I gave away my digital camera the other week, and I have been amply rewarded for doing so by the recent influx of photos of my brother's end-of-year-10 shenanigans.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you -- my brother, the gimp.



What can I say? He's a kid after my own heart. (Although I am sort of concerned by the no-shoes aspect of the outfit - those lessons in 'what to do if you come across a hazardous sharp in the schoolyard' weren't exactly theoretical at my high school when I was there.)

I have not so far asked what he was auctioned off for, or how it compares to everyone else. I should do so.

I caught up with a high school friend yesterday, and while our conversation was pretty wide-ranging, I've since found myself contemplating at length the concept of a dealbreaker.

We touched on it only fleetingly yesterday, and while I could certainly think of things that would be dealbreakers for me, I'd never really come up against one in anything other than my imagination.

Last night I did -- and it wasn't anything from the little list I'd made up in my head. Not even related to anything from the little list in my head.

Would you believe this? Cheese.

Sad but true -- I cannot love the lactose intolerant.

This all comes up because last night I had dinner with a guy I've known for awhile, at my place, and we made pizza. Homemade pizza is one of my favourite things in the world; in fact, homemade anything is one of my favourite things in the world, and I really enjoy the process of making things from scratch -- I'm old-fashioned like that.

Homemade pizza, though, is particularly good, and it's particularly good for two reasons. Firstly, making pizza at home seems to be the only way to get a perfect crunchy base. And secondly, when you make pizza at home you can put whatever you like on it -- which, when I'm given free rein, tends to mean mushrooms, mountains of pepperoni (I'm not kidding at all when I tell people I can't be a vegetarian because I can't commit to a life without pepperoni pizza), and three or four different kinds of cheese. While I probably like the pepperoni better than the cheese, it's a close-run thing. The best restaurant pizza I ever had contained tomato sauce and five different kinds of cheese, and nothing else. It was incredible.

Anyhow, Mr. Man that I had dinner with last night, he doesn't eat cheese, and so we made pizza without it. It sort of pained me to put the pizza in the oven without that final layer of cheese. While I've come up against cheeseless pizza in the past (my mum once went on a zero-fat kick, and offered up cheeseless pizza as a dubious 'treat', and I went out a few times, a couple of years ago, with a vegan girl who made incredible pizzas -- she easily sold me on vegan meals, but nothing could induce me to drink my tea black in the mornings, and that was the end of that), this was the first time I'd made it -- and it was actually very good. While I think that those pepperoni-and-cheese extravaganzas will always occupy pride of place in my heart, I certainly wouldn't be averse to having cheeseless pizza in the future.

What? Didn't I say that cheese was a dealbreaker? That doesn't sound like a dealbreaker to you?

Yeah, alright, it's not. But this is -- I love cold pizza. Maybe even more than hot pizza. And cold pizza without cheese? Is a fucking disaster. It's quite, quite disgusting and awful. It is a hideous travesty of all that is good and right in the world, and doesn't even bear thinking about, much less trying again.

And just as I cannot commit to a life without pepperoni, I cannot commit to a life in which leftover pizza is rendered inedible by a lack of cheese.

It's probably just as well that Mr. Man had left by the time I tried to eat the leftover pizza for my lunch, since I had a small and absurd temper tantrum over the unfortunate state of what should have been a delicious lunch, and said a number of rash and inflammatory things -- although, all things considered, he may well have gotten a kick out of being around to be the subject of my frustration.

Now, it only remains to think of a suitable and creative use for cold, inedible pizza ...

This is absurd.

It's eleven o'clock on Sunday night, I have a 4000-word essay due tomorrow (at five, but really at eleven since I have to go to work in the afternoon), and I've really progressed no further on it than I had on Friday, when I abstained from going to the work drinks in honour of three birthdays including mine in favour of working on the damn essay.

This is not like me -- or at least not very like me. It's like me, exaggerated and blown out of all proportion.

My usual practice is to write very little, read a great deal and let things stew over in my head. During that time, I'll do anything that keeps my hands busy and my mind free -- bake, vacuum, knit, garden. Towards the end I'll sit down in my clean house and write the essay in one sitting.

