The composer Xenakis regularly employed random processes such as stochastic models and radioactive decay to compose music – producing ascetic works featuring wild shrieks and moans devoid of any rhythmic or harmonic structure. Some say this was to emphasise Xenakis' atheistic views on the finality of death as the ultimate event of human life. From the resources you have produced for this course, I can see you have taken a similar artistic approach in their construction and your own teaching style.

1. "Do you still have your tonsils or adenoids?"
2. "Yeah, I think so. Why do you ask?"
3. "Well. At the clinic, whenever there's a kid or someone who has sinus problems, usually the clinicians will just recommend removing their tonsils and adenoids."
4. "Does that help? What does removing them do?"
5. "Hmm", she paused for a second. "I'm not actually too sure. I mean, sometimes they can get inflamed, and that can cause problems."
6. "But, do they only remove them if they're inflamed?"
7. "No, it just seems like they recommend removing them if they aren't really sure what the problem is – or at least if it seems like it could help. Like, if a parent comes in and they say their kid gets out of breath quickly when running around and makes wheezing sounds when they breathe, it will probably be the tonsils or adenoids blocking their airways. So they just remove them."
8. "Is that safe? Like, what do they actually do?"
9. "Well, some parents get all freaked out by the idea of surgery – which, I mean, I guess it is a little scary thinking of your kid going under the knife. But some of them just go along with it and get them removed. As for what they do – I know the adenoids are part of the immune system. But I don't think they do much. So removing them is fine."
10. "And there are no side effects of getting them removed?"
11. "Nope. None that I know of."
12. "Weird… that's kind of like, I think it was around the 1920s, where on people's 21st birthdays, they would get all their teeth removed and get a pair of dentures as a gift."
13. "What?! All of them? Why?"
14. "It was so they didn't have to pay for any dentist work. Don't need to see the dentist if you don't have any teeth."

I once had the misfortune of knowing a man. This was in first-year uni at my university hall. He was the type of annoying person who wanted to flaunt wealth at any opportunity. Although, he didn't really have that much to flaunt—just talked a lot about how rich his family was and how horrible and poor he thought all of us were. He also believed that kitchen microwaves would give your food, and therefore yourself, cancer. One day, when we were alone in the common area, he asked me how many tiers I have on my birthday cakes. This question took a moment for me to process. "How many" he had asked. Not whether it had tiers. Simply a question of quantity.

For the past several years, I had worked weekends at a cafe. In the summers, when it got busy, I worked there full-time. Since my birthday was in the summer, I often worked on my birthdays. From memory, I hadn't had a birthday cake in years—even before I started working at the cafe. I didn't really see the point. To be honest, I never even threw myself parties. I relayed this information to him, and he nodded sagely, considering the revelation that some salt-of-the-earth common folk like myself didn't even celebrate their birthdays.

Thinking the conversation was over, I made to get up and leave. But he suddenly started talking about his own birthdays—apparently, for as long as he could remember, his cakes had always had three tiers; however, since he was getting older, he wondered if he should start making his family get five-tier cakes instead. He asked me what I thought of this. Fragments of what he had just said were rattling around in my head as I tried to make sense of it. Make his family get a five-tier cake? Why five? How many people does he have at his parties? Also, his family organises them? It reminded me of a friend talking about Asian weddings. I can't remember the specific region where this happens, but apparently it's common for the family, particularly the parents, to invite a lot of random acquaintances to weddings as a way to show off. I wondered if that was what he and his family did, invite vague acquaintances to… I guess make it look like he knew lots of people? Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink, I guess.

I looked down at him, not sure what to say. I couldn't tell if this was just another way for him to gloat about his own five-tier cake–affording riches, or if he was just stupid and didn't know how to read a room. I said something vague, and I left.

For the past week, my nipples have been sore, and I've had worsening bouts of vertigo. My only explanation for this is that I might have sinus problems – although I don't know how that explains the sore nipples.

The vertigo had gotten so bad I decided to book a doctor's appointment. For some reason, the clinic booked it as a phone appointment. After a series of questions about how bad it was, when it usually happened, whether I felt like I was going to throw up when it happened, and whether anything made it worse, the doctor brushed it off as one of those things that just happens "with old age" – I didn't know that started at 25. They wrote a prescription for anti-nausea medication and said they would send it to my pharmacy.

I forgot to mention my sore nipples during the appointment. I don't know whether this would have changed anything – pinpointed some rare disease with odd yet specific symptoms. "Oh yeah – sore-nipple vertigo disease. Take two paracetamol a day until it calms down." Maybe next time.

