Hubris.co.nz » cwa

The day that never happened

johubris — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 11:06:01 +0000

The Saturday before last was one of the worst of my life. Luckily it never happened.

Friday 29 June was my last day at NZAID. I’d suggested that I didn’t want to have a morning tea, and suggested instead that we could have drinks. My manager asked if she should invite ISU, the internet services unit. I squawked out “NO!” very loudly at her suggestion, because that is where the Web Developer works, and if someone is the sole reason for you leaving your job, you don’t really want to see him at your goodbye drinks. Instead, I told Lani to come down for it, and invited Bart to come up, and since Shirley’s starting there soon, she came in for a meet’n greet and to stay for drinks. My manager made a tiny little speech, but they didn’t even give me a card. You know how normally cards are really lame, full of impersonal messages from people who don’t even know you? Well I miss not getting one anyway. The boy who sent me sexually harrassing hilarious emails every day only stayed for one drink. Eventually everyone left, except for Bart and Shirley, and then the company director showed up which was very nice, and this crazy sixty year old woman. Bart and I laughed comparin gthe scene to my long, drunken goodbye at CWA New Media. Then the fucking cunt showed up. I went to the bathroom, went to my desk and logged out and forgot to clear my caches, and then went to get back and Shirls saying “we’ve got to go meet Dylan now”. So we ran away, leaving my tags behind me, and went up to Tupelo.

At Tupelo we drank more wine, and more wine, and more wine. Dylan showed up with his friend who I’d given a lecture on homophobia that one time, so I bought him a beer to make up for the one I’d spilt on his pants the last time we’d met. Eventually we all started playing ‘I have never’. I’m sure that wasn’t a smart idea. Shirley felt me up and I exposed my beautiful red bra to her and Dylan. It was one of those nights.

At some stage we stumbled our way up to the Southern Cross because Bart’d gone up there to meet up with his friends. More unnecessary drinks followed (but handily provided me with a receipt saying $15 at 00.39am, which makes me think it was two glasses of wine for Shirley and I) and then I remember thinking “why is that guy’s arm around my waist?” and then I believe that the guy kissed me, and I was like “umm, don’t you have a girlfriend?” and he said “yes, I have a girlfriend” and so I think we decided it’d probably be a good idea if he left, and so I went out in the rain to the back garden to find Bart. Smoo was there too, so I was like hurrah! And then the boy showed up again and I was like “didn’t you leave?” and he was like “yeah” and offered some lame excuse as to why he was back, but I just concentrated on talking to Smoo instead. Before the night was over I propositioned the last boy that I had sex with again and he was like “not a good idea” and then I woke up on the couch at 8.30am and was like “FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK” before crawling back into bed.

I crawled out of bed at 11.30am, somehow thinking that I could get up then, pack and still make it to check-in around 12pm. Interesting line of thought there. Of course, that thinking was somewhat handicapped when I got out of the shower and realised that my passport was not where it was supposed to be. I wanted to sit down and cry but I ransacked my room instead, wailing to Smoo who’d got up to drive me to the airport. By the time I’d found it in an old handbag, I knew there was no way I could make my flight, so I sat down and bawled, going “why am I such a fucking fuck-up?”. Then I shook myself off, threw a pile of clothes into my large suitcase and asked Smoo to drive me. My suitcase didn’t fit into the boot of his MR2, so we took my car. I’d kept KateH in the text loop and she was lovely, asking me if I needed her to book me a new flight, or send Shirley over to help me.

Qantas had no more flights to Auckland before 7pm that day, apparently, so I ended up forking out $400 for a ticket on Air NZ. It didn’t go until 2.30, so I very slowly bought a paper and a latte and a pastry and sat shaking at a table in the terminal, trying to do the sudoku. Then I went and threw up the pastry and the coffee and sat trembling a little more. When I finally got into KateH’s car in Auckland, I warned her I was about to cry again, and she said that aws fine. She drove me to Wendy’s in Manukau where I proclaimed that she’d saved my life – until all the saturated fat hit my heart anyway. We gossiped, and she soothed my soul over my fuckedupstupidity, and it was just so lovely to see her.

That feeling of loveliness disappeared when I got back to the airport and found no one waiting to check me in at the Pacific Blue counters. I asked at the service desk, and they were like “that flight’s already closed!” and I was like “OH MY GOD WHAT?????????????????” before the other woman said that no, it was just at a counter at the other end of the terminal. So I told my heart that was all thumpthumpthunp to calm the fuck down, and schlepped over to the check-in counter. They asked to see my tickets. I was like “umm, wasn’t this an e-ticket?” but apparently since I was coming back on Air NZ and not Pacific Blue, that was a problem for them. I had to go to an Air NZ service desk and get them to print out my flight details, trying really hard not to cry while doing so. Then they said that there were no more seats. I just about exploded. They had to unlock some seats or something, and told me that the plane was completely full. Great. I got stuck with a window seat. The rest of the waiting time was horrible. Every duty-free shop made me dry retch. Luckily I managed to sleep on the plane, although I’m sure I snored.

But then tobacco was $20 a box at Duty Free in Rarotonga, and I got a bottle of bacaardi, and my daddy was there to pick me up and drive me to our house in a late-model BMW. I opened up the lounge doors where I was sleeping and stepped out onto our lawn and looked at Muri Beach by the light of a full moon. I’d flown over the dateline and so I had a chance to redo my Saturday so it wouldn’t be the worst day of the year again…

In which I am drunk and foolish. For a change.

johubris — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:12:55 +0000

Goddammit, when is someone going to actually punch me in the face and remind me that English accents aren’t actually as awesome as they make my loins feel?

So this week, my manager has been away, but luckily she gave me a very comprehensive list of things to do which has had me making many many calls. Do you know how easy a comms girl’s job would be if people actually answered their phones? Easy like woah is the answer you are looking for. But as a key feature of Comms is being patient, work has been busy in the sense of lots to do, and slow in the sense of much waiting for others. It’s that waiting that had me having lunch with Miss Kimberley today, so I could give her a copy of 101 Stories that I want to tell you, for her raffle, and now it turns out that instead of just buying some tickets, I’m also selling them. Go to her page for more details, or get in touch with me when I’;m more sober (It’s 3.24am right now).

Anyways, towards the end of the day, we were supposed to go to Concrete for a drink, but I went there with Mel last Friday and most of their cocktails were $20. Seriously? And not even a Long Island Iced Tea? No way am I paying that (although the $8 glass of rare and tasty white that I had was bloody good and also generous), so we suggested that we get a bottle of wine in instead, since our coopted lady wasn’t done (she was waiting for our minister to wake up, apparently), and so I went to Kirks’ and bought an $18 bottle of very tasty Sav. We had nice conversation and plotting for next week and stuff, then I wnet with one of Lani’s friends down to Ministry Drinks. It was Caribbean themed, which meant rasturbated pictures of Bob on the wall and cricket stumps. I sold two tickets and left to go to New World Metro for a $17.50 bottle of Shingle Peak Sav that I thought was $12.50, and a bus up to the lovely Miss Lisa’s house. She cooked me spinachy cheeesy pasta and we watched ANTM the recap episode, until we were joined by Dave, and headed down to Havana for Amber and Karl’s goodbye drinks. It turned out that I’d left not just my phone but also my wallet at Lisa’s house (I am so usually not that girl),so we cabbed back for it, and she stayed, so I went back and talked to many ex CWAers. And I was all woah.

Then I found myself on a couch talking to some British boy, so I made Karl change places with him, and he was saying he flew kites, and I was all “oh,that’s so interesting” so I bid everyone goodbye as they left and settled in to talk to the Brit. He was all blah blah blah and I was all “tehehe accent” and our knees were touching, and our thighs against each other, so I was like omg, makeout. He said he was a chef, so I was like “okay, so what would you cook for me? I’m drunk and kind of cute” (cos I know that he’d been staring at my cleavage like woah), and he started going on about crab, not in a vol e vant (sp?), but rather in a wonton wrapper, and I was like oh yes? saying that I’d never eaten crab but trying to imply that I was totally willing, but then he went to the bathroom, and I was all “okay, he’s got 10 minutes to get back here”, checking my watch, but then he was all talking to others, and he reawlly did remind me of Kateb’s ex, and there’s no way I’d do that, and I was like oh stink bro, you’re a chef, all I wanted was a hot beef injection, but I taxiied home and now I am here. Hurrah. l

Stone the flamin’ crows!

johubris — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:45:14 +0000

I have been as busy as a mongoose lately. A mongoose! And consequently, there is not a part of my body that doesn’t ache. Except for maybe my right ear. But that’s it.

After work on Tuesday, Karen and I went to jump into the ocean by the lagoon. Something went wrong with the way I was holding my head as I jumped off the plank though, and as I plunged into the water I felt as if I was receiving an enema through my nose. Not a pleasant feeling at all, I tell you. In fact, it made my throat and ears ache, and made me feel really sick. Add to that the teenage boys yelling “stingray!” at each other, and then the something solid that brushed my hand that made me swim and hide behind Kar, and when she saw a jellyfish I was well ready to get out. So I texted the divine Miss Fur and she came to pick me up and we went to the fish’n chip shop in Lyall Bay then drove out of the sun to go eat on the pier by my secret beach.

On Thursday Anji and I went to a pilates class at our gym for the first time. It seemed easy enough while we were doing it, although I got trembling holding my left leg in the air for so long, but afterwards, my abs were screaming. Oh yes, I apparently have abs. And for the rest of that night and all of Friday I felt like I was wearing a corset, I was so aware of them. I drove out to the airport to pick up Lani and three of her giggling friends who are staying with us, and then Lisa came to get me again for the Julia Deans (that’s her from Fur Patrol for those of you not in the know) solo accoustic gig at Happy. We got there shortly after 9pm, and were told it wasn’t on til 10 so we went to Karen’s house and made fun of her for a while before going back. Man oh man was I tired. Ryan Prebble didn’t start playing until after 11, and even though I’m sure he’s a lovely man and that some people were into his music, I started having fantasies about his guitar strings breaking as he was twanging them so hard and cutting him and him bleeding out and dying on stage so that Julia could start sooner. And then the taste in my mouth let me know that I’d actually fallen asleep for half a minute. But when Julia finally started singing, ti was all worthwhile. She did lots and lots of new stuff, no old Fur Patrol, and ‘Freak show’ and wow, her voice sure is stunning. The annoying part was that someone had brought along a baby, who cried. What the fuck? Yes, the baby was wearing ear muffs, and yes, apparently the mother was known to Julia who stopped and said “I know it’s not the volume cos that baby’s been to Shihad gigs!” but hi, you are not Gywneth, and this is not Live8 (and no one should ever aspire to be Gywneth anyways, because dude, could you pick a more bland milksoppy role model? Maybe Andie Mcdowell. But still.). I can put up with screaming kids at the beach because I suppose I do swim by the kids’ playground so I’m asking for it, but I don’t care if Happy was the first smokefree bar and it was fairly quiet, children are totally inappropriate in that context. Yes sir. But yes, apart from that, good times. I thought about how I can totally see the way I’m replacing you in the role that you used to have, and how even though I know what I’m doing is dumb it’s going to happen anyway, but meh, maybe I will go with this week’s counselling work whereby instead of being all “I should be doing this or that” or whatever, I can be all “I am making a choice to do blah blah blah”. I totally dig on how she gets my semantical issues.

