How do you decide which shade of black to wear?

Flat hunting, or as Australians call it 'House hunting.' I have had more than one irate Australian breath heavily down the phone at me and tell me, in a quiet voice, that 'I think you'll find this is NOT a flat.' It is.

It's a delicate dance, this business. First there is the online application, which involves scouring Gumtree for potential dwellings and dwelling-mates. It's a difficult task, trying to find the gems amongst bovved entries such as 'exhausted guy needs room in cool flat ASAP!!' However, things can be whittled down pretty quickly, once you count out outer suburbs, share rooms, flats with cats, anything south of the river, ads which describe the house as 'damp but cosy' and people who use the wrong 'your' in the opening paragraph. There are also ads that will never be answered by anyone, like this one

Gumtree fail.

Once you've found one that looks suitable in a pinch, there is the delicate task of describing yourself as a potential share houser. Usually its a matter of sounding like you are employed but interesting, independent but part of a team, clean but not anal, enjoys an early night but is also the life of the party, intelligent but non judgemental. What ends up happening is that, in a desperate bit to stay neutral, you end up saying nothing about yourself.

"I Like my music, chilling out, sometimes up for a drink or a party, but saying that not a complete party animal. I'm a pretty easy going sort of person. I likes to sit down and have a cuppa and a chat, but also likes own space."

Sometimes your don't hear back, sometimes you do. And then begins the city hopping trek of meeting and greeting your prospective housemates. In this step, you sit on opposite couches, asking dull questions and laughing politely at each others jokes about the state of the front garden or the abstract painting over the fireplace. Occasionally you are offered a glass of wine but this a rare and privileged exception. Usually, the interviews are kept to a 15 minute maximum after which the next ad replier will be knocking at the front door. Sometimes, the house dwellers will take down notes on in an exercise book as you speak; sometimes they will ask you to leave the room while they discuss your living potential. Usually at this stage, I am sweating like a demon after a 20 minute bike ride and all the questions I want to ask have vanished into the ether. I am left with inane queries such as:

"So, like, what's the general vibe of your guys flat...I mean House?"
"Oh you know, its like, pretty chilled out. We like to hang out together sometimes but we also like our own space."
"Mmmm yeah that sounds great."

What you really need to is to cut the crap and ask the questions that you're actually curious about. Like:

"Are you one of those people who leaves their washing in the machine for days after its finished, because I fucking hate it when people do that."

OR "Would you be annoyed if I brought home a party of friends to listen to funk music at 3am or would you get amongst it?"

OR "Do you boil your mooncup in a pot on the stove?"

At one house, I was forced to sit on the veranda and read from a book of poems. The poems were written by the dizzy head flatmate who told me she inspired a song by the alternative band Beach House. At another house, I sat and talked to the creatures who lived there about their desire to have a 'gangsta party.' Their desire ran so deep, it seemed, that they had already spray painted neon gangsta graffiti over two walls of the kitchen. In one area, the paint had dribbled down and left a neon pool of yellow on the top of the stove. I smiled and went on with the questions, unable to tell them that I would rather fall down a flight of stairs than live in their spare room. As I left, I realised that the stool I had been sitting on was actually a broken, rusty TV.

But its all worth it in the end, all the dull interviews and the hectic bike rides and the flowery poetry. There's always another door to knock on.

And this is why I love Shallow Grave.

Trams

One of the girl singers from ABBA has put out a solo album. It's called 'My colouring Book' and listening to it is like staring at a colouring book where everything has been coloured in with manic highlighters, both inside and outside the lines. It's quite lovely but I have to have at least one strong, black coffee to get me through it. 'My Colouring Book' works as a nice contrast to The Shaggs, a no-talent prepubescent girl band from the Sixties who were overweight, acne scarred and sang tuneless songs about Halloween and their lost cat, 'Foot Foot.' It's rather a cruel name for the band given that none of them are even remotely shag-able.

