eat it all the time in Turkey. My life was filled with all sorts of stuffed vegetables that year, but the aubergine was my favourite.

The name means ‘the Imam fainted’, and there’s a couple of lovely stories that go along with it. One is that the dish was so delicious that the Imam just fainted from delight after tasting it; another is that he fainted when he realized how much the ingredients cost. Regardless, it’s a beautiful way to describe a food, I think, and so much more evocative than just listing the ingredients, like tomato and lamb curry, or pan-fried chicken breast on corn pancake with avocado salsa. I know these dishes are just saying what they are, but I don’t believe in telling everything straight away. It’s a very blunt way to live.

Anyway, I cooked something sort of like Imam Bayildi last night. It was aubergine stuffed with risotto, served on a bed of tomatoes and fresh spinach (not that I would have called it that). The proper Imam Bayildi is stuffed with a mixture of onion, tomato and aubergine flesh, like a ratatouille, and in Turkey it’s usually eaten cold, with yoghurt.

But eating my version last night still reminded me of proper Imam Bayildi. I kept saying the words in my head, Imam Bayildi, my Turkish now shrunk to just a few phrases.

But when you say a foreign word that’s familiar to you, you hear the sound of it echo back and it works like a song or a scent or a flavour or a rainstorm by taking you somewhere else entirely from where you are.

Tuesday

I am bedridden today with an injury of the most unusual kind. If I smile, speak or laugh, a lightning bolt of pain shoots all the way down to my right rib. The doctor explained to me that it's muscle spasms. "Did you go the Ekka?" she said. "We get a lot of injuries this time of year because of the rides at the Ekka."

I went to great pains, more pain than I was already in, to politely explain that no, I didn't go to the Ekka, like, do you think that I have ever in my whole life been to the Ekka?

I rattled off a list of activities I've been involved with over the past two weeks. Bike-riding, jogging, yoga - such is the alpine purity of the tampon commercial that is my life. I also mentioned that I'd had to chop up about twenty kilograms of marketing material using a guillotine last week at my awful job, which required the repetitive, intense use of my right arm.

(I had really hoped that the guillotine might be the cause of my pain. I think there is a strong case to build against marketing departments worldwide, not only for the distress felt by the poor targets of these campaigns who, against their will, receive illiterate marketing material that is offensive in its disregard for both the environment and spelling, but also for the physical pain gone through by the Temp who has to trim the edges off this sort of crap.)

The doctor immediately homed in on the bike-riding though. She asked me how low my handlebars were. I winced as I demonstrated the genuflected position I am in when riding the bike I found discarded on the side of the road and made my own. She said there was no doubt about it - the bike was the cause of my problem.

She showed me a few stretches I could do. The pain made my eyes water. She gave me some Nurofen and sent me back to work.

All of this brings me to the question: how are facial muscles and rib muscles related? The word 'rib-tickler' acknowledges this connection, but I haven't really thought about it since primary school, which was the era when I laughed so much my ribs would ache for hours.

I recently experienced again the heaving, unstoppable laughter of primary school when I had dinner with my friends, Sarah and Andrea, who I grew up with. Heaps of people can make me laugh, but no one else in my adult life can cause such abdominal agony as they can just by reading the wine list out loud. Maybe it's because my ribs emotionally remember the hilarity of being with these people, and immediately go back to being 9 years old and silly again. (Q: Why did the boy fall off the swing? A: Because he had no arms!)

Needless to say, there is a moratorium on jokes in our household right now, as even the tiniest twitter of a giggle makes me howl in pain. But as much as Anna and Amy tiptoe around and try not to be funny, suddenly everything they say and do is totally slapstick. Because the very fact that I can't laugh makes me laugh. It's the funniest thing I've heard in ages.

I suppose if you have to be hurting for some reason, it might as well be because you're laughing. And at the same time, if you're laughing, it might as well be because you're hurting.

Monday

As my weekend melted away yesterday into the remains of a sombre, late Sunday jog, I found myself heading not towards home but to my local bookshop.

