Australia, Australia, Australia. We love ya.

So it’s Australia Day, we all got a holiday and another excuse to have a barbeque!

I’ve finally come through my adolescent activist angst surrounding this day (an angst that coincided with the Howard years funnily enough, because what wasn’t to hate back then) and come to thoroughly appreciate the celebration of living in a moderately egalitarian country with a decent healthcare system, great public education and weather that generally doesn’t necessitate a large coat.

But, in addition to these blessings that have been afforded the lucky country (and very much avoiding problems like poisonous creatures on land, air and sea and a tendency to say ‘somethingk’) there are a couple of things that I am particularly happy to celebrate this Australia Day.

-Lamingtons

Whilst there are many different version of when, how and why the lamington was created, one things for sure, it’s as Australian as Vegemite and flat white coffees but not Pavlova, apparently New Zealand had dibs but I’d like to see them prove it! I found out on Tuesday that there’s such a thing as a lamington eating competition and Papa, I want in! I’ve often dreamed of entering an eating competition and unlike pie or hot dog eating competitions I think I could kick a lamington eating competition in the arse with a glass of water and an empty stomach.

-Thongs

There’s nothing more satisfying than the ‘slap, slap, slap’ of thongs against feet. Chuck on a pair of double pluggers and you can go pretty much anywhere and still be well dressed. I totally get why people overseas might call them flip-flops, especially if their already using thongs to describe underpants, but we call those G-strings, call erasers rubbers, call ‘rubbers’ frangas and call everyone mate. If you’re from overseas and are at any point lost in the lingo, call someone ‘mate’, we’ll hear the ridiculous way you shorten the ‘a’ and understand you’re not from round here.

-Fireworks

Australians will celebrate anything with fireworks. Seriously.

‘Cool, I just opened a can of beans!’

‘Yay! Fireworks!’

‘I just brought the cat back from the vet!’

‘Catherine wheels and those Saturn wavy ones that go PAATT-EEEW!’

‘I just passed a clean urine sample.’

‘Whoooo! Golden shower off the bridge!... wait… Eww!’

Australia is renowned for our fireworks, which is weird considering we're a wide brown tinderbox. Our Sydney NYE works started the tradition of insane pyrotechnics and we will continue setting more things spectacularly on fire for years!

-Flying your flag

On Australia Day, you are obligated by law to sport the Southern Cross somewhere on your person, worn on a bikini or temporarily tattooed on your face, if you haven’t gotten it and your post code tattooed on your back already.

We wear our flag on our backs like a cape, which is very enterprising, turning every drunken sunburnt teenager into a dashing superhero. If Australia had a superhero, Aussie Man, his super powers would be getting drunk, starting fights and speaking with a rising infection or somethingk?

-Being drunk

We Australians are number 1 drunkest nation in the world (according to a study I made up). We have an appauiling reputation overseas as Foster’s swilling sots and do nothing to tarnish it. Heck I’m drunk right now, and it’s a Thursday! I would have been drinking since 10 if I had gotten up earlier. But that’s what Australia Day in about. Eating sausages and being drunk. Check and check my friends.

Studio Sounds

From what I gather, people who don’t live in studio apartments have very different ideas of what kind of dwellings they are. Some people imagine giant spaces in restored warehouses with mezzanine bedrooms and bathrooms cordoned off by huge neon fish tanks, the kind of thing you’d see in a Rosanna Arquette movie about Desperately Seeking After Hours Life Lessons for Susan.

Other people imagine roach infested tiny dank dark rooms with enough space for a single bed, where you wash in the sink and there’s a leaking toilet in the corner. When I tell people about my studio, I try to describe it as a large, light bedroom, with a tidy bathroom and kitchen/dining area. Big enough to swing a cat, small enough to open the fridge without getting out of bed.

I read somewhere once that walking into someone’s studio apartment is like walking into their personality cos everything about them is in your face and on display. One quick trip around the room will tell you everything about them, their music tastes, their favourite food, their grooming equipment. I find this a mixed blessing cos whilst visitors can admire my great taste in DVD’s, ornaments and rock biographies, they can also see I haven’t done the washing this week.

Compacted living also gives you an idea the inhabitants priorities. Have they sacrificed owning an oven in order to keep decorative china cabinet? Does their weights machine also double as their bed? Do they have a giant TV and hang the rest of their stuff out the window in a bag?

Yes storage is often an issue. There are only so many places to hide secret things in a studio. Underneath beds or on top of the cupboards is fine to clear some space, but the minute you actually need something your entire life dissolves into a really dusty version of Tetris. Everything might look neat and organised in my house, but open the wrong cupboard and you’re likely to be buried under an avalanche of random shit I’ve stuffed in with a shovel.

Unless, like me, you’ve got a large roof space or a balcony, you might as well you can forget about parties in your studio too. There’s no room for a couch, so entertaining does take place on the bed. I’ve found that this makes bringing dates home exceptionally awkward, even if you were just going to have a cup of tea. With literally nowhere else to sit it’s no wonder some people have got the wrong impression and said ‘well, we’re already here…’

Moreover, whilst bed entertaining (or bedertaining) is fine for watching TV, it’s really terrible for dinner parties. I once went to bed to find someone had stashed pizza crusts under my pillow. Not to mention, if you cook a lot in a studio, all your clothes start to smell like food and you end up with dogs following you around and not one will sit next to you on the train.

