Hubris.co.nz

So Cheney is briefing Dubya on the events of the day, and of course Dubya isn’t paying much attention because he’d rather be playing with his toy cars, but when Cheney says “…oh and three Brazilian soldiers were killed today in Iraq,” George looks up and his eyes seem terrified. “Dick,” he says, “how many is a Brazilian?”

Aha ha ha ha ha. Yes, that’s right, I created a whole Country Club theme just so that I could tell you that very lame joke.

But before there was Brazil there was driving out to the airport in the crazy wind to pick up KateH on Friday night, and then cooking her rare sirloin steak sandwiches in fresh french bread with tamarillo chutney and caramalised onions, and then being picked up by our (and everyone’s!) chauffer for the night, the everylovely Miss Lisa who took us to San Fran to see Sam Flynn Scott play with Lawrence Arabia. They sounded good, but I was tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired and coming down with a nasty sore throat and cough. Katie meanwhile had enough energy to get up and sing on stage.

The next morning she and I went and had brunch at Elements before picking up more party supplies, and she vacuumed while I made Brazilian rice and finished off the feijoada. Then we jumped on my bed (Smoo declined our invitation to join us – wtf?) to listen to the Wellingtonista on Public Address Radio, which you can download here and I giggled at the fact that I got bleeped once but I mostly sounded fairly articulate. The mp3′s not online yet, but I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up. I think that we sounded like pretty smart, on-to-it people, and that’s good, because that’s who we are. And I sounded less nasally and cackly than I expected to.

After that it was nap time before finishing off preparations and heading off to pick up Lisa and Jimmy. I was planning on dressing up all fancy in my hott green dress, and fishnet stockings, and my 4.5 inch wedges, but by the time I’d found my suspenders I’d lost my stockings, and given how low cut the dress is, I thought it was also a bit short (boobs or legs, not both, after all. Not that I’d normally go for legs, until I get to the bit where I write about my day today) so I wore jeans underneath, and didn’t risk breaking my ankle on my shoes. One day I’ll find an occasion to actually wear them. Honest. Maybe when I act out a Tori Amos lyric with someone sometime – “he liked my shoes / I kept them on”. Speaking of Tori Amos, I discovered that someone most unexpected is really in to her music, but I will keep his secret. I was very very surprised though. Anyways.

Brazil turned out to be really good. Caipirinhias are a fantastic drink, especially mixed with copious quantities of cerveza. Rice’n beans is tasty, and Jimmy had made some fantastic sweets that went along with his fact that Nestle stole all the cocoa in Brazil in the 1940s and imported mass amounts of condensed milk instead. Who knew that Nestle could be so tasty and so evil at the same time (well, me, since I’m currently writign a piece on Fair Trade – and calling it Free Trade 70% of the time. Whoops)? I had bought planes, trains & automobile lollies to illustrate my facts about Brazil’s capital Brasilia having been laid out in the shape of an aeroplane and built from scratch in 1960, and also the fact that someone else snaffled, that 40% of Brazilian cars run on ethanol made from corn. I also found tasty ranch-flavoured corn kernels in the scoopermarket bins that went with the theme very well. We didn’t get around to eating fried bananas, but I did scoop out a pineapple that Karen had brought along and serve communal pina coladas in it. In fact, as the night wore on – and oh lordy, did it wear on – many, many more cocktails were served up in that same pineapple and delivered to the boys who were outside playing “soccer” and to the girls sitting civilly on the couches using many many words starting with ‘C’ for some reason. I tried to pressure people into joining the Wellingtonista Bowling League, and since everyone except Barbara, Jack and Nicole were Country Club veterans, there were many facts to be shared. Blair showed up with his iPod so we could listen to CSS and Sepultura instead of our very inauthentic attempts at Brazillian music (One Million Dollars), but no sambaing was done.

