Saturday 30 October
My Mum is so cool! We just made beer lickety-sips and now she's roasting me all these different vegies for dinner. Potato, pumpkin, sweet potato, capsicum and onion. And she's making me peas and no roast carrot!

Saturday 30 October
This is from the lonely planet guide for Brisbane.

On Australia Day (26 January), Kangaroo Point hosts the cockroach races. Brisbane's major festival of the arts, the outdoor Brisbane Festival, is held over two weeks in mid-September. The Royal National Agricultural Show (the 'Ekka') is held at the Exhibition Grounds in mid-August. There's also a 12-day international film festival in August, the Livid alternative rock festival in October, an international comedy festival in April and a biennial music festival every second June (odd years).

I have never heard of the outdoor Brisbane Festival (unless they mean Straight Out Of Brisbane ?), the comedy festival or the music festival. Incredible!

Friday 29 October
The smell of rain on the wind.
Seeing Sgee was really good today. Work was bad, although there was a point where I was thinking that it was a particularly good day. I saw Rory at lunch which was cool and I'll see Rory again tomorrow at his Halloween party which I am very much looking forward to.

Tuesday 26 October
Is it wrong to laugh at children?

yes no

A Note to the Immoral: Take particular note of Grace and Nick, Christina and Parker, Evan and Paul, Jordan and Andrew, Marissa and Jared and the pictures of every one of them parading through the school.

Tuesday 26 October
I just went and saw "Shaun of the Dead" with Leo. What a horrible movie! Really clever and funny but also very gruesome and needlessly violent. I would say that in the Zombie Comedy genre this makes it a startling success.
Anyway at one stage it got too scarey (yes, shut up) so I went to the toilet. On my way to this toilet I noticed that the cinema was empty. It was completely devoid of both customers and staff. That was minutes after thinking the thought "it's like we're just killing time until that huge inevitable war" and being freaked out by a zombie movie. So after relieving myself I had a bit of a look around and there really were no staff visible. Not even in the ticket box. Obviously there was somebody operating the movie reel that I was watching, but if the cinema complex had have been taken over that person would have been as oblivious as myself. So there were no people around and at that stage no cars on the road. It was very quiet. I stood still for a few moments just listening and wondering what to do. From behind me I heard a noise. I reeled around just in time to see a little girl piss bolting from one part of the cinema to the other. I froze. I probably would have freaked out completely at this point if I had not had noticed a car driving down Indooroopilly station road at a very lazy pace as though nothing had happened. Nevertheless I raced back into the cinema to find Leo and to claim my last few minutes of freedom.
As you might have guessed armageddon didn't come and soon enough the movie ended and I went home. But for those few moments I was very, very scared. And it does feel like, at least to me, that we're killing time until the environment's fucked and this war comes.

Tuesday 26 October
If you read this journal I've probably already mentioned this to you, but here it is again: I think Grace is the best indie kid ever.
Here are my reasons. They are few. The first reason is that Grace has wonderful taste in music. All of the songs she likes are great, that's just how it is. This makes her, in the eyes of all music lovers (including other indie kids) a really good indie kid. The interesting thing about Grace's taste in music is that although you would describe it as "indie", most of the songs that she listens to are not from the "indie" genre. They come from all over the place. Some are quite popular. Most of them I will probably die never having heard. Despite all of this superiority in song listening, Grace never shoves her indieness in your face. In fact she never even mentions it. Grace really couldn't give a crap how indie you are or how bad your taste in music may be. She knows that everyone is less indie than her and that they have worse taste in music. She's used to it. And this makes her secure enough to accept this and all of life's other little complications and to never ever judge you as a person on your taste in music. And this is why I think Grace is the best indie kid ever.

