Things I have learned in the past few weeks, while trying to do some proper work on The Crappy Novel That Dare Not Speak Its Name:

1. I have no self-discipline. Leave me alone in the house with a laptop and within 20 minutes I’ll probably be watching re-runs of The Thick of It.
2. I am incapable of NOT simply ripping off the style of book I am reading when it comes to writing my own. For this reason, biographies or books I don’t mind ripping off are the only sort I can stomach right now. Should TCNTDNSIN bear a passing resemblance to the life and times of Patricia Highsmith, who am I to judge…
3. I have spent more time mentally imagining myself mosying around the house in the bathrobe as a full time writer, following my incredible success (fuck off, I only tell you these things because I have no shame) than actually writing to make said success possible. By, shall we say a fair margin.

I suppose we all have our little cross to bear

What a terrible thing it is to be white, straight and middle-class sometimes.

No, really. I mean the guilt alone is killing me. I'm so (comparatively) privileged and out-of-touch with anything approaching a common man or woman that I pretty much assume I'm liable to offend everyone in my immediate vicinity at any given moment. I used the word "eskimo" the other day and spent the next five minutes wondering if the person behind the counter, to whom I had spoken, was now convinced I was racist scum and/or planned to spit in my coffee anyway, just to be on the safe side. It's like a comedy of manners but without the comedy bit.

Anyway, a friend of mine used the word "queer" the other day to refer to a friend who - no shit - was gay. I looked at my feet. "Is that, er allowed?"

"What do you mean?"

"'Queer'. Do you not have to be part of the gay community to be able to reclaim the word?"

"What are you talking about?"

"It's like the n-word-"

"It's not like the n-word."

"It is! Black people are allowed to use the n-word and that's it. We're not black so we can't get onboard: that's the law."

"You're crazy."

Am I crazy? I might be crazy.

Either way the whole thing reminds me of a test we did in first year psych at uni (which I think I've blogged about before) where we had to look at photos of people and guess what ethnicity they were. Being me, I agonised over it, the idea being that I'd prove how right-on I was by identifying Woman Number 3 down to her country of origin instead of offering a vague "Middle Eastern-Indiany maybe?"

To boil it down, the study found that racist people took longer to guess ethnicity than non-racist people because they were so obsessed with race. Shit.

I think there's probably a lesson in there for me somewhere. Perhaps that lesson is that I'm actually, albeit subconscioulsy, a racist, classist homophobe who has deluded herself into thinking she has little-l liberal values. Which actually, now I come to think about it, would explain why I don't really like black people. Or jews. Oh and gays? Don't even get me motherflipping STARTED.

Overhead in my office. Tuesday, 2.54pm

Random journo: (on the phone):"...well he called me a cuntface..."

Or something like that

A friend of mine has just fallen in love. How sweet, you might think. How lovely.

Well, yes, but also how fucking insufferable.

There’s a strong parallel to be drawn, I think, between people in the first flush of love and people who have just broken up with someone. Both of them corner you for long conversations entitled This Is Why It Was The Right Thing To Dump Them/You Do Think I Did The Right Thing, Right? and This Is It This Time/I’m Just So Happy, respectively. Neither of them can think, or talk, of anything else and both of them bring out exactly the same reaction in me, though I hate to admit it: they bring me doooown.

Because to a person in a long-term, albeit very nice, relationship the only thing worse than counselling someone through a break-up is listening to them rattle on about the new objective of their affection. The first makes you think Oh God That Could Be Me – the second is much more depressing because you get to think Oh Great That Will Probably Never Be Me Again.

The pain is particularly great in this case because I first met this friend several weeks after he had been booted out of the family home. Which is to say he was miserable, bitter and willing to tell me, quite often, that it didn’t matter how much I thought I loved someone – stay with anyone for long enough and within 20 years you’ll be fighting like two rats in a sack.

Like a non-paedo version of Humbert Humbert my friend’s message was not so much Never Grow Up but Never Fall in Love. It is a line I find myself increasingly keen to bring up now that his heart has started to flutter and cynicism has turned to sunshine and rainbows.

