+ity, -ity,

The transition from pessimism to optimism is extremely hard, cause the pessimist doesn't believe it's possible. A self-perpetuating state...a negative feedback system. So change depends on a momentary forgetfulness of that state: positivity sees it's chance and swoops triumphantly, and you're miraculously borne upwards into another plane of being.

Talking of this kind of reminds me of something i read in philosophy last semester. Something about how humans elevated consciosness give objects meaning. Implying that before we evolved, gracing the planet with our reflexive minds, everything was worthless. Or at least theoretically. Cause we attribute them meaning.

I don't like this perspective. It's bloody anthropocentric. I like to think of objects having innate value. That there's some glade in the woods that has never been appraised by the critical human eye, and yet still thrums with worth. Hey, forget glad in the woods. What about the frickin universe-minus-the-mote-that-is-earth?? Sheesh.

Hmm. How was that at all related to how i started off? I forget.

I'm listening to an english lecture write now (this keyboard scuffling = concentration blip) and there's this phrase she keeps using over and over that sounds so snooty that i want to jab that computer screen every time i hear it: 'as it were'. What does it even mean? Who the f uses it nowdays? AS IT WERE.

'Let me introduce a new way of unpacking, or as it were, decomposing these textual economies'.

BLEH. Really. Seriously? What are you like?
Is the pot calling the kettle black? But i dont' do that. Here, quickly, here: i make a standing oath: i shall never EVER say 'as it were'.

All right then. I've had my spiel.
As you were.

Why is it that in summer, you can never quite breathe in enough oxygen? The air is heavier somehow. Even if you breathe like a buffalow, or transform yourself into some glass-blowing bellows machine, the quivering cells in your lungs still gasp for more. I've been exhausted all week. For no real reason. Dragging myself through the days, seeing a desert beneath the deceptive curtain of the green uwa campus. Fixated with a kind of detached dismay at how every cell seemed to wimper out in protest at the prospect of exertion. hehe, i very nearly fell asleep in one of my lectures. DROWWWWWWWWWWSSSYYY.

I had the best break i can remember ever having though. I wish i could just for a moment incarnate that glorious week just so i could hug it. Going to the beach...catching up with friends...sipping curiously away at a cider and feeling the not unpleasant novelty of slight drunkenness...kayaking with Jemps on the still waters of Matilda Bay...

Yeah. It was all good. God i wish i'd had the courage to explore all these spaces that blossom in the beautiful axis of the right time and the right company. I need someone to work on me with a jackhammer to crack out all the surface stiffness.

An end in themselves....

Not a lot to record in the Journal of Kate. Not sure i'm socially integrating that well into uni life... I can't quite configure how people get from being strangers to being friends. I guess it just takes me a long time to trust anyone, to be openly familiar with them. So- in the critical preliminaries- i'm kind of cold and distant. Not a very appealing starting point. SIGH. But i talk about these things as though they are indelible, written in stone. I'm not fated to be a social misfit (or am I? Even in preschool i remember that sense of not fitting in. I remember myself playing dress ups in my own little fantasy world, while other kids interacted. Cripes.)
No, i refuse to believe in THAT kind of destiny. After my philosophy course however, i can't help BUT believe in determinism though. It's blinking irrefutable, and that's why its so depressing. I don't know if you're familiar with the theory, but if not, the basic idea is as follows:

...ok i'm too lazy to reconjure the theory from memory, so i found this in last semester's exam notes:

"Hard determinism resolutely denies the existence of free will. In Holbach’s unequivocal words: “Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for a instant” . According to the theory, every event is necessarily determined by the unique set of conditions that immediately precede it. Likewise, that preceding order was the end product of the inconceivably complex formula of interacting components which were its antecedent. And so it goes, ad infinitum to the beginning of the universe (granted there was a beginning). Man can be described as the sum of circumstance; for circumstance is merely the macroscopic and temporal result of interlinking natural laws. The individual is cast into a genetic mould upon conception, and from birth has no say in which forces should harshly buffet or gently mould him, ultimately dictating his every protean trait. In this sense, not only the jailed have no freedom, but so in the jailor; the oppressed and the oppressor, the mentally afflicted and the sane. None can lay legitimate claim to a shred of autonomy in their conduct and behaviour, bound by the fact that they could not have done otherwise than what they do."

