wallpapered over.

last night of easter break

2006-04-24T11:54:51Z

head cradled in my hands, dry from the soft autumnal chill now just settling in, and the wind beating rain against my window as i burn slowly through the waxen hours of night. lids are heavy. can hear only the faint murmur of my computer and only feel the hard seat of my chair, its unyeilding white smoothness a triumph of form over functionality, taunting the weakness of human flesh. i raced through my political analysis notes in two hours, and will read leftwich on the politics of politics (how trite!) again before this brutal night is over. hopefully that will tide me through tomorrow's exam - the past attests that i have survived on less than this - evidence of classmates' well-organised preparation relegated to an external fact which ceases to exist. coffee also ceases to have any effect though there are three mugs on my desk, on my bookshelf and on the window ledge.

the last week vaporised and the coming weeks are a vertiable monsoon season, as always happens during this time of semester, when assessment pile up, as do other obligations, until sanity tips under the heavy weight of tired metaphors.

easter was meant to be a refresher to return to semester brighter than before, but am drained instead. violent fights with parents over the weekend eventually leading to reconciliation and the promise to support me financially if i went on exchange to Berkeley next year; dinner at a hole in the wall restaurant that was surprisingly cosy, all lit as it was with red paper lanterns and wood tabletops highly glossed where i feasted on yams and poultry and dessert was a rhapsody of soft, cool coconut jelly and rockmelon composed as an egg. did dutifully force myself to the university library on saturday morning, where the bleak light forced me to attack and dispatch three chapters of my text for political theory and methodology, before i succumbed to sleep on the stiff red chairs provided in the silent area with my feet tucked underneath me, but slid from that high point until i tottered out of a karaoke session on tuesday afternoon, having drunk too much wine and champagne for a daylight hour. walked in shame to sober up in hyde park, propped on B's shoulder and slept the last dredges of intoxication off before my parents arrived home. the tell-tale sign of drinking (my complexion becomes abnormally pale, even for me, about 2-3 hours after the initial alcoholic rush) was still present. thankfully returned to civility on thursday morning: ate finger sandwiches, drank black lavender tea and wore a black and white polka dot dress to the self-portrait exhibition at the art gallery of new south wales with B; a giddy grab at that polished sphere i once aspired to desperately, as though aesthetics could save me from vile adolescence. plans to see xiu xiu with M that night were aborted. worked from 10-2 on friday, starving on a breakfast of weak coffee and grabbed a sandwich on way to city from my favourite sandwich place, met N and we worked for a few hours on prep for the torts moot. came home early, but didn't have dinner before sleeping at insanely early hour. was at library again on saturday morning, researching my paper of development and democraticisation in southeast asia but frustrated by the lurking of moor hags (hsc students deluded enough to think musty books = social place) and a brazen, flickering light out of the corner of my right eye. had thai with B, summoned all my mental strength and went to N's birthday bash, where i didn't get trashed and emjoyed myself catching up with uni people and old high school friends. arrived home, made hot cocoa and sat on the roof talking to B before sleeping, and after breakfast and lounging around for a while reading the papers, i kicked her out (bad hospitality!) to start studying.

now head splitting open and brain too worn out to contemplate anything. after exam tomorrow morning, have four midterms coming up (two exams and two papers) and a trifling quiz. all the souls of the world are asleep but my own, i feel. want to slip into darkness and treacle-like sleep. but will instead rally my spirits! shower now ( brief luxury) and then will tackle these annoying questions of law for the moot tomorrow. will read and digest authorities and spit out rationes and dicta. will then plough through leftwich and marsh and maybe allow myself brief sleep before dispatching the microeconomics problem set i intended to do before the break but now shall face at dawn. leave for exam early, then find refuge in library to write out oral submissions for evening moot and maybe seek sleep in a deserted corner.

and must must remember why i am doing all this for at all hours lest i lose the will.

[Written at 4.53am, 23rd of April]]

I return when april breaks.

