The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

i mean i was already twenty three on friday but now i have ~celebrated~ it so it’s all official and stuff!

I celebrated so hard that I woke up with enough alcohol in my system to forget that taking codeine-fortified painkillers with alcohol in your system is a really bad idea! And then I went woooeeeooo and sat next to a bowl for about half an hour just in case. But now I am past most of the nausea (and it is ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY TYPICAL of me to be nauseous in the standard hangover space for reasons completely unrelated to hangovers) and all that is left is a bit of swimmy vision and wheeee.

I had a pretty great day yesterday. Al and I had brunch with both our parentses and it was minimally embarrassing! My dad gave me a skull-shaped shotglass & a t-shirt with a screenprint involving a Russian che guevara joke, and my mum gave me yet another unnecessary purse, a CD called “Land of The Powerful Owl”, a cushion and a dinky pearl necklace. This tells you everything you need to know about my family. Al’s mum knitted me a beanie. If I marry this guy I forsee a future of owning many, many beanies.

In the evening we went down to the Summer Hill Hotel. It turned out to have some minor space issues, but after a while most of the other patrons cleared out because the footy was over, so we could spread out again. At one point a random drunk older woman sat down at our table, knocking over someone’s drink, because we were in front of the TV. After a while we asked her to move so we could fit all my guests at the table, at which point she glared daggers at us from the next one for a while. Anyway, I caught up with a bunch of great people, although I think may have neglected Stan and his new girlfriend for a while there, because she embarked upon an ambitious construction project using leftover chips and aioli.

My first three and a half drinks managed to leave me feeling relaxed but otherwise soberish, and then someone bought me a double and about four sips into it my face started feeling numb. Cumulative effects of alcohol! But anyway, I don’t remember saying anything embarrassing, or at least anything I felt embarrassed about saying, so I’m going to call it a win. It really should have occurred to me that I couldn’t metabolise all that overnight though. Now I’m going to go see what Land of the Powerful Owl is all about, I imagine a codeine high can only help.

I found it odd initially that the UTS theatre society, Backstage, wanted to do a double bill of The Real Inspector Hound and Mother Courage & Her Children, but I must admit it's worked out pretty well. You come away from the night with a real sense of the general theme being Plays That We All Studied In High School er Won't Let You Forget You're Watching A Play. Fourth wall? Hound's got five. Suspension of disbelief? Bertholt Brecht spits upon suspension of disbelief. And yet, it goes without saying, the skill of the respective playwrights means you can actually make a pretty entertaining evening out of it, and this the actors did with aplomb.

We open with Tom Stoppard's absurdist classic The Real Inspector Hound, and let me reassure you I am fully aware of the irony of making any sort of critical review of The Real Inspector Hound, and promise not to use the word "elan" at any point other than that one. To say this production was on a budget is to make university students the world over laugh uproariously and insist that it is your round, so rather than engaging in funny business with mirrors, the traditional Messrs Moon And Birdboot Are In The Audience game was played by means of several chairs extending the audience seating onto the stage (floor) in a curve with Reserved signs on two of them, not that this was necessary because the audience knows what's what and nobody wants to sit in the weird seats where the lighting kids can stare at the back of your neck. I hadn't brought a companion, so I ended up sitting in the middle of the second row next to pair of men with accents so incredibly German they could not possibly be actual Germans from Germany.

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What can I say about Mother Courage? Many things, but a lot of them involve trying to pronounce Verfremdungseffekt. It seems like each new production uses different theatrical devices to shoot for Brecht's ideal of estrangement, and each one manages to shoot itself in the foot by casting likeable, empathic actors. This was basically the case here. It is of course possible that the artist's goal of undermining audience immersion in the story to breaking point in order to make them think about the issues presented is truly impossible to achieve, and it is also highly probable that anyone who's going to think about it at all is capable of doing so while totally engrossed in the story, but it is more to the point to note that the spread of postmodernism and the vagaries of student theatre mean we are entirely accustomed to a fourth wall that's more of a colander, to highly non-naturalistic scenery and to metanarrative commentary. The only things that remain unique to Brecht and therefore remotely jarring are the thing where you announce what's going to happen in the following scene and the thing with the awful music. All of the above were used quite well in this production.