Bleh. How prattish I sound. Sometimes i hate words. No, that's not right. I hate this mentality (that, admittedly, i'm weaning myself of) that to sound smart, you have to inject it with complicated, indecipherable words. NO! I RESIST! The best writing expresses itself clearly, using words which best communicate its meaning, not the ones which make it sound snotty. I REJECT THAT. Hey! No! Look at me Kate! What about JK Rowling? Tim Winton? ANY of the great authors (yes, i regard Rowling as a great author. It may not be "literature" as those ACADEMICS would classify it, but MEH, i say MEH). Think about their writing! The beautiful architecture of it, not the glamour of the building blocks.

...Forgive me. I'm in the process of self-education here. Which goes against some old, entrenched habits.

OMG MUM WILL YOU STOP SAYING ETC!!!!!!! IT IS SO ANNOYING!!! AT THE END OF EVERY SENTENCE!! EVEN IF THAT SENTENCE CLEARLY ARTICULATES ALL IT INTENDED TO SAY!!! ET CETERA, ET CETERA, ET BLOODY CETERA!!!!!

There are some things that you just can't help but tighten your jaw at.

Anyhoo, it seems i have, once again, meandered off course from the initial subject. I was talking about the dynamics of friendship...the unplottable progression towards it. You know, i actually get shocked when people who have just met are open with each other, joking around like they're old buddies. I think, at such times, i actually stare at the impossible MATERIALISATION of this space of intimacy that they share. I think i think too much of the logistic of it. Agonisingly pondering the economics of gesture, movement, the sound of my voice cutting through silence.

HAHAAHAHH- you know, when i get really self-conscious, i am suddenly very aware of my nostrils. Like, worrying if they're flaring or not. *cackles hysterically*

...

I keep thinking of something this other philosophy guru (Kant) said. It's just a snippet from one of his normative ethical theories which i thought was rubbish, but in isolation, it just stuck with me: To treat people not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves.

Yeah. I'm Hip.

OK, so i'm not the MOST 'in' with today's teenage lingo. MSN-speech. Twitter-talk (aka twat). The identity-asserting idiom of our gen. *gibbers and gestures excitedly to her use of the word 'gen'*

It's kind of embarrassing, actually. People around me are always using slang. When they do, i can only respond blank-faced. Or sometimes i take a wild stab at delivering the correct reaction: nodding sagely, laughing sardonically, etc. Although usually i just get looked at strangely. And then the hearty/knowing false laugh gurgles weakly down into silence.

At least when reading something you don't run the risk of exhibiting your ignorance, and can discreetly look up the definition in dictionary.com. As i did when reading a friends blog (Sam groans and forehead-palms)

totes: an open handbag or shopping bag used esp. for carrying packages or small items.

Or was it a juxtaposition between matureness and teenage slang? I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

I even had to look up 'stoob': the insult thrown at those who couldn't decipher 'totes' independently.

STOOB: ........'did you mean STB/stab/stub?'
Wikipedia wasn't any help either:
STOOB- "a town in the district of Oberpullendorf in Burgenland in Austria".
Enlightenment was achieved at urbandictionary.com...
STOOB- Stoned, unmotivated, idiot, boring, fiend, clumsy, greedy, selfish, unsociable, silly, lazy friend/person.

It even gives examples of STOOBS in sentences:
Your blazed out friend says something he thinks is quite funny', eeeeeerrr, shaking your head, laughing at his pointless remarks, "fuckin stoob".

Waiting over-time for pizza to be delivered "where and what the fuck are these stoobs doing with our pizza".

Hmm. This site could be an essential resource for me. It could even by my social salvation.

Hey, awesome! Word of the day:
TESTICULAR FORTITUDE: balls, guts, intestinal fortitude.
Used in a sentence: He lacked the testicular fortitude to stand up to his boss.