Because Lani’s friends were sleeping in the lounge when I got home I couldn’t have my usual unwinding time with the television when I got home, so I couldn’t get to sleep for ages so Friday morning I was dreadfully dreadfully tired, but hopped up on excitement about the forthcoming weekend. After work I went to the ministry social club drinks where Lani introduced me to her friends – many of whom know my father, and I laughed at where a couple of the boys apparently thought my eyes were. I suppose the Mary-Kate and Ashley locket I was wearing that Martha made me buy at Craftwerk did help to draw the eye down to Mary-Kate and Ashley, which was of course totally the point. But it made me feel appreciated. Yes. I only stayed for one glass of wine though, because I ahd to go home to eagerly await the arrival of KateH and Shirley, hurrah! We had a couple of bottles of bubby while doing much gossip catch-up, and it was lovely. A couple of times I felt a bit weird, because I always used to be better friends with both of them than they were with each other, but of course now I live in Wellington and they don’t, so they have all these stories about people I don’t really know and tales to tell about nights together and I was just like “waah, left out”. But Shirley has just moved to Palmy now to finish her grad dip, so the balance will be restored again. Muahaha. We’d planned to go out to dinner but instead I fished bolognaise out of the freezer while they went for more wine. Then we went to Fia’s birthday party, and I didn’t check the address so we wandered around the top of Ghuznee St for ages trying to find a number that didn’t exist, being invited to student parties playing Metallica before I checked my phone and saw I had two digits wrong. So we got there in the end. Mostly I just talked to Karl and Amber, and laughed at the very very drunk very very young lady who tried to hit on both Shirley and KateH because she was missing her girlfriend. When we were in the taxi home I rang Lisa and decided to go to her house to panda-dance, so the girls went home to watch taped Daily Shows which Shirley didn’t like and is therefore off my weddding guest list.

It was a Saturday the next day, strangely enough, but much like last weekend when I didn’t get to sleep in because I went to the Petone fair with Shayne and Lani to see the wonderful Sue and Martha, I had to get up early to make the most of the day. This meant Shirley, KateH and I taking the bus in to the Cuba St Carnival, leaving like before 11am! I know right, haaaaaaaaaardcore. We were as awake as lemurs. Even though I’m sure it got much more crowded as the day went along, Cuba St was buzzing, and I was so fucking proud to be a Wellingtonian. I was also stoked that all of my “I am the boss of the weather and it will be sunny tomorrow!” blustering had paid off and it was still and baking. We wandered around for an hour or so, People’s Coffee from Plum in hand (I actually don’t really like it. Stink), and KateH bought a top, I found a hat that actually fit my huge head in Frutti so I bought that, and Shirley got a hat too. We also popped into Slowboat to see Ev, and now she probably thinks I am insane. Nevermind. Then it was just after 12 and we’d seen everything so I decided we should go home to get my car and go to my secret beach. So we did. KateH and Shirls were all “oooh eeek arrrgh too cold!” so they sat on the beach and read “Next (heh), while I had a bloody nice swim.

Lani and her friends were on salad duty, which cut down on my prep work for Country Club: Australia rather substantially. I went to the supermarket for beer (VB) and assorted snarlers and charcoal and ice and so on and so forth while Shirley and KateH did the dishes. We made dips, filled up a tub with ice and beer and then I turned our washing line into a pavilion in the style of Spiceworld (remember? In the grounds of the big old spooky house and they’re all wearing different coloured bathrobes, sucking chuppa chups and planning how to set up Debra and Clifford) with the help of a large couch cover, some pegs, some lime green netting curtains and assorted mattresses, pillows and lanterns. It looked bloody marvellous by the time I was done, even if it didn’t provide quite as much shade as I’d hoped. The absolutely fantastic Jimmy turned up and for a very long time it looked like he was going to be the only boy there, so he had to Make Fire by himself, although I stood around and fetched beer. Luckily Dave showed up to be manly with him. I had a period of total Hostess Anxiety because the bbq was going slowly so we thought we might have to cook some things indoors, and I didn’t know what, or when or how, and Lani’s friends were in the house so I thought if we took the food outside they might not get anything, and my friends Anne and Frances were in the kitchen preparing respectfully shrimp and falafel and I wanted to talk to everyone at once and make sure that everythign was going okay and the ghetto blaster on the stairs kept skipping on the mix CD Lisa brought (AC/DC and Powderfinger and Icehouse and Midnight Oil and the Vines and Jebidiah etc) aaaaaaaaargh freak out! So I made a choice to just sit down and have another beer. And things got much easier from then on in. I grilled some venison burgers indoors and the shrimp and falafel were fried, and people ate, and the boys tended the bbq most faithfully and more people came adn the sun went down, and ahhhh bliss. Lisa left for a while to go see the Phoenix Foundation play, and Lani and her friends took off, so it was just my posse hanging out. Instead of eating the pavlova I’d bought to be controversial, we toasted marshmallows and pears over the coals and the sugar cominded with the mango margaritas once the beer ran out made me incredibly fucking hypo. I jumped around and danced in the garden to CDs that reminded me of Volcanic and also the Pulp Fiction soundtrack that soundtracked my first-ever pash, and was just very very amped to go back into town to meet up with Shirls and KateH who’d left earlier and see the Battacuda Sound System, or whatever the correct spelling is.

We managed to squeeze six of us into Miss Lisa’s car so we could drop Frances home, and so Kar and Dyl and I were dropped off by Manners Mall to head up to Swan Lane to the big stage and crowds. I was still VERY VERY HYPER and yes, I am writing much like I was talking and jittering. It was fun. While we were waiting for the band to start the boy from the Great Blend showed up, so we chatted for a bit and it was nice to see that contrary to the stoogling results I’d turned up, he is actually just a secret ginga. Heh. Battacuda were SO MUCH FUN! I danced like a crazy person and so my calves are still aching today, because apparently dancing on concrete is not as soft and accomodating as you might think it could be. If you were stupid. I was all very hyped up so we went to Havana after, and danced some more. KateH and Shirley went home but Dyl was all let’s stay out! so I did, and then after one more drink both him and Kar were like “tired now, let’s go” and I was like you guys are DICKS. But there was a taxi right outside the door, and so that was handy. I told Karen to remember it was a black’n gold one, and texted her when I got home fine. I wasn’t that drunk, but I’m trying to form good habits in case of insane drunkenness at a later date. Ahh taking care of myself, nice work.

When I woke up on Sunday I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, what with the calves, and the pimple just inside my nose, and the cut on my foot and the scratches from Sebby who was a little unnerved by the masses of people at the BBQ – so much so that he almost didn’t want to eat steak – but he dragged it away to eat in private and emerged much calmer – and all, but I still managed to get showered and dressed and to take the girls to the Maranui Surf Cafe for breakfast. We had to wait for aaaaaaaaaaaaages to get a table and then for our food but it was well worth it because dude, Wellington is so fucking rad. I dropped KateH in town after that and said sad goodbyes to Shirley who had to return to Palmy for her first day of school today. I spent the afternoon lying in the pavillion reading Prep (so good! although I expected more sex and panties from a book set in a boarding school) and then bonding with my couch and HDD once the wind got too strong. I did a mountain of dishes and threw away salads and prawn heads, but cleanup wasn’t too bad thanks to the wonders of disposable plates. I discovered that Smoo wasn’t actually dead in a gutter but had instead gone to Hammy with Bart for the weekend. When they got back they came over to bbq up the leftovers. But it turns out that Jimmy is teh BBQ King and they can’t even touch him. Much like Hammer. While Bart trying to catch flaming pieces of paper with his bare hands was somewhat entertaining, we resorted to cooking on the stove instead. Smoo ate about a thousand chops, so KateH and I were looking forward to seeing Bart polish off a whole pavlova, but that didn’t happen, sadly. So there is still some passionfruit pav with Kiwiberries (so weird!) in our fridge if you are hungry. Okay? Okay.

Today I got up early to take KateH to the airport, but she fetched me coffee while I was in the shower so I love her for that. And that’s about all I have to say for now, I think.

In the summer in the city

johubris — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:14:13 +0000

On Thursday night I had my first summer ale and then yesterday I had my first swim of the summer. Around 1am. At Oriental Parade. In my panties. With my now ex workmates and Bart. It was awesome, and not very warm. Luckily the booze in me kept me warm.

Today, consequently, has been rather slow. I spent a couple of hours at Elements in Lyall Bay eating, drinking latte bowls and reading the paper very very slowly. Now there’s been Thai takeaway and Fred Prinze Jnr movies on the television. And my laptop that I picked up from the shop last weekend is STILL ticking and overheating, but I know that htey must have done something to it because now it says ‘Packard Bell’ on the screen the second time I turn it on. It’s an NEC though. And I say second time because the screen stays blank the first time, every time. Good times.

What else should I talk about? I can’t start my new job yet because my security clearence still hasn’t finished. This is a good thing though because it means I get to have a couple of days off first, wahoo! I can go buy some fancy schmancy clothes to match my fancy schmancy new offices down Lambton Quay way. I’m proud of myself for running around in my underwear last night. It makes me feel more prepared for New Year’s, and it also reminds me of the good times skinny-dipping in KateM’s dad’s pool with not a care in the world, or the olden days when I was regularly doing bad things with bad people when I’d get up and walk around the house butt naked and go read magazines in the lounge – if I knew Clayton was out, of course. Or open the curtains if morning sex was to be had, for the benefit of people in the office building across the road. Heh. My self esteem has been very weird lately, I had some total wigginsing on Thursday night, even though I knew at the time I was just being a dork. If only I’d never gone to that damn talk about Myspace!

Now it’s Sunday, and today would have been Oma and Opa’s 60th anniversay. To celebrate, we got together at my parents’ house and scattered their ashes together around a magnolia tree we planted. That sentence does nothing to describe the comedy of errors that the occasion actually was, with the unmowed lawn all wet and long, and the bugs biting me. The containers with the ashes in them didn’t want to come open for a long long time, until finally Cousin Andrea cleverly pointed out that there were latches on the bottom that could be open and the ashes shaken out. There is something a little bit strange about shaking out your grandparents like salt and pepper, passing the containers around so that everyone could have some time with each of them. But the tree – once we managed to get it staked – is really pretty, and I think it was a nice thing to do. Afterwards, we watched super8 home movies that my parents, my uncle and Oma had all shot in the seventies. The clothes were fabulous, and we were all such fucking cute kids (yes, I wasn’t alive in the seventies, but I whined enough that we got out some ’80s footage too). Mum and Aunt Diz were running around in bikinis and looked hot. My dad was in a floral speedo and despite his womanly hips he still had a good body too. Also, eww, did I just say that? The whole effect was a litle bit like watching many many L&P ads. Or perhaps looking at current fashions. Or super 8 footage played behind the Phoenix Foundation…

I also grabbed Deuchlandriser, which is a board game in which you travel around Germany, and also some large beer mugs. Germany is on October 14, the day after Dimmer, and I’m so very happy because Jessie may be at it. And also I’m very happy that I will finally get to see Dimmer. Assuming that it hasn’t sold out yet. Woo!

Oh, and one more thing that I wanted to talk about was how nice the goodbye speeches for me were, and how genuine they seemed. And also, the best part about them was that they were surprisingly similar to my answers in many job interviews lately about what others would say about me – my ridiculously large banks of trivia in my head, my dry wit and my social skills. If I hadn’t put my card in Bart’s backpack along with my purloined coffee cup (shoosh!), I’d put in actual quotes. But yes, very very good times were had. And everyone who left their computers on will be looking at my face when they get to work as their desktop image…

It’s the little things that really matter

johubris — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 10:10:05 +0000

Little things that make me happy

1. My kitchen is all sorted out now. This was a bigger task than you might think, given that we are now officially (OFFICIALLY) the coolest flat in town with two fridges and a full-length freezer. Badoom Chish.

2. My books, also, are all sorted out on a new tall black bookshelf that Briar brought with her but won’t be using because she said she’s not really in to books. And they’re all alphabetical, and chronological by author, and it makes me happy. Except when they’re all sorted out like that I can tell instantly how many of my Douglas Couplands have been appropriated by evil borrowing fiends, and that makes me sad.

