I can still only flirt with the idea of not caring. I can only stop worrying about what people think of me when I'm alone, with no intention of going outside. Because then I know there's nobody going to see me, and hence no reason to care. Except there is never any reason to care. I don't care that re-piercing my labret makes me, again, one of the masses who have pierced labrets. However, I am embarrassed for girls with tattoes of a) dolphins, b) butterflies, c) roses, and/or d) any combination of these. Because for fuck's sake, it's wrong.

Today I burnt 600 calories at the gym, except it didn't seem to take anything out of me until I got home and couldn't move. And cried when a baby possum died on tv - its head had been pecked the most, out of all its brothers. Birds peck out the eyes of carcasses, which may be a contributing factor to why I only feel upset when I see dead baby birds, and mere disgust at dead adult ones. Disgust and fear, because fear is disgusting.

If you're going to write proper chronicles of days and, you know, a life in a city, I guess you have to use capital letters. The thing is, I have issues with consistency, and only using machines for multiples of 10 minutes. But we all have to lighten up a bit, and there's too much to bitch about to worry about rewriting everything using capital letters. You see, washing and ironing can easily take an entire day, if you have an entire day to do it in.

Yesterday I decided to be good, get out of bed, eat an apple and go to the gym in the wee hours of 8:30-9:00am. The first bad omen of the day was my mother asking me about C, and whether she still walks slowly. I know my mother hates her, and sometimes I do too, but that's what best friends are for. Or perhaps I just have bad relationships with everybody. But C was 15 minutes late, and mopey, and "sick" again, and it's hard to be excited about the prospect of an entire day in someone's company when they piss you off in the first five minutes.
Gluttony was shut, because some café owners have better things to do with their lives than hassle staff to open and work for a pittance on public holidays and days which most business owners consider public enough holidays to close shop. They wanted me to work yesterday. Get fucked. I'm never working on public holidays again, unless I get paid a decent amount, or some incentive other than to give someone else a holiday. Someone I like.
So we went around and look, I'm indecisive, I'm always indecisive, and everyone was pissing me off. T loves bargain shopping, but finds it hard to find bargains cheap enough to consider bargains, and like many girls I know, buys things for the sole reason of their being cheap. C doesn't do this, and painstakingly tries on everything. Really slowly. Which, yesterday, left me and T spending quality time sharing an uncomfortable chair intended for bored boyfriends, making small talk, resisting the urge to complain about how shopping is.. shit. It's just shit. And everything on Bridge Rd is the same. Everything. I swear to god, the same clothes are in every fucking shop, and I don't even like them.
I bought a trashy studded belt with a pink rim thing and various homewares from Supply & Demand, my love. And I refrained from buying myself a towel (singular) because I have enough purple things and you can't buy chic coloured towels one at a time. Or just one, in my case. Forget that 'at a time'.

I started to use iCal because I'm working a lot this week, varying shift times, and it'd be good form to start using some form of planner so I don't forget to go to work, and because the first week I used would have lots of coloured blocks on it. Is 33.5 hours per week still a part time job? Am I getting ripped off?
For a moment I forgot about the 'argument' I had with Chris last night, during which I became incensed but tried to withold it from him. Because whenever he knows I'm angry, he manages to turn it around until it's my fault, for being angry, for whatever it is that I'm angry about. I would like him to be honest about something, for once. Anything, really. I can't be fucked thinking about it anymore, because it's so ridiculous, and there's nothing to think about. He can find someone else to fuck, if that's all he wants. His self-esteem issues are no longer my problem, and the excuses he gives for not calling aren't funny enough to keep listening to. ...But I do like having the last word. And I would like him to realise that I came out on top. Oh, the wit.

I have to confess that I haven't read a single article in the paper for the past 3 days, because everything is about the tsunami. It's not that I don't care or don't want to know. I get angry because everybody cares now, but when the time comes to accept refugees, it won't happen. Everyone's so eager to help when it's convenient. I don't feel patriotism, either. Maybe it's socially unacceptable, but I don't feel any more distraught about the 107 Australians missing than the 100,000 people from elsewhere who died, and countless others who are missing. We are all people.

