this posting is dedicated to Kegroll - infamous sister of the now mountied TXQ - who just sent me a eulogy about that corcodile wrestiing dude all the way from maple syrup land.....
Actually this posting has nothing to do with Keg - except that i've stolen her vinyl spinning moniker of Cheese Single. Together Keg and texta are known as the cheese sisters - coz they are the world's biggest connosieurs of cheese - I mean the cultural variety coz they are vegans. Texta got me into trashy DVD's when I was really depressed a few years ago, and the two of them are into cheesy clothes, cheesy mock cheese, cheesy vinyl.
which brings me to the lyrics of the phill collins song that haunted me last month
you know I love you but I just can't take this
you know I love but (aaarrrm i've got cold feet?)
you know I mean it but I just can't take this (maybe?)
something something but I'm in too deep?
OK I never claimed to be anything but shit at karaoke - and I always liked the blood curdling schmaltz of that little tinny synth riff that follows anyway - and hell -if you want decent well referenced reactive readings of trash culture go look at bloody antippopper!
so. ahem
the subject at hand
my department (cultural studies) now has a new blog: "thinking culture."
naturally I'm wayyyy too scared to post on it.
partly coz i've got 3 or for blogs already running.
Partly coz i'm scared my supervisor will see how much writing I'm NOT doing on my thesis
Partly coz I feel nauseous thinking about any of my students reading aobut my sex-life.
(am I such a puritan for regarding the tutor/student relationship as akin to parenthood - neither of you should ever have to imagine or witness either of you having sex - or are sydney uni undergrads just extremely sexually repellent?)
but I would like to be able to share some of my teaching/life experiences coz they are fun at the moment.
i'm teaching 2 subects: one is sex violence and transgression and it's so much fun (reading Bataille, foucault and even bloody zizeck and sharing the love with eager young fee paying minds) I'd even do it for free. (hope brendon nelson never reads this)
the other one is also great: a cutlure studies 101 - which is hard to get the students to take seriously and rise above the anecdotal -thogutb I'm starting to make some progress. Structuring the tutes into debates seems to really work with the bright children of sandstone: I guess they are aussies and love a competition and if you can convince them it's like a footy match they'll even engage in a bit of collegial intellectual endeavour.
(fuck.... do I really enjoy teaching after all?)
anyway this week we were doing de Certeau - and Ideally I wouldn' have liked to have taken them on a trip down vaneigem street - but.... I don't think they'd notice or care.....
so- in an attempt to get the minions motivated this week I brought in a packet of CHEESE SINGLES (generic brand) and got em to do a semiotic & ethnographic and political analysis according to a debate on whether the cheese singles were emblematic of modern australian life.
the first class (a whole room of NON-SKIP sydney uni arts students - shock horror!) really got into it. the second a bit less so - a few of them opened up the plastic and made faces or ate the cheese.
Anway - it's weird living out your fantasy writing/theoreising subjects vicariously in a tutorial.
coz I've been wandering around blabbing to people for the past month that the Cheese single is the ultimate emblem of atavisitic skippydom. that you can't comprehend the skip until you can comprehend the cheese single. So it's suitably ironic that the coffee coloured kegroll claims cheese single as her moniker. (In Australia Keg and texta constantly get asked "where do you come from?" and they say "perth", and people keep asking them about their origins instead of just being blunt and barking "why are you brown?").
Abel (who 6 moths after we broke up, and after spending our 8th anniversary and 5th wedding anniversary under this roof is FINALLY moving out_ was feeling disconsolate about sinney siders the other week, so I tried to console her with a little analogy. taking De Gaulle's comment that you can't rule a country wiht 200 types of cheese - I took cheese as the ultimate meotnymn for naitonal spirit; so the yanks chuck their cheese in a spray can (translates a a bombe in french) and aussies divide theirs up into individually wrapped hermetic portions; precalculated, prefabricated, hermetic, artificialy pale coloured, flavourless, insulated, contained, concealed, artificial, plastic. I told her, "skips like to calculate their food, and control how much goes to whom, we have to label our food on our kitchen shelves, we have to argue about the milk, and split the bill after yum cha, and bring our own drinks to parties; we can't help it!"
