scheißhaus

The following things are wrong with my house:

1.      today there was no electricity

2.     then the electricity got fixed

3.      and then it broke again and now there are lights (which is convenient because it is night time and the barbeque lighter I bought from Foodland six months ago for $2 has finally run out of gas which means I can’t light the gas stove) BUT everything else doesn’t work. No toast. No micro waved soup. No tea. We’re out of coffee anyway. No fridge. No Internet. NO HEATER. WAH

4.      there are possums living in the roof

5.      I never knew what kind of horrific noises possums made. They looked like such friendly little yowi toy creatures but they sound like DEMONS. And they live in the roof

6.     Apart from the noises they are capable of creating they are also capable of TEARING A BIG HOLE THROUGH THE CEILING

7.     Things like possum poo fall through this hole

8.     The hole is also stained by things like possum pee

9.     It was sitting there with its fat arse hanging through the hole (the hole isn’t particularly large.. at the moment) and we poked it and I didn’t even move

10. One of my housemates always leaves dental floss around on the bathroom sink. I’m not sure if he’s used it already and couldn’t be bothered throwing it away, or if he wants to re-use it or if he’s just leaving it there for future convenience. (it’s a pretty weird thing to be grossed out by there’s way worse things someone could do but I just don’t understand!) if you’re the kind of person who flosses (I’m not. I’m the kind of person who falls asleep and just before they fall asleep remembers they haven’t brushed their teeth yet but then can’t be bothered getting up so doesn’t brush their teeth anyway) - so you have to be a super clean person to want to floss your teeth but why if you were a clean person who flosses would you be the kind of person who wasn’t clean with your dental floss!

11. Its really giant and cold

12. It’s always colder inside than it is outside during the day

13. In summer it will be really giant and hot

14. There are random holes in the walls filled with steel wool

15. There’s a piece of something in front of my wardrobe which creeks every time I walk over it. I think there might be a secret cellar but there’s carpet over it

16. My windows look like jail windows

17. The hallway door has a ‘window’ in it but no glass

18. There are random nails nailed into the side of the kitchen door for no reason, like not the kind of nails you could hang anything on just the kind of nails that would be there if someone decided they were bored and wanted to nail some nails somewhere for no reason and make the house look stupid

19. The toilets periodically stop working

20. The water is yellow and tastes like blood/rust/cancer/death

21. The theme colours are orange brown and yellow

22. The front light definitely doesn’t work it exploded when we tried to fix it

23. Our door bell sounds like one of those alarm clocks from 50 years ago that’s just two bells ringing really fast and loudly and quickly and offensively and that’s not so bad but what is bad is sometimes it gets stuck and the horrible offensive really loud sound never ends

24. The shower head sucks its really hard to have a shower without getting your hair wet and you can’t turn it on without getting your arm all wet

25. There’s this kid who lives next door and he has a dog and some times just wanders into our back yard looking for the dog. It’s unnerving.

26. The tap doesn’t stop dripping

27. Some of the other lights don’t work

28. The fan in our lounge room is definitely going to get pulled off the ceiling again because the ceiling is really low and drunk people can not resist the idea of swinging off a conveniently reachable fan

29. There’s an old meatsafe in the backyard (this isn’t really something ‘wrong’ with the back yard it’s just weird)

Apart from that it’s ok. The good things are that I have a giant room and the light has an extra convenience-from-your-bed light switch pulley thing (which isn’t really in the right place in relation to where my bed is but that’s ok). I can fit chairs in my room. And because this house is so crap I think we can probably claim that anything that breaks was ‘already like that’ and they’ll believe us. The possum-hole isn’t in my room and apart from the electricity issue and the fact that I blew my bike tire last night on a rock on the way to work and have realized I am completely stranded as far as relying on public transport because there isn’t really any but it’s not actually that far away from the city. And living with four boys is actually way better than living by myself. I may take that back later though. I don’t really think I will though.

I successfully produced 5000 words on Friday in an 11-hour period. I’m quite happy with my efforts. One assignment was like 30 pages and 9500 words long more or less a thesis. I’ll be interested to see how that turns out, basically those assignments will determine what I do with my life next year – whether I am allowed to go to Berlin or not and obviously whether or not I’m going to berlin for a year is going to have a fairly large impact on the rest of this year and my life in general. When I put it like that I probably should have put a little bit more effort in (a little bit earlier too) to keep my options open. I wonder if I’m allowed to go still if I get a less than credit average next semester.

