the prehistoric oxford boating society

Went to Oxford for the day with my friend Whitey to press our noses against the big iron fences and dream of going to pretty colleges. We jumped the fence and snuck into the Botanic Gardens for a while, they have a big bed of sunflowers that are at least ten foot tall and all the little old wooden boats are lined up in the river waiting. Ate a lot of cookies, was disappointed by the castle, and bought a rad set of plastic dinosaurs from awesome junk shop.

So it turns out I now go to college with Princess Eugenie, which means there is a constant throng of camera men lurking outside the front gates of Goldsmiths. I saw her in the hallway, she looked lost and lonely, it was all very disappointing for my first royal sighting. College is awesome though, it has long black and white checkerboard tiled hallways and its heaps smaller than Melbourne Uni so it feels a little like being back in high-school. Only everyone is much better dressed. I haven't actually started class but I've met all the people on my course and already been given a reading list which should occupy me for the next eight to ten years.

This week I went to visit my aunt and uncle in the countryside, they live in this beautiful little cottage by a huge lake-I also bonded with the people at my work finally, when I discovered that the German girls all love Scrubs, and we celebrated by going next door to the bar where we traded cupcakes for free drinks all night. I'm a little slow so although we were the only girls in the place it took me about an hour to notice all the soft porn on the walls an realize we were in a gay bar. Check out the art in the background-
I've been exploring my local area and its actually pretty cool, we're in the midst of two big local arts festivals at the moment so there are heaps of gigs and art events going on everywhere. I went roaming round Deptford markets, which are just around the corner, yesterday and got soaking wet but I found a mad fully-functioning Super 8 projector getting rained on and rescued it for six pounds! The only Super 8 film I have though is 'Tarzan and the She-Devil'. Last night we went to 'Nail The Cross', the annual New Cross music festival, which had five different venues and rad music and projections in all the different rooms. Saw These New Puritans, Clinic, Archie Bronson Outfit, and heaps of bands I'd never heard of, and fell in love with a tiny grime singer called Micachu who I tried to bribe into coming home with me with blueberry cupcakes. Now I'm horribly hungover and I haven't even started my summer reading even though term starts tomorrow.

New job, new house, new badge...

Today has been a mixture of large failures and small victories:

1. I failed to make any friends. The International Student Vegetarian "Buffet" was in fact one home-made pizza and a bowl of salad in a tiny very shabby church hall. There were about 150 students, most still smelling strongly of airoplanes, all competing viciously over one packet of paper plates and a single sixpack of beer. I had a bit of a freakout when I arrived, because I literally walked into a room full of strangers all already ensconced in conversation, but I overcame this after three solitary glasses of Diet Pepsi and spent the whole night following around one Dutch girl who made the mistake of talking to me. When that conversation faltered (after we had jointly encountered about fifty American cheerleader types, all on exchange together, and two Russian girls in white latex zip-up boots) I made a bolt for the bathroom, tried to chat up one normal looking guy in the toilet queue (who totally snubbed me, you can't blame him), and I then totally panicked and fled down the street. It was, all in all, not a resounding success. Also, there were very definite hints of organised religion in the air.

2. I then didn't have the guts to go home and admit my failure to the housemates who were so eagerly barracking for my success, so I sat in a park staring into the distance and contemplating my friend-less future for an hour. Then I found an internet cafe and watched the whole of Scorpio Rising on full volume, thereby alienating the rest of the customers.

3. I guess the above counts as a minor success.

This is my house-mate Sam (actually sorry thats a cupboard. Below is Sam) who has alerted me to the existence of 'Sleeveface', a website and encroaching world order devoted to taking stupid photographs of people with records over their faces. This is about the most exciting thing to have happened to me for days.

