[Miscellany]

* Whenever I come back from holidays I look magnificent. I'm rested. I'm manicured and I'm stress free. Give me three days and I'm back to being an old hag with chipped nails and crazy eyes. What is it about work that just does your head in? I mean why can't we all just have jobs where you get to work, swan around, drink your coffee and then spend the rest of the day on facebook/blogger/email/whatever else peeps do these days and then leave right on the dot and arrive home with your lipstick still on? My lipstick lasts literally 30 minutes.

* I've been getting a few misdirected emails lately. There was the one about pet sitting - it was a couple of emails actually. Can you sit with the pet for the first one and the second email was sort of like "great job but we found the door unlocked, please don't leave the door unlocked". I've also had a couple of specific party invitations to people I don't know, FROM people I don't know. Is this happening to anyone else? At first I thought it was a spam thing but the emails are really quite specific and personal. Are spammers getting cleverer or am I getting dumber?

* Am back on the house hunting bandwagon. Great time to be out on the lookout eh? FINANCIAL CRISIS - MARKET CRASH - RECORD BANKRUPTCY. Ooohh, how 'bout I get out there and look for a house? yeah.

I'm already in the email wars with this estate agent. He's such a smarmy bastard. God, why are they so inhuman? Why can't they just be normal people? We had an argument about the price of an apartment. I thought it was unrealistic and told him straight out. Smarmy bastards hate it when girls have figured out they are idiots and let them know about it. Personally I think more girls should let smarmy bastards know that they think they are idiots, it would make them rethink their smarmyness if all girls kept knocking them down. I feel like I'm providing a service to everyone else out there. I really am. Ego stroking is so fucking 1980. We're already into 90s retro - time to get real! His next clients are going to be treated so nicely, mark my words. Aaaaanyway. So we disagreed on this price. He went to the trouble of conjuring up some auction results list which supposedly proved his point - which actually had no apartments on it, just houses. I mean, who the hell do these people think they are? You can't compare a house and an apartment and say that "therefore these prices are on par". I let him have it. He rang me recently saying that the "owners" had rethought their unrealistically high expectations. I hate saying I told you so - but you smarmy bastard - I told you so.

* I hear the first couple of episodes of Kath and Kim US season has debuted. Has anyone seen these? Kath and Kim (Oz) is a parody on suburban Melbourne life. The ladies who write and act the lead roles are brave performers. They take their normal middle aged bodies and make fun of them all the time. This is something that women on television do not normally do. This is something that women on American TV don't even contemplate. American TV is not about making women ugly. It's about making women who WATCH the shows FEEL ugly within themselves. Hence Kim being a chunky girl who thinks she's a hornbag (which is how it's supposed to be played) is not going to be played that way. Selma Blair is gorgeous and probably suffering an eating disorder (let's face it). In this day and age she IS a hornbag - she can't be walking around complaining that she's fat and being rejected by men all over the place. I mean it just doesn't work. It's not funny. It's not funny when an anorexic looking chick talks about weight. It's just not. It's just a psychologists appointment waiting to happen.

Therefore I have to ask. Why can't they just import the show and play the original on their tele? I mean, is American humour so unique and American culture so like a vacuum that they can't listen to other accents/learn about other cultures? Every other nation in the world just watches other shows from other nations, accents and all. We got no issue with it. Why should they? Why "Americanise" everything? Haven't they worked out that Americanising *anything* is just very, very bad?

* S was telling me about her guardian angels (spirit guides, whatever you call them) the other day. I dunno - do you believe you have a guardian angel of some kind? That is a specific "person" assigned to help you out in your life? If it's true I sort of feel sorry for mine. I mean, how boring for them.

* I checked my stats for the first time in about a million years. One of my referrals was "I'd love to fuck Kerri Anne Kennerly". Folks I feel so proud, you just have no idea. I'm having about a million pop-cultural orgasms at once.

* I think I'm going through a bit of a life transformation. Things are getting a bit weird. I don't know what to say about it, but things are shifting - not really forwards but sideways.

