bliumchik | Entries tagged with stories

I may not have mentioned here, but dad and I are going to Nepal in the summer, and because my dad is Macguyver, he is insisting on stringent preparations involving several kilos of waterbottles in a backpack and infinite stairs.

Al didn’t have to carry a bag though, because he was just company, not training. Anyway, the walk is mostly stairs and boardwalks and a couple of regular-street detours around blocks of posh dicks who wouldn’t sign off on the walkway going in front of their properties, but there’s one section where you have to pick across Lurline Bay, which is basically just a section of the Sydney coast where enough bits have fallen off the cliffs that there’s a crescent of rock shelf and large stones where you can walk right next to the ocean. People fish there. It looks like this.

( cut for multiple images and me blathering on about tides )

Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/358502.html

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.

Current Mood: wharrgarbl
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/357677.html

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.

( Read more... )

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.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/357048.html

and boy do my feet hurt. I was unfortunately rostered such that not only did I miss the panel I wanted to see, but also I spent two thirds of the day on my feet, telling people how to queue and when to queue and that they were bloody well not in any way allowed to take recording equipment into the photobooth to ask a star personal questions about his dead wife, oh my god.

however, I still had fun wandering the stalls on my off-shift. I bought a Hufflepuff badge and a Hawkeye hairclip and a ring with mustaches on (I decided against the love-heart caribiner), and a boy at the costume stall inexplicably gave me lollies and a dodgy Harry Potter wand when I entered their raffle (which is how I discovered that the French word for wand is baguette), and I found a wooden clothespeg on the floor with "I don't think you are a waste of space -- Dudley" written on it (aww), and I took photos of excellent cosplayers like Ms Marvel and Xena, but not, alas, of the four-person Nyaan Cat cosplay or of the spontaneous fencing match that broke out between a gentleman in a white mustache & black top hat with a cane, a jedi with a green lightsaber, some other cosplayer with a big triangular sword I didn't recognise and an eight-year-old sith with a broken red lightsaber. I am legit heartbroken that nobody was filming that, and my phone had run out of batteries ;_;

Probably instead of some of that I ought to have like... sat down in between my shifts and rested m feet. Oops. At least they got a rest during the Outland panel. I thought, for some reason, (I lie, the reason is that the supanova website is not supa informative pre-con), that it was going to be about queer comic book characters or something like that, but it was actually a specific panel about a specific TV show that I do not watch. The two gay dudes at its helm seemed like cool guys, but I had absolutely no familiarity with their subject matter (it sounds a bit like a queer Aussie The Guild? maybe?) and one of them kept on cackling in a faintly disturbing sort of way, so after a while I left and looked at more stalls.

Tomorrow I have less work to do, but also absolutely no panels that I really want to see, so I expect I shall wander the stalls yet again and perhaps buy some books or overpriced Goth clothing. There was some really cool stuff, but I figured I'd do my wallet some good by waiting until a second look confirmed I really wanted it and/or someone put up end-of-show markdowns. And obviously I can't afford any tophats or funky necklaces made of old clock parts or trench-coats with buckles on, regardless.

Oh, and I cosplayed Delirium again, but nobody recognised me this time, and I saw nobody else dressed as anything from Sandman. It made me sad. But there's always tomorrow!

Current Mood: exhausted
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/356713.html

I dreamed I was sitting with the Writers’ Society exec, the old group of which I am the last one still involved in the Society, at a weirdly open-plan sort of Clubs Day.

Several tables to our right, another, younger society was resolving a dispute primarily by ganging up on the disagreeing member and making her cry. I started ranting about this, causing a few heads to turn when my “DOING IT WRONG” echoed across the room. Eventually the group dispersed, their ringleader locking eyes with me as she walked past us, and I went over to the circle of chairs they left, where the girl was silently crying. She had a long blonde ponytail.

“Boy, have I been there,” I said to her, choking up with sympathy tears, and then had to get up to fetch tissues. We shared a laugh-cry moment, and then for some reason I decided to share a Greek myth with her.