2006-04-14T01:50:54Z

1. I thought first year of university was going to be like season one of Felicity. I was walking down Broadway after a particularly exhausting Contracts seminar when I realised this. One of the straps of my tote bag was broken, I was hurrying home so I could flick on the lamp switch and start in on my law assignment and my shoes needed to be re-soled. I probably paused at a red light along the way - the sky was most likely an evening blue complementing a crescent moon - and everything that wasn't right with last year hit me, wrapped in this trite summation. I thought, 'Oh my god,' gave a half-laugh, caught myself and then rushed the last few metres to the bus stop as my bus pulled in.

2. I've had my red P's for a month and recently bought a new car! As recognition of how I become enamoured of the narratives of other people's lives, I named it Miyuki. She was an adopted Japanese girl who played bass in a band, went to art college, was beautiful and bisexual and lived in Boston, had her heart broken when her ex-girlfriend married a man and denied ever loving her. Last I heard, she was dating a fine arts major at NYU named Adam. My car is yellow and a small hatchback. The resemblence is minimal at best; perhaps Miyuki liked the colour yellow. I think only N has heard me speak of her; perhaps she's just a fragment of my mind.

3. This semester I'm overloading with 30 credit points (Contracts, Microeconomics, Econometrics, Southeast Asian Politics, Pre-honours 2 Political Analysis), learning Chinese and German, and resuming piano lessons again after a five-month hiatus. Work and I have mutually cut each other down to about six hours a week. There's a boy at work whom I'm always on the verge of strangling because nothing will stop him from asking about my boyfriends, ex-boyfriends and non-boyfriends, who I would hypothetically date and who I would not and other questions inapporpriate to a tuition center. After this week, I will never see him again. I hate that I've started to bite my nails again, I've moved from drinking lattes to drinking skim mochas for the chocolate hit and I coloured my hair again on Wednesday; it is now blacker than noir.

when october ends

2005-10-30T10:39:38Z

Quiet day: curled up against the wall in cotton pjs with cherry print listening to Antony and the Johnsons and the River Waltz. My mother on the phone to my grandmother in the other room; I can hear her talk about me in a smooth stream of Shanghainese. It stops raining for a moment this afternoon and I crank open the window for a sliver of fresh air. Otherwise the day is dense and breathless and slippery grey like mullosc shell walls. I slip in and out of sleep, printed pages and emails to N, drinking mugs of hot water and lemon. For lunch I ate the leftover orange and cracked pepper duck pate on toast from Friday's makeshift picnic, when R, B and I feast on Italian bread, persian fetta, pate and beetroot dip in the Domain. Exams are fast approaching but still too distant to interrupt the calm solitude of a rained-in Sunday.

After a 3am phonecall from B last night, I slept fitfully, but not much worse than the slew of recent nights and bizarre dreams. My dreams lately have been carved strangely between futile anxiety about the future and life in a suit and a 9 to 5 job, and the movies I've been watching lately. Hollywood Hong Kong and I dreamt of roast piglets and surgurically retached arms; Versus and City of God and I dreamt in technicolour of zombies, guns, and drug money, six hundred dollars an hour work and tax fraud; Serenity only heightened the visuals of cannibals and resurrected corpses, and interspersed gun duels with bullet trains, sleepless days, red lips, black eyes and starched linen; and after The Motorcycle Diaries, I saw myself standing by the side of a road covered in snow, holding an open briefcase and waiting, waiting, for the corpse of a bird to fall in. The wintry roadside trees swayed to Mozart's Requiem and the sea would creep closer and closer to my stockinged feet.

Meaning eludes me but my October has been cleanly cleaved into halves. The first curdled with assignments and a hellish mid-semester period; the second under an umbrella of psychadelic dreams fueling pre-dawn writing sessions, hatching out the skeleton of Le Cirque which now opens in a night market haggling over birthdays for unborn babies.

her long hair, it strangled

2005-09-24T13:08:55Z

Reading The Human Stain, I find myself both identifying with, and disliking heavily, Delphine Roux. Not because she is me, nor I her, rather because her character is not singular and particular, but amassed from a familiar type. Her flaws, characteristics, impulses, struggles, are all hewn in the image I know so well: the intellectual female. And in that particular female, such a cadence of intellect eclipses her being; she is not simply a person blessed with intelligence, but learned, all learned, and nothing natural. A person purged by the great ideas and critiques of the world, both real and yet artifcial. And I am annoyed at her, and at absurd moments, cry for her, because she is crippled by the paradigms of her intellectualism, paralysed by an image of herself. I haven't read or known half a whit as much as she has, and yet I wonder how much of myself has been fashioned in the image of some idea?