Whenever I used to cook mince for pasta sauce, a cat would appear. Kipper was the most on to it with figuring out that me cooking mince in the kitchen would often result in it getting a few precious morsels of half-cooked beef. Bob, however, never quite got it but was usually moseying around the kitchen at some point during the cooking process. I found it quite useful; if a piece of mince was flung out of the pan due to careless spatula work, I could put it on the floor to be cleaned up. And maybe some pieces of mince might have made their way out of the pan on purpose. Who knows.

It's sad cooking mince now. I seem to have made careless spatula work a habit over the years. No noisy Kipper or clueless Bob around to clean up after any pieces of carelessly spilled beef.

The store had novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta labelled as "children's novelty dino pasta". CHILDREN'S novelty dino pasta.

It had been a bad week. I needed some novelty and excitement to help make it all more bearable and this novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta was just the thing to pull me around. But the implication that this was children's novelty pasta posed an issue. Was I in some way forbidden from purchasing this novelty pasta? Would a tired-looking 24-year-old buying novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta be some kind of social faux pas? Forever branding me as some kind of deviant weirdo in this small upmarket bulk foods store?

I was stuck staring at the novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta pondering this while few customers moseyed around the store. The world is a panopticon – through their eyes, they control. I had been looking at this pasta long enough. It was time to act.

And who decides which pasta is for who anyway? There's nothing particularly infantile about "dino-shaped" pasta, is there? Is there some point at which pasta must cease to be novel? To be without dino? I disagree. We must imagine the modes of spirit and thought that allow for such wonderful things as… cat-shaped croissants; large zebra-striped lamingtons; monkey shaped madeleines. And, novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta.

I selected a small disposable paper bag and filled it with the novelty pasta.

Through an almost Rube Goldberg-like series of events, there was soap in my coffee. Unfortunately, I was too tired that morning to realise this until I had drunk nearly an entire large mug. People were drivelling on about something in the zoom meeting I was in, but this seemed like a much more pressing issue – I had just drunk an entire mug of soapy coffee. Would I be ok? Did I need to call someone? Are there people for this? My stomach was starting to feel upset. I went to the kitchen and had two glasses of water.

My first suspicion was that the mug might have somehow gotten soap on it, so I got a new one and poured myself a new mugful from the plunger. Without thinking, I took a large gulp. Still soapy. Two more glasses of water. I took the plunger and mug of coffee to the kitchen and, as much as it pained me, poured it all down the sink.

Ahhh, I remember. I had spilled some laundry detergent in the sink the day before while my plunger was in there. But I thought I rinsed it properly? Apparently not.

I use a small bottle with a pump mechanism for my laundry detergent; it makes it easier to carry to the laundry room in my apartment building and dispense into the machines. But, I recently bought a new kind of detergent – some ultra-concentrated stuff. This brand was much less viscous than what I had previously and had a habit of dripping out of the nozzle when the temperature changed. It was especially bad the day before and was dripping on my hands while I was walking back from the laundry room. Not wanting concentrated laundry liquid on my hands for too long, I hurriedly placed the still dripping bottle in the empty sink next to my plunger and went to wash my hands. I guess that was all it took for it to get into the plunger and cause my coffee to be soapy. It is ultra-concentrated, after all.

I made myself a milk coffee in yet another mug and went back to the Zoom meeting. I hadn't been listening to anything. I had no idea how much soap I had consumed, but my stomach felt so uncomfortable. Surely there must be someone I should call? Or check-in with? The milk coffee made me start to feel better.

My parents' house had quite a long driveway; and, when I would come home from school, Kipper would come running up to me to meet me halfway down the drive – meowing all the way as if to say "you're home! you're home!" When we finally met, Kipper would walk all around and in between my legs and would make sure I was caught up with all the daily gossip.

"meowmeowmeowmeowmeow! meowmeowmeow!"

Which I, obviously, understood as:

"Ugh! You would not believe what that nasty cat from the Taylor household did today – she tried to claim some of our garden for herself. Well. I chased her off, alright. And that new dog next door is making a terrible racket. Keeps howling and wheezing at every passer-by saying "Oh, oh please play with me – please" sounding like some old broken chew toy…"

Once I had been caught up on all the important goings-on of the day, it was time for belly rubs. Kipper would flop on the ground, rolling from left to right expectantly awaiting a well-deserved petting after a hard day of work. And, of course, who could resist?