“I mean, Heliotrope,” I said, “was having the worst day ever. Not only did she find out her husband was fucking a rabbit, but she literally turned into a painting.”

(At this point my dream treated me to a graphic vision of Heliotrope’s skin grafting onto the painting’s canvas as it absorbed her.)

“But let me tell you something,” I continued. “Heliotrope won.”

But before I could explain how Heliotrope won, my mum came in and woke me up (for the LAST TIME, which makes it fitting that it was absolutely classic – she told me last night when she expected me to be awake, I set my alarm for that time, and then she came in 40 mins earlier than my alarm to “fix” something about my room that wasn’t bothering me and opened the curtains so I couldn’t get back to sleep.)

Here’s the problem: there’s no such myth. The word heliotrope comes from a Greek story about a nymph who was in unrequited love with the sun-god Helios, and thereby turned into a flower whose face always turns toward the sun. This contains the right elements from my dream, of the lover forsaking you for someone else and of turning into something nonsentient, but a) there’s no rabbits or paintings and b) she doesn’t Win. Unless you call having a 19th century German guy name a scientific instrument after you winning.

So help me out, internet – tell me the rest of the story. If your husband was fucking a rabbit and the Gods turned you into a painting, how would you Win?

Current Mood: chipper
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/356135.html

I trapped a tiny spider under the box that holds my retainers. I should have got new ones last year or the year before, but my orthodontist kept saying I wouldn't need them at all soon. Then my wisdom teeth showed up, and they said to ask again once I got them out, but alas: procrastination. I thought I killed the spider but the centre of the box is raised on the bottom, and it ran away when I lifted the box again. I let it go.

There are seven toothbrushes in my bathroom. The little dinosaur one is my brother's, and mine is one of the green pair (I can never remember which). The dark red one is old and has been consigned now to those hard-to-reach places belonging to the bathroom sink. That leaves three pink ones and whichever green one isn't mine. Can my mother possibly be using all of them? My dad only ever uses their en-suite, but mum thinks it's too cold on that side of the house. The toothbrushes are never put away, so it doesn't seem like you could accidentally open a new one before you needed it, but my mother works in mysterious ways.

Today she decided the fridge needed cleaning. It did, but she only got as far as taking everything out before falling asleep in front of the TV. When I found her and turned it off, she woke up, mumbled about her stomach and went upstairs. Dad came home while I was cleaning the fridge shelves and we had a nice chat as we returned all the produce whence it belonged, including the five roots of ginger and two of turmeric that mum bought on a whim and none of us actually know what to do with. Also beetroot. Do any of us eat beetroot? Why do we have so much parsley? The only dish I know of incorporating large quantities of parsley is boscaiola pasta, but I know this because Alexander likes to make it. That doesn't normally happen at my house. My parents' house. My house. My parents' house. Double vision.

Double vision. I still expect my cat to turn up underfoot. Poor old thing. We didn't even bury her, we figured the vet would know what to do with animal corpses. My parents are thinking of minding a foster kitty for a few weeks. Not my responsibility. No pets allowed where I'll be living now, or at least no mammals. I like snakes. Do I still have that tiny mummified lizard somewhere? I'm going to have to move all my knick knacks off the bookshelf and decide which ones to take with me. Finally an excuse to leave behind the porcelain dolls my grandma gave me that I never played with. They can gather dust somewhere else.

My grandparents (or rather the more active busybody in each pair, being my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather), collectively appear to be worried that my new flatmate will either seduce me, steal my shit, or seduce some random guy who will then steal my shit. They're also vaguely relieved that I'm moving into a white-ish neighborhood. Previous generations, huh? Alexander offers in consolation that a) he's just down the train line to ~protect my virtue~ and b) his grandma is technically the class enemy. I think that's because she owns property and rents it out at market value. Alexander is very concerned about the housing market in his area, specifically its place in the gentrification of a traditionally poor black neighborhood and dispersal of housing commission tenants to economically dead outer suburbs. Or something like that, I get this stuff basically by osmosis - it's hard to follow along on any individual rant because of his tendency to interrupt himself four times in a row with nesting parentheses. This is as yet more cute than irritating. I've made a game out of counting the levels of tangent and then holding up a number of fingers and saying "ding ding ding." One must find amusement where one can.