The Escape; from humiliation into the shades of dusk

It all boils down to one question really. That's what i realise right now, staring down glumly at my scattered sheets on WA hydrology and soil and the virtues of dung and stuff. Yes, one single question. 'Can I be stuffed.'

No. No i cannot.

A little while ago, i exited my habitual study den and braved the outside elements. Embraced Spring! Well, if you go by date that is. It don't really feel like Spring at this first, fragile turn of season. Yet my hopes have been lifted. It's the opposite of the feeling of impending doom as Autumn withers itself away. From winter to spring is an upward swing, a glorious waxing into sunshine and the bliss of the warmer months. It's all about the anticipation.

Dusk is my favourite time of day i reckon. Everything is so soft-hued and purply. And the clouds! Pink, drifting, golden-gilded. There's a downward sloping alleyway not far from my house and it's almost a spiritual feeling walking down and getting the panoramic view of the humming suburban life being crowned by that radiant disc.

The mood is catching! I saw an old, white-bearded man in dark glasses on a bicycle, playing the harmonica with one hand.

I think i needed Nature's remedial touch after the humiliating state of affairs this morning. You may know by now that i have an incredibly bad memory. My past just drains away. It's rather terrifying really, this things that are lost forever in the chasm of forgotten. Anyway, i have this theory (probably a conceit) to rationalise this poor memory. It's a survival strategy. It prevents me from flinching and squirming myself to death; since i do so for almost every social encounter i've ever had. WHY MUST MY LOOKING BACK BE THROUGH A PESSIMISTIC GLASS? Well, to it. The latest faux pas:
I'm walking towards the lecture theatre for WS. I'm about 10 steps away when i see a girl i've been sitting with so far this semester. She's with 2 other girls and is just about to go through the door. Our eyes meet. 'Hey!' she says. 'Hey!' i say. She goes in with her posse. I trail in behind. As i enter, she sits down in the last row, on the end seat to the left. Naturally, her two friends fill in the 2 seats right of her.
I have 2 options. They flash through my mind in that brief hiatus of indecision, and i teeter on the question of 'what now?'. I can
a) locate a seat alone away from them
b) sit down in the 4th seat to the right.
In the first option, reason is enshrined; risk and madness in the second. Reader, when such a conflict of choice rages within me, i fear to confess reason is sat upon and suffocated by panic and immediacy. Unfailingly, i just give way to whichever course of action will be quicker, requiring less movement.
...
I sunk into the 4th seat.
FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!! And what's more, i could not, dared not even turn my head to the left, let alone TRY to engage. I felt as though the muscles in my neck were locked. Or rather, that they had fused to muscles lower down, and i would only ever in the future be able to look left by swivelling my torso.
Instead, i calmly opened uwa's student mag, The Pelican, and endeavoured to read an article whilst wishing will able my being just to evaporate. Shrivel in my seat. Become a gas and deftly waft myself under the crack in the door.

When the lecture was over, i fled. Missing the workshop that immediately followed. But this time, there was no conflict of choice. Escape was the only option.

Right now, i am fruitlessly and half-heartedly scanning the internet for a good, sexist article to castrate for a women's studies assignment (yes, i do WS, fuck off. I'm no dismembering harpy, ok?)

So i was scouring a plethora of newspaper articles from this UK magazine called 'The Guardian', and one title caught my eye: 'Women: embrace your facial hair!'. Beneath was a black and white photograph of a bearded woman.

A partisan of the 'Hairy Awarey' campaign contributed this: "Now I am proud of my hairy lip. I sit playing with it when I am thinking, or watching TV."


"Del La Grace Volcano, formerly known as the lesbian photographer Della Grace, grew her goatee beard in the late 1990s to much media consternation."

and,

"Maybe it's because I am 40, and men look at me less, but I feel so much better now I am letting it all grow out."

HAHAHAHAHHA

yeah, no.

