one of the weirder food combinations, possibly the weirdest out there

On Sunday morning, I was exposed to something which I think actually killed my tastebuds a little. A friend who had stayed over had on his crumpets the rather alarming combination of vegemite and peanut butter.

I know! This is stuff of freak status people, but I have to say I do admire his creativity and his ability to express himself so deftly through the use of spreads/condiments. Usually with food combinations you sort of look at it sideways and question whether it will really taste good but when you do lunge in for the taste-test you find it to be a surprising and all-together pleasing experience for your growing family of taste-buds. I was this way with vegemite and eggs, vegemite and avocado and vegemite, avocado, garlic, tomato and eggs on toast. When informed of these various combinations I did my usual ‘Oh gross!’ face and backed several steps away from the person who was suggesting I try this. But after trying it, I’ve now incorporated those unconventional food combinations into my weekly eating habits.

There are other ones out there that I didn’t think would work but amazingly enough did. Peanut butter and chocolate biscuit sandwiches. Peanut butter and cheese. Cheese and jam. Cheese and steak sandwiches. Honey and banana. Peanut butter on raisin toast. These are all pretty good and I definitely encourage you to at least try them once.

However, the combination of peanut butter and vegemite was one that unfortunately did not work for me and now I feel like I’ve lost a little bit of my sense of adventure, or at least am now a little scared to keep trying food combinations because for the first time, I actually found one that didn’t work. At first I could taste the peanut butter and I thought ‘Yeah, all right, let’s see where this goes’. But then the vegemite kicked in and my tastebud family began screaming, kicking and vomiting all over my tongue in reaction tho this really awful combination. I think my friend was slightly saddened by this too. Here was a person willing to expose a side of themselves previously kept hidden and this person obviously thought highly enough of me that they felt comfortable exposing this dirty, dark secret of theirs in the privacy of my kitchen. And I didn’t end up liking it.

I applaud this person. They have guts and bravery that I could never have. They have a faith in humanity that I wish I possessed. They have an ability to trust that continually eludes me. They, dare I say it, are a true artist.

a truly awesome purchase and the division of time in a 7 day week

Yesterday I made a truly awesome purchase for a truly awesome price which will provide me with a truly awesome amount of entertainment for any number of truly awesome tram rides. For the bargain price of 99 cents, I bought John Travolta: An Illustrated Biography, published in 1976. I love books, I truly do, but I do hate the fact that I never have enough time to read the ones I really want to read, like John Travolta: An Illustrated Biography or I Owe Russia $1200 by Bob Hope.

Unless I’m on the tram network (which I actually frequently am, but usually when it’s so busy that I feel a little too like a sardine to actually feel comfortable reading without putting my personal safety at risk).

And I’m wondering if I should make an effort to prioritize my time better. Not having really been an expert at time management given that I don’t even own a diary, I have recently found myself wondering where all my time goes. Where are my hours leaking? Where are my minutes seeping? Where does all the time go that I could be spending reading such high quality literature as John Travolta: An Illustrated Biography or I Owe Russia $1200 by Bob Hope?

Every now and then some crazy boffin gets a grant to spend time compiling how much time we spend on the various tasks of our day to day lives. You know the ones, they say we spend something like half of our lives sleeping, a total of 4 years vacuuming and roughly 15 years wondering where we put the keys. Come the end of the week, I’m always shocked at how much time I’ve spent not doing the dishes, not doing the laundry, not cleaning, not cooking, not food shopping, not ironing, not sweeping or vacuuming, not cleaning the stove or not cleaning the bath. It usually goes down with me walking into my apartment on a Saturday night after work and excited that I can sleep in on Sunday but then I turn on the light and scan my apartment and sadly realize that I’m going to spend half of my Sunday cleaning and by the end of the cleaning, I’ll be too tired to do anything else except eat things on plates which won’t get washed for a few days and unpack fresh produce into my fridge, a disarmingly large percentage of which will not get used and next Sunday will go straight in the bin to avoid me contracting some kind of salmonella.