The place in Summer Hill has nothing on the walls yet. I meant to write more on the ceiling of my room here, so the words from that insomniac episode was a few years ago seemed more artistic, but I didn't get around to it. I'm moving into a smaller room and one I can't write on because of that large bond I just transferred. On the other hand - no more surprise ginger. My dad says ginger juice tastes awful. I'm going to miss him.

Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/355927.html

So I finally went to see the last Harry Potter movie last night. I had several aborted first starts - I booked a midnight screening that turned out to overlap with a family holiday because I don't understand other people's definition of which day midnight is part of, I went to a Let's Watch Deathly Hallows 1 And 2 gathering where everyone gave up after the first one, but at last! Success! And a really awful milkshake!

I thought it was an excellent movie - even the epilogue was well done, considering it was, you know, The Epilogue. And I have for some time been planning a mixtape for Draco Malfoy, partly out of fanon nostalgia but mostly because the movies do so insist on lovingly panning over Tom Felton's really quite effective HALP!face. (Incidentally, I vaguely met the guy in passing at the last Supanova which I failed to write about here, and he is in fact a genuinely awesome person. Ironic casting choice ftw!) (When I say "vaguely" and "in passing" I mean "we were in the same room for a while and he addressed a small group of people of which I was one in a friendly and jocular manner, I am not trying to project a hob-nobbing with the stars image here.)

Anyway, so here's the mixtape.

I was a little disappointed that I couldn't find a song that really summed up the Malfoy family relationship and the way they grew over the series. I mean Narcissa's priority is very obviously keeping her child safe, and I find the reversal in Lucius Malfoy really interesting - the actors showed it very economically in the movies, the gradual but huge realisation that they have gotten in over their heads and now all they can do is try to stay afloat.

But I guess not many people write songs about that sort of thing.

( Playlist and links to lyrics )

In other news, my final semester of university has begun! I've got one day a week at UNSW for my Linguistics elective, and one and a half at UTS finishing off the writing stuff. I say and a half because Independent Writing Project turns out to meet fortnightly, on the basis that we're not really doing anything except workshopping and it's better to take two weeks and bring in more work to discuss than to do it in little spurts. Screenwriting is shaping up to be fun, our teacher is a stand-up comedian and has good taste in short films. Linguistics is fun as always (my lost major creys ;_;) and I like my teachers - the lecturer is an adorable old butch lady (who I think must have been strikingly attractive twenty years ago) and my tutor is Italian and pronounces my name right!

Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/355393.html

Hey, internet. Long time no see, unless you hang out on tumblr. Now I am ill and livejournal is unreliable and OBVIOUSLY THIS IS THE BEST TIME TO RETURN TO BLOGGING. In lieu of a huge catchup entry that I will procrastinate on because there is so much stuff to put in it, I am just going to post three random things that have happened since last I wrote here.

1. I had a belated 21st birthday party. But Maggie, I hear you say, is your birthday not in August? why, yes it is! And in honour of my 21st birthday party being closer in date to my 22nd actual birthday than anything else, I dubbed it the Timey Wimey birthday and me and my boyfriend dressed up as the fourth and eleventh Doctors. It was awesome. I got very very drunk, which I maintain was not my fault because my friends mandated that I take a drink every time I interrupted someone else's speech, and they know me.

Also this happened.

2. I won a journal subscription using a tin of sardines. Also I ate the sardines.

There was a book-themed picnic competition listed in the program for the NSW Writers Center inaugural young writers festival - they invited everyone to bring a picnic basket selected to fit a favourite book, e.g. mushroom products for alice in wonderland or whatever. I didn’t realise till a few hours before the thing, so I grabbed some random stuff from my kitchen and a 7/11 on my route to make a Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy spread - a towel, of course, a thermos of tea, a tin of sardines (for Babelfish), some bread to eat the sardines with, and some peanut butter and mixed nuts in honour of the peanuts Ford buys from the bar in Chapter 3 (these latter two from the 7/11). I did not even have time to rustle up Trillian’s salad from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and a friendly cow toy, I had to get on a bus. I figured people would laugh and share the fruits of their lengthier preparation with me, and everybody would nom in a writerly fashion.