Yesterday on the tram, I was reading a play called 'Wiping my Mother's Ass.' It is exactly as it sounds and is not a very good play. A woman with a pinched nose sitting across from me give me a dirty look when she saw what I was reading. She was reading some kind of Vodafone pamphlet. The man next to her didn't have anything to read but seemed quite intent on examining his fingernails. He was weedy and wore a suit that was slightly too big for him. From time to time, he tried to read bits of the Vodafone pamphlet over the woman's shoulder. After a few minutes of this, the pinched face woman closed the pamphlet and shoved it deep into her handbag. She gave the weedy man a sharp, angry glance and turned her neck to stare furiously out the window. The weedy man got off at the next stop and the pinched face woman reached into her handbag and went back to her Vodafone pamphlet. I went back to Wiping my Mother's ass. It wasn't that great.

Playing pool

Monday is a good day for the Fitzroy community pool. I swam a bunch of laps and watched people. There are no aqua joggers but a lot of people seem to have taken to wearing flippers in the lanes. They swim very fast but you'd expect them to. It's the fast swimmers without the flippers that really impress the rest of us. The ones in speedos with Adonis figures. There seems to be a congregation of them at the start of the week, flexing and talking about their girlfriends at the start of the fast lane. They don't swim that much but I guess they don't have to with bodies like that. Sometimes, when they get tired of standing around in waist-high water they lie down on the bleachers, arms behind their heads with their arm pit hair exposed. I find it pretty sexy despite myself.

All this I witness through quick glimpses, occasionally taking extra long between breathes and take every chance to de-mist my goggles. In the medium and slow lanes, less attractive people swim with less impressive strokes. They stop more often than I do but with less pervy intentions. The life guards amble around the sides of the pool not doing much. They are also unattractive but might be less so without the wrap around sunglasses and yellow polo shirts.

I sat with two of the Adonises in the sauna. Their conversation was dull but their aesthetics pleased me. One had a loud voice and a smattering of chest hair, the other--James according to his mate--was soft spoken with serious pectorals. I sipped from my water bottle and pretended to stare into space. It was an excellent seven minutes and then I reluctantly had to exit before the temperature made me pass out. I tried the steam room but was sorely disappointed by the lack of Goodbodies on display, only a small Asian woman in a brown bikini. We smiled quietly at each other and after a few minutes, went on our separate ways.

The woman at the front desk is called Annie. She is a rather dull looking woman with a mess of hoop earings in her ears and she wears sweat pants. She works behind the desk every day of the week or so it seems. I wonder if she goes swimming in the pool. I wonder if she pervs at the Goodbodies. I would get probably not given that she has extremely thick spectacles and is probably legally blind if she takes them off. But you never know.

India and that

Well, Hamish and I are now in Jaipur, Rajistan. Can honestly say it is not our favourite town; there is rotting filth everywhere and children covered in flies go through the rubbish bins which smell so bad that we have to hold our breath when we walk past them.

There are many animals scurrying about, mainly cows and goats but in Jaipur there are also a lot of massive pigs which roll around in the rubbish and squeal with delight. There is an excess of mangy dogs; we saw one that looked like its skin was falling off and it was blind in both eyes and had a limp. As I took a photo of it, the wretched thing scurried into a pile of refuse and picked up a chickens foot in its teeth.

We were also almost victim to a jewel scam; a long story but it involved us having a little too much faith that the little Indian man with a scar on his face who stopped us in the street and asked us why foreigners avoid Indian people seemed genuinely interested in us as people and was quite happy to sit and talk about cultural divides with us. He was an artist and tried to sell us his hand drawn Karma Sutra pictures, but apart from this he was nice enough. He told us that he once had a New Zealand girlfriend, 'Stacey,' who was a truck driver from Wellington and had too 'big an ego inside' to make a long term relationship really work. He also told us about his other New Zealand friend, who was prison guard in Auckland. He then made everyone a bhang lassi and asked us how many wives we had.

