Didn't work. All that came of that little exercise was two freshly covered pillows and the odd notion that males don't really have an anatomical equivalent, so perhaps I should make it my duty to introduce the term 'penis pals' to the world and see how that sticks.

(Eugh there is a penis pal stuck to my arm, get it off GET IT OFF!)

I realised fairly recently that being good at one's job seems to involve thinking that one isn't good enough at it, which in turn makes one feel guilty and try harder. At least, all the people I know who are good at their jobs seem to feel this way. I also feel this way. I assume, therefore, that I must be fairly good at my job. There is something very wrong with reality if the only way to suspect that one is good at one's job is by gauging the amount of time one spends feeling like a fraud.

Who is this One character anyway? He shows up in a lot of my stories. Help! I'm being mind-controlled by a cardinal number.

I am growing out my hair. It's probably been so long since my last entry that no mention has previously been made of the fact that I had it cut very, very short in the first place. Short is great. Suited me. However, it was designed to be carefully maintained and styled, which I didn't mind too much except it meant that an occurrence like running out of 'product' leapt up through the ranks in a wild field-promotion from 'non-event' to 'disaster that means I must not leave the house or be seen by any human, animal or familiar houseplant'. If the walls have ears, then surely they also have eyes and mouths (what good is it to have a means of hearing gossip without the tools to spread it as widely as possible afterwards? Plus it would lend credence my theory that walls feed on Biros), which means that even if I stay indoors, the news of Bad Hair would spread among walls worldwide like INSERT LATEST PANDEMIC HERE until I can't enter any place with walls - buildings, I think they call those - because those walls will KNOW about my hair product catastrophe.

What is our obsession with creating images of ourselves that are entirely unnatural anyway? Why must our hair be vibrant red or deep black or impossibly blonde? Why do we wear shoes that add six inches to our height and bras that serve to act as little more than false advertising? For a man, that must be like opening a packet of crisps only to find that whilst the packet is half a square metre, when you open it there are only three chips lying broken and demoralised at the bottom of the bag.

Piercings. I have my ears pierced. I poke bits of metal through them daily on a whim, which is bizarre. And spacers! You know, those things that stretch your earlobes. The ones that fifteen-year-old skaterboys seem to like so much - look, ladies, I've stretched my earlobes, will you let me touch your boobies now? No! I will not. I might get an extremity caught in your peculiar new hole.

Look, everyone! I have painted my belly button green and there's a fork sticking out of it. I am your new god.

---

Things that have made me happy this week:

- Striding around the neighbourhood with Rubber Soul blaring peace, love and rock into my brain via my iPod.

- Being reminded by a television show how much fun it can be to listen to Stevie Wonder.

- Red wine with cheese.

- Red wine with chocolate.

- Seeing Dylan Moran live at the State Theatre in Sydney - event of the year. If I could be bothered poking around the inside of my head for the scraps of HTML I can remember, that sentence would be in a 70-point font and I'd have hexadecimalled the fuck out of it, blowing it into rainbow-text oblivion.

- Watching my small nephew attempting to crawl. He's not quite there yet, but can drag his bulging baby belly about quite effectively now. Interestingly, he has a thing for electrical cables and sharp objects. Emo baby alert.