I used to think only I was afflicted with this mad desire to make a project of myself. But listening to V wax poetical about his diet, his maniacal desire to erase the fleshy excesses he associates with being bullied when he was younger (who am I to disagree with his perception?); his sudden transformation, suing for popularity and acceptance; his frustration of being caught in tales of the past, strikes down that old pretense of being unique. Daily, hourly, dedicated to realising an image of himself - an image far from sublime, but delightfully shallow.

For a while, I tried to construct an iamge for myself from the ramblings of another girl, who had deserted her journal, and left me a relic frozen in time. I idolised her utterly. I thought of stealing her identity - I plotted, wrote lists of changes to implement, so desperate was I to escape being me. I added to her basic silhouette features and adornments plucked from other sources - books, movies, people seen on the streets, and produced a pastiched girl to become. But I didn't, despite the immense simplicity of lying, of denial and deceit; identity seemed such a tenuous concept and time promised to shed me of several skins. And I wake every morning, dress, dry my hair, its red tint catching the light, apply make-up, and walk out into the world, wondering which is the lie: the girl I invented in my head, or the one I remained faithful to in the end?

friday routines and books.

2005-08-26T08:06:25Z

Every Friday this semester I have a midday tutorial for world politics on the Camperdown campus and a legal research seminar later in the afternoon at the Law School on Phillip St. Usually I catch a bus into the city, get off before King St and wonder around David Jones Food Hall for the hour. At lunch hour, it's all hustle and bustle and I'll buy myself a dark chocolate covered strawberry before I begin my rounds of eyeing the immacutely stored jars of pickled foods and mustards, the wholesome and tempting colours of corn-yellow and capsicum-red, wasabi and ginger relish, polenta, oil-packed sardines and imported olives; all over-priced and exquisitely pacakged. Every ounce or pinch of food served up is consistent in one way: bourgeois affluence. And instead of any half-ironic tolerance, I'm utterly seduced: the colours, smells, textures send my senes salivating; the neat compact wodden shelves with neat compact rows of condiments screaming: 'Taste me! Eat me! Decorate your kitchen pantry with me!'

Today I got off early and went to Abbeys of York St. instead, where I bought two books I have been longing to possess: The History of Love by Nicole Kruass and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Last night I searched for Murakami's writings in the library, but they had all been cleared out. Dymocks also told me that I would have to wait until January next year for Kafka and even the Abbey's website said it wouldn't be available in the shop until October, so when I went in and saw it perched nonchantly before me, I felt that it was fate and there was no question: I had to buy it. It was hard to resist the impulse to buy more: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, also by Murakami, The Unbearable Lightness of Being to celebrate my love for the book and Kundera, and a few titles by Martin Amis, because M's been reading a lot by him lately, but I placed them back gingerly, resolute not to amass excessively in regrettable retail glee.

I took the books, packaged in a brownpaper bag, with me to Hyde Park where a young man was singing Unforgettable, ate yoghurt and figs whilst sitting half in sunshine, half in shade, opened The History of Love, lost track of time wandering in lyrical prose and Brooklyn, and was late to class. On my way home I stopped by the library and borrowed these books:

The Human Stain; Philip Roth
Wintering: a novel of Sylvia Plath; Kate Moses
Beloved; Toni Morrison
Death in Venice and other Tales; Thomas Mann, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel
The Stories of Katherine Mansfield; Katherine Mansfield, ed. by Antony Alpers
The Lawyer and the Libertine; Ian Callinan

The last book was chosen not for its literary charms (it hardly has any) but more for the fact that the author is a sitting judge on the High Court of Australia. And the final thing I grabbed was The Cell Phone, a chinese movie that I remember reading about a while ago in Y's livejournal.

old husks discarded, on old tides carried out.