Several hours later, we went for a beer with the uncle of our new found friend who ended up disappearing and leaving us with the toad-like Brahman uncle and some sort of sleazy nephew in a cheap suit who gave us a packet of cigarettes. Stoned, we half listened them boast about how many million ruppees they made on a weekly basis and that lying was ok if it was done 'for the greater good.' And then the convesation came to its inevitabe conclusion, What about if the two us were to make a quick buck by smuggling some precious jewels back into Australia with us? They talked about loop holes, we looked nervously towards the door and lit another cigarette. No strings attached apparently, except casual tax evasion. The whole situation was made more ridiculous by the fact that we had just spend the day before reading an article in the Lonely Planet (our second copy after our first one was stolen by a man with no teeth on the train to Agra) about how so many stupid tourists still fall for the 'gem scheme.' Hamish had then guffawed but after the incident at hand (which grew quite nasty with raised voices and slamming of hands on the table), he hung his head; we both did. we bought a bottle of whiskey on the way back to our guesthouse.

Tomorrow we head to Pushkar; an apparently beautiful holy place with a holy lake at its centre. Jaipur is rather a fail city; gem scam aside. My bowels are getting edgy with vegetable curry twice a day which is a pity given that it is the best curry I have ever had in my life (and costs virtually nothing). Our hotel, the Red Tomato Hotel Palace is a grand, 'Shining'-esque building, complete with a man throwing up (loudly) at 1am and then again at 6am. I am reading A Fine Balance and Hamish is reading Midnight's Children, token travellers that we are. Still, we sat across from an even more offensive pair of English girls at dinner last night who were both reading John Grisham (The Rainmaker and A Time to Kill respectively) and who sent their malia kofta back to the kitchen in a rage because it was too spicy. Bovved.

Zac who?

Joseph-Gordon Levitt, the hottest man on the planet, lies sprawled on my desktop and all over my heart. Celebrity crushes, delightful and destructive, have for a long time eluded me. Not since I caught my first glimpse of Seth Cohen in the candy coloured world of Orange County, have I been so head over converse chucks in love with someone on the other side of the screen.

But Seth wasn’t real and, as the seasons of The O.C. persisted, he began to deteriorate into a character fail. The show, suddenly devoid of plot, followers and Mischa Barton, stripped their remaining characters of character and left them all high, dry and washed up beyond belief. Seth’s demise was especially painful to watch. His nerdiness lost its cuteness, his hair lost its curls, and his quips were no longer witty and eventually, no longer even quips. It didn’t help that the actor who played him, Adam Broody, was a tool of the highest order, dating his onscreen co-star and starred in emotionally heavy films in which he cried onscreen and made out with Meg Ryan.

MEG RYAN.

In contrast, Joseph-Gordon Levitt kicks some serious ass. For a start, he’s got a better name. He smokes pot and wears sharp suits, although not often at the same time. He’s Jewish and lives in New York. He’s got the face of an angel but that wouldn’t stop him laying some serious shit down if the going gets tough. He’s a stud in (500) Days of Summer even though the movie is a bit of a dud and he’s amazing in Mysterious Skin.And can thrash out an acoustic version of ‘Bad Romance’ that would make even the greenest sceptic go Gaga. Babe; certifiable.

My flatmate (twenty-six today and radiant) is currently gaga over a different lady; One Joan Hollway, the curvaceous figurehead of TV’s pastel coloured masterpiece, Mad Men. We are respectively obsessed, sitting side by side on the couch trawling Google images for hours with grins on our faces. The other flatmates go to the gym and give us looks of disgust. They come back and we are in the same exact positions, but with a glass of wine. We watch really bad movies just to see our beloved do a five minute scene with Sally Field. This must be the reason so many gazillion people saw Twilight.

It’s a good age for the celebrity crush. Google has made stalking into an art form. And in today’s indie scene-themed day and age, a celebrity crush is mandatory. It’s like a familiar. Joan is very popular. So is Don Draper (and fair enough). Hoards jump on the Jimmy McNulty bandwagon and others on flock to Eric Northman’s Scandinavian aesthetic. Johnny Depp is still acceptable but only if you specify ‘early nineties Johnny Depp’ and mention John Waters. Julian Casablancas will do in a pinch. Tom Cruise will not.

And so I develop my obsession with Joseph. I drop him name in every social gathering and let people that I am (or think I am) the go-to authority on this particular hottie. Because people judge you.