3. The leaving beads around my neck (three more sleeps!) go really well with my black and white striped top. An emo is I!

4. Now I don’t have to worry about any more job interviews, I can finally get my hair striped blue-black/aubergine. But I need to get it cut first, since while Anji’s trim looked good at the time, the bluntness of those scissors has left me more split-ended than ever.

Big things that make me happy

1. It’s less than a month until I go to America. Fuck Yeah! Suggestions for what to do with myself in New York and San Francisco will be gratefully accepted.

2. It’s five sleeps until I start my new job!* I’m going to be Helping People. Or at least the government body that I will be working for will be. I will be its web coordinator for six months. And I will make more money than here. I will, however, be far away from Contours so I might have to join a gym down that end of town. Any suggestions?

*Contingent on my passing security clearence, that is. The form was about 30 pages long, and wanted to know such things as addresses of where I’d lived overseas, details about where everyone in my family works and where they were born and their nationalities, stuff about my flatmates, everywhere I’ve been overseas, my religious affiliations if my ties

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

johubris — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 10:03:49 +0000

Right now I am looking for these things:

1. A new job. They announced my resignation at work so I get to wear the leaving beads now. The leaving beads look like Mardi Gras beads but I’m pretty sure I haven’t shown my boobs to anyone here at work in order to earn them. Unless there is actually a camera in the hole in the ceiling in the bathroom. I’m looking for writing/editing/web/communications type work, so lemme know if you hear of anything that’s going.

2. A new flatmate. Bart’s going off to find new adventures on the other side of the tunnel, so if you know of someone who’d like to live in Sunny Hataitai and pay $120 a week for a good room in a great house with Smoo and Seb and I, then please do send them in my direction. The ad is up here if you want to perve at photos of our lounge and dining room.

3. A bach to stay at over New Year’s eve. There will be six or more of us, and we want to be close-ish to Wellington and on a beach. Yes I know we left it kind of late.

4. People to party with at our ‘Meat Market vs Bart’s Goodbye’ party. It’s on Saturday, and it should be fun, and you should come, and you should bring some people we haven’t met before.

Things that I have done lately that have been of some sort of note:

1. Looked for jobs.

2. Looked for flatmates

3. LiveAid for Africa – despite its sparse attendence we raised $100 which was enough to buy two chickens, two AIDs awareness kits, some farmer training and soap for ten families. Go us. You can see some photos of the events in my flickr space, but if you are too lazy to click a link, here’s a photo:

4. The drum & the bass. At a party, and then at ~~Indigo~~ San Frindigo Bathhouse on Saturday night. I had forgotten how much fun it could be. I especially liked the guy who bumped me, and then went to pat my shoulder in apology but grabbed my boob instead and so we had an “it’s okay dude” hug. I was somewhat less fond of my taxi driver who seemed to mistake my slight interest in why he chose NZ instead of Norway as a refugee as interest in him, and decided to ask me out for a drink then and there. At 4am. Really really inappropriate and sleazy, and it made me feel so uncomfortable that I got him to stop a half block from my house.

5. Dinner parties. Food Baby was at my house last week, and so I went with my staple beef burgandy and mashed potatos. Last night I went to a potluck dinner for Lisa Fur‘s birthday, and I made apple crumble. Another one of her friends had made a crumble too, but mine was better. Heh.

6. Had my last boxing lesson. I want to do more, but my trainer’s having a shoulder operation (as if I didn’t already feel bad enough about punching towards a tiny little blonde girl), and I have to control my finances (sort of) until I get a new job, and then my membership is up in November, and while I will be continuing to go to the gym, my new job location might dictate somewhat the gym that I join. So it is all to be confirmed later.

7. Obsessed over Rockstar: Supernova. I don’t know what I’m going to do after Thursday when it’s all over.

Buy me a goat

johubris — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 09:16:35 +0000

So tomorrow is Africa at the Country Club, and I will be asking people to make a donation. Then with the money collected from donations, I won’t be paying off the rest of the keg from America. No no. I will go to http://www.oxfamunwrapped.com.au/ and buy some things to the total amount of what we collected, and perhaps some more. I’m gutted that they’ve sold out of goats, but perhaps we can buy some chickens instead. If you can’t come to Africa, and I suspect most of you can’t, you should do the same, okay? Awesome.

EDIT: Mad props must go here to Robyn who bought a chicken. Yay!

I need to be careful with my money though, because I resigned from my job on Monday. Four more weeks and I’m out of here. I don’t know where I’ll be after that, but it won’t be here. If you know of any writing/editing/communications/web coordination type roles going in Welly, please do let me know.

I still have a food baby in my stomach from last night with the tripleK. Apparently I’m not supposed to call them that anymore, but meh, it’s just so good. And if they keep up with the lynching, I’m going to have to keep calling them that. Food Baby is at my house next week, which means that I feel better about being part of the group rather than just being a tagalong, and also I can drink instead of driving as I did to Brooklyn last night. In my car that had $583 worth of repairs and servicing yesterday to get its warrant. Right after that $200 fine. Good times. And my laptop is back at the shop. I have adopted a very mellow sense of calm about all this, somehow. I suspect it’s mostly brought on by laughing my guts out at Family Guy. And being proud of saving Magni. Mmmmmagni.

I thought I was going to cry again in my boxing lesson, but I didn’t. I mastered the right uppercut very quickly, but not the left one. Stupid left arm. It’s so useless, I can’t do anything with it. Why do I even bother having a left arm? Maybe I should cut it off and replace it with a hook. I bet that’d pull in all the chicks.

Also, in other social event news, we’re having a Meat Market on the 16th. Everyone should come, and bring some single friends with you. Woo woo. Remember the last meat market that I held? I was just saying to Tom (exactly!) the other day that 2006 was the new 2003. Except better. But without drugs and therefore with far less sexing. Haha sexing. LisaB was talking last night with all these new words like ‘performancing’ and ‘materiality’, and I was like “you are so awesomenating”. Except I didn’t say that, but I wish I had. It was such a change having civilised grown-up conversations instead of spending the entire dinner talking about butt sex as Eta Beta Pi tend to do.

Lessons in living from the past five days

johubris — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:00:58 +0000

Okay my dear loyal readers from around the world, I need your help. In fact, it’s not just me that needs your help, it’s Africa. Which also happens to be the subject of the next Country Club. Yes, since we’ve neglected that continent so badly so far, we’re going to do it all at once on September 2, and we’re going to do it like Live Aid. And therefore you should too, and then we can link it up all around the world. And that’d be awesome. In Wellington, we’ll dress up like rockstars, eat some Africanish food (that as I plan it in my head bears more than a little similarity to the Caribbean feast, but that’s where the origins were, I suppose) and then we’re going to do Singstar and deliver our stunning concert performances. I’m going to suggest to everyone who comes that they might like to make a donation to a charity that I’ll finalise later, so that as well as having the awesome time that we always have at Country Club, we can do a little bit of good as well. Awesome. And now that’s out of the way, on with the week!

And the second thing that I wanted to talk about in the general category is who is subscribed to my rss feed? Only Jessie is listed publically. Come on kids, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. And here I go with the showing:

Lessons Learnt on Thursday

If you cannot master the art of the left hook instantly, you will become incredibly frustrated with yourself, and find yourself crying in your boxing lesson, which will make you even more frustrated with yourself and you will cry some more.

If you try to recover in the spa afterwards and are just starting to settle down into nice quiet time, you should expect stupid loud Americans to get in the spa too and talk loudly about how they’re going to drop their World Vision kids because they’re not in school any more.

If you go to the supermarket after having such a crap day, expect to come home with little more than five bottles of wine, sparkly body wash and an eggplant.

Your flatmates will make fun of you while you bawl watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition but it doesn’t matter because the crying will still feel good.

Lessons Learnt on Friday

Everyone will leave you. Even the receptionist. You can, however, set her up with a blog so you can stalk her in Korea.

Even the most cynical people will admit that Jordis and Marty are fucking awesome when you make them watch their clips on the ludicrously large screen in your work’s boardroom when you’ve all been drinking.

Topping up your mobile phone via credit card is very very hard to do when you’re on the long bus home and you’ve had a couple of bottles of wine. But if you finally manage to do it, you will manage to finangle yourself a party invitation.

If you’ve had a bottle of bubbly, and some white wine already and you come home and throw it up, perhaps it’s not the best idea that you’ve ever had to grab two bottles of red on your way out to the aforementioned party.

You will always have fun at parties at Nial’s house, but you will probably stay for far too long.

If you ever get to the stage where you’re like “I should just tell so and so that I think that what they did was dumb” and the other half of you is like “yeah! you should so totally do that!”, you’re wrong. And if you can manage to not do so, as I’m pretty confident that I managed to do, then you should be commended.

If you drink rather a lot, you will no doubt have some fantastic conversations, but you may struggle to remember them all beyond remembering that there was much discussion of the Country Club, and The House of Leaves and antidepressants, and ummmm huh, I don’t know what else. But they were like, rad!

If there’s a fire in a barrel outside and you toast marshmallows over it, and if you accept puffs of other people’s cigarettes because the headspin is fun, you will be smelly in the morning.

Lessons from Saturday

If you mix many bottles of wine, you may find that you’ll be trapped in bed until 5pm, getting up every hour to have things streaming out of every hole in your body except your ears.

Lime toilet cleaning block thingies might not be as hideously stinky and smellable from the front door as the lavendar flavoured ones, but they’re still not something that are fun to spend a lot of time with your nose right up against.

Garlic bread is awesome as the first food of the day when you’ve had difficulty keeping down water.

Brendan Fraser is really hot, and The Mummy makes me want to do a seperate Egypt at Country Club. But that was probably just the hangover talking.

Lessons from Sunday

Getting up before 11am means that you can accomplish heaps. And by “accomplish heaps” I mean “do some laundry and put away two baskets’ worth of laundry from the previous weekend”, and that’s good enough for me.

The Mediterranean Warehouse is always a good place for brunch. And if you take a stroll around the shelves afterwards, you’ll clear enough room for gelati.

Shopping for records is best done by yourself instead of with people who don’t own record players and are therefore not interested in combing every bin.

Kmart’s underwear selection is awesome enough to yield you that much-searched for sports bra that actually fits, even if it’s perhaps a tiny bit too tight and therefore points your nipples at the sky. Kmart will also offer you up a lime green masterpiece with enough padding to cover up nipples but not change your cup size. Wahoo!

You really should have bought your pants in a smaller size, which is quite exciting.

If you buy a striped top from Farmer’s, you can talk about forming your own emo band called Fragment Consider Revising, which conforms to the three-word-name-which-makes-little-sense rule.

Even though your lasange is awesome, your stomach does not appreciate the double dose of dairy.

Surprisingly few of my friends are available to come see MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES! ON A MOTHERFUCKING PLANE! at the preview on Wednesday. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Have you not seen Jon Stewart interview Samuel L Jackon in what is perhaps the best interview ever?

Lessons from Monday

If you wear the aforementioned black and white striped shirt to the gym without taking your hoodie along, it will start to pour. And the awesomeness of your new green bra will be able to be appreciated by the whole world. Awesome.

If you send your pregnant friends clothes from Babylicious, they will love you.

You are too obsessed with Rockstar, and it’s just self enablement if you discover that the reality episodes can be found online before they’re posted on the official site. And also the guy in the kebab shop you frequent who still hasn’t learnt that you will always have tahihi, garlic yoghurt and hot chilli as your sauces and that you’ll ask for three mujaver and three falafel in your mixed vegetarian instead of two of each and two dumplings, looks like a cross between Magni and Ryan without being hot.