Mmmm. Basking. As though my pores are drinking up the sunshine. Common analogy, strange image. I have no idea how people can stand living in cold climates all year round. My mood pretty much follows the seasons: i'm cold and bitter in winter, warm and genial and lazy in summer. I think i'd become an evil yetti if there was no warm relief in the years cycle, hurling a sharpened ice-pick at whoever got on my nerves.

Oh! A honeyeater just swooped down and collected some straw from one of our hanging baskets! Springs a'comin!
..............................................................................

Some words you just have to say a certain way:

Snigger: pronounce 'schnigger'. Draw out the schh sound

Nerd: pronounce 'nyerd'. Purse your lips like a turtle while you say it and do your bug-eyed impression.

Excellent: Mr burns style.

Kraken: dramatic, Davy Jones style.

Flesh Computer

There are times when the power of the computer over my mind are undeniable. For a split-second i go to type in the 'search' function of my mind for certain notes written down tangible sheets of paper. Grotesquely, i had a dream about facebook. And it wasn't an interesting dream, with strange contortions of the cyber-landscape, or bizarre fusions of inside and outside the screen. No. It was excruciatingly mundane: just a vivid pulse of excitement encapsualted in a red banner at the left hand corner of the screen.

I read in an article somewhere that, with the advent of technology, a human's memory capacity is shrinking. With the ability to file away permanent notes on our supplementary brains, it becomes no longer necessary to imprint and solidify knowledge in our private brains. Technological repositories become a crutch, an extension, a safe. Learning becomes a more transcient process. You leak easier. And nowadays, that's ok, because the outlet's for topping up again are just so accessible.
I guess it was kind of the same phenomenon when literary rates exploded sometime in the 18th century, and the concurrent proliferation of the previously rare and sacred text. I mean, imagine the only channel of learning being sound! The spoken word; loaded but ephemeral, so susceptible to decay and deformation by its listeners. Except for the few prodigies, we don't have minds like tape-recorders. Our memories are not only imperfect, but recollection is contingent on a personal context that changes with time. So essentially, we can never articulate what 'was'.
Anyhoo, back to what i was saying. Imagine if you could only learn through listening. How high the value of knowledge and story would suddenly ascend! You'd savour every new tale that entered your ears like drops of honey that dissolved instantaneously into 'then', relish every image and avenue. Eagerly lap it up and encompass it, enfold it to yourself.
Perhaps we've lost some of that appreciation. Grown complacent. Look at the immediate world askance because of the assurance we can review it later through exterior channels.
I also think this habit grows with age. Everything was so much more vivid in childhood. Everything had a mood to it, a tone. It takes a bit more effort nowadays for me to feel a place or an object or a situation. I dunno. Maybe it's just me that's grown complacent. I'm such a generaliser. Projecting myself onto the world to spread the guilt.

Yoowwwwlll!! My hands are all weather-cracked. Tiny little lacerations have appeared all over as though some invisible miniature goblin has been slicing away with a fencing sword throughout the day.

Poor tiggs. He's just had his teeth cleaned at the vet. For obvious reasons (to avoid slightly more painful lacerations than mine) he had to be sedated. Now he's all dopey. His lazy eye is even more lazy than usual. They're so cute like that. Drugged up.

SNIGGER OF THE DAY

Milton Jones: "I was walking along the road today, and on the pavement i saw a small, dead, baby ghost. Although, thinking about it, it might have been a handkercheif."

Cringe

'So what do you think?'
'Mffffgrmm' i whimpered. With dismay, i realised from my expression in the glass how extraordinarly transparent i am. The face staring back at me was pallid, and bespoke of untold horrors. What vision had it been confronted with should should've made it so bloodless, so aghast? A vile serpent? A sour-skinned crone, gumless, with blood dripping from sagging lips? Had she looked into the eye of a basilisk itself?
It was as though the face of Eve had surfaced from the depths of ancestry, and wore on her descendnts face the very look that had appeared when she realised what paradise was left behind and saw instead the black mineshaft she had dropped into.(Metaphorically, mind).

