Fever dreams are weird. I should probably write them down, such a wealth of possibilities. But that would require focussing, and that just isn't working at the moment.

My throat is just a big ball of ouch. My head is stuffed with cotton wool. Coughing is bad, because it scrapes my throat raw and makes my head ring like a bell. That, of course, doesn't mean I'm not doing it every ten minutes. Sneezing is an adventure. I'm going through tissues at an alarming rate.

Remember how gross-out Dee gets when she gets sick? Welcome back.

Tonight is Halloween, and J² has gone to a lot of trouble to organise a party of the (hopefully) uber-gothic persuasion. He's certainly going to town. I'd feel bad if I didn't go. Like I'd let him down. So I'll make an appearance, emblackened and all, but just a short one. Then it's back here, and into bed.

Doctor's appointment tomorrow. Hurrah.

R^y is a real worry...

See The Prime Number... uh... producing Bear. Courtesy of R^y.

I am sicker than thou. I am some sort of guardian angel of the flu. I feel awful.

Woke up diseased. Cursed everything. But it's just got worse during the day, and I'm really annoyed. In a pathetic, droopy sort of way. I can't afford to be sick now, not with so much work to do in the next two weeks. Why couldn't this have waited two weeks, and then I'd have all the time in the world to be sick.

Blah. Meep. Muy. I wanna go back to bed. I'm going back to bed. G'night, folks.

Ugg: Where are you going next year?
Me: Oh, I'm staying here. I'm going to be anti-social and irresponsible and all those things you can be when you're not a tutor.

Ugg: You're staying?? Hang on... won't that make you a fifth year?
Me: Yep. I'll be the only one.

Ugg: So, you going to fuck the system?
Me: I may give it a gentle grope now and then.

There's a very cool exchange student from America/Canada and she's cool because she just cut my hair and it's cool! (See what hanging out with North Americans does to my vocabulary?) Short, except for two long bits framing my face. It looks like comics Storm. Or Tabitha from Boy Meets Boy. My longer bits are shorter than either of them, but they'll grow. That's what hair does, right?

Jesus fuck! They have gone and made one of the most irresponsible, least approachable, most obnoxious, least respectful and generally fucking moronic gits in college a goddamn tutor.

(Jett, you say I don't swear enough any more? That's just because I haven't had anything good to rant about for ages.)

Why, WHY in God's name, would you make tutor a nitwit who doesn't respect others. Doesn't respect them, their property, their privacy, their space. The sodding bastard thinks nothing of just wandering into someone's room if they're not there and borrowing something. You're going to give him a motherfucking masterkey?? You fuckwits!

AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!

Now that I have vented this, I'm off to write a much more eloquent, erudite and hopefully persuasive letter to the (not-much)esteemed principle of this establishment, begging him to regain his sanity and rethink this fucking stupid decision.

Oh, but at least they gave a tutorship to J^e. So obviously they had one moment of clarity within their morass of idiocy.

Because Shauny has really good ideas a lot of the time, and today I'm stuck for things to blog about: Things that scared me as a child:

1. The concept of things under my bed. I think this stemmed from an episode of Doctor Who (why were kids ever allowed to watch that?) involving giant maggots. I always leapt into my bed from halfway across the room, and lay in the perfect middle, afraid they would reach around the sides and get me.
2. Showers. That came from watching IT at too young an age. (Me and watching things, I dunno...) I would shower with my face-washer over the drain hole. I flooded the bathroom three times before my mother made me stop.
3. Sulpher-crested cockatoos. I got bitten by one as a young child. It hurt. Now, I just hate the pernicious motherfuckers.
4. Brussel Sprouts. Someone told me they had cyanide in them, and for a while I was convinced my mother was trying to kill me.
5. Cockroaches. Some things you just never get over, I guess.

I'm not really as interesting as Shauny. Oh well, I can try.

I can't figure out if my pants have somehow got bigger, or if I just woke up thin this morning. I seem to be showing a highly unhealthy amount of midriff. I didn't even know it went down that far.

