Hubris.co.nz

Tuesday September 11th, 2002

Grr students and interviews and mentors and work and grr and grr and grr. GRRRR! Grrr $218.42 to get the phone reconnected. Grrrr going to work where Terri was also having a bad day. GRRR at ANZ. Grrrr at the HR lady calling me Love and then saying that no, they still hadn’t made up their minds. Grrrr at the memory of the dead mice in the cupboard. Grrr at dynamics that just don’t work. Grrr at the mean receptionist at my doctor’s who told me that Dr. White refused me a new prescription but didn’t say why (yeah, like I can afford $50 for another consultation right now – if my blood pressure is raised, it’s her fault!). Grrr at thousands of clippings to do, adn then GRRRR at problems with avmed stuff. Grrrr at getting rained on the way home. Grrr at Clay being sprawled out on the couch watching some stupid movie when I just wanted to be alone. Grrr at hearing Kara while i was hiding out in my room, rereading the Blind Assassin for the trillionth time. <!– homage mode: He follows her into the empty room, concrete floor bare except for the mattress, piled with messy sheets and pillows.  When she sits on the windowsill, he pushes her against the glass and kisses her intensely, until they move to the mattress. When her moans that she had never heard before have subsided, he tells her his tragedies, and she kisses him every time words fail her. You intrigue me he says, I feel like you’re holding me at a distance.  And she can see his eyes casting around her room, trying to find some clue to her, but there’s nothing, nothing but her Blind Assassin poster on the back of her door.  What’s that about, he asks, pulling her in tightly to his chest.  It’s about lovers who lie in bed telling each other stories, she laughs.) –>

But they went out, and I drifted in and out of conciousness as I have been doing a lot lately, and then I got up to eat spinach soup and watch Buffy. KateM came over half way through it, and asked a lot of questions, but she’s allowed to cos she’s cool. Oh, and I finally got my invitation to Justin’s party, so I can put that slab’o paranoia aside. After KateM left, I ran around my room trying on various clothing combinations. Fuck I need a needle and thread. The slit at the back’o my black dress has split basically almost up to my slit, so I won’t be wearing that tomorrow (eww, did I just use the word “slit” instead of “vagina” or even “panties”? Dirty). Tomorrow is, of course, our industry evening where we all try to impress PR bigwigs and get jobs. I debated wearing my cleavage top, but it doesn’t cover the hole in my bright pink skirt which I really wanna wear, so I think I will stick with my stretchy black skirt, providing it dries in time, damn excess soap powder, and my boots, of course. I figure standing at least 6’1 is one way to make an impression.

Oh, and what with today being you know, THAT anniversary, kinda, except a day ahead, it also means that today it’s also a year since I started taking the everlovely fluox. Of course, I stopped in umm February I think, but I still think it was like an important anniversary for me, cos that was such a fucking hard thing for me to do, and it of course kicked off my whole “why can’t I feel anything? maybe I should have another drink or some more cock” phase. Fun times. And I lost someone I cared about. And etc. Oh inncidently, I think I still have about a month’s worth of fluox, which I’ll trade anyone for a month of estelle35, or some more straight codeiene. I also have voltarin and brufen and maxolon, in case you too have excessive nausea. I like my pill drawer, although most of the pills in it don’t do anything, but some of them, like the brufen and the fluox are pretty colours, and it makes me feel like I’m some late sixties housewife.

Okay, it’s bloody cold today, totally and utterly freezing. I probably should put another layer on, but i’ve been sewing, and so I’m modelling my creation (and when I say sewing, I mean using a pair of scissors on an old top).

Scissors go snip snip, top goes awesome

I don’t know if you can tell from the photos or not, but I now have a semi-off the shoulder top, in this charcoal coloured semicobwebfeely fabric. It’s real nice. Cool. But not especially warm.