What do you SAY to someone who has fallen in love? “That’s awfully nice”? “I’m very happy for you”? “Let’s all hope it doesn’t end in tears this time around, eh”? What about a plea not to mention a new love until it has soured, maybe just a little?

The sad truth is that I think I prefer ever-so-slightly-unhappy people to very-happy-all-the-time people. Which says, I’m sure, a lot more about me than it does about any of my friends and is, frankly, fairly descpicable. Then again, love means never having to say you’re sorry, right? Right?

Words fail me

A certain friend and colleague of mine found herself in Broome a few weeks ago (along with half of the population of Perth, if my circle of friends is anything to go by). Gallivanting on the beach, clad in a bikini and accompanied by her boyfriend’s niece, said friend spied what everyone else in Broome would soon be busily spying too: Orlando Bloom.

What to do next, given that my friend had both eyes and class? (Well, sort of.) What I mean is that although she certainly had an eye for Orlando she also had some misgivings about draping herself across his chiselled torso (this isn’t my hyperbole: she told me, honest) for a photo.

The solution presented itself in the form of the 4-year-old boyfriend’s niece. Dragging the poor child across they gazed up into Orlando’s startlingly well structured, almost elf-like, face (now this definitely isn’t my hyperbole: he was in the movie and EVERYTHING). Would you, she asked the almost ethereal-in-his-good-looks-especially-with-those-cheekbones-and-the-eye-crinkles (ok, now I’ve just lost it) Orlando, very politely, mind having a photo with my, er, daughter?

Apparently the Fjf###@%fkjldfljdkffbhgm-ing Orlando was a peach and happily chatted to the lucky little toddler bitch while my friend snapped the photo.

A nice story. Which becomes even nicer if you open this week’s OK magazine and turn to page four or so, where a certain “fan" and her "baby” have been snapped posing with Mr B. Oh hilare, I believe my sides have split.

Token Smokin' Hottie: Sam Worthington

I’m really not into muscles. They don’t do it for me on any level. Give me a boy who disappears when he turns sideways and I’ll go a bit weak at the knees. Show me a hip bone protruding above a pair of too-big pants and I’ll begin to pant. This is pretty sick stuff, obviously, and it will come as no surprise to me regular readers (Mum, Dad) but I have always have had a thing for skinny boys.

By contrast, show me a body builder and I throw up a little bit in my mouth. Deliver unto me a finely chiselled specimen with C-cup pecs and I’ll assume he beats his wife and fucks yours.

And yet every so often someone slips past my guard who defies everything I like in a boy. Most of the time I don’t even realise that it’s happening until it’s too late. An idly fancy turns to fancying and before you know it I’m googling someone who looks like he could throw me around like a rag doll, daydreaming about bunched thigh muscles and abs you could cut your fingers on. There’s no rational explanation for this: I call it The Sam Worthington Effect.

NOTE: Yes I did just see finally see Terminator 4 and yes I do find the entire ridiculous plot more believable than *SPOILER* the fact we are being asked to believe that, apparently in 2018, a LONE DOCTOR is capable of doing a motherfucking HEART TRANSPLANT on her husband in the middle of a FUCKING DESERT under a bit of shadecloth. Fuck you, writers, and your figurative dump on our collective chests.

A new low?

Meanwhile a supposed friend, has just sent me a photo of myself, wearing sunglasses (at night) in a pub, drinking wine with a straw. Oh dear.

Emery board

I’m sorry I’ve been a slack blogger this week, I think it’s because I’m bored.

Silly, really, because you would think all this boredom might motivate me to do something but, oh no, it’s quite the opposite.

I liken it to the way a friend of mine talks about the shithole that is, or was, his bedroom. Booted out of the family home, said friend was so depressed he couldn’t be arsed picking up after himself and rather let the bedroom in his new, crappier, home turn to shit. I asked him (yonks ago) why he didn’t get a cat or pretty things up. He said he didn’t want to let himself think the new digs could be permanent. But, of course, the grottier his bedroom got, the worse he felt and the less he did, making the room even grottier.