Today in brief: too much reading of novel. It is now finished. Third book by Jennifer Fallon - Harshini, it's called. Highly readable. Immensely readable. Not brilliant. Before this novel I wouldn't even have said very good. This concluding volume to the trilogy was, I think, better than the preceding too. Everything matured, came to fruition. It was more considered, I think, and much more interesting for it. Not counting, of course, the errors where the minutiae of expression had been overlooked in the rush to get it to the publishers. But for once the relations sorting themselves out in a non-linear fashion really, really worked for me. I felt immense satisfaction. Job well-done there, Ms Fallon. Plus the growth of R'Shiel was excellent.

More about today: Daylight saving. Stupid bloody idea. I needed that hour. Of course, I get in back in March, April, whenever, but who needs a fucking hour in March? Honestly.

In conclusion: Fnord.

Bah diddly qua qua. (5 points, none if you're J².)

And now I discover that my leather pants, as well as being very cool and, obviously, leather, also spontaneously generate money. At least, that's the only explanation I have for the five bucks I just found in my pocket.

J^e, poised with eyeliner in hand: "So, what do you want?"
K^y: "I kinda want it to say 'Fuck you!' I'm in a fuck you mood tonight."

J^e: "Ah, you'll want to use the blue then. Nothing says fuck you like thick blue eyeliner."
K^y: "Really?"

J^e: "Oh yeah. It sorta says: 'Yes, I'm doing heroin, do you have a problem with that?"

(I love goth nites.)

Bah.

(I started writing fourteen times, and deleted it all. But since I've spent so long looking at this input screen, I feel like I really should hit 'post and publish' on something. It's been one of those days. Not one of those days, like poor old Puss had, just one of those nothing-days that I really could have lived without. I don't know if I have the energy to go out tonight.)

Points of note:

1. Redesign. I guess you've already noticed that. All sorts of things might still need fiddling. Please email if you find something abhorrently wrong, or even mildly fucked up. And also let me know if you like it.
   
2. Name change. Yes, I threatened it, and now have carried it out. I wanted a name with which I felt a bit of connection, that actually had something to do with me, that wasn't sorta pretentious-wanky (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course) and that had a link to the domain name as well. So 'the world according to carp' no longer. Now 'guts and garters'. It has the right sort of tone of random collections of fashion and violence, both literal and figurative. I like it. I declare thou shallst too.
   
3. Archives now not on the sidebar, but back on their own page. If you want to go rummaging through the archives, you can do it the old-fashioned way. And now I don't have to worry about being verbose enough to keep the main column longer than the sidebar. Not, of course, that I ever let that worry me previously.
   
4. Things may still get tweaked. Especially the comments. Now that I don't have to have everything all .shtmlly, I might look at switching over to dotComments or something similar. Something wonderfully me-powered.

I just killed a fly by dropping a book on it from a great height. Can't say I was very impressed with its reflexes.

Book stores are, seriously, my Thieves' Maze. Yanno, like in every good/bad adventure flick? The hero has to go through a death-defying dungeon of doom, dodging this and avoiding that until he gets to the end. Well book stores are my Thieves' Maze.

It all starts with the bargain tables out the front. It's easy to underestimate this first obstacle. You think it's just the first one, so it'll be easy, and anyway there's never anything on these tables that's good anyway. And then, when it's lulled you into a false sense of security, you get hit by a low-flying 'Myths of the World' for $7.95. Vicious, I tell you.

I escaped, though, just barely managing to put the book back on the table and keep going inside. I made it to the back of the store (the fantasy/sci-fi section) in one piece; the next challenge. This is the big one, the standard, the point where most intrepid adventurers falter and are lost. Oooh... new KJ Parker. New Australian fantasy author I've never heard of. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay! And shelves and shelves of Robin Hobb.

But I resist! I walk away, through the unappetising business and travel sections. I see the light ahead, the entrance to the shop, I'm nearly clear...

And then I hit the booby-trap. A huge pile of books, with enticing little $1.00 price tags on them. Dungeons and Dragons books, and Forbidden Realms, and other pulp fantasy fiction. All the bad fantasy you can stand for one buck a pop. My resolve turns to water, and runs gibbering. I am entranced, enthralled, gathering printed pages like the hero at the pile of gold, running it through his fingers and cackling maniacally.