My German abilities are definitely not good enough to produce the kinds of essays I’m writing for Australian university. My current mastery encompasses talking about ‘what I like to do’ and ‘what things I have in my room’ but certainly not the ‘continual dialectic between consumption and aestheticism’. I’m screwed. Ich lieber esse. Maybe they’ll let me hand up assignments in English and admire my English skills. Or maybe I’ll just put them into google translator and hope for the best. It’s pretty funny doing that and then translating them back again. One of my emails had obviously originally said ‘you’re a jerk’ and came back as ‘you are beef jerky’.

I was actually quite interested in all of the subjects I was doing this semester – usually they are the most boring load of useless crap things I’ve ever encountered but this time they were all really interesting (but admittedly they weren’t taught particularly well – especially one which was run by this little Japanese lady who was really nice but could not explain anything articulately to save her life and she was so nice and timid that tutorials – which were 2 hours – were the most painfully awkward thing in the world like she’d ask a question and there would just be a long silence) but even though I was interested in them I still found it basically impossible to motivate myself to actually do any of the work until the day (or the day after) it was due! What is wrong with my life. I’m just not really that interested in anything. But nothing is actually that interesting – tell me if I am wrong. It’s not. Who cares about shoes or dresses or perfume or university or music. It’s kind of interesting but only in comparison with that there is nothing more interesting.

I like the idea of going somewhere where no one knows me or thinks anything about me yet so I can be anyone I want them to think I am. Maybe I’ll re-name myself like Asians do. Germans seem to have a problem with ‘mary’ they tried to write my name down and wrote ‘mari’ I thought that was cute. Marie would be preferable. But what about ‘jens’ or ‘jutta’ or ‘manfred’ like the names in the German textbook. They have the funniest names. Although according to my google search for ‘German popular names’ the names they actually have are pretty normal i.e. paul, anna, laura, Emily, nick wow marie even made it in. how disappointing.

Oh electricity come back!

i like you really

"i like you really" the nicest compliment anyone has ever given me, in englisch.

how to be unproductive: buy a macbook. 

Best jumper ever; makes me look quite ambiguously giant but that doesn't matter because it has 'australian cockatoos' on it. my mum used to wear gross things like that in the 80s. i am turning into her. although i bet she would have done all of her assignments (badly and with lots of spelling errors - they didnt have the internet or microsoft word then, who am i kidding though mine aren't going to be any good either) about a week before they were due. i still have six thousand words to go and they are due tomorrow and i have a test tomorrow too so i can't do them tomorrow because i'll be doing the stupid test.  university is stupid.

also here's another little excellent piece of advice: dont fall asleep (/passout) next to, or put your heater on your bed where you might fall asleep, or get very comfortable next to a heater or probably just don't go anywhere near heaters, if you're somewhat intoxicated because your body may fail to awaken you as your skin is incinerating and you may wake up with a big fat electricity bill and big fat burnt legs!

altwerden

haiku

Pop will eat itself:
Hence, T-shirts with wry slogans
About wry t-shirts

care of Siobhan Adcock.

kindered souls

i would totally have bought this tshirt if it wasnt $270 and i wasn't going to london in a week. $270 is approximately 21 hours of work at my work. that's more than a whole week of working for $270... aren't we glad we have credit cards. it's going to suck when i have to pay for things in pounds. and its going to suck even more when i have to pay for things in euros wahh.