For me, it’s the same with boredom. When I’m bored and a bit down, nothing, absolutely nothing, interests me. I’m like a petulant child screaming that she wants something, but with no idea what (Sweet? Toy? Nap?) it is that she wants. Just that she wants it immediately.

For my friend it has simply been a matter of bagging a new job and shagging his way around London. For me, neither option is a)viable and b)that appealing.

I tell you this now, readers, because I am a little concerned. I have booked in a haircut for tomorrow afternoon. I need a haircut - my fringe has grown so long I now resemble a slightly dim sheepdog – but I can’t escape a slightly nagging suspicion that having a haircut in my present mood is a mistake. I’m restless, I’m a bit meh, I want something to change. All of which translates, I fear, into a buzz-cut. Or a bob. Or going blonde.

Old friends may recall an ill-advised decision of mine, in my teenage years, to tell my hairdresser to just do whatever she wanted. What she wanted, apparently, was an ear-grazing bob accompanied by a short, blunt fringe that made me look almost exactly like a surprised hedgehog. I went home, locked myself in the bathroom and cut off my hair with a pair of scissors until it was about an inch long all over. Don’t feel sorry for me, feel sorry for Mum: she paid for the haircut.

And now… and now… I can feel the dreaded phrase sliding, once more, towards the tip of the tongue. In the noble tradition of bored teenagers, dumped girlfriends and gormless dullards alike, my lips are preparing to sound out the dreaded phrase: “Go ahead - whatever you want.”

"What the effing crap? That angel guy just felt me up!"

This is random but somehow incredibly amusing. Thanks to Joey for the tip-off:

The little Jerboa that could

There is no way to disguise this as anything other than a 'cute animal pictures post', which is lame, I know. But look at the expression on that little Jerboa's face: just look at the concentration etched all over his or her tiny little face. You can almost hear the little guy/lady whispering "I think I can, I think I can..." Go you magnificent rodent bastard, go!

Form an orderly queue, girls

I try to steer clear of commenting on anything serious on here. Mostly because I don’t know anything about anything and also because I assume my small readership would prefer to stare gormlessly at semi-naked shots of Milo Ventimiglia than here my talk about… you know, anything.

But this story really got up my nose today, and it’s not entirely because my blood sugar is dangerously low and I have this weird unexplained gash on my knee…

HOME & Away actor Lincoln Lewis's mum said she wouldn't want the girl featuring in a sex tape with her son as a daugher-in-law. Jacqui Lewis was interviewed by Nova 969 Sydney and asked about whether she felt disappointed as a mother after the sex tape came to light last night, Perth Now reports:
"I am glad he is not with that girl anymore," Ms Lewis told the Nova drive show team of Ryan, Monty and Wippa.

"I don't want that as a daughter-in -law.

"She must have said she was willing to do it.

"As a female I wouldn't be doing any of that. We keep things. Have a look at Monica Lewinski, she kept the dress."

It’s not that I don’t think sex tapes are both pretty tacky and completely icky but really – is it the 1950s? By which I mean, is some poor boob of a girl really expected to be the one to keep her legs together while her lovable son is just Being A Boy. Ugh, give me a break, Mrs Lewis. Your real concern should be the fact that your son apparently thinks it is appropiate to make a sex tape and then SHOW THE FOOTAGE TO HIS CAST MATES. Or the sad but undeniable fact that his face resembles a sad condom wearing a dyed Raggedy Andy wig. The sight of his wet pink tongue, flopping like a soft cock across his lips makes me want to cry. Or retch. Or both.

Things that probably feel worse than returning to work after a two week holiday:

a) Stacking it so badly while running across the road that your knee resembles an open pot pie.
b) Discovering that your partner of 20 years is actually a long-lost brother.
c) Death. Or, rather, the bit right before you actually die.