During my weeks, I work in the call centre enough to get me by. I also socialize but not to the extent where I know all of my friends phone numbers off by heart and backwards and I wake up on a Thursday morning with three people on my couch all sharing one blanket, one of whom is a complete stranger. I sleep, of course and several times a week devote some blissful time to the afternoon nap. I work on whatever zine project I’ve got going on at the time, usually late at night with a tureen of coffee beside me and a large bag of crinkle cut potato chips to provide me with salty creative fuel. I spend some time watching things on tv of course, but only educational programs like The Mighty Boosh seasons 1 and 2, So You Think You Can Dance and the Olympics and I don’t usually just sit and watch, I’m doing things at the same time, like cooking, typing or trying to find things underneath the various piles of paper and socks I have dotted around my apartment.

I spend a good percentage of time on public transport but this is unavoidable and slightly fun as well. For the cost of a metcard you get entertainment, rest time, reading time, eating time, drinking time, dating time and social experiment time. I don’t believe my time on public transport is wasted at all. Each week there’s roughly 6 months I spend in the local Safeway trying to recall the shopping list I left on my kitchen floor and wish I had remembered to bring and then about 2 weeks of time spent blankly trying to calculate how much my bag of mushrooms will cost at 8.99 a kilo. I eat, of course and I do like to dedicate my time to my meals. Of course I watch tv whilst I eat my meals on the floor, but I don’t like to do anything else, opting instead to concentrate purely on the meal I am eating and how good it tastes despite how bad it looks and wondering what my pasta would taste like if I added crinkle cut potato chips to it. There’s grooming time but that is not a significant chunk of time (not because I wake up looking like the most naturally beautiful girl in the world with perfectly ironed clothes and perfectly styled hair, but mostly because I usually wake up too late and throw on whatever clothes don’t have coffee stains on them and briefly shove some bobby pins in my hair to sort of hold down the boofy bits).

I spend some time on the blog and sitting in the library using the internet. I also spend some time returning overdue books to the wrong library then talking to the library staff about why I don’t seem to have a good concept of time or library locations. I spend about 162 hours a week climbing up and down the stairs to my apartment. I spend about 16 weeks of my week making and drinking coffee. I also talk on the phone sometimes and each week visit my dad in his office to make sure he knows I’m still alive and haven’t died on the floor on my apartment surrounded by piles of paper and socks with chocolate around my mouth and an empty cup of coffee in my hand.

I like my life, I like my weeks, I like the things I do, but after all my absolutely crucial activities of daily living, I can’t possibly be expected to find the time to complete such literary landmarks as John Travolta: An lllustrated Biography or I Owe Russia $1200 by Bob Hope unless I spend more time on the tram or more time on the toilet. And frankly, I’m not prepared to eat a large amount of fibre just to get me reading time.

the personal minefield that is underwear shopping

Yes, everybody wears underwear. Just like everyone sleeps, eats and poops, everyone (i hope) wears some form of underwear at least a couple of times during their life. But at the age of 22, I still get embarrassed talking about underwear, being in the underwear department and even taking the underwear I am about to purchase up to the checkout for the extremely bored check-out chick to beep through. Being a girl, I inevitably find myself being included in conversations with other girls about specific brands, colours, comfort, price, occasion, boostage and convertability and I am ever so quickly realising that I either need to have a sex change operation in order to decrease my chances of being included in such a conversation, or, and I believe this option is more feasible, through a series of graduated exposures, desensitise myself to the world of underwear.

Not only is underwear the seemingly silent fashion statement, it’s engineering astounds me. When I was a kid, my mum would just buy the no-brand 6 pack of undies for me and that was that. When I needed new ones, she bought the same types again and I never had to think about it any further than that given that in grade 2 when playing kiss chasey I decided to ward off some amorous pursuers by flashing my undies and I doubt whether david in grade 2 took one look and said ‘Oh, she wears home-brand. I could never be with a person who wears THOSE kinds of undies). Now, when I buy underwear, I am faced with an enormous selection and it takes me roughly about 4 years standing in the aisle to actually work out whether my body type is best suited to the boy leg, high cut, low cut, bikini or hipster style of underwear.

Then you have to decide which colour. This is impossible as underwear now comes in so many patterns, colours and metallic shades that it’s nigh on impossible just to find the plain grey undies I so desire. I never walk around in public in my underwear so why does it matter? If my underwear is covered in butterfly patterns, it’s not going to make the tram less crowded or the metcard people less annoying.

