This spay tonight

Beatrice and Harriet and I have spent today at home, recovering from yesterday's non-consensual ovarohysterectomies and trying not to gnaw on our stitches. Harriet was so non-consenting, by the way, she bit my hand, drew blood, and then sank four envenomed fangs into the vet's hand. The vet shoved her back into her box and told me that I had a naughty cat who would get her sedative later in another form (ominous) and I should show it who's boss because if it were a German Shepherd then I'd be in real trouble. (Too right. And if she were a sabre-toothed diprotodon ...) I should practice disciplining Harriet, apparently, by devising and enforcing rules (like "No scratching the furniture", which sounds completely fascist to me; what is furniture for if not scratching?). I sympathise with the vet's aversion to having his hand bitten (gosh, I do), but I was secretly cheering Harriet on. If someone tried poking a cold thermometer up my bottom without asking, I'd like to think that I'd draw blood too. And as Harriet is a civil and delightful person at all other times, I say "naughty" my aunt's bottom.

For those of you who've been wondering why the world's overrun with delinquent children, the answer's clear: it's femo-anarchist parenting and a permissive approach to sofas.

Today was meant to be quiet day - a day of heaters, laps, computers, and not chewing on our stitches - but instead there's been a deluge of tele-interuptions. They go something like this:

Poor telemarketing blighter: "Good afternoon, Mrs Harlot. I'm ringing from Blah-Blah Sunshine Blah Corporation to tell you that you have been specially selected for seven nights holiday at any major Australian city for only blah blah hundred dollars blah."

Me: "Thanks, I'm not interested."

Poor telemarketing blighter: "You do not like to take holiday?"

Me: "No, thanks. Bye."

Poor telemarketing blighter [indignant, incredulous]: "May I please ask why you are not interested in taking holiday?"

Me: "No."

Or

Poor teleresearching blighter: "Good afternoon my name is Blah and I'm ringing from blah blah Scientific blah Research blah to ask you some questions about hair-thinning and balding do you or does anyone in your household experience hair-thinning or balding."

Me: "No."

Poor teleresearching blighter: "Are any of your friends or family members experiencing hair-thinning or balding."

Me [overcompensating for the fact that I'm about to not mention the majority of my close male relatives]: "Well, I'm quite young, and most of my friends are quite young, so we're all too young to be experiencing hair-thinning or balding, so no, none of my friends are experiencing hair-thinning or balding. Byeeeeeee."

Poor teleresearching blighter: "Could I please speak to your mother or father?"

Me: "Byeeeeeeeee."

Or

Blighter: "Good evening ma'am, and how are you this evening?"

Me: "Very well, thank you. How are you?"

Blighter: "I'm wonderful. Thank you for your concern. I'm ringing about the Motorola blah blah from Optus blah with free blah. It's an excellent deal."

Me: "Thank you, but I'm not interested."

Blighter [shocked]: "Don't you use a mobile phone?"

Me: "Have a lovely evening."

I wish I could pull off my father's trick, which - regardless of the day or time - consists in muttering, in wounded, righteous tones, "Making telephone calls on the Sabbath! Not in my day. On the Sabbath. Well, I, never."

Seeking...

... clichéd dubiously-appetising pre-fab microwave meal. E.g., shrink-wrapped chicken Kiev and rice. Free packet of frozen baby carrots for the best suggestion.

Painted ladies

For about a year I've been conscientiously ignoring the raw timber window frames I had installed - about a year ago. I've been trying not to think about their gradual disintegration, the westerly sunshine, the westerly frosts, the westerly winds bearing the westerly rains, or the fact that I installed them to replace window frames so rotten they'd sprouted fungus. My timber window frames stand six metres above the ground in their stockinged feet, and as I lead a ladder-free existence, I knew that the only way I could do the right thing by 'em was to recruit the services of a professional painter with a ladder. Thus the year long delay. Professional painters with ladders do not grow on trees.

Happening upon a painting consortium run by teh ladeez last month, I figured that this was the painting consortium for me. Their "98.5% testosterone free" slogan sounded a bit second-wavey for my tastes, but as I discussed self-priming acrylics with a deep-voiced lass called Jay on the telephone, I decided that maybe they weren't as biologically determinist as all that.