It works for me, although I know it doesn't work for others. This time around, I'm getting a feeling for why it is that that process doesn't work for others. My house looks like a bomb hit, and my essay is causing me to want to slit my wrists. I think it's related to daylight savingses (which fucks me up every year for about a week, and which was exacerbated this time around by some dumb blokes across the road having a loud party) and chronic sleep deprivation. This time of year sucks.

Well, now I know it's summer. I have a sunburn so bad I have an icepack on it. It's a driving burn, so it's thankfully limited to my right shoulder, but it's stinging, and unpleasant nonetheless.

It happens this way every year: starting in mid-August, I swear to myself that I'm going to be really careful this year; I'm going to wear sleeves when I go outside; I'm going to try to stay inside when the sun is strongest; and above all else, I'm going to remember to reapply my sunscreen throughout the day. That's the one that always trips me up, and the one that is responsible for today's sunburn. It seems to take the first sunburn of the summer to kick me into being (relatively) good about my regimen.

I remembered to put sunscreen on in the morning before I went to uni -- I've got fair skin and moles everywhere (they're getting demented faster than my doc can take them off), sunscreen is part of my morning routine -- and then Ethel and I cruised off down the highway to Wollongong to catch up with a friend from Canberra who was visiting there overnight.

We spent the afternoon at the beach, me in my long sleeves, looking with not inconsiderable horror at the steelworks just down the beach. We're small-town girls; large-scale industrial developments are a worrisome novelty. It was that cliched scene -- smoke billowing from chimneys, lurid orange flames spurting into the sky. I imagine it would be quite nightmarish at night, but it was pretty disturbing even in broad daylight. Actually, I'm sort of intrigued to see it at night ...

On the drive back up to Sydney, I got what I think was my first real glimpse of the scale of the city, and I was honestly horrified. While I have a certain amount of intuitive understanding of the size of Sydney (90+ minutes from my place near the CBD to my brother's former school in the outer suburbs), it's a very different thing to see the city stretching from horizon to horizon in front of you. My reaction was disgust - I found it difficult to think that I was driving back into something like that.

I suppose the usual reaction to a day like today, in which I was confronted with the industrial realities of city life, would be to start thinking about sustainable living practices -- but I've never had a great deal of time for rabid tree-huggers, and still don't. My vague ex-flatmate put me off serious environmentalism for life with her evangelical spiels (my favourite remains the one in which 'possums should be allowed to vote' and the extended - and deeply flawed - Lord of the Rings metaphor). No, my reaction today was to start thinking more seriously about what I'm going to do when I finish my thesis next year. I've been saying for awhile that I want to move on from Sydney in the near future, and have always vaguely imagined that it would likely be to another big city. Today, I'm thinking that maybe some time spent in a small community would be good for me.

I don't know. It's all wild speculation at this point. At this stage, all I can really say is that I want to spend some time out of the city this summer. Day trips, I suppose, since I have work commitments, but definitely to get out and about.

I've really been meaning to pull together some writing to put up here, but I've been utterly snowed under with end-of-uni stuff. A measure of how snowed under I am with uni is that, for the first time in my life, writing is starting to feel like a chore. I dislike this feeling, and look forward to it going away. I write a lot, and didn't realise until now just how much structure my writing time (for me, not for uni) imparts to my otherwise unstructured life.

I finish coursework forever on November 4th (extended from October 31, an extension I'm in two minds about), and I promise that regularly scheduled activity will resume then.

A highlight may include the utterly surreal conversation I had in the first stages of trying to organise a hens' night from 300km away. This may, but is unlikely to, include Strippers On Ice. The ice is not my idea. My suggestion (of strippers, obviously) was met with inexplicable horror.

Instead of writing to relax, then, I've been knitting instead - Christmas things, mostly - but I did experiment today with felting knitted objects. I dug out my slightly warped Dresden Dolls logo and spent an instructive hour or so sitting in my bathtub splashing hot water around. The good news? It came out well, and is now small enough to be pinned to a bag. The bad news is that the felting process seems to require more than that one instructive hour, which was all I had to hand, and so I'm going to have to go back to it later.

