Tuesday, 16th March

I see we've already failed at our assigned task to complete one of these everyday. It is good to know that ALL my therapeutic attempts at self-improvement are doomed to failure. I thought perhaps that as this one was entirely self-motivated and controlled I would be better at it. But then I wasn't. Almost immediately. There isn't even a good explanation for it.

Previous rationalisations for ceasing helpful activities have included: 1) The counsellor is not gay; 2) The therapist is not gay enough; 3) That is really far away; 4) The pool is too chlorine-y; 5) I'm sure the guy on the front desk at the gym looked at me funny.

A Second Attempt at Sticking to Task:

1. Better coffee is now available on campus. This is definitely good timing, as - why do I never see it coming? - the campus is once again filling up with students. Millions of them, making queues for said coffee interminable, borrowing books that I need, filling up space and making noise... And one of them gave me such a *look*. An up and down kind of look. A scoff-lesbian-scoff kind of look. I see that they are indispensable for the running of the institution, I just wish they were small and quiet and studious. And maybe invisible.

2. A Republican Senator with an appalling voting record on GLBT issues was caught drink driving on his way home from a gay dance club. Please, tell me he had a man in the car with him. Why yes! Yes, he did. Senator Roy Ashburn (oooh, look at that face! I am going to pinch his cheeks) models himself on the grand old "tradition of Ronald Reagan ... a true reformer and a champion of openness, accountability, and bi-partisanship." He has, of course, been attacked by both the right and the left. So now, instead of enjoying the moment of righteous irony that attends most of these stories, I'm having a bout of empathy for him. Damn it. I don't like hearing conservative commentators call for his resignation, or claiming that because he was divorced a few years ago he "chose homosexuality over his marriage." So now my opinion is sliding... not towards him exactly, but certainly away from his critics. Crap, now I have to have a 'complex' response to the case, rather than just enjoy the revelation of hypocrisy and the satisfaction of seeing someone who took (several) stands against GLBT rights be dragged kicking and screaming out of Narnia.

Then I read out-gay mayor Chris Cabaldon's comment on hate crimes against gay men outside of a club in Sacramento. He pointed out that Ashburn has "voted against laws that would protect them. But he’s going there with a reasonable expectation that he will be safe.” And then I swung all the back again, to being pleased and slightly smug. Privacy vs Hypocrisy? Hypocrisy wins. Out you come.

3. I've been noticing that every morning when I go down to start my scooter (his name is Sascha) a spider web has appeared in between one of the rear-view mirrors and the handle-thingy that makes the bike go faster. A perfect triangle of web, appearing as if by magic. Now, I realise my arachnophobia is pretty extreme (see previous post), and thus my corresponding level of denial has the potential to be equally extreme. But I never really believed it appeared by actual magic. Here is the story I have concocted in my head to explain the phenomena (which has being going on for about 6 months):

Every evening when I park my scooter, a spider that lives nearby (not too nearby, probably next door or across the street) sees me do so and thinks, 'Hey! That looks like a great place to set up my web!', then he trundles over from his permanent place of residence to visit. Like discovery a perfect weekender - not somewhere you'd ever want to live, but nice to visit. He works hard, spreading silk between mirror and handle-thingy, creating a perfectly formed little net to catch his fill of nocturnal insects. I imagine him playing, kitten-like, with his reflection in the mirror, or maybe just sitting on the seat, making little ‘Rrrrr! Rrrrr!’ engine sounds. Then the sun rises, and he, feeling exhausted from an evening full of building and eating, trundles, a little fatter, a little happier, back to his home with the knowledge of a job well done.

So every morning, I get rid of the web, secure in the knowledge that he’s back home, fast asleep. And thus I am able to drive off, my hand on the throttle, completely arachnid-free. Today however, crumble, crumble goes my little narrative. I parked at university for six or seven hours, and when I went to drive home I was surprised (marvel at the level of denial going on here) that an exact replica of my little friend’s web had been made in my absence.

