They've made floats and dresses and attached feathers and glitter and joy to all parts of their bodies. There'll be music that pumps and breaks through the crowd and Mardi Gras will show everyone that gays and lesbians are out and proud.

With parties being the order of the weekend, the police are out in full-force. It's only Friday and men & women in blue stand outside a train station while they hold teenage twenty-something drug offenders to the ground. The labrador who did the grunt-work sits ready to receive his pat, stroke, belly rub reward.

People walk by, walk on, wait for a bus or taxi, but mostly move on. No one wants to be a suspect or a criminal and no one would dare comment on the irony of ten officers nailing one person to the ground.

All throughout this, this little place's transport system attempts to serve the population by providing enough buses and trains to support demand. Enough means to get the people around, from place to place and point A to points B,C,D and F.

No one wants to go to E. We're all sick of it.
Despite the Mardi Gras being a one-night thing, Sydney's bus system seems to struggle with maintaining any sense of order or structure. Instead of responding with planning, the State Transit Authority seem to have taken it under their wing to make it more of a hassle for Sydneysiders to leave their suburbs than anything else.

My own experience is one of trying to get from Bondi in Sydney's East to Crows Nest in Sydney's North. This trip would normally take roughly forty-five minutes to an hour.

Tonight, this would take a lot longer.

Tonight, most Bondi-residents would be lucky to get out of their suburb. The bus stops are overcrowding and the little areas of the path that have yellow bus signs attached to them have become waiting queues of pissed off pedestrians all hoping to board what never comes.

What never comes does come in short bursts. The famous Bondi buses – the only Sydney bus to run 24/7 – don't come and serve the people. Buses drive by with numbers serving other areas, a driver who didn't want to work or was relaxing at the time. Services that should be taking their place are either not coming or avoiding people and taking their own breaks at the bottom where beach-goers dwell.

The surfers and tourists and families and folk are all boarding at the beach at the bottom while residents trying to get out of their one-road-town stand by and wait. They wait for one overcrowded bus that drives by, then another, and then another.

Some of these people get so sick of waiting that they stand a bit further from the bus stop with their hands out, their fingers held to attention up high as their arms extend from their bodies. They wave at the white & silver cars with the word "TAXI" nailed to the top but the cars just drive on by.

While most of the cabs are filled with a passenger ready to pay what's needed, many of them are also vacant with their drivers just shaking their heads at prospective clients who haven't a clue what's up. They drive on with their lights on, they see passengers who wave and turn their lights off.

Suddenly the passenger is no longer important and the cabbie in demand can treat the client like a load of crap.

Which is wonderful because tonight, the State Transit Authority is jumping on us in the heat and Sydney's taxi population are kicking us when we're down.

What follows is big. 

I mean big. Really big. Big as in "this could seriously look like you're carrying it around making up for something you don't have if you're a guy".

You know… if you're cynical like that… which I of course am.

In any case, I now present to you the 32cm Soft Serve…

Click on the image to see it (disturbingly) bigger!

That is one big ice cream, and at $2.70 it doesn't taste too bad either (you know, for soft serve, that is).

That picture actually isn't quite 32cm because by that time, I'd already eaten a little bit off of the top. It's bloody close though. Disturbingly close.

I think they should have offered a mint version or an apple one or something because – with a little bit of green – it could look just like a Christmas tree! 

In any case, if you want a 32cm Soft Serve, head to the convenience store next to Hungry Jacks on George St. in Sydney.

I feel I just don't belong.

I'm used to the penetrative stares that look through me as if to tell me I am not one of the group, one of the herd.

I get them here too. Me with my brown jacket, red shirt, yellow headphones, and old grey hat, I still get the glances to a stranger. A no-one. Anon.

It's not just my lingering depression- trigger happy but never willing to say why or what for – but rather the attitudes people convey in their eyes.

Lady with a tired face in the long brown coat: you don't think I belong.
Teenage boy in the technicolour trip-hop towel: you don't think I belong either.
Brown haired lady five years my senior – l what is it, is it my attire or my face: you know I don't belong.

And so I stand here in the cold. Unable to understand, confused as to why, for no matter how much I try to fit in not a single person will let me.

An artist at an art opening and I can't relate to a solitary soul.

