Woohoo! Only a few days till I head off. First to Hobart, then back to Perth for Christmas and to tutor in the summer intensive philosophy courses at Notre Dame. It doesn’t look like it will be much of a holiday, however, since I have to redraft my whole thesis and paint my mum’s new house. But there will be a little bit of holiday time. Just a little.

Incidental Things That I Am Discovering #44: you can’t do philosophy all day. After 8 hours, your brain starts to seize up and you begin to forget things. You start writing illegible and angry comments in your notebook and decide that you don’t actually need to read the books on your desk because you can “guess” what they say. If you go on after this point, you will probably die or something.

The guy in the next row of computers just started snoring. I think he’s fallen asleep.

Or maybe he has bronchitis. The point is I used all my scrabble letters in one go and got the 50 point bonus. Shelley will have a heart attack when she sees it.*

*If she takes the game as seriously as I do, that is.

New government. Nice! It even looks like the PM will lose his seat to former ABC current affairs presenter Maxine McKew - and I imagine she’s happy to have gotten him back for his slippery behaviour in interviews.

I guess I ought to sum things up in an insightful way. Well, the first thing to note is that we have the lesser of two evils now. That’s obvious enough. The other thing is I’m a bit uncertain about how it’s going to feel, as someone who will have many ongoing issues with the way the country is governed, to criticise the government without any hope that a better government will be elected eventually. As a fairly young person, I can’t remember what Australian politics was like without the reigning Big Bad (so to speak) and it will be strange knowing that this new government, as lame as it is, is probably the best we will have.

Anyway, the main point is that it feels as if a balance has been restored. I might still be unhappy out here on the fringe, but it is comforting to know that things aren’t going to get worse, and that the people out there know how to exercise some political judgement.

(from the ABC)

Oh, you bet I’m gonna vote my arse off tomorrow. You bet. Hey, I think I should have extra votes because of all the contradictory and inconsistent political opinions I have. Is that allowed?

Other things I will be doing this weekend, apart from taking a 5 minute, 11 second break to rock out to Run DMC vs. Aerosmith, include reading the innumerable angry notes that my supervisor put on my thesis and having a nervous breakdown, and then reading some big, boring books as a means of gaffa-taping my shattered ego back together afterward. I tell you what - any creative enterprise can be a rollercoaster ride, can’t it? You have to appreciate how much better your work is after you put it all back together, but that’s a not much of a consolation when, if you had a bit more skill, you could have just done it right in the first place. Up and down, up and down. Fuck it.

I am listening to Fantomas. Fantômas. Fant00000000mas. It’s experimental avant-garde glitch mathcore metal, y’know? And I am digging it - that is the important thing. I’m not just digging it intellectually either - if there was any discernable beat, I would be rocking out. If it was possible to predict any of the riffs in advance, I would be earnestly playing air guitar. Therefore I am teh kewl. I heart music that is also a fashion accessory.

So what else is the haps? I am bored out of my head actually, since there is no uni work to be done. On Wednesday there will suddenly be months worth of work landing on my desk, but today and tomorrow there is none. You see, if 200 pages of corrections and redrafting wasn’t arriving on Wednesday, I would have found something constructive to do today, because then I could have finished it in one go. But no. I wonder how much longer I can make this go on before I have to go and find something else to do?

I guess that’s about it.

Daytime TV, anyone?

It’s a kid’s ride with a fibreglass Steve Irwin and a crocodile on the back. A plaque said it was dedicated to his memory. I found it outside Target in the Broadway shops, Sydney.

I think this qualifies as tacky memorabilia, but you can bet Steve Irwin would have loved it, so in that sense it’s strangely appropriate.

Does anyone else see that tv ad for the competition to win “$150 worth of Puma gear” and think they’ve just been offered a chance to win a hundred and fifty dollars worth of pubic hair? Talk about an unfortunate choice of words.

Anyway, I am now hosting all my photos on this site - there’s a link on the sidebar. I haven’t really custom-coded the photo pages yet, but comments are available and, most importantly, it ain’t Flickr.

Today I went out and met Misha at the Newtown Festival. It was full of hippies and shirtless Aussies and just a couple of emo kids. And also some dogs. The bands were crap but we had a good time anyway. We saw Hugh McKay say wise things about today’s society in his moderately left-leaning paternal way, and almost saw some of the Chaser guys through a big crowd of frenzied fans. We also met up with Shelley, who is very nice and not nearly as crazy as she makes out on the internet.

Er, that’s it.

What’s new? Um, on Thursday I went to a social meeting for arts postgrads and made myself queasy on these gooey salmon roll things and complimentary wine, but luckily didn’t lose my head say anything stupid about anyone’s mother. Mind you, I can’t believe the Powers That Be gave us gooey salmon things, chicken sandwiches and wine when they are cutting every other thing from the budget and generally treating everyone like crap. Well… take your complimentary sandwiches and run is my philosophy.

And I got my 1337 Macbook back. For a few brilliant minutes I even managed to restore the flickr cookie from my backup drive, but then I broke it and it don’t work no more. I’ll be putting up a photo page here instead. Maybe next week.

So those are the main things. Yeah, and my yearly review was OK. They liked me because I’m not having problems. (Yet.)