Can't touch me!

Legal Resource Centre, fourth floor. University of Melbourne Law building.

It was as quiet as can be, and should be. I was plugged into my earphones (to say it was the other way round would be, alas, highly inaccurate), watching Annie Hall on my laptop, with Asher sitting on my left studying his geology notes and his friend K____ diagonally to my right.

Rustling of a plastic bag.

Crackling sounds of a plastic tupperware container opening.

A meaty stink filling our immediate airspace.

"Oh yuck K_____, that is fucking disgusting." Asher goes, as K_____ lifts up a forkful of cold steak and takes a huge bite out of it with obvious relish, even though frozen fat and gristle dangle off the fork, and each bite releases a new burst of gravy stench.

"Mmm," goes K_____, picking up a cold sausage (solidified yellow fat clinging to it in places) next. "Real food."

Asher shakes his head, I give K______ a bemused expression, and he continues to dig in.

Later on he gives an almighty belch, Asher continues making disgusted sounds, and K_____ turns to me all wide-eyed and innocent. "I swear I didn't burp, that was just the sausage releasing itself."

To be fair, he is not at all, (not at all!) a fat, slobby person. Au Contraire, he is incredibly fit and good looking. So yeah, just throwing it out there. And very generous as well, handing out lollies and butter menthol drops (which he decimates with his teeth into noisy splinters) and cans of red bull.

Now why did I blog about this, I wonder. Oh yes, because I thought it vaguely amusing.

Labels: University

I had my last exam for the semester yesterday. It also happened to be my first uni exam ever! All in all, it was an experience I'm ambivalent about. Most of our uni exams are held in the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens. All well and good, because what better motivation for students to go all out to ace their exams than the knowledge that they are sitting in a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with Culture and Splendour and Heritage springing up from the creaky floorboards and filling their orifices with the Spirit of Learning.

Wonderful.

Taking a walk from Melbourne Central to REB is a cake- er, walk, especially if you have a good friend to accompany you and to run through pointers and last minute notes with you. Oh it was freezing, absolutely freezing, plus a strangely foggy day (which one of my friends pointed out, made Melbourne seem distinctly Silent Hill-like. I agree entirely, it was the first thought that popped in my head when I realised I couldn't even see the top of my not at all tall apartment building. I admit, seeing Eureka (PHWOAR the tallest residential building in the southern hemisphere) sliced in half by a fog machete is a truly who-gives-a-shit experience.)

Personal acrimonious feelings towards fog and frost aside, most of my discomfort was helped by being able to out-conservatise, out-liberalise, supra-feminise and ideologise each other with quotes from Locke, Smith and Bozo the Happy Clown. (Three cheers for a sense of humour that, while decidedly corny, is at least not uncommon.)

They made us wait in the cold however. We sat out in the open, sat our frost-hardened buttocks (what an image!) upon hard concrete. It wasn't too bad, but after half and hour of sitting out in at most 10 degree weather, the PA System of Doom ordered us to put our belongings in several stainless steel containers very much like the ones used by shipping companies to store their crates of Oreo cookies and Hello Panda biscuits.

Unleash the scrogs and boars! At 2 o clock, at least 2000 students streamed into the entrances of the Cultured and Unheated UNESCO Building to sit for 2 hours and 15 minutes of mental regurgitation showing their examiners their accumulated skills and knowledge (which of course will not disappear at the end of the exams in a brain dousing of alcohol and unhealthy finger food!)

The instruction from my lecturer (which was, for god's sakes, repeated by my tutor in our tutorial) was that CIM students were allowed to write prepatory notes during reading time. Yes, that involves picking up a pen or pencil, and writing out throughtful essay structures and key quotes on paper. No, not every subject gets this. In this case CIM students were allowed to. It's on the lecture slides of our final lecture, which I quote verbatim from Contemporary Ideologies and Movements Week 13 Lecture Two, 'Exam Information & Revision' , Slide 4 Point 2:

•Notes may be prepared during reading time

But no, during reading time, one of the invigilators comes striding by, yanks the paper from beneath my furiously scribbling hand and yells at me, "NO WRITING!"

I was flummoxed. That does it, I thought, I'm going to be disqualified from this exam, which means I'm going to fail my subject, which means I'm going to have to pay another 700 bucks to take it again.

Fortunately, another invigilator comes running by. "Oh no, it's alright! Seat numbers 800-932 are exempted from the no writing rule."

"Oh," goes the first invigilator, still hanging on limply to my shrivelled up question paper. She then puts it back on my table (gently this time), gives it a few quick pats, issues a breezy "Sorry about that" and goes off to terrorise some other student for not placing her bottle on the floor or for not putting their student ID card at right angles to the table or for not ensuring that all therr pens are of the same brand and same colour and placed evenly with no pen caps peeking out naughtily between the rulers and erasers.