A boy at work recently told me that his biggest celebrity crush was Jennifer Aniston and that she was ‘the most beautiful person in the world.’ I excused myself politely and picked up a copy of some glossy magazine, the front cover graced by a rather sultry looking Penelope Cruz. He shook his head and muttered that he’s rather “bone Rachel any day.” I sighed and nodded and smiled acerbically. I don’t doubt that a lack of judgement of would make the world a better place sometimes. But let’s be honest here; in the worlds of Sinead O’Connor, ‘he’s a fool.’

Manage your Manila

The other day, I sold a woman over a hundred dollars worth of books on how to save money. She handed me her Amex card with a wincing,, a blush of relief spreading over her features when it came up ‘Approved’.

Outside on the pavement, a busker man sat cross-legged on an upside down bread crate. He played an acoustic, not very good rendition of ‘The Entertainer’ over and over again all afternoon. It was relaxing, bordering on torturous. People dropped money in his hat but not very much. I stood at the counter and de-bugged the DVD security tags, humming along when I didn’t feel like throttling him.

The corporate bookstore, with its tangled web of sales targets and conversion rates, chews through managers like rats chew through muesli bars. Someone is appointed to take charge of the chain in question, given a bumped up salary, a pokey office and a bunch of cheap flowers and told to increase sales by X per cent by the end of the fortnight. They think they can do it, and they usually do. They wipe off their damp forehead, congratulate the apathetic floor staff and head home to their loved one or cat and open a bottle of something cold and bubbly.

And then, the next week. The corporate wigs, hair full of slimy product and usually sporting cheap, well pressed suits appear in the pokey office again, another sales target in the manila folder. Sales are good but they CAN be better and, as manager, that is their responsibility. And so, our heroine of sorts (although keep in mind that she is dull, power hungry and too dumb to realise she will never earn the respect of anyone) widens her eyes and devises some elaborate scheme involving a free pen for anyone who spends over a hundred bucks or a Twilight-themed day in which every customer who knows the magic answer to some trite, semi-literate piece of trivia goes into the draw to win a free New Moon DVD. The staff groan and co-operate, mainly because they are also promised a piece of the meagre prize pie; a free cinema pass if the sales threshold is reached by the end of the day. You see, the manager also has to manage her staff in order to meet the target, otherwise she’s in hot water (and we’re not talking about those dreary instant coffees she’s beginning to knock back with her eyes closed every morning after a night of restless sleep).

And so it goes on. Week after week. Sales targets; conversion rates. Men with round faces holding manila folders invading much needed personal space. Instant coffee scooped out of the jar with shaky hands. Coupons. Staff with twisted, resentful faces. Morning meeting speeches involving phrases – ‘We all need to pull together guys’ and ‘Only five more sales each per day’ – that don’t have the desire effect. Sleepless nights. Resignations. Personal vendettas. Cold sweats. No time for reading. Fractured dreams about Reaching Target.

Eventually, the manager snaps. Her eyes are wide with something other than excitement and she meets her corporate oppressors with snappy, bitter remarks and shrugs of her tense shoulders. The time for jokes has long passed. They try to rope her into a seemingly fail safe promotion involving Lonely Planet travel guides but she shakes her head and demands a holiday. They sigh and send her off and know that she won’t return; the nerves in her brain too frayed to stay focused on line graphs. The rest of the staff are kept in the dark about this, thinking only that their leader has abandoned them in a time of need and are not so secretly relieved to hear that she will not be returning to rule with an iron (although very well manicured) fist.

The corporate heads gather, hover less than gracefully over the morning meeting and pick apart what is left of the staff. There have been a handful of resignations (or ‘quitting’ as it is known in the retail world), most likely caused by the anxiety waves radiating down the management ladder. Their manager, they are told, has ‘moved on.’ She has left the high life to open her own cafe in a town much too small to even mention, feeling the sudden need to leave the high heels and budgeting book behind in favour of a baker’s oven and a cupboard full of scone mix. Nothing is mentioned about the breakdown, the headaches. The claw marks on her office walls are sanded down and the whole place repainted a nonthreatening shade of peach.

