Priceline doesn't often make you think.

Actually, that's rubbish, because there's nothing like a whole frigging aisle of subtly different versions of the same personal-grooming item to paralyse you with indecision such that you're still there, muttering, "But do I need it to have a moisturising strip as well?" when they close.

But the thinking today was of an (arguably) higher nature. Making my lightning raid upon Priceline (you've got to keep moving, it's the only way to possibly avoid the paralysis) I overheard on the radio station they were piping in (to increase general torpidity) an advertising spot that used the phrase: "Me Sully, you Neytiri."

It made me guffaw.

And then it made me think fond and condescending thoughts about the generational shift.

And then it made me think about that more deeply.

Because, I think we'll all agree, the standard concept of Tarzan-and-Jane goes something like this, which is pretty definitely a pre-bra-burning sort of image. Jane clings to Tarzan, she's reliant upon his strength, she's helpless as he heaves her about the jungle. Oh, her calming/gentle/personal grooming influence is vital, but she's not really an independent lady.

Neytiri, on the other hand, is not to be trifled with. She came packing, wanders about the forest making it her mind-melded bitch, and she will fuck your shit up. Now, sure, she likes her some pretty buff marine and she does sort of hop on his motorcycle towards the end of the movie (but I forgive that, because I'd want a go on that beast as well, and I'm not talking about Sam Worthington here). But she is, no doubts about it, a strong, independent sister who's doing it for herself.

I sneer a lot about the generation gap, because clearly if you didn't know Nirvana, watch James Valentine hosting the Afternoon Show, and play the original Doom, you are missing out. But if Tarzan-and-Jane is being swapped out for Sully-and-Neytiri in the popular consciousness, then bring on the paradigm shift.

Anthony: (coming in with that extremely thoughtful look on his face) You know... Really...
Me: (assuming this is House or Cricket or in some other way important) What?
Anthony: Really, they should be the Teenage Mutant Turtle Ninjas.
Me: ...what?
Anthony: Well, they're not mutant ninjas, are they? They're mutant turtles.
Me: It's a string of descriptors. Technically, there should be commas between each item in the list to indicate that all of them pertain to the subject at the conclusion.
Anthony: But the fact remains that the ninjas stands alone, while the mutancy pertains only to the turtles.
Me: Surely it should actually be a question of which element they most strongly identify with, that being the final descriptional tag to which all others relate. Do they see themselves as ninjas, with teenage, mutant and turtle elements? No, they are turtles.
Anthony: (nodding seriously) That's bullshit.

We watched The Times of Harvey Milk (documentary) last night, and it was really damn good, but I spent the last third of it being depressed, because thirty years later, California votes to ban gay marriage. Thirty years. Why does progress to enlightenment have to be like dragging people kicking and screaming through cement?



It fills me with rage that half of my acquaintance can say, "Oh, about time!" when Anthony and I announce we're engaged, like we've been dragging our feet on the predetermined path of coupledom. What about all those couples who aren't even allowed on the path?


Oh yeah, and Anthony and I are engaged.

Addenda to the previous:

• Justin wishes it be noted that he has no idea where the sex shops are in Gladstone, and any implications that may have been present to the contrary are complete nonsense. Honestly, officer.
  
• His wife, however, knows where they all are and is on first-name basis with the owners. Allegedly.
  
• In fact, possibly their daughter owns one.
  
• Big W took Prophecy's Ruin back with an alacrity that made me suspect they know precisely how rubbish it is. This item has nothing to do with sex shops. Sorry. I'll try harder with the next point.
  
• Shibari. See? (Possibly NSFW, though what your boss is going to think about you reading something that mentions sex shops this often, I really don't know. Tsk tsk.)