Of course, this analogy -though providing cofomrt and amusement to abel is pretty limited given the amount of the global populatin that is lactose intolerant or doesn't have a lot of cloven hooofed sucklable mammals. so I'm glad I confined it to the tutes.
now. back to the never ending soap opera of my life.
as the pressure has mounted over the past few months - i've taken up more and more forms of natural self help and self care. I must be gettig old - of maybe more desperate - cooz I've had almost no urge to drown myself in either chocolate, guinness or scotch. Actually - probably since I spent the previous 2 years doing just that - and consequently feeling like shit - this is probably whiy I've left the alcholism & overeating behind.
anwya everyone tells me I look fabulous
yee fucking harr
My thesis is still a slow trudging debacle, my social life is minimal, I'm not making any art, I'm not getting enough sex, and I've spent this week wracked by hell stomach pains, nausea and diaorrhoea.
anyway -this may have been the result of the last self help pitch - a nice celebration of my household resolution (yes - both flatmates are moving out this month - anna has a room at No.11, and coco is moving into no.10) I dragged a relatively hermetically fleshed fairy fraggle out to the korean ginseng baths on monday night. (finding a window period between the last piercing and the next suspension was not easy).
I'd aquired a blistering thong burn (from my footwear not my g-string) over the summery weekend so was hopeing this wouldn't disallow me from soaking in the spa..... but maybe I should have demurred.
the baths were great - we scrubbed and soaked and sauna'ed for 3 hours and I felt like a soft down pillow afterwards (i felt that I was one) or the centre of a marshamallow.
I floated home and floated into bed and slept the sleep of the just.
until 4am.
woke with throbbing migraine.
bastard head. took aspririn.
then the nausea started.
I slept on and off and swooned and sighed and wondered if it was a migraine or poisoning or a flu.
tried to meditate and fell over.
felt so shitful that I thoguht i'd watch old videos of Abel getting undressed and dressing up as a drag king. Only felt slightly worse.
then I felt horribly cold, and sore all over.
started curnching codeine and working out how to arrange my tutorial for the afternoon.
found some stomach pills. Bussed into uni. taught, somehow.
i'd had a noice night planned: meeting The Estimable Doctor Germs and taking in an art opening before being joined by the consort for dinner and a night of danicng to a 17 piece mambo orchestra.
After teaching I headed for the quad and met The Estimable Doctor Germs (henceforth referred to as TEDG) and she accompanied me on a slow crawl home via a friendly pharmacy, and the consort came around and prepared them both dinner and wine while I swilled aspirin & miso soup & tried to convince TEDG to move in.
Aspirin, codeine and whatever I got from the chemist worked and I can't resist mambo so I (god my mum would disapprove) joined the posse out to the basement..
I sipped tonic water and danced a little bit and broke out in a sweat and tried to draw but failed. fuck.
also met the ex of the consort. This was an experience not unlike an endoscopy I had 2 years ago, except that I was more tranquilized during the endoscopy and can't remember much of it and Abel was holding my hand anyway.
How to find reason in things that are unreasonable - like emotions? the consort has met my ex (because she wouldn't move out and then kept coming popping in - and still does) and I tell him about the few other fleeting flirty things I have (wiht all the time I have they are tragically minimal). we're not monogamous, and freshly emerging from the last marriage there's no way I want to try that nasty little experiment... well - at least before I'm 40 or gravid with child or something. so how to explain my feelings of... jealousy is it? He told me he would introduce me as his 'friend'. so I told myself I'd pretend he was a girl and we were in a suburban nightclub. be in the closet. Fuck. i didn't tell him anything. just something nasty hardened within me, and I can't see it thawing for a long while yet.
The consort is obsessed with his ex. When he's not exorting me with buddhist aphorisms about being in the present moment, he's exorting me with tormented tears about hi ex, who seems nice enough, but isn't actually his lover. I am. Well, not right at this moment. but I am in his presence, when he talks about her, buys her drinks and not me, fantasizes about her, takes me to their favourite restaurants, tries to include me in their little old routines and habits. Like him, I'm also in love with my ex, i've also wept on his shoulder and cried in his arms about abel, and god, of course I still long for her. but not when I'm with him. Or anyone else. Call me the immanence queen but I find sex delightfully and deliriously about the present moment, the present person, the present flesh, touch, taste, smell. So I've started calling myself the placebo in my diary, and whingeing a lot to my counsellor, and to my friends, and even to him. This is good, he's not comparing me to her as often. (Can you believe i'd put up with this shit? yes! I'm fucking tragic!) Of course i don't measure up. not skinny enough, not feminine enough, not frigid enough, not a good enough dancer, not as good in bed - I don't come enough, I don't come at all actually and no fucking wonder. Vaginas are intelligent things, really. Mine begs and begs and begs and wants a vast amount of attention and refuses to perform any acts of instant reassuring satisfaction before... well ......
