A Luce Affiliation

I am the crappiest, happiest runner around. I run around the Carlton gardens twice and then back home. This is not very far, but I love it!! I run past the museum and think about how I would like to go there to visit the little bower bird who has his blue-things nest in the forest. Today I ran over all the autumn leaves. Here's what I listened to today: 'This Charming Man'- The Smiths (warm-up, walking) 'Lose Yourself'- Eminem (running now) 'Harlem River Blues'- Justin Townes Earl 'Every little thing she does is magic'- The Police 'Let Her Dance' Bobby Fuller Four (walking break) 'She plays yo-yo with my mind' Sonny and the Sunsets. 'Don't think twice'- Bob Dylan 'The New Workout Plan'- Kanye West and for the grand finale (running home) 'I got you babe'- Sonny and Cher I try to pick tracks that either naturally match my running pace ('Lose yourself'; also 'Survivor' by Destiny's Child

This week I am: 1. Bereft. I have finished Friday Night Lights, and no amount of listening to The National's 'Boxer' on repeat is going to bring it back. The sun-drenched Texan football fields!! People who struggle!! The music of Explosions in the Sky!! 2. Anxious, after reading Tina Fey's memoir 'Bossypants'. I love Liz Lemon because she is a plausibly imperfect high-achiever. She has a great job but she has lettuce on her sweater and a room full of unopened Ikea furniture boxes. She doesn't have it all!!! But it seems that the real Tina Fey *does* have it all. And apparently you get it all by working all night whilst your toddler sleeps in the next room, and then making your toddler breakfast in the morning before going off to work again. 3. Relieved. Our book club met on Sunday, and this means that I don't have to try to read 'Wol

In an awesome development, a new girl is renting Ghita's room whilst she's overseas. HER NAME IS LAURA PALMER.

In 2005 I lived with Pen and Stu in a house next to Rose Chong's costume shop in Fitzroy. My room was at the very front of the house and I was plagued by snatches of conversations of people walking past my window. Worst were the suburban tourists making their way to Ladro's for a fancy pizza meal: "It's so hard to find a park! It's all permit parking!" "That's because the people around here don't have garages!!" That's right, we had no garage. But we had a lovely courtyard and a sunny kitchen. Pen: well, clearly I'd lived with her before. And to be honest it was a relief to move in with someone who had the same cleaniness standards as me. (which i would classify as 'moderate'. Moderately clean and occasionally very clean). Pen's most notable habit was her penchant for running around the house naked. She liked to clean the kitchen and bathroom in her undies and a large pair of rubber gloves. She was always running t

I am becoming increasingly reserved about telling my work colleagues that I live in a share house. Most of them have bought houses in Eltham, and the rest live in rented apartments with their partners whilst they save for houses in Eltham. I have received some pretty strong reactions to the revelation that I share a house with at least four others: "But where do you wash your CLOTHES?!?"** Meanwhile- and I say this because I know it won't last- I live in a mansion! With a conservatory and a cellar!! With talented and interesting housemates!! So to the sharehouse sceptics, I say this: wouldn't your life be more interesting with housemates?? Wouldn't you be more interesting (and AT LEAST AS CLEAN) with housemates? My first sharehouse was a small place in Flemington, a former bootmakers workshop on a roundabout in a beautiful tree-lined street. It felt terribly Ivy League compared to my friends' Brunswick digs, even though I could see through the gaps in the

I went to my friend Arla's baby shower today. It was great, she got a huge surprise, but did not actually go into labour. Olivia, the hostess, showed us the curtains she had made for her bedroom. They're fantastic, they look like they've been professionally made. Eve had crocheted a baby blanket (AND has made her own curtains). Bonita, of course, was wearing an outfit she'd made herself. Arla is making her own baby's clothes. I wish I could do things like that!! I think that I have spent too long studying the books and not enough time learning the things. (Admittedly, reading books and reading about books are pretty much my favourite things). My practical skills are now centred almost entirely around emergency medicine- eg putting in a central line, reducing a fracture, removing a foreign body from eye. Moreover, most of these things require me to be in a certain location with specialist equipment. One day I will learn to use a sewing machine.