Today I staggered in to my 8am class, freezing all the way down, and then spent a very very long time at the bank getting a new eftpos card – the one for my rent account expired in April and of course they didn’t bother to send me a new one. Now my two accounts are loading on the same sparkly pretty card. Then I discovered that there’s a new juice bar right next to Oporto – this could be very dangerous. I had the yummiest smoothie for my breakfast before hightailing it back home to scan the paper, check my email, jump in the shower and run off to work.

I like the stroll to work, it’s relaxing even if I’m always rushing cos I’m running late. Work itself is good too, even if they haven’t quite figured out what to do with me. I’m doing a lot of backreading, and I also got a tour of the place, which is huge and includes a secretish network of spooky tunnels running all over the city. I kid you not (although possibly I exagerate a little). Just for the record, I’m working Mondays, Thursday mornings and friday afternoons. All the other times I have classes. Busy busy Joanna.

But I’m not busy tonight, no. Instead i parked my ass on the sofa to watch TV under the safety of a duvet and a wooly jersey, cos it’s FUCKING COLD. I’m jealous of boys with open fires in their lounges, although I guess it’s okay as long as they provide you with plenty of pot when you go over there last night, even if it means that they can’t make conversation. Tomorrow night Nigel will be in town for his birthday (back from somewhere near Warkworth where he is making porn with a kumi kumi pig – nothing nondodgy ever comes out of that area!) and so there’ll be going out and drinking and dancing I imagine. Excellent. And then next weekend’s a humdinger, what with parties and KateB being up, and Brad being up, and PACIFIER concerts and all… so I should go get a good rest now. Yeah. Night!

I accomplished a great deal today.

Thursday 25; February, 1999

Got out of bed to the phone ringing, pulling on my dressing gown and was kinda short to Clayton’s friend Antz, practically hanging up before I remembered it would be polite to say “do you want me to take a message?” But he didn’t. So I stripped my bed, and put my light washing in the machine, and then went back for a bit more of a lie-in. When I went to put my dark washing on, I realised that there had been a sponge in the tub, and I’d flooded the laundry. Aces.

Anyways, so finally I managed to leave the house, and I stopped in Newmarket to get out $800 at ANZ and carry it up to ASB to pay the rent. The guy at ASB was really nice and sympathetic, because of course I moaned out the whole story when he asked. Man, it was fun having that much cash in my hands, even temporarily. Then I went to some crap-ass cafe and had a coffee, just to perk up a trifle before my three hour tv workshop.

Because we’re Year 2 this year, we don’t use the m100 cameras anymore, we use some bigass flash pro 2000s or something like that, which are apparently worth $10,000 each. Scary shit man – that’s like waaaaaay too much responsibility to place in my hands! We had to divide up into groups to do stuff, and we had Dan in our group. Dan who’s 23 and has a background of making short films. He was being sooooooooo patronising about all the technical stuff, and I just couldn’t see anything because I wasn’t wearing my contacts (my bottle of cleaning fluid has vanished somewhere into my room), and I was bored. We spent like 45 minutes getting two shots. It’s funny how paranoid people are when they think they’re being filmed getting out money from an ATM. OH! And I have another mini story sort of on that note – this morning when I was in the bank, I sat down at one of the counters that had two chairs at it, next to a counter that had no chairs. This old woman comes up, goes “Excuse me” and took the other chair but moved it over to the other counter. So what am I – chopped liver?

Man it’s pouring hard. I’m glad Si and Leyton were kind enough to bring in my washing. I was kind to them and hung most of my underwear up in my room (there’s this really weird line of nails sticking out of one of the walls that worked a treat). I guess I’m just really paranoid about people handling my underthings. One thing that really bugged me last year was whenever I went to Hamilton, Andee would always paw through my bag or suitcase (depending on whether or not I was enroute to somewhere else or just down for the weekend) looking for cool clothes that she could wear.

