the flatmate's bored

and i have requested her to draw me an elephant on my toe. and she complied.

i have slogged for close to 6 hours, and all i've come up with is 449 words that describes the organisation of my thesis in a satisfactory way.

where... is... the... justice??!!

why not

that's the view outside, from where i am seated happily in the louis matheson library at monash uni. strange that i'd be happy to take a half-hour drive out of the city to be inside some old crumbly building, contented, and doing my work. this is even more odd because i have never spent more than an hour at a go within the old crumbly library of rmit, which also happens to be the university i'm currently enrolled at. which also happens to be 2 strollable blocks away.

it is not so much that the building and shelves that are falling apart, but what they contain within them that draws me to the library. i love the smell of old, stashed up books - and it has recently been pointed out to me that it reminds one of a prolonged musty whiff of leftover sour-ish fart, but that doesn't deter me at all. the books i want keep getting borrowed or put on hold by someone else at the rmit library, while the library at monash has got all the books i need. and with 5 storeys, there are endless cubicled desks i can hole myself up at and get stuff done. i feel smart and productive and efficient at the expense of a half-hour drive.



sitting at my desk, i notice and begin to feel comforted by the droning whirr of the air-conditioning duct. it intrigues me that there have been so many books published that surely not all have been borrowed and perused. if books had feelings, i wonder how they'd react to, literally, being left on the shelf.



and then i notice, as i slip my student card back into my wallet, that the friendship band a friend had once made for me is showing signs of fraying. that is an understatement, actually. the frayed portion is barely hanging by 2 threads. it's been there ten years now, which attests to the amount of time i have used this wallet, and have not removed the band that says 'god's baby'. i could never make it out, but the friend who made it insists it's there. it is a remnant of the bygone churchie days, and i'm sorry to tell you, H, that i need to remove it for safe(r)keeping now. thanks for making that constant reminder.

ugliness not

while watching ugly betty on the telly tonight, me and the flatmate were commenting on how roles that seemed much more characterful had to be 'ugly'. it seemed the 'real' talent of an actress got clouded when she was too pretty. nicole kidman had to have a prosthetic nose to play virginia woolf in the hours. and hilary swank in million dollar baby, and boys don't cry? is plain-ness more acceptable, or familiar? somehow, a physical flaw needs to be made up by a powerful trait in personality before a character becomes credible.

and i wonder why that is, that i tend to identify with flawed characters much more readily.

purpose?

i am in the midst of creating a horcrux. the durable visual record is splitting my soul, and a bit of it will be stored in the words and efforts of the artifact. if it is preserved, a part of me will live on. used for the safekeeping of a fragment of my soul, i will be severely weakened if the artifact were to be destroyed.

and there is a deadline for the torturous process to come to an end, and that's a grand ol' 6 weeks away. and oh, doesn't the clock tick so.

one of the supervisors have suggested creating a research blog. i've resisted this idea for many months now, partly because i didn't want everyone and anyone to see just how silly i really was. but now, it's up for all and sundry to see, and comment, and, perhaps, ridicule? here it is.

it is a bold step for a person often accused (they're right, i know) of being too secretive. or inarticulate. or both.