I feel dizzy, I feel sunny, I feel fizzy and funny and fine. And so pretty, Miss America can just resign!

I just gave my computer an external hard drive for its birthday, and it is SO like, omigod! Thank you!

It was on special too, which is weird, cause sometimes I feel like everytime I really want something it is miraculously on special, and yet if I examine this inkling, I realise it is often not true (for example, my new external hard drive wasn’t really on special at all, I just totally made that up and the first half of this sentence is a complete lie, but there was a general OfficeWorks special of external hard drives at the time I bought my external hard drive, so I’ve kind of just lumped my hard drive in with it). It’s my general Pollyannaishness at work. See, and it sounds like it should be advantageous, to see the world in such rosy terms, but it’s actually not because it means I spend more money than you would think someone with a so-called eye for specials ordinarily would.

Anyway, after dumping all the music files my brother-in-law kindly gave me on the external HD, my MacBook is suddenly all skittish and playful again. It reminds me of nothing so much as when my friend’s dog Hicks is staying with us, and we take him to the park, and he’s all a bit sluggish and labradory, and then he does a poo, and suddenly he’s bounding all over the place and breaking into the uplifting numbers from West Side Story.

I haven’t got a photo of Hicks at this time – he just turns into a cartwheeling blur – but here is one I took earlier when we were playing hide-the-ball. Hicks was counting. I hid the ball.

Talking dogs

Neverland & the finger

Brilliant opinion piece by Simon in The Age yesterday.

‘I DON’T want to grow up. I don’t want to be a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” So said Peter Pan as he set off for Neverland in J. M. Barrie’s immortal fairytale. But were Peter Pan living in Melbourne today, he wouldn’t have to fly away anywhere. He could be as boyish as he liked, for as long as he liked, right here. His playfulness would moreover be seen as good — even essential — for the economy.

The signs are everywhere that childishness is more popular than ever, that infantilism is in. Look around. Adults read Harry Potter, rapt like children. Movie screens are dominated by cartoon characters, pirates, superheroes and sequels (“Tell me the story again, Mummy!”). Workers queue round the block to buy a new brand of doughnut. Women dress like teenagers. Men lose days playing with their Wiis.

The rest here.

Also much wisdon on rudeness from Thornton McCamish:

‘Oi!” someone shouted. I kept walking. Then there was a dog-whistle. I turned, half-expecting to find a runaway hound at my throat. But there was no dog in sight, just a guy lumbering up the street. He was whistling at me. He wanted to know where he could find the pub. I told him. Then he lunged off, without a word, like I’d ceased to exist.

Then there was that man in the city, scowling at his parking meter. As I walked by, he asked me if I had any change. I said no, I didn’t, sorry. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” he muttered. I said: “Pardon?” “Just piss off,” he told me matter-of-factly, already lining up the next passer-by.

The rest here.

Don’t shoot anyone

The other day the guy in my local FoodWorks asked me what I was listening to on my iPod, then before I could answer he said, “I always get the feeling that you’re listening to someone saying, ‘Keep it together. Just don’t go crazy. Don’t shoot anyone.’”

I am aware I can look like a bit of a nutter sometimes – my iPod is basically stapled to my head, and I’ve a tendency to giggle and sing under my breath when I hear David Essex’s Hold Me Close – but I don’t think I fully realised the extent of it. It’s cause my brothers were so much older than me that I basically grew up as an only child, and I lived, and still do live, in My Own Little World. (See the spotty house description, below.) I notice everyone on the street, but I sometimes feel they can’t see me. I don’t like running in to people – I may be very distant, so far, far away, and it’s difficult to suddenly drop back in.

That’s sometimes. Other times I walk around so convinced of my own freckle-faced glamour that I’m surprised anyone can tear their eyes away. Although that’s not so often.

Anyway, I was premenstrual at the time (of the FoodWorks incident) so when I came home and told Simon I started crying. Then we stood in the kitchen while he patted my head and said, “You’re not a nutter. No one thinks you’re a nutter.”