Oh yeah but back to my day. So yeah, after the three hour workshop (which was actually two and a bit) I went up to Auckland Uni and wandered around the Quad there for ages, clambering up staircases all over the place, looking for the Craccum office. They hide themselves away pretty well, above the Koreans singing Boyzone in the clubspace. I like their office because its trajic state made me feel so much happier about the mess in my room. Anyways, I went to proofread for them, so I did. And ate their pizza, and rejected their offer of smokes. Like, I haven’t had pot in ages, and I would quite like to have some, just not right after eating. I’d rather just have my own stash so that I could get giggly when I felt like it, instead of getting drunk and moody. Anyways, Craccum was amusing, and I feel special cos I think my name gets published. As ‘Jo McLeod’ actually, which is kinda weird, cos I’ve stopped being Jo reccently because of the lovely Eaton lass. But that’s okay. People won’t know it’s me, so I’ll be like, incognito. No, honestly they don’t have someone from AIT helping out. It was funny how much Nexus, and Hammy in general got mocked.

Then once I’d proofread the whole thing, and fed it back to Matt while he made changes onto the puter, I figured my work there was done, so I walked up to the bus stop. Checking my cellphone, I saw I’d missed a message from Trudie, so I rang her back but she didn’t answer. However, while I was on the bus, Kate rang me, wanting me to go over, but instead she agreed to meet me back at my place. Mmmm. So yeah, I got home and then she came over. We sat in the lounge giggling for ages, squeezing the inflatable aliens for a bit. (Simon and I are starting a blow-up toy collection – all donations gratefully accepted). Kate just got hooked up to the net today, and she said she was surfing with her flatmate Matt, when he read the stuff I wrote about him (“kinda cute, but I’m SO over the stoner thing. Being a little more on-to-it is kind of a bonus”) and complained that he IS on to it. Hahahaha. Guess I won’t be going back to her flat then!

We realised that we were fully obsessed with the aliens, so we started playing that props game from “Whose Line is It Anyway?” with them. “Oh, an extra leg!” and “yes, it’s a real fur, darling”. I guess you kinda sorta had to be there. Actually, no, cos Clayton and Si and Leyton were all there, and were greatly bemused while Kate and I just about died in fits of giggles. I think the boys were more entertained when Kate and I started beating each other up with the Aliens. Man, we gave each other such a fucking huge walloping!!! She wacked me one right across my face, and it hurt like a motherfucker cos it crushed my glasses into my nose. Then we went into the kitchen and screamed at each other, to the great annoyance of the lads who were trying to sleep. Kate had the audacity to call me a slut, and Si joined in, calling me a Hoe. I was like “WELL AT LEAST I’M MAKING MONEY OFF OF IT!!!!!!!!”. That shut them up.

And that’s shut me up too now.

xoxoxoxo

Wednesday 24; February, 1999

“Woman, you’ve got too many brambles, hiding under these bushes” – ‘Cooling’ – Tori Amos

I felt so nauseous on the bus on the way into town all morning today, not in a hungover way (cos god knows I was awake long enough to sober up). I was glad that Clayton had the varsity orientation magazine which he leant to me so that I didn’t have to make conversation, because I was so not in the mood to talk.

I was late for my TV Production tutorial cos I spent a while hovering in the bathroom wanting to be back in bed for the rest of my life, so I had to sit at the front of a class that was half full of strangers. It was okay though, cos Shirley came in late too a minute later, so she sat up the front with me. We were watching some Nazi Propaganda film and the site of a screen thick with their banners just made me feel ill all over again. It’s funny because the swastika was like originally a Buddhist symbol of life or something like that, but now it’s such a symbol of hate.

Once that class was over, Shirley and I went down to the Midcity, but the movie we wanted to see wasn’t on there, so we decided to go find a paper to see when and where it was. We both also had to make Bank Missions, which I don’t really wanna write about now. Suffice to say, our rent is a week overdue, because of problems clearing money and bank shit. I was shaking once I came out of the phonebooth and telebanking, teetering on the edge of a total nervous breakdown on the main intersection on Queen Street. I’ve started this fun new thing where instead of crying properly, I just start breathing shorter and shorter until I get all lightheaded and just about faint. It’s especially funky when I’m drunk and spinning anyways. Not. So yeah, Shirley saw me and she was like “it’s okay, we’ll check back later – we’ll go take the link now and go to Newmarket”. So we did that, after finding out ‘Elizabeth’ was on at 10.50am – perfect time.