Of course, I have known it all along, that this is not really typical spider behaviour, and far more likely is the fact that I do not have a nocturnal visitor, but a permanent squatter. The discovery that the web reappeared in the daytime, at another location entirely, shattered my happy denial and forced me to acknowledge that the spider lives INSIDE my scooter. All the time. Probably tucked safely away inside the body of the bike, right next to the throttle. Where my hand rests. And I have been driving around in blissful (forced) ignorance of the fact that at any moment, whilst driving, a spider could emerge from his hidey-hole, and climb directly onto my hand. The hand that drives the bike. The hand that controls acceleration. There would be screaming. There would be flailing. There would, almost certainly, be crashing.

But look at how I change and grow! Instead of catching a bus to the supermarket, purchasing a can of insect killer, catching a bus back to uni and going on a little killing spree, I started the scooter. I got on. I put my hand on the throttle, and I drove home. I have no idea why I was ok with the idea of a spider actually living in Sascha when usually the idea of a spider even looking in my bedroom window will throw me into hysterics. But I was. And I am. Perhaps if I was to see the spider this would all change, but for now, in an uncharacteristically affectionate gesture, I have named him Henry, and think only with fondness of my hitchhiking spider friend.

4. Panda and I watched ‘Mrs Dalloway,’ and ate huge bowls of freshly made vegetable soup. We both decided, at the exact same moment, that we needed to get a poster-sized picture of the scene where Sally kisses Clarissa.



There is nothing better than Panda’s home-made soup and homosexual content in period costume.

5. An image of a better world:

Friday, 5th March

5 Things is starting to seem ambitious. I barely left the house today, in an attempt to get serious work done and meet Monday's looming deadline, and not moving from in front of the computer makes it quite difficult to 'allow' 5 good things to happen. It tends to have the obverse effect, in creating quite quickly 5 bad things: writer's block, neck strain, fuzzy eyeballs, self-doubt and on occasion small fires when I leave a cigarette burning in the ashtray in front of the window by my desk. I could spend a few minutes googling, seeking out news stories or charming factoids or just typing 'surprised kitty' into youtube's search engine, thus providing myself with, at a stretch, 5 bits of stuff that improved my day. But I decided that would be cheating. The aim of the exercise is to find 5 things from the day that has passed, not rearrange my life in order to complete a checklist. It is meant to be a retrospective task, and I'm determined not to cheat. That means no lying either, and keeping elaborations to a respectful minimum. Better to have the list look a bit sparse, a bit desperate (Wow! What a fabulous coffee! That's going on the list), than betray the project's intent. So if I list charming factoids or amusing news stories it is because they came into my life in an organic fashion; they were forwarded to me, or appeared in the papers I usually read, not through a nefarious keyword search.

1. There is a massive tree that looms over and above my first floor balcony. In the summer months it encases the whole balcony in lush greeness, pressing itself against the apartment building, branches reaching onto the balcony and whipping against windows on windier nights. It has grown above and beyond the height of the whole building in the 4 years we have lived here, and now it feels like the building itself is being hugged by this ambitious arbor. If it were cut down, it feels like the building would topple backwards. The tree, aside from providing shade, green-filtered light, privacy and the vision of nature hugging architecture which always pleases, has also provided us with a mini-ecosystem of fauna. The birds I have mentioned before, but the last few weeks have seen Panda and I glued to the windows or squished together on the tiny balcony every night, as a flock of fruit bats come to visit. We've seen up to 10 or 12 of them at a time, screeching and clicking at each other, fighting over the berries that cover every branch, and I can only assume, in the spirit of the Mardi Gras festival they have arrived in time for, having lots of fruity sex. I love their ginger ruffs, and their pointy noses and the way they stare, eyes perfectly round and unblinking, when they see or hear us moving about. The best part of their visitations, of course, is Panda. He is a much more avid bat-watcher than I, and will spend inordinate amounts of time sitting perfectly still on the balcony or on the couch in the living room, window flung open and only the top of his head peeking above the frame. He also, to my never ending delight, has spent a considerable amount of time perfecting his 'bat-call' and will click and screech back at them, watching with joyous fascination as their heads turn towards him and their little triangle ears flick back and forth like antenna or tiny satellite dishes. Then, sometimes without warning, they will leap out of the branches, spread their wings and fly into the night. One bat with a particularly well-honed sense of the dramatic, delighted us by flying directly across the gibbous moon before disappearing. Ooooo. Aaaaaah.

