The swine flu, like other highly feared and publicised diseases before it (SARS, bird flu), fills me with a little bit of excitement. Not because I'm sadist, but because it brings a dramatic nuance and a sense of commotion to our rather flat and contained times.

In the bookstore a few weeks ago upon seeing numerous copies of Anthony Keidis' autobiography Scar Tissue, I remarked to a friend, "How is this still selling? Hasn't everyone read it already?" When he replied he hadn't, and I admitted as much, I began to realise that due to its wide distribution it has become embedded into our consciousness, making it feel like everyone has read it, when no one actually has. This is a strange phenonemon, but definately not an isolated one. The actress Meryl Streep is another good example. Despite being so acclaimed and prolific, has anyone actually seen her films? (Except perhaps The Devil Wears Prada and Mamma Mia!, and if this is the case, you should admit to neither.)

This time of year evokes the song "Young Pilgrims" by The Shins, all songs by The Decemberists, Annie Proulx's short stories (they are synonymous with clear blue skies and stiff denim jackets), the smell of firewood and the texture of flanelette sheets.

Polarising characters of fiction: Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, Carrie Bradshaw, Lauren Conrad (more or less fictional), Edward Cullen.

Having now been blogging for an entire month, the reception has been mixed. Lauren Perkins, still perplexed by the idea of a blog, was harsh. "It's just slabs of writing and pictures... Like who would actually read it? What the fuck?!" (However, upon learning that the blogs were my own work, and not just copied and pasted from other sources, she claimed she would review her decision. "Oh, so you wrote what's on your blog? I'm going to go back and read it now.. I thought you just got stuff from newspapers.") Jack Talbert claimed that whilst it showed signs of promise at the beginning, my blog lapsed into a crude whirl of "pussies, sex and mandarins". Brodan was slightly more kind, claiming whilst it was sad that this is how I'm spending my time, the blogs are well written. Leading the list of fans was Lia 'Lightbulb' Boulton, who admitted when she logged on and there were no new entries she became suicidally depressed. Others were yet to form an opinion, most notably Chris Whitton, for he has yet to look at the site, for fear it would "have lots of big words in it."

In Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the novel's protagonist, college professor Chip Lambert, teases a student he is sleeping with by "running his erection up and down the keyboard of her computer, and applying a gleaming smudge to the liquid-crystal screen." The New York Review of Books calls it "the first great American novel of the 21st Century."

Notorious local child star Chris Whitton (a less intriguing Macaulay Culkin, a more loveable Hayley Joel Osment) heads off today to do the rite-of-passage Greyhound bus trip across America, and spend an inappropriate amount of time in Mexico's gay resorts. Here's hoping he doesn't O.D. in Tijuana, a la Marissa Cooper, or come home with the same disease that killed Freddie Mercury. GOOD LUCK CHRIS!

Never having visited one I had glorified sex shops, seeing them as inextricably linked to some kind of erotic, excitable pleasure. I often wondered what kind of titilating mystery took place inside when passing the inconspicuous store fronts of "XXX World" and "Pleasure Dome". Last week my curiousity was satisfied when a group of friends and I decided to venture up the badly carpeted stairs and enter an adult store for the first time. Needless to say, it was not the hedonistic haven I had in mind. The expected arousing, oversexed ambiance was absent, replaced instead by a suspicious stench. A seedy man browsed the "literature" section, and the desparate employee watched us intently trying to make a sale. Instead we gaped down rows of fetish DVD's (a naked, obese women in her fifties sitting on a bed with a bucket of chicken stared out to me from the cover of "Big Ol' Bitches") until we reached the erotic toy wall, where the 50cm dildo named "The Punisher" took pride of place. Scarlett whimpered at the leather whips and cuffs in the bondage section, Brodan spied a butt plug, and we all ran gagging from the squalid, sleazy premises. This whole experience served not just as a wake-up call that pornography is unenticing, but as a means of hampering any future erections for the rest of my life.

