It is convenient for two vegetarian ghosts to go out for dinner, except when the world of wait-staff cannot perceive their presence. One Saturn’s day I ordered a “Victoria Bitter” and discovered it was just my favorite cheap AU beer “VB.” At Kelley’s, a Newtown bar that consistently holds a place for me, I asked for the finest “Victoria Bitter” and was given blank stare in return. Finally the bartender said: “There are only four people in the world who know what VB stands for, and two of them are dead.”

Romy and I swapped jackets because she was shivering and I was wearing a pea coat. At the next pub a guy with “New Zealand” shaved into the back of his head questioned: “Who are you ladies rooting for?” Being Australian by birth, Jack reckoned Melbourne would win. Naturally, I said I was going for NZ. I don’t know who eventually won, but it was a victory for me, having always hoped to find someone to defy gender with.

We are a ouple of hipsters eating spaghetti out of jars with chopsticks. Uni life has left my kitchen forkless, and with few plates, but we always have jars. Even though I have posted an insistent set of kitchen rules, the only one anyone seems to be following is the addendum created by Romy and our good friend Clarence Clancy Jr. (CCJ): “Don’t forget to smile like a powerful whale.” I escape the gritty kitchen often these days, for fun times and modeling gigs, but mostly to go home to the music lab. I made a set looping live soda-can opening and mbira, with video to match each track and transition. I also dropped many samples of the New Mexican folk-storyteller Joe Hayes. I began with quotes from the drunk coyote hiding under the table: “Ah que carai, ahora se voy a cantar, now I’m really going to sing!” I am a Table Coyote. But who wants to sit under one’s own table when one can depend on a campus of climable sculptures to drink on? Plus, all the fatherly security guards see us and offer us packed lunches with sandwiches and juice boxes.

Human memory is a fundamentally creative act, each time we visit a memory we are making that memory again. Each blog post and picture from this era in my existence as M is being solidified into a golden-fun-feeling. Each message in my inbox is a small poem about how much fun life is. The fields of communication are littered with happy-faces.