I began to notice long ago that the moment I have some sort of social event on, my stomach clams up and decides to launch itself at me with horrifying results (horrifying for the toilet bowl in question). It's almost as if it's an instantaneous reaction by my stomach as a means of protecting me from whatever the hell it needs protecting from. Or whatever the hell I need protecting from. Either / or, as is the case in this… err… case.

Case in point, I was originally thinking of going out this evening.

It was to be Edward's last pub crawl (and by last, I technically mean first as I'd never heard of him do a planned drinking night before this) before he leaves to work for Microsoft in America. I wasn't sure if I was to go – you know… me being socially inept and bored in crowds of people relatively quickly – but the thought more or less lingered in my mind with the prospect of my brother, Boris, Ross, Edward, Leora, and other random girls there.

I like random girls.

Anyway, as I decide to take a shower before I leave, The Stomach of Doom strikes rendering my gut unconscious and forcing me to take refuge at the nearest Porcelain Palace of Protection (this is my neat-o way of saying "toilet" in this blog post). I was at that Palace for god knows how long and while I did manage to get a fair amount of reading done, I felt uneasy the entire way through.

Sort of like how Indiana Jones would feel if he were told that his toilet was infested with snakes. SNAKES.

When I did decide to come out and cleanse myself of the stink that The Stomach of Doom presented me with (Christ, this movie would suck), I showered and then dried off trying to stave off The Stomach and see how long it would take before I felt… decent.

It's now 10.10 PM. The event started at 7.30PM. By the time I'd get out there, it'd be damn near 12.

I don't think I'll be going. 

I just had a yoghurt and that seemed to trouble The Stomach of Doom enough to reverberate all my back muscles and cause End Credits music to shake in its grave. Or something like that.

Thank you stomach. Thank you for thoroughly pissing me off.

Well you will later.

By the time I'm through writing about it, anyway.

Cool picture, huh. 

Yes, I dropped my iPhone tonight. My heart stopped as the Apple iPhone disappeared from my fingers, the slippery coating shifting itself from my grasp and landing on the floor beneath me.

And let me just say this…

It is one durable fucker.

Go see for yourself.

Two minor scratches on the corners and a bit of wearing on the tint on the camera which I rarely use.

I have to tell someone so it may as well be you – my blog – and anyone else in earshot.

A part of me is still concerned it won't work. A part of my wishes I had left the rubber grip on which barely worked in my pocket. A part of me wants to jump off of a cliff. But I'm more or less dousing that part of me in mental kerosene and threatening it with a mental match.

Here's how fine the iPhone is.

Seriously. The Apple iPhone is one durable fucker. 

Tonight, we had drinks after work.

Justyn, Sarah, Nat, Tim, Jake as well as our usual drinking buddy of Nat's friend Laura.

And I would be writing about it while smelling the smoky cotton smell on my wrist if this bus wasn't so god damned bumpy.

I mean fuck, you should see this writing.

Right now, I'm sitting in the bus on the way home with some dickhead guys who are chilling in seats and looking around at the bus as if they owned the place.

I dare not fall asleep lest I wake up without my nice hat.

I'll be home soon anyway.

Home where my brain will linger on the same topic while I turn on my computer, feed the cat, take off my shoes, take off my socks. My brain will analyse the night and catalogue every word I spoke at drinks.

Frankly, it's all very relative and yet it's not at the same time. 

Click on this murky inner-city landscape if you want to see it bigger!

The bus goes up Oxford St. and speeds on by happy people, smart people, sexy people, fragrant people, dumb people, drunk people, and then all manner of white, black, red, yellow, blue, green purple, ultraviolet, sad, glad, bitchy, snitchy, simple dimpled motherfucking people who can all go through life without their brain needing to replay everything you just did in exciting Technicolor while giving you a blow-by-blow summary of everything else you did wrong.

I don't think I did anything wrong today. But I do know what I didn't get.

And it's that simple thing that I didn't get which continues to haunt my disillusioned self every time I come back from "a night out".

It's not about the sex, though I can see why many would think it is: I'm male, a Scorpio, and a frequent masturbator.

It's not about the hook-up: I wouldn't even know how to flirt or how to interpret flirting if I tried.

