in just this way.

"'But what are we doing? We're talking.'

'Still,' said Hatsue. 'you're not Japanese. And I'm alone with you.'

'It doesn't matter,' answered Ishmael.

They lay beside each other in the cedar tree talking until half an hour had gone by. Then, once again, they kissed. They felt comfortable kissing inside the tree, and they kissed for another half an hour. With the rain falling outside and the moss softly under him Ishmael shut his eyes and breathed the smell of her fully in through his nostrils. He told himself he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never again happen in just this way no matter how long he lived."

- Snow Falling on Cedars, David Gutterson.

Where does the line lie between telling yourself how you feel, and feeling? I wonder that from time to time, as I think thoughts I never thought I'd allow, say mellow truisms to suit the circumstance and company, let the world flow by, and me in it, a leaf in the stream to the sea. Alike, in almost every way, with the full forest of falling leaves losing themselves to the river tides. Is it humility to feel this way? Or resignation?

Snow Falling on Cedars is a story of so much love, aching love, from a very teenage affair between an American boy and Japanese-American girl. The seductively forbidden kind which flared bright and burned deep. As a man, he returns to his hometown to cover the trial of his lover's Japanese husband, accused of murder. The novel traces, ever so delicately, his regrets and untidy longings. He questions whether his feelings were ever real or true. Certainly, there's nothing left for either of them to pursue in this life. She's loyal to her husband, and more loyal to her sense of being Japanese - a point sharpened by years in an American internment camp during WWII.

I guess in this reading - it's really just a skim-read over a book which I read and left years ago, unimpressed at the time with its plain language style and subdued descriptions - those are themes that stood clear. What is real? What do you do because you feel you need to? And where does right and morality come into all of this?

If anyone was to ever ask me why I work so hard, so relentlessly, in so many directions, I would probably tell them, 'To buy freedom.' It's a capitalist world we live in, cold and contractual. I know the world doesn't have to be this way, but for now, it is, and we have to abide by its framework of laws. You need money to buy comfort - a home, clothes, food, travel, free time. You exchange your time and skills for money. And if you're shrewd, strategic, and very lucky, you might build a business, write a book, make a film, which allow you more choice - freer time, endeavours to enjoy - like work, but better. And at some point, you could choose to exit completely - do your Dharma Bums mountain watch. That's where I sense, under the day-to-day muddle of doing, I'll understand the truths that elude me. Painful, honest, obscure, elegant. And maybe I'll wring art from the experience. Or maybe become something else, someone else I never imagined.

Just as I have today.

You lose, you gain. Nothing stays the same. It is merely energy, transmuted. Still, it aches. 

Where did I go wrong? on Channel V

My uni friend, Rosie, has just recorded a song with Little Birdy in Melbourne. Her song will be featured on Channel V's 'MySpace Mixtape' Show on Monday July 13 - 10.30am or 1.00pm.

The song is 'Where did I go wrong?'
Check it out on Little Birdy's MySpace here

Totally proud right now. I did catch one of Rosie's first shows in her pub-playing outhouse days ;) Bleary and skin bleached from not-enough sun, I'd just done the first draft of my honours thesis, knocked over a multiple choice ethics exam (you read that right) and hitched a ride in my friend's tiny green little mini cooper to the gig in Balmain. Along the way, we saw AJ, our one-time Catfox photographer, taking photos of Sydney Uni park on Broadway. It was one of those days, full of incidental social crosswires.

I was dressed for law school, so naturally I looked like I could board a yacht at any given moment. Embarassingly preppy in contrast to the shaggy arts crowd there - but hey, if you must be a dork, be proud. Sunday afternoon. Rosie's self-depracating wit and habit of letting loose everything thought that runs through her mind is actually quite endearing...well, it won me over, but I'm a loyalist.

To cut short the ramble, Rosie's band, The Rouge Balloon, is damn good. Jazzy-cool, bemused, ruminative, it's the kind of music well-attuned for late nights alone, or lazy days with little to say. Rosie is a talented writer, which shines through in her songs. And I really, really hate bad writing (tis in fact a pet hate, along with weasel words like 'nice' and 'great' and grammatical errors and spelling mistakes...yes. dork.) - so when I say good - she's good.

...