I got completly and utterly nauseous again in the opening scenes of the movie, cos the camera was at a reaaaaaally high angle, and swirled around and stuff – plus it’s never very nice watching people being burned alive. But after that, I got really settled into the movie. It was amazing. Cate Blanchet is one of the most stunning looking women I’ve seen in a long time, and she was astonishingly good in her role. Joseph Fiennes was sex on two legs – or he would have been if it wasn’t for the puffy shorts. Even Eric Cantona was in the movie – playing a French Ambassdor. As a humouress little side note, I was playing World Cup ’98 on Si’s puter the other day, being Holland (of course). I absolutely sucked at it, and Brazil so would have kept scoring on me except for the fact that the computer ran my goal keeper and kept saving my ass. That is until I somehow managed to hit enough keys so that I took over him, and accidentally made him turn around and throw the ball into my own goal. I rebooted the computer before I could hear the crowd jeer.

Okay, back to the movie. I was so inspired by her strength and stuff – as you can probably tell by the quote from the title of this page “I am not your Elizabeth. I am no man’s Elizabeth”. It was so sad and so lonely for huge big lots of it. I almost cried when she cut off her hair, and had to put up my hands to make sure mine was still there. I know that the movie didn’t make any mention of all the nasty shit she did, like burning Catholics and stuff, and apparently there was no way she could ever have had an affair but hey……….. it was dramatic license.

Shirley and I were going to take a tiki tour on the link bus back to town, only it went pretty much the way I thought it would go, instead of the way SHE thought it would go, which was through Ponsonby. So yeah, we sat at the back and giggled a bit. Getting off the bus, I nearly fell over in grand tremendous style and only saved myself by sliding around the pole like some kind of cheap tacky dancer only without the silicone and wearing a lot more and laughing louder.

Then we had to go to a Radio Production tutorial. Dee was really sad cos she got cut off from most of us Dsters when the tut got split in half, but that’s her own fault for not sitting by me (Karma). Our tutor assigned us all a talkback program to listen to – I got Kerre Woodham, 8pm-12am on Newstalk ZB, 89.4FM. I was given that one cos I told the tutor I didn’t sleep at night – she looked at me like I was a vampire or something. I listened to it for a while tonight while playing Cool Boarders 2 (god Si needs some new psx games – I go to sleep at night with snowy trails flashing before my eyes). It sucked. Talkback sucks. And I have to write a five thousand word essay on it.

What else? Hmmmmm. I met up with Simon after class, and rang telebanking but the money hadn’t cleared yet (STILL) so I couldn’t do that – fuck I PR’d the landlord when he rang last night. So we took the bus home, and I caught Si up to date on all my latest crisises. Poor wee lad. At home, both Clayton and Leyton were around, but luckily weren’t playing The Rolling Stones again like they were yesterday when I wanted to play my new Placebo album. But Simon had bought some new hideous NZ hardcore album or something, which was annoying me, as was the other boys talking about supermarket shopping and dinner plans and stuff, so I snuck off to bed, giving Si the power of attorney to make any descisions for me. I was asleep by halfway through the third track. Brian Molko’s heartbreaking voice just has such a lulling effect – sometimes.

Si made us instant pasta for dinner in the evening, which we ate in front of Shortland Street (did I mention how thrilled I am that Mike’s back?) and Friends. Doing the dishes, he made the mistake of sassing me – I had to mop the floor up after throwing so much foam at him. I’ve already mentioned the psx/talkback thing, so that’s about it.

I guess I should maybe say something about yesterday’s entry, but I don’t know what. And I don’t expect others to know what to say either – it’s okay, I understand. And thanks for the support – it means the world. Oh yeah, Isobel’s page is here. And my own little tribute to Amy is here. You’ll find similar traces and puzzle pieces scattered throughout and one day youll wonder how it came to be that you just didn’t know.

