Sunday night Warhol.

This is very good. 

But Jesus Christ don't try to watch it in one sitting. 

Happy Winter Solstice.

A love poem for Ivan Idea.

Stop touching those candles

and stop

saying those stupid things,

You are fucking ridiculous

and 

repulsive

and the way you put commas in your sentences

makes me sick like a Mintie on a roadtrip

and you are so fucking beautiful that it tears my heart out 

So why can't you just put your tongue

back in

and stop being pleasant and enthusiastic 

Because you look so stupid
and I know you're not. 

And I wish you had loved me

But I wish I hadn't loved you,

because you are

pathetic

and I'm embarrassed by the cliché of loving your fucking face

and your horrible pile of bones.
Although your bottom lip was quite nice
and Jesus
you could speak
like no-one else. 
So I hope you'll be happy one day

but I doubt it because cowards are 
rarely 
happy.
And you 
are a coward
coward
coward. 

Ode to an Education

Since everyone is going through exams at the moment, I just thought I'd remind you all (in case you've lost sight of this via an increased sense of self-importance that is, to be fair, not your fault) that what you're doing is shit. 

Look at it. Look at your exam notes. They are so fucking boring and ridiculous it's embarrassing that you're even reading them. Do you even have the slightest interest in this stuff? And while you tell yourself that you are going to somehow benefit financially from this fucking degrading four year experience they call "getting a degree" that has forced you into pseudo-poverty for your entire adult life, haha, fucking joke's on you mate because the only people who get jobs in their chosen field after they graduate are people who did fucking revolting degrees like law or engineering or business so if you're one of those people then congratulations, they told you you were training to be an innovator and an entrepreneur didn't they? Ha, joke's on you again because what you actually signed up for is sitting behind a desk until you die choking on your own clogged arteries or the bile you've accumulated after fifty years of listening to women talk about fertility treatments and drinking fucking instant coffee like it's the elixir of life. And don't worry creative types, I haven't forgotten about you guys - I fucking hope you like the smell of body odour because you're going to go and do a graduate diploma and become a teacher now, putting all your creative genius to good use marking Macbeth essays and explaining how influential Frida Kahlo was to a bunch of gormless teenagers every year for the next hundred years because teaching doesn't even give you the dignity of retiring you before your tits start to sag below your belly button. Either that or you aren't doing the grad dip in which case, how is bartending/unemployment/living with your mum going anyway? Let's face it these are the prime years of our lives and while we should be using them to see the world and piss people off and prepare for the fucking zombie apocalypse, instead we're choosing to publicly masturbate for four years at Uni while our parents perversely look on in pride. 

Your degree is a fucking joke. I'm sorry but it is. It's going to churn you out along with thousands of other graduates at the end so you can become party to a fucking genocide of individuality whereby in the first five years of your career you undergo a process your parents will refer to as "growing up" but what is in fact the fucking removal of your soul through your anus and the connection of your brain to the mainframe of society so they can refill the space where your soul used to be with an interest in fad dieting and Siromet winery tours. And before you get your metaphorical knickers in a twist at me for being judgemental, I would just like to point out that I am currently, at this very moment returning home from an exam that was part of my own ludicrous tertiary education efforts so it is only in sympathy and solidarity that I tell you that you'd be better off dropping out and joining the fucking army or becoming a prostitute because let's face it, you're never going to look better than you do now and time is a-ticking till the day you'll want to pop out some miniature versions of your sucker self in the hopes that one day you'll be able to watch them publicly wank their way through a university degree just like mum and dad.

I wish you all luck with your exams and degrees, and hope that unlike me, when they dangle you by the ankle over the bog of eternal banality, you have the good sense to scream your guts out in protest before they drop you in it and you reek of disappointment for the rest of your days.

06/11/12

I was up all night and all day watching this happen. 

I'm glad.

Excerpts from "Four Years on the Southside."

"I'll never forget it, but I sometimes wish I could. That house. That horrible house where three of the people I've loved lived at one time or another. The sad one. The disappointing one. The one across the hallway.

After that it was a series of different houses within a short distance of the first one. One to pass the time. One to start over. One to recover from the first two. 

...

The Southside had its appeal. It was on the other side of the river. It was wide and open and had fewer trees and more trucks, which I liked because it spoke to my sensibilities as a reluctant and abashed member of the upper middle class. I thought looking at trucks instead of poincianas as I walked to work was giving me valuable life experience. Sometimes I would walk from Greenslopes to Buranda station trying not to let the construction workers see me crying, but I didn't think about what kind of life experience that might be giving me. 

I see now that it was probably more poignant, in this respect, than trucks."

1974.

This is my mum Tina at around the age I am now. 

She has been probably the best mother anyone could ever hope to have. I hope she realises this when she looks back on her life so far. 

Also, still waiting for these genes to kick in for me. Both the ones that made her such a good person and the ones that made her look like a 70s Calvin Klein ad. 

Abandonment issues, part 5; On the farm.

From the first glimpse of a horse, small and kindly-looking, with a yellowish coat and black mane;  the first trip to the chicken coop, a haphazard tin-and-wire structure in the corner of the yard; the first game of tug-o-war with a foolhardy but benevolent dog – I was hooked.