That is usually my favourite part. I love that up close, when their leathery wings are tucked around their bodies, you can see why they are compared to foxes, or in Panda's case, 'flying puppies'. There is something almost painfully familiar about them, and when they are caught in our torch light, close enough to touch, the desire to have one for a pet, to reach out and scritch the back of their fuzzy necks or stroke their velveteen ears is overwhelming. Though Panda and I are currently (sadly) petless, it is as if that intense maternal instinct for my lost fur-children returns; muscle memory commands me to hug the nearest mammal. And then they leap, extending a massive wing-span at odds with the tiny little bodies I had decided would fit perfectly into a makeshift bed in my sock drawer. The tree heaves with their leaving, and sometimes you can feel the wind created by the beat of their wings. And then they are completely alien, untouchable, wild. They wouldn't want to sleep in my sock drawer, or eat the fruit platter I would make for them and put in their row of little bowls in the kitchen, embossed with the names I had already begun doling out (Morris, Lady Jane, Bea Arthur, Captain Jack...). In the moment of flight they are beautifully distant, and I love their dual nature, their duplicity. They are hybrids and I have always loved hybridity. And, as Panda pointed out, laughing gently when I voiced my desire to keep them and hug them and love for ever and ever, 'You don't need to own everything. It's enough that they've visited.'

2. I made a stranger laugh.

3. I was reading a collection of essays by David Sedaris that mentioned that in New Jersey it is illegal to give a monkey a cigarette. This of course brings to mind a series of excellent and time-consuming legal questions: If it's illegal to give a monkey a cigarette, are you legally obliged to take the cigarette off a monkey who has obtained it legally? I assume it is completely legal if the monkey manages to procure its own cigarettes, as no-one wants to arrest a smoking monkey (turns out I am sorely mistaken in this point). Apart from the truly satisfying tangent this fact sent me on (how did the law come into effect? What was the case that pushed this into legislation?), it also led me to try and find out if this was actually true. And, whilst I could not at first glance find any supporting evidence for this law, I did learn that in New Jersey it is prohibited to give zoo animals cigars or whisky. Excellent.

It is in fact, illegal in South Bend, Indiana to make a monkey smoke a cigarette. The case that propelled this specific law into legislation occurred in 1924, when a monkey was found guilty of smoking and fined $25.

Like any good researcher, I am driven, not just to accept the facts as they are given, but to seek out their origins and ramifications, the context of their conception and their continued effects in the world. And now I have a whole host of new questions that beg answering: Why is it illegal in Zion, Illinois to give a lit cigar to a domesticated animal? Why cigars specifically? And why not, while we're at it, extend the law to protect wild animals from the dangers of mouth cancer at the same time? Also in Illinois, the town of Champaign has forbidden people from urinating in their neighbour's mouth. Why only your neighbour's mouth? Why don't forbid mouth urination in its entirety? Does this law take into consideration consent, or does it merely reflect the town council's abiding interest in stamping out piss-play where ever they find it?

Arkansas outlaws both oral sex and keeping alligators in bathtubs.
You will be fined up to $500 in Kentucky if you try to sell a duckling or baby rabbit that has been dyed or coloured. In Kansas City, if your taste in decor runs to bathtubs with clawed feet it's time to relocate, as bathtubs with feet resembling animal paws are prohibited. In Mole, Missouri it's illegal to frighten a baby. In Montana, it is illegal for unmarried women to fish without a chaperone. Professional boxers in Louisiana may be tough physically, clearly a well-timed insult will send them bawling back to their corners, as it is illegal for spectators to mock them. In Florida, if you're a male wearing a strapless gown and you leave your elephant parked at a meter without paying as you would for a vehicle, expect some jail time. Legislation exists all over the place to outlaw such dangerous and offensive behaviour as gargling, shaving and humming in public.

It is always a good thing to expand your knowledge. Especially bite-sized bits of knowledge, which I intend to use instead of greetings from now on. Each email, text message, and letter I write, will now begin with the citation of one of these laws, skipping straight over the boring and often disingenuous 'Dear Blah, How are you?'

