Page 123

I've been tagged by Tina. Here are the rules:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
(No cheating!) Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

______________________________________

Okay. Well, the nearest book to me right this second is the Griffith Review, Autumn edition (topic: Re-Imagining Australia), my birthday present from my parents, the first edition of four, which arrived in the mail today. Yippee. I love the Griffith Review. I hope one day to have something published in it. This issue is quite political, so this may be terribly boring.

"Moving beyond a system based on a half-baked colonial framework has long aligned with popular aspirations. Today business remains keen to support quite dramatic surgery to achieve simpler, more efficient and uniform approaches to national regulatioin. How to fix the problems of federalism is again a major political topic."

Well, it's kinda interesting to me, but I won't get angry if that sent you to sleep :) I find politics and issues of national identity and all that stuff interesting ponderings these days, feeling as I do like I'm kinda a bit out of the matrix. I don't feel as patriotic as I once did. (Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, apparently, and so I'm finding other places to take refuge in before I return there :)

Consider yourself tagged if you want to play.

6 Quirks About Me

Erin tagged me with this cool meme. But the buck stops here. I am allergic to tagging others with memes. So therefore I don't need to post the rules.

• I felt a giddy sense of abandon about breaking the rules for this meme. Is that childish? I have always had a distate for rules that just seem to be there for no reason (not that the rules for this meme are there for no reason, but I choose to not follow them). I enjoy sticking it up rules that are just stupidly there to help people stop thinking and follow blindly. I think lots of people want to be told what to do instead of feeling/thinking/hurtling/discovering their way through life
• I'm not good for much before about 11am (unless it's reading, blogging, eating, writing or meditation. Please don't talk to me before about 11am; I'm not here). The job I'm doing now starts at 12pm and that suits me just fine. This used to make me feel like I was a freak. Now I think it's just my body clock.
• Once when I was a kid I went through this phase of drinking orange juice and milk mixed together. It sure tasted nice at the time (but the milk would curdle into the orange juice and just the thought of it now makes me rather ill). Who the hell knows what that was about? Around about the same time I also did a green poo. Perhaps the two are related
• I'm pretty casual about a lot of things, but have a touch of anal retentiveness with certain things (like Heather with her towels needing to be facing the same way). I can't tolerate a crookedly hanging picture
• I have this funny bit of toenail sticking out of my little toe. It's like this little spike of nail that has decided to grow up out of the side of my toe. It doesn't grow very much, but every now and then I have to cut it off. It's hard to cut it with scissors so I bite it off with my teeth (which was much easier accomplished when I used to do yoga but I can still get there)
• Sometimes when I'm looking at something, I will trace the outline of it's shape with my finger while I'm looking at it. Sometimes I do it with my toes.
• I can't remember what your bloody name is, but I can recite my 12 digit bank account number. I remember car number plates pretty easily too. But I can't remember much else. I think remembering things is overrated. But then maybe I'm just thinking that because my memory is so shit
  
• I would rather live in a bartering society. I like the idea of having to first make you a stir fry before I can fill up my doona with extra feathers from your goose. Or whatever.
• I know, it says 6 quirks, but I'm on a roll now
• I did pretty badly in high school, then went home and read copiously books from the public library. Even then I had problems with the institutionalisation of things, henceforth making them rulebound and people confined to boxes where they could do their worst work
• My ex and I are planning on having a Divorce Party. We are going to have a Worst Man. Mocca is going to take my rings off and then at the end I'm going to leave in a car and drive away. The last bit is maybe a bit too sad and bittersweet. But the rest of it we were laughing our heads off and I really think maybe we will do it. Maybe it can be a fancy dress party, seeing he loves dressing up so much now ;)
• The newly-started-up mag where I am hoping to have my short story published added me as their Facebook friend. I responded by writing on their wall to "publish my bloody story, would you?" :)
  

7 Random Things About Myself

I now know I'm a real, rool blogger, because I've been tagged! Thank you to my wonderful new blog bud Eileen. Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
4. Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

Okay, here goes:

1. As a child, I used to eat strange things. I would stand at the window gazing out (daydreaming has always been a feature of my life) and thoughtfully scrape some of the paint off the windowsill with my teeth. I also used to eat the dog's dry biscuits. I was partial to the cream-coloured bone-shaped ones, but I also liked the pink heart-shaped ones too.

2. I once found a piece of chicken meat in my belly button (the flat kind you get from the delicatessen and put in your sandwiches). I have no idea how it got there.

3. I have no idea where my life is going and I don't even care anymore.

4. I love inventing new words. This week's is "foolity" but I'm also really partial to "blerty". I'm wondering what the word "qwerty" would mean if it was a word - which it will be, by next week.

5. I am going skydiving one day in the next year or two. I have no idea how I'm actually going to jump out of the plane when I'm up there ... but I really hope I do.

6. I'm not scared of dying anymore (just of being tortured so please, Papa, let me go peacefully - please! And also, while we're here, can I also not live till I'm 110 stinking away in a nursing home somewhere because that would just kill me).

7. I think being environmentally conscious is a good thing but I still can't take showers that are shorter than 15 minutes. I'm sorry, water catchment areas, for contributing to your lowness, but I just get in there and away my imagination goes. Sometimes when I'm in the shower and I'm singing, I will pretend that I'm on stage in front of an adoring crowd. What a total, complete, utter, egotistical daydream that is. And really totally childish. But it's fun. I also have rehearsal conversations with people, which is a bit scary.

I now tag the following people (I don't like this bit. It feels manipulative. Please don't feel the need to contribute at all if you don't want to): Kent, Tina, Urbanmonk, Cindi, Erin, Barbara, Joy.