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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.

Gosh, getting back into this blogging thing is hard. I've gotten out of the habit of recording stuff I do. I forget about it really easily. What did I do last week? Beats me. I've always had massive blank patches in my memory, I don't know, probably a lot of people do, but sometimes I get anxious like things I haven't told anybody about never really happened. It doesn't help that my fall-off-the-face-of-the-blog periods tend to coincide with times when my head is foggy and I can't concentrate on things, much like I feel now since I have decided to blog in the evening after basically just messing around on the internet all day. Good job, Maggie!

So what I have been doing is seeing friends and procrastinating heavily, mostly! On Thursday I went to mishka_jayne's birthday do with Al. We were late because when I dropped by his house to pick him up he was still picking knots out of his epic, epic hair, having wasted much of the morning arguing about Hugo Chavez on facebook. This tells you pretty much everything you need to know about him. We got there eventually, ate delicious sushi and watched Inception, which was mindfuckingly awesome. I have been raving about it all over the place, all I shall say here is MUST WATCH SEVERAL MORE TIMES and then write fic :D

The next morning Al had a 9am plane to catch for a cousin's wedding in Queensland, which meant that I had to wake up at six in the goddamn morning and help him locate things like hairbrushes that had been eaten by his room. Now, my room is pretty messy, right. Piles of clothes everywhere and all, books and comics, sure. But I, at least, do not have rogue cutlery haunting my room. He claims that the mess has character, so I named it Baldrick. It works on pretty much every level, I am quite pleased with myself.

Anyway, I went home to shower and then came right back again to have dinner with Avi, Jess, Alice and Joy in Newtown. We ate large volumes of vegan food and then wandered all the way up and down King street looking for a particular gelato place Avi insisted had vegan chocolate sorbet, to no avail. We ended up in one of the classier sex shops, ogling latex skirts and handcuffs and comparing er, notes. Also, discovered a) an entire case of what looked like nothing so much as sex toys designed by Apple, and b) that there is a rechargable vibrator you plug into USB ports to charge. I discovered this last one by pointing at it and saying "Gosh, even your flash drives look like vibrators..."

The rest of my weekend has been nowhere near as novel, consisting largely of sitting inf ront of the computer and being shouted at by my mother. \o/ However I did at least cull my epic volume of open tabs just slightly. So, not ENTIRELY unproductive.

I have finally caught up on and added to my regular reading a non-English webcomic! Here's an update that is totally understandable to everyone, though :P (also, punk rock god [and son]: who CARES what they're saying!) (Also I think I just translated a Russian cuss as "becoming covered in dick.")

Also I have been listening to music here, it's pretty sweet!

And just now I got eaten by Youtubehopping Adam Hills videos. BRB DED OF LOL

I think I have some sort of persistent opportunistic flu infection that pops right up as soon as my immune system is compromised by stress or leaking or lack of sleep. grah. hate. Also I have had a weird skin reaction to this lotion my gran brought back from Israel. Fuck you, dead sea! However this resulted in hilarious twitter conversation yonder:

jk_rockin: you're allergic to the Dead Sea?
me: Apparently so! This does not bode well for any undead israeli boys that want to sweep me off my feet in the future!
fishmouse: Better a vampire than a zombie anyday.
me: yeah I'm pretty sure EVERYONE is allergic to zombies :P
me: oh man, imagine if you were allergic to the kiss of death! talk about adding insult to injury!
me: MOOHAHAHA, NOW YOU ARE VUN OFF USS! ...and svellink up somesink awful. Armand, is zis supposed to happen!?
jk_rockin: ONE OF US ONE OF US ONE OF US

Further such hilarity occurred IRL last night, when I showed up at Jenn's Batcave (a warehouse full of amazing giant piles of junk, omg I wanted to put on a snorkel and wade in) for adventures with hairdye! But first, a scenic detour to the Shire. "Hey Jenn... I think I am on the wrong train. Where is Panania?"