4. Yep, that really was a fabulous coffee.

5. When I'm suffering paralyzing writer's block but don't want to leave my desk because then I feel like I'm letting it win, I valiantly stay at the computer to try and fool the writer's block into thinking I'm still working (bad news, by the way, when you start to treat something that is inside your brain as an external force with a consciousness). So I do things that can be considered, at glance, as work. Like electronic filing, moving documents to other areas, creating new folders and labelling them with a complex coded system of organization which I will of course forget immediately. I also spend time painstakingly moving things to my external hard drive, and whilst engaging in this rather pointless busy-work, I found this very old photo of Morgan, my beloved ginger tom, who died 5 or 6 years ago now. It is maybe not a good thing to ponder death and loss when you're trying to simultaneously unblock your productivity gland and hide your lack of productivity from your writer's block, but I found his image, after all this time, very comforting. It so completely captured his personality, perched on a space too small for his gigantic fat ginger body, perfectly content, fast asleep. A lover of velour and colour schemes which would best show his ample shedding. I remembered with perfect clarity how his fur felt after he'd been asleep in the sun, how he'd wake, blinking and completely put-out when I'd snap a picture of him, and then, with an expression of affectionate forbearance, tuck his head under his paws and fall back asleep. I'd forgotten that he snored, and that he once fell in 'love' with a teddy bear, and that he'd pull the garbage bin over if you didn't get up to feed him at 6am. And that if my bedroom door was shut at night, he'd fling his mighty frame at it, again and again, until he was granted access. How he'd wake me by whacking me in the face with his paws, or by leaning his face so close to mine I'd wake with a start to the sight of enormous green eyes in a chubby ginger face and a petulant 'Mrroah?'.

All of this rushed back in a condensed little ball of emotion and memory, and in the face of an otherwise pretty empty and frustrating day, it wasn't such a bad thing.

Thursday, 4th March

I'm finding it difficult to extract 5 good things from today. The problem is not that 30 bad things happened. It is more of a definitional problem: What constitutes a 'good' thing in this exercise? Looking at yesterday's list, my definition of good seemed pretty broad and also strangely visual/animal based. A good day for an urban nature spotter/sad bird watching type perhaps. A day lacking, it implies, any contact with people (or at least with people that would contribute to 'goodness'. Does the list imply a lack of good people around me? Or an influx of 'bad'? I'm already becoming fixated on what I'm not writing; on the gaps and elisions produced by the task; on what is not written). Because of the parameters of the exercise - which is still a bit 'life-affirming' for my tastes - I feel the intrinsic dishonesty of the task. Focusing on 'goodness' rather than 'truth' (in my head, a tangent about the impossibility of truth... leave that philosophical argument alone for now) means even as I'm writing in the hope of alleviating anxiety and depression, I'm constantly reading underneath myself (makes me sound quite flexible doesn't it?) to see the layer of not-good things that happened. And that are happening all the time - Uganda's kill-the-gays bill, the conservatism and corporatisation of Mardi Gras, that twinge of pain in my knee, outspoken supporters of gay marriage not turning up for the vote in the Senate (bastards), out politicians not turning up for the vote in the Senate (traitors), deadlines I let slip by, small cruelties of conversation, large injustices and general thoughtlessness (some of them carried out by me). I feel like in affirming good things I'm ignoring everthing else and will turn into one of the those glassy-eyed nitwits who insist on accentuating the positive (eeee...lim-min-nate the negative...) to the detriment of the important; who use phrases like "positive affirmations"; who refuse to hear anything they consider to be negative (no newspapers for them then) because it would impinge on their morally justifiable quest to achieve happiness. I often blame Oprah for this highly indivdualist tendency but it's probably not all her fault.

These people look like they are in serious denial. They must be. In their strict refusal to hear information that might be a wee bit of a downer, their eyes must glaze and slip, unseeing, over objects, people, facts, thoughts, entire countries... It seems to me like a terrible way to live, insular and isolated, lazy and irresponsible, disrespectful and unchanging. It is easy to be buyount and light-hearted if you are empty. They are aiming, probably without realising it (because they'd have to read a novel with some death and injustice in it), to become Mr. Skimpole of 'Bleak House', that epitome of 'positivity', that 'child of the universe', whose blank refusal to deal with anything on the grounds of his vaulted innocence damages everyone around him. Forced 'positivity' only produces pure, terrifying innocence. Innocence, it turns out, is selfishness. Look at babies. (Yep, an anti-baby rant). They are very cute and squishy, but they are (until they get a bit older and eventually turn into people) pure selfishness - concerned only with meeting their own needs, unaware that other people exist as people, sucking, draining little vampires of desire. But there's nothing wrong with that in an infant, they are little more than flesh pods intent on survival. Larvae. In an adult though, it is terrifying. So boo to innocence I say. And boo to positive affirmations. I am not a man-baby, I am not Harold Skimpole, I refuse to affirm! No to O(prah)!