2005-08-19T09:23:43Z

Some time last week during my recuperation from a cold I took the time to log into into viennawaltzing so I could read the old entires I had locked away last April. In suspension was the cyclic wheel of work, study, reading, music, errands - and coughing a little, a little blue - I pried open one great marbly eyelid of time to vanish within. And maybe it's because I've always been haunted by a sense of nostalgia, or because with being ill I felt myself watered down like runny ink, but I couldn't stop reading after the first few entries. I started from the beginning again, reading each sentence, each comment and reply, and I read the high school journals of my real life friends and travelled on a path laid out with words to yesteryear when we were in 9th and 10th grade and the most common thread was our visceral pain and our desire to hurt and be vanquished.

And my immediate reaction was 'we survived, we survived,' not really knowing what it was that we had broken beyond. I read through three years of memories from different perspectives, drowning in S's poor syntax and her inelegant but honest phrasing, in N's short pithy entries to her long, dense daily epistles, in M's sharp erratic collisions of prose and lists and my own writing, which seemed to wax toward some unheralded zenith, until I turned seventeen and wrote odes to the world's refuse and hacked down images of serpents and moths to disguise the inadequacy of being myself. And if any aspect of me emerged from that tide of boiling teenage emotion, it was a terrified, but elated girl whom I can only glimpse at through a glass darkly.

Maybe I read that day, entranced, because I was trying to seize at the hem of that fey shadow I called unefille, in the days when I wrote choppy poetry about urban jungles and concrete hells and a novel titled 'Le Cirque': a thinly disguised transcription of the people around me, in the glory of self-destruction coupled with exultation, unleashed from the numbing circadian rhythms of surburbia. Glorious girls and fags and pretty boys and an emotional mess that in text could never capture the machinations of what we lived everyday in our minds. Not merely at the hem of a vanishing skirt, but at the feet of days when high school, in its excruciating ordinariness, was my glass cocoon and I could feel, and write what I and those around me felt in a flourish of linguistic chiaroscuro, as I no longer can. That intensity is gone because those heights of joy scaled, those depths of despair plumbed, now, in a wider, larger world, seem like no movement, no feeling, at all.

And I read because I needed to go back to when I was so certain that some richness, even if it had been artifical, touched me. And having reached the end of that skein of words and memories, I talked to C, who told me I was 'not myself' and possibly drunk. And perhaps I was not myself that night, drunk on nostalgia and, through the unromantic medium of online journals, touching the transience of life itself.

upon a feast...

2005-08-05T14:26:13Z

When I began this entry, the sun was barely skimming the skyline, and long branches in the distance were illusively gaunt and withered, wearing the glamour of a day that was almost cold and sterile enough to be Winter. But persuaded by the normative should, I read R v Ireland and Symes v Mahon instead. Now the night is truly plunged in darkness and looking out my bedroom window I see the city in the distance: flickering fluorescent, elemental lights.

There's a pork roast in the oven, and its delectable scent wafted from the kitchen and pickled the air as I was reading. We've been eating terribly well lately, mostly because I've taken up cooking and after the first blush of mishaps (three months ago, I burnt six pieces of toast in a row), dinners have turned out in my favour. More pleasurable than eating though, are olfactory delights produced by the preparation process. This afternoon, home from a day during which I had my introductory tutorial for World Politics (far from inspirational, but I'll leave judgements to later in the semester) and legal research class, I stopped by the butcher and bought a slab of pork loin. The smell of sea salt, which I rubbed into scored skin, lingers faintly around my fingers, mixing its alchemy with rose-scented soap, and my eyes stung for minutes after cutting up onions, but there will be crackling and balsamic roasted onions served tonight.

Food and words have become intertwined for me recently. Last night I dreamed a strange, culinary dream in which feta cheese, fresh rocket, prosciutto and dark, plump olives floated before me, and I feasted upon them whilst reading Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, the opening, which described the scent of bitter almonds, embroidered onto napkins folded beneath the platters of food. And now the full scent of roasting mingled amongst dicta and obiter, which I should be tired of reading but am not. I find the cases much more pleasant to read than the textbook, which lays out principles in plain terms, whilst each judgement is wrought with the peculiarities of legal prose. What I am a little tired of is the endless nature of reading for law; the numerous cases to trek through, plotting our path through the law of torts, disgusted by the minute size of our knowledge. Still I soldier on, becaase it is too early in this still dew-bright semester to blow dust on my dreams and sit, twiddling my thumbs, on the throne of mediocrity.

