2001-03-31 :: 2:52 a.m.

tonightidid 2: the australian outback

Soundtrack: none

Tonight was a fine night out on Brunswick Street. Robyn and Liz had planned on going to The Vegie Bar, and being less than enthused with the institutional cooking I was going to have, I joined up with them. Melissa and I had plans to get a drink, and since she rarely gets to go out with her waitressing, I invited her to come join us, and so we four had a delicious meal there. Justin¹ came by and joined us in media res, but he'd already eaten, so he just got a smoothie.

It's odd, but I eat more and more vegetarian food here. Meat is in my diet for sheer convenience (not to mention sheer deliciousness), but nearly every lunch I have now is veggo. Most of us felt the Mexican: we split a bunch of nachos, had the burrito for the main course (myself included), all of which was excellent and tasty and mouth-invigorating. But then the cheesecake came -- and my good God, this was the finest cheesecake I have had in years -- literally years. I fell back off my stool, lying against the wall with my eyes closed, mushing the fatty deliciousness into my palette; I was in such gustatory delight.

But here, here comes the best part: the people that sat next to me. First was a lady from Scotland. She had flown in for a wedding (the bride and groom were there too), and she offered me a taste of her gnocchi. I passed, but was amazed at her making this beyond-normal-bounds friendly offer to a stranger immediately upon meeting, without even getting a name. When the wedding party left, a bunch of punk kids sat down. One of them had a Jawbreaker shirt on; it was made to look like a Morton's Salt container, the little girl with the umbrella, navy, all that. I asked if that was Jawbreaker, the American band, and the mouth above the chin patch said "Yes." Then I asked if they weren't broken up, and he said they were, and I think he explained that they became Jets to Brazil. I had it mixed up with Jawbox and Burning Airlines (too much "Jaw"). Finally I asked if he knew what that logo was for, and indeed, he did -- a friend had even brought back a can of Morton's² for him.

I got to talking to the punk kids, and it turned out that the girl next to me, Elly (not Elly), had worked in Charlottesville. Shocker! We got to talking about my hometown, and she'd bought her snowboard there, at a shop I used to pass every time I drove to Brent's before I changed my route. The Jawbreaker guy's name was Daniel, and he began lecturing me on proper Melbournian slang ("It's 'cun-eyes' -- you drop the 't', if you said 'cunt-eyes' the guy would fall over laughing."). Daniel's friends trashed him with an inordinate amount of shit-giving. Elly and I bonded over our shared geographic background, and I could not get over the world connecting back on itself in a lovely little recursive moment. I told Elly and her friends that I needed to see a good rock show and would Elly please call or email me, please? We'll see if he follows through on that. The cheesecake, Elly knowing the roads back home, the nice people around me, the food being so tasty, it was all just good. Good in a simple way, an easy way.

After dinner we went to Polyester's, which is a strange sort of book store featuring all kinds of taboo materials. We peeked through a book on genital piercings and tattoos (as bad as it sounds, I had to wonder how some of these people urinate without making a garden-sprinkler style mess) and I perused the extensive Henry Rollins section. The most interesting book I came across was a hardcover about graffiti, with lots of background on legendary artists and their work. I can't read half of what they write, but I am beyond impressed with some of the stuff these people make with nothing but spray cans. The book was $AU68, which is about $US34, so I held off, but I may return for it.

Melissa and my original plan had been to go for a drink, so we began searching for a bar. At first I wanted to go check out Gin Palace, but A) it was very far away and B) getting to Brunswick takes enough work to make staying there sound like a good idea. We ended up at a pub called Perserverance, and a boy/girl acoustic act was performing covers. I hesitate to call it a pub because it has such nice decor and the music wasn't loud and invasive. It was easy to relax and enjoy the conversation. It's kind of a pub/beer garden/lounge sort of setup.

By the time we'd left I'd had 3 G&T's and a kamikaze, and at dinner I'd had a Cooper's Red. I guess you could say my head is a little heavy, but surprisingly, not much more than that. The bill was about $20 at the bar, and I'd used my Visa, but forgotten to sign off on the tab, so the bartender (a bit overweight) gave chase and managed to catch me before I'd gone too far. Good thing, since being without my credit card in Australia would be less than ideal. Funny though -- it's "Void" according to the worn-through signature strip, and no one gives me any grief whatsoever.