Ah fuck it. Here are my five good things for today (based, to keep my sense of self intact, on MY definition of good, not to be confused with the accepted meanings of the term "positive"):

1. I am petrified of spiders. It is my worst fear, matching precisely the defintion of 'phobia' (from the Greek phóbos, meaning 'morbid fear): an intense and persistent fear, couple with an excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared stimulus. (See how you can't have fear without desire? Nice.) I have been known to travel two suburbs over in the middle of the night to avoid a huntsman which interrupted me while I was making a cup of tea (which prompted a short-lived fear of tea).

The most common reactions to the 'feared stimulus' inclulde: a) freezing as if caught in headlights and staring intently in an effort to destroy spider using eyeballs and as-yet-untapped telekinetic powers; b) running away whilst squealing like a small child and flapping arms around head; c) sitting down, crying, and compulsively rocking back and forth; d) begging Panda to kill said stimulus (though I never use the word 'kill' because I am effectively ordering its execution and at the same time trying to protect myself from the guilt and blame that will inevitably occur. So, like a mob boss trying to distance myself from the hit and retain plausible deniability, I ask Panda to "get rid of it"). This hardly ever happens because Panda is a life-protecting person, much better than me, and hates to see living creatures killed, especially slowly and obviously painfully from toxic insect spray. At the same time I am panicking and reaching something like a spider-induced critical mass, Panda's well-reasoned and ethically sound argument makes me feel like some kind of unfeeling monster, oppressor of creatures smaller and weaker than myself, but only able to assert power through the actions of others. So I start to hate myself. But in my terrified state I quickly project this hatred onto him and spiral into an ill-advised spate of accusation about Panda's obvious deficiency of love for me (ie. 'if you really loved me, you'd want to protect me.'). As you can see, a spider encounter is a very busy time for me emotionally. It has the capacity to alter my sense of self-worth, ruin my relationship, and occassionally force me from my home.



So why a spider-themed no. 1 spot on good things? This morning, before Panda was awake, I took my coffee, toast, cigarettes, and novel and went to plonk myself down on one of the sofas in the living room. Naturally there was a massive (ok fine, a medium-sized) huntsman spider on the wall above the couch. I grabbed the spray and gave it a couple of squirts. This in itself is a victory in self-control and moderation, as usually, when left to my own devices, I spray them with enough insect killer to bring down a large bird. The spider dropped behind the couch, and I retreated to the other sofa, curled up against the arm and began to read. Another victory for me, as this meant remaining in the same room as a possibly-alive adversary AND taking my eyes off its last known location. I had only read a page of my novel when my eye was drawn to the curved edge of the sofa's armrest. One creepy, pale brown leg at a time, the spider was attempting to traverse the curved incline, only a few inches from my hand. Like a mountain-climber reaching the crest after a long journey in a low-oxygen environ, it slowly, painfully, and with a dogged determination, reached the crest and came to a stop. This. Is. My. Nightmare. Instead of the panicked, skittish movement of a healthy (and justifiably scared) spider trying to get away from the enormous fleshly blob of death they must see me as, this little trooper had covered a huge distance in a very short space of time to arrive, surely not without design, so close to me as to warrant a suspicion of cognition. More than mere cognition - of strategizing and possible super-spider speed and power. We're talking about at least 4 metres of carpet and a 1 metre incline in less than 2 minutes. And it was ill. What the hell was happening?! How did it know where I was? Had it come for revenge, or god forbid, assistance? Was it seeking out the only other living thing in the room in a desparate bid for medical attention? Or did it understand it was I who had attempted to kill it? I imagined it struggling onto its four hind legs, and with its last breath, raising one shaking leg to name its killer: "J'accuse!" (Apparently spiders are French. Or have read Émile Zola.)

