Movie.

The Sydney Film Festival's just started, and I was trolling through the program to see if there was anything good. And there is, for sure. But there's also some stuff that just sounds a bit ghastly, for example:

"A young boy works in a water bottling factory. A rare glimpse of everyday life for the poor in Myanmar".

Coffee.

There's a coffee place downstairs in my building, and I've taken to bringing my Economists and New Yorkers along with me when I have my coffee, and if I've finished with my magazines I surreptitiously hide them in the stack with the fashion and celebrity magazines. I figure it's a small thing, but I have a fantasy that it might open someone's eyes.

Star

I got this today from a woman I was flirting with in a chatroom. "But u cute and have a funny profile - oh yeah i guess u scorpio cos they dont believe in star signs".

She was wrong, of course.

Trinny

I was watching Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation, which apart from the fact that it has Trinny in it is a bit awful, and she at one point said to the cameraman "please don't do me from behind again". I won't be able to sleep now.

Worldview

Sometimes I find myself thinking that I should get a nicer place to live. My flat - and I know one or two people who read this have been in it, so I'll try to stick to the truth - is very much a bachelor pad. The walls are bare, with just a few recriminatory picture hooks. The kitchen is.. well, really just an alcove off the living room. As an aside, I realised the other day that I didn't have an oven. But what was fun about this was that it's taken me 18 months to realise it. And that was only because I had a houseguest who asked me whether I had an oven. I told her that I was pretty sure I did, then started looking for it.

On the other hand, it's got great light and it's in a fabulous location:

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Of course if I did live in a nicer place I'd be able to impress people with what a swell apartment I had. But this troubles me a little - do I want to impress people who are impressed by that? Should I buy a nice car? What next? I console myself with the thought I'm better off with people who are impressed with the grandeur and complexity of my worldview.

Packing

I was in the middle of a discussion this morning with a colleague, and he told me that what I'd just been saying was the verbal equivalent of the foam that they put in boxes when they ship stuff, to stop it moving around. I thought was a lovely analogy. Especially since he'd said it in an approving way.

Lol.

For reasons that are a bit too complicated to go into, I've been spending a lot more time online lately. And clearly not spending much time at all writing stuff in here. I've ended up chatting with people in, well, chatrooms.

It's fascinating, especially the 'adult dating' ones. There's a bit of everything, comedy, pathos, rage, jealousy.. the works. I've even found myself getting caught up in some of the intruiges (Chatter A asks me to surreptitiously check up on chatter B, that sort of thing. Chatter C asks me to have a look at Chatter D's profile to see whether I think D is hot.)

Some people's profiles are mercifully short: "I want to meet someone [with these characteristics] for [some activity]". Others are almost a chronicle of hurt and heartbreak, and love-gone-wrong, as the person (usually a woman) describes the characteristics of people she doesn't want to meet, and you know that these are based on bitter experience. And then, often as a series of postscripts, she goes on to describe other people she doesn't want to meet too, and you can just tell this is based on recent experience. It has the feel of something being constructed in real time.

But the chatrooms get me. Every second sentence ends in 'lol'. Or, sometimes, 'pmsl'. I can understand using lol to soften the impact of a sentence that might otherwise risk being read as too harsh - tone's hard to convey. (I would never use lol myself in this way, naturellement, but I sympathise.) But it ends up on sentences that are at no risk of being misunderstood. It's like the rising inflection you often hear at the ened of sentences (especially in Australia, it's our gift to the world). I think the message it sends is "I'm pretty unsure of myself, so I'm going to put this lol marker on the end of the sentence so that if anyone disagrees I with it, I'm not putting myself on the line".

Someone in a chatroom yesterday took me to task (not surprisingly, I must come across as a really fusty and mean person) and said 'lol', 'pmsl' and 'ffs' were just easier than typing it all in full. Exactly. What sort of moron would type "laugh out loud" at the end of a sentence?