From my paper journal, written in a moment of doubt in February:

...picking my way through the graveyard of language. Words live and glimmer, mercurial and subtle. What am I doing studying law, analysing the meaning of each word, defining, drawing absolute lines, watching words fall around me, felled by precision and legislative acts on interpretation...cutting, picking, hacking, cropping, and digging, digging amongst the bones language; prose picked clean of any softness to glean coldly, darkly, belligerently against miscontrual.

But since then, I've discovered that the law can be expansionary; seen through a glass darkly, it too grows organically, evolving, adapting, mellifluous and uncontainable. And that's why I can't truly believe in the Originalist position, despite its purity and purported rigour, safe from undisciplined judicial activism. Because Originalism believes in stagnation. At the moment the words were written, they fell dead and have been dead since. All that is left to us, as children of a past doctrine, is to read meaning from the pattern of its bones.

But I am now enchanted as ever, lit with intellectual fervour. N and I met last evening to attend the Julius Stone Address together. Professor Ratna Kapur was speaking on the 'The Dark Side of Human Rights' and she began with a reference to The Life of Pi, drawing an extended metaphor throughout her speech between the 'kick in the curry' and the manner in which Human Rights have been intergrated into the modernism narrative, transformed from fluid abstraction brimming with revisionist humanism into a stone and mortar construct that excludes and divides between the other and 'universal self'. Though I faced the evening with a gnawing headache, I was drawn into her spiel, her voice clear, measured, with a hint of an American accent sustaining her critique of monolithic 'Human Rights', cutting through the Banco Court, where the Chief Justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court usually holds session. And she made me wonder if I would prefer a life in academia, rather than as a practitioner.

I cringed at the questions she fielded however. The audience was too intent on fostering a political agenda upon her (said one man, who had throughout the lecture wrapped his fingers, one by one, around the metalwork before him, 'your political agenda is obvious to everyone here' even after he stumbled on pronouncing it) to appreciate the manner in which she spoke of the liberal democratic project from the perspective of the 'other' as a post-colonial, feminist scholar. One question spoke of 'conquering the Islamic mind' even after she made clear that she did not support 'inter-civilisational dialogues' because they reduced 'civilisations' into one homogeneous voice. And the questions seemed to underline and make bold her message. Why is that the 'other' is always catergorised and the process of understanding subverted to 'conquering their mind'? When America disembarked at Japan's shores after the Pacific War, holding in their hands the blueprint of an ultimate liberal democratizing project, they conceived of a Japanese mind: militaristic, heathen and supine which required reform, to dismantle their pathology of aggression. And that woman who asked the question perpetuated the same myth - of an Islamic mind, simplistic in conception, spawning the pathology of terrorism, which can be 'understood' then altered to believe, as the 'universal self' does, in liberal democratic values: a bad child broken of its naughty habits by the righteous teacher.

-

So, sated now, since the hour is midnight and the roast long hours ago carved and eaten, the vapours dissipating through the windows and my casebook closed for the night so that I can rest and not think about the readings that I need to prepare for class, or the novel which I am poised to start, but never do, nor the empty canvasses, nor the silent piano, but simply to yearn to sleep and wake and write again and learn and think.

of cabbages and kings

2004-12-30T03:03:19Z

For New year's Eve my parents are planning on going back to the Wenty house during the day. When they come back they'll have my piano books with them - books I haven't touched since May when I broke down in my piano teacher's studio and she berated me, her voice shrilly climbing octaves like a chromatic scale. It was my last lesson and concluded with her throwing me out. She usually wore glasses but that evening she removed them and held in her eyes was so much acrid bitterness. Everything seemed burnt and amber that night. I cried for hours, and for weeks after approaching the piano sickened me with the psychosomatic symptoms of guilt.

And despite everything she said to me, or because of that, I will go back to those damned keys. If not for myself than because she told me I wouldn't - that I was turning my back on music, that I would never find the discipline to continue, to complete the diploma (which I had put of twice already for other commitments), and everything of the past ten years would simply be a waste. I'll admit I was never the perfect student; I lacked dedication, the gift of virtuoso and only developed a love of the instrument after seven years of weekly lessons and parental harrassment. So, maybe it's for all the wrong reasons that I'm going to enter the routine of lessons and practice again, but then that has been the overriding reason for so much of what I do: because for one brief moment I saw in someone's eye a glimmer of disbelief and doubt.