lose weight, meet new people, climb mt everest

well, last night was as pleasant as a balmy friday evening in the presence of people i hated at high school and an ex boyfriend could be. i collected some memories which may, one day, be 'fond'. my first encounter with a personal breathalyser, and the knowledge that it doesn't matter how fashionable people manage to convince me they are, it easily turns to shit. eg when their fashionable friends leave to go to a cooler party where people other than them are snorting lines off an outdoor dining set, and the most enjoyable moment of the night is in front of the tv watching lavinia nixon wish them a safe new year. aww.
i fucking hate fireworks. and how my boss wants me to work for normal (read: shit) pay tomorrow, again. i'm not even making excuses about being at a beach this time. i'm just not going in to work. instead i will "have brunch with the girls" at gluttony, where they have home (shop) made bread with hunks of cheese embedded in it. that is so good i eat it, despite not eating cheese. fucking oath.
i ate a few pieces short of an entire family block of black forest chocolate yesterday, and weighed 1.5kg more than usual today. ..how can this be. how can 250g of chocolate become 1.5kg of bodyweight? I KNOW. what-ever. i'm still pissed off. there is so much cake and chocolate i want to eat.

the ex boyfriend has new tan leather shoes that almost made me choke, until i realised that ownership of such ubertrendy bullshit is right up his fucking alley. like his new hair cut and colour. it really wasn't that awkward until he reminded me of how much i earn, per hour. even i don't remember that. it has been 6 months since i last saw him, and were it someone else, i would worry that they remember job related details. it just irked me to remember that, no, he just remembers everything. which led to me remembering why i hadn't spoken to him for so long. why is "we should meet up!" such a popular catchphrase?

i still wonder why v hasn't settled down into who she really is, and insists on keeping this image of .. cool. it's high school cool. everyone has left that behind, but she still sits down next to us and yells into her phone. i have never heard the word 'babe' used that many times in one one-sided conversation, ever. it wasn't only her, either. i was privy to many loud conversations that wouldn't be had, were there not others present to hear them. funny how these people end up passed out on the couch with their legs apart, hey. you can only be cool for so long.
oh, and i accidentally enquired about the health of a couple of dogs, ducks and guinea pigs that are dead. there's really no way to redeem yourself after that. and i broke the length adjuster thing on the strap of my cherry dress, which i hadn't worn before. shucks. so a good portion of the evening was spent adjusting it by hand, and standing with one shoulder hitched higher than the other to prevent a tit falling out. now i know why i never buy new clothes and always wear the same thing when i "go out".
at some point in the last 24 hours i bit my fingernails off. fuck. but.. interesting. interesting.

lumpy wednesday

all i want to listen to is metallica. i've been listening to about 5 songs over and over the past few weeks, and i'm too lazy to branch out. i'm not in the mood to discover new things that i know i'll like and eventually become attached to. that goes for everything, not just music.

i have nothing to write. i just want to write.
i want to go out with my friends 'for a drink', but the logistics are all wrong. i don't want to drive, because i want a pink cocktail in a nice glass. i can't be bothered getting changed out of my gym clothes, but you can't drink cocktails at home, with the dishwasher and musicmax in the background. designer meat bashing and whining is fine, when it's on a cd. because i've been listening to a bit of einstürzende neubauten too. which i have to burn for chris so he believes i've known about them for a while. i hate having to have something to prove, but i like being able to prove it. i was like this before i met him, and he keeps forgetting that.

i keep dreaming about michael and people i don't know, and i'm always friends with their girlfriends. and i think about how he thinks his friends would eat me for breakfast, and how he's probably right, but his friends are the only kind of people i really want to talk to. just one of those things. kind of like how i'm a coffee maverick now, and i never want to drink coffee ever again. i say this as i'm drinking coffee.
a customer quizzed me about chai tea today, as if she were a representative of a company who, by making bad chai, i would damage. but really, she worked in a coffee shop, and she was just a girl. girls who are just girls can't be moles, can they? i made her some damn fine chai, anyway. soy. with honey. fuck, she asked me how sweet our chai was, and gwen told her that t2 tea is the best tea in the world. how do i give her a measure of how sweet it is? it's about a 2, on a 1-5 scale. hand movements? christ.

it's taken me three attempts to finish my right wing extremists book, the third or fourth that i've read this year, and i only have a page left. but even though i skimmed a large part of it, i want to finish it well. so i can move on to genghis khan. i don't appreciate books enough, i don't think. i often get to the point where i'm finishing a book because i'm pedantic about finishing things, rather than because i want to. it's not something you're meant to do with books, is it.