Instead the night wound down around 4am with some highly amusing and rather disturbing antics that involved a lot of mocking, bluff-calling and toe-sucking. When are people going to learn that I will always call their bluff? And when I laugh at changes in morality, I am taking the piss out of myself, as I watch myself acting out in jest parts of actions that I’d used in previous lifetimes but then in a serious capacity. This is what happened in that bathroom. This is what happened after the Placebo concert. This is what happened when you so conveniently happened to leave your laptop at my apartment and came back to pick it up at 3am. This is what happened when the boy I was hooking up with at the wedding wouldn’t come home with me so I decided to substitute you instead. And it makes me laugh, and I will always, always go for the cheap laugh.

Sunday was very slow. I went for coffees and the paper and sat and read it on the front steps in the sun while the house was cleaned up behind me, hurrah! Brad came over and did the dishes on Monday as well, so it was like, easiest party evah! We watched a million episodes of The Simpsons off the hard drive and it made me remember how horrible the time around New Year’s was for me. Shirley came down visiting from Palmy in the evening, and we all went and had dinner at Cambodinia in Kilbernie (it’s Cambodian, in case you couldn’t tell), because I wanted something more interesting than the very bland Nahkon Thai in Hataitai. Then we played DVD Cluedo and I went and finished reading the Anthony McCarthen book that I think is called The Death of a Superhero but I’m not entirely sure. If only there was some system of tubes that I could type into that could deliverme the answer…

On Monday I was still coughing up my lungs – assuming that my lungs were dry like wheatbix, so I didn’t go to work. Instead I lay on the couch and napped on and off and moaned with sickness. Brad came home and cooked us dinner and I thought about breaking Katie’s legs so she couldn’t leave but instead I took her to the airport. Today to work I wore my new green dress from Torrid with my new black opaque tights and boots. The dress is, like all my torrid dresses, too short to wear over bare legs (but not bear legs), but I thought it would be fine with the tights since there was no chance of my vajayjay showing. I was super paranoid about the dress coming up, and the tights rolling down – although being footless helped them keep their crotch in the right place – but I like the way it made it look like I had legs a million years long as I strode purposefully down Lambton Quay to meet Jessie for lunch at Kapai. We walked down to the waterfront and sat and shot the shit, and watched the Water Whirler whirl. Good times. Tomorrow I have the day off, hurrah!

I forgot how anal I get when I do quizes. Ohmigosh my team isn’t devoting their full energy to answering the questions? They’re disagreeing with me? THE WORLD IS ENDING! Still, it’s nice to dress up like a pirate every now and then, and then take photos from the 21st floor of your building:

I lost the momentum when we stopped at Jarrod’s apartment for him to get changed, so I ran away to take the bus home instead of going out to Karaoke, but I was also aware that I had a very big night planned for the following night and an early morning to deal with first.

So yes, Saturday, I got up before 11am so that Lani and I could move the fridge out from under the house and back to the kitchen so the repair man could put it back together. We were clever and decided not to lug it up the difficult steep kitchen stairs and around tiny corners, so instead we carried it al the way around the house and inside. And then the repairman was late, and later and latest, but Lani was kind enough to say that I should just leave her a cheque and go to the beach and she’d take care of it, so I went and swam between the flags for like the first time ever at Lyall Bay. There were only two other girls swimming because the water was powerfully cold, but damn it was nice, becasue it’d been ages (umm okay, since Tuesday) since I’d last been swimming. And then it was Jo Time brunch by myself, and I went for a hair cut and nearly purred/came/passed out when the lady gave me a very long, very thorough headrub. I wanted to ask for a happy ending, but I suppose settling for a nice haircut was happy ending enough for me.

