2004-08-16..3:16 p.m.

THE VOICES IN MY HEAD ARE THREATENING:

Frankly Mr. Shankly (The Smiths)

Boy with the Arab Strap (Belle and Sebastian)

Burn This City (Franz Ferdinand)

William Tell Overture

Blue Monk (Thelonious Monk)

I Get Around (Beach Boys)

Glass Onion (Beatles)

Emma (Field Mice)

(personally I�ve learned to stop asking questions)

IF MY SUBCONSCIOUS HAD A FIRST NAME�

I had a dream that MC was going for the hair metal look: long, permed and bleached blonde. Excpet he had tiny blue and green streaks in it as well. He was wearing skinny leather pants and had copiously lined his eyes in kohl. He was at the Water Rats with Whibbs (slightly odd because they�ve never met, slightly odder because Whibbs is in Canada), and both of them were huge in comparison to my puny dream self. As soon as I saw Whibbs I felt filled with joy and ran up to jump into his arms. We stood and talked with MC for a bit, then Whibbs sidled off and motioned me to follow because the bar next to the Rats was nicer and he�d rather have a pint there.

I�ve been dreaming a lot lately about masks and disguises and being hidden, focusing on colours and fabrics and what people are wearing as opposed to what they�re doing. Saturday night I had the longest dream about this obstacle course in the water which we had to swim through by following a riddle. I�m crap at riddles and even though I could have easily swam ahead of everyone, I stayed with the pack so I wouldn�t veer too much. The last leg was to climb onto this platform and one by one ascend a case of stairs and jump across a bridge to board this boat that would end up taking us about 200 metres down the river and finally let us out into the city, but before leaving we were given an unpainted papier-m�ch� mask. No one in the city wore them, so I�m not sure why we needed them. Then I had to sit and watch Zanna try on a bunch of different outfits while I sat in this tree thing the shop we were in had set up which had these reams of sheer fabric in green and plum hanging decoratively, but they obscured my view of Zanna so I tore them down.

THE WEEKEND UPDATE

We went to Regents Park yesterday where it was cold and blowy and a bit wet, but there was grass to sit of and beer to drink and Proust and Satre and Captain Orgasmo to discuss. There was also a bunch of twee young hipsters playing football in their vintage t-shirts and rah-rah skirts, battered Doc�s and ballet slippers, going mad over missed goals and showing off. I love twee young hipsters, for all their seriousness and indie-angst they still manage like everyone else to revert into little children at the sight of a pitch stretching before them. I�m not sure if it was while watching the rather drunken game ensue, or after, but my left shoulder got bitten about six times by some unknown insect that took a fancy to my blood. My delicate sun-kissed shoulders now have angry red bumps eating up those much-preferred tiny freckles. And because I decided to (for once) take advantage of the sun (rather than reading and smoking in the shade of my room) I�m also a little sunburned. The itching and the dehydrated do not make for a pleasing combination.

Not merely was it a weekend for the insects, for I too was allowed to sink my teeth hungrily, if not greedily, into all manner of things. Like Sock Monkey. And Nausea. And more of my delicious biography of Simone de Beauvoir.

It was also a weekend of shamefully huge First World amounts of food. Friday was Thai all over the place after a few games of pool (one of which I nearly won, all the others I stank at miserably because no matter how good I think I�ll one day be, that day refuses to come). Monk�s vegetables and rice for me, and some sort of dead animal and fat noodles for M, and muchly much of the red red vino for us both because we felt like splurging. Saturday I felt like playing the domestic goddess figure and concocted a feast of grapefruit and strawberry salad with tofu sausages, avocado, grilled mushrooms, fresh baby tomatoes, and toast. Saturday night we picked up a pizza from Papa Jones� in Angel after our shift at the Betsey, the unadulterated extravagance of which caused me to burn the roof of my mouth (or the fact that that was one hot pizza, we had to wait about twenty minutes before it was anywhere near being cool enough to consume with out mouth blistering.) Sunday the spirit of a 50s housewife suckerpunched me again and I found myself making smoothies and nectarine and strawberry salads and toast with blue cheese and beetroot sometime late afternoon. It�s a shame I was only entertaining M, all my June Cleaver instincts were wasted on cooking only for two.

The only thing that happened this weekend that had nothing to do with M or food and everything to do with me was talking to my editor on Saturday and accepting an additional role with the mag as copy editor. Ha ha, I see you roll your eyes and point pointedly at the screen because my online grammar and spelling are *creative*, but I scoff in return and call your doubt a silly thing. I was the editor of a mag at my uni for two years. It�s funny I suppose. In my own works, punctuation and grammar are relative, all part of the creative process, yet I�m a she-devil in disguise when it comes to other people and jump on mistakes like a pitbull on a toddler.

I�m lacking in forethought, nicotine and sugar today. Time that was rectified methinks.

****meep