soon i'll have a list of links to other blogs down the side of this. once i find some good ones, and work out how to do it. how exciting. i need more to do than read the livejournals of people i went to highschool with. i hated them then, and i hate them now. inadequacy.

a fat slug without a mirror

it comes to a crunch and it's like there are suddenly thousands of prying eyes on me, who would otherwise care about what i have to say. how can you have an inferiority complex behind layers of plastic on the internet? all you know is my name. it's allie. and i'm scared of friends finding me, because girls can do such horrible things, and i'd never even know. but they would, and that's what i'm afraid of.

i tend to be afraid of a lot of things lately. of things changing, of things not changing enough. scared of people, of people realising there's no mystique here, and nothing behind any veil of mystique, either. though there's nobody to do any of that kind of discovering, anyway. i read something one time about how history students are the most interesting to talk to at parties, about how we should be thankful, because knowing things about history is an attractive quality. and i worry, because i still end up on the periphery. and who wants a fairytale, anyway? these things shouldn't bother me. i don't even go to parties.

oh. and a lot of jealousy. i thought that once i finished school and started uni and got a job, i'd move out and suddenly have grown up. and i'd be so on top of everything and on the way to something that i could go there with people, and we'd all have a nice time. but all that really happened was i finished school and felt inadequate and unhappy because i had no job. and now i have a job and i care too much about that, because i tend to care too much about pursuits like that. there's conventional gems of wisdom about things like this. you have to work to live, not live to work. but when you're tired at the end of the day, and it's all happening again tomorrow, that's what life is. at the end of the day, life is daily life. you're not meant to be resigned to this at the age of 18.

i've been reading a girl's website, or maybe what can only be classified as a woman's website, with journal entries about her travels and having time to write. i couldn't do that in fiji because the difference between holidaying and travelling is evident when it takes two men to lug your suitcase from a boat to a bigger boat. it wasn't even my life in there. it was just some crap, and i worried about it being broken. that's not travelling. i keep seeing things, signs, telling me to just go away. thinking my reasons for not doing it are legitimate, and those doing it are in a different place and more able. but the key is to book a fucking plane ticket. and do it.
plan a trip and just go. so i guess i'll do it and make too many arrangements to go back on them, and do it.

i worked today and had no break because it was busy all day. family-busy, though, not suit-busy, which is a lot more tolerable. there were only three of us and when you mention being understaffed to dads, they're more understanding than when you mention it to suits. who are probably dads too. but, you know, when they're with their daughters, i'm like a daughter too, i guess. i had all these plans about going to the gym and running around near the yarra with mimi and the bats, but i got home too late and it's so easy to make excuses. when work is horrible i think about what i'd rather be doing and all the possible excuses to fall back on later, when doing things becomes possible. and i get to do it all again tomorrow.

and then maybe go out with chris to develop a friendship from what was never a friendship before we started having sex. i don't know the etiquette of situations like this. i was happy to leave it at him not returning calls, because at least then i'd made an effort. it's not an ordeal, and i do want to see him. especially when he makes a point of saying he wants to see me, and isn't sure whether i want to see him. i do. but how many unreturned phonecalls is too many? at what point do i give up?
i don't expect anything anymore. but it would be nice. and if nothing happens, i have all his excuses to laugh at.
who, but him, would use dimebag dying and subsequent depression as an excuse for not returning calls? who, but him, would expect me to accept this as a reasonable excuse? we weren't friends before we started having sex. evidently. everyone knows me better than that. how many times can i laugh at him and excuses like that before he realises they're pathetic, and i i know it?
there's no grudge anymore, though. it's just 'cute', for lack of a better word. it's funny, because it's just him, and i should stop laughing at him, but. it's funny. especially because he doesn't understand it.

i licked a spoon with soy milk on it, today, and it tasted like wheat juice, and now i want to drink it. i don't have any urge to use this as a step to veganism, though, in the way way that i don't have any urge to feel guilty about eating a reasonable amount today. when i have my period, convictions don't matter. i eat and i don't care, i don't think about calories and exercise because i don't care. there are no picture of dead calves with ripped rib cages, because. i can switch it off. i switch it off. i'm too lazy to care or think. i hate it. it's so easy.
the idea of new years resolutions even appeals. though there's nothing important i can think of, you know? i just want to make lists.

..a temporary end.