Hubris.co.nz

The floor is lava again. I know it will pass, and I know the fact that I have been negligent in my lexapro intake is to blame, but it’s kind of like a vast conspiracy.

I had a glorious week before the lava set in. As I already said on Wednesday, Lisa Fur and I went out to the Hutt and had a marvelous drive around. On Thursday, we went to the zoo! There were otters! And meerkats! And giraffes! As my camera is at Anna Jane’s (I hope) I will pinch some pictures from Lisa’s flickr to display the otterly adoreableness of the trip:

Lisa kept calling the animals jerks every time they wouldn’t pose for photos properly or if they were just busy sleeping and we couldn’t see them, which happened a lot. I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. However, it did keep me giggling a lot. Afterwards we went to Lyall Bay to eat chips and be sad looking at the burntpout Maranui, and then we drove up and around Maupuia and then up other hills in Miramar, questing to find a particular yellow house we’d spotted from another peak. Spending time with Lisa is lovely and easy and great. I wish we could make out and then I’d never have to hang out with anyone else ever again, if you know what I mean.

On Friday I went to meet up with my old workmates Matt and Ros for drinks at Mighty Mighty. Apparently the SSC has not completely fallen apart without me. I’m as shocked as you are. Ros reads my journal, so I must give her shoutouts. Matt does as well, apparently, although he does not wish to discuss my periods with me. I warned him that I intended to pretend to be Mark Harris the next day and heckle his talk at Word Camp about the SSC blog and yell “Show us your tits!” a lot. He said that would be  a good thing. It’s a shame  I didn’t actually make it along, but I suppose we’ll get to that soon enough.

Then Karen came along and we took a taxi up to Anna Jane’s masquerade flatwarming. Once again I’ll steal a photo from someone else, in this case from Phillip:

I painted and glittered my fan myself, in case you couldn’t tell. It had creepy dolphins on it before, which Lisa made dolphin-killing noises when I painted over them at her house on Monday night. That was not as adorable as the sound the otters made when they saw us coming over and stood up to greet us.

Anyways, the party was fun, for a while. I was feeling very uncommunicative, and drank a lot to cover that, although we couldn’t find a corkscrew for a very long time which meant we couldn’t open the prosecco for a long time and had to resort to drinking white rum. I tried to steal a mask from a canadian guy because it matched my fan. He didn’t want to swap though. There was some piling onto Anna Jane’s bed, and pretty French girls. Then at one stage I was leaning on the bathroom door frame when someone shut the door and it turned out my fingers were shut into the frame. I howled in pain, and screamed until the door was open, and then I bawled and bawled and bawled. I was so very fucking embarrassed at how much I was crying, but once I started I couldn’t stop. It felt kind of cathartic and kind of horrible at the same time. People gave me hugs and ice packs and Bad Tom forcefed me straight brandy, and I still couldn’t stop crying. Karen made me go home pretty soon after that, and I cried in the taxi on the way home, and again once I was in bed. My fingers are still kind of fucked now.

Needless to say, I did not feel very good on Saturday. I was very very hungover, yes. But also, I was just so so embarrassed. I mean, twitter assured me that crying at finger pain is completely okay, but there was an element of just losing total control, letting down my facade, ex cet er ra, ex cet er ra. I was not comfortable about it at all. So I hid in bed, constantly resetting my alarm pretending I’d go to Wordcamp later and later but then I realised I wasn’t going to go at all. Instead I made watery mac’n cheese and watched half a dozen episodes of series four Buffy because I love the recaps of it on The AV Club so much.

Today I have also hidden in bed, beset by strange dreams about dreams, cheese, weddings, Kat’n Kane and cherries the size of pumpkins. I also dreamt that I cloned myself and we had some great sex. I ran away to Elements to eat haloumi and roast beetroot and read the stupid paper. Tonight I might make rhubarb crumble and toasted cheese sandwiches for dinner, and attempt to restore some order to my room. I wish I had a job. I really want to buy that bed that I want. I finally got a call on Friday from the job I’d interviewed for last Monday, and they said that they had no feedback to give me because I’d interviewed brilliantly but the candidate they went with had more general Comms experience and I’m too specialist. Damn my speciality!

Actually, given the soreness of my fingers, and how difficult wanking was last night, I’m not sure I will be able to make crumble, dammit. Hmm. I suppose I can but try.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2627/3793683901_ab75aed967_m.jpg

This post will be written very quickly while I wait for my flatmate to vacate the bathroom or the kitchen or whatever it is that he’s banging around in.

Things that I have been up to lately have included achieving all the things that I set out to achieve in my last journal entry. I also bought some new jeans. Excitement. I’ll write about them on PPP sometime soon. Posting to PPP is tomorrow’s ambition.

