some nights what you want to do is sit, legs up, lengthways on the couch, reading “vogue”. eating an ice cream sundae. see? it’s even a suitably gaunt ice cream sundae. (i’ve actually only done this the once, last week, but it was so pleasant i will do it again.)

[ in response to your question from the other month, hikaru-san, i don’t subscribe to any magazines — call it a lack of faith: maybe next month will suck — but if someone were to bestow a subscription on me, “vogue” would be on the wishlist. whoulda thunk? and then would it be the US, UK or um, Australian edition? one day i will buy myself a subscription to “the new yorker”. when i was younger, i subscribed to “new internationalist”, and then younger still, the “lucasfilm fanclub newsletter”, and further way back, “stickers and stuff”. in between i was also given subscriptions to “readers digest” and “national geographic”. i know. ]

the morning after the ice cream sundae, i was cold sweating and blacking out in a photo gallery, vomiting a bottle of fizzy apple juice into a gutter, entangled in stomach cramps and dizziness, and seeing through the weekend on all of two cups of sweet black tea and three slices of buttered toast. no doubt some strain of monster flu to herald in the spring. however by sunday night i decided that the dizziness and pangs were by now actually caused by hunger, so i cooked up a pot of spag bol (but with curly fettucine. have you seen it? it’s like normal fettucine except one edge of it is ruffled! oh the mouth feel!) and staggered down the road to recovery.

is this what blogging is? i can’t quite remember. a couple weeks away becomes a month, and then another month of being without the internet as the ISP passes you on to the phone company and the phone company returns the volley… to another phone company. ch. and so a new season, and a new suburb…

…and this morning at the supermarket there was a new product, i think a cross-promotion with the willy wonka movie: bite-sized chocolate pikelets — “eat them straight out of the bag!” said the bag. i just did, and i think the people who wrote the bag were being optimistic. the pikelets were chocolatey, but somewhat flaccid, and cold. yes, i ate the second one to be sure, and then the third because hey, they had grown on me. the thing is, don’t eat them out of the bag, but toast them lightly and then put ice cream on them, and berries, and chocolate sauce.

you see? always it comes back to the sundaes.