The times, they are a-changing...

And never could there be more conclusive proof than when you go to look up the spelling of (industrialist) Armand Hammer in the dictionary and find MC Hammer there in his absence. Hee hee!

What's wrong with me? (Answers on a postcard, please.)

It's undoubtedly the slowest lift on campus, possibly the slowest lift in the developed world, but I take it anyway. True, the stairs are right there to my left, but I take the slowest lift because I'm early for the meeting upstairs and don't want to seem too eager, because I've trekked back to my parking meter three times already and I'm getting some crazy blisters, and because it provides the perfect opportunity to check out my hair. (I know. I'm a woman obsessed.)

The lift only travels one floor, between ground and first, because, perversely, someone has decided to put the Disability Services office... upstairs. I can barely be bothered climbing up to it and I have fully functioning limbs. As the lift grinds painfully down I'm aware I'm being watched. A girl in the queue for the cashier's window is staring at me. "That lift," her gaze seems to say, "is for people in wheelchairs." Which it isn't, officially, but so overly-socialised am I that as I at last walk into the waiting lift I adopt a theatrical limp, for crying out loud!

To the Tune of'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head'

All together, now - "Small parts keep falling off my car..."

I'm beginning to worry my car might be some sort of physical manifestation of my own troubled brain. (Spooky!)

In the last week...
- the plastic panel under the glove box fell off
- I blew two brake lights
- the gas struts which hold the tailgate open finally gave up
- the clock battery went flat
..and, this morning, when I went to plug my mobile into its car charger the whole cigarette lighter socket came away in my hands!

Happily for me, none of these things actually affect the safety of the car (although I'm running out of leg room for my passengers), but I'm beginning to feel that things are unravelling around me. (Have you ever replaced the clock battery in your car?) And I've been feeling so good too!

The Edge of Remembering

They've stopped making my favourite perfume. This makes me sad - I feel like every time I get really attached to something like this (and this was a fragrance I chose myself, for me, not because anyone I knew wore it or I was talked into it or it was advertised) it gets discontinued. Hmm...Midas in reverse. Trout, everything you touch will dematerialise. So now it's time to choose a new one, and I'm reminded of the strange power of scent.

I find that smell, more than any other sense, has the tantalising ability to balance things right on the edge of your memory. Chase them too hard and they'll disappear entirely. (I turned to look but it was gone...) My favourite perfume reminded me distantly, distantly of my first trip to England (and so of watercolour sunshine and horse chestnuts and tea and midnight foxes) even though no-one I knew there had ever heard of it. The smell of Oil of Ulan makes me think of my mother - she tells me she only wore it when I was a baby. I remember doing the washing once when my Dad was quite ill in hospital and crying at the smell of his aftershave on a jumper.

The smell of sorbolene cream is the smell of preschool, but I've never been able to figure out why. Our Grade 5 classroom smelled like damp hessian, even though I can't remember what it looked like.

And the most pungent smell in the universe is wet German shepherd.

Rock Is Dead

LONG LIVE PAPER AND SCISSORS!

I've been to Melbourne to see my dear Moose, and splendid they both were. For those of you not yet rendered unconscious by my photo collection, here are the edited highlights:

1. 1. Being allowed to hang out with beautiful people (c.f. the beautiful people)

2. Pretending to be a real live theatre person by watching the show from 'heaven' and from the wings and generally getting in everyone's way.

3. Visiting the Italian book and music shops in Carlton - on reflection it might have been simpler (and cheaper) to move my house to Lygon Street...

4. Being rescued from a truly filthy 'Donwannagome' mood on Tuesday by a trio of utterly delightful silver-haired ladies who cornered me in the Plant Crafts Cottage in the Botanic Gardens and bombarded me with enthusiasm for their activities until I couldn't help but feel in love with the universe again. I still owe them a dollar - and I intend to pay it back!

5. The tram driver who plied us with all sorts of useful information - including where the Bunnings on Bourke Street has moved to and how to get there - and passed the time at traffic lights asking her assembled passengers who it was who was wearing Jean Paul Gaultier.

A delightful city in delightful company - thanks, guys, can't wait to see you again.

Oh, and...

..I'm back from Melbourne, about which more later.

I always feel a ridiculous affection for my home town when I see it from the air. Flying gives me a heightened awareness to begin with. For someone who already finds it very, very difficult to shake off the sense of their own mortality and near-purposelessness (!) in the grand scheme of things (I'm thinking about it ALL THE TIME, I say) the sheer awe that I feel when an aeroplane lifts off that we as human beings can leave the ground (and stay off it) makes it impossible to think about much else than my own fragility, and therefore the things that are important to me.

Now I really enjoy being in the air, but I remember being quite frightened on my first long-haul flight. Take-off had already freaked me out (I was only 10) and in the wee hours of the morning I looked around and found myself to be practically the only person awake in the plane. The projected map-thing showed us surrounded by ocean. Suddenly I could FEEL the profound distance between us and the sea, knew it as a space we could fall through to disaster.

