2002-08-12 at 9:31 p.m.

Want an all-purpose, all-occasion gift guaranteed to bring joy and delight to the recipient?

Simply give the gift that keeps on sitting-perfectly-still-and-looking-slightly-disturbing- a garden gnome.

My friend George�s 25th birthday was on Saturday, and I had NO idea what to get her. So, I adopted my �Zen Gift Buying� strategy- go to a shopping centre and hope for the best.

After two hours of shopping, I emerged with- one CD for George, ten CDs for me, and two garden gnomes.

But not just any old garden gnomes. Musical garden gnomes. Not musical as in they play music, but musical as in they�re playing instruments. Make sense? No? Good, let�s move on.

The first one- the singing gnome- I gave to George, who is a vocal major. By the time I reached the party, George was so drunk I could have given her a slap across the face with a wet fish and she would have been delighted.

The second gnome- the piano playing one- wound up in my front garden. I called him Thelonius, after a great jazz pianist of the same name, and because it sounded funny (which is imperative whenever I name anything). The thing about Thelonius, is well� he looks pissed off.

Really pissed off.

And yet, he has this evil little grin on his face which has convinced me that one night he will rise up and kill me as I sleep. (I�ve never really shaken the conviction I had as a child, where I was sure that my toys woke up when I was asleep, and held tea parties, sack races, and plotted my untimely demise.)

Anyway, if Thelonius never channels an evil spirit and rises up against me, I give his stay in my front garden two weeks, max. Our street is privy to a lot of teenagers (being near a school), commuters (being near a train station) and drunken idiots (being near about 5 pubs). So, eventually, Thelonius will be gnome-napped, whisked away, and subjected to all sorts of strange and marvellous adventures, like those other garden gnomes you read about who send their owners postcards from Paris and Vladivostock and Uganda.

You know your life has hit new levels of pathetic-ness when the highlight of your existence is the possibility that your deranged garden gnome will soon be sending you postcards from Vladivostock.

In other news, the Music Festival is approaching. This is basically a week where classes are cancelled at the Con, and instead, three or four concerts (featuring students, staff, and guest artists) are held each day. I was talking to my piano teacher before my lesson today, and mentioned that I was having trouble preparing my solo repertoire for the end of semester because I was so busy preparing for the Music Festival.

�What, the Tango concert?� he asked.

�Well, yes� I said, �but also the Opening concert, the Lieder competition, the Chamber Choir concert, the Liszt concert, the cabaret��

I think I�ve overbooked myself, just a little bit.

At least I had a good lesson. My lesson last week was fairly pitiful, seeing as though I�d just gotten back from Sydney after the Sydney Choral finals (which we won! Woo and yay!) and was completely fucking exhausted. My playing was appalling, and I knew it. But my teacher doesn�t yell at me when my playing sucks, oh no. He does something even more diabolical.

He uses guilt.

He has a way of looking at you, with exactly the right mix of concern and disappointment, that inspires you to move Heaven and Hell to get enough practise in the next week, just so you�ll never have to feel that guilty again.

Damn manipulative bastard.

I recently found out that one of my uni friends also has a diary on this server. Hi, Peter, if you�re reading this.

Oh, and remember that competent HTML I promised in my first entry? Well, here it is! It took me several hundred damn hours to find a free image server, and another ice age to get the bleeding HTML right, but here it is!