can you take me back where i've been, boy, can you take me back?

excuse #758828278932 not to write this essay: eatin' peas.

this is small town music, this is big town music

excuse #758828278925 not to write this essay: feels a little degrading to second wave feminism for unqualified me to assess it's achievements in 2000. especially as i'm doing so badly so far. sorry sisters, for not doing you justice in this essay in particular and generally in life.

you were the fugitive but you don't know what you're running from

do you remember being 15 and staring down a certain persons user name on msn, desperate for them to initiate a conversation (or convo, as we called them) because if you did it of course they'd instantly realise that you were interested.
i thought i'd outgrown it.
and sure, facebook's changed the game a bit. now you can pretend to be fascinated by your newsfeed while keeping the "friends on chat" profile pic grid firmly in your periphery. but no. i'll always be that girl, despite the almost complete reversal in the particulars. i'm even listening to the same music i used to. and, tellingly, writing angsty blog entries. what a reversion. and it's self-fulfilling because the more i get like this, the more i hate myself and the less i can believe that anyone could be happy for me to start fb chatting with them. and the more i hope that they'll start fb chatting with me.

alone we stand, together we fall apart

on wednesday afternoon i was on the bus home. i have a funny relationship with wednesdays, my hardest two tutes are on wednesdays and though i usually end up enjoying them, i always get nervous and intimidated beforehand, because i never feel properly prepared and most of the other students seem to really know what they're talking about. but that wednesday had turned out pretty well. i hadn't failed the assignment i'd been so stressed about (i done rather well, in fact) and nothing else was due for a while. i was flicking through my ipod, trying to work out what i wanted to listen to. nirvana was too heavy, kate nash too perky, laura marling too deep and crystal castles too processed. i somewhat randomly settled on the strokes and they were perfect. definitely rock, but not too hard, intelligent but not too complicated. and they build up the perfect feeling of euphoria, they seem to propel you along with them. it'd been a while since i'd listened to them, and i wondered if they had anything new out, or if they were even still together, thinking how great they'd be live. then five minutes ago i finally looked at the "on the bright side" festival's facebook page which people had been liking all week. it's a perth sideshow of splendour in the grass. it's the day before i leave perth to go back to adelaide. it's all ages, so my underage sister/musical twin can come. and the strokes are headlining. this almost makes up for florence and the machine playing my hometown on my birthday, two weeks after i leave it to come back to adelaide.

come back to me, no need to hide

i just need to have a little rant about lily allen and all the shit being chucked around re: will-she-won't-she-retire. i mean, fucks sake.
to start with, let me just say, yes i am a fan, so i am undoubtedly biased. but i still think that people tend to forget that she's an actual real person. it seems to me that she has several reasons to retire, all of them perfectly acceptable.
-she's constantly hounded and criticised in the press and online about her talent (or rather her supposed lack thereof), appearance and personal life. especially in the light of some personal tragedies in the last few years (which, believe it or not, fame and money don't immune you from), wanting to move away from the thing that brought her all this attention is a pretty reasonable reaction.
-after all these attacks she might not be feeling very confident in her abilities as a performer.
-she got into this pretty young, and she might have just found it isn't what she wants to do forever.
i don't know which of these, if any, have any truth in them but it just seems utterly ludicrous that people are making such a big deal out of this (yeah, i know, i'm a hypocrite). would you be bitching if this was someone you know talking about leaving their job?
as for her pushing back her retirement plans, if you had the chance to play with someone of the musical calibre of jay-z, would you say no?
in summary of that jumble of indignation, leave her alone, she's probably having enough trouble with this decision anyway. and for the record, although she should do what makes her happy, i really hope she doesn't retire, at least not permanently, because i'd love to seen her play live again.




and while i'm on a roll, what the fuck is with this nrl bullshit all over the news? "rugby club fudges books" is headlining every news bulletin, for christs sake. it's getting more attention than when they gang-raped that poor woman! what is it about fucking rugby? it's just a stupid game. how many iraqi civilians were killed today? perspective, people. once again, hypocrite.

i speak because i can

an old entry on belle de jour's infamous blog has inspired me to fire this old thing up after my unintentional hiatus of eight months... lucky i have no regular readership.
belle was discussing anonymity amongst female writers in response to a columnists claim that not using your own name was somehow anti-feminist.
it's an interesting point. i hadn't really thought about it but the female writers use of a nom de plume is a long and noble tradition, dating back even further than george eliot and the bronte/bells. In fact, there's really no way of knowing how many ancient authors were actually females in disguise. before the days of paparazzi, identity theft and the internet it would be pretty easy to get away with it. but as to why it's done...
originally, of course, it was because women had trouble getting published, or being taken seriously as writers. nowadays, however, in the "post-feminist" age, are nom de plumes used to disassociate oneself with potentially controversial ideas? or to avoid fame? perhaps the question should be why men are more likely to publish under their real name. might it not just be a matter of the stereotypical "male ego"? or a way to pick up...