Worthy of two kudos:
-Honeycomb Crush Tim-Tams
-Connoisseur Cookie and Cream Ice Cream
-Underbelly Season 1

I can only sleep on one pillow. This idiosyncrasy, along with other less subtle ones, such as the fact I don't eat cheese (I have disowned friends who have not known this), and when I brush my teeth I make the face of a buck-toothed beaver, essentially make up who I am. These actions are not merely shallow lifestyle choices, and come with their share of disadvantages (eg. I can't enjoy cheese and crackers, and could never star in a Colgate commerical). Yet only being able to sleep on one pillow is the most problematic. The pillow cannot be too thin (otherwise it's just like sleeping on no pillow at all) or too thick (like sleeping on two pillows, and despite being the owner of a relatively long neck, I cannot manage this), meaning that perfect pillow that sits somewhere in between, is so illustrious and hard to find. So imagine my sheer delight when I found the perfect one in a hotel a few weeks back. It was completely compatible with my nocturnal behaviour. Night after night I had ten glorious hours of sleep, and woke up with my head propped up behind this precious piece of manchester. I decided right then and there that I had to steal it. I would take it home, and have my nights spent in absolute comfort. Since coming home, however, I have tossed and turned for hours every night, and wake up in the morning sleeping on my bony elbow, with the pillow strewn across the floor. I can think of no other reason, excpet karma for my petty theft.

Whilst watching the entertaining yet unfulfilling documentary Bra Boys, Nicola chortles through all scenese involving fights and drunken misdemeanours. "That's just rude!" snaps Brodan, as a teenage gang harass a bus driver on screen. Nicola responds that she finds the incident 'funny', and misbehaviour 'glamorous'. "There is nothing glamourous about misbehaviour, it's not even romantic! I can see how something like revolution could be seen as romantic, but misbehaviour is just disgraceful," Brodan replies. But Nicola, with her penchant for N.W.A's Fuck the Police and Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the U.K., completely disagrees.

The real reason why I want to go to Yale.

I often like to bring up controversial topics (Aboriginal equality, evicted reality stars, PETA's attitude towards fur coats) amongst strongly opinionated friends. I do this not only because I love watching heated confrontations (I squeel with glee when I sense one coming), but because it has long been a successful tactic in gaining more friends and a better reputation. Whilst I bring up such debatable topics, I soon fade into the background and become a neutral, passive observer whilst these arguments take hold and heat up. At the end of them, when the opposing sides have now said things they regret to one another, I am clean on both sides, and therefore liked by everyone. Case in point: Mitchell and Izzie's clash over Bill Henson's artworks. Izzie believed they were art, Mitchell labelled them pornographic and what ensued was a screaming match across a quiet classroom, complete with vicious personal attacks. The argument was punctuated only by my meek and occassional commentary ("Good point Izzie", "Yes, Mitchell I see where you're coming from"). Anyway, the whole point is that now I am prepared to bring up a controversial topic, and put my opinion forth. Twitter, the hottest new social networking site (if you believe the hype), has been copping flack from all directions, and leading the charge is my friend Jack Talbert. He believes Twitter to be end of person to person contact, and claims it's sad that we have a fetish to know every detail of everyone else's lives. It's also, he says, sickeningly addictive.
Whilst I understand some of his points (the world's most profilic Twitter user, or "Tweeter", John Mayer posts up to 50 updates a day, which translates to one every half hour, which is a little excessive) Twitter is being unfairly treated.Why is wanting to know details of other people’s lives seen as such a bad thing? Doesn’t it makes us more alert and interesting people? And besides, there is nothing wrong with posting mundane updates ("Andrew is eating jam toast"), because don’t these meaningless things give our lives texture? I’ve also read more interesting “tweets” than monotonous ones, and if anything, Twitter’s 160 character limit stops rambling and makes you more succinct, in the way a blog (such as this one) cannot. If this was a “tweet” it would simply say: “DON’T DISS TWITTER”.

Changeling, like all movies by Clint Eastwood: stark, violent and one step off being truly moving.