Labels: about me, house, houses, stressed teachers, weird little happenings, weird things

posted by M at 11:39 pm 14 comments

My friend B lives in a old Jade coloured farmhouse in a large-ish town in Northern Victoria. It's a grand old home sporting a patched tin roof with a sharp rusted peak and an imposing chimney rising up from the back. The dry patch of front garden is carefully framed by fragrant flowers in various blushes of red and littered with brightly coloured children's play things. She's standing on her front porch, right hip jutted, holding the baby expertly in one arm and waving with the other as we pull up into her gravelly driveway. Her own smile is mirrored on the face of the pixie-faced 4 year old clinging to her side (inside a 2 year old awaits, sans pants but singing rather loudly).

It's been a while. A lot has changed.

B is as comfortable in her role as mother now as she was holding a cocktail glass and a flirty smile back in the day. She calmly sails across the cluttered rooms gathering this and that, chatting away happily and creating order where there once was chaos. Pants are put on, presents are opened, children are placated...tea is offered. Hubby comes in and gathers the jellybean shaped child from her arms and rocks him from screaming to sleeping within 40 seconds - all the while asking how the drive was. This is a couple in control.

B takes us on the tour of the labyrinth-like house. Across the scratchy but beautiful old floorboards and into the study which is more like a library, with floor to ceiling books decorating all walls except one - reserved for the well loved upright piano. I look closer - the piano is labelled, the desk is labelled..the door, window, etc - all labelled unapologetically with brightly coloured pieces of paper. Obviously we have a young reader in the household. B and hubby are showing her teaching roots. Immediately I love the house and somehow this small act of inclusion of the children makes me love it more. The house belongs to everybody.

Brother and sister begin fighting over the crayons and all of us adults offer an easy solution that involves sharing. You might as well give up now says #2 with a laugh looking at the children You're surrounded by teachers. The eldest gives us a quizzical look and we all laugh. The terrifying truth has been told. B and hubby look at each other and smile.

They are in absolute bliss.

The old farmhouse reminded me a little of this video. Really a gorgeous song - almost a lullaby. For those not familiar with Badu, she is worth getting to know.

On and On - Erykah Badu

Labels: house, houses, kids, marriage, musings

posted by M at 10:29 pm 7 comments

Does it want to get any hotter? Seriously, what is with the heat wave? We're only in Spring folks. SPRING. How shit is summer going to be if Spring has sprung 37 big ones on us already? If this is a taste of things to come then I'm going to start stockpiling water soon cause the reserves aren't going to make it past December. I predict widespread panic and desperation over the last bottle of Evian at Coles. Maybe we should start killing off the elderly in an effort to conserve water (for the rest of us)...Just thinking out loud.

The heat makes me grumpy.. obviously.

And what's with house prices lately? I know that I've been a broken record about house prices but the other day I found myself at a "renovators delight", which happened to be directly across the road from a rather large block of commission flats. Now I'm sure a lot of honest hard working people live in commission flats - however it was 10am and a guy holding an open stubby of VB beer was taking his woman for a stroll down the street to have Sunday brunch at a popular Southern fried chicken establishment (yes, I saw them go in). I love me some of those fries myself, only not at 10am, but then I realised that for fucks sake this renovators delight in this guy's neighbourhood was going for a MINT. Mint, that is, for what it actually was worth. The clincher was when I asked about parking spaces the real estate guy said there wasn't one on title but he was ....kind of sure that it'd be safe to leave my car parked on the street... it'd be sort of safe anyway. Great. Problem is, this is right in my price range and I'm so very desperate at the moment that I'm wondering whether I should just bite the bullet. Apart from that street the surrounding suburb is one of my favourites in Melb. Would you move opposite a commission flat? Yes it's a serious question.

In Musical Monday news. This is an oldie but a goodie. Way back in the dawn of the 90s, The KLF was taking over the world with their brand of trance and being a child of many dance lessons and obsessed with beats of any kind it was right up my alley. Those of us living the early 90s dream of fluro board shorts (or skirt) worn with a sheer black chiffon shirt and hi-top sneakers can remember that the early 90s dance, trance, rap scene was tragic (see last post) but in amongst the shit there were a few gems of which this was one. I only recently started reliving The KLF. They do not sound dated unlike much of the music that came out of that time. I'm a fan.

The KLF - 3 A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)

Labels: 3am really is an eternal time, Ancients of Mu Mu, fake mad but not really, houses, musical monday, questions, rant, wonderings

posted by M at 10:48 pm 15 comments