I've been working in the cupcake mine nine hours a day, and sampling my way through the entire range of English ciders at night. They have raspberry and lime cider here! Or blueberry cider! I'm never coming home. Also saw a really cool gig by this guy Jeffrey Lewis from New York who kept pausing in between songs to tell bizarre stories about the rise of communism, in rhyming verse, accompanied by a big book of hand drawn illustrations which he called his "films".

Today at work some bastard stole out tips right in front of us- he just wandered in off the street, pretended to be looking at something behind the counter, and then emptied the tip jar into his pocket! We get paid minimum wage and our tips amount to about 15 cents a day so he can't have ended up with much, though I'm outraged. A girl sitting out the front also had her bag snatched, so clearly Covent Garden is a dangerous place to be.

In other news I built a cupboard for my room from some stuff I found in a dumpster and lugged back all the way from Greenwich on the bus. My biceps are now huge but my cupboard is rad.

Three things I love

Damn, I was trying to upload pictures of the mould I was growing but I'm not quite on top of this whole technology thing. But I do love mould. Meanwhile, I also love tax refunds. I just got two grand back off the government, so I spent the day drooling in an art supply store and bought the most beautiful set of professional artists felt tip pens. They were mind-blowingly expensive though so I only got a range of very muted colours, which is why theres a bit of a recurring theme to some of the drawings on this page. Wow its amazing how quickly this blogging thing soothes you into thinking people actually care about your inane ramblings.

In other news, my housemate Sam and I are in the process of starting up a regular Friday night gig at the Deptford Arms, where he'll DJ and I'll get to have a go at VJing, woot! Since his music taste is eclectic, and mine is just bad, the night is going to be called "Dogs Breakfast". (Although actually I don't think Sam is too keen on this idea).

I hate blogs, they seem like the most self-centered egotistical exercise, but I'm lazy and I'd rather do this than email everybody. London is pretty rad, its crazy how quickly its suddenly begun to feel like home.

I've moved into a house in New Cross, which is right next to my new college, in an area thats fifty percent fried chicken shops and neighborhood drunks and fifty percent big wide tree-lined streets and old beautiful houses. I live in the Garden Flat (at 18 Jerningham Rd, New Cross SE14 5NX London, send me stuff!), which has a blue front door and a big scruffy back garden and three lovely housemates. I live with a couple, Tom and Vanessa, who are both working full time in the city, as engineering eco-science type people, and Sam, who's a Masters student and part time DJ. They've just completely renovated the flat from scratch so everything is covered in paint sheets and smells deliciously toxic. We think we have a mole living under the house because something keeps burrowing along and raising the floorboards, meaning its a bit of a lottery whether or not the doors will open and close each day. Big red double-decker buses go right past my front door, and I'm one train stop from London Bridge so its easy to get into town. My room is little and square and white and brand new pristine clean, so i've set to work destroying it with my brand new set of textas.

I don't start school for another week and a half so I've been exploring London and searching for the perfect bike, in between shifts at my new job. I work in the worlds cutest, brightly colored psychedelic cupcake store in Covent Garden, called Candy Cakes. I work Friday to Sunday making coffees and sandwiches and generally contributing to the global obesity epidemic by stuffing tourists faces full of cake and sugar. The cakes are pretty amazing, they're really bright colors and exotic flavors and they pile them up so high its like working in a little fortress built of cake. Unfortunately, its a pretty horrid place to work since you never get a break, the shifts are really long, its minimum wage, and you end up filthy and covered in brightly colored bits of icing. As soon as my housemates get sick of eating cupcakes every weekend I'll probably start to look for something else.

We're not allowed pets in my new house, which is a tragedy, so the hamster/gerbil I have dreamed of for so long is going to have to wait (or live quietly in the bottom of my wardrobe). I'm consoling myself with our vegie garden, in which there is one lonely beetroot which looks like it needs a bit of love. I've also been trying to feed my way into my housemates' hearts by cooking massive and overly ambitious vegan pies. I may just be trying to distract myself however, from the fact that (as everyone keeps pointing out to me) I have no friends.