Considering my first reply was somewhat lacking in eloquence (whilst nonetheless emotionally overt) i tried another on its tail.
'Yes, fine' I gibbered. No, this fringe cut doesn't look hideous. No, i don't feel like snatching your barber-ous instruments and doing a Sweeney Todd on you. No, i don't look like a toy doll with its feafully dead-straight fringe that bounces gently over its dead eyes. No, it doesn't look like this hairy waterfall is just a massive monobrow on my forehead, in grotesque ascent of its designated spot in the facial hierarchy.

'Yes?'
The unease which whined into his voice and was the anxious furrow in his brow was damning. He knew he had created a monster. In that moment, he had his own demons to face; a modern Frankenstein, who would no doubt screech as soon as the (in my mind) batwing doors had swung shut: 'WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!! Lord have mercy on my soul'. Complete with hand wringing, head-whacking and sobbing.

Cringe at the fringe.

AAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!!!!! HOW CAN THIS BE?? STPEHEN FRY WAS IN MELBOURNE AND SYDNEY AND I DID NOT KNOW?!!!

I should have been there. I should have been there. I should have been there as a presence on his periphery, always sensed, never seen, skirting the sidewalks, aggressively introducing kiddie nose to sidewalk as they can into my line of pursuit. Within a few days i would have acquired the art of the most infamous enigmatic spy ever to not be known. Even Fry, with the intellectual ability of a nation- no!- a nation is too full of morons, any wit is diluted by them- with the acumen of a, a, a, another Stephen Fry, would only be semi-aware of some thing there, but not there. And as he strolled around the eastern metropolis, admiring the sights, my inner-stalker would have been in such orgasmic revelry that when my instincts slipped in this blissful state and the police put me in irons, i wouldn't even notice.

Tragic. I don't think i will ever overcome this moment of tragic realisation.

Drama on the Bus

The bus ride. The brief space in one's day where one is assured of comfy mundanity. It feels like a commuter's god-given right, that stretch of blankness inside that mobile, pocket-sized and fluid community. A bus is a place where as soon as you sit down, you assume the mental faculties of that grimy, hideously upholstered bus seat. You become one; you and the bus-seat. A joining of arse and fabric, welded together until the fatal departure, the ominous 'DING!' a falsely cheery funeral knell. It malevolently mocks that wrenching apart of a newly created organism. *DING!*
And then SNAP, your consciousness rushes in you like a poltergeist possession, and you're let loose once again into the stream of daily existence.

How many bus rides have i had over this year? How many bus rides will i have over the rest of my life? How many hours spent in such peachy vacuousness?
Well, i've had a few to date anyway. All non-descript, as you expect.

Until yesterday.

The bus was trundling down the street down the same predictable route. I was in my happy place. My fellow commuters were presumably in theirs. Then, at the corner of my eye, i saw a white flash. THe bus screeched to a halt, flinging an old biddy at the front right out of her seat. The white thing on my periphery had been a car reversing like a rocket out of a driveway across the road. I looked over the edge of the bus out the window. There was a hairs breadth between the two vehicles. After a stunned pause, the white vehicle drove away from the scene. Inside the bus, there was a stunned pause. THen two passengers leaped off their seats and rushed over to the dumped granny, who was lying on the floor, stupefied. One of the helpers took complete control of the situation, whipping out orders right and left as though she had been a sergeant in her former life. The rest of us might have been statues, staring tensely at the traumatised lady. Throughout the whole of it, the busdriver sat in his cabin. I wondered briefly whether the government had us fooled, and that they were trying to cut expenses by replacing human drivers with automatons.

I'm not too sure, but i think i overhead a mutter that the woman had broken her arm. A nosebleed at least. Poor old biddy! Luckily, we werent' far from Charles Gardner Hospital. For whatever reason, the bus didn't take her there direclty, and an ambulance was called. The passengers were directed to file off from the crisis scene and we migrated over the adjacent oval to the nearest bus stop.

For sure, poor old biddy! But the episode was- who could deny it?- exciting! Should i be whipped for finding it so?