I've come to the conclusion that felting is a lot of fun (how many times do you get told to ignore everything you've ever been told about washing wool?), but that, given the amount of hot water, and thus steam, involved, it's not a hobby for muggy early-summer days. That said, I'm not sure when one should do that, because I wound up very, very wet from splashing water around, and I'm not sure that's a good idea for hot days.

There is some serious God Squad action happening on campus today.

I've been wandering around a little more today than I usually do -- I think I may have a path worn from my front door to my carrel on level 8 of Fisher Library -- since I've had to go to a couple of branch libraries, but I've passed easily half-a-dozen people handing out tracts, and gone past two full-on God Squad encampments.

The first one is set up where the circus guys normally are, and they've got a tent and beanbags, and are offering hot dogs and free drinks. They're apparently from Hillsong church, which is a bright-lights-and-big-bucks Christian cult from the outer suburbs of Sydney.

The second one is set up behind the geology building, and seemed to be modelling themselves on a revival meeting. There was a pastor up the front with a microphone, and he was passing it around the audience. The girl that was testifying as I walked by was a mumbler, though, so I didn't hear anything interesting. I do think that interesting things might be heard by lurking behind the big, white tent they had set up in a corner, with a big sign advertising 'Confessions'. They also had a big sign up saying 'Christweek' (sic), so that may explain the Hillsongers on the other side of campus, too.

I find this really odd, since we've already had one God Week at USyd this year.

I have very little patience with rudeness at the best of times, but I have particularly little patience with rude doctors.

I had the flu over the weekend - went home sick from work on Saturday, and stayed home on Sunday - and while I wasn't on the verge of death, I have a sufficient number of uni things coming up that I would rather take my sick days from work now, for minor illnesses, than let them develop into major illnesses which will interfere with my study (which is prioritised significantly higher than work).

Since I'm on a permanent part-time contract at work (and hence have paid sick days), I'm generally meant to get doctor's certificates when I'm sick -- something which is obviously problematic on a Sunday. I went to the doctor today, feeling much improved by my day of mostly sleep yesterday, but still not feeling my usual sunny self. My sore throat had gone, but I was (and am) feeling lethargic and feverish -- and when I get feverish, I get dizzy spells. Always have, ever since I was a kid. I once joked to my mum that I'd fit right in in Victorian England, if for no other reason than that I'd be really good at the part of being feminine which requires one to faint at the slightest provocation.

At any rate, it's an established pattern, and I'm familiar enough with it to know that when I'm sick, I need to be more careful than usual about not leaping to my feet suddenly, and that staying in bed is the easiest way to make sure that I don't pass out face-first into a brick wall (or the side of my shower, as in the example this morning) -- and that's why I went home from work on Saturday, because my manager thought I was going to pass out in the middle of the store. The problem is that it's a pattern which it's hard to prove or disprove, and while it says PRONE TO FAINTING in big, red letters at the front of my medical file at my family GP's surgery in Canberra, I don't have a regular GP here who could make such useful notes in their file. Instead, I go to the uni health service, where I don't always see the same doctor, and where their record keeping is sub-standard.

Case in point: I went to the doctor today, and had set up an appointment with a doctor I'd seen before. Turned up shortly before the appointed time, waited until awhile after the appointed time, and was asked if I was dead-set on going to that doctor. I said I wasn't bothered, since it was hopefully only a quick consultation about a medical certificate, and hence saw an older immigrant guy that I'd never laid eyes on before.

I followed him into the office, sat down and explained the situation: I've had the flu, was off sick from work on Saturday afternoon and Sunday, still don't feel great, dizzy spells, blah blah blah -- need a medical certificate for work. I got a lecture about how they're not allowed to back-date certificates (illegal?), and that he could only give me one for today onwards if he found symptoms which would keep me off work today. Sounds positive, huh?

He had me stand up and walk over to the bench-y thing, so that he could look in my throat and ears -- I got dizzy standing up, mentioned it, and got a sneer in acknowledgement. Nothing was found in my throat or ears so he had me pee in a cup (I thought they only do that for diabetes and pregnancy tests and stuff??) and felt my neck and told me that I had no symptoms that would prevent me working today, and thus he wouldn't write me a certificate.