It was obvious upon entering the shop that something quite spectacular was going on. They were offering 10% off any book in the store, which in and of itself, isn't all that spectacular. But if you did buy a book, then you could also choose a FREE BOOK from their LUCKY DIP. That’s what I’m talking about when I say spectacular. The lucky dip prizes looked mysterious and appealing. They were – literally – brown paper packages tied up with strings.

I swiftly arrived at an understanding with myself that life was unable to continue satisfactorily until I purchased Voltaire’s Candide, thus making me eligible for the lucky dip. A 10% discount on one French classic later, and I was hovering in front of the massive, teetering tower of lucky dips in front of me.

“All you have to do is pick one!” said the girl at the counter.

“But how will I know what I’m gonna get?” I asked.

“That’s the point!” she exclaimed.

I fidgeted, nervous and idiotic. The brown paper was not transparent. I started picking up each package and kneading it thoughtfully, as if a simple little massage could separate quality reading from common trash. Perhaps well-crafted literature yelps when it is squeezed?

Of course, the likelihood of me picking from this pile, at random, a book of quality that I actually wanted to read was already pretty grim. Any fool could see that the books they were giving away were almost certainly of the remaindered variety. But I thought that if I could avoid any work of chick lit generally, and Maggie Alderson specifically, then I would feel satisfied with this little gambling experiment.

My theory is that the best way to know if a book is chick lit or not without seeing what’s on the cover is by knowing that chick lit generally comes in a C-format. These are those large, attention-seeking paperbacks that stick out of your handbag like a small box of Special-K. I also knew not to choose an A-format either – those small, thick books with tiny print that are inevitably of the mass-market paperback variety. Of course, both of these assertions are massive and wildly inaccurate generalizations, but I had to have some kind of method or I would have gone mad trying to choose something.

The B-format was definitely the safest choice. The size of a Penguin Classic. B-format is, in fact, the size of many, many books, so it still wasn’t foolproof in any way. But I simply had to throw caution to the wind. I took a deep breath and decided – a B-format-sized brown paper package with an orange string.

I galloped home, crashing on my bedroom floor and screaming out to anyone to come and witness this moment of truth. Amy, my housemate, appeared, breathless and concerned for my health as there was froth pouring from my mouth.

“I’m telling you, Amy, if this lucky dip book is crap, I will be so upset, because, man, I’ve just had such a hard week and I’m counting on this to be something brilliant or I just might ...”

She stood in my doorway looking on as I garbled and unwrapped the string and tore away at the paper, placing all my hopes on a gamble, as people often do. And suddenly, there it was. We both gasped. I had chosen, through my own genius and natural gravitation towards orange string, none other than: Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Other Plays.

To say it was the happiest moment of my life would sound ridiculous if I had ever had a child or won an Academy Award, but as I have done neither then I can confidently say it was the happiest moment of my life. I had not only not chosen chick lit, I had chosen a book I loved dearly (proven by the fact that I already owned two copies of it) and also one that – mind-bogglingly – arrived with the best timing ever. Because here’s the fantastical rub of the whole situation – I had watched the most recent film version – twice – just one day earlier, and in our wonderfully bourgeois home we had been chuckling at each other’s Wildean wit with Wildean accents and Wildean self-importance all day long.

We heard our other housemate, Anna, let out a muffled query from her room, something like what is all that ruckus going on in there, and I ran in to confirm, with tears in my eyes, that yes, I had just picked The Importance of Being Earnest out of a motley and random pile of wrapped books from which I could have just as easily pulled out Spotless or Spun Out: The Shane Warne Story. And wasn’t that just unbelievable because in this very living room, just yesterday, the three of us sat chortling at the movie of the same title.

I finish with the happy assertion that we now have one copy of Oscar Wilde for each and every taxpayer in our little blue house, which today stands more proudly than ever here in the prime minister’s own grand electorate. How lucky we are.