Rosie once asked me to do a review for her and get it published, due to my general knack for being able to do that. I said yes then said no because of the crush of other commitments. This is my small way of making up for that. I'm glad she's getting the audience she deserves. A slightly kooky mutual friend and occasional reviewer for The Brag did offer to do a review, noting that as a reviewer for a free street press music magazine, he had power and influence - it would be foolish to turn down his offer. She did the foolish, crazy thing - and turned him down.

Yep. Yet another reason why Rosie is so very cool. She's actually the second friend I met while studying Writing...and it turned out that she was already friends (from high school) with the first. Sydney. It's about as big as a fishbowl ;) I kinda love that.

...

In other news, my law school site launches in 2 weeks. Oh dear god.

Free-thinking hedonists.

I've been reading up about my favourite writers lately. F Scott Fitzgerald, W. Somerset Maugham, John le Carre, Michael Ondaatje, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Haruki Murakami. I'm not sure what in particular binds them. Each write of wealth and corruption, politics, romance, human flaws and foibles. Foibles, incidentally, is one of the funniest words ever made. Foibles. You can't say it aloud without giggling. Don't deny it. Also, kumquat. Onion-domes. There's more, definitely.

I like their restrained styles (ok, Plath excepted, comparing yourself to a Jewish holocaust or Hiroshima bomb blast victim isn't restrained at all.) To me, the mark of a truly good writer is to say so much with so little. The art of the understatement. Like evidence in a courtroom. Let it speak for itself. Let the world judge. They're my heroes, if you could ever speak so grandly. Some of them, like F Scott Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath, ended up spiralling into hedonistic self-destruction (or less hedonistic and more feminist martyr.) Still, I love what they were trying to do. Free-thinking hedonists. In life, they wanted only the absolute. The unattainable highs. By drugs or sex or success or wealth or wild company. Silken moments to forever play. Life at full volume. Now that's interesting.

"We die. We die, rich with the tastes of lovers and tribes. Characters we have climbed into as if trees."

- Michael Ondaatje, 'The English Patient.'

I have this feeling that people are watching, and wondering what I will do next. Perhaps this is pure vanity. Probably. It's the product of walking past your face on a wall every day and being told you are a person of promise and potential by your professional mentors. By professors and strangers, family and friends. Promise and potential are fickle. I'm very lucky. My sheer academic indecision prompted me to choose courses of study that fit my passions - creativity and high ideals. But you know, now what? My job contracts expire at the end of the year. My editorial team - essentially, talented friends - and I have, at most, six months to prove that this wild idea dreamed up over law school coffee does have an audience, can attract advertisers/sponsors beyond a seed money Law faculty grant, and ultimately, can change the systemic flaws that feed a law school culture of ruthless competition, suicidal anxiety, and ambition without real purpose. These are issues that really aren't exclusive to law school - they are just more prevalent and obvious here than elsewhere. So, perhaps we'll succeed. Then what?

You know, you can rule nations. You can lead companies. You can make grand speeches. You can be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a circus sideshow. You could be a writer. You could be an artist. You could be a film-maker. You could be an Indian seamstress or a Indonesian maid or a Columbian drug runner or Sudanese rebel leader. It really doesn't matter. It's not about you, or your talent, or your ambitions. No, life - and death, god or whatever your name for it, and love - is about something more ephemeral. You can't hold it, but you can taste it. You can't own it, but you can feel it. Your moral conscience. The flow of life. The Holy Spirit. The Four Noble Truths. Turn from these, and life grows claustrophobic.

Anyway, that's the realisation I've reached in these past few months, perhaps years. It has no practical advantage - nothing obvious. It's not a degree or a job promotion or a legal victory. But I have a hunch that these beliefs will lead to a very untidy, deeply fulfilling life. Life ends anyway. If you are not meant to survive, then life can't be about accumulating great material wealth by which to gratify your visceral senses. Sure, I like expensive living. But sustaining such a life is not the purpose of my actions. I wake up everyday never quite sure what will happen next. But I guarantee it will be interesting. It will be worthwhile. It will be something from which to learn.

LLM v PhD. It's a matter of inches.

"We need to break the cycle of take, make, break."