Anyway it turned out nobody else brought anything so I won by default.

3. I am hopefully participating in thissss and it is not too late for you to also participate!

ladiesbigbang: a female-centric panfanwork big bang challenge.
Optional sign-ups open June 1-30th, final drafts due October 1st.
sign-ups: creators | cheerleaders | betas
info: minimums | rules & guidelines | pinch hitting

Current Mood: groggy
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/355168.html

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.

Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/353601.html

So anyway, I have clearly not kept up with my good intentions of updating lots. I should really stop waiting for my life to calm down to do stuff like this - all signs point to not any time soon, so I may as well figure out how to work around ALL THE THINGS for blogging. I have been keeping up on reading blogs, but not really commenting - sorry guys, I'm always either feeling like I have nothing relevant to say, like you've forgotten who I am since I haven't updated in so long, or like it would be awkward to comment because the post is two or three days old in the time it took me to read it. But I am reading! I have reverted to lurkerdom. Sorry :( I'm going to try to both post and comment a bit more, but we know how that has turned out in the past :P

I'm writing this first bit chilling at a dinner party on someone else's laptop while I wait for stuff to happen. By stuff I mean food. Since the last entry I have had a fairly solid block of social life and work.

( rock and roll! )

( tattoos! )

( parties! )

( extremely nerdy pursuits! )

( work! and dashing about madly! and more work! ...and then moar social life, this time more sedate )

So yes, that was A LOT OF THINGS. I have conveniently split them into sections using The Magic Of Cuts (although it will be of most utility to DW users on their reading page or anyone browsing

bliumchik, because of Dreamwidth's handy little triangle cut thing). It has been a fun week, but I am also glad now that the weekend is appearing sedate. There was a party on Friday as well, but I had to babysit, so instead of flailing at people on a beach I played scrabble with a sevenyearold. And I lost, because I kept telling him what words to use. It's just really frustrating to play against someone who keeps putting down "at" :P

I'm just gloriously lazing around my room and immersing my brain in the internet, while outside my window my new neighbours yell incoherently and splash about in a kiddie pool with all their housewarming guests.

SO, PEOPLE WHO INEXPLICABLY STILL READ MY BLOG: if you have gotten this far, or even if you have skipped all of the random anecdotes, Answer Me These Questions Three!

1. I am submitting a sample Advice Column to my student magazine, hoping to write a monthly one this year! Give me sample questions to answer in it. They can be serious or humorous, preferably some mix between the two - you can post them screened if you like. LET ME ADVISE YOOOOOUUU MOOHOOHAHAHahem.

2. Who wants to volunteer at Armageddon Sydney? I'm not sure if it's too late or not, but the form is still up on their website... I'm thinking of applying but obviously it's more fun with friends!

3. What hilarious horrifying yet realistic tattoo shall I tell my dad I'm thinking of getting before revealing my comparatively classier one so that he doesn't freak out about it? (nothing will stop my mum from freaking out :P)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Amanda Palmer: In My Mind
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/353323.html

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.

Current Music: Big Japan - Life Saver
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/353254.html

I've been dreaming odd things, like a virus that turns people into douchebags and somehow leads me to an underground cookie warehouse with a pudgy middle-aged topless androgynous but probably female head of security who has writing all over hir skin in sharpie and keeps secretly rearranging the toffees so the colours don't pattern as well. Also, before I finished reading Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, I dreamed an extra chapter to it - one set in the future instead of the past - and took a while to remember that no, that wasn't actually part of the book. I no longer remember what happened in the dream-chapter, but I'm done with the real book now and I have got to say it was pretty awesome. I definitely reccommend it to anyone who enjoys a bit of grue in their some and appreciates cool stylistic devices, and/or is interested in British history. But trust me on the grue.

