Safari on Mac and Javascript, they are not friends. I keep not being able to use drop-down menus, and now the draft function of Blogger is crashing Safari. and anyway, the draft from New York that I wanted, the one about how I used to adore Dave Eggers and his mob unconditionally, but the turning away of my disappointed four-year-old in the rain from the Superhero Supply Shop has brought about the inevitable decline in my opinion. Yes you're run by volunteers, folks, but you *could* put your hours and notices of unusual closures on your site. and if, perchance, a small person travels 45 minutes by foot and subway in the rain to visit your store and you're closed at a time that you're usually open, and you (meaning a young woman who I shall refrain from describing because I can't be kind about her), you could also let him in to look around for a minute or two.

if anyone else finds themselves locked out of the superhero supply shop by a heartless b*tch (oops, see what I mean?), you might want to look on the other side of the road a few blocks towards the station, where there is a fine, non-volunteer, for-profit, comic book and figurine shop which will happily sell your small child a light sabre and a Spiderman comic, thus saving the day.

so this is post 1921. will I make 2008 in 2008? not if my *&^# hand doesn't get better. a minor but significant - to me as a writer anyway - side effect of the cancer surgery was the loss of the lymph nodes in my right arm, and some subsequent swelling and discomfort. not huge, but enough to bother me. and of course handwriting and typing make it worse. so, I suspect, does swimming 2k a day whenever I can. but it's not stopping me. I think, though, that it makes me subconsciously reluctant to pick up pen or keyboard, makes me feel that what I'm writing has to be prejudged as worth the discomfort and risk of making my hand worse.

nothing on email. coffee not kicked in yet so randomly went to Blogger and clicked on a recently updated blog (they flash past like express trains these days).

and found this - the 2013-dated affirmation blog of a man who is probably in Indonesia or Malaysia or similar, probably has nothing (particularly not a house like this or a woman like this), but who clearly has some strange cargo-cult belief that by putting these affirmations out there online (and you'll note that each one appears to be hand-typed rather than cut and pasted, because there are typos), he will get It All.

and who knows? maybe he will. maybe I'll try it.

I am Married Johnny Depp
I am Married Johnny Depp..

(waits)

nah. nothin'.

two posts to put up on one day; and as it's "a poor sort of memory that works only backwards", I'll do today's now and the one from two weeks ago later.

Jet lag. Like a dream of being awake in the middle of the night; but it's bright and trams and bikes are rolling by. I wake up at 6.30 am. It's not ligt yet; it could be midnight (it is in Vegas).

By seven, the sun is just rising. I keep it behind me as I set out on the ride, the same ride I always do in the morning. Today, though, it's different. Two weeks off these shores have disconnected me from the familiarity of landscape, the rhythm of days and I see anew with the clarity of an acid trip. It's been raining, and I'm in love with the sudden green of the park, the tang of eucalyptus in the air. All around me, people are taking this morning, Melbourne, here and now, for granted, but I arrive at the Vic Market at 7.30 with the surprise of a witness to a resurrection. I buy a coffee - proper coffee, which is unobtainable in America - and a donut - smaller than my own head and freshly made, I note to a friend later - and make my way in the anonymity of a scruffy bike rider to a chrome chair at a chrome table.

On the way I collect a free postcard advertising an anime exhibition, and what looks like a small cartoon/newsletter zine, photocopied and stuffed into the postcard stand. Only when I sit down, bite into the soft dough and hot jam and start reading, do I realise that it's a piece of provocation, a pretend newsletter from a pretend refugee action group, advising the good people of North Melbourne that they must take in refugees this month, and then learnt to slaughter sheep halal-style, to cover their heads and silence their women. Who would believe this was real? who would be turned against other humans by such transparent trash? I don't know, but a hot flush of anger invades my ghostly disconnected self; I leave my coffee, walk inside, take the rest of the newsletters off the stand and chuck them in the recycling bin. I wouldn't do this in America; I don't think I would. This is part of what it means to be home; to care, and to act, on how things are.

That was yesterday; today I rode out even earlier, at 6.30, when the only sign of dawn was a small crack of yellow sky hovering to the west. There was a storm coming (now, at 2pm, it's blowing all the trees outside down in a synchronised fawning bow, and people shouldn't go outside); the storm somehow coloured the earliest light of the sun so that the clouds were an inverted dunescape, red glowing sands on the peaks and dark purple greys in the valleys. Over the sky-desert a small flashing white light travelled tiny; a plane moving fast, but small and out of place in the angry sky. By 7.30, when I was almost home again and the sun was rising, a nuclear explosion coming up from the east, the city was a jagged mirror reflecting yellows and pinks against a purple western haze; the white trunks of the trees were tinged pink and the green of their leaves glowed with radiation.

oh hooray. another movie. my average must be approaching one a quarter. and, strangely enough given my stated preferences and tendency to hide my eyes behind my hands when there's blood on the screen, another very violent one. No Country for Old Men; you don't need me to tell you it's good; none of the reviews I've read, however, noted the originality of the dialogue and the depth of characterisation even for minor players. seeing that has certainly moved Cormac McCarthy's The Road up in my 100-book pile of to-reads.