In a similiar vein, I always said to my friends that of those strange goals people hold close to their heart for ridiculous reasons, mine was to read the Aeneid in Latin and Homer in Greek. I've wanted to be able to since year six when I turned down my PLC scholarship and with it the possibility of an education in the Classics. So, this morning, I rose from bed and ran down to the library to borrow the Oxford Latin Course books. This summer, despite being told of the frivolity in pursuing dead languages when they bear no tangent to any 'future', I'm going to teach myself Latin.

grey days and veins

2004-12-23T06:24:04Z

These days in the morning I'm out of bed before 6am which is when the construction site first begins to cough, rattling its nuts and bolts, and wake. I can hear it across the street as I make my way down the corridor toward the kitchen, knocking against itself, two buildings like two wintered knees against the blanched sky. I'll make coffee and then, in slippers and pj's, climb the tightly wound and rheumatic staircase to the roof. I can wait for the sun to rise and at fifteen floors, the wind on some mornings almost knocks the coffee from out of my hands. I like it when it's grey and the sky is unclear and the giant neck of the crane dominates the view and on the wide concrete roads, traffic lights are flickering out and buses and cars are trundling. It brings back memories of sitting by the window of my grandmother's cramped flat in Shanghai, dipping my fingers into a cup of tea because they were bitten by the cold. Those images swim around in my veins.

There's nowhere I can escape to. I move from the computer to the empty living room and curl up against the wooden floorboards, reading poetry, waiting for late delivery men and carpenters to slowly piece this place together. More than ever, I keep escaping to the roof. Some days I wish I was a girl named Lola. She'd climb onto the roof in the evenings, drinking whisky and kicking off the moss and piecing together an autobiographical sculpture from soft drink cans and ten dollar bills. She'd probably read Foucault and Proust and one day, she just might jump over the edge. Of course, she'd always land safely, somehow, with her electric pink hair. My fifteen year old alter ego from the alternate universe of Le Cirque in which we lived, also had bright pink hair.

Isn't there a song that goes:
I met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry-cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Lola.

vigil.

2004-12-18T01:32:33Z

thursday

My heart is dangling from my teeth. I can't breathe anymore. In this strange new apartment, with my life boxed up still, I stare outside the window at the street lit with dim lights. I have Pink Floyd, espresso and Anne Carson's poetry to tide me through the night until 6am comes.

friday and saturday

Subject - Exam Mark - Assessment Mark - HSC Mark

English Advanced - 99/100 - 94/100 - 97/100
English Extension One - 50/50 - 49/50 - 50/50
English Extension Two - 50/50 - 48/50 - 49/50
Mathematics Extension One - 98/100 - 96/100 - 97/100
Mathematics Extension Two - 94/100 - 93/100 - 94/100
Modern History - 97/100 - 94/100 - 96/100
History Extension - 44/50 - 44/50 - 44/50
Philosophy - N/A - HD - N/A (came 4th in course)

Commentary: The school is appealing the History Extension result, not merely for me, but the whole class. Something happened there. I think these are the results of someone who should have worked a lot harder during the school year and I can't help rankling about Extension Two English and the injustice I still feel about that arbitrary mark deduction during school process that pulled me down overall. Really though, it doesn't matter anymore because:

UAI: 100

Still speechless.

I can't really think of a better conclusion for that chapter of my life. At 9.05am this morning, Ron McCallum, the Dean of Law at University of Sydney called me up to congratulate me, welcome me to Sydney Law and offer me my little 'nerd' scholarship (oh, the shopping I plan to do even though it's just 5000 dollars a year - which really should go to text books) and in my exuberance I greeted him with 'Hey, Nadia!' thinking she was calling. It's going to be a very pretty christmas and I'm looking forward to the new year.

Edit: The scholarship has now become a $10k p.a ticket to my desired degree and the first step in cultivating my disinclination to employment.
♥

figures.