My boyfriend had a St Andrew's Day party, in which he and a couple of his friends cooked ALL OF THE SCOTTISH FOOD, if by Scottish you mean made of oats. I missed the bit with the potato cakes and the whole roast duck because of a meeting I had to go to at uni, but I got to partake of oatcakes, alcohol, oat-related alcohol, roast lamb and stew (as far as I know, not containing oats) and a sort of oat-and-nut dessert thing which turned out to be quite nice on top of oatcake. With tea.

Also I trolled a Bear Grylls fan and was briefly subject to the awkward realisation that I was wedged on a couch between a dude with a girl on his lap on one side, and two chicks making out on the other. I couldn't decide if I should feel intrusive or left out. Later, a fridge magnet flower fell into Tallulah's cleavage in such perfect arrangement that I assumed it was there on purpose, but it turned out she hadn't even noticed it was there. Or possibly earlier, my memory fails me. Alcohols!

Deadlines are starting to threaten to loom, but I have gotten done SOME things of use, so I feel sort of okay. I have applied for cross-institutional study, this time BEFORE the office closes for the new year, which is an improvement on last time, so I might actually get to do that this time.

I shall leave you with a hilarious anecdote from a friend of my mother's, a Russian woman. Her husband's job took him to New Zealand for several months on a contract. His final day there, he got really drunk, fell over, bashed his head open on something and woke up in hospital, still tipsy. He then decided he did not need to be in hospital, removed his IV drip, walked out and caught a taxi. In the taxi he ripped out the IV nozzle from his vein and started bleeding everywhere. Somehow, the Kiwis still let him on a plane - he showed up at his wife's doorstep in Sydney, drunk and covered in blood, right on schedule.

My mum's only comment was to sigh and shake her head and say "Russian men, you know. This is why your father doesn't drink."

Current Music: The Mountain Goats - How To Embrace A Swamp Creature
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/352873.html

I am half-convinced, by now, that tales of sunny long weekends in Newcastle are but a cosy myth perpetuated by the organisers of This Is Not Art in order to attract people to their festival. Oh, sure, Hannah claims to have spent nearly a decade attending it with reasonable success in the weather. Faced with two consecutive years of rain, rain, rain I feel a tad skeptical. But hey, at least this time we weren't camping!

We met in the city at the unspeakably early hour of nine in the goddamn morning¹ and divvied up car seats. Bonnie and I had a pleasant chatty ride in Hannah's car, interrupted only by an emergency bacon stop and a brief moment of confusion as Mat waved at us from the window of his car - in order, it turned out, to tell us to stop hogging the middle lane. We arrived at the Beachside Backpackers in a more-or-less coordinated fashion and set off to have lunch at a cafe which turned out to be twenty minutes walk away. (Luckily I had filled my thermos with tea at the hostel.) Only when we got there did I realise that I wasn't actually hungry, so wandered off to Staple Manor to check out some panels and things. I arrived just in time for the vaguely named "hosted by Vanessa Berry" which sounded exciting as she is a well-known Zine Personage. She was indeed very nice but what she was hosting turned out to be a bit of a sit down on some cushions to chat about her op-shop zines and upcoming festival events and such, so after a bit I left that to check out a Comic Book Launch on the other side of the same room. This turned out to be a Comic Book Not-Launch on the basis of the copies of said comic book having failed entirely to actually be printed in time for its own launch. However there were free samples, champagne, and David Blumenstein's industry stories, all of which I partook of before wandering off yet again². Having been inspired by Vanessa Berry and the realisation that everyone else in my group was planning to go to the parties I had avoided last year, was not anticipating this year and had failed to pack for, I checked out some vintage and second-hand stores for improved attire.

