The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

Amanda Palmer at the Opera House: wheeeeeee. AFP always puts on a good show, and while I'm not that into the music of her pet projects/opening acts, their showmanship cannot be faulted. Jane Austen Argument are adorable and the Baltic Sea Gentlemen have excellent comic timing and hilarious faces. And an accordian.

And of course Neil Gaiman came out to read some stuff, which was awesome (megafauna :D) and slightly terrifying (after reading the intro to Smoke and Mirrors, where he sheepishly explains that the sexy story in it took him years of writing a paragraph, blushing, and putting it away for a month, it feels incongrouous to hear him say "fuck" out loud in his impeccable British accent).

Amanda was lively and entirely at home on the stage, as always - even when her skirt/train thing got caught on a speaker, and when she forgot her setlist, and when her "make out with random audience members during Missed Me" plan encountered what appeared to be an awkward grabby dude (we were up in the circle so it was a little hard to see what was actually going on if the spotlight wasn't quick enough). She also told a cute little story about one of my favourite covers from Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, On An Unknown Beach. Apparently it's from an obscure CD that was given to her by a music nerd when she was 18, and it's by Peter Jeffries, a New Zealand artist who is now a music teacher, and she has been looking for him in vain ever since. She earnestly requested that if anyone in the audience knew him, or ran into him, they should let him know that she covered his song.

The theme of the show was "Bogans vs Artfags" but, you know, it's Amanda Palmer - most of the fans went with the Artfag side. I considered going half'n'half to bring balance to the force or some shit, but let's face it - my wardrobe is not skewed heavily towards the thongs and australian-flag merch end of the scale. I went with the colourful stockings/whacky face make-up/weird wobbly butterfly clips concoction instead. The stage was crowded with theme stuff, though - there was an esky, a grill and a Hills Hoist, and a rack of whacky costumes, and a dummy in a gaga-esque dress, and all that.

Afterwards most of us made a speedy dash for the bathroom (it was a long concert - the encore included ladies in spangly dresses for Map of Tasmania and Oasis) (yes, that IS a rainbow flag with some pubes on it, why do you ask?) (also one of the dancers did a rap rebuttal about how shaving was okay xD) and then joined the others in the signing queue. I didn't actually bring anything to get signed, but I wanted to show Neil my tattoo, since he'd been blogging about seeing a similar one. He was delighted, and spontaneously hugged me and then pointed it out to Amanda. (They were signing at one table, which made it all the more convenient for Jess to wheedle them both into signing one side of her chest each. Classy as always xD)

I am told by my friends that I actually squee'd, but I don't believe them. Anyway, I hustled them off to get food as soon as that was done, because I was about to faint or cry or something. This ended up being me scrounging off of Avi, because the only thing open in Circular bloody Quay at midnight is McDonalds, and a little vegan muesli bar with promise of instant noodles in forty minutes is basically preferable. We hung out chatting at Avi's for a while, then everyone remembered their various 8am wake-up calls (suckerrrrs) and dispersed. I ended up waiting at a bus stop with some bats for half an hour, most of which I spent spamming twitter and singing random bits of songs that were now stuck in my head.

Slowly, things come into order. I have scheduled singing lessons, and a tattoo. Tomorrow I'm making overdue medical appointments. I am caught up on Anthology work for now. I successfully wrote a yuletide story in the Mirrormask fandom entitled The Point Of Keys. I also recieved this cute (and longish!) Obernewtyn story.

I'm going through my least-listened files in Winamp to rate and playlist stuff, although it keeps listing TV shows there because, obviously, I don't watch most of more than once or twice. I am getting into Jawbreaker, which is odd because when I first looked them up, years ago, on hearing and loving Brand New's cover of Accident Prone, I was horribly disappointed by how amelodic they were. I suppose my tolerance for less-than-perfect vocals has increased. Level up in punk rock? xD

( amusing stuff that happened this weekend, containing equal parts fail and win )

EDIT: lol for some reason this posted backdated to last month? I swear I did not mean to do that... I think maybe I had the post window open for longer than I thought. Oops! fixed now.

Dear Santa, for this miscellaneous holiday season I would like some rollicking adventure stories, or lulz, or possibly both!