- Panelist, AHRC Corporate Social Responsibility Evening

I attended the Australian Human Rights Centre CSR event this evening. A week's worth of sustained sleep deprivation, mad deadlines, strained overcommitment and strong coffee couldn't keep the nerd within away. It was good. More than. Satisfying. Challenging. Inspiring. Realistic. Provocative. It is what you experience when a group of highly intelligent people come together - that synapse-buzzing rush. 

I am considering postgrad law. Intriguing choice for someone who really did believe they were going to fail, every single semester. Sigh. I just want it. To live the big idealist dream. I want to go all the way to the Un-i-ted Na-tions. (Imagine that, hissed in Hannibal Lecter voice, when he says to Clarise, "You wanted to go all the way to the F...B...I...")

The big dream. Mmm. Minimum qualification for admission is an LLM. Apparently I did well enough to consider a PhD. Indulged in silly Lisa Simpson fantasy as my former thesis supervisor proposed the idea. ("Dr Yap. Paging Dr Yap!" ..."I'm sorry nurse. I only fix...THE LAW.") My friend who studied Landscape Architecture (but, with typical North Sydney Girl bent, could not exit her degree without first gaining First Class Hons, as a kind of par minimum for our peers), is considering postgrad in the States. Which is what I'm considering too.

Then, PhD. I mean, seriously. Now that we're talking crazy here (and I always proposed even honours as a crazy wild idea. My boyfriend has the email entitled: "Crazy wild idea" to prove it), doing an LLM without going on to PhD (esp since I refuse to become a practitioner) is like reaching third base and backtracking. Deeply unsatisfying for all concerned.

Tenuous innuendos aside. I've been mulling over a story I read somewhere many years ago. Possibly Reader's Digest. What? Don't judge me. Sometimes it's good. 

Three brothers found themselves stranded ashore a fertile volcanic island. Discussing amongst themselves, they decided to share the island equally between them, and each set off to claim his stake in the virgin land. (No dinosaurs ala Lost, don't worry.) The first brother, the eldest, found a fruitful stretch of land just within the rainforest. Close to shore, close to water, warm. There he settled. The next brother, the middle child of stranded history, climbed further up the mountain island until he found a more temperate region - further from water, but cooler with views of the sea. He stayed.

The youngest brother left them both as he climbed up the volcanic mountain. Steep and sharp, the forest gave way to ash and craggy rock, moss and snow, crisp winter chill year-round. Still he climbed. He left behind land suited for planting vegetables, rearing animals, pitching tents (presumbly of palm tree leaves and well placed logs.) The air grew thin. The island fell away beneath him. Still he climbed. The peak in view, he looked from the top of the mountain and saw the world stretched out before him, as far as he dared to look. Vertiginous and dizzying. He saw how the sea met the sand, how wild animals hunted their prey, how the weather ebbed and crackled. He saw the connections and patterns underpinning world order. There he stayed. Far from food and water, eating moss, watching the world unfold.

...

As I recall, this story was given as a scenario test to prospective entrepreneurs as a means of measuring where they 'fit' in business. No prizes for guessing how it worked. I think, however, it's a far more telling story. About what drives us. 

Honestly, I don't know. Dizzy with altitude sickness, I can feel my addiction. Not to a substance or a product or even a person. To this feeling. Even if it means scraping moss and never sleeping. It's a dopamine rush within the foggy glass of a car under the thin cover of night, knowing only metres away are a group of prison escapees totally unaware you're even there. (It's a long story.) It's payoff. Knowing all you've worked for is meaningful, is recognised, is...remunerated. Half the time, I'm afraid of being found out to be completely incompetent. The rest, I relish the labels. Star student. Amazing. All of it. 

Even though I know it is meaningless, in many ways. Even though I am the same person today as I was five years ago, or ten, or the day I was born. I have simply followed a course of events, seized upon opportunities offered and run with whatever luck came by. I can't claim to be special, but I like the idea of somehow - yes - being unattainably unsurpassed. 

"I find the impossible far more interesting."

- Elizabeth, The Golden Age.

Haha. Some days, I just want to walk down the street ala Will Smith at the end of The Pursuit of Happiness, applauding. Quiet. Unrecognised. Just for me. Just to know. It's not about you or me, of course. Life. It's about leaving the world better than you have found it. It's about doing good, if you can, where you can. It's about life full volume - the big blind, the rags-to-riches risks. 

