Looked at a flat tonight, out in the northern suburbs. It's on a back street, five minutes from the train station. Down a lane with no footpath or curb or gutter and a ragged-edged road. It's all brick and weatherboard and is peeling badly. The path up to the door is covered with jacaranda and vines, until it turns into a kind of tunnel. Cue womb images. Or not, as I always felt free to discount those as Freudian bullshit better left to people like the guy I forgot to mention in the last, angryangry post. I'll get to him in a second.
Anyway, it turns out that living in Japan is a really useful way of finding everything spacious and inexpensive, as I believe the place to be huge and palatial. With a hills hoist in the backyard and a claw-footed bathtub.
By the time I got on the train, I was smiling happily enough that innocent schoolchildren intercepting my vacantly beaming face got up and changed to other carriages. Virginia Woolf, although she probably wasn't speaking for me, was right about having a room of one's own. Now, fingers crossed until I get it.
As for the guy. I went to see the Carmina Burana the other week. And with some people I didn't know well at all. And asked one, the guy, whether it was a full performance, as the stage looked kind of bare. Two pianos and the percussion only. He asked me if I was at all familiar with the Burana. I said yes. He said he thought I would find there was no orchestra in the full version. What about all the trumpets and horns, then, I asked. He said he thought I would find that there was mostly a lot of crashing and bashing. Afterwards, when I mentioned the baritone was out of his depth, he said it was clear I didn't know much about classical music, given I had been brought up in Newcastle, and should be informed that the reason the baritone had sounded weak and ineffectual was that we were sitting up high.
Now, I've been living here for a while sheerly on the kindness and indulgence of others; I've tried to be a good guest and not be overly messy or boisterous or opinionated or rude. So the effort of not sneering at, mocking and finally using this guy's hand to slap him and say "Stop hitting yourself" in a high and superior voice pretty near caused my eyes to start bleeding with internal pressure.
Once I move out, I'm going to find him and deliver some vengeful noogie action. I'm exactly that mature.
Then back home for internet scrabble. I'm challenging all of you right here and now.

Currently suffering from an anger management problem. Although I'm mostly managing quite well, with the counting and the hand-sitting and the constant mental imaging of cathartic acts of violence.
A short list of things that have caused me to count almost to a thousand would include Sydney, Sydneysider's inability to walk and look where they're going, Sydneysider's public transport skills, my flatmates feeling free to foist their empty headed/interfering/GOD IT MAKES ME SO ANGRY views on me. (Case in point: Flatmate A claimed suicide bombers were completely justified with the murder of innocents, as the end justifies the means. Flatmate 2 then mentioned I shouldn't have bought oranges in a net bag and that it was time to change my toothbrush. I mean, a) the end doesn't justify the means; the means create the end, which is a very different thing altogether and b) who the fuck examines other peoples' toothbrushes? Suicide bombers planning to detonate entire happy weddingfuls of likely innocents would shun this kind of behaviour. For fuck's sake.)
Apart from that, everything is going ok. I have a job until uni (hopefully) starts, I'll be moving out (hopefully) on the weekend and will (definitely) be telling the flatmates what I think of them in the form of a short song I have entitled "Fuck You To Hell (I Cleaned The Tile Grout With Your Toothbrushes)". It's a love ballad.
Actually, it's not that bad and they're actually very nice, it just seems a shame to have an online journal without some bile and whining.

The other night, after a thoughtful and intelligent discussion of our lives (called each other nerds and discussed Xander Harris), I took a girl out to dinner (as long as you're willing to accept that it was neither a date, nor was it a restaurant). She, naturally, couldn't leave me alone for an instant (due, possibly, to the lack of excitement to be found standing alone in a dark train station lobby) and admitted, on the train ride home, that I had rocked her world (by revealing the existence of plushy porn and causing her to feel repulsed in ways no other had ever managed). She admitted to having "feelings" (about plushies)
Life can be good, so long as you know where to cut the sentences.