Oh no! She's lost! Our intrepid adventurer has met her doom. But wait! What's this? She's putting down the busty-wench-encovered volumes! She's setting aside her sword-wielding barbarians. She's turning for the exit. She's walking out without a book!

Yeehah! Now all I have to do is kill the bad guy and rescue the love interest. Rock!

According to my Lonely Planet desk calendar, present from my sister last Christmas, I'm supposed to be going to Iran this week.

Think I might give that one a miss.

Hey kids! Next time your teacher asks you for a word containing no vowels, don't pull out the boring old examples of 'try', 'cry' and 'fly' that everybody uses. Even 'rhythm' is dull and passe. Instead, try this one on for size:

syzygy: A pair of connected or correlative things; in Gnostic theology, a couple or pair of opposites, or of æons.

Your teachers won't know what's hit 'em.

'Sect' is just a couple of small typos away from 'sexy'. Coincidence? I think not.

For some reason, everything in life is currently coming down to one little point: Life would be easier/better/cleaner/friendlier if I had a laptop. I suspect this is bollocks, and yet it increasingly appears to be the underlying theme of the universe.

I have little patience with history texts containing 14-line-long sentences. I dislike playing 'hunt-the-verb'. I hate having to look up four words in the one sentence. Academic historians annoy me. I hate the feeling of intellectual helplessness this essay is giving me. Not waving, drowning.

Can someone please give Marilyn Manson diction lessons. It's 'marked' men, not 'macked' men. I don't even want to know how you go about 'macking' someone. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd need to shower after.

I'm not sure what's scarier: the fact that there's S Club 7 fanfic at FanFiction.net or that I am still desperately in search of a ripped .avi copy of Dungeons and Dragons. They're both pretty damn scary.

3B Sign last night. My party, as I gaily told someone at some stage, clutching one of the ubiquitous VB longnecks (bloody awful stuff, but it's tradition, so what can you do?) and harranguing people into signing the sheet on the wall.

You know, now that I've got the comments thing (which, I'm sorry, seems to make the page take longer to load) I have some urge to say dazzlingly clever things in every post so that people will comment.

But there's not much that's dazzling or intelligent about the Sign. We fill the bath full of ice and the aforementioned beer. You get one, you drink it, you peel off the label and stick it to the wall (more difficult since the cheap bastards cut down on their glue) and grab a pen to sign the sheet. You have another beer, and write derisive comments next to other people's signings. You have some Mystery Punch (a true mystery, even to me who made it, but a wonderful, tasty batch nonetheless) and proceed to mosh with pen on the sheet, creating some tres artistique scribblings.

And then you clean the place up so that the principal can't have a hissyfit at you. Ha ha bloody ha.

So how was everyone else's Thursday night?

I've got the 'let's give Osama bin Laden a sex change' email three times now. I'm just as annoyed with it as I was the first time. Yeah, OK, it's supposed to be funny. Ha ha, I get it. But think about it, will you? You want to punish this guy because he's done bad things and condoned the human rights abuses of the Taliban government. So you're going to perform the grossest violation of rights I can think of, and change his gender without his agreement. Jesus. What the fuck are you thinking?

So it's just a joke. So fucking what? Think, people. That's all I ask.

Comments should now be working (they were when I tested them, and I even got rid of the horrible salmon pink that had somehow insinuated itself into my colourscheme) so feel free to comment widely and mightily on anything and everything. I'll be a happy girl. I've wanted comments for a while now.

I left my film group card at Starbucks. This annoys me.

I do, in fact, do things other than watch movies and occasionally go to class. Though, glancing first at my life, you may be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

The only time I wonder if I'm dysfunctional is when I watch other people's relationships in progress. Maybe I should stop doing that. Maybe I should accept that since I'm so radically different from most females in my acquaintance, it's patently bloody obvious that my relationships aren't going to be conducted in the same way as theirs.

