After all that schlepping from country to country, you’d think I’d have covered more ground. This can only mean one thing. Must Travel More.

Being gorgeous

Talking about Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Vincent Price

And laughing at people’s misfortunes

And a bit on language that my Writing the Unconscious classmates will probably appreciate

And this from the older, wiser me. Oh dear.

Five hundred years of women in art. Images morphing into one another. And they’re quite similar until the last few.

I’m going to voluteer to be tagged by Penni. So answers to the follwing questions:

1. Four of my favourite jobs
2. Four of my favourite local places
3. Four of my favourite foods
4. Four of my favourite international places
5. Four names of people I am tagging

Favourite jobs

• Teaching/tutoring, particularly the creative writing tutoring I got to do this semester. I love that moment when you see the light flick on in a student’s eyes. 
• Editing – I spent five years as a technical editor at an energy and environment consultancy firm and can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It helped that people were willing to let me resort to violence on occasion. I also learnt how easy it is to collapse into hysterical giggles when you’re five hours from an 8am deadline.
• Content writing, when you’re working with sensible people who actually give you the information you need to do your job. The opposite has also happened and that can turn it into a nightmare.
• Cat sitting. Getting paid to take care of a cuddly, purry cat? Yes please. Poop-scooping is not fun though and is probably why I remain very firmly a dog person, but it was nice to get to know a cat properly.

Favourite local places

• It’s pretty big, but Sydney Road pretty much from Brunswick Road to Bell Street. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked from Coburg to Parkville and back, but it serves up something new each time.  
• Coburg Lake Reserve for picnics or for days when you want to lie out in the sun and read a book next to a lake.
• The CBD for me. Although it doesn’t have nearly as much of a vibe as other cities, it combines some of their speed with a sense of safety I find almost odd at times. Great for when you want to dance your ass off too.
• Ashi and Nuz’s apartment. It’s the comfiest, coziest, homiest place I know in Melbourne.

Favourite food

• Croissants and baguettes fresh out of the oven. Also bagels. Also fresh naan. I am an Atkins aficionado’s worst nightmare.
• Chop suey, which I used to hate until a few years ago.
• Pakistani food of pretty much any description. It is quite possibly the most delicious kind of food on the planet. And no, it is not the same as what you get in Indian restaurants. The spices are different, as are the cuts and kinds of meat. So there.
• The burgers at Munchies’ in Islamabad.

 Favourite international places

• Kathmandu, Nepal. The approach is one of the most spectacular in the world (if you can still look out the window once you realize what you’re looking at is rock, not cloud). The place is small but extremely friendly and, with the right company, is full simply fantastic.
• Still in Nepal, the Annapurna Circuit. I only did part of it, which meant ten days of trekking and camping including a stopover in the village of Ghorepani and a dip in the Tatopani hot springs, as well as dodging rock falls and goats and one very nasty mountain buffalo.
• New York City. It is the most amazing, electric, alive place I have ever been. Living 28 stories above the East River didn’t hurt either. I still squeal when I see ‘my’ building in shots of NYC in movies. (Look left of the UN building. That building that looks like a stack of cigars? That’s it.)
• Hunza in Pakistan, nestled in the Karakorams. Where the Himalayas give the impression of softness, the Karakorams are naked rock. Terrifying and beautiful. In fact, here are some pictures of our trip there in 2006.

Four people I’m tagging

Let me take a leaf from Penni’s book here and say, consider yourselves tagged.

Bless the Daily Puppy. I wandered over to their site again and prompty fell for this little one. Meet Zoey, the dachshund-chihuahua mix.

I love web comics. My latest discovery is 7 Shades of Black by James Treagus. It begins with Violet being so goth that Death turns up thinking she’s dead. Violet, naturaly, seems to develop an…erm…attachment to Death and proceeds to woo him. Oh and then there’s Poe, Violet’s cat, providing social commentary and a general reason. They’re all still getting to know each other at the moment, but I hope this strip sticks around. It’s funny in the way only death and cats can be.

Another discovery, although it’s been around for years is Questionable Content. I started at the beginning as I tend to do and so far the whole indie/emo thing is quite funny. I don’t know how it’s developed over the years, but the drawing’s certainly improved between #27 and #891.

So what do you do when your country’s going down the tubes? You watch funny stuff on YouTube of course. Things like Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry looking disturbingly young as they parody that play about the Brownings. While you’re there, check out the clips from Fry and Laurie (that’s Hugh Laurie as in Dr House on tv).

I dislike middles intensely. I have an idea, I have images, I have symbols, I have a story and I have research to back them all up. I also have a beginning and an ending. All I’m missing is about, oh, 135 lines of middle.

Which really isn’t that much to come up with when you think about it, specially when it’s just the middle that needs to be placed neatly between a tidy beginning and a strong ending. But this one’s different. This one’s surly. I’ve written and re-written and cut and tightened and squeezed and stretched, but it’s still all flabby and jiggly and even saggy in bits and I’m beginning to suspect it ducks out to gorge on candy bars when I’m not looking. Tsk. No discipline.

Since taglines are oh-so-important and so utterly pithy and positively oozing with meaning, I thought it appropriate to spend a bit of time thinking about mine. Because, you know, with a name like ‘mixed nuts’ a blog can so easily be confused with, say, a laundry list and it’s so very important that you explain that it isn’t.

So our search for clever little taglines for our blogs threw up the following for mine:

1. Smarter than the average nut
2. More nuts than you can shake a stick at
3. Because you’re worth it
4. My imagination is more than a match for your reality
5. Nuts eat dementors for breakfast
6. The premium choice for sophisticated hunter-gatherers
7. Evisceration is best done on a cool day
8. Mixed nuts are happy nuts

I’m quite partial to number 3 simply because it’s so beautifully inane. 4 and 7 come from my journals. They’re true, too. Don’t ask. 1,2, and 5 are similar to ‘mixed nuts are happy nuts’ (which Ameel came up with and I quite like) and don’t really say much at all, which is good. As for number 6, the more I look at it, the less I like it. Hmm. Since so much hangs in the balance, I think I’ll simply avoid a decision and cycle through the lot. Hey it gives me something to do while I try to write something worth writing.

If you’ve ever wondered why our voices go up a few octaves and become distinctly sing-song-y when we talk to children (and yes, even a misanthrope like me does on occasion talk to children), Professor Steve Jones may have an answer.

And thereby hangs a tale; for rhythm is essential to language. Children pick up the pulse of speech well after they have learned its vocabulary and grammar. That explains in part why they sound childish and why adults talk to them in such an embarrassing way. The young pick up trochees first (which is why “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” – a perfect example of the form – is so popular and may even lie behind Shakespeare’s use of the same rhythm for the child-like figure of Puck). An ability to respond to the ponderous iamb takes much longer to emerge. When faced with a complicated word like “banana”, infants often turn it into a tasty trochee, or “nana”.