45 year old co-worker holds up a tacky, discounted statue of Jesus nailed to the cross, and asks "Is this what happened at Easter? Can I mark this as Easter stock?"

Mandarins are back in season, meaning that inappropriate innuendo is also ripe again. Tight, wet mandarins versuses loose, dry mandarins is an issue of hot debate. Whilst Chris prefers his mandarins "all tight and juicy", it is a known fact that I am an avid fan of the tight and dry.

People's favourite magazines essentially reflect who they are. Sophisticated, style-minded Brodan reads Vanity Fair, clean cut Kim reads Cosmo with the sealed-section torn out by overpotective sister-in-law, and "quirky" Izzie basically has a lifetime subscription to Frankie. However, despite a plethora of publications for every age and interest, I cannot find a favourite. TIME magazine is basically a love letter to Obama, and its pages are too thin. Rolling Stone with it's strong, pretentious focus on Australian rock music is mundane (call me unpatriotic but no one really cares about John Butler or Bernard Fanning). All men's "lifestyle" magazines tread a fine and tired line between being masculine and fashionable, and the result (articles on penis size, metrosexuals and perfect women) comes off looking so superficial that the whole genre is just a gaping, monstorous void. The sad thing is, Zoo magazine, with its shameless jokes and advertisements for Portable Pussies ("disguised as a torch, so your missus won't get suspicious") provided a good half an hour of enjoyment for my friends and I. ("How photoshopped are her boobs?!!", "Surely you can't have sex sitting like that!") It may be lowest common denominator material, but at least it's not pretending to be anything it's not.

Things that are getting too much exposure, and therefore I am sick of hearing about:
-Hugh Jackman
-The global financial crisis

Greenwood Hotel, Thursday night. The sole clientele are attractive, affluent high school students, none of whom are 18, but all of whom are armed with fake I-D’s. “IT’S LIKE FUCKING GOSSIP GIRL IN HERE,” screams a friend over the thundering dance music as we enter. The air is thick with good-looking flirtation. I mutter something back about how the club is like “walking into a General Pants commercial” and how “everyone looks like Luke and Georgia” (see below). We are stunned tourists, in a deep culture shock, on foreign land. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of raben shoes and trilby hats, and the amount of North Shore muscle, we do one dazed lap through the labyrinth of bustling bars before leaving.

Currently reading the 1992 Rolling Stone yearbook. Frequent references to AIDS and Nirvana.

The feeling when driving through the main street of my myopic small town, coming home from more vast and exciting places, is comparable only to sticking my head into a plastic bag: suffocating.

You know how there are those cliche teenage moments on TV, or whatever, where the child feels that their parents don't really know them at all. I had one of these moments in the video store yesterday, when my dad suggested we rent Die Hard.

Currently on the hunt for Nicola Cooper's top secret blog, and want you to join. From her own admission it is a verbose, badly edited account of characters including a feminist vegetarian, an amateur royal and a rake thin genius who says lots of mean things. It goes under a pseudonym. Reward: $200.

There are times when I wish I was born in England, so I could be a backpacker in Australia. That way I could get hideously drunk and sunburnt, and wear ugly sandals and get away with it. Does this make sense?

From time to time (okay, so it may be more frequent than that) I wonder if Miley Cyrus is a virgin. Although most people claim I am 'a sick freak' for thinking about the sex life of a sixteen year old, it is undoubtably a very polarising question. On the 'yes' side: she is a strict Christian and a Disney star. On the 'no' side: her dance moves in 'See You Again' hardly scream chastity and she dates a 20 year old. This same thought about virginity and child stars crosses my mind everytime I see River Phoenix in Stand By Me. Was he a virgin when he made that movie? 'Yes': he was only fourteen. 'No': he was a very mature fourteen year old. This question was answered the other day when reading a magazine article in which Rob Reiner (Stand By Me's director) fondly recalled how Phoenix lost his virginity in a tent on the set of the film. Anyway, this all just goes to show how some of my 'demented, perverted' questions eventually get answered. I am one day hoping for similar closure in the case of Miley Cyrus.