Hand that pen over to me, poetaster.

What an exciting time this past fortnight has been. I found out that I am about to crawl out of the casual pool and walk on two new feet through the world of salary-earners. A job, I kept telling people, I just want a job. And by that I meant the kind of life with consistent pay one week to the next; where I could commit to regularly making myself dinner and perhaps even learn to enjoy doing so; where I could have Saturdays off, and recover from hangovers properly; where I could occasionally be paid for being sick. I am leaving my forager's life behind me and moving to a higher state of being. A hunter now, I'll be sitting on my ass all day, using my free time to order books and organic fruit & veg boxes online, and plotting my company takeover. Progress feels good.

Leisurewise (and I must think about leisure time now) there has been much afoot. My charming and knowledgeable friend Nick works at the John Buckley Gallery in Richmond, and I have been meaning to visit for too long. I've missed many unmissable exhibitions, including Wade Marynowsky's full-skirted robots in The Hosts: A Masquerade of Improvising Automatons. (Damn, damn and damn.) When I am a full-timer, working daylight hours, I will be at arty shindigs all the time... starting with last week, when I went to the opening of Rodney Glick's sculpture exhibition at said gallery. This is an eclectic gathering of contemporary people posing as characters from 18th- and 19th-century Hindu paintings. Dressed in tracksuits, leather and jeans, watches and spectacles, they are strange in scale and polished plastic-bright. You wouldn't mistake their woody complexions for real flesh the way you might with Ron Mueck's sculptures, but the humour in their clothes and props and stances makes them just as sympathetic as Mueck's vulnerable naked folks.  I especially liked the couple engulfed in lotus flowers, the rubber soles of their sneakers just touching.

Jess and I departed Richmond earlyish on a city-bound train. Meagre of dimension like me, and with a similar attachment to red hair colouring, Jess is a food scientist in training and plans to use her powers for good. In her leisure time, she scored cheap tickets to Joanna Newsom. This is the first gig I have been to in my work-neighbours' building: the beautiful Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. The interior there appeals to me in an unsophisticated way, like anything colourful or mechanised or made of cardboard. The walls are delicate-looking wood, pale, with patterns pressed out by giant child's thumbs. Wrapped around the house lights are skinny wooden swirls which from beneath look like aliens or insects, as if the child who pressed the pieces out of the walls, hoping to construct a majestic lobster, messed it up and just glued all the bits in a stack instead.

image from woodentoysuk.com

not my image

Joanna Newsom has been criticised by people close to me for quibbling about foldback levels at Golden Plains, and for generally sounding like a cat in pain. Although her recorded voice can sometimes make me want to turn the volume down a notch, her clever lyrics and unique vowel sounds win me over every time, to the soundtrack of a rollicking harp. Her dress. Her bright lipstick. Her fat, resplendent hair. Her effortless handling of that great harp. There was not much about her we didn't like. 

Afterward we discussed our own tentative musicalities. Tall people play basketball and model and become flight attendants; conversely, Jess was encouraged to delicately hold a flute. For my part I took up guitar at the age of ten. My nails were too bitten for me to properly strum and my fingers would never quite fit around the neck, even though my guitar was only three-quarter-sized. I would stay over at my friend Jade's house and would have to read a book for an hour in the morning while she and her sister did their violin practice. Boy, they sounded terrible. But twenty years later, Jade is teaching tiny, terrible violinists in London and here I am, singing the praises of a forty-hour week.