I turned to my Dad, personal plane guru, for reassurance. He knew how everything worked. "Don't worry," he whispered in my ear. This was what I needed to hear. There was nothing to worry about. "If we land on water," he continued, "these things sink like a stone." He chuckled and put his headset back on.

And so I always grin like an idiot when I see Frisby from 37,000ft.

Random Thought

Perhaps it all comes down to the ability to phone and say, "Hi. It's me."

A Rant and a Rave

Namely:

If you are going to rate something on a scale of 1 - 10, you are no longer,
NO LONGER, I SAY, allowed to quote a number outside of that range - viz, On scale of 1 - 10, they're a 15! It drives me INSANE.

(Clears throat and has a good lie down.) But...

Buying socks in Woolworths this morning I bumped into a DVD copy of
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, hiding with its back against the wall in the bread aisle, of all places. I never seek these things out, they seem to find me - some proof of the predestined organisation of the universe, or do lots of nerds hang out in Woolies? (Should it be called Wallies?) It's not cinematic genius, I guess, but I have a really soft spot for it - particularly for Robin Williams' cameo appearance - and I needed to make it feel loved.

Whoo, they've got my number, don't they?

Momos and More

Went out for Tibetan on Friday night in honour of Banana's birthday.

Evidently a carload of beautiful women is just too much for some cabbies. The gentleman who drove us to the restaurant had his eyes popping out of his head...or must have done, given that he was simultaneously managing to text message AND tailgate an unsuspecting early-model speeding Porsche while arguing with us heatedly about whether Wednesday had been the 6th or the 10th of July. I wasn't as vocal a participant as I might normally have been - I needed all my strength for hanging on as my seatbelt buckle had been jammed with chewing gum! (Who does that?)

The man who drove us back started out promisingly enough, laughing at our inability to tell which side of the Maxi Taxi was fitted with a door - and only half of our cohort had been drinking - but only a minute had elapsed before he started bemoaning his inability to get Bluetooth going on his mobile - which he promptly produced for our advice. We were getting used to this, but we were, I admit, a bit more disturbed by the story of his devastating addiction to [scary painkiller] Tramal and attempts to guess what line of work we were all in. Perhaps we should have all said yes at 'nurses' just to get his eyes back on the road!

Vyvyan, you utter bastard!

Have just noticed that Paul Jackson, producer of The Young Ones and Red Dwarf, amongst other things, is now in charge of...wait for it...Nanny 911. I'm working on my second episode of this steaming pile in 24 hours, so I'm rather biased, but don't you find that just a bit sad? Perhaps he needed another Landrover.

In Defence of Depravity

I think it's time I said some words in defence of my porn lamp. Or, rather, in defence of my purchase of the porn lamp. See that gentle orange glow? That's how it looked in the IKEA showroom. I realise I get dazed and confused in IKEA and attempt to purchase anything that isn't welded to the floor, but that's not an evil light, is it? True, it looks like something you might need to use in hospital, but there is nothing in that picture to suggest the Close-Encounters-type, apocalyptic red FLOOD that emanates from the damn thing when you plug it in at my house, making it look like we're running a bordello...or having a bonfire indoors. I switch it on now and again just to make it feel useful...but never when there's a footy match on. (Oooh, satire!)

Up to My Usual Tricks

True to form this afternoon, I walked into a tyre-fitters for a $24 wheel balance and came out with a new steering arm joint, two new tyres and a wheel alignment. Comforting to know the state of my steering system AFTER racing down to Lismore and back last week in the torrential rain! In other circumstances I might have been a bit peeved to wait the extra time in a mechanic's waiting room, but as it was I drifted into the gentle delirium that comes of having a really soggy cold and let Martha Wainwright sing to me for two hours as I dozed and watched the rainclouds grow and sulk away through the glass.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Went on a bit of a bender in Borders on the weekend and was delighted to discover the above on DVD, at last! I had the privilege of captioning the 'middle bit' of Mr Gilliam's production about eight months ago (Il llama est un quadrupedo, my friends) and have been looking out for it ever since. It's still the most exhausting movie I've ever seen - I always come away feeling that all my senses have reached saturation point - but it's well worth a look if you have the opportunity. And if you don't, well, you can always borrow my DVD - provided you promise put the subtitles on, of course.

Word for the Week

I know, quoting 'dictionary' definitons for things is really hackneyed and irritating, but this one is too good to let go. From our house bible here at work, the Macquarie Dictionary:

embuggerance noun Military Colloquial
1. an unnecessary or irrelevant interruption in the completion of a task
2. an insignificant or irksome factor which will not prevent the achievement
of the overall outcome

As in, "My word, Glen, that timecode glitch was something of an embuggerance, was it not?"