Friendship test

Which is your favourite animal negotiating a field of dominos? If it isn’t armadillo then I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW YOU.

They really should have called this one The Shocker

Via Everything is Terrible

Role model

Toki’s new favourite thing is to sit and watch me intently when I attend to womanly fussiness. For the past few nights he’ll perch by the sink when I take off my makeup, or sit and stare when I dye my roots, or inch dangerously close when I wax my legs. I feel like I’m Betty Draper and he’s whatever the kid’s name is, and soon he’ll be mixing me Manhattans and learning from my bad example. I can’t say I really disapprove.

Pets who want to kill themselves.  Via Jezebel.

It’s not over.

Never, ever forget.

I doubt your commitment…

I so want to be in their gang.
Via Bake and Shake.

Oh hai, 2009

So far I’ve watched three episodes of the second season of Gilmore Girls, consumed three cups of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich, sent three text messages and an email, and thought about all the things I intend to do this year. For the most part, 2008 was good to me. I just hope 2009 is like this little horse.

Listened to slow jazz, sat on my sore ass

By Riitta Ikonen, via never slap the gift donkey

I don’t really care too much about ‘the music,’ but lately I can’t stop listening to At Hultsfred 98 by Jens Lekman, because that song is the sound of the last couple of weeks.

I came back to Melbourne from Canberra at 6am on Boxing Day, and as soon as I dragged myself into the office four hours after landing I knew it was a mistake. Canberra isn’t exactly a fun town, but my micro-family of mother and sister and their pets is there, and so are many friends I never get to see, but I had this idea that I should come home and work on my thesis. I shouldn’t have come home. My boyfriend of two years left in November, and with him went my concentration, and I’d have been better off in Canberra, puttering around in the rented car I’d named Marshmallow, watching Foxtel, loitering in friends’ living rooms and kitchens, walking my mother’s dachshunds and thinking of new nicknames for them.

My office building is wonderfully empty, though, and silent, almost post-apocalyptic. I can listen to whatever embarrassing music I like at whatever volume I like, and scuttle from photocopier room to photocopier room looking for paper. There’s no one around to see me punch the air when I finish my daily quota of words to be written, and no one to notice that most of those words were quotes ctrl+c’d out of Endnote, and I can have my crying spells with the door open.

I will be glad, though, when everyone’s done having a holiday and there are people around again.

Learn something new

Mum would say ‘don’t prop’ whenever we were out in public and dawdling, or daydreaming, or loitering, or any of the things my sister and I liked to do. She did this as long as I can remember and never understood what she meant by ‘don’t prop,’ but got the feeling I should know and didn’t bother to ask. When I was in Canberra for Christmas I offered to take her dogs out for a walk, and she became fretful and explained that Monty, a sweet-faced dachsund with the dimensions of a manatee, would often prop while out on walks, and twist out of his martingale collar.

‘Why don’t you just say stop, mum?’ I asked, after 25 years of wondering. ‘Why is it always ‘prop’? It would be just as easy to say ’stop.’ You just swap out one vowel sound.’

‘Well, you know, it’s like in the rugby.’

‘The what? That sport we’ve never watched or paid attention to ever in our lives?’

‘Don’t be difficult.’

Well, at least I don’t have to wonder any more.