( long weekend is somehow less long than my last post )

¹ for those who do not know me, be not alarmed! every hour before noon counts as the goddamn morning in my books.
² I was having a bit of a fidgety day and had circled entirely too many concurrent events on the program.
³ The store also had shirts and excellent aladdiny vests, but all of them were, alas, the wrong size. Woe.
⁴ The program said "featuring Simon McInnerny" and he was sitting right at the front, so that might have been him? IDK
⁵ It was also easy to locate by zeroing in on the nanna-noises xD
⁶ The first batch was vodka-lemonade flavoured, mmm-mmm!
⁷ Well, I don’t know what YOUR year twelve formal was like…

Current Music: Vienna Teng - Kansas
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/351930.html

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.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Andrew Jackson Jihad - Rejoice!
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/351571.html

Guess who fell of the edge of the world again? I have got to stop doing this. You know, that or accept it and make it part of my ~journalling style~ or something.

Too much stuff has happened since my last post (A MONTH AND A WEEK AGO, HOLY SHIT) for ye olde post of recap to be anything more than tl;dr, so I'll just give you a miscellany:

I had a couple of those EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING AT ONCE weekends, including a particular day on which three separate parties were scheduled and all I wanted was to curl up with a book, and managed not to explode spectacularly all over the furniture!
I saw Scott Pilgrim and Tomorrow When The War Began, both were pretty great and I will elaborate below!
Stan and I baked bread! It was delicious!
I printed some zines!
A dude from Writesoc who I spent entirely too long thinking was a lesbian suggested that I edit things for money! Specifically his as-yet unfinished movie script! So that was odd!
My mother had an epic meltdown and did non-permanent damage to my worldly possessions!
I bought stockings from We Love Colours and they are excellent! Also some awesome fishnet gloves~
...which I immediately wore to a Musical themed costume party and dripped wax on, as my assigned musical was La Boheme. It's the Opera that Rent is based on, and shares with it a catalytic Candle Lighting scene, you see. The only candle I could find was a shallow flower-shaped one, which promptly broke, and I spent the party periodically attempting to fix it using the heater mushrooms. (The rest of my costume consisted largely of a skirt, a beret and ALLLLL OF THE SCARVES. Other notable efforts included Elphaba from Wicked, Sweeney Todd & Mrs Lovett, Frank'n'Furter, Rocky, Marilyn Monroe, the chef from South Park and a Cat from Cats.)
(Both Marilyn and Elphaba were dudes.)
I bought a Smashing Pumpkins ticket!
I went to a stand-up gig with, among others, my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend and girlfriend, and the girl who would shortly become my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's new girlfriend in addition to same (but without my boyfriend). (That is, without my boyfriend both at the gig and in the harem.) Try saying that out loud three times!
I accidentally a WHOLE pudding!

So that was some things that happened! and now hopefully when more Things happen that I want to write about I shall do so in the immediate aftermath, rather than summing them up for twitter and then forgetting about them. *cough*I have also been linkblogging on tumblr, and have signed up for too many writing/BB complement/other things, some of which I am currently working on. I'll be posting the complements over the next few days/week as they have, like, deadlines, lol :P BUT

bitternarration and

miss_sapphy rest assured I have not forgotten you!

And now my spoilery thoughts on some movies!

( Scott Pilgrim and Tomorrow When Australia Got Invaded By The Red Menace Or Something )

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Fall Out Boy - Snitches oh god this song title is long
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/350467.html

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

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Radiohead - Kid A
Crossposts: http://maggiebloome.livejournal.com/350073.html

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

Current Mood: chipper

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 )

Well, my two-week flood of assessment deadlines is over! Now I have at least three weeks before the next one starts, and I am naturally going to use them to procrastinate.

In TOTALLY UNRELATED NEWS, Portal is free from Steam for another week or so :D

...you guys, I get motion sickness from this game. And it's awesome. I do not even.

So anyway, since handing in my final assignment last Friday I've been tumbling and shooting portals at things and vegging out on the internet, woo! This sluggish state has been partly in response to the freedom from all that writing about socialists and french philosophers and moths, and partly in order to recover from Friday itself, which was approximately 36 hours long. (PS: I totally started this post on Tuesday :P oops!)