I am so sick of wading through the molasses of perverse prose. I feel like i'm grinding through the words, having to call up every fibre of determination that is holding my being together just to make it through one bloody sentence. My eye sights a full stop, a blessed relief, a respite at the end of a laborious journey. My heart rejoices! My lips begin to peel back into a smile of epic proportion; - then they transform instead into an O of despair when i realise i haven't understood a single thing.

Why do they do it, these so-called 'academics', knighting themselves with the titles of Connoisseur's of Knowledge? Why do they insist on encrypting sometimes the most simple of messages into some obscure, esoteric package, where meanings swarm, cheek by jowel, jostling and crowding? WHy-hy-hyyyy? I get so sick of these scholarly words that are scraped off their dry tongues and pasted to the paper; words like 'intersect' and 'continuum' and 'fabric' and 'discourse'. Yes yes yes, all bloody important, all bloody useful in discussing topics 'laden with ideas'. But, just, you know, shut up. Shut so very up and go so very much away. I want to keep to my little, lovely nook of syntaxical simplicity. Is that so bad? Is that so sneer-worthy? And what's so wrong anyway with chucking in a word like 'chucking'? Is such a stoop to the vernacular beyond them?

Even polit-talk isn't so stodgy to digest as the academic article. However, i must say, if either Gillard or that moron Abbott says 'fair dinkum' again i will personally push them off a cliff.

animo-pomorphic

She pokes her head out from beneath the long-term cone of silence. Elongates her neck warily. Her lips compress and her eyes assume a shrewd, narrow expression until she looks like a constipated turtle. Tentatively, she beings to type.

Or continues, rather. Whatever man. Stop suffocating my poetic licence.

Is my long-term absence in order of an explanation? Probably not. Reasons:
a) i don't exactly have a swelling fan base
b) who gives a shit
c) unnecessary and tedious preamble
d) i am Kate, Lady of the 673th realm. I need explain my presence or absence to none!

But i nonetheless feel compelled to, in part anyway.
At first, like a debutante into society, i thrust myself into the blogosphere. Young, fresh and fervent, i gushed out text like the oil that gushed out of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill. After a while though, i became suspicious, then horrified, then dismayed, then apathetic, then horrified again that, like the oil spill, it was all a horrid effluence and a gross mistake. The following posts became more and more self-referential, until they resounded with a pathetic plea of justification. Disgusted with my lack of topic expansion and imagination, my committment to my adolescent blog weakened. I grew disenchanted, and capped the spillage. And then forgot about it entirely.
...
Then it reappeared in my mind. I considered a reunion. But as the neglect deepended, i became more convinced that i was/am no longer up to the task. That over that long period of silence my cyber tongue has grown heavy and musty in my cyber mouth. That boorish seriousness has set in, etc.

But here i am! My pledge: to keep the tortuous tremor out of my voice.

Hem.

*finds amusement for a while in trying to squish a miniature surfboard across the computer screen and into the net. When venture fails, tries a spider.

That one failed too.

Wipes screen.*

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The world has transmogrified. Nothing is as it seems. I'm seeing strange creatures peering out behind the veil of humanity. Small mammals, actually. I'd idled into two separate lectures, slumped down on my seat, and looked up to see small marsupials wrapped in the deceptively pink and hairless skins of my lecturers.

I've decided against mentioning which units they teach. Some forms of paranoia are wise paranoias, i think.

One lecturer had an uncanny resemblance to a possum. A soft, brown and curly fuzz covered her head, and i found myself redesigning the drab screened background into a dark and leafy tree hollow within which she could tuck her round body. I didn't get so far as add a tail though.

Next, it was a mouse that blinked timidly up at me. He had a grey parcel of hair flopping neatly over a think face. Perched ona turned up nose were rectangular, metal rimed glasses, which he would push up with both hands at hte edges every now and again. A small mouth was drawn uder an enlongated upper lip, and on the sides two largish ears protruded with perfect semi-circular form. When he was speaking, his thin frame perched over the podium, he had an endearing pattern of looking down at his notes then dipping his head up and looking around at his audience imploringly.

Twas uncanny.

Anyhoo, such were my observational preliminaries to semester two.