Weakly Rap Up

johubris — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 06:34:42 +0000

Oooh look at me, I’ve finally got my journal kind of current. Except for filling in my RAGE about Dana being eliminated instead of Jill. Or Zayra, naturally. But let’s not talk about that (or the boards that I have been reading, or the tears that have sprung to my eyes today watching clips of Marty and Jordis…). Let’s talk about me instead!

Firstly, what I left out of my Auckland recap was that while I was at Annabel’s, she pulled out her copy of Boys Boys Boys Boys Boys as I emailed her a copy of 101 Stories, and it was soooooo weird reading it again. Did I really write that? Did I really live that way? Strange. No wonder people have mentioned what a progression 101 is. But I would still really love someone to send me back a copy of Boys because I haven’t got one. Please? Someone? I know they’re mostly pretty bad photocopies anyway, but maybe someone has one of the A4 versions that they could send me? Thanking you in advance.

Other things that are good in my life right now is meeting up with the rest of the Wellingtonista crew tonight for martinis (except for me because I am under 30), and then a cocktail party tomorrow night for Cinta’s hens’ night. Then on Sunday dinner for Karen’s birthday. On a much healthier for me note, I signed up to do personal training boxing sessions today. I’ll get to hit stuff! Yay! I think that will be fucking awesome stress release, and also I’m trying to mix up my exercising, because I don’t want to get bored and I really need to step things up for the sake of my wrist and also not dying on the flight to America.

I am so looking forward to America, like woah. The time is creeping closer and closer. In fact, America at the Country Club is next Saturday August 12. We’re having a kegger Frat/Sorority party with John Hughes and Showgirls. And a pillow fight. And junk food. And initiation ceremonies and hazing. You should come along. In real America news, I rang Kate at some ungodly hour last Friday night when I got home. I was aiming for her birthday but kind of missed, and also I was drunk and lonely, and I miss her! All the same, I’m really not looking forward to the phonebill.

This afternoon I am sniggering at the Peaches CD I’m listening to and trying to postpone doing more phone calls, but since there are a hundred people on my list (almost literally – once I finish assembling my list there will be anyway), I suppose I shouldn’t put that off for much longer. Work is interesting right now in terms of RFPs, and black holes, and also new projects that I am working on, and the fact that I went on some weird trip on Tuesday and cleared out about four things I’d been sitting on for months. Go me. And now I must go and pee. It’s important that I tell you this, honest.

Finally, just some links to things I’ve been up to lately – TV Squee / Rockstar Obsession / Pirate and Auckland photos. That’s about all. OH! And I have an RSS feed that works now, which I would add in to the bottom of the page, except that without a laptop I can’t FTP in, but you can find it at http://hubris.co.nz/rss apparently, according t the wise Heather. That’s it now. Ask me some questions about what you would like me to tell you about.

Jamaican me crazy

johubris — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 05:03:52 +0000

So apparently if I want to talk nonstop all night and all the next day, I should do what I did on Friday again, which is accept Cinta’s challenge at work to stick a berocca in my mouth and let it disolve. I don’t understand why NZ has a P problem – why aren’t all the kids just doing this shit instead? Man I can fucking babble, and talk a lot of shit, as I did all the way through Havana, and Scopa and Good Luck. I mean I know I normally talk pretty much nothing but shit, especially I’m drinking, but not usually with quite that much speed or lack of ability to stop myself even though I could hear my talking in my head. On reflection though, I know I brought up at least a couple of intelligent conversational points. I just raced through them very quickly. I’d sent out a couple of texts about gaxy and a lack of shine, and then the gaxy made me feel even older when she was like “oh, I remember listening to this song (‘Forgot about Dre’) when I was 15″ – it came out in 2000, right? And then that was compounded when she was like “so have you finished your degree yet?” But then she called another girl a whore and I realised that we weren’t so very different after all and I laughed at myself a whole bunch. I also laughed when we were at Scopa and the boys went out to smoke, and I looked up to see one of them stopping the tourists who were trying to come in and demanding to see some ID. Drunk boys are hilarious (*).

On Friday I’d ordered the weather to be sunny, so I wasn’t too surprised when I woke up on Saturday to see that the weather was glorious. I still managed to have entertainers’ stress outs though when my phone started beeping with people cancelling, or saying they’d be late, or that they’d meet us at the venue. But I went and picked up Brad, and got changed into my outfit and started peeling kumara while he said he was finishing off my birthday party. He then ahemed me and I turned into the lounge to see him standing there IN A FUCKING BEAR SUIT and when he told me to turn off my music in the kitchen, he started up a Spiderbait song and performed a dance he’d choreographed especially for me, although it had some basis in his class assignment to create something you’d want done at your funeral. He danced and he danced and i just about died from smiling and the sheer total fucking awesomeness of it. And like that I was giddy all over again and I knew that the Caribbean would be awesome – and it truly truly was.

People showed up in various states of dress, and the boys who weren’t piratey enough were made to wear headscarves. The McLeod’s Daughters, meanwhile, were tarted up to all excellence:
.

We had some RUM and some other forms of GROG, which mostly consisted of PIRATE BEER, and then Katy put my boots on for me when I discovered that I couldn’t put my boots on without revealing pretty much all of Mary-Kate and Ashley, and I felt like an incapacitated drunk, instead of a tipsy giggly pirate, and now on reflection what I should have done was just taken my boots to a different room. But nevermind. We loaded ourselves into the good ship Insanity, which in a previous life had been my parents’ van, and passed around more cans of pirate beer to those who wanted them. I have photos from the van, but no laptop, so therefore no photos. But I do have photos from pirate mini golf to show you though, from my parents’ camera:

My mummy and daddy, who enjoyed themselves hearrrrtily, I think. And who are also crazy.

Myself and Brad

Two thirds of the revellers (2/3 of the KKK and the other Jo were exploring the mega centre when we got there)

Par for the course. Heh.

So, it turns out I’m as bad at minigolf when I’m drunk as I am when I’m sober. I still got a hole-in-one out of the castle, but on some I got sixes. Nevermind. It was very hard to stop saying “yarr!” so I gave up and just continued to spit out terrible pirate jokes and say inappropriate things. I found also that zipping up my hoodie kept the twins under a little more control so I got less distracted. Minigolf is awesome. You should all go.

Then we drove back home, waving our cutlasses at Ash’s car, and I started cooking my Caribbean feast of “goat” curry, blackeyed beans, candied sweet potatoes, jerk chicken and yellow rice. I am fucking awesome. We made daquiris and other rum-based concoctions, and Mike and Chrisana and Lisa arrived. People rather disturbingly started deep-throating a cutlass handle. General revelry and rumbustification was had. It was fucking awesome and radness. And due to the amount of mangos in the daquiris, and staying up late playing records, I wasn’t that hungover the next day, hurray!

Instead I spent my day laughing at Bart and Smoo who’d been on a different, shinier eyed journey the night before, and cooking a roast family dinner (yes that’s right, I roasted a whole family), and rereading Microserfs and doing dishes and laundry. Clean, dry laundry! Oh happy day!

Then this morning I got up to watch the soccer, because Dave had a $50 bet on Italy and they won, and that was yayness. Although my whole view of Italians has been shaken by the revelation that my favourite hospitality person is apparently younger than me, went to Onslow and actually went out with LisaB. I was like “what? he’s so beautiful, how could i not have seen him around before?” so I am obviously going to have to find my yearbooks and do some investigating.

Auckland in two sleeps’ time, yay!

A Moot Point

johubris — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:11:44 +0000

This whole not having a computer at home thing is pretty sucking. I mean, I can check my emails on Smoo’s computer (which is actually my old one), but it’s at a funny low table, and the monitor is 14 inches, and I asked him if I could rifle through his panty drawer while I was in there, and he said he didn’t have a panty drawer; he has a panty floor. So you can understand why I might not be so keen to do that.

And I’ve been crazy-busy at work too! On Monday and Tuesday I went to Moodle Moot 2006 up at Vic Uni, which is every bit as geeky as it sounds, but parts of it were actually interesting, and important for me to learn. And I got sandwiches. And felt like puking when I went into the Student Union building (and then I laughed because I spent so long wondering why some of the people there didn’t like me, until I realised that actually, maybe it had something to do with me actually not liking them, actually). For the past couple of months at work I have made the mistake of saying “I need some more work! I need some more work”, and now all of a sudden I’ve had four projects dumped on me. One of them involves becoming an expert in Moodle pretty much last week. Awesome. Another involves me actually project-managing various things. Luckily most of what I need to manage is myself, and I’m ~~crap~~ totally awesome at that. Honest. You should see how on-to-it my project plans are, if by that I mean “what project plans?”. Come back Peti, all is forgiven! Even if the temporary scheduler has declared that I am her favourite project mananger on account of how I’m not asking for any resources ever.

Current things apart from Moodle that are high on my list of things in my brain right now is about a thousand tons of MSG from lunchtime yum cha with Cinta and Dave (“Oh, they’re white people, well I suppose we’d better bring out the deep fried stuff”), a thousand tons of bad pirate jokes for Saturday, and a bunch of anxiety about the weather and the likelihood of playing mini golf not being very high, and also stressing about whether or not people will actually come to the Caribbean, and thinking about how much cleaning I have to do before then, and how much money and time I’ve spent on food for the event and oh oh oh, I’m just typing way too quickly now because I need to have this entry finished in four minutes so I can make it home and put on my pjs and do some cleaning and also rejoice in the glory that is Rockstar being back on TV.

I had other things to tell you, no doubt, but I can’t remember for the life of me what they were. Oh yes, I’m going to be in Auckland on Wednesday-Sunday, and I’d like to hang out. I’d also like someone to go to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs with since Lisa can’t make it. I mean, I can go by myself, of course, but it’d be nice not to have to.

Oh, and one of my other new workmates knows Annabel. Damn small world.

Shirley the blended pirate

johubris — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 02:50:30 +0000

So you know how I said that I’d try to update every day this week? Well, okay, so I’ve royally sucked at that. But it’s not my fault! Anji blew up my computer on Tuesday night when she was over to watch The Amazing Race so I couldn’t. So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend – trying to track down my warranty and a place to take my computer to, which hopefully won’t involve driving out to Johnsonville where I originally bought the computer.

Shirley

The Great Blend

Pirates!

Shirley

On Wednesday I got a text from Shirley going “come and meet me at this bar after work” and I was like but you’re in Auckland, so you are crazy, and then I remembered that oh actually, on my calendar in Outlook and on myspace I had “Shirley in Welly”, so I went on down to Vivo. It was very warm and pretty inside, and they poured me a glass of Pegasus Bay Cab Merlot into a veritable bucket of a vessel. Then the bottle was finished, and I said I would buy another one, having looked at the menu for wines by the glass online, which seemed quite reasonably priced, and then I read the wine list for bottles, and it took an awfully long time to find anything for under $70. It made me laugh that they were playing the Wu Tang Clan when there were $600 bottles on the menu – and it wasn’t Cristal either. Shirley’s identical twin’s partner was celebrating his 36th birthday, and there were lots of people in suits there, so I felt a little out of place. Ordering what I suppose would be the equivilent of Bernadino – the $36 Pemberton Flybrook Shiraz would have made me feel stink except that I wasn’t getting paid until the next day, and honestly, $51 for the Pegasus? Insane. But after a couple of glasses, I hit the chatty stage, and tried to restrain myself from talking too much bullshit to people. Eventually Shirley said that we were allowed to bail, and so we went to Harem for mountains of meat and cheaper wine, and talked and talked and talked. I’d sent Shirley a copy of 101 Stories and she wanted to talk to me about that, and at one stage she was like “It’s not all Thomass is it?” and I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my chair. No, it’s really really not. And then I told her stories about how people from it who were long gone have shown up again, and that’s weird and confusing. And we also talked about rejections and pashes and work and home and friends and everything and everything. She said that I was a great pash. Haha. After Harem I took her to Good Luck, where apparently Denzel Washington and Peter Jackson were enjoying a $500 bottle of wine, but we didn’t see them. We enjoyed $7 caipas though, before she insisted on calling it a night.