And then there’s bras. Oh my lord, this is an impossible and so unbearably drawn out procedure. I recently heard from a friend that MYER’s actually does bra fittings. I admit I am a little curious to find out my exact size rather than me standing there trying to judge from two metres away if the B or the C cup is going to provide the best support and all the while not actually wanting to touch the bra unless I am certain I am going to buy it for fear of somehow, someway, getting bra germs. But I worry that I would go in for a bra fitting then be encouraged to participate in a lengthy episode of underwear shopping in which it would come out that I actually know very little about underwear and the bra fitter lady would look at me and think ‘You’re a 22 year old girl? How can you not know about this?’

There’s t-shirt bras, convertible bras, lacy bras, maternity bras, sports bras, balconette bras for those in an architectural mood, push up bras, minimizer bras, bikini bras and sexy bras, none of which I am in the least bit comfortable shopping for. All I want when looking for a bra is one that will hold them up, hold them in and not get really itchy over the course of a day. But apparently, I should be putting a lot more thought into it than that. I wish they made a bra specifically for people like me. It would be called the Non-Interesting Bra With Non-Itchy Seams, Non-Nipple Revealing Cups and Non-Complicated Clasps for those Non-Solitary Romantic Moments. And it would be reasonable priced. I’m always appalled and shocked when I realise that the bra I’ve decided to buy costs more than what I spent on food for the last 5 days.

And finally, we have a contraption which Ive only just been introduced too. The chicken fillets. Not being the most generously endowed little lady, I have often, in the depths of my mind, wanted a little more voluptuousness up top. Revealing this to a friend in a particularly un-guarded moment, she’s now encouraging me to buy chicken fillets. And I’m not against this. I actually would like to be able to buy them for those less than rare formal occasions when I might wear a low cut gown and want to trot out the puppies for a day at the show without stuffing tissues down my top. What I do worry about is a) them falling out or b) in the throes of romantic passion, my suitor discovering them and wondering exactly why i felt the need to stuff imitation meat products into my bra. How does one broach that topic?

So maybe for the new year (financial that is) my resolution should be to progressively expose myself to the greater world of underwear and be open to learning about, thinking about and eventually discussing underwear related topics with my fellow female kin. And if all else fails and this optimistic plan falls through, this time next year, I will either have become a man or I won’t be wearing any underwear at all.

university: a musing on whether or not i should join this educational movement

I was at university once. Yes, I too did pay HECS and I too did get assigned an impossible to remember library password. However, I left halfway through. Now, I am absolutely positive that I have a brain, either that or my head is inhabited by a race of miniture aliens who control my every movement and who will one day finally learn how to launch their probe-like spaceship out of my nose and into the world in order to exterminate the human race and I will be the one everyone hates because I will have unwittingly been providing these aliens a home for 22 years whilst they ruthlessly plotted against us.

This year, unllike others, I am going to some university open days. I plan to attend for several reasons. One, there are usually free balloons. Two, I live really close to some universities and always see the students getting off the tram ready for a day of full on learning and I wonder, what if one day I got off and decided to attend a lecture? It’s not as if i couldn’t go home for lunch, it’s walking distance for christ’s sake. Three, I think my alien-inhabited brain wants to be used, stretched, if you will further than the five minutes I spend in the cereal aisle wondering if my box of cornflakes will last for another day or if I need a new one and if the box of cornflakes was travelling on a train at the speed of 80 kilometres an hour, how many rose bushes would it pass as it went through the eastern suburbs on a rainy tuesday?

I’m definitely not anti-university, it’s just up until recently I’ve had other things on my mind. But given that recently I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time surrounded by people who complain about exams, compare lecture notes and discuss the pro’s and con’s of the various referencing methods, through means of osmosis, I’m starting to slightly crave for another taste of university.

My initial university experience was, in all honesty, seriously crap. I lasted two and a half years in a course I didn’t really like, at a uni that I didn’t really like, working in a job that I didn’t really like and going out to places that I didn’t really like. Whilst there were positives, such as learning to give injections, learning how to take blood rpessure and being in possession of a visually-aided medical dictionary containing some seriously creepy real life photos, it was, in it’s entirety, a shit experience.