Thursday 28; January, 1999

gosh aren’t bus timetables fun?

See that? (<<<) THAT is South Auckland. That is where the buses that I ride end up. However, what you won’t see on that map (even if it wasn’t such bad resolution and around the wrong way) is my street, or my house. I know this, because I spent an awfully long time this afternoon (ie ten minutes) trying to figure out exactly which bus I had to take home. I mean, I remembered the number of the bus I took in, but I wasn’t wearing my glasses, and by the time I got to the map, I was a litttle bit tipsy, so it was all a bit confusing. But then I went to the bathroom, where I do all my best thinking, and figured out that my house was off the map, to the NORTH thank you very much. See, I have a complex now, because I’m the most judgemental person in the world, and I’d hate for people to think I lived in South Auckland. Or West Auckland. Or the North Shore. And too far east, just to round it all off nicely. Honestly I’m not a snob. No, reaallly I’m not.

Okay so anyways, on with the show. The landlord rang me out of bed at 9am, which pissed me off cos I couldn’t get back to sleep afterwards. Amazingly enough, I’d gone straight to sleep the night before – I’d thought I’d lie awake freaking out about every odd noise, but I guess Piha just wore me out.

Anyways, he finally came over and I pointed out the leaks and damp patches and he agreed to change the front locks – YAY. So hopefully that’ll happen soon. Layton also rang and said he’s moving in tomorrow, so I’m home alone again tonight (oh shit, you missed your collective chances, didn’t you?). Anyways, back to my story.

I took a bus into town today. How proud are you? I was pretty proud. I took it ALL the way too – down into the terminal. Fuck the bottom end of Queen Street sucks. The top end’s not all that shit hot either, but at least it’s not so sheepskinandpaua-ry. So yeah, I went to the bank (yay, my cheque finally cleared so I’m as rich as I should be) and cancelled my APs to Access Ezy – a storage unit place with a name after my own heart.

Then I bought a V and Pulp Magazine (the BEST read in town), and went and sat in Aotea Square for an hour, reading my little heart out and listening to the clatter of skateboards. It was nice there – it would have been better without the boppers though. Haven’t they got the whole of the shore to hang out on? Anyways, then I went and used the bathrooms in the Aotea Centre. Nice and clean, air conditioned, no one saying I can’t…. perfect.

Since it was by that time after 4pm, I went up to the London Bar, to meet up with assorted atmos/craccum people. I know people man! Hahahah, I’ll just revell in my moment of snobbery. Gareth, the exhalted editor of Craccum had been drinking 15% beer, and well – he was pretty slumped in his seat. The beer was FOUL too. Errrgh. So I sat back and watched enthralled as they talked about all this businessy stuff. I was so in awe, man. In Wellington, I listened intrigued to hours of hospitality talk. Up here, it’s hours of web design and advertising stuff. I love it. Very impressed with the proffesionalism of some of the people there…. and others were amusing. And two-for-one happy hour’s got to be a bonus.

I explained about the map before, so we won’t go there again. I got on the right bus eventually, after hiking up to Symonds Street. Then I got foodage from Wendys and came home. After Shortland Street (NO MACKENZIE NO!!! LET MINNIE KILL OSCAR!!!!) I rang Karen, to find out she was at Home, so I rang there and hung up so they’d have to call me back and pay for the call. I was still sorta drunk then (fuck I’m a cheap date) and I hadn’t talked to Karen in sooooooooo long that I just babbled my little head off, telling her filthy foul stories that had her in hysterics for ages. So that was cool, until she told me she wanted to hang up because I was just repeating myself. And even my own father didn’t want to talk to me. Shock horror! This is made for tv movie stuff, man. “Hyperactive Girl Cast Out By Family ” I had to spend the rest of the night on the net to make up for it. And now my back hurts cos there is no back to this chair. That’s probably something I should invest in. Or if someone wants to steal me one, that’d be cool too please.