Blended

Last night, I went to The Great Blend with Lisa, which meant that after we watched Star Lords I could say to her “well sure he can cut up movies, but what’s he like with MS Paint?” and I laughed. As I said on the Wellingtonista list, a lot of the presentation seemed to boil down to “so apparently there’s this thing called the Internet, and oh my stars, the kids are using it”. That’s me being snide, but you must remember that I got into the whole online journal thing from reading Tori Amos fan sites and their related journals, so the idea of healthy/unhealthy online communities etc is not really any kind of new thing – I am after all like totally tangata whenua. Plus as I’ve already snickered about on the Wellingtonista mailing list, dannah was talking about the importance of the ‘Top 8′ for the kids, and in between whispering in Lisa’s ear that I’d cut her if she ever took me off her top 8, I was like ‘but you can have a top 24 now….”. And I shook my head a little about the lack of capital letters in dannah’s slides, but that is actually my job (please note that my job does not include checking spelling ever. Honest.), so I can’t help the analness. I was playing a drinking game with myself, taking a large gulp any time anyone said the ‘B’ word, but it was like how people can turn my Creedstance into aerobics, the frequency of it. And beer made me need to pee. I was disappointed that there was no vodka on offer, despite mention of 42 Below sponsorship, because the large amount of beer that I had made me need to pee an awful lot.

But enough with the criticisms. Dannah was an articulate and interesting speaker, and I was also impressed by Sam Morgan. And I learnt that rural America has a crystal meth problem, how totally Carterton of them! It was nice to see many of the Wellingtonistas out and about, and to try out our secret handshake, and a drunken Martha is always a good time, even if I did catch myself referring to her as Wanda. How embarrassment. And the Boatshed was gorgeous. Lisa told me that I was being that girl when Bunnies on Ponies were playing, as I was a bit loud by that stage given how few people were left. And I was a badass and whispered my way through a lot of the presentation. Honestly, you can’t take me anywhere. I was going to introduce myself to Russell, but then the band were playing, and while I will talk through dreadful movies about sinking boats, I don’t talk during bands because that’s what people who have a special circle of hell reserved for them do.

Pirates!

I sent out this email to some people today and also to the Country Club members on myspace (ha ha, myspace):

Ahoy me hearrrrrrrrties!
Set your ship’s course to sail to Hataitai next Saturday July 8 for the very special Caribbean at the Country Club: The Pirates Edition.

Drinking of RUM and GROG will begin at 2pm, with the pirate fleeting taking off at 3pm to search for booty at the mythical Pirate’s Cove Mini Golf. After that, there’ll be more bucaneering hijinks, booty and drinking back in Hataitai. (While the sun always shines on pirates, if a hurrrricane stirrs up, the wet weather plan is to go see Pirates of the Caribbean 2. While dressed up. And drunk. Naturally.)

To make sure that everyone can be accounted for and gets a seat in the long boats, please RSVP by Wednesday. Also if you’re for some unknown reason planning on drivin’ instead’o drinkin, and you could ferry people about too, let me know cos that would be arrrrrrrrrrrrrrsome.

Prizes will be awarded for the best pirate costume, and as this is a Country Club event, you’ll need to learn a fact about either pirates or the Caribbean to share with the group. And bring GROG. If you don’t like rum, might I suggest pirate beer?

There’s no excuse for missing this great piratical rumbustification, unless you’re a layabout landlubber who should be made to walk the plank.

You’re invited.

Oh, and just another whinge before I sign off: we went to One Red Dog for lunch today for a goodbye thingie for the last remaining person under 30 who isn’t me, and holy fucking shit that place is shit. Terrible service, drafty interior and incredibly mediocre food. $24 for some pasta and a glass of wine? Bullllllllshit.

Girl Power

johubris — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 10:15:03 +0000

I appreciate that I haven’t written in quite a while (eleven days? sheesh!), so bear with me while I try to address the many things that I want to tell you about, okay? This may take a while because I’m watching some terrible teen horror flick about virgins getting killed in some small town. Has Brittany Murphy made a good movie ever, apart from Sin City? I don’t think she has.

So, since then, what have I done? Of course I went drinking after work on Friday, even though I wasn’t entirely sure that we would, cos of the blah blah blah, but large bottles of chang were had at the Poon, and then we went to eat at One Red Dog, even though it’s only cocks who like their pizza, and it was funny cos then we went to Boulot (I was a little hesitant, based on the blah blah blah, but it was fine) and I even saw Stephen and expressed some Farrar bashing opinions, so that was amusing to me. The waitress offered us pizza and I felt so dirty for cheating on her. Later in the week, on Thursday to be precise, Karen and I went to Scopa for dinner, and Enzo was like “you can have this discreet table over there” and I was like omg, shame. Even though that was probably just me being paranoid. Scopa is fucking excellent, by the way. The girl waitresses were a tad lax (Water glasses didn’t get filled and I had to ask for more wine), but with all the food under $20, and so so tasty, and cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese and yeah, it’s superb.

On Saturday I took a big pile of CDs in to Real Groovy and got $160 credit, and then spent $180 on old records (The Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Fleetwood Mac, Split Enz, Madonna, The Mamas & The Papas), the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs on vinyl (‘Phenomenon’ is currently my play over and over song), the Punches EP on CD for Karen since I felt stink about not going to the gig with her the night before, even though she did come out drinking with us instead, and the Family Guy movie for Bart. Then I went to Dick Smith and bought a record player, wahoo. I took it home and realised it wouldn’t work with my polk audio speakers, so I went in to Noel Leemings and bought myself a new stereo as well. It’s so pretty and shiny, and also, it’s apparently a DVD player as well. Not that I have a TV in my room, but that’s beside the point.

When I got it all home, along with a new crate for my records, and tried to set it up, the record player was playing waay too quickly. Before you go accusing me of being a moron, yes, I did adjust the 33/45 switch, to no avail. Jessie offered me the helpful text advice of “stop listening to trance” when I complained it was going too fast. Later when Bart was taking a look at it for me, I realised that I’d put the rubber band on it up too high, and so we moved it down and everything played at the right speed,hurrah! Then I even taught myself how to select tracks. I’m like, pratically a DJ now.

That night, we had Bart’s Mexican themed party. Karen Lisa and I hung out in my room for ages playing records and iPods, before we emerged to share tequila shots and laugh at drunken 20 year old boys. There was much postit note abuse going on, and the room ended up buried in peanuts. The tequila wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. Bart still ended up with huge grazes on his face though.

What else? Strange things this week have been having ex workmates sign up as Hubrettes, which is nice that they let me know, but it still meant that I had to go and check up on all the things I’ve written, and that meant I found this from April 2005 in my footnotes, which is very amusing if you read this and realise that was who the shiny was. In more real life/internet collisions, I got a myspace request (yes I know, myspace sucks) from this guy whose site I’ve been reading on and off ever since I found it in the referal logs for Hubris, and it turns out that I do actually know him already in the real world as friend of a friend. Yeah it’s Wellington, I should have expected that.

In other woah moments, on Thursday or Friday at work, I found myself going “holy shit!” when I heard myself on the phone to our technical services manager, and I was talking about a problem our client was having, and I proposed a solution, and an alternative solution, and I was like, so smart, and so on to it, like I’m actually good at my job or something. I know right, crazy. And I’ve been working really hard too. Of course, soon there’ll be like no one at all to talk to left. Sigh.

On that note, we had D’s goodbye drinks on Friday, followed by Sarah’s. I’d worried all morning that I was going to be in a crappy mood at it, but then when I went to the gym, the trainer was like “hey guess what? one of the other clients told me that you’re shrinking!” and I was like “what? Huh?” and she was like “yeah, you’re shrinking and she thinks you should be member of the month” and I was like well, I suppose the twins are perkier, and so we made an appointment for me to have another assessment next week, and then I was feeling really good about that, so I worked out extra hard, and felt just fan fucking tastic. Of course, the good mood didn’t last as long as I needed it to though, and when we were at the Last Supper Club and later the Welsh Bar I did wonders for the spirit of womankind and female empowerment by deciding that the reason no one was paying me any attention was that all the women around me were whores. Witness my text messages to Heather: um actually I deleted them, but they were full of “icantstandupstraitanymoreihatethosewhorespleasekicktheirassesformeihategaxyboys” typeness. And yes, that’s right, gaxy boys. Your guess is as good as mine as to what I meant.

Yesterday was a write-off. Today I spent the day in Ngaio doing laundry and reading the paper with my daddy. And crying at the Gilmore Girls. Finally! Fuck man! Took far too long. This week I have Poseiden tomorrow (yay free (bad) movies), dinner at Anji’s on Thursday and then Japan at the Country Club on Saturday. In preperation for it, I picked up my photo albums from Japan, and I can’t believe how long my hair and legs were. I was totally cute, and I wish more people had told me that.

A Handmaiden’s Tale (aka: you know who else is from Canada?)

johubris — Fri, 05 May 2006 09:02:42 +0000

I came home about 10.30pm last night, and the kitchen was absolutely spotless, so I immediately asked Bart to marry me. He said yes so I walked back out to my parents’ car and they gave me a cheque for three grand, and I showed it to him and he said “well, I guess we’d better get a wriggle on then”. But then I decided to pay off my credit card with the cheque instead, since he hadn’t actually caught the mouse that we apparently have in the kitchen which was the reason for his cleaning. And yes, that’s right, I’ve had a credit card for under a month and I already have over three grand on it. But I also have tickets to America figuratively in my hot little hands, so that’s okay.

And I was home that late at night because Anji and I had gone to Capitol for a bottle of wine (I <3 Capitol, the service is outstanding, and the toilets smell so good, and the bruschetta is yum), and then we'd joined up with the rest'o the family at Hazel, where much more jolly awesome wine was drunk, and mountains of tasty tasty food eaten. I am currently craving more squid rings from there, and I don't even like squid. Perhaps I am pregnant. With the second coming.

If you're wondering why I am so much more chipper in this post than I was in Tuesday's, well it appears that the one/two emotional gut punch of watching 'The Body' and 'The Gift' together paid off. Well, that and large doses of the Arcade Fire, St John's, exercise, listening to 'Kim' on repeat (geez, why are you so angry, Marshall?) and all twelve episodes of the unbelieveable hip hopera Trapped in the Closet, which is just so fucking wow that it deserves another round of Holy Fucking Crap!.

Other things of note that I have been up to lately? Hosting the work quiz last Friday. After much debate about the amount of wine we were to have, we did end up running out. My arms ached from carrying eight bottles one block, so in a way maybe it’s better we didn’t have more. The quiz went well, even though I was having initial “no one likes me!” thoughts at the number of attenders, although we ended up filling the room very well. On Saturday I went to see the Dukes of Leisure play at the Carter Observatory, and I was drinking straight vodka from a small bottle, and it was all misty with lamp posts on the way there like Narnia, and we had pillows and got to lie down, and I got to have snuggles with first Anji and then Karen and we all know that I’m a Romanian orphan starved for physical affection so that was nice, and I fell in love with the man who gave us a star tour, because I love story-tellers, and they made us popcorn in the middle, and the music was good too and oh, it was just great and I was crazy giggly, and that amused me muchly. On Sunday I went to a private screening of The Imposters which was hilarious, and found out various bits of gossip that I might reprint here if I could be bothered footnoting it but I can’t, and I just felt choice.