god. sorry to bore whoever is reading this with all with this excessive bodily detail.
a rebound thing seemed so simple and safe and straighforward. Both of us non committal because we're both recovering from and in love with other poeple. both of us so extrmely different that the relationship has a shelf life infinitely shorter than that of a cheese single anyway. Him being a man is a nice safety net coz I'm still queer - still dreaming of the perfect woman to sail into my life and sweep me off my feet... but then, confusion still strikes.
i've got a new habiit of looking at my vulva in the mirror each morning - not as some trippy 2nd wave feminist self love exercise - but because I'm completely perplexed. she's completely infatuated with the consort. Leaps and sequeezes and oozes at the sound of his voice on the phone. Drags me over to his place, similing , simpering in the hope of contact. Generally I have a great deal of respect for an implicit faith in my vagina, and the life affirming and self preserving tendencies of her desires and whims. (It took 4 years of somatic psychotherapy to reach this point). but this has got me really perplexed and confused.
Because - cavorting with the consort is hideously inadequate. Sex occurs once a week, for an hour at most. This is decent and rational because I've got a thesis to write and a damn busy life and I shouldn't complain and it's exquisitely pleasant however occasional and I don't have to act on all my desires, and I can still just enjoy my sexuality wihtout being fucked senseless every waking minute and maybe I am a sex addict after all, and maybe this is all just utter shit. I'm 35, in realsonalbe good health, attractive, intelligent and passionate. I'm in my sexual prime! of course I should be be fucking myself senseless every fucking minute plus anyone within grabbing range!
Readers will be relieved and slightly bored probably to read that straightness is not of course a matter of gender, or genitalia. It's a state of mind. Most of the men I've slept with in the past, were, if not queer, then certainly quite eccentric and not afraid of themselves or other men, or kinky sex, or stupid sex, or mess, ambiguity, confusion, ineptness. the consort comes from a different planet - one with too many no-go areas, too many rules, boundaries, appearances, norms. If I come from the land of messy raclette, bad moulding philly, goopy 5 cheese lasagna, vache qui rit, cheese sticks, cheese singles, cheese cream, cumquoiatte, scary smelly munsters, dumpster diving mouldy chevre, and gorgonzola icecream, he's definitely from - if not cheese single land, then the pre packed pre prepared david jones food hall approved gourmet portions. He's the ONLY man I've ever slept with who hasn't tried to impress me with some bravado boast or feat of nascent bisexuality! (Oh, actually there was this bank teller in the early 90's. He'd been in the army and was pretty fucking homophobic, but he was HUGE, and I was drunk and we only fucked twice before the impossibliity of conversation killed any further encounter - and I think I had a girl return to port anyway)
I'm not sure if the cheese analogy works actually. I don't really eat a lot of cheese. Too much cheese gives me migraines and i've got a big fat gallstone, and I only kee the cheese singles in the fridge in order to scare Abel. I like to tink of myself as a rabelaisian gourmande - of sex, life and love - but i'm pretty ambivalent, scared and confused about most things. I don't know if blabbing about it online helps or hinders my slow muddling through life. Am I really here?
I'm meant to come up with an act for BIFUSION next sunday at 3pm - and I reckon it's time to seriously purge some shit (I seem to be doing that physcially at the moment anyway)
I thought of dressing up as scrag and doing a version of:
"I spent my last ten dollars
on birth control,
and beer
My life was so much simpler when
I was sober
and queer
but the love of a strong hairy man
has turned my head I fear
and made me spend
my last ten bucks
on birth control,
and beer"
but it's probably innappropriate for a performance about celebrating bisexuality.
so I reckon i'll do a scraing scragg version of a great Mambo track instead:
Un poquito de ton amore
Un poquito nada mas
Una sonrisa de tes labios
tanto querer me feliz"
not only coz I got it on mp3, but the lyrics refer to my scraggling scraping inadequate unrequited desperate existence at the moment.
"A tiny little bit of your love
a tiny bit, nothing more
Just one smile from your lips
Is plenty to make me happy"
Bull fucking shit
viva la fromage!