But now, I’m realising that there are things that I want to go and learn about that I don’t think I can do at the local library. For instance, I’ve always, for as long as I remember wanted to be an astronomer. I love stars, I love all the questions that space presents and I love the idea that we might not be alone in our universe and I seriously want to study this. I also want to study university maths. I love algebra and geometry and would love to be challenged in these areas further than what I’m able to using my old maths textbooks sitting in front of my tv late at night, thinking that maybe I should have a more active social llife but also secretly thrilled that I’m sharing my night with a happy group of pronumerals who are so pleased that they’re about to be placed in equations, thus fullfilling the whole point of their existence. I would love to study biology in uni as I absolutely am entranced by the formation of cells and pretty much everything to do with cellular biology, human structure and the way that we interact with our fellow cellular bodied creatures.

But, I don’t know. I like not having a HECS debt. I like not having homework. I like not having an impossible to remember library password. I like not having a humiliatingly ugly photo on my student card. I like not being faced with the political quandry that is voluntary student unionism. I like not sitting in a lecture theatre asking myself a) why they can’t provide us with more comfortable seats and b)does anyone else in this theatre not understand what the lecturer is talking about, or am I just too pre-occupied on what I want to eat for dinner that I’m not listening and taking notes when I really should be?

Hmm. Maybe some free balloons will help sweeten the deal.

the nature of true love as pertaining to my personal faults

Over breakfast today (the unexpected but strangely satisfying combination of raisin toast and crinkle cut chips with possibly a little too much coffee), I remembered something I heard recently about the nature of being in love. I can’t say that I’ve been in love so far in my life, at least with a person, but what I heard said rang very true to me. This person (guess who) said that they thought that you don’t fall in love with someone until you have your first argument because that’s when you get to see someone’s faults as well as their good side. In theory, love is accepting someone for their good and bad sides. This person also encouraged me to write whatever I wanted about them, be it good or bad so long as it’s true. I often write about myself as though I am some sort of demi-god and in order to even the scale here, I have dedicated this post to my faults. You will only hear about them once, but for future reference, here they are.

a) I fall over a lot. Not intentionally, mind you and not from being intoxicated but in general, I have pretty shocking balance and therefore, spend a larger than average amount of time picking myself up off the floor and counting the bruises on my shins from bumping into pointy-edged things. I also am not a great bike rider for this very reason but come with the added advantage of never having to deal with the monster that is helmet hair.

b) I am not good at giving directions. The words left and right don’t come out of my mouth often, it’s sometimes ‘that way’ or, more often, a general shake of my hand in the vicinity of the possible direction of where it is I want to go. I am not a good person to be lost with and I would not be a good orienteering partner. Our team would lose and my team mate would hate me forever for my poor navigation skills and my failure to disclose these before they selected me as their partner.

c) I don’t like being in areas where ball sports are being played. I have an irrational fear of a soccer/footy/cricket ball being slammed into the side of my head and me either developing amnesia therefore forgetting the previous 22 years of my life along with my shopping list or me having to go through the rest of my life with the words ’sherrin’ imprinted on my forehead.

d) I sleep really quietly. So quietly I could be mistaken for actually being dead.

e) I cannot for the life of me ever understand people when they talk in double negatives. As soon as they do, I realise that the conversation has elevated to a level which is beyond my understanding, my eyes glaze over and despite the person continuing to talk to me, my mind has left the vicinity and has gone down the street to get a coffee and some lolly bananas.

f) I don’t flatten out my monetary notes when I put them in my wallet. I scrunch them up into impossibly tight balls of notes, knots if you will, and I have received many an annoyed look from a cashier in a store as they somehow try to pry the clump apart to be able to put it in the register.

g) I steal forks. Seriously. So far these last few months, I’ve taken 4 different forks from different locations. I’m a menace to the cutlery world.

h) I like to salt my dried fruits. Never accept a dried date, cranberry, sultana or apricot from me if you have high blood pressure or get dehydrated easily as they will be dusted with salt and may shock your tastebuds into a state of unfeeling.

i) I always forget that I have paper/tissues/lolly wrappers in my pockets. Then when I do my laundry, I am always surprised at the large amount of white paper flecked everywhere and like to avoid blaming myself and instead force myself to believe that it was the person who used the washing machine before me who is entirely to blame. Then I feel bad for not taking responsibility for my actions and spend the next half hour washed in guilt regarding my quickness to point the finger at anyone else but myself.

j) I can’t whistle. I could never join a bush band and for this reason, have alienated myself from the entire bush band community, a surprisingly large majority of the general population.