Tomorrow is Canadia, as I’ve mentioned before, and then The Phoenix Foundation at Indigo, and then on Sunday Luke Buda at Caberet. And now it is nearly 5.30 so I must put on lip gloss and harrass the boys downstairs until they come out for a drink with me. My feet hurt from being an escort to a group of people who came to look at the clever things that we do at work. And then one of the directors referred to me as a handmaiden. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen…

The ‘I’ in ‘Me’

johubris — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 08:54:41 +0000

We could say that this bout was kicked off by the email “I’ve got some bad news – apparently he’s seeing someone, my friend said he was out on a date” but I think we – or at least I know that it’s actually about me, not about him. The crushes are interchangeable. What remains constant is how I cope – or don’t, how personally I take every rejection (cos duh, rejection is a personal thing), how much I worry about how much this will close me up even more. So I’m cocooning. I don’t want to be told “oh well at least you ahve a new friend”, because so fucking what? I don’t particularly feel like torturing myself with hanging out with someone I can’t have, that’s generally not my style (and yes, there’s always exceptions). I don’t want to be told “I told you so” because believe me, I’m telling myself that enough for two. All I want is a shoulder to cry on, one that’s not going to try and figure me out or puzzle it through or offer trite cliches because I’d rather tear out my womb and eat it than listen to the same old things over and over again, which is of course somewhat ironic on account of how you suckers are reading the same thing over and over again, on a montly basis. I hate my womb. Maybe I should tear it out. If I could reach it with tweezers or hot wax in the socially acceptable way, I would inflict the pain like that.

I worry that I cannot communicate my thoughts and feelings clearly – not only the hesitantness that I metaphorically dipped my toe in with in this particular scenario, but also in the way I describe the after-effects. I suspect this wasn’t helped by venting about a different thing on a particularly stupid-in-these-kinds-of-contexts workmate, who totally missed the point of a discovery that the ex girlcrush had only been with her boyfriend for a short while and therefore I wasn’t actually as stupid as I thought I was not to know about it. But there are plenty of other things that make me go “well, am I really that dumb or not?” And again, sure, some of this is in relation to that boy, but remember, I was never that sure if I really liked him or if it was just the thought that maybe he liked me that made me like him. This could be me being all in denial, so to offer up proof, I will tell you that I never thought of him whilst wanking. Assuming I’ve crushed on him since February 19, and my journal will back up that date, that’s at least 140 times that I haven’t thought of him.

And as always, I am terrified that the state of my mental health is crumbling. Three nights of heavy drinking over the weekend didn’t help, nor did yet another blast-from-the-past getting in contact via the internet. FUCK YOU INTERNET. I am scared that I’m going to relapse into being utterly dependent on other people, and I fought for a long time to not be like that. I’m scared that I am trying to alienate myself from my friends right now in order to fight that. I’m scared that I will cease to be entertaining, and that I try to buy friends, and that I won’t be able to sustain current friendship circles, because until this bout kicked in I was feeling glorious and popular and content, and we all know I can’t have that. I’m scared that I make excuses, I’m scared that bring all the scaredness upon myself. I’m once again longing for celepram, but I’m supposed to have all my shit together now.

Then Humpy went and sent me a job ad for a position in Auckland and I went “fuck this sounds like a really good job, content editing music sites” and then I freaked out about the thought of having to move to Auckland just when my homelife is all working out so well, and then I thought about how I might apply for that job and they might reject me, and then I wondered where exactly my career is taking me, and what if we don’t get the new tender for the site that I manage now, and then I came up with reasons not to apply for the job, and then I hated myself just a little bit more and I just don’t know what to do about it. Exercise. Take St John’s wort. Pray for my bleed. It can’t be far off. I’m mangoing and I think I felt the start of a cramp last night. Cross your fingers for me. Do the blood dance. Can I ask you to humour me a little longer?

In the “and I’m sure you’ll totally be keen to hang out with me if I’m still like this then” news, I’m coming to Auckland in July, from 14-16. Hurrah for impulse buying and credit cards. I’ve also paid for my flights to the States in October, hurrah.

Pornography and videos

johubris — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 05:40:12 +0000

My weekend was a shocking pile of debauchee. I participated in: lying to my manager; drunkenness; sexual harassment; sexual arousal; groping; other people’s hands on Mary-Kate and foul language. And that was just Friday night. Okay, so the lie was totally bald-faced, and was merely an excuse to accompany my cow-orkers to their netball dinner. The drunkenness was nothing special, just a lot of white wine. The sexual harassment was constant, and returned (the boys were trying to look up my skirt, despite the fact that I was wearing trousers), the groping was hilarious and mutual, and the foul language was to be expected (*).

On Saturday I felt great on account of having stayed up til 5am so I was stone cold sober again. I cleaned the house, had a shower, treated Seb for fleas, kicked the boys out of the house and set off flea bombs in my room and in the lounge. Of course, it was after I had locked the front door and exited that I heard the BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP of smoke detectors going off, so I had to rush back into the lounge, find a chair to clamber on and pull out the battery, all the while coughing in the flea gas. Still, at least it should have killed the larvae in my lungs, right?

I repaired at the Medditerean Warehouse with a margharita pizza (and one of these days I will learn to spell) and the paper, before continuing the Italian theme with shopping to prepare for ‘Rome at the Country Club’. Later, after attempts at napping and some of The OC, which quite frankly I find myself really not giving a shit about, the darling Lisa Fur came and picked me up, and we went to her house via being served at the mill by Conor Oberst, who has apparently fled to New Zealand where he can shed his cold cold tears on his cold cold bathroom tile before getting up to sell cheap cheap liquor to ladies and say “laterz!” to them. We went to Lisa’s house and she played me absolutely devestating videos by the Dears, which you shouldn’t watch unless you’re prepared to cry. Then Brad and KateB came over (do you like the way I invite my friends to other people’s houses? I’m really good at that) and we had some more drinks and played some more music and then took off for the Aro Valley for Joel’s house.

At Joel’s, we sat in the garden and feared for our lives when he threw more furniture on the fire. I saw people I knew from when I worked for VUWSA and was happy that they were the people I liked. I think we were either very early or very late, but it was nice to see Joel again, even though I goddamnmotherfuckingshitfuckcunt forgot to get my Straitjacket Fits CD back off him. He’s had it for like a year now. Grr. Then we left to wander the streets slowly, and I started a long text conversation with my friend because we happened to be passing his house. Upon reflection, I realise that I do tend to text random things at random times (*). Brad peeled off somewhere, and Kate fell asleep on Lisa’s couch, so I made Lisa play me vinyl and make me popcorn. She’s a good bitch like that.

On Sunday, I was in pukesville. Apparently drinking a lot of bubbly straight from the bottle is bad for you. Who knew? Nevertheless, I soldiered on with Rome preperations, chargrilling red peppers to go in homemade hummus, making trifle with banana cake and pineapple in lieu of tiramisu, and putting pizza dough on in the breadmaker. Eventually I had to call a timeout so I retired to the local cafe for coffee and grease and the paper before coming back to the mountain of dishes and assorted other hospitality tasks that awaited me. And then I awaited my guests. You know, Kate mentioned that she thinks there’s been a drop in recent years in the number of people who actually call (or even text) to say that they can’t make it to an event, and I think she’s right. That said, there was still a stream of “oh, I’m too hungover” or “oh, the formula one is on” texts that made me go grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. But the people who did come were very cherished, and appreciative of the effort I’d gone to. Also, my flatmates now think I am the greatest flatmate in the world, because it turns out that while I’d heard that Caligula was quite porny, I figured it’d just be softcore boobs and fake sex. Oh no, my friends. It was hardcore jizz baths, penetration and cunnilinguis. With costumes. And sex with horses. Hurrah! I fear I have set a high standard for further Country Clubs, but oh well. I can rename it the Cuntry club and feature porn from all around the world.

Last night Karen and I went to Kazu for some food on sticks. I should point out that we went to the good new one, without the terrible service and the quivering pizza that are found at the Tory St branch. The one on Courtenay Place is right next to the once beloved Arashi, which has since removed both ginko nuts AND their banana & peanut butter spring rolls from their menu, so what’s the point? Then we wanted to see Sione’s Wedding but it was all sold out so we went to A History of Violence instead, which was good. And violent, strangely enough.

Today at work I sat in on a videoconference featuring Tze Ming Mok, who was almost frighteningly articulate and Tusiata Avia talking about writing from a non-European perspective to an audience of Wellington High and Wellington Girls’ girls via video links, and it was really interesting. It made me think lots of things which I have completely forgotten about now, because it’s the end of the day. The ‘compare and contrast’ between the two of them in pretty much every aspect of their work was really interesting, as was also thinking about identity in general. Oh, I know what I wanted to say, and I’ll have to paraphrase really badly here, but Tze Ming spoke about how there’s a sort of expectation in the circles that she moves in that she will write about certain things, and I suppose that’s something that I feel too – not, of course, as an essayist and a blogger, but as a person with an online journal. It’s something I spent a lot of time talking about in the olden days when I was at counselling, my need to keep people entertained. And then I’d say something deep and then I’d say something else to make Kalpana laugh. Awesome, nice consistency there. Hmmm, this all sounded better in my head over lunch. Nevermind, I’ll call it off here.

Floating On

johubris — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 05:34:42 +0000

Despite the $50 bar tab hangover that I have (I got Daddy to come to quiz night last night so we came second), today is fucking rad. The sun is shining, ‘Float On’ bubbled through my earphones (apparently today my iPod battery has decided to work) and I ate fish’n chips in Waitangi Park with Noizy and Tom. I found out that I got the pay rise that I asked for (which is twice as much as I actually wanted), and I have exciting plans for the weekend (party in Aro on Saturday and the first meeting of The Country Club on Sunday at my house – we’re wearing togas, drinking wine and watching Caligula – you’re invited as long as you refrain from pointing out that ‘Rome’ isn’t actually a country), I have a new old mattress and I vacuumed under my bed. Life is pretty sweet right now. Did I mention that Bic Runga offered to buy me a drink? Cos she did. And that’s RAD.

Last weekend was very very choice. On Friday night I went with two cow-orkers and three ex cow-orkers to Tupelo, which freaked me out a little with its redness. I left at 8.30pm when Kate picked me up, and they apparently stayed out until 4am, so it is just as well that I left when I did, especially since Kate and I went home with quadruple chocolate ice cream and Hairspray. Now we both want to learn how to do the mashed potato and other assorted dances. Hairspray is total radsicles (and radsicles is the new awesome – it’s like popsicles but cooler. Hehe). In the morning I made Kate pancakes and used my good china, even going to the extreme lengths of putting lemon juice in the little sake pot. Suck on that, Martha Stewart. Later I put on my pretty new dress that very few people have complimented me on (what’s up with that?) and met up with Lisa Fur and Brad to go to Bic Runga at the Michael Fowler Centre.

*Insert wide-eyed awe and aural orgasms and much spine-tinglingness here.*

She was playing with the whole band who played on Birds and played the whole album, so I might just pop up my review of that from Pulp now and then times that by a thousand and add in the goodness that is Neils Finn’s stage banter, and the amazing hotness of her base player who had his bass at exactly the right height – two inches lower and he would have been a nu-metal wanker, and five inches higher and he would be a geek – for maximum sexiness, and the total adoreableness of Annika Moa and the wonderfulness of our seats right by the sound desk, and the incredible aura and Strong Pixieness of Bic and and and wow. Just wow. I was dazzled. Simon Sweetman, you can suck a fuck, because of course it was polished. They’re the top fucking musicians in the country – how could it be anything but? I do wish that she’d played a couple more tracks off Beautiful Collison like the title track or ‘Election Night’ but that’s okay. It was still wow. I was moved pretty much to tears.