So where was the good? It is perhaps a minor good, a good defined by lack rather than positive value. Returning to points a) through d), I am proud to say that despite the extreme nature of this encounter (and it was supernaturally bad), I refrained from my usual display of histrionics. I merely stood, recited my mantra quietly so as not to wake Panda ("nightmarenightmarenightmare...") and brought my trade paperback down upon its brave little head. The paperback's flexibility and the soft give of the cushy armrest meant that instead of a mangled spider body stuck to either sofa or book, its body bounced off the armrest and out the balcony door.

This, as you can see with all the contextual information provided, is a definate victory, and in the scheme of things, though perhaps not 'good', provided a moment of profound, not-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been relief.

2. As part of the Mardi Gras festival I went to see a female cabaret show called Lady Sings it Better. Six women perform songs by male artists, so the performance has a nice lesbian-appropriation feel. The show in itself is good, because they are all beautiful and talented, but what stands out for me is the context of its conception. The creator/artistic director was taking singing lessons in her teens, and was belting out some romantic number sung originally by a man. Her teacher, showing the endemic blindness of the heterosexually inclined (or as I like to call them, the heterosexually limited), encouraged her to change the pronouns in the lyrics, which would straighten out (ha ha) the meaning of the song for a female performer. To come back to this rather seminal event in a young dyke's life and reclaim what was probably yet another damaging instance of straight-brain presumptions in a life filled with them, will always be welcomed as a kind of reparation: returning to trauma in order to heal it. Healing with singing? What could be more gay!



It can also be read as a defiant (and in this case by turns witty, touching and sexy) re-reading of mainstream cultural texts. You don't want to give us songs, films, or books that reflect our lives? Well, fuck you, we'll steal yours and make them our own. What makes this performance more than apt for this particular Mardi Gras is the way it fits with the this year's theme: History of the World. It draws into sharp relief the double meaning of the theme. As queers we are constantly seeking out figures, texts and events in history that we can retrospectively claim for ourselves. This happens whenever marginalized groups are denied a history through censorship, invisibility, or misreprenstation. Women, gays, lesbians (who are also women, poor dears), people of colour, perverts and freaks, criminals, the mentally ill... Being marginalized is not something that is temporally fixed - it extends, from our perspective, back in time, hiding our likeness, shadowing histories that could be ours, if only they hadn't been (deliberatley) lost. Think of the poems of Sappho, burnt centuries ago and coming to us only in fragments. That's what we have to work with. The practices of making a coherent narrative out of fragments is varied: historical fictions, imaginative reconstructions, queer readings of otherwise 'straight' texts. Listing famous people in history who can be claimed as one of us, as another practice of historical recuperation, is more than a fun pasttime; it takes on real and affective meaning in the creation of an imagined/imaginative genealogy for those normally excluded from such structures of belonging.

The second meaning, linked to the first, is our own personal histories of exclusion, isolation, fear, shame, abuse and violence. And being born post-Stonewall does not necessitate a waning of these experiences. The removal of discrimination at a policy level, and even at a general social one, does not mean the immediate reduction at other levels of experience. It did not stop the gen-Y creator of Lady Sings from being informed, however inadvertantly, that her desires were not even a possibility in the mind of her teacher. So hooray for Lady Sings it Better for performing a bit of time travel for the homos enjoying their spirited renditions (pronouns definatly unchanged!) of AC/DC, Michael Jackson, Leonard Cohen and Lenny Kravitz. Because in their acts of gendered ventriloquism and appropriation they took me back to adolescent moments of undefinable pleasure, singing along to love songs about women, relishing the perversity of the improper pronouns in my proto-gay, out of key and uneven voice. Seeing six women doing a cabaret version of 'Closer' by Nine Inch Nails? Good thing.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=532340111&ref=search&sid=570443446.2003291912..1#!/pages/Lady-Sings-it-Better/135424649838

3. Drawn to the balcony by someone yelling out the name 'Amy' over and over, in increasingly frustrated tones, led to the sighting in the back alley behind my building of an enourmous man - bulky and tall and terribly butch - chasing after a fat little pug. Amy, despite her genetic disposition towards plumpness, bad respiration, and stumpy legs, had made a bid for freedom. With a dexterity defying her shape and size, she consistently avoided the man's attempts to restrain her, dancing around him, taunting him, then darting just out of reach. A pug's face, though expressive, does not often convey such a clear sense of smugness and joy.