Somedays, I just want to celebrate another day of living. Whether you live at the base or the peak of that mountain. 

Like today.

Cue applause.

Psychiatry is this year's candy pink stovetop.

Don Draper (Mad Men, 1950s Madison Ave Ad Man): 

I can't tell whether you have everything...or nothing.

Midge Daniels (Don's mistress, an artist/commercial illustrator): 

I live in the moment. Nothing is everything.

- Mad Men, Ep 2.

...

I've had a line running through my head for the past month. It's from Lupe Fiasco's 'Superstar' from The Cool. "I try to believe my own hype, but it's too untrue." Mingled in like lemon lime, the various obiter* comments of academics, interviewees and friends on the inherent nature of 'intelligent people.' Call it a vanity interest. What are these comments? That intelligent people are given to peculiarity, idiosyncracy, 'bed-hopping', bent morality and a sense that the rules governing social interaction apply only to the proles, the common people. For whom we may fight, but certainly do not belong in their ranks. We are the special people. As one interviewee told me, "It's disturbing. Here are people who would rather die than be ordinary."

Because as Angela Hayes in American Beauty put it, "There's nothing worse than being ordinary."

Hrm. Does that mean that we strive for only the impossible? Do we get our thrills from doing something that's never been done? I was asked once, as part of some classroom meet+greet, what drove me. I said, "to do something that's never been done." 

Doesn't that stink of vanity? I keep saying that my ultimate ideals are to embrace, cold and clear, the flaws of this world - from markets left to the whim of neo-capitalism to dictators whose rule of law is down the barrel of a gun, or to show a way out from the closing four walls of depression - and from there, from within, from understanding and research and constant questioning, to improve the world's ills. To leave the world better than how I found it. I know - how humble. Haha.

Sometimes, every so often, I love the glow and glory. Pride and vanity. The by-lines like 'star student (wherever you go)' and 'amazing', 'driven', 'ambitious', 'genius'. Sometimes, I want to be a beautiful and unique snowflake, dammit. Haha. Tell me Doctor, is that ego? Is that bad? Do you have a fix-it? A pill cure or expensive rest house in the mountains, by the sea?

Sometimes, I spend so much of my waking life in a pitch, developing palatable spins, window-dressing disasters, being as creative with truth as I am with words, that I can't tell my own hype from what I believe. 

(And on those days, I must be doing a good job.)

Haha, no, that's too cynical. Perhaps I just realised that you can make a comfortable living from being unusually persuasive, from a heady mix of idealistic dream-selling delivered in a proven formula package. 

"I want you to manipulate the media. What else do I pay you for?"

- Head of Lucky Strikes to Don Draper, Mad Men.

Oh well. Perhaps it's all delusions of grandeur and I have nothing to worry my sensitive conscience over. Perhaps the ad-savvy audience of latter day noughties know better than to believe what they read in the news, on TV, on the internet, from their friends, from their favourite stars and pop culture icons. Ah. My conscience. It's very sensitive. (Some would say that's a plus. ;)

So - assume that audiences know exactly what you're doing when you say, position an article, or write one, or pitch a story you know slants facts a little. I'm not saying I've done this. After all, my clients are completely harmless...for now. There's nothing to slant, really, which is why I chose this industry to learn the fine art of media...'relations.' If you assume this, doesn't your act still deprive them of the true variety of thought, opinions and debate a free democracy needs to truly thrive?

Or in this spin-driven world that we live in, should we just forget it, channel some Paul McCartney, and live and let die? 

Have a drink. Have a painkiller. Forget about it. The ability to persuade is like law itself - a tool. The law is not necessarily justice, and nor is persuasion necessarily about offering truth. Truth is personal. Truth is an understanding you hold as you crunch through autumn leaves with nothing but the ground beneath your feet and above, the blue open sky. Knowledge is not a checkbox right answer in the exciting life challenges of academic exams or career climbing. It's cycling in the dawn through the streets of a foreign city, on a bicycle so unsteady you expend every effort just to stay upright. Your mind clears. It forgets to think. A definite virtue.  The mind too, is a tool. We - the 'intelligent people' with our brains packed full of IQ points and pride bursting with all our brilliant possibility - are so busy worshipping our clever minds, we forget this fact. 