I'm sorry, I had to get that out of my system. I do not deal well with authority figures. 16 years of being told how to behave by authority figures, and 18 years of living in absolute terror of the Highest Divine Authority Possible has done me no good, I'd say.

And in the mad rush to grab belongings from the containers after we were dismissed, someone pushed my bag off the shelf, which caused everything to fall out. People happily trampled on my notes and stepped all over my subject reader. Even my poor tissues were not spared, and were so trod on and soiled upon that they turned into grimy, hole-ridden, limp-lettuced, floor-adhered, pulped patachouli. I managed to grab everything that had scattered across the floor, carefully dodged other student's scattered belongings (I saw lots of sad-looking bunches of keys sitting forlornly between strewn highlighters and unclaimed textas).

But 5 seconds later I realised my iPod, my iPod had gone missing! In a panic I ran back to the Container of Cattle-tude, hoping that it's unglamarous packaging (it's stored in a ugly plastic casing) would deter even the most greedy bastard thief, and feeling unjustifiably mad that I had to queue up along with the rest to neatly ascertain whether any grubby itchy-fingered robber had made off with my precious electronic music listening device. I know I say this in a stinky fart of middle class privilege as a parental-income reliant student who used Pappy and Mammy's money to claim feudal overlordship over my oppressed, overworked nano. (And I shit you not, it shames me, though not nearly enough for me to emancipate it.)

In the corner, wires all tangled up, ear-piece nearly fallen off from being kicked around and stepped on by Steve Madden heel taps, Nike rubber soles and whatever that guy from seat number 628 was wearing on his feet, lay my iPod. I grabbed it, thanking FSM (flying spaghetti monster).

It played like a dream, sprongy ear-piece or not.

Labels: University

I'm so depressed right now because of this. A woman in LA dies on a hospital floor, writhing and vomitting blood, but no one helps her. Patients just look on (except for one who checked on her, then presumably went back to whatever s/he was doing). She's dismissed as a complainer and ignored. While she lies there, a janitor comes by and cleans up the blood around her. Her boyfriend comes by the hospital, is enraged by this, calls 911, who are reluctant to send police dispatches to a hospital. They do anyway, and run her record through the system, finds she's got an outstanding warrant, and arrest her. Un-fucking-believable. She died even before she got onto the squad car.

I find birthday presents and birthday parties, in general, to be puzzling. Why be rewarded for something you didn't do?

I like parties, I like celebrating with friends and family. Parties should be thrown as and when, not seen as an obligatory event for the commemoration of the anniversary of someone's exit from her mother's birth canal.

In my opinion, everytime someone's birthday comes around, throw a party for her/his mother. She, more so than the father, was the one who went through 9 months of hell, a cervix-ripping birthing process, did the breastfeeding, changed the diapers, she might have given up her job, did the housework, chauffered the kids to school, scrubbed the toilets, massaged her husband's feet and scolded, nagged and hugged the kids an inch away from psychosis.

To be fair, the Father should be rewarded too. He gets a cookie for his production of spunk (at great enjoyment to himself, don't forget) and his weak little cry of 'Push!' when baby's head crowned.

‘Tis true what angsty teenagers have long suspected: the family unit is a corrupt building block of civilization. No other social grouping has been used to oppress individuals in such a deeply personal and intimate manner. No other social construct has been used to categorise, judge and delineate boundaries, awarding punishment, pain and plenty.

At once a unit of oppression, at once itself oppressed, the nuclear family unit is the tool of the patriarchy and the capitalist class; it is itself the gadget with which states, countries, nations, continents, cultures have replicated power inbalances in social and material relations at the macroscopic level. It is, in other words, the whipped bitch’ of the ruling classes. Look yonder, her tail doth tremble between her shanks!

How so? Clearly, when we are but wee toddlers and our brains as soft and addled as custard (or a delightful pan of scrambled eggs), we absorb at pernicious rates the practices, ideas and beliefs of those from whose loins we spring forth from, and from whose seed we germinate from. These we know as our parents. It takes years, decades even, before our minds are truly our own, and even then, vestiges – oh those dreaded, calcified remnants of thoughts, speech, beliefs, habitualised actions that do not truly leave us!

And therein lies the crux – the way family units replicate unjust social roles and unequal divisions of labour. Just look at how boys and girls are treated (‘tis but a small difference in gonads, but it makes a world of difference in every other way!) are duplicated through eons and eons of one representative of each major gender. Yes, Father, you are all powerful and knowing. You are the light, and the conqueror of nature, and the bringer of bread. Yes Mother, you are nurturing and loving. You are the provider of the Teat of Plenty, and you are warmth and moist and darkness. And you are the Ideal, and you are the Absolute, and yes, that means that boy babies will wear blue and girl babies will wear pink because I TOLD YOU SO, and you better DO AS I SAY, AND NOT AS I DO. But in this case, I DO, I DO, I DO, because the ones who came before me have done so, and the ones who came before them did so too. Verily I say, Hegel would be proud, for we are at the end of history, a comet with a trail blazing behind it from which we see all that came before us.