so what exciting things have happened this week:
my cat has successfully dismantled two roles of toilet paper which i stupidly thought were far enough out of his reach. remainders of these are currently spread around my house in little pieces which i cant quite be bothered dealing with due to the absence of a vacuum and the presence of the less efficent 'carpet sweeper'.
i have successfully learnt how to say 'my favourite colour is' 'my favourite tshirt is' 'my favourite season is' (etc) in german. i also conveniently attended the 'leiblingsfarbe' (favourite colour) class in my brightest most incredibly colourful jumper that i have ever seen or owned and thus was victim of the 'examples' 'what colours is mary wearing' for the entire lesson and now everyone knows my name and i dont know theirs. i also was victim to the next class of discussing who 'ist klein' ie small. at least it wasnt who 'ist dick'. schmutzig means dirty i think it's a better word for dirty than dirty i dont know why we didnt keep it.
someone in german thought i was 'still a teenager' (who obviously was 18 and straight out of highschool because the first question he asked me was what high school do you go to and i was like (well i didnt say this i told him the answer but) you cant categorise me by my highschool anymore because it was 3 years ago!) and was shocked and disappointed to find out that i was NOT a teenager but a 20 year old. it's depressing
i also had a highschool student ask me where i got my shoes from today. i felt good when i told her they were from london and no she could never buy them online because they are 'vintage' aka were a rip off and dont quite fit me properly. it felt good except for that she was some random highschool student. and it was also a bit awkward because just before she had started talking to me i had shoved about half a sushi role into my mouth.
is it normal for other cyclists to talk to you while you're riding down the road? i would lean towards that it's not, and that it's wierd and a bit awkward. but apparently not. it's happened to me twice in 2 days at hte same random intersection for no reason people starting conversations wiht things like 'nice bike' or 'good weather isnt it' and then preceeding to ask me where i'm going, what i'm doing etc and then seeming offended when i ride off to go to do what i was doing.

so the things i've realised about my life are: my boyfriend looks like the guy in the background of this photo
http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?pid=3543963&op=3&o=global&view=global&subj=502615419&id=658016493
(i have not mastered how to insert a link here yet properly)
and also that his brother looks like that photo i put up under the title 'boyfriend' but infact jason schwartzman is not my boyfriend and my boyfriend doesnt look like jason schwartzman. i also have realised that another person i find incredibly attractive looks extremely a lot like a friend of mine who died a few years ago and i really miss and this is probably the single reason i find him so attractive, except i only realised it just recently. thanks a bunch subconscience.
so i bought some marc jacobs mouse flats off ebay. they were my exact size. they DO fit me.. except they're a little bit small. i mean well, so i also bought drmartins and they're a little bit on the small ish side too awhile ago, and whenever i wear them they make my heels hurt, so i was wearing those shoes the day my mouse flats came in the post but i really wanted to wear my mouse flats so i wore them and then because my feet already hurt it made them DIE but i blame the docs not the mouseflats. and then i waited for them to heal a bit and they werent quite healed but i thought 'oh well' and wore hte mouseflats to uni and then my FEET STARTED BLEEDING. so i had to stuff the backs of my shoes with toilet paper and looked like a freak.
and so i havent worn them since. i dont know whether i should try my luck again and see if they really are that small for me or if i should try and make my feet get used to them. i want to keep them so much! but i oculd get a fair few $$$$ for them on ebay.. also i should probably sell my docs too, they're the real problem, i hope. i wish you would 'loose weight' in your feet and make them smaller.
ALSO I'M GOING TO LONDON ON THURSDAY. i am probably going to die or come very close to nearly being murdered at some stage in this trip. it will be fun. i can tell my grandchildren if i ever get that far in life.

end times

these photos by jill greenberg are incredible. i'm not really an art person but if i was going to say that i liked some kind of art this would be it. apparently she made them cry by giving them lollies and taking them away which apparently by lots of lame americans was considered extremely unethical. big deal kids cry all the time and she's captured it excellently. what is a let down about this exhibition (from 2006) is it's some anti some time of american politics political statement. i had forgotten about them until tonight when i rediscovered them. they are so interesting!

i love pictures that are just simple photos of peoples faces when they dont really know the photo is being taken.

fair, free publication, punk rock

I went to a 'zine fair' today. the above picture was without doubt the best thing that i acquired from the lovely little event. i dont really know how i feel about 'zines'. 90% percent of people in the world who arent punkrock (which i most certainly am not) have no idea what a zine is and therefore trying to explain it makes you sound like a wanky exclusive elitist jerk and defeats the purpose of the thing in the first place, or so i have found thus far anyway.

they are truly excellent things - in theory. finding a good free diy publication is one of the most excellent and entertaining things you can do, but it is SO dificult. you have to sift through so much shit that people have produced for no apparent reason to find the one excellent thing you know has to be somewhere in the pile.