It's about the kiss: it's like a toy I never got to play with in high school. I still don't experience it now. The concept of random thoughtless tongue-literally-in-cheek is still mostly foreign to me and I never wanted it to be.

And while it may sound childish, man-beating-his-chest, and overall pointless behaviour to you, my brain seems to force it on me in a manner not dissimilar from Bart of Lisa Simpson talking to their brain as if it's another entity altogether.

I'm not quite sure where I was headed with this tangent so I'll just try and reconstruct myself…

Friday Night Drinks

The office had drinks and while most people – you, them, anyone else – can have the drinks and go home happy, fulfilled, and at least in the early stages of intoxication, my brain operates on a slightly different frequency.

It might have been because I was tired and was beginning to see things as blurry, but I just didn't care much at the end for sitting in a pub or a club pretending to give a damn.

I am not a pretender.

I am not part of The Pretenders either. As a result, I will not walk five hundred miles.

Still, I am not a pretender. I gave up mostly on that aspect of my life long ago when I felt too much lying was a little pointless and tedious.

So in the beginning of the night, at the beginning of the drinks, when I was just socialising with work colleagues about work, TV, music, and random dickheads, I was being myself.

But as the night wore on and our group became 3 plus me, I began to care less. There was less for me to talk about and more in exchanged to drink, and while you might argue that "more to drink means more possibilities for that random kiss you just mentioned a few paragraphs ago," I of all people know that that's a load of crap and that combined with my tiredness from the duration of the week, I should probably go home.

So after the four of us had a carb-filling Macca's meal, the others walked to a pub while I meekly said "later" with no one hearing me.

I stood there outside of this McDonald's Restaurant knowing I'd said "goodbye' while the rest of the group walked away. I wondered if any of them had realised it. 

A minute or two later, one did and they turned around and waved. I waved and walked off.

As my pen begins to run out of ink and I recant the night in some randomly poetry nonsense that can only be joined together with a reasonable apprehension of everything & nothing and a bourbon on the rocks, I realise that more than anything, I've left something out.

Tim – who can be found here attempting to add his own injection of celebrity gossip to the greater orifice that is the world wide web – seems to have taken it upon himself to get me laid, and in doing so, has arrived at a pick-up line for me to use when I'm out.

Are you ready?

*ahem*

Hi. My name is Leigh and would you like to touch my Wii?

Oh yeah. Tim's da man.  I am so getting action nowww.

First we tried the Imax but the movies all had icky starting times so then we tried George St. but there was nothing on there that we wanted to see.

This is already beginning to sound like The Three Bears… and Juliet is blond. Does that make her Goldilocks? 

Anyway, so we headed back to her car parked around the back of Darling Harbour and as we headed towards Darlinghurst thinking of one of the Palace cinemas, we got a call from Wendell. Back to town we went picking up the fashion photographer and heading to dinner somewhere else.

I love this photo I shot of Juliet talking to Wendell. Such colour… such… wait– did I just get a colour shot?!

This is the story of that dinner.  (Okay, it's not really a story… it's a post.)

Juliet parked the car on one of the side streets near Five Ways. By park, I mean that Wendell and I got out while we sort of pushed the car into a position so it wouldn't misbehave. Aren't Wendell and I strong? Super-strong!

Anyway, by now I was hungry. After only having breakfast this morning and a slice of pizza of Tim's while my co-workers and I were drinking, I was pretty hungry.

Wendell suggested we go to this little cafeteria sort of place. It wasn't very good and we more or less walked out as fast as we walked in.

Next to it, though, was Christo's.

Wendell & I discussing while drinking. Juliet shot this while I post-processed it. Click it for a bigger one!

When Wendell & I used to work at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, I can remember going by on the bus or walking by Christo's wondering what it was like. It wasn't that I never had the money to go there: it's an Italian place and it's not really really upmarket. It was more that I had no one to go with. 

Tonight I did. Tonight I was dining with Juliet Bennett and Wendell Teodoro.

Juliet at Christo's. I shot this picture. 

We sat down outside and had a look through the menu. After deciding on a prosciutto & bocconcini pizza for me, a spaghetti bolognese for Wendell, and a 2006 Willow Estate Cabernet Merlot for the table, we tucked into the conversation.