speaking of: have embarked on the second reading (25 years later) of Henry Handel Richardson's Australia Felix. I'm gradually coming out of denial about the gold rush being quite an interesting period; well, you try growing up with compulsory weekly excursions to Sovereign Hill and general Ballarat gold-obsession. yesterday I poked around some abandoned mine shafts at Yapeen; it's strange to think of all the people that once swarmed over that empty bush; I even caught myself scanning the ground for that fat gold nugget that several thousand people before me had missed. but it wasn't there. :(

and just btw, as comments are closed, but I know that Watcher is a well-read blog: this Jennifer Sinclair is not me. I think I've said it before. but I'd just like to say it again, as Watcher has pretty much summed up my general objections to the article in question. but not to my sharing a name (almost) with the author.

and the real question of the day: should I start another blog? this one is kind of personal ramblings; my current writing blog is just writing ramblings; I'm thinking of one where I could post completed works. yes, the ratio of rejections to acceptances is starting to drive me crazy; I'm in danger of missing the days when the ravenous Age published every word I could bash out. not that that was necessarily a good thing.

or maybe I should just roll all the blogs together and start labelling. so those interested in my surfing progress could skip the whinges about Melbourne uni, and anyone who cares to read my writing could avoid accounts of how cute my child is. have I mentioned how cute my child is?

:P

Fridays are Mummy Days at the moment. Today seemed a particularly long one, possibly due to the prone form of Daddy lying in the bedroom having a sick day off work while I cleaned, cooked and amused the child. Fortunately there was a visit from the grandparents to break up the uninterrupted joy of motherhood.

reading: David Sedaris. If I'd been born gay and Greek in the American midwest, I could be achingly funny too.

so after the grandparents were seen off, the kid was in bed and the husband driven out of my space by my objection to his turning the a/c off while I was working in the kitchen, I thought I'd top off the day with a trip to the supermarket. and as often happens, once out of the house there was no stopping me. First the Vegie Bar for good vegan apple crumble and surly service, then the lovely Brunswick St Bookstore: le cour de la citie, c'est commerce, or similar, as Sedaris would mangle it. I bought another of his books - just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day - among others, and took some schadenfreudian (???) pleasure in coming across a book of poetry by my ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, the one before me. now, I have mostly given up poetry, or at least attempting to publish it. and she sure should have. there were poems in there about my dog, or anyway the one she passed on to the ex and me. then there was one dedicated to the actual ex, with salacious lines about thrusting. erk. no names, no pack drill, but erk. I still have a tape of this woman describing the ex as something unprintable - she saw fit to leave the message on my answerphone, so I saw fit to keep the tape - I guess time must have softened her view. although, you know what? she was right the first time.

horrifying fact: the review of Eastern Promises below, dated October 25, is the last time I saw a movie.

maybe it's because I've been bouncing out of bed early to ride every day, but I just don't seem to have the stamina for movies that finish after 10 any more. good legs, underdeveloped mind...

What do you do when you've tidied up your study, packed away all the 2007 calendars, re-sorted the unread books piles, written a list of places to submit work and connected up the new keyboard you got for Christmas?

Right. You blog. Consider this my official procrastination blog for 2008.

Year began well with a brilliant camping week at Cape Conran, though there wasn't much surf (didn't I mention I was learning to surf? maybe that's because I haven't been blogging for months). It has not progressed all that well, though, with the sudden death of my cousin, who has a three-year-old son and was one year older than me. Of course it won't sink in until the funeral; and of course it's wrong to think this way, as I'm alive; but her death has hit me that little bit harder because her boy is now in the situation I was afraid my son would be in when I was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. The parallels in our lives are strong; same age, late motherhood via IVF - but this is one parallel I didn't foresee. And there will be a funeral.

These are issues I might not have blogged before; among my new years' resolutions is to consolidate all my thinking. so bloggety blog may reactivate in 08.

other resolutions include not assuming the worst of people's motivation until I'm sure of them (springing from a few times recently I've flown off the handle unfairly) and to take all my vitamins. health and fitness are under control, due to my obsessive nature; in the past three months there have been 3 (three) days I have not ridden my bike, and I'm averaging 6 ks a week in the pool. and there's the surfing, which seems more likely to damage me in some violent way than to make me fitter.

and of course there is the question of writing/work, in an environment where there is plenty of paid work. with one uni subject to go and three days' kindy, I could easily start freelancing again. or I could get my teeth into the writing. I would prefer the latter; which brings me back to the big study-tidy, which has given me a relatively clean and clear space not full of kids' toys, washing and other distractions. possibly that can be a final resolution; to keep this space available and active for what I'm really trying to do, as opposed to the things that make claims on my time.

ah, the things that drive one back to blogging.

like being alone in the house after 9.30, so it's too late to call anyone...and not strictly alone, as husband and kid are both in bed...and really, really wanting to rave about the movie you've just seen...so of course you think "I'll blog it".

I've always had time for David Cronenberg's particular weirdness. And ever since Lord of the Rings, Viggo Mortenson has been pretty high up my celebrity safe list. Saw A History of Violence, liked it. and tonight, it was Eastern Promises. Now, I'm not a big thriller watcher. I don't go for violence for its own sake. I admit I watched some of the gorier bits through my fingers or not at all. but this was a Good Movie. It didn't rush the plot. it wasn't confusing. it had enough "aha" moments to make the viewer feel clever. It had Naomi Watts. it didn't go for the easy solutions. And Viggo, well, apart from the deeply homoerotic nude-fight-in-the-sauna (deeply violent too, as eroticism can often be), even apart from that, he played the part just far enough - enigmatic Russian thugs are a movie cliche, but I forgot the others when he was onscreen (apart from one Pulp Fiction moment involving sunglasses in a diner.)

go see it. it's good.