This Blog Is Going On Holiday

As you can see, the updates have been infrequent lately. That doesn't look to change in the near future for a few reasons-- 1) my internet is going away soon, 2) I have exactly 6 days to polish up and turn in roughly 14,000 words, 3) I've been traveling and, as soon as I'm done writing, will continue to travel. So. That leaves us in a quandary.

I'll pick it up again in the future at least to give a real update of the costume party, my time in Melbourne, the run-up to handing things in, and my time in Canberra and Sydney-- pictures, etc. But after that, well, it's hard to be the drunkard of Oz when you no longer live in Oz...

Drink Count(10/25): 6
Drink Count(10/26): 3
Drink Count(10/27): 10
Drink Count(10/28): 8
Drink Count(10/29): 9
Drink Count(10/30): 0

10/22-10/24 Hooooooly Shit

I found $100 on the street Monday afternoon. Shannon said it was bad karma to have taken it. 24 hours later my hometown was burning to the ground and my favorite torrent site had been shut down by British and Dutch police, so now at least two international bodies know how many thousands of albums I've stolen over the past few years.

I didn't write much for two days because of these things, and I certainly didn't update the blog.

Other things happened, I'm sure, I just didn't register them. I didn't drink quite as much as you might think either, though I had the added misfortune of having to say goodbye to the few people from class that I really care about, as well as Jane who has been absolutely amazing this semester. If I ever publish a collection of short fiction, confidence-credit has to go to Phillip. A novel; Jane. Poetry is still all mine, no matter how 'vain' some Asian lady might think it is. Billy Collins never said it, and I only listen to him.

Drink Count(10/22): 7
Drink Count(10/23): 6
Drink Count(10/24): 4

Thank the fuck Christ no one I know's home got destroyed (that I know of, at least), but super-sized condolences to anyone who did. Fire is a fickle mother fucker.

10/21 'When Australia assholed Ben last week'

Finally, Australian Idol got good. Mind you, this is very relative since the show still basically sucks, but for once I was actually glad to sit through a whole episode (90 minutes so six people can sing for 3 minutes each?? What the crap?). It was judge's choice night, where Mark, Dicko, Marcia, and Kyle respectively get to choose songs for the artists. They made some awesome choices-- No Woman, No Cry, It's Not Unusual, Fragile, etc.-- but it got downright bad ass later when the Salma Hayek looking chick played and a sang a slow piano version of that insipid Umbrella song (ella, ella, ay, ay, ay) and for the very first time I didn't want to puncture my own eardrums when I heard it. But that's not the best part.

There's this kid, right, and he's sixteen-- fucked up hair, thin lips, girl jeans, aw-shucks personae and everything. But homeboy sings better than any kid ever has the right to sing. There's something damn near magical about him that none of the other contestants have. Last week, he chose and arranged a cello/solo guitar version of Phil Collins' Another Day In Paradise that was astounding. Then last night Mark chose Music Of The Night for him, and he nailed it in a beautiful baritone. Then he sat down at the piano and played a version of Death Cab For Cutie's Transatlaticism. I almost shit the bed. This kid is good. He can do anything, and he'll get a record deal no matter when/how he leaves the show.

Oh yeah, I got serious about the assignment stuff too and knocked out and tarted up the last 40% of my excerpt, and edited down the rest over 6 hours. All that's left is to get Jane's feedback on Wednesday, mostly incorporate it, and print out all three sections and read them straight through to see how I feel. If they pass, I just need to go through my proposal twice more and my experimental assignments once, and I am done like dinner with this semester.

W00t! (Ella! Ella!)

Drink Count: 0

10/20 Water Day

The drinking has been fairly epic lately given the late-semester lull and the arrival of an old drinking companion, so I took the day off to rehydrate myself and do these things:

Study African geography
Write a new book review
Catch up on some badly needed sleep
Listen to a few hours of music
Work on my final two experimental writing assignments
Make some headway on one of Jane's books
Watch more Rescue Rangers

Tomorrow it's time to put in a good, hard effort on the novel excerpt/proposal. With luck, by the time Marco returns (Thursday) I'll be a few hours of editing away from finished with year one of a Masters.

Drink Count: 0

10/19 My Math Skills Are Sucks

So, Kait corrected my horrible maths, and everyone in the world but me is right-- I have totally lost 15 pounds since my arrival in Oz. I blame the lack of jack in the box, and the fact that I walk everywhere, but I'm definitely slimmed down to about 154 (or 70 kilos!). So. Rock on.

Marco got super hit on by two girls at the Flight Centre today who complimented his 'sexy' American accent! WooooOOOOO! Then this other guy pulled out a blow-up doll with 'silky black hair, supple mouth, inviting vagina and anus' (that was weird). Marco booked a 5-day trip to Sydney leaving in the morning, so he got mobile and walked around the botanical gardens before we went to the bar, where fifty cent beers were a lie invented by the communists to kill God from the free world. Or engineers said they would get in trouble if they did it again because of safety issues. Either way, we had regular beers and a round of Pac-man followed by MacGyver drinking games, Subway, and the first half of a Kevin Smith marathon (except he brought the gay version of Mallrats.) 5 am taxi. Sweet like Pete.

Drink Count: 9

11/18 I could seriously run guided zoo tours now, but I never get tired of them siamangs

Marco Mayhem at the zoo, and for the third trip this year I saw exactly zero tapir dicks. BUT the wombat was semi-out, and the Syrian bear was kicking ass, and the tassie devil was a total ham, and a peacock hated me, and monkeys are jerks... hilarious, hilarious jerks. So it was alright.