k) I am jumpy. As anyone who has ever approached me from around a corner/walked up behind me/rang my mobile phone/sneezed unexpectedly close to me or knocked on my door will attest to, any sudden sound or significant change in my immediate environment and I let out a yelp, jump roughly 4 foot in the air and will sometimes even hit the offending person to make them aware of how much they scared me. Working in a call centre is dangerous for me. Supervisors will approach my desk from behind and put things on my desk and I’ll be on the phone to someone and I’ll see this hand reaching over my shoulder and I’ll scream some combination of bloody hell/jesus christ/what the hell is that/oh my lord I’m going to die down the phone line to a rather shocked stranger who probably thinks I’m in some sort of personal danger and who hangs up and calls the police.

l) I am hopeless in situations where price bargaining is involved. When I moved out at the start of the year and was trying to buy a fridge, I went to a store where bargaining is actually encouraged by the staff. When a well-intentioned staff member approached me in the refrigerator section and tried to engage in bargaining with me, I actually ran away and was too afraid to go back unless I had a rational thinking adult with me. A price is a price. It wouldn’t be a price if you were meant to haggle the price down to your preferred level. It flies in the face of what I consider to be good economics.

m) I cannot give back massages. In the past, when well-meaning suitors have offerred to be romantic and give my back a rub, I’ve unwittingly said yes then instantly regretted it when I realised that they expected me to return the favour. I try my best, but get self-concious kneading someone’s back like pizza dough and having to deal with some sort of lotion or oil. How long is it meant to go for, how hard are you meant to knead, how much lotion or oil do you use, how do you know it’s going well, should I be talking or should I be silent, am I meant to be thinking of twenty six places I’d rather be than here, giving this person a massage, two of them relating to war zones and one involving Kerry O’Brien wearing bermuda shorts?

So these are my bad points. When you read a post and you begin to think ‘Wow, this girl’s ego is slightly larger than what could be considered healthy’, please refer back to this post and realise that I, despite being at a level of greatness equal to that of a demi-god, have my faults too.

the extremely organised and slightly mob like advances of magpies in the park

I was ogled by a magpie today. Braving nature and all it’s unpredictabilities, I sat in the park for a little while and a magpie with beadier than usual yellow eyes engaged in a silent battle with me. He plonked himself in front of my feet and would waddle back and forth, looking at me like I might possibly be made of birdseed. I would eye him, he would eye me, he would advance, he would back up and the dance would continue.

The odd thing was that after a while, I was almost hoping the magpie would pick a fight with me just so I could exercise the supreme superiority that comes with being much higher up on the food chain than the creature you are taking on. I’m sure it’s exactly the feeling that a lion feels when it’s about to take on a giant swarm of krill, it’s an exhilarating rush of adrenaline that comes with the knowledge that the fight you are about to engage in is totally justified since you are the superior creature in the animal kingdom.

After a while, and presumably after the magpie realised that he stood no chance against a creature with opposable thumbs, he flew off only to return minutes later with a friend. Now I had two sets of beady yellow eyes staring me down, just wanting me to relinquish my seat and declare defeat in the face of my feathered foes. One would approach, the other would try and distract me by waddling around the edge of the chair, I would stare them down and the tango that was the stand off between me and the magpies would continue.

Then I realised they were getting organised. A third magpie had waddled over and now I had three sets of beady yellow eyes trying desperately to intimidate me. And the thought actually crossed my head that maybe the playing field was a little more even now. One magpie I could have beaten, two possibly if I was feeling particularly energetic, but three was pushing it. I saw myself getting taken down, one malicious beakfull of flesh at a time and that feeling of superiority was being questioned.

It was at this point that I realised that I was employing war strategies against magpies. I also realised that staying up last night talking to the hyperactive boy with green hair and then watching The Hand That Rocks The Cradle in the dark by myself, had left me in a somewhat less rational state than usual and that I should probably go home now since I’ve managed to thoroughly convince myself that the magpies in the park have not only formed some sort of mafia, but that they’ve also sent me fish in the mail and are trying to take me down with their beady yellow stares of hatred.