Now that I’m considering moving back into a share scenario, I’m gonna have to kerb some of my studio dweller habits. No more storing facial toner in the fridge. The five minute house clean will also be a thing of the past. And my preference of post shower air-drying, naked TV watching and stripping off the minute I get through the front door will also have to stop. Unless my future housemate is exceptionally liberal, I expect my nudity quota to plummet dramatically. I might still be able to get away with naked blogging though…

Oh brother...

To say that I am a bit of a day dreamer is a bit of an understatement. I like to see myself more as a modern day Walter Mitty with a fringe. Usually what’s going on in the real world isn’t half as fun as what’s going on in my head. When I’m out walking, on the train or trying to sleep I get myself into a kind of reverie that can totally block-out the rest of reality. My favourite day-dream is the one about my imaginary twin brother, Johnny.

John Lincoln would be a tall gawky dude named after grandpa, who looks like my dad with eyes like my mum. He’d wear scarfs in the winter, and cut down singlets in the summer, and grows a beard just to annoy Scooter. He could be sent into space as Earth ambassador for ‘guys’.

Johnny and I would live together in a messy home somewhere in Sydney’s inner west. He could look at the kitchen and it would be filthy and, despite my best efforts, our mum would always look disappointed at the state of the toilet. Every other month I would rage and decide I will move to a nice clean girl’s house, but the ever changing parade of Johnny’s hung-over mates, strange girls, rescued kittens and children he teaches guitar in the living room would keep me there, to be their hostess with the mostest.

My dad would have made sure that Johnny was musical and if he wasn’t in a band, he’d working in JB, Billy Hyde’s or Allen’s Music. The discount he gets is worth it and our music collection would rival all. Eventually we’d run out of storage space, and would have to sell the keyboard he bought me one Christmas to make more room. We’d use the cash to buy a slab and drink it in the garden and make up country songs about the people we knew.

Johnny would be handsome, in a hipsterish, groomed way that men are when they were raised with sisters. When we were teens, he was Dingo and my personal Ken doll, with the distinction of being the first guy at school to wear skinny jeans. I would constantly be fielding questions from girls of my acquaintance about him. I’d tell them that he was hopeless, they’d only get hurt, but I knew that it was him who was always falling in love every Friday night only to be heartbroken on Sunday.

We would jokingly resolve that that brother and sister were enough for each other and to spend the rest of our lives together, knowing there was no way we would ever let that happen. I would keep making morning cups tea for girls that I secretly resented and he would keep telling me about his friends that said I was cool. Eventually we would go our separate ways, partner up and marry. He said he'd be a groomsman, because to be a male maid of honour is weird.

I have three sisters, who are the best sisters in the world but if Johnny was there, life would have been different. Johnny would be able to be brave, to deal with life. His eyes are calm and clear. Johnny is all that I am, and all that I’m not.

Weird Stuff on the table Part 1

You know that building in the first Ghost Busters movie which was specially designed to be a magnet for supernatural activity? Well my building is kinda like that, it was even built in the same time period (“Deco… very nice”) except that instead of ecotroplasmic temples and rabid Rick Moraniss, my building is a magnet for crap!

There always seems to be junk mysteriously turning up and lurking around. There was this huge blue velvet winged arm chair that someone chunked out two blocks down and a flight of stairs away for my building. For three weeks it sat there mouldering in the in the rain, I’m pretty sure a neighbourhood cat started to live in there. It changed colour, swelled up like a dead whale and started to smell of cheese. Then, one day, it was gone only to mysteriously appear on our roof, next the flaking veneer sideboard, the water swollen chipboard table and the rusted through barbeque. See! There’s crap everywhere! And I have no idea who puts it there.

There seems to be a culture of putting crap on places in this building. In the Art Deco foyer of my building is a coffee table which has become the unofficial trading post of the building, where people leave anything from CDs to lamps, bags of rice to corduroy paisley shirts. I’ve gotten some of my best 2009 Men’s Health magazines there. Things are arranged in artful little piles, orderly towers or strew across the joint like someone like someone was trying to escape a fire. Today I found this tantalizing object d’art.

Inside were a bunch of old cd’s which is laughable in itself, (CD’s, scoff! As if anyone has those anymore, you might as well have put a pile of 8-tracks and a Sega console out there!) but the selection of rejects was bizarre.

Amongst old Triple J top 100’s and a Matchbox Twenty album were four Queer as Folk CD’s, the soundtrack to Sex in the City Movie 2 and Fame Monster, see?

…. It’s like someone gave up being gay for New Year’s! The bottle, I should mention, smelt suspiciously like vomit. I figure it was worth a mention. I’ll be documenting the weird stuff I find on that table, if I find anything really good, I let your guys know about it before I swipe it.