Anyway I have a red skunk stripe now. Oh did I mention I got a superdykey haircut last friday? I did that, yes. It is. Interesting. I can never quite impress upon a hairdresser that MY HAIR IS A LITTLE CURLY and they keep giving me styles I have to straighten bits of otherwise they look ridic. But anyway I have a red fauxhawk with an S-curl and brown lady-sideburns with almost-shaved cut-outs behind them. I like it but I don't think short and rectangular is really my thing in general - next time I will let my hair grow out much longer before I go in, give them something to work with. On the other hand, it looks excellent under hats! :D

A meme I tagged long ago and forgot about:

Reply to this post asking for words and I'll give you five I associate with you, which you then talk about in an entry on your journal!

From amber!

slam poetry: hahaha I am not sure why you associate this with me? I have done it all of twice. I find it interesting how rhythms are different when you're writing poetry to speak aloud, than to look at on a page. It's a matter of long and short beats, internal rhymes and consonance. Whereas book-poetry is less about how the words sound aloud and more how they look on the page, what kind of beats a space, a line break, an indent create. I think the best poetry combines the two, really, but I can't quite express the process.

Russia: ZE MOTHERLAND. lol. I identify as Russian without any particular tie to the place we call Russia, I think that's common to a lot of immigrant kids like me. It's about the language, the food, some little customs and cartoons. Family history plays a part, too, anyone whose family spent a few generations in the Soviet Union generally has a fairly russo-unique set of "grandpa stories" and interesting familial neuroses.

The actual place is by all accounts a corrupt racist alcoholic winter wonderland, but I'd still like to go back there some time just for the novelty of getting by in a language other than english.

neutral_omens: Ahh that old game. A Good Omens based "let's throw some characters into a place and see what happens" roleplay, albeit much smaller than ones like CFUD and la. We actually got together in OOC-chat and worked out bits of plot :P also, it was HILARIOUS (or maybe I just thought it was because I was sixteen). Angels, wizards, demons, an antichrist and some random bewildered humans in a hotel that used to be a satanic nunnery cum paintball retreat? OH yeah. I played Newt Pulsifer, toying with a proto-accident-field-superpower that has inspired a comic book character who now lives in my head. At some point I will script the first issue and find an artist for that.

Here are some of my favourite threads I was in: John Constantine and Newt Pulsifer vs. the Cellophane Beast was fun times, as was American Gods character Loki prodding Newt's Special Fail Powers. That one also resulted in a hilarious AU drawing based on what else could have fallen through the ceiling (hint: there was nudity).

Amanda Palmer: lol this list was given me before Evelyn Evelyn drama drama went down. I should have done it then, I could have gone on about her voice and lyrics and audacity and ability to connect with people instead of her privilege and public relations failure. And after all I said in the last post I STILL ended up arguing about it with strangers on the internet. God, both sides, too! I guess I am just one of those CAN'T SLEEP, SOMEBODY IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET people, regardless of whether that person agrees with me or not. Well, you know, you don't want people who agree with you to be wrong, do you?

Honestly I am more disappointed in the way Amanda has handled this whole fiasco than with the concept of the record. Like, sure, that was problematic, but as an initial provocation on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is accidentally saying "stand up for yourself" to a wheelchair-user and 10 is Spartan social darwinism, Evelyn Evelyn is maaybe a three. She could totally have salvaged that situation, but instead she's managed to make everyone who started off going "amanda I love you but I feel a little uncomfortable with this" feel like she sees no difference between us and people who tried to censor Oasis/think her photography is "goffic snuff porn"/hate her for dating Neil Gaiman (disclaimer yes I know those are all different people). For somebody who has cultivated such a feeling of closeness with her fans that just feels like a bit of a betrayal.