Friday

When editors hit rock bottom, they don't turn to booze or daytime TV. They automatically reach for anything written: newspapers, notes stuck on the fridge, leaflets left in the mailbox, electricity bills, the liner notes of CDs and DVDs, billboards, the marketing material their parents get sent from the ophthalmologist, and THEY SLAUGHTER THEM. By which I mean, they improve them. Significantly.

If you live with an editor, look for the warning signs. The sudden appearance of Biro corrections on all printed matter. Suggestions and queries which, in a gainfully employed scenario would probably be helpful and useful, have instead got the querulous gnash of an unreasonable human with an ax, I mean, an axe to grind.

Fueled less by an upstanding interest in clear and consistent prose than by self-righteousness and despair, every piece of text in the home becomes so much more elegantly simple that you have to wonder why this editor's extensive skills weren't used at the proper time - prior to publication. But a perspicacious witness can see this destruction for what it is - an editorial bender.

Where vexed musicians would just smash shit up, she makes sarcastic comments in the margins of The Brisbane News. Where frustrated writers might self-destruct with whiskey and extra-marital affairs, she strikes through misspellings on the take-away menus pinned on the fridge. Her carets add nothing to the prose but vitriol. Her suggestions are just plain mean. She's rock bottom, and the only solution is for her to get a job, so she can use her skills for good, not evil. And get paid for it.

Thursday

There’s a girl at Coles in West End whose name is Nebraska. I was putting my groceries through her checkout and, would you believe, listening to Bruce Springsteen, when I noticed her nametag. I pulled out my earphones. “Hey, are you named after the Bruce Springsteen album?”

She was cute, but after a quick assessment of her plastic jewellery and wide eyes, I confidently dated her as having being born no earlier than 1990, which almost immediately answered my question. (The album was released in 1982, the year my brother was born. My parents, rather upsettingly, named him neither Bruce nor Nebraska. You can't blame them for not having their fingers on the pulse that year though - they had four children under the age of 5, and ever since I had learned to speak a year earlier my voice drowned out any of their attempts to listen to anything else but me for the next 26 years or so.)

So even though she was born well after 1982's initial album release, I was still intrigued by my Springsteen theory. I believe that people harbour things like baby names for years and promise outrageous things to themselves such as, “I am officially gonna name my kid ‘Expo Oz’ and that’s the end of it,” after identifying deeply with Expo 88’s beloved platypus mascot, for example. I felt that her parents, or the more dominant one anyway, could have been saying ever since 1982 that his or her kid is going to be called Nebraska, after the haunting genius of Bruce Springsteen’s serial killer album. I could believe that. I wanted to believe that.

But back to Nebraska. The girl. She obviously gets asked this all the time – probably more by old guys with grey hair and a ponytail than by young girls with red hair and pigtails. She smiled a well-rehearsed smile and said, “Nah, I wasn’t actually,” and gave me my docket. I picked up my packet of Cerevite (“I don’t need a plastic bag thanks, Nebraska!”) and walked away, a bit shattered that something seemingly so deliberate and full of visionary splendour wasn’t, in fact, deliberate or visionary or splendid. I was also frustrated that she was still too young to cotton on to the idea that if she started claiming this album origin as her own then perhaps she wouldn't be a checkout chick anymore, but instead she could become, for example, the trophy girlfriend of some guitar-playing dude (which could potentially take her further than Coles ever could, at least if she was motivated and willing to travel).

All I’m saying that, if you're going to name your kid one of those names – an American state name – you want to make sure you have some more meaning behind it than your average Joe, or should I say, your average Indiana, Montana, Alabama or Utah.

Wednesday

I can think of nothing more tedious than having to listen to someone recount their dream the next day, unless of course you are so caught up in them that it's a thrill to speculate how exactly the dream might connect with their waking life. But I break with my own rule now to recount a dream I recorded in my diary from 30th July, 2004.

Somewhere between Swanston St and Victoria Markets. S grabbed my arm and said, ‘There’s something I’ve got to show you’, and led me towards an exit near the street. She showed me my name graffitied into the wall, something like ‘D12x5gr3 LOVES LORELEI.’