Melissa is meeting her boyfriend from Belgium at the airport tomorrow (er, today) morning, so she left the group, and then a couple hours later, the bar began to shut down. Post-Perserverance we sauntered down Brunswick and stopped at two bars, each of which featured women dancing on the counter. Bar La Sangria was playing Frank Sinatra (doing it his way), and two women were up on the bar, dancing away with each other, while oblivious couples tongue-lanced at the bar over, what else, sangria. The other bar had a girl in a plaid Catholic-schoolgirl fantasy skirt shaking her all to Britney (the skirt made it extra-surreal in a music video sense). The sightseeing lasted for a few minutes, and then we hit the Bullring, where Robyn insisted on dancing since we'd just had Latin dance lessons a few days ago. I wasn't really in the mood, so she grabbed Justin (!) and cajoled him on to the floor, where he swiveled his hips back so as to avoid looking too sleazy, like he was coming on to her or anything. Secretly I was hoping he would just pull something, but then again, Liz and I were right there. We danced a bit, satellites that didn't feel like coming in contact, moving in orbit around the larger body of Robyn and Justin. One dance later, we were all ready to go.

We just dropped off Justin and Robyn at Intersection Cafe. Neither Liz nor I was hungry enough to hang any longer, and Robyn needs to make up her own mind. I told her I wasn't going to pull the trigger for her, so throughout the night we were making funny little hand-gun motions at each other.

Kirsten goes to school with me and lives one college over, at St. Hils. She said every morning the gossip flies at breakfast and people who hooked up get "spooned" at lunch, meaning people bang their spoons around them on the table in order to publically humiliate those who hooked up the night before.

We'll see if there's anything to spoon for today in a bit, but my prediction says no. Regardless, it was a lot of fun just going out tonight. The conversation wasn't super deep (a little about relationships, a little about jobs, nothing aspiring towards epiphany status), but it was fun, and the company was good, and I am glad to just have so many nice things to report.

Nice things happen here frequently, but rarely do they all pack in so well into one single relatable experience. I find myself wanting to enter short, clipped sentences, but never find myself near a computer when they hit, and so the moments from the past week or so have been lost, good though many of them were. For example, on Wednesday, at the Clyde and PA's, I talked to Alicia about relationships, and the strange way our friendship has grown and never would have at school. I was too tired to write anything about it though. The more I settle into the easy routine of letting days go by here, the less I feel like journaling. Because how interesting is it to say "Today was nice! Here's how nice it was."?

[ Added at 4:10PM: Who cares if it isn't interesting. More niceness: after that talk with Alicia I came home and found Claire in the computer lab, and had a long talk with her about her laconic way of speaking, and why that is. Claire isn't an introvert, so how did she find such a balance? But I could tell this wasn't a subject she felt too comfortable discussing at the moment, like it was something that just needed some time to mature. So I got nowhere as far as conclusions, but Claire is just one of those people that are good to talk to. Her eyes matched her Foo Fighters hoodie, and she said they have a way of doing the chameleon thing. Last Saturday (I think it was) I went to Bennetts Lane, and enjoyed brie, camembert, and shiraz while listening to the Yvette Johannson Quartet do a bunch of standards -- not a usual night out for me, it was perfectly low-key, exactly what I wanted. It was also a lot of fun because I got to talking with Adam and David about writing and life and David really went off on it; he's just out there. These little anecdotes are just here to make me remember that I was right when I said that I'd be back on the happy track. The day-to-day pressure is less than back home, a feeling that comes from the mixture of responsibilities that are thousands of kilometers away, and the general "when it happens, it happens" attitude that pervades here. I'm almost fearful that I'll feel a stress re-compression when I go back to the States. ]

Then again, so many journals are just seas of negativity and frustration, a little cheer could never hurt, right? On that note, I'll end this todayidid business and head to bed. I've been doing a fabulous job of avoiding school reading in favor of fun reading, and I intend to keep that streak alive tonight. If I can hold my increasingly drowsy eyes open, that is.

---

¹���The subtext I've left out is that Robyn is somewhat interested in Justin. She has a boyfriend back home, but it seems like this is going to win over at some point. It blows my mind that Justin could be getting some tonight if he just laid it out on the line. It makes me wonder how many times you hold back from saying what you mean and miss out on opportunities, be it with someone you like, or with your job, or whatever. How many opportunities were passed up for the wrong reasons?

²���Back in the day, I actually knew a girl who was an heiress (of sorts) to a large portion of the Morton's fortune. Her dad was some high up executive, hence the "of sorts" since she wasn't really a biological Morton or anything. She was a bit of a party fiend, tried it all early, and had a lot of boy issues. She flew around on her dad's private jet. Alison, I think her name was. Hm.