Also I am a little disappointed in the manner in which many people pursued this complaint against her in the first place, but that's a whole essay on effective privilege-checking that I want to save until tempers are less frayed, so that I can use this as a specific in the general case without putting people on the defensive.

And speaking of defensive don't even TALK to me about the people jumping in with "it is your responsibility if you feel offended because we choose our feelings" (more or less verbatim from one) because OH MY GOD. Alternating fury and motts at those people, why must you remind me that just because somebody likes the same stuff as me does not mean they are not a douche? (also mottsy because it reminds me of times when I have leapt to the defense of something without thinking, although I can't recall specific instances right now, but that just makes me paranoid!)

talking-really-fast: it's. a thing I do? XD I think out loud, and thoughtspeed is always faster than we are physically capable of forming words, so sometimes I trip over myself. Also sometimes people say "okay now say that again only use a spacebar" (not in so many words). Aside from that it's not much of a thing one way or another. Now talking really LOUD is a real problem I have, whereby I forget that I have a volume setting that can be adjusted until someone goes OMG STFU MAGGIE. (I feel that is a good note on which to end this post.)

And OBVIOUSLY I then make my first post in 2010 on the sixteenth of January. I swear I have forgotten how to blog, or something.

So, first things first!

Stories Wot I Wrote For Yuletide

1. My main fic! you said you'd help me disappear, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, 1200 words, for featherlane

2. Madness treat one! And I Said Who Are You Thinking Of, Glee, 937 words, NSFW (oh my god), for pixienotes.

3. Madness treat two! Some folks say there ain't no bears in arkansas, Mirrormask, 408 words, for Angie.


Naturally the porny one has over twice as many hits as the others XD

ALSO: I wrote something for the no_tags fixchange, which I am about to repost here, as well as the WKAP fic - I think I'll leave the treats just on the archive, because one is more a ficlet which I might still expand on and the other is. porn. /o\

I want to rec a heap of other stuff from no_tags but I have not even finished reading all of them yet! So i will save that for then. And I'll be periodically rec'ing yuletide stuff as I go through THOSE, there is SO MUCH FIC, YOU GUYS.

I've also been reading a lot of srs bzns stuff about cultural exportation of conceptions of mental illness and gendered expectations in relationships (I got my mum this book for new year and I highly reccommend it for a feminist analysis of the mars/venus trope) and ~stuff.

Oh and I posted an offer on help_haiti for three lots of epic beta services, despite feelings of insignificance surrounding the whole endeavour - hey, it can't hurt, I guess. Actual monetary donations were problematic because no charity seems to accept paypal for some reason :/ but someone on ontd_startrek finally came up with one. I really have to get that visa debit this summer :P

And ~stuffff has been happening in my life but I am way too behind to document it at this point! In any case I feel like this blog should be less of a "and then this happened and then this happened" sort of place these days. I will still post about hilarious things that happen to me if I can write about it in a narrative way, or as a brief anecdote, but maybe if I don't feel like absolutely everything has to go on here in chronological order I won't have these huge build-ups of pressure and I will actually post more often!

Of course this week I have been lazy and chilled out at home for a few days in a row - even last night when I had no less than three possible events to go to. I guess I just felt kind of burnt out after the last month or two of epic socialising, and wanted to sit around and play facebook scrabble and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. Which is... interesting, I guess. I was amused by the opening sequence, which I documented on twitter thus:

@bliumchik: lol Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened begins with Watson rolling around on a bed, moaning "Holmes!"
@bliumchik: Then Holmes bitches all the romance has gone out of the criminal world, & Watson suggests he buy some books of a vague yet specific nature!
@bliumchik: Why does Holmes have a portrait of a random dude petting a creepy little girl on the head and waving?
@bliumchik: Aww, but when I try to walk into Watson's bedroom Holmes says "I have no reason to go there!" ...methinks, protest, too much?
@bliumchik: lolol the pictures on the walls are recycled. Hello again, waving dude and creepy child! I see you have migrated to the hallway!
@bliumchik: Haha the good thing about animating london is that all you need for sky is one grey tone XD
@bliumchik: Why have I just purchased a book about fish?