And if you let your mind rule, it will forge an empire for you alone, within the confines of your own skull. You, as the warm burning heart of the universe. With your life of dramas and affairs, scandals and successes. Your narrative arc. Your three act finish.

This, of course, is untrue. 

Still, we are living. The dramas keep rolling. The camera's on you. If you don't 'do something', some very great something within the designated time appropriate with your so-called 'life plan', you're clearly a lost cause. You know what I'm talking about. The life plan that some might say ensures you are engaged by 22, married by 24, scaling Everests and conquering the wild unknown on the cover of Time by 27, ready for children by 29, and onward, upward. Ad altiora. No? Don't know it? Your life plan might be a little different. I'm referring to the overachiever's life plan. Lisa Simpson. "Grade me, grade me!"

I am not sure whether I have deftly sidestepped that life plan or found an even more novel way to fall right into it. What I do know is that when you step close to the vertiginous abyss, the blank oblivion depth...and find within it, the possibility of freeing yourself from the tangle of all these...dramas...you are craving peace. The kind you can find deep in a forest. High on a mountain. "I know this from gazing at mountains months on end," said Jack Kerouac. 

I know this from watching the dusk strike the sky alight, a smoky sunlight, ignored by the world below. Busy and important with their own private concerns. I know this from watching a girl cry over scoring 97% on a meaningness mid-term Maths exam - because it wasn't 100%, and this clearly meant her life was doomed. (I wasn't this girl, by the way. I was a consistent 80%...97% would have had me in serious hallelujah.) 

Mmm. I know this from the way words, strung together, mere symbols of our language, of our souls, can sink a writer, reader, into reverie. Which some say is better than sex. Some, I said. Not...in my experience. Haha.

Ah. I know this from those very few moments you might let yourself be. Breathe, and be. 

Maybe, Doctor, you just think I'm crazy. What else am I paying you for?

Still. Talking this way helps me feel a little less crazy in what is really a mad, mad world. 

Or perhaps all of you out there know exactly what you mean to be, need to say, wish to do, and no such questions trouble you. 

So, thanks for listening. How much do I owe you? $400 for an hour? Give me a receipt. I'll claim it as a business expense.

...

* Obiter: legalese to mean a comment made 'in passing.' Frequently turns up in judgments where a judge expresses a digression which might later become law. Or cloaks an irrelevant remark on say, the importance of realising international law via case law, as a human rights norm, bypassing parliament. Obiter. Because even passing comments are a betrayal of intentions perhaps more subversive.

wine on the high wire.

Blog update. Work rushed headlong into Xmas break, my book/website project has been tentatively approved for sponsorship by the faculty, I scored First Class Honours in Law as quietly confirmed (in manner that is not open to most students - so hurrah for working in the faculty), my little bro looks on his way to cruising quite well into a selective school with all his friends (which is all he wants right now, other than more lego and to go to the Powerhouse Star Wars exhibition and play Wii + PS3 and sing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the Bono cover), I fell privy to personal scandal to rival de Sade's finest works (Philosophy in the Bedroom, of course - thank you Iris for that continually amusing book), I am now fully employed and then some, pulled into several projects (Catfox, 85Boroads, the new Communications Law Centre), I caught up with old friends and found new ones, tidied up a little more Japan organising...

...and Julian came back from Vancouver, alive with the wild bug of traveling in a way he's never known before.

This, like so much, is for you.

To the world out there: I expect your intelligence and worldly experience, whether gained from a book or first person, will leave you to infer the finer omitted details.

"Travel & Leisure." (or "Here, the strange familiar.")

You said: I'm home when I'm with you.
Whispered in my ear as we reached (backseat, where else)
For the elusive
In the midnight crisp
By the black shadowed park tall with trees gnarled
Skin dried thin, cracked and peeling with burn
Trees emaciated after an overindulgence of summer.


You said: I found something
The Siren's song, an Absolute
I've sought so long in the strange familiar
Shapes of clouds.
In dead philosophers and suburban churches
In nights deep with you
I found it
In the north of the border city, walled by wide high snowy peaks
All alone but not lonely
Kerouac's months of mountains.