I don’t know how my somewhat estranged brother ended up owning a farm. I wasn’t really at the age where I was inclined to ask conveyancing-related questions. I was at the age where I looked cute wearing a leotard and a tutu and carrying a basket of fake flowers at said brother’s wedding. So were my sisters. It was, I think, mainly for this reason (the wedding, not specifically the leotards and tutus) that we took a seven week trip back to Australia just before I turned nine.

While we had moved to the UK, my brother, whose name is Nicholas but who has been known as Harvey all of his life for reasons unknown, lived on a stud farm near Busselton, Western Australia. I think their main source of income was a giant, rather frightening horse named “Chopin,” whom everybody called “Chops.” I didn’t get the joke until many years later when I started piano lessons. I thought the horse’s real name was simply “Show Pan,” and that like Harvey, he had been given a pseudonym that had nothing to do with his actual name.

We did a lot of things on this seven-week stint back in the motherland. We circumnavigated Uluru, visited my grandparents in Newcastle – I vaguely remember something about Sydney Harbour too, but really, one never remembers specific visits to Sydney. They all just mesh into one. But we also stayed on my brother’s farm for a while. I remember absolutely nothing about the house, or where we slept, or even talking to my brother much. I was eight and he must have been about twenty-two. At the time I thought he was old – a man – and placed little distinction between his age and that of my parents. It’s only now that I realise he was younger than I am now, and certainly quite young to be getting married.

What I do remember is loving the farm itself. I loved the hot sun on the coarse, browning grass. I loved the shrill, metallic notes that each steel gate sung when opened or closed. I loved the sacred sense of responsibility when entrusted with the task of collecting eggs from the chicken coop each morning; the sense of wonder each time that, overnight, these unassuming feathery dimwits had produced such miraculous feats of nature, and that we could eat said feats of nature for breakfast. There was a novelty in it that was appealing, for sure. But there was also a longer-term sort of personal satisfaction that as an eight-year-old, I was more inclined to phrase as “this is so cool.”

When I was in grade nine my parents bought Ironbark farm; 902 acres in the Hogarth Range, just southwest of Casino, NSW. For many years it too was a source of novel pleasures, from Schoolies week to renovation symposiums for Chinese PhD students. It had the same squeaky gates and scorched grass. But over the last few years I’ve begun to see its value as a living, breathing entity too. Its lack of mobile phone reception, internet or television, along with its constant need to be renovated, cleaned, painted, fixed, demolished and rebuilt is addictive. I have been unashamedly guilting my parents out of selling it for three years.

I’ve seen my brother maybe six times since his wedding, with increasing sporadicity. I know he moved to Melbourne and no longer seeks his fortune in farming. When people ask me what he does I say “he's in IT,” because he is, but that’s all I know. I’ve never asked him what inspired his brief period as a stud farmer. I’ve never asked him what inspired his decision to stop being a stud farmer. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked him a single question about himself except for “Harvey, why did you cut off all your hair?” 

As I move closer to the time at which I am bound to have a mid-twenties identity crisis (also known as finishing university and facing the prospect of starting one’s career) and entertain, with increasing enthusiasm, the notion of abandoning my aspirations as a schoolteacher and moving down to Ironbark full-time and becoming a hermit, I can’t help but wish I had, in fact, asked my brother these questions. Perhaps I will now, and maybe while I'm at it, I'll ask him exactly what it is he does in IT. 

Abandonment issues, part 4.

Abandonment issues, part 3; Does your prom dress still fit?

Today I did a good portion of the cleaning out of my old room wearing a $2000 silk prom dress because six years on, I don't really feel I've got my money's worth out of it. 

Abandonment issues, part 2; The third or fourth house.

In 1998, we bought our first family computer, on which my father wrote his 1999 book, Uses of Television. 

I suppose I was about eight, and used the computer to play the Babe computer game, which was fantastic, and make endless, horrible place-mats, cards and name-tags using some sort of Disney software that allowed you to cover all these items in different 101 Dalmatians pictures. 

I also used "Notepad" (wasn't allowed to use Word; not sure why) to write some of my first short stories which, if memory serves (it does, freakishly so) included the tale of a girl who lived inside a light bulb, a fairly generic rabbit story, and the various adventures of my many Mary-Sue-type characters of the day. I abandoned all attempts to write fiction soon thereafter. 

The computer room, pictured above, was the other half of the living room, and one of the many reasons why this particular house was and still is my favourite of our many houses between 1989 and 2001. 

1996 to 2000 was spent here, a deceptively lovely terrace overlooking Cardiff Bay, but not on the Cardiff side. It was stairs, horrible blue carpets, rocks and perfect Christmases spent on the floor in this living/computer room. Every house on the terrace had a bay-window at the front, and if you didn't have your Christmas tree and lights up in it by December 1, our neighbour Pauline would ask you why (she also hated the Willow tree you can see in the picture because it blocked our view of the Bay. She poisoned it one summer and it died). 