It's summer, and traditionally this means I go up to Queensland, lose my mind in the heat, and ill-advisedly buy a swathe of new Australian fantasy to read while I loll about on the couch crunching ice and jeering at the cricket. Often I manage to wangle these in the form of Christmas presents, but this year I had a brain blip in Melbourne, somehow thought half a Stephenson novel would be enough to tide me through a three-week stay (well, it is Stephenson) and have been forced to take matters into my own hands. Which would have been fine, except this is Gladstone, the town with eight pubs, three sex shops, and no bookstores. (Thanks, Justin.)

The pickings at Big W were paltry, if I didn't feel like reading further Twilight books (and I won't until they lobotomise me, and even then I hope that some deeply entrenched hivemind memory will not permit me to hand over money for the dubious privilege). But I had, actually, been eyeing off Prophecy's Ruin by Sam Bowring in bookstores, partly for the spiffy-looking cover, and partly because it sounded marginally interesting. Stalemates! Two sides of a story! Potential for interesting character-driven stuff!

I got two chapters in. I'm a very neat reader, do you suppose Big W will let me return it?

It's not that it's bad - it's not! It's written as competently as any current Australian fantasy, with some literary flourishes that are sometimes delightful and sometimes overwrought. But in the first two chapters we were introduced to various of the forces of "shadow", comprising:

• a cold, cruel, ruthless and unattractive overlord;
• goblins, complete with claws and casual homocidal (or goblocidal, I suppose) impulses; and
• an inscrutable, feared lich (well, what do you call an undead mage? Yeah).

"Oh good lord," I said. "This isn't just a Tolkien rip-off, it's a Peter Jackson inspired Tolkien rip-off, complete with stupid special orcs. There'll probably be wolf-riders for no good reason later on."

(I feel like maybe I should also point out that the bad men - sorry, perfectly nice men on the side of goblins and vicious overlords and liches, what the fuck was I thinking? - are called Arabodedas. I don't know how that got past an editor.)

I am a post-Tolkien fantasy reader. Good vs evil is boring. More importantly, good vs evil tells us nothing about the complicated, ambiguous, shades-of-grey world in which we live, and it's my opinion that good fantasy should hold up a distorted mirror to reality, using its freedom from that reality to show us new things about it. But mostly, it's just that it's boring.

And in this particular instance, it's probable that a lot of my dissatisfaction comes from the fact that I picked it up purely because the blurb sounded like it was a story full of compromise. Shadow and light (not evil and good) and a "hero" on both sides! Poking around the internet has revealed a couple of reviews using words like "balance" and "ambiguity".

So perhaps he's just establishing cliches of "light" and "dark" in order to ruthlessly undermine them later? Seems a little unnecessary, considering how insidious those facile terms are, especially in the genre. And TWO SODDING CHAPTERS (plus more - that's just where I stopped, and he seemed to be rather excited about his goblins catching up with the pretty blonde sorceress of the light) is completely unnecessary. Make it a prologue. GET ON WITH THE INTERESTING STUFF.

Though I am, now, considering trying it a little further, just to see if it does get interesting once the actual heroes show up. Except I am just so violently opposed to the establishing work he's done. Any shades of light that the "shadow" hero brings to the thing are going to be in contrast against the cliche, and the slow tarnishing of the side of "light" has been done before.

Of course, if I can't return and can only exchange, what the hell am I going to exchange for? Not even this is as bad as Stephenie "without your man you're nothing" Meyer.

This afternoon, I spelt your "yr" in a text message.

Sure, I was texting with my left hand while holding an umbrella and a 600 page manuscript in the other hand, but I'm sure when someone accidentally causes the apocalypse, they'll have a good excuse too.

Bartender: And what will you have?
Dee: Pint of the Fat Yak, please.
Guy to Dee's left: Pint of the Yak.
Guy to Dee's right: Pot of the Fat Yak.
Alterni-Yuppie part of Dee's brain: Shit. I'm going to have to get a new beer.
Sensible half of Dee's brain: You what?!

Omens from the keyboard of a good day in progress:

• "Are they fascist zombie house-elves?"
  