Then I got stuck in a rosebush. Whoops! Anyway, now I am slightly baffled because I can't figure out if there is more stuff I can click on hidden amidst all the ~scenery or if my next step involves DOING something with the stuff I've found so far.

But tonight I am not being a hermit, but instead going to Die Maschine! Thinking of not wearing my big goth boots this time, though - I wore them to Desiree's Vegan Anachronism birthday party and there was walking around and my feet were very angry at them. Also: lazy, see above.

Um right so. Twilight drinking game was fun! I blame Edward's hair for my subsequent headache.

Right now I am procrastinating on two items: 1. essay due Wednesday on an incredibly open topic WHERE DO I STAAAART and 2. going down to the junction for to return a DVD my dad left with me before fucking off to new zealand with my mum.

Other things my parents left behind: a total lack of margarine and a shitload of zuchini. What do I do with this much zuchini, you guys? I have been replacing the marga with avocado because leaving the house ew. But I have never eaten a zuchini! In fact nobody in my house regularly eats zuchini, so I do not understand why my mother bought like twenty of them right before going on holiday!

The main reason I am not returning the DVD, aside from general leaving the house ew, is the torrential rain outside my window. It is seriously niagara falls out there. My grandparents, brother and cat all got caught in it, because my grandparents, brother and cat all leave the house.

To be fair I barely spent a consecutive twelve hours in this house for most of the last month, so this week I am perfectly justified in hibernating. The trouble is not having to GO anywhere seems to equate in my brain with not having to DO anything, so this essay is not turning out well.

Incidentally my sodden cat looks like a hedgehog and has taken shelter in my lap. It is extroadinarily fun to give a cat a noogie when the fur on the top of its head is sticking up like a twelve year old boy that's got into his dad's hairgel. I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of a way to relate this to twitter without sounding vaguely dirty.

The building in which my awesome stickfighting¹ class is held is Undergoing Construction. Anyone who has any experience with builders knows that a site can remain in this state for practically infinite periods of time, entering a sort of Perpetual Construction Zone in which walled-off areas grow into the architecture and you start imagining that the construction noises are in time with the elevator music.

What I'm saying is, I got to my class two weeks ago and found the plaza and stairs all boarded up, with signs directing me to the main building lifts to get down to the right level. Once you descend you find yourself in a maze of twisty tunnels, all alike. In the distance you hear the eldritch sounds of industrial drills. You see a sign reading "Dentist" with an arrow pointing in an indeterminate direction. What would you like to do?
> look around
there are three exits.
> go north
which way is north? you are underground.
> take the first exit
that is not an exit. You were deceived by an inexplicably protruding temporary wall.
> take the second exit
you follow the corridor until you see a large sign reading ITC. you have reached your destination.
> hit some things with some sticks
you hit some things with some sticks. You are now sweaty, poorer by fifteen dollars and full of endorphins. Also your bus leaves in ten minutes. What would you like to do?
> leave
you are standing outside ITC. There are three exits.
> take exit I came in by
which exit did you come in by?
> um
your bus is now leaving in eight minutes.
> take first exit
You follow the corridor to a padlocked door.
> go back
your bus is now leaving in seven minutes.
> take second exit
you are now standing in front of a lift.
> press button
you press the button
> wait
nothing happens.
> press the button again
you lean on the button. Your bus now leaves in five minutes.
> go back
you are standing outside ITC. There are three exits.
> take the third exit
you follow the corridor to another dead end.
> go back
your bus now leaves in three minutes.
> flail
a stocky Chinese man sticks his head out the doors to ITC. "Wait." He says. "All go together." He goes back inside.
> ...
your bus now leaves in two minutes.
> go back inside
the door is stuck.
> yell through door
somebody helps you open the door.
> flail
the Chinese man returns. "Right, going now." He says. Everybody gets up to follow him.
> follow everybody
you join the herd. You are now standing outside the lifts. The Chinese man swipes a card at a security light and presses the lift button.
> facepalm
the lift arrives.
> pile in
you squish into the lift next to that ditzy blonde hippy with the dreads and spiky armpit hair.
> make awkward joke
everybody titters. The lift has now arrived at ground level.
> SWEET SWEET FREEDOOOOOOM.
you're welcome. PS you missed your bus.