And then a few minutes later, the food.

I ordered the pizza…

…while Wendell ordered the pasta. Or spaghetti bolognese in this case.

And then the conversation which went on for quite a while.

We spoke about religion and quantum mechanics. We spoke about politics and women. We talked photography and models and how everyone was, and at one point one of the guys sitting next to me on another table asked me if I was using a D300.

I replied "yes" and he asked me how I was finding it. I told him that I reviewed it (which I haven't finished writing yet) and that I loved it so much, I went out and bought it.

His friend said that was about as good as it gets. He's probably right.

Juliet when she laughs that beautiful laugh. I think this was shot by Wendell Teodoro.

The night continued as Wendell & I shot photos of Juliet and Juliet shot photos of Wendell & I. There was conversation, conversation, conversation, and it was all over a really nice drop of red.

And it was a nice drop. I even messaged Stubbsy to tell him of it.

Shot by Juliet Bennett. 

At one point, the conversation became so engrossed in religion that I switched over to playing God of War on the PSP. I got about ten more minutes into the game and then went back to being semi-social while I let the salty freshness of the pink prosciutto make its way through my mouth.

The food was excellent. Well the pizza was anyway.

I didn't try Wendell's spaghetti but my bocconcini & prosciutto with rocket-on-top pizza was excellent. It had fantastic dough baked to perfection and was simply excellent.

It really was a nice drop of red. I was sort of paying attention to Wendell but more paying attention to the final drops as the wine dripped out. Shot by Juliet Bennett & processed by me. 

I wish I could tell you of the conversation we had. Of the points about religion and happiness, of security and safety. Of so many technological and communication points I could make and probably did.

Unfortunately like most good conversations, it's one of those things that you just had to be there for.

Okay. I got this photo. Credit to me!

Next time you need some intelligent and stimulating conversation, you could always go out on a date with me. I'm good for it.

The problem with discussions (and arguments) over quantum mechanics is that neither of us – being photographers – will probably be right. I think I was more right in this case, though. Regardless, image shot by Juliet Bennett & post-processed by me. 

More pictures below:

First we have a serious-y photo of Juliet shot by me…

…followed by a less seriously and more giggly, happy picture shot by Wendell Teodoro.

Juliet managed to capture us perfectly. Wendell is… well, Wendell… and I'm slightly blurry. Just like in real life. Shot by Juliet Bennett, processed by me.

Don't ever let anyone tell you I'm not a dreamer. Not like they would in the first place. Unless they hated me or something. Shot by Juliet Bennett, processed by me. 

I initially was more of a "naaaaahhhh, I'll just wait to go out with my friends by playing video games at the office," but then something in my mind ticked over and said "Leigh, you're being a douchebag. These people actually want to drink with you. It's not just a load of crap."

So I agreed and as they waited for me downstairs, I packed all my crap up and then joined them.

And then we all headed in a great big packed train off to Jackson's on George for drinking, random conversations about Jennifer Hawkins, the occasional yelling at the fuckwits across the road walking to a party and dressed like the douchebag Corey, and all manner of things.

And yes, I took pictures.

Click the "to be continued" thing (it's called a "jump") to see them. And if you want to hear my occasional blurb on my thoughts during the drinking. If you're into that.

Laura and her beer. Never tear a woman from her brewskie. Shit, did I just say brewskie? *shutter* 

Nat won't give me a straight face. Must be the booze. Or Nat. One of them.

I know. I'll get a shot of Nat when she's not paying any attention…  right about… now…

There we go! Natttttttttttttttttttttt… with out the extra t's.

Timmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Without the extra m's. Unless you're into that sort of shit. 

When I'm sitting there drinking with people, I notice that most people chat and have fun… socialising without Facebook and doing it good and proper somewhere where they can all have fun. 

I, for the most part, tend to shut up because I don't really have anything to say and I usually won't talk until I do. It's just the way I am, I guess. I'm random and eccentric but social situations aren't something I know how to handle. That and girls. Completely clueless on those things.

I only stayed about an hour or so before heading off to Darling Harbour to meet with Juliet where we were gonna go bowling at some ultraviolet lanes or something. It didn't quite turn out like that but you'll see why in the next post.