good zines are people who just write about their life, normally and honestly; in a fashion that isnt completely self indulgent (not too much emotion in there) kind of like a short story but true. it is so interesting to read about someones daily mundane life, or it can be - i think you can make anything interesting if you are a good writer and some of the zines i've read, in my opinion, were far better written than a number of books i've read, or tried to read. but IT IS A RARITY.

so today there were lots of awkward little indy zine writing hipsters with equally awkward sales pitches for their $2 mini books. someone pointed out to me the issue of whether it was socially inappropriate to choose to 'put back' something from a table of free zines. i would say that it probably is.

i was sold the above picture from an attractive young syndey man who sympathised with my bland-wall but no $$ issue of decorating my house. i LOVE pity discounts, i got 4 pictures and 2 magnets for $10, instead of 3 pictures and NO magnets for $15. i also bought one zine called 'foxes in a supermarket' about some guy who worked at woolworths or something that had the potential to be interesting and then i was over my $10 budget by a long way so that was the end of the zine spending spree. i took some free things so atleast i wont feel bad if i throw those away because theyre usually free for a reason, sometimes. i always feel like i'm stealing whenever i get something - anything, even if someone buys me dinner or something - for free. it's a nasty feeling. or when you walk guiltily past the hand bag checking person in JB without showing your bag even though you havent stolen anything.

Purchase: cat.

So living alone finally drove me to the point of insanity that it has driven thousands of other lonely cat-ladies before and i became overwhelmed by the impulsive desire to purchase a cat.

My original plan was to buy one of those hairless cats:

As incredibly ugly as they are charming. I just really have a problem with those people whose houses you go to and get everything covered in cat hair. it's disgusting but i dont think i'd have the diligence to constantly be cleaning enough to avoid becoming one of those people myself, unfortunately these cats' pricing starts around $2000. so that was the end of that plan.

Plan B: more fur, less expensive, a breed called Devon Rex, which are basically just as ugly and wrinkly as the sphynx cats except for being completely completely naked they have a little bit of furr, except they have completely weird retarded whiskers which the breeder i bought my cat from had cut off!

only $550. Not really a bargain, had to drive about 2 hours out into the middle of nowhere to find this weird woman's house with all her weird cats. So far he has destoryed my half completed puzzle, tissues, books, shredded anything shreddable, shower curtain, christmas tree but not my gold fish yet. he also scratched my face. i have no regrets.

he is not hugely intelligent.

but he is very entertaining.
and when i get tired of him or evicted from my house for having a pet i'm sure my mum will have him!

Crisis of Finances

Bloody financial crisis. It was the best thing I’d ever heard of when we got free money from K Rudd (I somehow managed to attain two separate payments of free money too) and now it’s the worst. People only hire people with experience but I don’t understand how you’re supposed to ever get experience if you can only get a job when you have experience. How hard can it be to get a job in a call centre? Not very hard? It’s not a very good job. I can’t understand why there would be that many people who wanted to work there but apparently thanks to our friend ‘financial crisis’ there are.

I kind of enjoy that pretty much anything that happens that is bad can somehow be related back to the financial crisis. Michael Jackson dead, went broke, played too many shows, had a heart attack, financial crisis.

I would rather hire a 19 year old than a 40 year old. I would rather buy something over the phone from a 19 year old who wanted a job in a call centre than from a 40 year old in a call centre who couldn’t get a job anywhere else in their full forty years of life experience. But apparently not.

I think I’m going to invest in a car park. They must make so much money and they don’t even have any staff they just need to buy some building and some machines that dispense tickets and money and that’s it, practically a money tree. If I had a building I would make it into a car park. Although I guess owning an office building is kind of like owning a car park but for people so maybe that would be a good idea too. You’d have to hire cleaners for that though and that would probably be more expensive than owning a car park. Unless the office people had to hire them, I think that’s fair, it’s their own mess. But you’d still have to get someone to clean all the windows and car parks don’t have any windows.