public sleeping and surrealist yellow animated entertainment

I find my plans tonight to be exciting even if they don’t involve a whole lot of whipped cream, four hunky guys, an inflatable pool and the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. What they do involve however are a DVD of The Yellow Submarine, a new loaf of fruit toast and the ongoing exploration of a sort of burrow I’ve formed in my bed where the pillows are in a configuration that is perfect for sleep and I gain optimal warmness from my electric blanket. It is exciting to me.
There are quite a few people asleep here in the library. Public sleeping is a social mystery to me. I find sleep to be a deeply personal experience that I’m not altogether comfortable sharing with the public. For instance, I can’t sleep on planes. Ever. I just hold a terror within me that I’ll either drool on my head napkin and  spend the rest of the flight having to recline against my own drool, or that I’ll wake up and find myself draped over my neighbour in an unintentionally romantic position whereby I’ll either have pissed them off or made a new friend. I get awkward on the tram when the person opposite me goes to sleep. Should I poke them intermittently so that they remain half conscious and therefore won’t miss their stop? If I don’t do this, will they miss their stop and then blame me because I didn’t fulfill my unspoken responsibility as a public sleep witness? And now in the library I am resolutely amazed that despite the acoustic guitar emanating from the first floor, the toddler running around and the click click of people flicking through the DVD library, these people are able to sleep.

I am not a public sleeper. The few times I’ve just tried to close my eyes and rest my head against the shuddering tram window, I’ve felt a responsibility to my fellow travelers to open my eyes every few stops just to reassure them that I am still awake and aware of my whereabouts on the tram line. When I was a kid I could go to sleep really easily in public. Okay, fair enough, I didn’t have all of the various inhibitions that I’ve acquired through 22 years of living, but I was still totally comfortable finding a near-horizontal surface and catching forty winks, regardless of where I was, who was there or what I was wearing.

I know that overseas they have little sort of nap pods where in your lunch break you can go and steal a quick catnap, but I would still find that hard. It’s weird to sleep in the same room with someone you don’t know. They breathe differently, cover themselves with the blanket differently, some talk, some drool. I would be constantly thinking that there is one freakish peeping tom in every nap pod room who has some strange sort of obsession with watching people sleep and just plants himself there early in the lunchbreak to fulfill his most twisted desires and who would go home and log into his book the various nap-partakers sleep habits and soon he would have endless amounts of books and somewhere in one of the books, had I let down my sleep guard just once and nodded off, there I would be, nap pod inhabitor #461 with an itemized list of how many times I sniffed, drooled, repositioned and what I looked like when I woke up.

Because I wouldn’t want that to happen. Ever. Even on the rare occasions that someone stays over at my apartment, I am ever in a state of readiness when we’re meant to be sleeping. I don’t sleep well because I am conscious of how I am sleeping and I always wake up before them. Then I get bored just lying there, waiting for them to wake up, the whole time wondering how they are able to sleep in my bed way better than I am and also wondering if I could get up, have a shower and some breakfast then jump back into bed without them waking up or noticing that I smell soapy fresh. I’ll then stare at them, trying to wake them up with my powers of ESPN and then when they do awake, they probably think that I am some freakish peeping tom whose most twisted desire is logging people’s sleep habits into their log book collection.

It’s a complex thing this sleeping and one I’d quite like to keep to myself, personally.

extremely inappropriate ring tone at a surprisingly high volume

Once again, the library proves an excellent source of free and comfortable temperatured entertainment. Ring tones, I believe are an excellent form of personality representation. I like to think my one says, ‘This girl has such an interesting life that she didn’t have the time or the inclination to sit there on a wednesday evening listening to all the ring tones my phone offers and then making a pro and con list as to which one I felt represented me the best’. This, however, would be a lie as it is exactly what I did do in order to find the ringtone I thought would say what I wanted to say best.

But just before, I heard a ring tone, played at a surprisingly loud volume, that really made me not only wonder at the state of the human condition, but also to feel a little concerned for it. At full volume, ‘My Heart Will Go On’ rang out through the library and the person whose phone it was let it ring too. They didn’t, as one would have expected, turned a shocking shade of red as the try to pass it off as someone else’s phone and left immediately whilst trying to find the button that would turn the damn thing off. They just let it ring for a while as if to say to the world “Yeah, I’m a Celine Dion fan, so what? I’ll just give you the finger whilst I grab my crotch and continue looking for a collection of her greatest hits here in the cd section”.