The afternoon featured a nap and television shows-- I've been loving on Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers lately because it's Disney, and they don't skimp on the awesome. Except, watching it now, I realize how gross that show really is. Like, a pack of chipmunks and mice wondering around the Kennedy Space Center and the Police Station, crouching behind telephones and hiding under couches to avoid being seen. If there are crime fighting rodents (or even better, marsupials) hiding in my house and I see them creeping, I am going to kill them.

Also: Always Sunny In Philadelphia is perhaps the funniest new show to come on the TV in the past few years. Marco brought me the first season, and it's cackle-funny, especially while eating some surprisingly bitchin' homemade tacos.

Drink Count: 4

10/17 I am sick to death of playing tour guide in Adelaide

I have discovered the greatest drinking game of all time, and it revolves around MacGyver. Yes, that's right. Some stanky Irishman sent me all of season one, and after an afternoon of errand-running and city-orienting, we played. The rules go:

1) Drink once for each item MacGyver uses to make a gadget (this constitutes at least 15 drinks per episode)
2) Drink once per black character
3) Drink once each time MacGyver says his own name
4) Drink once each time anyone is kidnapped/held hostage
5) Drink once for every line that someone can predict word for word.

And the coup de grace-- any time anyone touches Richard Dean Anderson's epic mullet, you have to finish your drink.

There, go, drink, enjoy. I'm off to make a mud baby out of leftover Lion burger, tomato sauce, boxed wine, and the dregs of my pride. (4 ingredients--4 drinks!)

Drink Count: 9

P.S. Final workshop today, and the class hated Lynchpin. Apparently, I write better kitchen appliances than I do women. I must have a thing there, and even though Jane saw where I was going and praised my intent, the first half of the story does not even begin to work. So. That's cool...

10/16 I HAVE LOST THE MARCO

This was the most stressful thing ever-- I get to the airport a solid hour early and pass it in the bar, going to the gate (yeah, you can do that here) to meet The Marco as he got off his plane. Except he doesn't come off. So I run down to baggage claim, thinking I've missed him. Everyone's bags have already been taken, and the carousel has stopped. I freak. That's when I realize I missed a phone call a while back (no message), and I become convinced that I had the wrong flight and he arrived an hour earlier and I was not there. Not cool!

So I hop a taxi home mad fast, and there's no Marco. Martina is trying to talk me down from the roof to no avail, so I do what any good American would do and pour myself a massive glass of wine and camp it outside with two rogue cigarettes to await the inevitable phonecall/arrival. Turns out he missed a connecting flight and couldn't call to let me know, and so got into Adelaide right as I was on the porch losing my shit. So he caught a taxi. And things were cool.

A nip of whiskey, pool-shooting at The British, and pizza before homeboy turned in quite early-- he has been awake and flying for about a billion years.

Drink Count: 9

10/15 Since when is IQ based on vocabulary?

Facebook is the most fucked up thing in the world. I've got 50-some friends now, several of which I haven't spoken to since high school, so that's weird. It's full of silly time-killing shit like cow-throwing and music-comparing and wall-writing and drink-buying, but it takes me all of 15 minutes to run out of shit to do. I was afraid I'd get sucked into this thing hardcore, but it actually just kind of annoys me. Still, I spend a lot of time at the computer each day, so it gets checked fairly often alongside CNN, my emails, last.fm, fantasy football, and various blogs (many of which can be found on your left-- hey!).

Skipped class with illness but spent a good portion of my day being productive: finishing one of my final assignments, doing two loads of laundry, getting smoked in Fantasy Football, preparing for The Marco's arrival in 13 hours, and blowing up my house's vacuum cleaner. Oops! DID III DO THAAAT?

(10 points for Urkel-- you know you love it.)

Drink Count: 5

P.S. Wanna see how fucked up DangerMouse is? I wanted to cut a specific section out of an episode just to show it at it's cowboy-riding-a-fish-in-space best, but that's hard work. So I checked Youtube. Mind you, he has a limited amount of time to get inside this building, most of which he wastes like Wile E. Coyote in an eyepatch with an Irish weasel-thing (surprise! The Irish are portrayed as loquacious, dumb, and untrustworthy in a British cartoon from the '80s. Also, how awesome is the Negro-Italian crow at the beginning? No, Barone! Sorry, Barone!)

10/14 One Order Of Double Genius...

With a side of ANGER!!!! Like Margaret Sanger sitting on a bloody coat hanger!!!

I drank a half-bottle of vodka and watched Australian Idol while a loose gunman roamed North Adelaide-- police helicopters over my house and everything. That was pretty crazy.

Anyway, this 'listening to music out of context' thing is working great-- I finally like Broken Social Scene! Individually their songs are intriguing, but the full force of fifty minutes of that makes me all weepy and depressed and I stop paying attention. However, just throw "I'm Still Your Fag" into itunes and it will rule. Even bands like Strung Out, The Field Mice, or Blacktop Mourning are quite enjoyable one track at a time. Plus, I get to hear a Matchbox Twenty song randomly and go "fuck, those guys are cool" and listen to ten in a row before going back to random. Sweet.

I finished Lynchpin over four and a half hours today before the drinking began, cutting it down to 2,500 words (from 2,800 at the day's beginning, and 3,300 at its weightiest). I also had to do some restructuring for a massive chunk of exposition that I didn't think could really be dramatized, though it stood out like a massive, didactic sore thumb. So I chopped it up, changed the setting of one scene, and included it sporadically throughout that scene. We'll see if the class buys it like discount meat.

Drink Count: 8