Wednesday 20 October
I just found this looking through my files. I wrote it ages ago and it's probably published on some other journal of mine elsewhere, but I think it's worth printing again:

Emo thoughts on my breakfast:
A streak of red stains the pure white of my toast. Like an open wound it sits there, not moving, just waiting for a response that never comes. It is waiting for indignation, or fear. It does not care which and I start to question its intent. What does it want from me, that staring red streak? The image of it burns itself into my mind. I cannot look away. I stand accused of a murder I did not commit. In my apathy for the strawberries who laid down their life for my breakfast, I have committed a crime. I start to see the deeper meaning of the destructiveness of my existence. How did I come to be such a horrible being? Even if I sat still all day not daring to move for fear of hurting others like the cruelly damaged strawberry, it would be to no avail. I would be breathing, sweating and wasting heat and energy that is not rightfully mine. I may as well be dead. But even then I would be a decomposing minefield of bacteria and filth. The inevitability of it all startles me. And I know that there are no real winners, for even the pure white of the toast is burnt at the edges, curling into itself as if it too cannot stand the outside world and just wishes to disappear into a non-harmful existence. We sit there, gridlocked; me, the jam, the toast and I cannot eat for there is no longer any pleasure in my simple meal. I go to throw it in the bin and realise that even if I do so I will not win, for I have wasted the lives of the strawberries sacrificed in my honour and the wheat that is now in its most unforgiving form will be forced to live an eternity shrinking into itself until it, like myself, becomes a decomposing shell of pain... and then nothing.
I take a bite.

Tuesday 19 October
See the thing is I'm a lot like my father or at any rate I've been able to pick up a lot of his characteristics. And he has friends and a wife and people like him but the fact remains that he's this enormous jerk.

Tuesday 19 October
I just watched what I think was my first episode of Six Feet Under and it's pretty good. Kirstin used to say that there were days when all you could see were penises and days where all you could see were breasts. I'm in love with Claire from that show and right now all I can see is breasts.

Also my Dad just tried to talk to me but I wouldn't talk to him and now I feel like crap. It was just some stupid thing where he'd just been to the toilet so I didn't want to stand too close too him so whenever he moved closer I would turn and walk away a little and eventually he thought he got the message that I didn't want to talk to him. I wanted to talk to him I just didn't want to stand too close. Stupid feeling guilty over my father.

Monday 18 October
Has it only been two days? I have been away from my house for two days according to the date below this entry but it feels more like four. Anyway as I was saying, I was talking to that guy Jason before my lecture aaaages ago now and (in accordance with the conversation) he said "You don't have to be left wing to hate John Howard you know." My first thought was that he probably came from a family/world that was very right wing and probably hadn't noticed that a lot of people around him were in fact not this way inclined. Jason talks with an extreme amount of detail so to sum up the reason why you don't have to be left wing to hate John Howard, it turns out that the extreme right wing hate John Howard for taking their guns away. Then Jason went into how owning guns is just a hobby and how different people prefer different guns (there's the something gun and people like that one because it leaves a nice even blood stain on a white surface such as a floor or a wall, though of course this won't happent if you shoot the gun on an angle or near where the two walls intersect, basically. And after that you can get into your antique guns such as the something something or the something something, now the something something, that one's good for a nice sharp bullet that's going to go in and out of a body with the minimum fuss...) and should be allowed to collect and shoot the guns of their choice. By the way he described it, gun shooting and collecting is a lot like dog-grooming or crochet and the fact that people are deprived of it is senselessly unfair. John Howard you bastard.

My sister found this is a packet of candy hearts she was eating at work.

Saturday 16 October
This morning I woke up and there were three or four (it's hard to tell) mosquitos flying around me and I thought "big trouble!" but then I noticed that I had no bites and that they weren't at all interested in sucking my blood so I said "that's super!" and I didn't kill one of them!

This is a note to myself to tell you all about how the gun lobby allegedly hates John Howard. "You don't have to be left wing to hate John Howard you know." WORK!

Sunday 10 October
"We live in a society, not an economy" - Tim's Mum

So it appears we have another liberal government. And many greens, but not enough for a balance of power. Still it was nice to see Bob Browne smile. That had to be the highlight of my election coverage. And thanks to the great economy that Paul Keating (harshly) installed in the early 90's and John Howard has been taking all the credit for ever since, air travel has become almost affordable:

Departing Sydney flying to Christchurch in November 2004 - $342
Departing Sydney flying to Manila in November 2004 - $860
Departing Sydney flying to London in October 2004 - $1383
Departing Sydney flying to Zurich in October 2004 - $1383

And if that falls through there's always the Benjamin Party.

Wednesday 6 October
Mark was in a bad mood this afternoon and it was adorable! He's so cute when he's like that, and lots of other times too. Anyhow it was his birthday and he really wasn't enjoying his party so we went and hung out in his room and he told me how he hated everything and I enjoyed it immensely.