Monday 30 August
I'm currently reading about shopping malls as a postmodern space and it's good stuff. Apparently shopping malls (and other postmodern structures) are actually designed to shut people off from the ouside world and disorientate them to the point where they can't get a grasp of the building as a whole so that they have to submit by either following the pre-ordained flow of dawdling consumption or look to authority for help. Some quotes on the consequences:

1. "Postmodern spaces render persons incapable of grasping totality and encourage fetishistic consumption of commodities and ersatz pleasures. Postmodern forms, then, are part of a larger logic within the late-capitalist system which works to deaden human critical faculties. Nowhere are these synergies clearer, we are told, than in the shopping mall."

2. "According to Shields the architectural potency of the mall combines with the lure of the commodity to produce a kind of frenetic consumerist zombie."

3. "Like fish in an aquarium it is difficult to distance ourselves physically or conceptually."

And then the paper shoots it all down with:

4. "For all their charm, speculations about the bewildering and disempowering effects of postmodern geographics remain largely untested. Jameson's only source of data seem to be his own experience of getting lost."

Harsh.

Tuesday 17 August
Time is a cruel master. Older sisters are even crueler. This is what, according to my cousin Teresa, her little brother Conor will look like in a decade's time.

now

2014

Oh dear.

I would also like to take this opportunity to mention the journals of two of my good friends as interesting related reading. There's Ronnie's and Grace's.

Monday 9 August
I just read the last six episodes of 204 Bell St and they were really good. I remember now that I missed them due to exams at that time of the year and had always intended to catch up. At last I have and it was well worth it. Makes me want to read all 407 other episodes, but in all liklihood I won't.

Monday 9 August
We laugh it about it now
The other night Benjamin, Ronnie, Grace and I got sozzled in the red room. It was super fun! Before Grace got there and while Benjamin was going to get some drinks I sang Ronnie a song with an unexpected ending. After I had sung this song he looked at me with a grave expression and said "That was really unexpected."

Monday 9 August
Exactly a week since I last wrote in here.

I had the coolest experience the other night. I fell asleep in front of Rage about a metre (metric) from Sgee who was on the couch. I was on the floor. That's basically irrelevant detail. That night I had one of those weird running dreams where the universe changes constantly but somehow it all makes sense. One moment you're floating on ice with three of your highschool friends and one person who you've never seen before and the next you and that stranger have been friends for years and really that stranger's Ronnie and you're making milkshakes in the house in New Farm that the roof blew off of. That kind of a dream. Anyway, throughout this particular dream was the unchanging assumption that I lived in Yamanto. I truly believed that that when the universe stopped changing and the adventure was over I would return to this house and go on with my life, because that's what usually happens when you live somewhere and an adventure ends. When I woke up I fully expected to be lying in my room there with the street light shining in my face. Instead I woke up in the rectory and Sgee was right beside me. I love those dreams. It was good.

There's a spider crawling all over my pencil case right now and it's very cool.

Monday 2 August

Uni today was really good. I went in early and did the reading all morning and it made me love my subject. It was kind of like somebody had gotten a heap of the thoughts in my head, put them in a coherent order, researched them properly and published them in a book along with a whole heap of other stuff that I was going to be really interested to find out. It was that kind of good. It answered a lot of the questions I had had about the world in ways that I had never even begun to think of. It was very dense. It took me a good four hours to read and respond to about thirty pages of text. Most of those four hours were spent looking up words and sitting there slowly interpreting text but it was so worth it. When I got into class I was kind of half-informed which was good enough. Like, I kind of knew what was going on and could ramble out some semi-coherent answers and that was better than most of the folk there who hadn't even found the book. At the moment I'm trying to achieve a state of Libby Alvey-esque organisation, which is neatly helped along by two people in my class taking the role that I usually take. Not to say that I'm actually getting organised, in fact I'm fairly sure that I'm physically incapable of such a thing, but at least I'm not the person who makes friends with the teacher and talks too much.

One of the talkers in particular is really funny. His name is Jason and he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of just about every event in modern media culture which he spurts out at semi-relevant moments. You can feel him building up to it and then out it comes. He reminds me of Paul "it's like having constipation of the brain" Chippensomething. Today he knew the date of the release of Blade Runner off of the top of his head despite only ever having seen it once. Last week he went on about some guy called "Remy" or something for ages. It was in the context of a celebrity game in which this Jason guy was appalled to find this "Remy" fellow missing. He explained to us that the so-called "Remy" was a prolific musician from the band Motorhead and if we were all metalheads like we should be then we would love and revere this "Remy" as much as he does. I sure hope so. The other people in my class of interest are the girl I sit next to, Sasha; the neurotic "talker" with all the answers and the scowling indie girl. Also there's some other people. Not Michael Craft, though. This time his disguise is too good even for my cunning eyes. I'll get you yet, Michael. I will not stop searching until I have found you and returned your video.

Nothing in the above entry reminded me of the taste of licking corpses.