But in what other ways has the family unit become a replicator of ruinous lies? Here we must cease to judge it mercilessly, and instead look at it as an object of pity and contempt. For the family unit, as has been stated before, is the bitch of the ruling classes, the polity. The government, our dear, good, Roman government, uses the family unit like it uses a slatternly girl from the harem – as a receptacle for its odious substances, to be discarded and called forth whenever desired. It is the family unit that bears the expense – oh the US$18k per child (and more so, if one attends a private school, thus becoming one of the snobbish ones most likely to send one’s own malefalous offspring to two decades of lacrosse and golf lessons) that the polity durst rather laugh then reach into his (with great, great deliberation do I use ‘he’… were it not ‘she’!) layered pockets.
The notion of the family unit must at once cover up its hegemonic tyranny by insisting on its own necessity… but soft! Do we not need our families? Can we not imagine a world without our families? Would we not die, of loneliness and devastation without our families? Is it not, as Marx would say of religion, ‘the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’? Yes, yes and more.

These contradictions will render the family unit torn at its seams, the seams of which the polity stitch together with all speed and intention. And we must both tear it apart yet mitigate its worst effects, but with our hearts heavy and souls dark… for if it continue to be its instrument yielded by the people against the people for the people, we durst not dare live as we do now nor forever, a future too deep and distraught to parse.
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No, I am not drunk. Nor high. But since lefties are so 'dreadfully against the family unit', I thought it high time someone actually set it out in writing. Yes, we hate families. Yes, we eat babies. Yes, we go out and get abortions to spice up our lazy Sunday afternoons.

Labels: Straw-leftism

They're known as friends who benefit^tm. No, they're not going to jump in the sack with you, but they're going to fuck you over as much as they can get away with. They're the friends who make you feel bad, all the while getting off on something valuable that you provide, be it your company (makes them look less bad than when they have to have lunch all alone), your help in school work, your car, your DVDs, your books, your stationary, whatever. Something. Anything. They're the friends who only contact you because they need your help going through their work, or they need the answers to something, or they're not sure about this or that, and by golly, gee, thanks mucho for the citation tips and thanks for helping me borrow that book and thanks for helping me call this person up and thanks I'm done with all my assignments and I'm going out to a party now see you next semester.

I hope I haven't been a friend who benefits^tm to anyone, and I don't think I have, but could very well have been. I do know several though, one in particular, and I am as angry as I am grieved for the friendship we could have had, should be having, and I wonder why I have not done enough to make it more of a friendship worth speaking of, and whether it's just all my fault after all.

I was sitting in the basement of Union House at lunch one day, and I was waiting. And I had gone done deliberately because I had seen someone I knew walk down the stairs to go the the toilet. I was with two other friends at the time, blustered some excuse ("sorry girls, I have to go to the loo") and ran down the stairs. I sat and waited for a long time, but the person did not come out. Oh, to know someone and yet not know someone! Sheryl came down the stairs, surprised to see me sitting down at the table.

"Have you gone to the toilet already?"
"Yes," I said flushing with embarassment. "I just saw someone I know go into the toilet, and I'm just waiting here to say hi."
"Oh ok," she says, then goes into the women's toilet.

So there I sit, feeling foolish and stupid and embarassed for being caught flat-out lying. I shake my head, hoist my bag up, getting ready to walk up the stairs and out the south entrance.

Then lo, out he comes, and we're both equally startled to see each other. For a microseconds neither of us react. He hesitates, so do I, but after a long pause we exchange smiles. And off he goes, up the stairs once more, and I sit right back down on the chair.
Sheryl comes out of the toilet now, and I smile at her and say, "Boy, I could really go for some of that fish pita right now."

... suit yourself, but I'ld much rather be an ass-kicking radical feminist.
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The last of my assignments was handed over, stamped and sealed. Now all that's left is that pesky exam on June 15, then I'm free!! (To do what, I cannot imagine. Sometimes I think all my energy and identity revolve so tightly around school, that when it's all stripped away, I end up a sad, boring little person.)

A friend whom I haven't spoken to in a long while sent me a text message today. (The last time I met up with him is probably more than a month ago, egad.) It caught my completely off-guard, not in an unpleasant way, but it did make me think. Perhaps I should be sending random messages of friendship and affection to the people in my phonebook, just to remind them that I think of them. That would be nice. Although it'll probably have the unintended effect of freaking them out.

In other news, I am tired. Not just from assignments and (one) exam. I am just so tired of everything. I would have to explain why, which would make me even more tired. And I don't even want to get into how tired I will feel after hearing other people's responses to the explanation, so I think I shall just buzz off now.