And you should see it.
I want you, you said, to see it.
I heard you. In my head, your voice -
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

I - in stasis so long
Broke.
Fell below bottom and loved the fall.
I rolled as the wind in the tunneling space of no stars, no milky way
Flew me to a place
Free of -
Words and art and other cages
Naming the nameless.
Grasping the Tao - The Great Beyond.

I dipped my pale face, my slender long nose and its midway crook
Into spring bloom roses.
Low hung magnolia seized my senses
And shattered my sensibility.

Oops.
Beyond rock bottom is not a floor
Solid and infallible.
No, it is an endless fall.

Delicious.

And through, you call -
I want you.
I want to give you everything.
I am ready.

I heard you.
I fell through.
Sweet with dinner dates
Clever young men of many inclinations and tastes
Sharing our elitist histories under the glimmer lights, a carnival
This side of the Harbour.

You know as well as I do -
You can lose yourself, you can betray
In many creative and amusing ways.

Et cetera, et cetera.
Singing in my ear, Thom Yorke is so
Beyond the thrall.

You are here. I am here.
I wonder at the lines that have left your face
The world's weight cast from your
Muscular, winter-tanned, taut shoulders
Your Armani exchange and your red muffed headphones
Your bewildered smile. Your assured, self-possessed air
Your confidence.
You speak - but unlike before
With sureness.
Built upon a deeper knowledge and understanding
As always - you say precisely what you mean
And do exactly as you like.
So right.

Though now, it is 5.05.
None of this has happened yet.
You're walking in the store - looking for
Kino's Travel + Leisure
December's evening pleasures.

You're looking, well, very good.
I'm thumbing through Lonely Planet
Budapest - the Avis-itis city
The 'Second city' of the Hapsbergs

You're here. Like The Who:
You're looking at me and I'm looking at you
We - ah. Don't know what to do.

I look you down and size you up.
Head to toe, to fall for.
Absolutely.

Stranger. Familiar.
Later, you will say: for you, I'm here.
For now, I straight-shoot look at you
And say:

"Hello there."

So let's go crazy.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop."

- Jack Kerouac

It's a seductive, easy declaration. One for poets and professional bums, philosopher artists by reputation, purveyors of heady intoxicants and high as satellites when there's bills due. Attractive sentiments, true. Especially while the rule of cool logic has delivered a natural earth stretched on the rack of human demand, pollution and population growth, brinking on collapse; when distrustful neighbour nations choose useful weapons of annihilation and war rhetoric ("You are either with us, or against us", and you know the rest) over diplomacy; when lego economies crumble under the pressures of near-sighted lending policies, speculative investment and regulatory absence - yes, yes, when everything you know, blows in a deeply unsatisfying way, sexy declarations of ideals suddenly glow.

Don't mistake me for a revolutionary. I've grown up more or less knowing only affluence, even in the early years, when the wealth was reached for through glass display windows and glittering parties at which I did not belong. I've caught a lot of breaks in my short life so far: intelligence and luck, intrinsic talent and the will to risk, conspired for some very good times. In such surrounds - as I watch myself, my family, my closest friends and further friends of extended amusement, emerge, I suppose. Reap, as my friend said (over coffee, in Newtown, could it be any more cafe philosopher apt :p) reap the rewards for our long and lonely uncertain efforts.

And I wonder. Cos that's what you do at 1am when you're definitely supposed to be doing something else - like buying travel insurance, planning itineraries, writing law articles, organising interviews, reading the New York Times, browsing foodie blogs, filing my professional life, brewing a cup of oolong - you wonder about Douglas Adams stuff. 42 and the meaning of everything.

Around this time last year, I kinda broke. Law clerkships, the tugging obligation of a well-paid corporate future to match my impressive grades, sleepless nights and crankiness, were you know, annoying me with taglines. "It's amazing what a doodle can reveal." "We value our people." "No day is the same." "9 to 5 is boring." (This should ring alarm bells for anyone with a shred of value for sustaining human relationships. Not work, not academic - human. The kind of coffees, strawberries, gin martinis, reckless indulgence, midnight wisdom and inappropriate confessions.) It was, in fact, around 1am. Glazed and glaring at the July 2007 edition of Lawyer2B (the magazine to read if you are young and lawyerly), which featured a medical diagram of the human brain, with a young woman ripping through, between the eyes, peeking, apparently, at her future. Headline: Anatomy of the Ideal Grad.