The record of the dream ends a sentence later, with a whole bunch of people laughing at D12x5gr3's love for me.

I mention my recollection of this because of how strongly, upon waking, I still exactly remembered the name of my admirer. (But I love my own offhand vagueness of recalling the name as being 'something like D12x5gr3'. Was my relationship with my own diary so coy that I had to pretend I was unsure of the exact combination of letters and numbers - when it is completely obvious that it was branded into my brain?)

There must be a reason why I remembered that detail so vividly back in 2004. I just googled the code in every possible way in case there was a secret message there, some pharmaceutical I should have been on, a new robot that would have helped me make sense of things, but nothing came up. Disappointing.

Tuesday

I am reading a lot at the moment, because like Emma Bovary I find it’s the only way to escape the dullness of my life. Well, it is kind of dull at the moment. Which is not how I intended things to be. However, it’s only temporary. In the meantime, I think about Newland Archer in that last scene of The Age of Innocence, which I polished off late last night. Turning away and walking back to his hotel after watching Ellen Olenska’s apartment for hours. Sending his modern and bouncy son up to meet her, and deliberately deciding – although both he and she were now free to do as they chose – to not be with her. To not even see her after thirty years. I was pretty crushed; I’m not sure what made me think he would act, after his lifetime of trained inarticulateness - hope, I suppose.

And what a life you must imagine I lead when I report that I had the following stimulating, vital conversation before breakfast; nay, even before a cup of tea, at 7am on Sunday morning.

ANNA: I just finished Hedda Gabler. What a bitch!

LORELEI: Oh, no! No way, she’s not! She’s the bravest thing ever!

ANNA: She could have just left him.

LORELEI: No she couldn’t!

ANNA: She totally burnt the manuscript!

LORELEI: But she was trapped!

ANNA: She wasn’t, she had a choice!

LORELEI: No she didn’t!

ANNA: She was pathological! She had a choice!

LORELEI: Ha! Death or death? Good choice.

ANNA: Well, she could have lived on beyond her situation. Mrs Elvsted did it.

LORELEI: Mrs Elvsted was pandering to the men, that’s how she survived, nurturing their creativity. Hedda wanted to be in control of her own life.

ANNA: She was a coward!

LORELEI: She wanted freedom! Death was the only way!

ANNA: I disagree!

LORELEI: God, you know I had forgotten she burnt that manuscript though. Can you imagine if someone burnt our manuscripts?

ANNA: Well, I’ve backed mine up.

LORELEI: I know, me too, but the more I think about it, that was a horrific thing to do.

ANNA: But she didn’t have any other way out!

LORELEI: Yeah, but she was totally destructive!

ANNA: But that came from being completely dissatisfied because of the society she had to live in!

LORELEI: But she didn’t have to be such a bitch!

ANNA: But she had no choice! It was death or death!

It beats talking about the Olympics.

Wednesday

The fact that I haven't written in so long is terrorising me. You know how we get when we're like this. Fidgety, stormy, sometimes violent. So, this is my quick attempt to remedy it so I may act nicer round the house.

This morning I was captivated by a small, black bird, with a burst of orange around both its eyes. It was gobbling up berries which were the same colour as the patches around its eyes. The size of the orange patches on the bird, and the size of the berries was the same. Pea-sized, you might say. But not pea-coloured. Like I said, the patches on the bird were orange. The berries were orange. And sitting there amongst the green bushes, the black bird picked those orange berries with its pointy beak, and threw them back like a guy eating peanuts at a bar. Each time it did this, it froze still for a moment, so the three balls of orange - two bursting out from its eyes and one in its beak - made it look cyclopean for a split second.

A skilled writer who perhaps cares more for her audience than for herself may have been able to express that same thing in less than two sentences. Alas, the stumbling, the mass of words, the deliberately stubborn I-am-not-going-back-over-this-and-checking-this-for-any-sort-of-clarity is endemic in me this week (you may argue, this decade), which is why I haven't shown up until now. I'll come back in a better mood, at which point, the protagonist will push the bird off stage and resume her rightful eponymous role.