( also, PONIES )

i am a clutter
i am
two square centimetres of a clear, flat surface.
i have crooked teeth
in labyrinth piles on the floor.
tweezers.
where is my overcoat? no, the nice one
with the faux-fur collar, and which unfortunately has no pockets?
i am a useless lock. my things migrate
without my knowledge or permission.
i have fingernails like black eyes.
i am a citizen of object.
i have boxes.
my loss is chronic, not terminal: i will turn up.
who does this scarf belong to?
who will finally throw out these broken headphones?
i have
things in boxes.
i am cold. my fingernails. everything will fray.
everything will unravel. there is no focus.
there is this thick, grainy layer of dust. i am
peripheral, fogging the mirror.
i am fourteen pairs of dirty underwear
about the place. my clock
has stopped. it has been nearly two for weeks now.
this does not
bother me. time
does not stick in my throat.
i am currently reading split ends and cracks in CD cases.
what happened to my other glove?
what is beckoning me from the corner?
what have i forgotten?
what have i forgotten?
tweezers. panadol. my contacts.
i will not evict the spider until i must.
i will just finish this chapter.
i will
finish up, turn in, fray at the edges some more.
i have run out of tissues.
i have gifts and talents.
i have markers. some of them work.
i have spirits.
i have paranoid delusions.
i have four large hairclips, and thirteen small hairclips
and more bobby pins than pair socks.
this is a kind of despair also.

Hokay! So I am in the midst of another fortnight'o'doom but this time I am trying to keep up with the internet. Having got those mixes up my to-do list contains two gulf_aid promises and more stuff for uni. My more immediate to-do list consists of stuff to put in a perzine i shall hopefully print tomorrow evening have already printed by now because this entry is SO LONG OH GOD to take to This Is Not Art, where I shall spend the long weekend in a Newcastle hostel with some people from the Writers' Society, doing writery things.

What has my fortnight'o'doom so far consisted of? Well, on Monday¹ I went to a short story reading in Newtown entitled Penguin Plays Rough. My boy Alexander, meanwhile, was also going to Newtown to see the Rumjacks with his cousin, so I showed up at his place and we all walked down there together. The Rumjacks are a local sort of celtic folk punk type of band, which means they are basically Al's power animal². They were doing a free gig at the Townie, the performance space area of which has an approximately 60-40 pool table to regular table surface area ratio. Anyway, we got there before the first set, had some drinks and giggled a bit at the circle of little old ladies sitting on couches near the door. Little did we know, grannies were hardcore! When the band started they were totally into it, two of them even stuck their hands in the air and did those little palm rotor movements that old people do when they listen to music.

As soon as I finished my screwdriver I ventured forth to locate the location of Penguin Plays Rough, which heretofore I had only encountered in the form of WriteSoc newsletters. ( onwards! )

...and today I hung out with Alice and ate cupcakes and impulse-purchased comics before coming home to finish writing this LUDICROUS ESSAY OF A BLOG POST, OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS, WHAT THE HELL.

What have I been up to since I last posted? EVERYTHINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG.

---

¹ LAST Monday *looks sheepish*
² Thank you, jkrockin, you are entirely responsible for this figure of speech entering my vocabulary.
³ Also, spent way too long walking behind this one woman going in the same direction, which made me feel awkward about singing under my breath as I do when walking semi-deserted streets.
⁴ The third or fourth author to read began by apologising for not deviating from the unintentional "women's issues" theme of the night, before proceeding to read aloud her draft of a touching and hilarious story about abortion clinic waiting rooms.
⁵ Okay, Tasmanian Tigers, but dingoes are inherently funnier creatures :P
⁶ Heh, long entry is long too, BUT NOW DO YOU SEE WHAT KIND OF WEEK I AM HAVING.
⁷ Of course, the only ink I had was blue.
⁸ The men in my boyfriend's family are REALLY FUCKING TALL.

So, Australians! I am organising a Collective For The Dispersal Of Ludicrous International Shipping Rates with regard to http://www.topshelfcomix.com, which is having an excellent sale until Friday. I've got two other people in so far, but a couple more would be perfect :) (shipping is like $50, whereas some of the individual items are marked down to $3 YOU CAN SEE HOW THIS IS SLIGHTLY RIDIC) so check it out and see if there's anything you want. (I am making use of it to remedy the sad absence on my bookshelf of Alan Moore related items.)

Also, I have written a thing for this zine and I could do with someone who knows anything about christian mythology and/or the punk scene to give it a quick once-over and make sure I haven't written anything egregiously dumb or unrealistic about either. I'm trying to pawn this task off on my boyfriend but he has like sixty books to read about lady anarchists in spain or something, so yep :P

IN CONCLUSION

Well, it's been a bit of a week. On Monday night I noticed an odd lump on the left side of my neck, just at the base of my skull. Having been sitting in front of the computer all day, I thought it must be a tension knot, despite never having had a protruding one like that. BUT THEN I felt two tiny ones right next to each other lower down on my neck, kind of like someone had surgically implanted smarties beneath my skin when I wasn't looking. Naturally I was a bit freaked out, I mean, what? LUMPS? NECK CANCER! But then I told my mum, who immediately took over ALLLLLL OF THE WORRYING DUTIES and flailed around calling all my grandparents and This One Friend Of Hers Who Is A Doctor. I promised to make a doctor's appointment forthwith, which turned out to be Wednesday, so she decided to continue to panic.