Dinner with the Male, Z and their cohort. Through table nonplanning, I ended up sitting with the old-skool boys. There was one of their girlfriends as well. Though she was tutor on my floor for a year, and resident for a year before that, I still relate to her through her boyfriend, who I probably know less. I simply get on better with males, I think. They're easy to talk to. I don't have to think about it, or worry about what I'm saying. I know I've said this before, but it's a defining feature in my life, yanno.

Oh, and I'm about to start playing with adding comments to this, so excuse me if things go a little bit bung.

A few nights ago, in between Dungeons and Dragons on Wednesday, and Tomb Raider on Friday (so, in fact, on Thursday), we saw Thief of Baghdad, a sort of muck-up of the Aladdin story into an adventure movie. It had 6 directors. It had Djinns and flying carpets (only one of each, actually) and menacing octupi. There aren't enough menacing octupi in today's movies.

It also had a limp, blonde, insipid, British-supposed-to-be-Persian hero called Ahmed. He got turned blind by the evil, posturing, not-as-much-fun-as-Jeremy-Irons bad guy. He whinged all the time. Well, half the time. The other half he was mooning over the love interest, who showed off quite a risque amount of cleavage for a 1950s movie. And she got groped a couple of times, I imagine by accident. But anyway, when his sight is restored, he chucks a hissy fit, because 'what good is sight if I can't see her??'. And he chucks his stick into the sea. At this point the Male whispers in my ear: "Go on, have a whinge." We'd been MST3King the whole movie.

Henceforth, chucking the sads will be referred to as 'throwing your stick in the water'.

What if when theories are 'proved wrong', what's actually happened is that the world has changed? Why does the world always have to be the same? That which does not change, ceases to exist. Every theory is right in its place and time, but not necessarily in any other place and time.

There is no universalism. Just because we are looking at the same object, doesn't mean we are seeing the same thing.

My current writing implement of choice has no part which unscrews, no part with which to fiddle. I am slowly going mad.

(International Relations Theory with Dr Jim. My brain hasn't had a stretch like that in quite a while. Invigorating.)

I am a sick little girl. My head appears to have been magically transformed into a gunk-producing factory. Woohoo! Gross-out factor!

Meanwhile, Tomb Raider was fan-fucking-tastic! What the hell are all those people who didn't like it whinging about? What's not to like in this movie? The action is so much fun, and it was very slick. They might actually have had a touch too much plot for a no-brainer action flick, but they handled it well, and it didn't drag. Not even the info-dump was too long or boring. (Pointed look towards The Matrix: learn, guys.) And Angeline Jolie was absolutely sodding perfect.

In the opening action sequence, I grinned at every move that came straight from the game (and boy, there were a lot of them). When she did that big backflip and whipped out her guns in mid-air, I couldn't help myself saying "Yes!". It was beautiful.

The whole thing was just so much damn fun. I don't think I stopped grinning for a single second. Great turn from everyone's best friend Rimmer as the butler dude. And when they mentioned the Illuminati, once again I couldn't prevent a small "Rah!". Several friends turned to grin at me at that point.

Final judgement: Get off your high horse and enjoy the damn movie, will you? I found it impossible not to.

In my German dictionary, 'orgasm' and 'orgy' are right beside each other. Well, I thought it was amusing.

So, Dungeons and Dragons, hey? Well, not exactly the movie of the decade, is it? Or even the year, and it might even be pushing it for week depending on how good Tomb Raider turns out to be on Friday.

Redeeming features:

1. Justin Whalin. He played Ridley. He previously played the second Jimmy from Lois and Clark. He hasn't changed a bit, which is scary in about five-six years. I find him very attractive in an almost platonic way. In any case, he made watching the movie much more bearable, because I could just look at that beautifully arranged hair and not have to pay too much attention to anything else. His performance wasn't too awful, except for when he tried to show deep emotion. Stick to playing the Harrison-Ford-cardbord character, Justy-my-boy, and leave the real acting to people like Joaquin Phoenix who don't look as pretty, but do it better.
   
2. Damoder, or whatever his name was. He got some good lines. Once he stopped speaking at the speed of sap and started having fun. Particular favourites: "Are you joking?" and variations on that theme. The lovely vein-work up the sides of his neck and across his conveniently bald head were also quite interesting. Oh, and he'd been raiding J²'s make-up collection. I recognised that blue lipstick, Mister!