‘And this,’ the head-est of the head honchos exclaims somewhat grandly 'is the new manager.'She stands before them beaming. She begins to spout some sweet sounding words about her love of books and the good times that will fall upon everyone involved in the coming weeks and months. There are a few scattered claps and the day begins. Our second heroine of the piece feels a sense of achievement and picks up the manila folder in front of her.

And all around this, all through this and before and after and during, people buy books that make them happy. They read dramatic plots of heroes and villains and people falling through the cracks of life and leave the shop clutching plastic bags full of stories, oblivious to the real life stress and heartache dusting their covers.

Stress in the Afternoon

Yesterday, a fat, bald man in a mustard yellow turtleneck sauntered up to the counter with a pile of six Last of the Summer Wine DVDs and a copy of Model Airplane Monthly. He licked his lips incessantly and asked for two copies of his receipt. For the rest of the afternoon, he wandered around the shop, bringing small bargain buys to the register and repeating the procedure over and over again. A book about the Pyramids. A packet of pens. A bookmark with a Celtic pattern on it. Rinse and receipt, rinse and receipt.

The customers are the key to any retail job. It is their cameos that separate one hour from the next; their smiles and outbursts that turn that frown upside down or leave you with a severe case of the afternoon doldrums. The staff are there for better or worse; Vinyl Bitch and Riot Wmmmn, unglamorous as they are. But you never who which spacey patron is going to amble into your life and blow your book-themed mind right off its shoulders.

Take, for example, Harried Mother at One Fifteen. She wheeled her pram up to the counter; one of those cumbersome vehicles with wheels the size of tyres and probably a small engine hidden under the seat. The younger child sat inside, a blonde bubby of about two with snot dripping down both nostrils. He wore a dinosaur outfit and seemed unhappy about it. Beside the pram stood the older child; a girl with a beaming smile and the kind of wide eyed jubilation who might just tie you up and read you Little Women until you passed out. Harried Mother dropped an armful of books onto the counter just as baby bink started to cry.

“Mama, can I give Baby Jason a suck from my lollipop?” The Cherub Girl asked, pulling the orange Chuppa Chup out of her mouth and offering it, Misery-style to the screaming dinosaur baby. HM grabbed the offending candy and handed it back to Cherub, resulting in the dinosaur baby to intensify his screaming level to “everyone in the shop turn around and look” level. He reached out desperately for the forbidden confectionary, clawing with his little arms and straining to yank himself out of his pram straps. His sister took a passive step away from the pram and stuck the offending article smugly back in her mouth. Two old ladies were already queuing up behind this motel crew, pretending to look politely at birthday cards and averting their mortified eyes.

Baby Jason let out another embittered howl and HM, juggling credit card and a vibrating iPhone whipped around and hissed at her daughter “See what you’ve done now, Elizabeth? Stupid.” She then pulled a Julia Donaldson book out of the pile and, with a final venomous look towards the poor girl, told me in clipped tones that “I don’t think we’ll be needing this one today, thank you.”

Elizabeth’s face froze and then, somewhat predictably, burst into tears. She threw the orange Chuppa Chup on the tiled floor where it smashed into a few sad little pieces.

“Mama is the F word! The F word!” she screamed and ran out of the shop. The two old ladies stared after her with their mouths open. Baby Jason howled even louder and strained towards the orange remnants on the tiles below. Somehow, the wretched woman and I had managed to complete the transaction and I tried to give her one of those empathetic “what’s a mother to do?” smiles. As if in response, she reached into her bag and pulled out a packed of Benson & Hedges.

“You never think it’s going to be like this and then it is.” She sighed. “Thank god for these, eh? Oh, love your cardie.” She winked at me and wheeled the screaming child away. The two old women sidled up to the counter, stepping gingerly around the Chuppa fragments.

“Mums can’t be doing it these days,” one of them explained. “It’s all too soft, that big woman on the TV and her naughty stool. Sometimes they just need a good smack on the bum.” Behind them, Mustard Yellow stood quietly, another bargain book in his hand. He licked his lips expectantly.

Two days later, I ruined the very same cardigan by putting it through drier cycles at the local laundrette. It shrunk to half its size.

On the way home, I bought a packet of Benson & Hedges.