Jay turned up this morning at 7.15am and it was clear that on all salient criteria, Jay was not a lass. I have nothing against gentleman tradespersons - indeed, a wiser person than myself would befriend as many as possible - but Jay's undoubted mandom kinda undermined my attempts at affirmatively-actionizing the world of outdoor painting.

As it happens, Jay did a super job, and as he was leaving, his eye fell upon the half a page it had taken me six hours to write. We discussed what kind of work it is I do, and the fact that I'm from Sydvillea, and then Jay apologised for the Bourne. It used to be beautiful, he said, and safe, but that was before all these multinationals came. They’re the ones causing all the trouble. The Indians have been fighting the Mormons for thousands of years, and then they bring their fights over here. He doesn’t mind the ones that work hard, but these ones who come over and think they can just be like anybody else, they've really stuffed things up for Melbourne.

These remarks caused some consternation in feline quarters.

Beatrice closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts. "It's wrong for the Indians to fight the Mormons," she said. "They should just learn to get along. But don't you see, Jay? You are succumbing to the same impulses as those Indian-hating Mormons. You are making generalisations about the moral status of an entire people, and your empirical claims are slightly dubious."


Harriet was a tight knot of disapproval. "Jay," she said. "Jay, you should try to cultivate empathy. Race is discursively constructed, and if you reframe your discursive practices, your analysis of modern-day Melbourne will be quite different. Take it from me, Jay. Beatrice and I are living proof of these principles."

What I Did Last Summer

You might have noticed a certain silence around these parts, a silence punctuated only by my deep disgust at certain northern hemispehereans who think that 32 degrees on the ol' Celsiometer deserves a spot on the front page of the national newspapers. (As some wise philosopher has opined, this is perhaps no more disgustworthy than the channel 7 weatherboy who puts on a ski-suit and tells us to dust down the snowplough and affix the medicinal liquors to the necks of the St Bernards for an overnight low of 11 degrees. To such opinations, I say, "Pass me my vegan eggnog, Smithers," and, "They just don't make St Bernards the way they used to".)

So what have I been doing with myself?, well may you ask. Firstly, I went to this ripper of a symposium where people talked about mimetic representations of the temporal affect of memory (Bart: Is that a real thing? Lisa: Yes.), and ate muffins. And this person was there, and this person, and this person, and amazingly, despite the presence of some of my all-time antipodean academic superheroes, I managed not to gush. And then I marked a buncha essays that reached up to my armpit. And while I was doing that I read Annabel Crabb's Quarterly Essay on Malcolm Turnbull, and consequently was glistening with freshly applied Turnbulliana just in time for his recent acts of political autocannibalism. Meanwhile my Pa had that hip replacement surgery, which went swimmingly, as far as the hip was concerned, but plunged his kidneys and his heart into conniptions of such conniptedness that he is still in hospital eating jelly almost two weeks later. This was pretty scary for a day or seven, particularly as these parental brushes with mortality remind a person that her parents rate extremely highly on the most beloved people in the universe scale. Then there was this three-day quasi-compulsory-but-actually-not workshop on How To Be A Better Lecturer. The answer - you never would have guessed this - is to think about how students learn best. Personally, I've always thought that shifting into a Cornish pirate voice every seven minutes should suffice. Dad, at this point, is still alive and bantering at full pelt with anyone who's up to it. I pick up the essay I haven't touched since February, the one that's due at the end of the month, on cyborgs and slavery, and start googling "automaton"+"spartacus", which turns out to be a disappointingly fruitless research tactic. It rains a bit; Melbourne's water storage is up to 26.3% of capacity. I see Disgrace, which thank-heavens uses John Malkovich rather than Ralph Fiennes as David Lurie, but nearly vomit when a chuckle runs through the audience as Lurie's putting the moves on Melanie. (The capacity to elicit that chuckle - the "this is a romantic comedy, isn't it? and that reluctant girl will actually fall for him?" chuckle - was one of the best things about this film, which of course is not a romantic comedy, but grim and harrowing, as the chucklers must have found out to their horror.) And here I am, disgorged by the past fortnight, with a Beatrice on my lap and a Harriet near my feet, and great pools of unplumbed internet for me to continue to ignore as I get on with this next bit, of life.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha. Ugh.

"Britain declares heatwave as temperatures soar towards 32ºC"

Oh, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You do make me larf.