But I cringed every time the quite talented Thora Birch (you saw her in American Beauty) opened her mouth. Her Childlike Empress was quite simply the most stupid character I think I've ever come across. I've certainly never witnessed a character with more elaborate costumes, and less useful things to say. I'm sure Jeremy Irons had the time of his life, though. I certainly hope he did, and that he got well paid.

The CGI was good. The opening, in particular, was quite breath-taking, and for a few minutes I was actually hopeful about the movie. The dragon battle later was also quite spectacular.

But DOUG, it was the game. It was the game up, down, left, right and sideways. Witness the importance of having your main character being a fighter-thief, everyone. (This movie displays very adequately most of the reasons I don't play D&D.) It must have some sort of pain-killers implanted in the credits, though, because once it was over, I found myself thinking that it hadn't actually been that bad, really. Luckily, I remembered the four separate incidents where I literally cringed with my whole body, and was able to stay clear-headed about the whole experience.

Two hours of silliness. Laugh it up, fuzzball. And you'll need a little masochism to really enjoy this one.

Option 1: leave some of the pasta for tomorrow. Option 2: eat it all like the little glutton I am.

Dr Jim (you can always tell my lecturers, because they have 'Dr' in front of their names. You can tell how much respect I have for them by the fact that what comes after the 'Dr' is always short and familiar. Actually, I like 'em a lot. The ones I don't like never get mentioned here) told me that I wrote a good paper on Machiavelli. I refrained from doing the happy dance of joy in his office. Instead, I smiled and thanked him, got the Nietzsche references I'd gone to get in the first place, and did the happy dance outside in the corridor instead.

Now, I just hope 'a good paper' is over 80. Over 90 would be a new personal record, but if I'd done that, I think he would have been talking about getting it published.

In the course of writing this, I've eaten almost all of the pasta. There isn't really enough to keep. I'll just have to finish it all, now.

I read something yesterday, I can't remember where, about removing the World Trade Centre from movies, and not just upcoming movies, but recalling DVDs and such to take it out.

Because maybe, if we tell people it never existed, we can pretend that the USA, the pinnacle of Western civilisation, was never so vulnerable, was never so horribly and easily laid low.

Well said, Japan.

I'm trying to summon up some emotion, some opinion, some anything regarding the strikes on Afghanistan, but I can't. I honestly can't care. I can just watch, observe, take note. My brain refuses to deal with it. Maybe that's the most intelligent option, after all.

I saw a plover chasing a crow today. Tearing across the sky, the big black crow twice the size of its pursuer, but still running for all it was worth. The plover was screaming its head off.

I found this symbolic, anyway.

"The 13th Fairy".

Just read Sleeping Beauty in German ("Dornröschen") and this little phrase stuck in my head. If you remember the story (and who doesn't?), you'll remember that the 13th fairy was the one who got left out of the party because the King only had twelve gold plates and, let's face it, probably didn't like her anyway, otherwise he could have just borrowed another plate from the neighbours or something, right? So yeah, then she shows up at the party anyway, pissed off, and curses our dear little heroine to die horribly at the age of 15 (or 16, or whenever) by skewering herself on a spindle (pretty creative, that). At which point that meddling 12th fairy steps up and mitigates the curse. I maintain the scheming wench just wanted to insert her own choice of Prince into the royal line, but that's a story for another time.

That 13th fairy. She's a symbol, right? Of things and people that get left out just because. That you think of last. Of the people who don't immediately fit into the round hole, and hence are left to dwell outside the lines. Left to make their own rules and live life as they see fit because if the rules have rejected them, they can reject the rules.

Maybe I'm taking this a bit far, but "The 13th Fairy" is a great phrase and I want a project to make it the title of. I'll park it in the back of my mind and ruminate a little more, I think. If you get any good ideas, let me know, ja?

Dee's top 5 drool-worthy voices:

1. Sean Connery. Duh. I'd hire him just to sit in the corner and read the phone book out loud.
   
2. Michael Wincott. Voice like velvet sifted through gravel. Mrowr! (You may have witnessed his brilliance in The Three Musketeers or perhaps The Crow. I admit to nearly falling off my chair during some lines in the latter.)
   