I like how when you go outside, say if you work in some crap hospitality job like me where you have to be there by 6 30 am and its still dark outside, there are all these council cleaning people everywhere. And they’re doing really random jobs like cleaning in between the pavers and scraping chewing gum off things and there’s the lucky person who gets to ride the cleaner-like-a-lawnmower machine thing and there are so many of them and you wonder how long they’ve been there since if it’s 6 30am now and they must have to finish soon because as soon as it’s daylight they all disappear and if they go and do other cleaning jobs somewhere else or if they go back to jail or what.

Sorry about the run on sentence paragraph.

ebay bike

like winning an argument. expensive argument.

bandaids and condoms

Yesterday was an interesting day. I had bought a new pair of shoes that were far more expensive than they should have been but they held the silent connotation that their price was reflective of their quality. I was wearing them for the first time; a little unsure whether others would be as appreciative of their style as I was.

I got into a lift with two strange old men who had made a comment about me being their ‘new lift guide’ or something to that effect. They seemed to find this joke amusing enough to pursue it the entire lift ride and amidst this painful attempt at humour I received my first shoe comment. It was ‘wow look at those; they look like galoshes’ and I was like thanks. To which his response was ‘they’re interesting at least!’ and I was like ‘it’s okay they’re comfortable’ and then thought thank god we’re finally on the ground floor. I reassured myself with the notion that old peoples’ opinions on any fashion related items are invalid.

My day continued and I was shocked and horrified to discover that the city centrelink had been removed. God knows what the motivation in giving every one $50 short of a grand for free but removing the single only central centrelink was. It certainly had nothing to do with not getting enough business because there was always a minimum half hour line and two perplexed centrelink staff trying to keep it moving. I guess centrelink is the only company in the world where more business means less money.

This unfortunate discovery meant that I was given the option of catching a bus to either Marion or Norwood to the ‘nearest’ centrelink. What a ridiculous concept! I have a mind to write a letter complaining about it even! So I chose Norwood and proceeded to wait in a worse line than the one had been in the city. What did they think was going to happen? All the people stinging off the government in the city suddenly wouldn’t need centrelink anymore if they took it away? Just take it away? That was their solution to there being too many people in the line and not enough staff? Get rid of the most important centrelink?? Genius, thankyou Kevin Rudd.

You may or may not be aware of this but it is actually quite an effort to stay on the dole. These people are quite determined to remain unemployed! It takes about as much time and effort as actually having a job but gives you the false satisfaction of getting money for free. (obviously not every single person on the dole, I’m sure some people are actually having job problems but you know the kinds of people I am referring to) I don’t think that moving the central centrelink (how can they even call themselves that anymore) is the answer to the problem! It is not going to stop these people!

So anyway I line up in this ridiculous building all the way out in Norwood for goodness knows how long and then when I get to the front of the line the woman tells me I have to CALL CENTRELINK! BUT I WAS IN THE BUILDING! How can I need to call them when I am there! all the way in Norwood! It doesn’t make any sense. Doing anything centrelink related on the internet is the most horrendous hassle as is the new thing on the phones where instead of getting to press buttons to choose an option you have to talk to a machine. And if you happen to get frustrated enough to utter something unsavoury it will be like ‘sorry I didn’t understand that’ and you’ll be back to square one in the whole process. It was an ordeal let me tell you that much.

During this time – hiking through Norwood and such talking to some dumb ass centrelink operator who pronounced ‘vale’ as ‘valley’ - my new ‘galoshes’ had mercilessly been wearing away the backs of my feet. It was at the point where when I walked I would make a face each time my foot moved. I wanted to go and buy bandaids but the idea of walking any further from the bus stop, to Woolworths and furthermore through Woolworths to the bandaid section and then to the counters seemed like the most painful and treacherous journey. The cons of not enduring such an effort outweighed the cons of actually doing it though.

So I hobbled into Woolworths and searched their oversized ‘health and beauty’ section, finding all number of hair dyes and face washes prior to my discovery of their array of bandaids. These were conveniently located next to the condoms. An amusing concept I thought. They’re both for covering up things, stopping ‘infections’, for protection.

Once I had purchased my friendly box of bandaids I stumbled over to the nearest park bench in the middle of the mall and took my shoes off and covered my heels with a minimum of three bandaids each. This more or less solved the worst of my problems in life at the time. A good day.

winter

badelaide

(rosina street, city)

bizarrely ridiculous expenditure of adelaide 'art' funds