Celebrating my inordinate belief in the power of the fact

Captain Robert Hunt was the fourth commandant of the convict settlement of Norfolk Island between November 1828 and February 1829. That's not very long.

On spending the weekend in parentville

They have some amazing widgets, my parents, like the widget that enables their computer to photograph a surly beagle untimely plucked from 'neath his quilt.

It's 10.30. It's a Sunday morning. The valley is a low sea of fog and the hills have their heads in the clouds and everything outside is drippy and wet, and it's the shortest day of the year, and the black cockatoos are screeching like mad spirits, and why would any self-respecting dog be out of bed? I blame myself and my parents' amazing widgets.

My Aged Pa - he of death-defying quadruple-bypass fame - is having a state-of-the-art all-synthetic hip joint installed on Wednesday. It's been on my list of ambitions for a while now, setting up a seniors' nightclub called Hip Joint (this is after I move to Tasmania and change my name to Charlotte), but now that the Aged P. is staring down the prospect of six months swiveling around on crutches, hip replacements aren't looking quite so festive.

Because I was examining a wee thesis yesterday, the Aged P. and I got to discussing the thesis he submitted in 1970 on economic determinants of urban form. I've stolidly resisted reading it for thirty years, but I started on it yesterday evening, and it's excellent, with lines like "the hinterland of today's cities is the whole world".

The immiseration of the rentenproletariat will hasten the revolution

There are two things you should know about me:

1. I have no intention of altering my domestic arrangements in the foreseeable future.
2. I have been perusing the real estate pages over dinner.

Please don't press me for explanations. It's a disgusting habit and I'm thoroughly ashamed of it. It's only a matter of time before I'm checking the uranium prices first thing after breakfast, jabbing off messages to my broker, and saying savage things to the cats when my derivatives go toxic. (I don't do that, rest assured - it's still the garden variety vice of real estate voyeurism for me.)

So my secret's out: I have been perusing the real estate pages over dinner, and lo!, I see that the erstwhile Hôtel Harlot is once more on the rental market - for $230 a week. Those of you who inhabit the cockroachial climes of inner Sydney will of course scoff at my $230 a week. It's barely more than the price of a crushed berry frappe overlooking the jelly blubbers of East Circular Quay. But $230 is some 43.75% more than the $160 per week that I paid for Hôtel Harlot when I first moved Melbournewards 28 months ago. By my calculations (bear in mind that I single-handedly solved Fermat's last theorem before you try to challenge me on this), that's an inflation rate of over 19% per annum.

We can partly attribute this to the fact that folks have only very recently realised that Thornbury is an infallible source of wholemeal spelt pasta. But it's more than that: the world is not a whole 43.75% more aware of the charms of wholemeal spelt pasta. In fact, wholemeal spelt pasta is not particularly charming. You can gussy it up with lots of garlic and olives and jolly sprigs of parsley, but it remains, regardless, righteous, wholesome and cardboardy. My alternative explanation for the 43.75% rent increase is this (bear in mind that I wrote Das Kapital AND The Wealth of Nations before you challenge me here): the filthy capitalist landlord class is putting one over the rentenproletariat. Given the parlous economic times in which we live, and the very amenable interest rates the filthy capitalist landlord class currently enjoys (not me, I signed up for a mortgage at the preposterous fixed rate of 8.75% p.a. [for five years (yes, I know)]), I have to say that the filthy capitalist landlord class is not very nice. Unless it uses its vast obscene wealth to set up shelters for penurious spelt addicts.

Hello blog

Just dropping by from Planet Essay-marking to inform you that I seem to have inadvertantly converted three hundred and twenty-one students to Team Harold Bloom. Who woulda thunk that the youtubification of America's canoniser-in-chief would have the good scholars of tomorrer decrying the political correctitude that has robbed them, robbed them, of the opportunity to read Shakespeare? Nobody reads Shakespeare anymore, it turns out, because the canon-busting femmo-Marxo-anarcho-aesthetic-relativists put all the Riverside editions in a big pile labeled School of Resentment, tossed in a match, and proceeded to toast their organic tofu on little sticks.

Relativism

A very big eggplant or a very small fifty cent piece? The epistemic conundra of modern life, courtesy of the Psarakos Veg Emporium.

N.B. My sister took this photo, but it was my local eggplant market.