'Take some cold and flu tablets,' he said, 'and bucketloads of fluids.'

'What about the dizziness?' I asked.

'Well, the dizziness,' he said, 'I don't know anything about the dizziness. You've really had dizzy spells?' The implication here, although he didn't say it, was that dizzy spells are an awfully convenient symptom to have, since they can't really be verified unless I actually physically pass out -- something I prefer not to do, especially not to just prove a point.

'Yes,' I said. 'I get them when I'm sick, especially if I'm running any fever. Have done since I was a tiny kid. The doctor last time did make a note of this. I'm prone to fainting and dizziness because of my blood pressure.'

'Ah, yes,' he replied, 'your blood pressure. I see here that it's a little high. That shouldn't cause dizziness.'

Uh, no. There are two (related) things wrong with this conversation.

My blood pressure is unusually low, so low that every time I have it taken, the nurses ask me if I'm feeling alright, and warn me that I should be really careful when I stand up lest I pass out. I then explain that my normal blood pressure is generally around 80-85/50 (bottom of normal is 90/60 and average is about 120/80), that I inherited it, along with my slightly-lower-than-normal body temperature and my wordiness, from my grandmother, and that whatever number they've read out to me is not worth worrying about. It's pretty clearly spelt out in my chart.

Yup, there is one high blood pressure reading in there. It's from a day when I turned up with a nasty sinus infection that I'd let get out of hand before going to the doctor, and I'd taken the Sudafed my dad had recommended for it. Since I'd been having headaches with my cold for about a week, I never connected them - or the overheating, or the pounding heart - to the pseudoephedrine in the Sudafed, and put my inability to sleep down to my inability to breathe, thanks to the sickness. They took my blood pressure -- the first time I'd had it done since I stopped going to the doctor with my mum and started keeping track of my own stuff -- and noted down that it was 'a bit high'.

The next time I went to the doctor, a couple months later, I had my blood pressure taken again, since they wanted to make sure it didn't get higher, and they were surprised to find it at about half its previous level. They asked me all the usual questions -- did I feel alright, was I dizzy, had I been taking anything that might affect it, etc etc -- and I eventually said something along the lines of 'Well, I feel a damn sight better than last time it was taken, since I was on the verge of death from the combined effects of illness and treatment', and added that I'd stopped taking adult doses of cold and flu tablets since I get bad insomnia whenever I take them. Like, three largely sleepless days the last time I took Sudafed. The penny dropped.

Sudafed is full of speed, but its effects -- like those of any drug, I imagine -- vary according to the person taking it, and may be more or less pronounced. Looking it up, the main 'minor' side-effect of pseudoephedrine is restlessness and difficulty sleeping, but it goes on to mention that a very small proportion of the population are hypersensitive to the drug, and may experience insomnia, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure and tremors. Yup, I had all of those. No hallucinations, alas, but we can't have everything.

Anyhow, that 'slightly high' blood pressure reading was actually something more like 'dangerously high', given my normal blood pressure, and as a result, I have been Officially Medically Advised not to take anything with pseudoephedrine in it. This is definitely in giant red letters in my chart. And yet this doc wants me to take cold and flu tablets?

I don't know why I'm surprised. These are the same doctors that told a friend of mine, when she was worried that she had an STD, that she hadn't put herself at risk for infections like that by having unprotected sex.

That was the point at which I walked out. Fuck the medical certificate; I'm going to tell work that I have it on good, medical authority that I'm not sick, nor was I ever sick, and hope that my record speaks for itself (also that, next time I get sick and need a certificate, I do so on a day when the doctor is actually open).

(I've got a rant in my head about why I find it so much more offensive and upsetting to have a rude (if not incompetent, today) doctor than, say, a rude sales assistant, but I'm having trouble boiling it down to a pithy paragraph or two -- a necessary boiling-down, given the time of night -- and so I'm going to have to postpone it for a day or two until I have the time to structure it properly.)