• Creating a style in Word called "I'll bullet you in a minute"
  
• Then creating a follow-up one called "I'll bullet your mother"
  
• Realising that said styles are even in correct alphabetical order
  
• "Is there a more formal naming structure I should be using for these files? (Well, of course there is, because the only way I could get less formal would be to call them Fred and Barbara. Barb to her friends.)"
  
• "Imagining handcuffs is a noble pursuit."

It seemed like a lot of people, yesterday, asked me how my day was going. Possibly this happens all the time, but I particularly noticed it yesterday because the only 100% honest, full-disclosure answer would've been to say, "Well, I've had Space Lord stuck in my head since I woke up." (Keep watching at least until the dancing girls and the ejaculatory fireworks. And the lightbulb suit.)

On the other hand, at least I don't have a subconscious like Anthony. Who has dreams where he has to make a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter summarising Polonius. ("Sort of an obit," he says.)

I love getting my hair cut.

Sure, the hairwash and the treatment and the massage are nice; free coffee and trashy fashion mags are ace; leaving looking like a million bucks is... well, worth a million bucks. But actually, what I really like about getting my hair cut, is the actual cutting of the hair.

This would be a prime opportunity for the inclusion of some really edgy metaphors about ridding oneself of the old (that being, after all, what hair is: dead weight), perhaps get a bit of snakes-shedding-skins imagery in there, a bit of cycle-of-rebirth wank. Pretend I did, if you like, but the simple truth is that I just like having short hair.

This preference is, in its own way, something of a grand prize of a long struggle against myself. For as long as I can remember, what I have wanted more than anything in the world is to have long, blue-black curls. So why don't I? With the wonders of modern fashionista-ing, right, anything is possible.

Wrong. Blue-black makes my warm-tone skin look sallow and my hair will not take a curl even if you drug it, pay it, and threaten to kill its kith and kin. I managed to convince myself that the fluffy horror of the first perm was just a tragic misunderstanding that would not be repeated, but after a second disaster, I just gave my friends permission to shoot me should the suggestion ever pass my lips again, and resigned myself to straight hair. It's cool.

Black, though, was totally do-able, in strictly non-cool-toned measures. And the first time I went black nicely coincides with the first time I went short.

Well, not the first time. I'd had short hair for much of my childhood because it's easy to look after (my father used to cut my fringe with the kitchen scissors and a piece of tape across my forehead) and my mother always maintained (and I've come to agree with her) that it suits me. As I got into my teenage years I started growing it out, because of the standard long-hair/princess yen that most girls feel. It got pretty long. Halfway down my back long. Every morning my mother would braid it, and I'd just leave it in overnight (reducing sleep-thrash tangles) until brushing it loose about half an hour before she did it again the next morning. In short: gorgeous long hair, but I didn't do anything with it.

About a week before my senior prom, I got it all cut off into a Louise Brooks bob and dyed it black.

It took some firm restating and a bit of encouragement to get the hairdresser to do it. ("No, shorter. No, shorter. Yes, like that.") First day at school, I got sixteen variations on, "What did your mother say?" (Answer: "See, I told you short hair suited you.") And for the whole hour I was sitting in that chair watching the hair pile up on the floor, I was grinning. It was liberating. It was awesome. I no longer had to worry about doing things with my hair. My hair was done.

I've grown it out a couple of times since then, to lesser extents. Every time it edges past my shoulders, I hit the same problem: what do I do with it?

Yes, fundamentally, I'm lazy. (This surprises precisely no one who knows me, I'm sure.) Short hair doesn't need to be done. It requires no thought. Rarely, with me, does it even get product and more than two seconds styling. It's precisely the same wherever I'm going. I don't need to take heaps of stuff with me when I travel. Heck, if I forget my brush, it's probably going to be fine. It doesn't get caught in my earrings or necklaces or collar. It doesn't get in my face when I'm dancing.

I just like having short hair. And watching the hair fall on the floor as the hairdresser snips away is grin-inducing every time, because it's going to be short and easy and fabulous.