Washout.

I understand a lot of things in principle. For instance, I understand why vegetarians believe that eating meat is wrong. They have a pretty solid moral argument, and no amount of Sam Neill is going to change the fact that having canine teeth is a fairly poor excuse for sanctioning mass slaughter.

I understand why we should buy recycled toilet paper. I understand why we should take short showers. I completely agree that cars are a selfish and wasteful mode of transport. But there's a lot of stuff I just don't put into practice.

Here's one. Shampoo. Shampoo is unnecessary. I recently befriended a fellow who does not wash his hair. No, he's not a filthy hobo. He's just a smart enough guy to realise that if he stopped wringing the crap out of his hair with chemicals all the time, his hair would basically sort out its own chemistry.

Thing is, shampoo is a mild detergent. You know, like for laundry and dinner plates. It strips the oil out of your hair and exposes and washes away and dissolves all the foreign bodies (AKA dirt or, more likely, hair gel). That's why your hair feels pretty dreadful after you shampoo it. At a celluar level, it's been scrubbed ragged. That's why you need conditioner. The conditioner is there to re-coat your hair and make it smooth again, plug up all the rough bits you've just exposed.

Why do we need to do this to our hair? We think we need to wash the oil out of it, but the only reason our scalps produce so much oil is because they're periodically sucked dry with hair detergent. If I stopped washing the oil out of my hair, my head would stop overcompensating. Really, all I'd need to do is rinse with water.

But I can't do it. I can't give up shampoo. It would be healthier, but it wouldn't look as healthy. And I couldn't bear the transition period, where my scalp went into withdrawal and secreted too much oil because it expected to be washed and I didn't wash it and so I got covered in oil and had to go around like that for several weeks.

And I can't stop eating delicious lamb and I can't stop buying whichever toilet paper is on special and I really like having a car.

Am I evil?

Amazing achievements of summer.

Yes, you're quite right. I've been a big fat slacker lately. An unexplained non-presence. Two months of shamefully low output and what do I have to show for it?

Well, I have a new shiny Lady Friend! She is totally wrong for me. She is a vegan and she's very grown up and she's a church-going Christian and she plays Dungeons and Dragons. But she's also kinda awesome.

I started an internet business that has made several hundred dollars profit! Not the kind of work I expected to be getting into, but I'm really getting stuck into this jewellery game. I've even started advertising some of the jewellery I've made myself, which is a little bit scary but awesome.

I turned 23. I am now well into my twenties and have no excuse. Uhhhhhhhhh.

Thanks to Lady Friend, I am beginning to learn how to prepare food without dairy, which is a very new thing for me. With no disrespect to those filthy hippie vegans, dairy is my absolute favourite thing ever and I don't think I could ever give it up. Milk goes in coffee, in chocolate, in chocolate, in cereal, in tea, in pastry goods, in ice-cream, in glasses of cold refreshing milk... it's pretty much in everything. And when it's not, there's cheese. Which - I'm totally not exaggerating - is the closest thing to a miracle that has ever happened. Cheese brings happiness to everybody, including angry ferrets.

Behold.

I would do an-y-thing for cheese.

But, Lady Friend won't eat the stuff. And so, for her pretty sake, I am learning how not to serve it to her. She has informed me that there is a way of making "vegan cheese sauce" which involves dissolving dried flakes of yeast. That might sound gross, but if you think about it, no less gross than a coagulated lump of fermented milk fat.

Coagulated lumps of fermented milk fat. Oooohhhh.

Anyway, for our first trick we made a pumpkin pie using coconut cream. It was ludicrously good. Here it was (but isn't anymore - sorry):

By way of explanation, I put pecans on it, then decided it should be decorated like a clock. Lady Friend counted the pecans and announced that it would have to be a 13-hour clock because I'm a bit stupid. But that's okay.

Forgotten Gems.

I've opened a shop on Etsy! Take a look at Gran's Forgotten Gems.

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been bequeathed my grandmother's massive stash of jewellery supplies. When my mother heard I had decided to try making jewellery, she said, "Your grandma's got boxes of jewellery things. I can bring some over if you like!" I said, "Brilliant!"

Might as well have said, "Back the truck up!"

Grandma used to make and sell gemstone jewellery, so she has piles of gems, opals, pearls, chains, pendant settings, earring posts, faceted crystals and all manner of weird little decorative knick-knacks. I received a tower of boxes full of these supplies. Buckets of supplies. Sooo many supplies.

Why am I getting all my grandmother's hobbycrafts? Well, as I've said, Grandma's moved into care. My mother and her siblings have been cleaning out the old house before its new owner knocks it down. Over the past forty years, this building has transformed from a sweet 1950s family home for seven kids, into a wastaway shack stuffed full of collections of knitting wool, matchboxes, newpapers, and mountains of dusty junk. Mum is thrilled to find anything that anyone might actually want amongst the dust. As far as I can tell, the main stuff Mum actually wants is what's in this box:

Yes, it's a box of elephants. Lots of elephants. Etcetera.

Anyway, I visited the house last weekend. There's a big sexy skip in the driveway:

Which is making many trips to the dump filled with bewildering objects like this one:

Mum identified it as a coconut shell, but we can't work out what it's supposed to resemble. Yes, it is utterly coated in dust. No, we don't know how long it's been sitting on the lounge room cabinet. Yes, it went in the bin after the photo was taken.