( cut for length of the recount and a bunch of random tangents and an aside on the topic of good-touch/bad-touch and uh I got a little carried away...? )

Current Music: Straylight Run - The Perfect Ending

If you've been reading my journal for a while, you're probably used to my dropping off-radar in the aftermath of big events - I usually spend about a week feeling like I can't post about anything else till I've posted about the event, and after that I feel like I shouldn't post until I have enough time to write a massive catch-up entry. I hear Dreamwidth may be implementing a multiple-draft-queue new entry page, which might alleviate this problem somewhat. (Also, I could just use notepad files, it's only a few extra steps. Passive barriers: consistently surprisingly powerful.)

Anyway, in this case uni started right after I came back from Melbourne, and I am always a twitchy messy wreck the first week or two as I'm forcibly reminded that real life involves constant interaction with people who are not close friends or otherwise people I can assume like me, but I'm settled in now so here's that belated post about Soundwave! And, uh. Highlights of. The next. Month or two? I'M SORRY. This post has been accumulated in bits and pieces, so excuse any chonology weirdness. Under the cut, of course, this is going to get long.

( so fasten your seatbelts! or something, idk )

So that was my Soundwave trip! It was pretty great, overall, despite the cold, which opens up whole new vistas of me actually leaving Sydney ever, provided I am not doing so alone. Hurray!

Since then I have been:
-procrastinating heavily on university, despite the fact that all my classes this semester are BRILLIANT
-going to parties and being my hilariously awkward self
-making out with some people despite this
-doing TROUTS and WriteSoc things (more on this later! this entry is long enough already)
-going to MOAR CONCERTS (ditto!)
-failing to go to other concerts because I fail
-obtaining a ~boyfriend (!!) (funnily enough, neither airplane dude nor one of the people I made out with at the aforementioned parties)
-buying things from the internet, including a T-shirt depicting A CAT WITH LASER EYES, FUCK YEAH
-&c.

I'm going to try to actually post things here more often. Since my Grand Return coincides neatly with the beginning of Three Weeks For Dreamwidth I think I shall disable comments on LJ for these three weeks. Don't worry, LJers, I still love you and OpenID is very simple :D

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Tegan and Sara - I Won't Be Left

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October 2014

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so last weekend Alexander joined me and my dad on one of our semiregular coastal hikes
TWENTY THREE.
Postmodernism With Fake Germans
Day one of Supanova!
Choose Your Own
living liminal
Mix: Draco Malfoy
(no subject)
(no subject)
And when they put me in the ground I'll start pounding the lid, Saying, I haven't finished yet...
in other news, I gave myself an impromptu midnight haircut with nail scissors
in other news, I need a haircut
This Is Not Art: Round Two - FIGHT
oh god, okay, this is a post \o/ /o\
EVERYTHING. RIDICULOUS. FOREVER.
people keep linking me to nazi-related news today. gay zombie nazis on the moon, anyone?
Things! I've been doing them!
*dusts things vaguely and looks sheepish*
Bacon Tabs! Brainhack! Shakespeare! The Youth Of Today! Not Necessarly In That Order!
oh- oh HEY, guys, fancy seeing you here

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The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

Alignment: Chaotic AWESOME

Entries tagged with stories

so last weekend Alexander joined me and my dad on one of our semiregular coastal hikes

TWENTY THREE.

Postmodernism With Fake Germans

Day one of Supanova!

Choose Your Own

living liminal

Mix: Draco Malfoy

(no subject)

(no subject)

And when they put me in the ground I'll start pounding the lid, Saying, I haven't finished yet...

in other news, I gave myself an impromptu midnight haircut with nail scissors

in other news, I need a haircut

This Is Not Art: Round Two - FIGHT

oh god, okay, this is a post \o/ /o\

EVERYTHING. RIDICULOUS. FOREVER.

people keep linking me to nazi-related news today. gay zombie nazis on the moon, anyone?

Things! I've been doing them!

dusts things vaguely and looks sheepish

Bacon Tabs! Brainhack! Shakespeare! The Youth Of Today! Not Necessarly In That Order!

oh- oh HEY, guys, fancy seeing you here