I read it cover to cover. I was pretty sure I was supposed to have applied for every major clerkship in town. Or at least some. As opposed to...none. (I did accidentally win an interview at the Law Careers Fair with Gadens. To their greater wisdom and my lasting joy, I made it to the final round but didn't get hired.) Still, HECS debts were looming. Plus the general feeling that someone in my position should just be amazing already. North Sydney Girls, brilliant marks, a CV that employers swoon for...and here I was sipping black tea and doing things so useless as 'wondering.' Revelation struck. Seized by impulse, I foraged a black DVD marker pen from my little chinese take-out box on my table (from Sugar Fix!) which serves as a pen holder and drew lines through the medical anatomy of a human brain, the front cover of Lawyer2B. Dividing the brain, the face, into partitions of essential graduate attributes of the ideal lawyer to be.

Blind ambition. Flexible ethics. String of failed marriages/relationships. Shameless narcissism. Prozac + cocaine addiction. Cardiac arrest. Nagging sense of disillusion. = Ideal corporate drone. (There's more, definitely more. Haha!)

Tagline: ...It's amazing what a doodle can reveal.

Forgive me - or at least excuse me - I was something like depressed, cynical, and anger was a step up from being in the pits. Let it stand for the record that I don't think this is true any more. That like all that's worth knowing in this world, there's a lot more to lawyers, to corporate culture, to graduate recruitment and professional practice, there's worthy ideals that still hold and guide soulful (currently) corporate lawyers, there's corporations committed, (no, really) to being ethical world citizens (I did my thesis on this, just to prove it) ... there's a lot to like. Fine dining, magnolia in bloom, blue open skies, Border 35% off vouchers, Alicia Keys/Jack White, Obama 2008 ("Penn just went. Bolinger Bolsheviks. This is wild."), oysters and wine, John Mayer and Disney, park rendezvous, John Legend...ok, lots. Trust me. You know too. Really.

I'm coming to a point, I promise. I said at the start of this entry that mad people are the only ones worth knowing, that madness is underrated. No, I'm too bourgeosie to head for the nearest asylum for some friend-making (or to NSW Parliament, Seven News or Macquarie Bank, for that matter). My point is this: given the rather unsuccessful way logic has ruled our world for a few hundred years, in its Darwinian cycle of conquest, domination or to destroy what one cannot have (yes yes, success is relative, etc, but neither being a Jew in the Holocaust nor being a Palestinian in Gaza is a particularly pleasant reflection on the success of society's rules right now).... I seriously doubt whether the prevailing definition of sanity has served us well.

So I say, madness is an evolutionary imperative.

We're a generation raised by Tyler Durden & Dangerous Liaisons/Cruel Intentions. Interesting role models, no?

I say: Let me never be content (with the perfect sofa). Let me never be (made) complete (by buying stuff I don't need, funded by jobs I hate.) Deliver me from clever art. Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from self-destruction. Deliver me from nihilism.

Embrace craziness. Trust me. It's very cool right now. And maybe, with all our supposed excess of IQ points and other incredibly poor measures of intelligence, with all our lucky breaks, dazzling talent, thrilling potential and worlds of oysters and brimful promise, we might do something useful. We might go mad. We might - yes yes, you know you want to hear it - we might forge a better world.

Are you in?

stomp off, let's go!

Louis Armstrong says it best! So - set this entry to the soundtrack of Louis Armstrong: The Ultimate Collection, Disc 3, Track 13, because that's what's flowin from my cd player right now. Mmm-mm. It's raining, a thunderstorm remnant to douse out the bushfires which burned high near my house yesterday; I assume it was close because we were choking smoke all evening, but I was out all day shopping and caught up in the absolutely awful task of reading Australian Gourmet Traveller & Delicious back issues under the slip light fogged ceiling of the Mitchell wing, State Library, revelling in a room walled with books, smelling library. Yep, it's a fantastic life, and someone's gotta live it! ;)

As I just urged a friend: Listen to the rainfall. Trickle down tango partnered with birdsong. A family of rainbow lorrikeets squeak and squawk from our jacaranda beyond my balcony. On such a morning, like a Louis Armstrong song, I can't help it, I'm on the sunny side of the street, I'm in the mood for love, I'm stomp off, let's go!