Mum thinks Grandma probably saved every letter she ever received. While I was there, Mum found some train tickets:

...from 1953. Naww, Australia Day!

But there is beauty amid the flotsam. I got my greasy paws on this:

It's a set of six gilded china teacups. I have been slightly obsessed with pretty teacups ever since I started my adventures on Etsy, so I went into rapture when Mum waved at the whole set and said, "Hey, would you want those?"

*

Anyway, so regarding the jewellery: I realised pretty quick that I wasn't going to be able to start making stuff right away. Partly because a lot of it was made already. But mainly because the boxes of jewellery findings were covering the whole dining table and all the chairs in my dad's house. He does not like clutter. So I launched into cleanup mode and sifted through every box and bag and threw out masses of crap and held onto things like these:

Many, many opals

When I say "buckets of supplies"...

Victoriana!

It's taken me a week, but I have finally gotten things organised enough to open an Etsy shop for this stuff. So head on down to Gran's Forgotten Gems and marvel at the pretty examples of my grandmother's craft. Eventually, once I've made some more space in the house, I might be able to get back to working on my own glorious creations. But in the meantime, let's hope I can get some interest in Grandma's vintage jewellery!

So much to say, but no voice.

As evidenced by the pitiful lack of content this month, I have not been in a writerly state of mind.

When I don't write, it's usually because I'm doing quite poorly. And I'll be honest with you: I'm not feeling the best. I don't feel like eating (which is upsettingly uncharacteristic). I'm very tired. I sleep badly. Work stresses me more than it should. I'm getting out and about, thanks to many wonderful friends and a strange, brilliant, purple-haired girl who I'm seeing a lot of lately... but people are tiring me out and I don't know how to recharge.

I'm going to get some tests done tomorrow so hopefully I'll find out whether there's anything physically wrong. Otherwise I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't bear this fatigue. I have the desire to do things, but I feel kind of like a cigarette lighter that's nearly out of fluid. Flick spark. Flick spark. Flick nuthin'. Sorry, no fire today.

Anyway, for the sake of filling in gaps, here are a few things that have happened to me this month.

One
I have a purple hedgehog.

Imogen (Igor on the weekends)

Two
Because my grandma has gone into care and we are selling her house, I have inherited her collection of jewellery findings. Said collection is currently splayed across my father's living room floor. I'm working on converting it from this...

...into something a little more like this.

Three
I played my first RPG... sort of.
(Fiasco: probably the closest you'll ever come to being a character in a Coen brothers movie. It's not so much a game as a collaborative narrative, and you don't play to win, but to propel yourself and everyone else as far up shit creek as possible. Roaring good fun.)

Four
I woke up one morning literally shouting "ASSHOLE" in Claire's ear. Strange dream.

Anyway, more apologies for my lack of productivity. I hope I start to feel better soon. Honestly, I've come up with plenty of things to write about - things I really want to write about - but even this short update was a real trial.

Wish me luck.

A Divine Performance.

The other night I saw Hairspray, the Melbourne production of the stage musical based on the 2007 film based on the stage musical adapted from the 1988 film by John Waters.

I just loved it. The songs all grabbed me and carried me along with them; the production design was dazzling; the characters are loveably, unapologetically exaggerated. Its themes are so broadly depicted that there is no hint of darkness or moral ambiguity: just joy, and love, and doing what's right.

But, of course, I'm me. So I couldn't go long without overthinking the whole subject into oblivion.

You see, Hairspray didn't start out as a squeaky-clean musical toe-tapper. John Waters created it to be a horrific satire of two of the most hated genres in Hollywood: the teen movie and the message film. Tracy Turnblad is a fat girl pining for the gorgeous teen Elvis on her favourite TV show, but she's also a white hero of the black civil rights movement.

And, of course, Tracy's mother is played by a man.
For some reason, not many people seem to know why Edna is always played by a dude. It's because in the original, Edna was played by Divine, aka John Waters' longtime friend Harris Glenn Milstead. Whenever Milstead played a female character, he was credited as "Divine".

But the more interesting discovery I've made is this: Tracy Turnblad was conceived as a sort of "baby Divine". She's the girl Divine might have been as a teenager. Obese, yet loud and self-assured; a dancer, a romantic, an almost embarrassingly big presence. While she has never been played by a male actor, Tracy is in some sense a drag queen.

And, when viewed this way, the story takes on a completely new colour. The black civil rights movement of the sixties is a parallel to the queer rights movement of the eighties (and, indeed, right now).
The love Tracy feels for Link becomes something different and has far less chance of being requited - yet, wonderfully, it is.
Edna Turnblad, the miserable agoraphobic housewife, is a person who has spent years in a closet for fear of the world outside. Her daughter Tracy is the next generation, bold and determined and ready to be seen - and loved - by the world.

I leave you with a video you will almost certainly hate: "I'm So Beautiful", a disco hit performed by Divine in the 1980s. The thing I like about Divine (certainly not her singing voice) is that she was a drag representation of a woman, but not a parody of one. She was absolutely, unequivocally, herself. A versatile actress (as I said, it was Divine, not Milstead, who was credited for her performances); daring and shameless; fat, ugly and kinda grotesque, but just try telling her she should be any different.
No goddamn way.