Hey, at least they’re open about it.

a bacon sandwich, the flying pig and the high possibility that i am a coward

I would say that around 98% of the time I am a vegetarian. Meat is expensive, I live alone, I got food poisoning from mincemeat a while ago and I really like cows (I don’t really believe you should really eat something that you want to hug first) (unless you’re stranded on a desert island with your boyfriend/girlfriend and he or she is such a nice person that since you haven’t eaten in 12 days, they let you kill them and eat them to survive. This is the stuff of true romance people; voluntary cannibalism). However, of recent times, I have found my tastebuds and tummy wanting a particular something that sort of is not in the arc of vegetarian foods.

Bacon. Crispy bacon. In a sandwich.

It had been going on for about a week, this hankering. It started small and grew to the point where today I went and bought bacon. And I made myself a bacon sandwich on rye bread with tomato, spinach and mushroom. Despite the fact that yes, I would hug a pig so long as it wasn’t oily and I wasn’t chasing it around a field in order to win a carnival prize, I ate my bacon sandwich and I really, really enjoyed it. It was crispy, salty and porkish all at once. I’ve not really ever been a big bacon eater, it’s not something that I’ve ever included in my daily food intake on a regular basis (it would have to squeeze in between the fruit toast, peppermint dark chocolate and pink lady apples that give me an unnatural amount of joy). It was honestly one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever consumed. I think the hallmark of a truly great meal is when after finishing it, you don’t want to eat anything for ages, not because you’re full but because the taste is still in your mouth and you know that whatever you next eat will spoil the ongoing sensation the meal has left in your mouth and then you’re stuck between your growing hunger and the sense of enjoyment your mouth is experiencing and it becomes a battle between your stomach and your mouth and you know that eventually your stomach will win, to the disappointment of your tastebuds because despite every inch of your very soul not wanting to ruin the aftertaste, you need to eat to survive and to have the energy to go and tell everyone about this great meal you just had but then you do and no one cares and you feel terribly alone in the world and decide to go home, listen to Jeff Buckley in a dark room and feel like no-one could possibly know the isolation you are feeling right now.

There is also a high possibility that I am a coward. Remember my previous reference to the hyperactive, yet still intriguing boy with green hair who I met once and was strangely attracted to? Well, he works in a cafe and I want to be audacious enough to walk into the cafe where he works, order something and ask him for his number. And yet, all I’ve managed to achieve so far is the oh-so-high-school two times I’ve walked by his place of work, sneekily peering through the windows to see if he’s there (he has green hair, he’d be visible in a snowstorm so I should be able to see him through cafe windows). This is all done whilst walking at my brisk pace, so I get a super quick glance in, and hurry along hoping that maybe he was in there, saw me looking effortlessly beautiful as I scurried past, thought ‘Hang on she looks familiar’, thus rekindling the memory of how nice a person I actually am and that I made some sort of impression on this person other than the large haired, men’s clothes wearing, frenetically paced word tornado that most people remember me as . This is a very complex and convaluted procedure, I know and it’s strange because usually I am quite good at just asking someone out. I have completed many a brave act before, such as keeping my eyes open when I’m in a plane that is taking off and not wanting to scream at the top of my lungs as my every reflex is telling me to do. But this one, I cannot seem to do. This, sportsfans, is why people came up with the social atrocity that is internet dating.

Oh and did you know that there is a statue of a flying pig with gold wings on top of a pole on the corner of swanston and bourke street? Is it merely chance that I noticed this on bacon day?

drama in the library, rubbish bin throw down

Tee hee hee. I have to come to the library to use the wireless internet (since it’s free) and I do get to experience a varied amount of experiences, but they’re usually of the literary kind. However, drama just ensued, when out of nowhere, a guy came hurrying out of the computer lab with a girl following him calling him a c***face (i didn’t even know that was an insult) and then she threw the rubbish bin at him as he walked down the stairs. Seriously good entertainment for thirty seconds and totally free too. Myself and the guy who always sits in the same chair, always reading comics got through it though, we are unharmed and have found the experience an all together bonding one, much like being in the centre of some natural disaster wearing navy blue tracksuit pants.

Also, as I work in the call centre, I doodle, to entertain myself. Due to the fact that I now have a scanner and am still mildly fascinated with the fact that it can scan and I haven’t broken, lost or spilt coffee on it yet, I’ve put in a pastiche of my call centre doodlings just for your entertainment. It’s not as good as me throwing a bin and calling you c***faces, but for a tuesday morning, I think it will do.