And then of course Jessie was there, and so the lobby was a lovefest of everyone I know – Jimmy and Esther and Ash (who Lisa ran away from when I was like “she’s from the internet” and it made me laugh a lot) and and Amelia, Jess Clayton and um some other people maybe? So I invited everyone to Rome, and was responded to enthusiastically. Me and Lisa and Brad headed down to Good Luck via Lisa’s car to drop off posters, to await Jessie. A couple of drinks later, she texted to say she was at Motel with the band, so Lisa and I went there. The bar was insanely full, and I was intimidated by the beautiful people, and while yes, I have occasionally entertained thoughts of being pressed up again Shayne Carter, it was always in more intimate settings, so I paniced when I finally fought my way to the front to get a drink and didn’t want to ask for a menu but I knew that I wanted a drink that would last a long time, so I remembered Wellurban and ordered a dry martini. I forgot that I haven’t drunk martinis regularly for quite a while. It was definitely a strong drink. It was the right thing to order though, because after that I saw it was what Bic herself was drinking. She came and sat at our table and I squeed, and Jessie told her that I really liked Jessie’s haircut, and I said that yeah, if that whole singing thing didn’t work out for her, she could have a career as a hairdresser, and then encouraged by her laugh, I said that that concert was amazing, and that two years ago when she played the cathedral she’d asked the audience if we liked her tights, and I did like them. And then I realised that despite having said earlier that I didn’t, holy crapping fuck, I was talking to Bic Runga, and she was just so nice that I genuinely did like her tights. And now I will stop using italic tags and just reflect on how stupidly starstruck I felt, but how much I basked in her glow. And of course, it was very very rad to see Jessie again, and her hair is so cute it’s ridiculous. Everything was so wonderful, I was just walking on air.

On Sunday I played Domestic Goddess and shopped and cleaned and cooked dinner for my whole family, which they’re still telling me was great, even though it was just the exact same food that I served my dinner party that one time. It was a very pleasant night though. On Wednesday Anji, Karen and I had dinner at The Last Supper Club, and while the food was tasty (although I asked for my fillet steak to be medium rare and it came out blue), the waiter was smarmy (sample line: “there are three mints for you on that plate” – oh really? Is THAT what they are? Cunt.) and we really didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as last time. Then we went to V for Vendetta which was awesome and left me dreaming of nuclear warfare and being all alone when the bombs started falling and crying cos I’d left Sebastian outside.

Yesterday Mummy took me to lunch at Captiol to thank me for doing some design work for her. I had bruscetta and pasta with zuchini and ricotta and a French wine that was a combination of reisling and pinot gris and very tasty it was too. The waiter asked me if I was Joanna, and I said I was and he pointed out that he went to high school with me, and I laughed and said oh yeah, and pretended to not know what he’d been up to for the past couple of years. It makes me happy though that so many of the beautiful people from high school are still working in hospitality. I am so shallow. Last night we went to the quiz at the Realm, and I had too many beers and sucked at pool so I went home and then Del let herself in and her friend in knee high white boots trimmed with oversized laces and fur accosted me asking for hugs and snuggles. Maybe I shouldn’t have judged her so harshly based solely on her boots, because she said some slightly intelligent things about the Gilmore Girls that I was trying to watch, but she was very very drunk and loud. It was like Courtney Love coming to stay. I sent Bart a text going “come home NOW”. He was very apologetic.

Today there is the goodness that I have already described, and in an hour I’m going to go and have a drink with Sarah, and then maybe stare at all my workmates as they have their netball team dinner, but I should really go home and chargrill the kilo of red peppers that I bought for $1.95 at A-Mart instead. See you tomorrow night or at Rome.

Oh, and also, something I forgot to mention was how great it was to finish something creative that I’ve been working on for ages, and the end product of that is 101 Stories That I Want to Tell You, which you should get, if you want it.

The Amazing Wellington

johubris — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:06:43 +0000

Yes, I’m aware that it’s been a while. Here are the things I want to talk about, for my own reference as I write this over the course of the day:

1. The Amazing Race
2. The Newtown Fair
3. The building of a TV cabinet
4. The Oscars
5. Maori class, sort of
6. Political arguments with a friend that felt way too personal and made me cry on the bus
7. Installing broadband
8. Gig at Bodega
9. The reseting of my all my crushes to zero
10. The Phoenix Foundation and the goodness that is Waitangi Park

1. The Amazing Race

On Saturday 4 March, a southerly rolled into Wellington, and it was coooold. Therefore, it was of course ideal weather to run all around Wellington for Sarah’s Hens’ Party. I can’t find my camera cable, so I’m going to steal images from her flickr account, because that’s what friends do, right? Yes.

We met at 11am at Vista Cafe in Oriental Parade and had brunch.
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I was a little nervous at first because I didn’t know anyone, and they were all very pretty, and well dressed, and ordering skinny lattes, but then we had some champagne and I felt better. I felt better still when we were split into two groups and handed a large bag full of wine and snacks that we were ordered to finish before the end of the day, and given our first task. We answered ten questions about Sarah and Nick, and I felt very clever knowing who her famous second cousin is, even if I don’t really know who he is (something rugbyish, I presume). Certain letters in our answers led us to our next location – the indoor netball courts.

I handcuffed Sarah to the rubbish bin to leave her for the next team, we picked up our clue, drank a bottle of bubbly very quickly in the freezing wind cos we couldn’t drink it in the shuttle and headed out to the airport to pick up another friend with the next clue. I made friends with a girl who didn’t know many other people either, and we had another bottle at the freezing cold airport, so all was right in the world.

The next clue led us to an old flat of Sarah and Nick’s, and so we spent nearly an hour sitting on its steps trying to solve a sudoku puzzle as a group. It was okay though, because the organiser had arranged it with the new tenants (she organised all her part in the day from Dubai. That’s insane. And also very cool), and we had another bottle or two of wine to drink anyway. The other team took aaaaaaaages to show up, and we had to wait for them to retrieve Sarah, but then they solved their puzzle in like five minutes, and we all took off for The Grand, or Shooters, as I suppose it is now called.

More handcuffing awaited Sarah there.
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Apparently that’s just a New Zealand fan, not actually Hulk Hogan. Who knew? The wrestling was in town that night, as I’m sure Lisa Fur can tell you all about, and fans had booked out nearly all the accomodation in town. Anyways, we had some more bottles of wine, and some food, and played a game where every time Sarah answered a question that’d been asked to Nick wrongly, she had to put on another item. She ended up looking like this, which is just totally awesome.

I hope she doesn’t mind me putting these photos on my site. I’m not sure if she even knows of its existence, actually. If she does, holler at me and let me know, ‘kay? It’s the gentlemanly thing to do. And that goes for any other workmates reading. And as for ex-workmates – hey to my reader at Foodstuffs! You read me a LOT. I can’t believe that they’ve finally let you have internet access…

Anyways, we put together our puzzle pieces and did another sudoku on the back of it, which led us to Patel’s Superette on Oriental Parade. Me and Allison went via taxi, which I only mention because it’s going to come back in my summary of the following friday night, if I remember. Anyways, the final clue had us all digging in the sand for ages, in a manner highly reminiscent of my pirate tenth birthday party.
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We dug up a big chillybin full of wine and cheese and tasty treats and picniced on the band rotunda. When we were done, it was almost five pm, and so we decided to go back to the Orange Apartments where many of the girls were staying and chill out until dinner, which was booked for 7pm.

While we were there, I bought coffee from the Southern Cross/ex Zeebos, which was very tasty but took eeeeeeeeeeeven longer to make than the coffee at Ora, tried to take a powernap, but was unable to, because I can’t fall asleep on demand without a wank first and that would have been highly inappropriate. We also watched Top of the Pops, which was rad because it turns out that the girl who’d done the organising was the brother of the drummer in one of my very favouritist bands, and so I got to say to her “I did a phone interview with your brother once, and he was lovely, except I was shamed out because I thought he was the bassist cos I’m used to him being called Michael and the bassist being called Mike”. We also saw part of New Zealand’s Brainiest Kid and they showed a picture of some What Now presenter:
and asked who it was. The correct answer was ‘Tamiti’ and I was like ha, he looks kind of like my friend Tamiti from high school, but then I promptly forgot about it in the scramble to put on a little makeup and my shoes and all that sort of stuff.

We were walking to Kai in the City up Marjory Banks St when some guy sitting on his car yelled at me, and lo and behold, it was my friend Tamiti, who, as it turns out is actually hosting What Now now. Oooh spooooooooky, given that I haven’t seen him since 2000. He is in fact building an army, which is awesome, and when he makes it into parliament, he’s going to give me a job. It was great catching up with him, and he said he comes up from Chch every fortnight, so we ought to catch up shortly. Lovely.

Kai in the City was really choice. I was a bit skeptical when Sarah had said she wanted to go there because the owners walk around with a guitar singing, but it was so much fun. I probably wouldn’t want to do it every night, but hey, every couple of months it’s okay to break out the ‘Ten Guitars’, and ‘Tu teramai nga iwi’. Plus, the food was really yum, and the wine was really yum, and it was just good vibes. And another old workmate of mine was there, and so it was nice to catch up with her too and tell her how very lonely I am now. After that we went for a drink at the Cambridge, and then they were going to Boogie Wonderland, but it was 11pm, and so I’d been Hens’ Partying it for a solid twelve hours, and it was time to go home. But it was a fucking radass day.

The Newtown fair

Unsurprisingly, I was totally exhausted the next day, so what smarter thing to do is there than to head out somewhere to walk around for hours in masses of crowds? I picked up Karen and we drove around Newtown for ages trying to find a park because dude, public transport is for black people. That’s why the windows on buses are so big, so we can laugh at them (and there’s a little Oscar humour for you, just to tie in to later on in this entry. I am so fucking good at cohesion).

I decided that I wanted to eat everything, so I had a spring roll which was very average, and a coffee which was great and gave me a headspin, and some mini donuts, and then I bought a black bead necklace, and then there was a huge big pan of chicken with all kinds of colourful capsicums cooking outside Planet Spice and it looked so pretty I had to have some of that too, and then I got dizzy from the Indian food in my belly. I like Newtown.

The building of a television cabinet

I was still exhausted and sort of high on tastiness, but I decided to get the supermarket shopping out of the way since I had a lot of cooking and cleaning to do in order to prepare for my swanky Oscar Soiree the following night. I spied a TV cabinet that I’d seen in a mailer for $69, instead of the $100+ comparable cabinets are everywhere else, so I wrestled it into my trolley and got it home. Why did I need a tv cabinet? Cos I’m contemplating buying a 29 inch TV, so that I can put the one that’s in the lounge in my room, so that if the boys are watching crap and I need some private chill-out time (and for once, that’s not a wanking euphemism) I can watch it in there. So anyways. Mark was in the lounge when I got home, with the windows closed and the curtains not opened properly watching some crap (smelly boys) so I plonked myself down in the dining room and did some constructing. If I had an electric drill and four hands, I could have assembled the cabinet very quickly (except for maybe the doors), but I didn’t, so it took a while. Then the doors wouldn’t fit in, and they were all crooked once they did, and that took even longer, and I was dehydrated, and the floor was uncomfortable and oh oh oh the pain, but holy crap it was so satisfying and I felt so clever once it was all done. You should come over and marvel at my feat of engineering, and promise not to hold a level up to the doors. Girl power!

The Oscars

I had texted everyone I knew in Welly to invite them to my Oscar Soiree so that they could drool over Jon Stewart with me. In order to prepare for this, I made empanadas (beef with cocoa and flaked almonds and spices in savoury shortcrust pastry), pear and sour cream cupcakes, toasted turkish bread with creamcheese, sundried tomatos and fresh basil and two kinds of dipping sauces for samosas, spring rolls and dim sum that came frozen in a box – a party box, if you will. I also cleaned the house, of course, and put out bubbles in an icebucket, and glasses, and printed out lots of oscar nominee sheets for playing the ‘think will’ and ‘want to’ game on, and found some pens. When Anji and Karen arrived looking all glammed up, I decided to do the same. Also in attendence were KateB, Kartini & Mike and Ash, who gets special credit for being a person online (you will recall, of course, our “Oh, you’re that Joanna!” conversation) as well as a person from real life from the KKK crowd. Yes, that’s right, I hang out with white supremicists, not just people whose names all start or sound like K. Missing were Katy and Chrisana who piked due to the weather. Surprise surprise, it was windy in Wellington.