The room also had an over-the-top wooden fireplace. An ornate carving of five long grooves on either side of it reminded me of claw-marks and I ran my fingers along them almost every day. After we sold the house, it stood empty for a few months, during which this and the wrought-iron fireplace from upstairs were both stolen. I sometimes wonder where they ended up. 

Abandonment issues, part 1.

My younger sister Sophie has moved to Edinburgh to get a much better education than me and hang out with gay Spice Girls fans named Trent. 

Here is a picture of her as Draco Malfoy.

I miss her quite a lot. 

Abandonment Issues.

By February next year, almost all my close friends and family will have moved away. My sister has already moved to Scotland. My folks are in the process of moving back to Perth. My other sister is moving to Hobart and my two housemates and friends are moving to Melbourne. 

I will be documenting this fascinating process of mass-abandonment over the next few months, starting with the emptying and sale of our family home. If you like nostalgia, a few self-deprecating jokes and being nosy about what other people keep in their closets, you may enjoy reading my forthcoming blogs. 

Excerpts from "Orphans."

“The world hurts and I don’t want to live in it anymore.”

One of the many manic but truthful confessions I will carefully print into a Moleskine notebook, only to rip it out and re-write it because I used the wrong pen, or formed a letter imperfectly, or spaced the words unevenly. You can’t use white-out in a Moleskine – the slightly textured, off-white pages give you away immediately. Besides, if you’re going to leak all your inner pain onto a page in hope that it will somehow stay there instead of leaping back down your throat, you don’t want something as crude as white-out involved.

...

“You are beautiful like a thunderstorm.”

This one was for a long-lost lover. I was quite proud of this quaint little simile at the time. He was exciting and unpredictable in a way that made it impossible to do anything else while he was around – rather like a storm. He wasn't quite as pretentious as I was – he would have chosen Spirax over Moleskine to save money. But he was beautiful, that much was true. Far more beautiful than I was equipped for. When he left I realised I’d had an avalanche sitting on my chest for six months. 

Disappearing.

I am. I'm at least six kilos lighter than I was a week ago. My clothes are hanging off me like old bedsheets. My hair has faded so much it isn't even a colour. I wonder if I will completely vanish soon. 

How quickly we forget.

Travel blog part 24.

What was it?
Spinach and ricotta ravioli, cuppa tea. 

Where was it from?

Bar Roma, Sydney Airport.

How much was it?

Total $18.50 or something ridiculous like that. Yep, you're back in Australia. 

Why did you eat this, Rhiannon?

BECAUSE FUCK I WAS SO HUNGRY. After enduring about 26 hours of United Airlines no-vegetarian bullshit, I was about ready to eat a horse, which ironically I couldn't even do because I'm a vegetarian, so I settled for eating a very large amount of pasta. 

How was it?

In all honesty it was probably pretty average, but by this point I was so happy to see a non-aeroplane meal that it might as well have been five star dining. 

This also marks the end of my travel blogging. I will now resume the sporadic, aimless and probably somewhat inane blogging of old. Thanks for reading :)

Travel blog part 23.

What was it?

Tomato, hummus and cream cheese sandwich, air-popped chips. 

Where was it from?

United Airlines.

How much was it?

Free in-flight meal.

Why did you eat this, Rhiannon?

Because it was the only meat-free thing I was given in fourteen hours. 

How was it?

Kind of lumpy and slimy and generally pretty unpleasant. 

Travel blog part 22.

So because my trip had to end and spit me back into my comparably mundane life, you now have the pleasure of reading the rather pitiful account of my flights home. Apologies for the varying degrees of crappy phone-camera picture quality. 


What was it?
Beef & tomato pasta, salad, breadroll, "butterscotch brownie," tomato juice.

Where was it from?

United Airlines.

How much was it?

Free in-flight meal.

Why did you eat this, Rhiannon?

Well, I think saying I "ate" this would be rather overstating things. Because United don't have a vegetarian meal option I was just given this on my flight from LA to Sydney. I asked if there was some sort of alternative and the flight attendant suggested that one would be to "pick around it." 

I suppose that's basically what I ended up doing. I noticed several other vegetarians around me having the same conversation with flight attendants, some angrier than others, and also heard said flight attendants congregating at the back of the plane and referring to us as "the stupid vegetarians" later on. You can't beat American customer service. 

How was it?

I mean, I'm probably the wrong person so ask since I didn't really eat it and was sort of offended by the suggestion that I should. The salad was basically a pile of lettuce, cleverly disguised by one slice of tomato at the top. I more or less lived on tomato juice for the remainder of the trip. 

Travel blog part 21.

What was it?
Pumpkin and chickpea soup.

Where was it from?

MoMA Cafe, NYC. 

How much was it?

$6.50.

Why did you eat this, Rhiannon?

Because I accidentally spent the whole day at MoMA so I figured I might as well eat there too. I ordered this because it was the cheapest thing on the menu, and also because it was small, so I could eat it quickly and get back to being totally awestruck and overwhelmed by the wonders of MoMA. 

How was it?

As far as museum cafe type deals go this was actually quite a pleasant dining experience. I mean, there wasn't anything trashy or re-heated about it so that was a definite plus. I love MoMA.