2004-12-12T06:31:29Z

Caught in the rain on Friday, my white skirts billowing, I hugged Ulysses closely to my chest, small goosebumps rising on my bare arms. Vine-like tendrils coiled around my neck as raindrops weighted down my hair and I took shelter in the entry way of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church. Last evening, on the bus 393, I relinquished my seat to an old grandfatherly man with matted hair and a scratched walking cane, and stood, swaying, as it hurtled toward to Central Station. My stiletto heels made click-clack noises when descending the stairs and the sky broke open again and it rained. A girl in pink sitting two rows diagonally across from me had spent the entire bus ride watching.

Rising at 6am and moving slowly through the kitchen, putting meals together. My parents tap-tap-tap at their computers, printing out steel-detailing plans for a reconstructed church. I fill sketchbooks with images of our new apartment, trying to slip into the role of an interior designer. Masks; paintings; fabrics; vases; lamps. The palette is cream and chocolate, and tints of cherry, caramel and orange: rich, edible colours. And still the images of shining skin and rumpled Catholic boys slip from the inks of my pen.

My computer is being requisitioned by my father on weekends and weeknights.

p.s: an old diary in a shoebox

Emptied out my wardrobe to find buried in the very back an old diary from 1998 in a shoebox. Terrible diariest habits even then - six pages filled with miniscule writing and then nothing more as I deserted it. I wrote about anxiety toward starting high school in the new year, about leaving behind old friends - Le(e), Peggy, Jessie, Sarah - and being glad that Lishi and Veronica were also going to Ruse. There was an entry about my fury at Lauren, a large, gregarious girl with wild orange hair, for her matchmaking lists. But mostly it was my 12-year-old scrawls about the imminent rite of passage that I deemed moving into high school to be. I read the diary, bemused. Then I threw it out with so much else from the last ten years.

skinned.

2004-12-07T12:25:38Z

The last few days have been an exercise in metaphorical weeding. I've been sorting through my possessions in preparation to moving. I think this one of those snapshot moments because so much of what I have dug up have been remnants of childhood and that gap after childhood when personas are assumed and discarded almost imperceptibly, like veils of light over a blinking eye. Four large bags of clothing for St. Vinnies and three boxes of books for my mother's friend's children later, with the bins outside piled high with paper, diaries, letters and school notes, I felt just a little bit empty.

We still haven't gotten around to packing up the television in my room though, so I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's again whilst I was painting the borders of journal pages where school friends had written messages to me in the last few days before graduation. Then on Sunday evening I watched My Favourite Book on ABC. I wasn't terribly impressed with the selection - it seemed rather, well, plain. Disappointment turned into disgust when I found on the Top 50 list The Ancient Future Trilogy by Traci Harding listed at no.34. Nothing can really express my distaste for those trifles of predictable plot, leaden use of mythical reference, and flagrant Mary-Sue-ness. Nadia and I used to spend lunchtimes in the library in year nine tearing apart those novels, which we both had had the misfortune to read. The repetition of plot devices paled in comparison to Tory Alexander's ever perky breasts and talent for saving the universe from havoc. We would get so carried away, doubling over in breathless verbosity, sitting between the fiction aisles on the step ladders in our tartan junior skirts and lemon yellow blouses. I used to tug the sleeves of my bottle green pullover when I talked; I think I still do.

I've been checking the mail diligently recently because it's the season of important letters. The last philosophy assignment still hasn't been returned and thus I'm in limbo as to my grade. But this morning UAC sent it's general guide to the UAI. My mother and I ended up sitting around the kitchen table as she melodramatically overreacted in anticipation of next weekend. Her drama queen antics are putting me on edge. But whenever we talk, she throws in jokes about future publications and my next literary project - insert that character! capture that experience! that's your next idea! - which strike like teeth chewing on my lung tissue, to describe it graphically. Why, if both my parents want me to write something, am I pursuing a law degree coupled with political science, instead of an Arts degree? I'm standing frying whitebait for dinner, and the fish sputter violently in the hot oil before turning golden and I think I see two divergent paths shimmering before me. I thought I had already chosen. Salt skinned from the briny fish, I wash my hands, but they still smell of the sea when I sit down at the kitchen table; the indecisive sea. Lawyers, I am afraid, never become brilliant novelists.