( We cut to a commercial break as Maggie contemplates the ultimate destiny of... NECK LUUUUMPS! ...actually this is mostly about buses and thespians, sry )

Thing Of The Day: RIOT NRRD, a webcomic linked from Tiger Beatdown, which is SO VERY ADORABLE. I mean its name is RIOT NRRD, for fuck's sake. It basically does what it says on tghe tin :P also JOSS WHEDON PUPPYYYYY. I totally made a DW feed :P

I really need to relocate my mornings to the actual, you know, morning. I've lately spent hours after midnight doing nothing in particular and then woken up at one pm, and it's not doing me much good.

So yeah, today was mostly consumed with sleeping and waiting around for a friend to confirm whether or not he was flaking on a thing until it became obvious that he was, in fact, flaking on the thing, by the fact that he had not called me to confirm or deny flaking on the thing. There did eventually turn out to be a good reason, but it has become apparent that I really can't handle not knowing what's going on (especially when a definite cancellation would free me up for something else). I end up all jittery and trying to ring obviously-out-of-reception phones repeatedly and not getting other useful things done (not that that last one is exclusive to this phenomenon :P) and generally not being in the best place. I'm going to have to start mapping things out more thoroughly and explicitly with regards to backup plans and confirmations.

To more cheerful news! I wrote a fic for access_fandom's Festibility: The Uncertain Trumpet, X-Men gen.

I mean to write more of those prompts, because there are some really interesting ones, but I figure I should get started on some stuff I promised for gulf_aid_now. (Also on my epic mess of a room and all the shit I promised myself I'd get done before I turned 21, lol whoops)

Incidentally, I have actually been reading my flist and all while I wasn't posting. This has not helped the situation of my six million tabs, oh well.

I did that thing again. The thing where I don't post for ridiculous lengths of time because a post about some big event is just a-sittin' there in my draft box, steadily receding into the past. I know, we're all shocked.

So I really did spend most of that month procrastinating. I didn't even get much further in Portal, because I was hit by that curious mental tic whereby doing anything substantial is Admitting I Am Not Doing Work. Unlike, say... compulsively refreshing twitter and playing solitaire.

Yup.

But I finally handed everything in, not too late if you don't count extensions, and only slightly under all the given word-counts. Probably a lot of it was a bit shit, but oh well. I got at least one decent poem out of the Culture & Poetics final, a decent novel opening that I can hammer into better shape later (and the realisation that HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS NOVELS ARE LONG), and I had fun writing about tiny communists for Utopias. The stress was probably good for me! Or something.

My final extension ran out oh... a couple of hours before my volunteering gig at Supanova began. So that was good timing! I even managed to get my hair properly bleached for the first time on the way (which: holy burning sensation, Batman!) and which was handy for my Corinthian costume, seen here albeit not in sufficient detail to see the awesomeness of the facepaint on my eyelids. It was generally agreed to be a great outfit! Also, the sunglasses made me feel extremely badass standing next to queues with my arms folded and telling people when they can go forward and when they are in danger of turning into a snarling mob. That was handy because on Saturday morning I got commandeered for that particular duty at the Supanova Store just after doing my make-up but before getting a) my badge and official shift-times and b) breakfast. This is because a shitload more people showed up than expected and allllll of them wanted Lou Ferrigno autographs. Well, no, all the scruffy middle-aged men wanted Lou Ferrigno autographs, everybody else wanted Eliza Dushku autographs. We were so swamped that the coordinators couldn't find anyone to relieve me for another ~three hours (by which time McDonalds were no longer serving breakfast). I felt very put-out about this until I discovered that Jenn, Mish and Nat were about three times as swamped at the photobooth, because everyone and their mum wanted a photo with Eliza or Summer Glau.

Sydney Supanova is held in a big dome thing out in Olympic Park. I camped out at Al's place because a) he actually lives on a train line which significantly reduced my travel time and b) the man is some sort of crazy morning person and was pretty much certain to ensure I was going to be awake by seven. (The whole relationship thing is going well, by the way!) Somehow I still managed to be late on Saturday morning though (hence the lack of breakfast). That is because trains and me? We are not friends. We are not even frenemies, we are more like a rickety wooden bridge over a canyon, and a semi-trailer. I should probably put the rest of this story behind a cut, huh? Ahhh, the return of my epically long posts :D

( TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS sorry, no, I mean FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAILS no wait, excuse me, this is so embarrassing, EXPLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS fuckit )