3. Mike Patton. Of Faith No More and Fantomas. Growl for me, big boy.
   
4. Mel Gibson of recent years. Something's happened to his voice in the last couple of years and suddenly I find it very interesting indeed. I could listen to him narrating The Patriot all day.
   
5. There are a few contendors for this spot, but creeping in just under the wire is Michael Douglas. No, I don't have a thing for guys named 'Michael'. Another older man with good vocals. This bears looking into, I think.

This made me laugh. Thank you, J^e.

"When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.

The Russians used a pencil."

Casablanca is the best movie ever made in the history of anything. Discuss.

Actually, don't discuss. Just realise it, internalise it, live it.

I don't like the word 'naked'. It will not appear in the international language, come the revolution.

DOUG, I'm so tired. Deep in the marrow of my bones tired and it takes so little loss of sleep these days to do this to me. I want to be doing Honours already. Honours is the promised land. Somehow, when I'm doing Honours, everything will be OK, and managable. And interesting.

I want a rest. I want a pause button. Save game and quit. Sound familiar? Stop this whirligig of fun, I'm dizzy.

Fuuuuuuuuck! They're at it again! The sodding motherless bastards (that makes them orphans, yes, but this does not mean they get any sympathy from me) next door are having some sort of flaming recovery bash on their back lawn, which means they're going to be lambasting us poor drones in the Mothership with badly-covered booner crap all afternoon, drinking bad beer (and worse beer) and at some stage around 4:30 some total tosser with soggy Weetbix for brains is going to fire up his ute and do donuts on the basketball court vainly installed to prevent that sort of dimwitted behaviour.

That (she points to her right, from whence come the decomposing sounds of a garage band murdering something that might be recognisable music, backed up by a garbled chorus of a drinking song) is what happens when cousins fraternise. Hand me my grenade launcher.

Addendum to the above: now they're slaughtering 'Blister in the Sun'. A quick death is too good for them. If you need me, I'll be smuggling in rare and painful poisons. I can keep them alive for days, if I need to...

Want to be zany like Dee? Sing along to Metallica with a Scottish accent. Experiment with other bands and accents. Lisps are also fun.

The only good part of a survey I found, hence the only bit I'm answering:

Have you ever:
...kissed your cousin: Kiss as in the more down-n-dirty sense, I'm guessing. No. But I certainly considered it.
...pictured your crush naked: No. I was a dear sweet innocent girl back when they were crushes.
...actually seen your crush naked: Not while he was still a 'crush'.
...broken someone's heart: I don't think so. I could be mistaken, but I'd tend to think that any claimants to this title would be mistaken; your heart's only mildly sprained.
...been in love: Silly question. Of course yes.
...wanted someone you knew you couldn't have: Laughter. Oh hell yes. Just because I'm practically an old married woman doesn't stop me coveting my neighbour's arse.
...broken a bone: Nope. Little miss careful, me.
...drank alcohol: Riotous laughter ensues.
...lied: More laughter. Lots more laughter. I think I'm about to fall out of my chair.
...cried in school: Yes. The situation was so silly it boggles me now, but I couldn't help it at the time. You know how it is.

The 'points' thing has been changed to a more generic 'quick guide', which is a sort of glossary of things I say that aren't immediately explicable, and people I babble about a lot. If you can think of anything else I should add to it, let me know.

Oh my DOUG, I'm actually solvent again. All hail the tax office.

Long discussions with J^e (Gee, it's good to have her back. A real, solid, amazing connection I find myself increasingly reluctant to leave in any way.) regarding the Illuminati card game, which completely hi-jacks my attention and looks so amazing. Two cups of tea when I had never tried the stuff before (I'm still not sure about it, but I wan't sure about coffee to begin with, either) and now I'm dizzy.

Oooh... look at the pretty birdies.

Possibly not the best way to walk (stagger) off to do my hideously belated international relations theory reading. Considering I have difficulty understanding the concepts at the best of times.

More later, when the damn keys stop moving.