But yes, anyways. Everyone was very excited about the Oscars, and I was quite drunk by that stage, which is always a good thing. I laughed so hard that I nearly fell off my chair during Jon Stewart’s opening monologue (bless the wonders of the Internet that you can watch if if you missed it), especially during his address to Steven Spielberg (“I can’t wait to see what happens to our people next! Trilogy?”). And then I cried during George Clooney’s speech, cos I was very emotional, and damn he looked hot, and oh, even if it was a bit of a wanky speech, it was just so hilarious and beautiful at the same time, and I was still high thinking about the bedroom eyes he’d been giving Jon in the opening clip. And I kept on bringing out food, and everyone was witty and great and appreciative, and I just had a fantastic time, even though it did go on til 2am. Stupid Desperate Housewives rating so highly.

Maori Class, of sorts

I would MSN one of the web developers and ask him for the HTML tag for macrons, but I’m not talking to him or something today. So just believe it when I tell you that I’d like to put it in there.

Anyways, on Tuesday, I stayed home sick from work, and of course my KOL internet account had been allowed to lapse in preperation for the installation of broadband on thursday, so I couldn’t look up a map to see where Heriot Drive was in Porirua. Thus, after I had battled rush hour traffic all the way up to Kelburn to pick up Karen, I wasn’t sure exactly whereabouts we were going, but I figured we’d find it easy enough. The woman on the phone had muttered something about the roundabout near the mall. Heaven forbid that the wananga actually send me out a piece of paper confirming my enrolement and the class times and so forth, but nevermind that for now. We couldn’t find the street, so I pulled over by the covered bit of Porirua cos I saw an information stand sign, and thought there might be a map there. Instead, I saw a wananga sign, and was like “wahoo! I didn’t think that this was Heriot Drive, but nevermind…” and since we had half an hour to kill before 6pm, Karen and I went to get something to eat. We went in to the wananga office, and I tried to sign in on a list like the sign told me to, but my name wasn’t on the list (Karen wasn’t enrolled yet but i was hoping they could squeeze her in), so I was told to just add our names down the bottom. So we walked upstairs through a weird kitchen and back door and stuff, and came out into a big classroom full of new computers. We asked if this was the Maori class, and were told that was “on the campus”. Oh really? Well where the hell were we then? And where the hell was the campus? We were given some kind of weird garbled directions about how we had to head towards Bunnings, and when I said I didn’t know the area, and asked what road was Bunnings on, we were told to go to Bunnings, and turn. There was some arm waving too, but then we found ourselves out hte back of the building and had to walk in a large circle around the whole plaza to get back to my car, and so the incredibly vague directions rendered themselves pretty much useless. I thought that maybe Bunnings was in the industrial type area towards Tawa, so we headed in that direction, and, surprise surprise, ended up in Tawa. That’s when I decided that we’d go to my parents’ house instead and get Daddy to speak some te Reo to us. He, of course, was off in China, but at least we made Mum’s night.

And this week Karen and I have decided that really, five hours every Tuesday is an awfully large commitment to make for the next 36 weeks, and I’d have to drive and park my car in town every week in order to get there in time, and that’d be $10 a day, and so we’re postponing in favour of trying to find a place that does classes actually in town.

Political arguments with a friend that felt way too personal and made me cry on the bus

I met up with Anita-who-used-to-work here for a drink on Thursday at Ponderosa. She smokes, so we sat outside. Their stools are uncomfortable. When Dylan came out of work we waved him over so he could drink with us too. I was trying to tell a story about why I wasn’t particularly fond of someone using the punchline “and she votes National too!”, assuming that anyone I was friends with would just recognise that’s akin to eating puppies, but it kicked off a huge big very long argument which culminated in me getting very upset because I am very very heartily against smacking kids. Also, One Red Dog is ass and won’t serve food in their ‘bar’ area, which is pretty much exactly the same as the restaurant area. (*)

Installing broadband

On Friday night I went home straight after work and spent a while on the phone to Xtra who told me to reset our modem, and after finding a cunning comb with a parting spike in order to do so, I managed to get broadband up and running, although the cable’s a bit dodgy, given that I bought it for me and Bopha back at the Slab, and it had millions of Volcanic users trampling all over it, no doubt. Bart’s laptop is running Windows 98 and he didn’t have a network card, so he’s not so lucky. However, I did go over to my parents’ house last night to retrieve my old desktop that English Dave had reformatted so that in theory the boys can use that, but they didn’t seem too keen to go and get the monitor out of my boot, so they can suck it, queers.

The gig at Bodega

Later that night, after I had drunk a fair amount of vodka, Karen and I went to Bar Bodega for the Spiderplan/K1500/Rico Suave gig. It was loud. I mean it was LOUD. When we got there the halfway doors were shut, and we’d never seen that before so we asked the bartender what was going on, and he said it was just because of the loudness. We braved our ears (I wish I had thought to take earplugs) and went in, waved to Niall and sat at the back, where we occupied ourselves being hilarious making up sign language. In the breaks between bands, or songs, or what-have-you, I made funny jokes because I am happy and super-fun to be around, and carefree and oldskool gay(*). One of the jokes I made was so hilarious that I had to plug a reminder into my phone about it, so that I wouldn’t forget how Karen said “I see a small flaw in your plan” and I said “Is it a mezzanine?”. HAHAHAHA. Remembering that joke just makes me laugh and laugh.

The reseting of my all my crushes to zero

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not, but I’ve had an awful lot of crushes on an awful lot of people lately, and they’ve all turned out badly, well for me anyway. I think (hope) that 3/4 people remain ignorant of my crushes on them, with the fourth of course being that maple syrup-eating surrender monkey. Oh, and while we’re talking about a 3/4 ratio, if you ask me in conversation about my sexual orientation, I’ll usually say that I like people, and it’s about 70% boys and 30% girls, but if we look at the last four crushes, then we will make that figure 75%/25%. Not that it matters anymore, because they’re all over. Oh yes, that’s right, it’s that simple. My will shall be done. I am in control of my feelings, and the master of my own domain. And I suppose since I have now created another version of me, I am now the Master Beta. Ha ha ha.

The Phoenix Foundation and the goodness that is Waitangi Park

There is, however, no pain that liberal applications of the Phoenix Foundation cannot temporarily distract one from. Especially the Phoenix Foundation in a pretty pretty tent in the stunning Waitangi Park, preceeded by Lisa and I squeeing at sighting internet celebrities, and they played ‘Nest Egg’ and ‘Going Fishing’ sounded a little like ‘Sweet Child’o Mine’ and oh they were hilarious, and oh it was just so so rad. concert’o the year so far, although they may be topped by Bic Runga in two weeks’ time. Afterwards we wandered around in the freezing cold gazing at the insanely awesome Earth from Above outdoor exhibit, and I took off my shoes so I could run around on a world map and jump up and down on stupid Canadia, because why not? And then traffic crawled up Courtenay Place so we laughed at all the underdressed skanks (Lucifer_Sam would have been SO proud of us!) and watched Family Guy DVDs. Go see the exhibition if you’re in Welly, please. It’s like the nighttime equivilent of the pretty flags on top of this page. And of course, for more information, you should go to the very clever Wellurban for posts like this one.

I was going to write about other things, but I can’t be bothered now. I figure this will do, given that it’s taken me ALL DAY. I mean, apart from the work that I have also done. Naturally.

Conflict resolution

johubris — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 10:00:49 +0000

I have been super conflicted lately.

1. My stomach got butterflies when I knew that tiny little Rory was about to lose her virginity, but at the same time, I was so so so excited about Lorelei getting together with Luke VS: oh man, I hate it when they fight with each other, it gives me belly rumblings.

2. Via the interweb (youtube.com and onegoodmove.org/1gm, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert? Now, based on history, I should go with the best friend (Pacey not Dawson, Michael not Max, Seth not Ryan, and Logan Logan Logan not Duncan), but oh, Jon is so hot, and his mother used to be my subsitute teacher at ASIJ. But maybe I’m actually just in love with Ed Helms, because who can do a dead pan better than him? NO ONE. And dead pan is hot. I hope that the next person I have sex with (yes, in a million years, sure, whatever) is like “well, that was okay” afterwards. And then maybe ask me about how gay marriage is affecting my own marriage, because am I now tempted by other girls since it’s legal?

3. Which of coruse brings me to the real life problems, and the “oh what do I do in this situation?” blah blah, and you have no idea (unless you were Karen, who’d spent the day watching Firefly with me) how much I yelled at my phone on Sunday. The thing that was suppsoed to be all 2005 is like, totally in 2006 as well, and I confessed to someone who would know about it, and she was like “go for it!” and I was like no no no, and then there’s the girl, and oh yeah, she has a boyfriend, and I didn’t know, so don’t I feel like an ass now, and then there’s the other thing and oh I don’t know what to do about that.

And I think that’s about it for confliction, so can I talk now about how lonely I am at work since Sarah left on Thursday? Or about how I’ve been working super hard at the gym lately? Or about how I very almost won all the filters at poker tonight with my flatties? Or about how I am wearing my super awesome pyjamas for the first time this year? Awesome.

The observant amongst you would be like “holy crap Jo, why are you at home on a Friday?” while the more observant amongst you would have picked up on the cold, and the misery at work, and how I have Sarah’s hens’ party to go to at 11am tomorrow. Okay, so I haven’t mentioned that bit yet, but it’s like “the amazing race”, so I suspect I’m going to need my energy. And on that note, I should take Prince ~~william~~ Caspian to bed with me. Hopefully the boys will keep the noise down. I like them a lot eh, have I mentioned that lately?

PS- you know how I mentioned in my last post about how my friend Korinna was now going to be repping fuckerware parties? Well I got info from her today, and it’s not dVice, it’s ‘Joanna G’, which is mostly reaaaaaaaaally tacky lingere, but 1. the sex toys are a lot cheaper than dVice, for the same models and 2. you know my hott corset which I bought off Trademe? It’s in the catelogue, except in white, which is much tackier than black, and I paid a lot less for it. Awesome. Go me.

Loose Ends

johubris — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 06:45:11 +0000

Okay, one day I will finish part three of The Decemberer and you’ll know how I spent the rest of my holidays. But it’s on my computer at home, and frankly, I’m way too busy.

Why am I so busy? Well:

1. I’m driving up to Auckland on Thursday with Lisa Fur and Franrose for the Big Day Out. Hurrah! On the Saturday night, I’m having a dinner at Canton in Kingsland and then drinks at our apartment in Newton, so you should get in touch and come along. If you can’t make it out that night, I’d still love to see you. Keep an eye out for me if you too are bdoing. I may very well be wearing a lime green bandana to save getting a burnt scalp.

2. I’m looking for two flatmates since Anji is moving out – you can see the ad on flatfinder that features photos of my sexy couches and dining room. If you know someone who’s looking for a place, likewise, let me know. I think I’d probably prefer boys, and I promise not to sleep with them. I’m reformed.

3. Brad’s having a fundraiser to raise funds (fancy that!) for his secondment to a Philly theatre company, and you should come along. It’s on February 10, so it’s a while away, but I’ll pop the invite up here for now anyway:

4. I’ve been asked by my manager to set S.M.A.R.T goals for the next three months at work. I have to tell her what they are next week. Help! What are my goals? Do I want to learn software? Are there any courses I might want to do? OOOH! I want to learn Maori. And also how to macronise properly. Rock. But more ideas would be welcome.