So another friend, Alex, texted me yesterday to ask how Day 1: Operation the end of undergrad uni forever (ever ever, ever ever??) went down. And I wouldn't be a wayward procrastinating writer worth my whimsy if I didn't end up answering in a poem. Here it is. Yes it's long, but so was a 5 year degree. Unlike the degree, it goes down easy, like a Tetsuya Ying Sling infused with lychees, definitely a drink to woo women with.

"There must be more than being happy" (Scream love.)

14 Nov.
(1999). A mud hue sedan veered into Pennant Hills Road
The automobile artery of NW Sydney
Male, the driver, late 20s
His mind a kite on a long flying tether
On Caltex, milk and cigarettes
Failed to check right.
His collision theorised by Isaac Newtown four double oo years before
'One object in motion will proceed in due course
Until acted upon by some opposite force.'
Smash!
21.34.
I drank saltwater hospital soup & watched tiny-screen Jerry Maguire
In ER.
The boy across my aisle bore a bloody stump
For a left arm.
So it goes.
(Vonnegut theorised too, fifty years before.)

14 Nov.
(2008.)
I missed my stop.
By plan if not purpose
Thrilling under the passing Bridge beams
Steel pine shadow beams
Harbour glimmer, Quay cruise ships and sunshine
The drop point where a boy
Brilliant, my age, days ago
Dux, final year high
Law Revue loved
Career ready, steady Freehills for life
Forgot the feel of the sun
Heady perfume of magnolia bloom
Of crisp-baked French roll's virgin crackle
Forgot & knew only
Life. Hard life that stretched thin as the skin of a drum, ever ever on.
03.26.
43 mins before the first dawn Cityrail.
By the cold blowing sea gusts, under Bridge beams
He stepped off - saw not
Cruise carnival ships, the harbour as it glimmered
By the city's high lights and brand names neon emblazoned
Felt at last, the thrilling wind as it flew
From the fell drop to the sea.

12.43am.
North Sydney Station.
Unrecognisably changed.
Gone - the smog, 'smoke fog' stairway
Advertising lined, blasted steps
Here, slit aluminium ceilings let in light
By degrees. Dispelled shadows
By design.
I loved to see this. This change. I grew up on this steppes.
Now they're gone.
My battered phone buzzed a message - Alex:

'Spectacular sunny day,
Don't you think?'
I didn't think.
A wild idea for a walking brain.
No-mind. Zen free.
Part of the Plan.

'Exam soon, so relaxed.
Hope you're doing well,
First day of freedom -

Scream love!'

My reply was one line.
The end of the line.
(If I stake my word-bound career by this
I'll be a cardboard box pauper,
Give it days.)
Law - the corporate dream
Hard living
Now a myth.
Dispelled by design.
In one line.

"LOOOOOOVE!!!"

"In the unlikely story that is America..."

Yes We Can.

(Speech by Barack Obama.)

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics...they will only grow louder and more dissonant ........... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea --

Yes. We. Can.

September by Ted Hughes

A favourite and obscure poem.

September

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

atonement - the two letters.

Atonement Letter #1 (p.85):
"You'd be forgiven for thinking me mad - wandering into your house barefoot, or snapping your antique vase. The truth is, I feel rather light-headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don't think I can blame the heat. Will you forgive me? Robbie."

Atonement Letter #2 (p.86):
"In my dreams, I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long."

...

Definitely a letter worth spending a lifetime atoning for ;)

perfume

'I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes or blackouts. I liked that certain undefinable something directed at me by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it's a power that ensnares people and reels them in.'The closest comparison might be the power of perfume. Perhaps even the master blender himself can't explain how a fragrance that has a special magnetism is created. Science certainly can't explain it. Still, the fact remains that a certain kind of fragrance can captivate the opposite sex like the scent of an animal in heat. One kind of fragrance might attract 50 out of 100 people. And another scent will attract the other 50. But there are also scents that only one or two people will find wildly exciting. And I have the ability, from far away to sniff out those special scents. When I do, I want to go up to the girl who radiates this aura and say, 'Look, I picked it up. No one else gets it, but I do.'

- South of the Border, West of the Sun. Haruki Murakami.