Two weeks later and the temporary walls were still in place. A small sign by the lifts proudly declared that demolition was finished! but miscellaneous drilling would continue for up to six months. It therefore seemed the maze was there to stay. We had a group of new students that day. At the end of the class I collapsed into a chair, resigned to missing my bus and waiting for the next one and so in no hurry, and incidentally in a trance-like state from fatigue and euphoria.

"Well then bye everyone!" Calls one of the new guys, as they walk out the door.

"Bye," I mutter absently, echoed by a dude with a shaven head whose name I do not recall, also resting in a chair.

About a minute passes.

"Huh," I eventually say. "We possibly should have mentioned the Exit Problem, shouldn't we?"

"Let them have their fun," grins the dude.

Too true, shaven-head guy, too true.

---

¹ I ran into a couple of girls from my school on the way there. They were approximately the twenty three trillionth people to mishear "eskrima" as "eskimo" which was the last straw so I am now officially referring to it as Awesome Stickfighting.

Ahaha I totally meant to update... somewhat earlier. Anyway, as some of you may have noticed, the 27th was Rabbit Hole Day. Turns out there's an LJ community! rabbitholeday, who'd have thought.

In any case, What I Did On Tuesday did not in fact involve cyborgs in any way, shape or form, although i did end up looking a little like a cyborg. That's right, it was Liza's Epic Makeover day.

( pay no attention to the lulz behind the curtain )

Anyway, there is moar to tell about the past few days but I really need to go to sleep now as I'm heading up to Foster with Nicky tomorrow, and I should really be up by ten thirty at the latest. So I'll see you guys on like... Wednesday or something, idk.

Cassie: have you seen the YATTA video clip?
maggiebloome: haha what?
Cassie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZzgoGZilNg&search=japan%20funny
Cassie: a bunch of japanese men in underwear basically singing
Cassie: HOORAY! HOORAY! HOORAY!
Cassie: LIFE IS SO BEAUTIFUL!
Cassie: I'M SO LUCKY YOU'RE AROUND!
Cassie: HOORAY! HOORAY! HOORAY!
maggiebloome: UHHH
Cassie: it's
Cassie: awesomer than it sounds
Cassie: it's... strangely hypnotising
maggiebloome: ROFL
maggiebloome: NNNWHY
Cassie: |D because the japanese are crazy
maggiebloome: AUGH THE BABY
Cassie: HAHA
maggiebloome: THE NUDE DUDE PLACING A COMFORTING HAND ON THE OTHER NUDE DUDE'S SHOULDER AFTER THE GIRL WALKS AWAY
maggiebloome: THEN THEY ARE JOINED BY SIX OTHER NUDE DUDES
Cassie: XDDDDD
maggiebloome: THE HAND MOTIONS
maggiebloome: THE BABY AGAIN
maggiebloome: I
maggiebloome: I DIED
maggiebloome: I THINK YOU BROKE ME
Cassie: HAHAHHAA
maggiebloome: MY CAPS LOCK KEY RAN AWAY
Cassie: [p-pet]
maggiebloome: I CANNOT STOP LOLLING
Cassie: i told you it was amazing |D
maggiebloome: it is amazing
maggiebloome: ;_;

ETA: context for the weak. Also, have some cats.