4. There was a kitten called Charlie in the window of the vet clinic. He was white and tortoise-shell, with that little black spot under his nose that often prompts associations with another famous, tiny, moustachioed man. But the vet staff had gone for Chaplin instead, which is nice because one should not be miopic when it comes to referencing famous facial hair.

5. I had a good conversation. It was with Panda and Toosh, and centred around the current state of the gay rights movement in Australia, the unfortunate policies of New Mardi Gras, and Panda's fantastic idea to instigate a kind of reverse relationships register for straight people. The idea is to have an online register/petition which straight people would sign declaring their intention NOT to get married until marriage rights are extended to everyone. A show of solidarity. The idea came from watching The View (and that is probably the first and last time an idea for political action will come from that particular source). Sarah Silverman was being interviewed, and when asked by the panel when she would marry her long-time boyfriend, she replied 'Never'. She said she could not reconcile herself to participating in an institution that was, at its heart, discriminatory. She likened it to joining a country club that would not allow black or Jewish members.

Damn straight.

5 Good Things That Happened Today

In lieu of therapy, exercise or quitting smoking, I have taken the very Oprah-like advice of a friend, and decided to write down a list of 5 good things that happen each day. This "therapeutic" technique is apparently good for easing depression, anxiety and stress. I do not buy this theory whatsoever, but as I don't buy any therapeutic advice that sounds like it came from a book with a number in the title (the title in enormous font, usually surrounded by bold, primary colours. Why do self-help books always have massive titles on the covers? I always feel like they're shouting at me.)AND I don't buy any therapeutic advice coming from other, more reputable sources, I have decided to give it a whirl. As indicated, it is certainly the path of least resistance as it does not involve paying money I do not have, going to a gym, or giving up smoking, which I love (all of which would make me feel better, according to the books and all the self-righteous non-smoking, happy people). So here we go, 5 good things that happened to me today:

1. I saw a beautiful whippet staring intently at a bird perched on a street sign high above him. The dog looked like he knew, with absolute certainty, that he could catch the bird, but was just choosing, at this particular moment, to sit quietly next to his person while they finished their coffee. He was white, with tan and black speckly patches. He was sweet and his fur felt like soft, clean velvet. I told his parent I would love to have a coat made out of him. I think they took that comment in the spirit it was intended.

2. There was a bird in the tree overhanging my balcony. It was small, but pleasantly plump and/or chunky, which is always nice in a bird. It had dark brown feathers, strewn with streaks of white and a startling blue - like robin's egg blue. The texture its pattern reminded me of those bird's eggs that look like they've been flecked with paint, and are impossible colours.

3. I found an outdoor area at university that is a collection of tables and benches grouped together underneath huge umbrellas. In between each table is what I at first thought were ashtrays on stands but turned out to be little powerpoint stations. Eight powerpoints clustered around a stake at table-height. This seems small (consider that no. 1 was a whippet and reserve judgement) but altogether it means a place to work outside without fear of sun or rain or laptop battery dying. Most importantly, it is a place to be a drain on the uni's free wi fi policy and smoke. At the same time. As I am pushed more and more to the periphery of the social world (I will not stop smoking. And if I ever do, I will find someone to replace me in the smoking community. That's right. I'm going to recruit. And I don't feel bad about it), these small triumphs of comfort loom larger.

4. A tiny bird, about the size and shape of a tennis ball, fluffy and round, black with a white belly, just shot past the kitchen window like a very ineffectual bullet.

5. I parked illegally for two hours and did not get a parking ticket. Yes! AnaRchY! In the context of uni parking, this is more of a triumph than the little spot of paradise discovered earlier in the day. I don't want to invoke Godwin's law, so I will avoid the obvious comparisons and only say that the parking inspectors at uni are...efficient. I have seen them ticket a bicycle. A bicycle. Chained to a pole. So two hours and no consequences? Triumph. Almost erotic satisfaction.

End.