6.20 had me pacing at the bus stop all dolled up for my big night out with the Wellingtonista, cursing Go Wellington for sending buses past me that didn’t stop, but 15 minutes later I made it in to Tupelo, to discover all the lights on, no one behind the bar, and all the sliding toilet doors off the rails. Spoooooooooooooooky! So I went and sat outside, and luckily was soon joined by Tom who was enough of a good reader to tell me that I looked smokin’ hott. Heh. While the bartender was still setting up the bar, we were joined by Hadyn and Amy and his mother, and shortly after that the lovely Miss Sue who was escourting Mr Brown and Ryan. Once James had joined us, we were interviewed about the Wellingtonista for Russell’s new radio show, me smirking behind my martini and trying to define again what it is that I hate about the word ‘blog’. And calling myself a wanker, and – according to James – using the word ‘anal’ four times in one minute to describe myself. After the gorgeous Martha bought me a surprisingly not-sweet gin sling, half of us set off for Scopa as the advanced party for our 13 person booking.

We decided that it’d be easiest if we just ordered pizza and wine for all of us, and so I interviewed about being dominant. I’m not sure why I thought it was a good idea to let people record me talking whilst drunk. It’s not like I make much sense whilst sober, and when I’m drinking I’m even more slurry. Still, I thought at the time that I was articulate and verbacious, so until I hear otherwise (possibly at 2pm on Saturday on Radio Live, or podcast later, or broadcast on another date), I will continue to believe that I give great soundbite. It was nice catching up with Ryan too, who I went to uni with, although he was part of the radio posse and I was with the multimedia geeks who weren’t nearly as bondy. Dinner was very very tasty, although I accidently got a piece of pizza with an anchovy on it, but I was able to wipe away that taste with our next destination:

Yes that’s right, PINEAPPLES AT IMBIBE!

Anyone would think that we’d pre-arranged them or something. But our visitors sure seemed to enjoy them, as did Martha and James:

More photos of the night can be see here on flickr.

It was around that time that I think I started to try to convince Russell that he needed to change Public Address to attract a better class of reader than some of the people who’ve stalked me through it or people that I may have hooked up with at the Great Blend. I suspect I didn’t have a very convincing argument. So instead when some girls asked me and Hadyn where we were off to next, I made fun of them and their taste. We said we were off to Mighty Mighty, and they said they were going to Jet, because the music at Mighty Mighty was shit. I was all “yeah I know, like the way they mix indie rock with rare hip hop tracks? What are they thinking, turning out fresh new mixes?” and said that my other favourite bar apart from Jet was Dockside. Well, it amused me anyway.

Then we left to go to Mighty Mighty and some boys outside smoking asked me if I was wearing my flower behind my ear on the single side. I told them it was an umbrella, not a flower, and asked them to figure out the symbolism in that, before skipping off. We were at Mighty Mighty for a while but everyone seemed to be peeling off, so I decided that I would go for a swim, just to live up to my reputation. I was a tiny bit more wussy though, and jumped off the lower dock rather than the high plank cos I didn’t want to hurt my nose, ears and throat again. James came in too, and Ryan got his shoes wet interviewing us about it. That’s dedicated journalism! I don’t think anyone would contradict me if I said that a good time was had by all, although apparently many people felt a little under the weather the next day. But not me! That’s the great thing about swimming.

The next morning I went and picked up Brad who was in town and we had big delicious fresh fish burgers at Maranui and hung out for a while. Good times. Monday Bart came over for flat dinner (green curry with fresh coriander from our herb garden) and to play Cluedo DVD. Monday night flat dinner and games is totally on every week that Smoo’s not working. You can come if you bring wine and/or wash the dishes after. Tuesday was meh. Today I went to the doctor and asked her to up my prescription, and to give me the medical certificate that work asked me to give them to show that I need to only work four days a week. I don’t have much to say about that today. I did before, but then I felt like throwing up all afternoon,and was gagging on the bus (and threw up at home. Mmmm biley). I am somewhat disappointed in myself for needing more meds despite all the hard work that I’ve been doing, but I’m looking forward to the increased dosage euphoria. And looking forward to doing more projects. Yes. And also looking forward to coming to Auckland for the Bloc Party gig on August 8. Woo woo. I am so so in love with A Weekend in the City, and also Neon Bible. ‘Sunday’ is now officially my new walking down the aisle song (“I love you in the morning / when you’re still hung over”). Now I just need someone to marry.