Yesterday Anna-Jane came over, and commanded me to take off my top and bra. Then she rubbed me up and down with passionfruit oil. It felt gooooooood. In exchange, I gave her a teapot and cooked her dinner – mountains of fresh salsa, guacamole, yellow rice, roast pumpkin and quesadillas with black beans, corn & zuchini in gluten-free wraps I had to go to Common Sense Organics for as a courtesy to her and Phillip.  I am the bombdiggity cook, for serious. We also drank an awful lot of mulled wine and did some gossiping.

Today I went and picked up Lisa in Newlands and we went out to Wanda Harland in Petone to meet up with Martha and have brunch at Go Bang. I wanted to buy every single thing in the shop. I met Lucy for the first time and got to have a cuddle, and my ovaries went ping ping ping. Then because it was such nice weather and we had a new early ’00s mix cd to listen to, we drove out to Eastbourne, then went and watched Almost Famous at her house, continuing the trend we’d started with Singles on Monday.

I came up with the hilarious title for this post because I wanted to talk about the commentators on Dooce telling her that her bathroom tiling was ugly, and also the amusing comments I’ve read on sites that I hate but read anyway about insecure girls who pretend to be things that they really don’t seem to be living off trust funds, but really, I need to pee and watch ‘Hush’ so I don’t think I can be bothered getting into all of that. Instead I will say that it’s Karen’s birthday tomorrow, hurrah, and so we’re going to Roxy for dinner. Before that Miss Fur and I are going to go to the zoo, if it’s sunny! Excitement. Not that I can afford it at all, but hey, that’s what credit cards are for, right? And so I’ll sign off and ask you to leave me a comment telling me what you want me to write about in the next post. Cheers!

Haha, I tricked you. Well, sort of. My list of things to do today (well, okay, yesterday since it’s 2.22am now) consisted of “change the lightbulb in my room” and I did that. I also found some whitetac and put up some more Frankie posters, purchased a mask for Anna Jane’s masquerade flatwarming on Friday, and also some accessories for Tom’s #madbad party later in August.

I also had amazing gnocchi at Baobob, great homemade pizza at Lisa Fur’s, and some of the ‘Welcome Home El’ cake that I made. More tasty things in my mouth. Oh, and I had the joy of disposing of what Sebastian wanted to eat – a rat he brought in the window at 4am and was eating under my bed. I picked it up through a plastic bag, but it was warm, and may have squirmed, and I panicked and threw it out the window. Had the rat still been alive, that would have been probably the most humane thing to do anyway. Yucky.

A much more pleasant thing that happened to me this week was on Saturday when I was at Anna Jane’s she decided that she was going to give me a foot rub, and so while she was doing that I said to Phillip “you can give me a scalp massage while she’s doing that” and he actually did. I felt like a pampered princess making ‘o’ faces fit for a tabloid magazine.

And speaking of pleasant things, after she had watch me paint over dolphins (long story) tonight, Lisa and I watched Singles for like, the millionth time. I’m still in love with Campbell Scott, even if he does resemble Campbell Smith, minus the chambray shirt. I miss Jessie. Just as well that she, like KateH, are making home visits sometime this year then, huh?

Okay, so here are the things that I want to do tomorrow:

1. Decide what I’m cooking for dinner, and go to Moore Wilson’s to purchase ingredients.
2. Go to the Warehouse to look for part of my madbad costume
3. Finish the thing I was painting tonight
4. Do two loads of laundry if it’s sunny
5. Tidy my bedroom a little.
6. Cook, mull wine, enjoy the company of my friends.

That’s all achieveable too, right? Right?

Despite all my statements on Twitter that I’m gay this month (because yes, you can totally dictate your sexuality like that, weren’t you aware?), mostly June has been a month of birthdays, and that is a fantastic thing, but it has pretty much killed me and my July schedule is looking about as full, and really, maybe it’s time that you guys all started paying attention to the things I say about you all behind your back, because really, I can’t take all this popularity anymore. It’s exhausting!

So anyways, near the start of June, I was supposed to go to Social Innovation Camp, but I was so so tired from presenting about SMS to people, and so much talk talk talk about work stuff, and I was hungover from something, some drinking after work but where and with who I can’t remember, but oooh, a look at my Google Calendar tells me that I had a glasses adjustment (I got new glasses) that day, so now I remember that I thought I lost my glasses that night, which means that i was playing Rockband with a whole bunch of public servants (I eventually found my glasses days later having torn my room apart and uncovering a dead rat under my bed by following a trail of peanuts – my laptop had crumbs on it so I had obviously been eating something while writing crap on the internet drunk, and then I saw a peanut container by my chest, and so if I’d thrown the peanut container there, perhaps I had thrown my glasses there too, and I had – I’m so Veronica Mars it hurts sometimes). I would not be able to function without Google Calendar, I almost had a heart attack when it went down one day oooh la la. Anyways, back to my point. So anyways, on a Saturday at the start of June I had to drag my ass over to Karen’s house to do secret work on Neil’s birthday present, and Amy was supposed to be coming over to make us up, so I was in ratty tshirt and jeans, and I was carrying food, and wine, and I had to walk up three floors because the lift was down, and I walked in the door of Karen’s apartment and then this happened:


Photo by Jed
It turned out that I was having a MOTHERFREEKING CIRCUS FREAK SURPRISE BIRTHDAY PARTY! Have you ever seen me speechless before? No? Well you should have been there really, shouldn’t you? Oh my stars, it was astonishing. There were lions and tigers and bears and creepy hypnotists, and two-headed freaks, and bearded ladies, and kissing booths and cakes with ponies and decorations everywhere and flaming hoops and gypsies and fortune tellers and cupcakes and umm, just go look at photos from Anji and Bambi and Kowhai and Jed’s and my crappy cellphone photos (I can’t find my camera cable). I was truly truly blown away, it was astonishingly awesome. I have never had a surprise party before, and apparently it was rather difficult to plan one for me as I am so hyper-socially-organised, but Karen and Anji and all the other lovelies did a most spectacular job, and I was just like holycrapwowfuck for a very long time. And they read out nice things from people who couldn’t be there, including KateB who had rung the night before to wish me a happy birthday and I had been like “umm, what the fuck? it’s not my birthday for another couple of weeks, how do you not know that?” and she’d been like “oh, umm, I’m drunk” and I’d laughed, but looking back there were a million little pieces that all make sense now. So yes, birthday party. Awesomeness.

There has been a lot of drinking at work lately as well, because of half of our team losing our jobs, and there’s gradual goodbyes, and finishing off of projects, and writing “No, I rocked” as an answer to a personal assessment question about whether I could have done anything better this past year. I’ve finally published the report that I worked on over the summer with the intern, and I’m having my final say about stuff. I cried a little bit when I wrote my last update for the work blog. Then I got drunk. I had birthday dinner with my family at Elements in Lyall Bay which was amazing – incredible service, value and taste, and then last Friday I had a big group dinner with my friends at China Delight, who were delightful and rang me after I’d left to say happy birthday to me again. I have a lot of friends it turns out. There were more drinks at the Hawthorn Lounge after that, even though we’d just been there the week before for Shirley’s 30th. They always give me extra olives in my martinis now.

It’s been so cold that there has had to be lot more drinking because bars are warm. There was burlesque at Bodega that was squirmy. There were long conversations with Canadians at Hooch about the Zombie Apocalypse and the roles that we will all have to play after that. It’s my standard conversational pickup line, obviously. There actually hasn’t been any gayness at all really despite June being Gay Month, unless we count me making $1.50 showing my sailor bra to Anna Jane in the kissing booth at my party, but since I refunded her money because I always give that away for free anyways, it doesn’t really count. It is nice having new friends like Anna Jane, and Kylie, and it is fun to twitter that I’m drinking with Kylie and comparing notes because I am a mean girl.

Wellington continues to be – and in fact grows even more – incestuous but mostly I’m sitting on the sidelines giggling at everyone. I’ve written some mean emails to someone who maybe does or doesn’t deserve it, but they aren’t read anyway. I’ve also written naughty emails to balance out the passive-aggressiveness, because everyone likes that, right? Anji reminded me that I’d been so happy at my surprise party that I promised to not be passive-aggressive to anyone for a whole week, but that didn’t quite work out. I’m surrounded by people all the time and that’s lovely but I’m also kind of lonely sometimes but I know what it is that I want, and I can’t have it, and that’s just that.

I have one full week of work left, and then two days. I am actively applying for jobs, but there aren’t many around that I want. I want to go away to a tropical island for a while but Karen can’t get leave until August. I’m also currently fantasizing about blowing a substantial part of my redundancy payout on this bed which I suppose wouldn’t really be blowing my money away so much given that I spend so much time in bed and I’ve had this one for ten years, but I think I should maybe wait until I have a house of my own in which to put it. I’m not entirely certain I’ve taken my zopiclone tonight (or rather yesterday) since it’s 2am now and I’m not sleeping, so beds are weighing rather heavily on my mind right now. I’m going to use the time without employment to ween myself off the zopiclone very very slowly. I will miss the crazy intense dreams, but I also can’t wait to get rid of them.

Were there other things we needed to talk about? Oh yes, this:

TEN YEARS, BABY! You will come along, right? And finally, if you’re wondering what I look like right now (or rather earlier this evening), here’s a picture of me with a chip cat on my shoulder.