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.”
Jack and I swapped jackets because ze was shivering, and I happened to be wearing my 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 be androgynously confusing with. 
I wouldn’t mind being mistaken for a couple of hipster creatures eating spaghetti out of jars with chopsticks either. 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 Jack and our good friend Clarance Clancy Jr. (CCJ): “Don’t forget to smile like a powerful whale.” I escape the gritty kitchen often these days, for friend adventures and modeling gigs, but mostly to go home to the music lab, which is where I truly live. I made a DJ 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. Naturally 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 myself am quite 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.
It is convenient for two uncanny kids to drink cocktails out of one another’s clavicles. Uni life has left the kitchen cupless, and when all the jars are in use the most elegant cups are those created by skeletal structure. Of course pre-drinks and facepaint on the Hump Day before Halloween led to the missing of yet another costume contest at The Ranch, but when one has a kindred art-kid to make faces with, that type of thing just doesn’t matter.
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 Emily 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. 
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