No need to nightmare alone

This has been doing the rounds and if you need a bit of unsettling I reccommend it. And now this one. Oh geez. Officially, I've never been more freaked out by comics. Maybe because I don't read them, but still, there you are.

Amour propre

This is getting ridiculous, but considering it probably has a pretty short shelf life, I'm going to enjoy it, and this is what I'm going to enjoy: fuck, I am a total peice of ass. I can hardly keep my hands off myself. It's all the running and Fitocracy and rope skipping and delicious subtropical fruit instead of Belgian chips and beer. I am just . . . so . . . hot.

That's awful to say, isn't it? But it's not that often people really enjoy the way they look, so I'm going to enjoy it. I'm sure in a few more weeks or even days I'll be back to thinking I'm really ugly and could stand to lose another 10 pounds, and in a few more years I'll be so swollen and damaged and exhausted with babies or just life that I won't even remember looking in a mirror and wanting to fuck myself more than almost anybody in the world. But for today, I'll just enjoy.

All the more remarkable as Romola has been here and she's been baking desserts and I've been eating them, a lot of them, probably enough calories to keep a small refugee camp going for a month. Holy SHIT, were they good. Here are two:

Zucchini chocolate muffins
Carrot cake with cream cheese icing

Even though Romola's visit rounded off two weeks of having houseguests and I'm happy to have my space back, as is the F-word, I'm still totally bummed out she's gone. She and Rodelinda hold a very special place in my heart, on their own and us as a unit of three, and Melbine and a few others hold the same sort of place; this place of having been my friend and my partner in silliness for almost half my life so far, and having the same sort of beginning-of-adulthood experiences.

I'd be lying if I said part of that wasn't the same beginning-of-intellectual-beingness experiences. Maybe that sounds like pretensions to intellectuality (sic?) that aren't appropriate, but there you are - our brains were trained in quite similar and I think largely positive ways. That undergrad degree helped knit some pretty lovely bonds. I don't know what subject I'd push my kids into, but I think I'll push them into something where their brains'll get a chance to develop in parallel with a bunch of other people in relative intimacy. Probably something where they have to share a dorm with their classmates. I think that's mostly what did the trick. Just as long as it's not the army or brothel school or something.

New houseguest this one, from undergrad this time, and it's substantially more relaxing. And it follows up a really, really nice city break in Brisbane to celebrate my birthday. What a wierd town that is. I guess it'd be more normal if we explored it more? I don't know. It seems too big for what it is. We kept ending up at South Bank, one of the most successful, if highly disturbing, civic embodiments of Star Trek I've ever seen - for the art gallery, for a showing of Pygmalion, for the modern art gallery - or else we were in New Farm, where the hotel was. And that seems to be all we bounce between when we go there, on the river, or else by foot.

Chinatown's a dead loss there. Where are all the Asians? I had been promised Asians. Oh well. We still managed Shanghaiese, Korean and Japanese cuisine within the three days, and the Shanghaiese cuisine was quite good. Yay for soup dumplings!

The modern art gallery was actually fucking great. I don't remember the last time I enjoyed an art gallery so much. Maybe because I finally found all the Asians there. I do talk in generalities so I will about art as well now; I find in terms of art peices created in the last five to ten years Chinese and Taiwanese art speaks to me more than white person art, probably because the art I see from there is intended to. It's intended to mean something to people besides the artist. Maybe in China and Taiwan itself the art scene is as full of self-obsessed wankers as the art firmament is here, but the stuff that makes it into Anglo galleries is awfully communicative. And the trip to the art gallery yesterday was a bit of a kick in the face, especially after spending so much time in L--- where any art up for sale anywhere is all fucking hippie wank. Well, at least they're putting themselves out there.

Anyways, this was awesome. This was awesome, and this was awesome. Although that last one is actually Australian. This was a real kick in the head, and so was this, though that last one is some sort of German. So it wasn't exclusively Asian charm, just heavily so.