Hubris.co.nz

So, they’re recounting the votes in the US. Cool. I could make an effort to find out who’s won, but I can’t be assed, because I was at tech until 9pm today, and that’s quite a long time when you’re as sick as a sick dog. Coffee and a vege sandwich and gossiping with Jody and Jeremy perked me up a little though. Jeremy’s definately moving in, so yay. Kate B and I had a spat last night when she told me that oh maybe she’s not going to sublet, she might just move out, and that so wasn’t what I needed to hear after I’d arranged someone to sublet, and we were both very very tired and grumpy, so I stomped off to my room, but we made up before she went out to Johnno’s so that was okay.

So yes, very very tired. I was relieved to find out today from Mansfield that actually, all our paperwork and website isn’t due in today after all. Plus, apparently he’ll very happily give anyone an extension on their I.D project, and accept stuff with “Under Construction” segments. But that’s cheating. I figure if I can get an A on the planning of it all, I can damn well get an A on the actual thing. But I’m not sure if I will or not. I can dream. It’s all that makes doing an instructional program on how to use the AUT Phone System bearable. We had some career people come talk to us, and they said “You can expect a starting salary of around $30,000 in your field when you graduate” but Mansfield said after that if you go into Coporate Instruction work, you’ll start on at least $45,000. But where oh where is the soul?

I like Director. Well, I like it better than Quest anyways. I think I like it better than Flash too. My timeline is all colour coded and pretty. Arrrrgh, what’s happening to me? Helen asked me and Jody today if we’d had any Fireworks this year – my automatic response was “yeah I have it installed on my machine at home”. Of course, she was refering to Guy Fawkes. Why do program makers try and give their products such fucking bizzare names? I mean “FLASH!” – and how many people start singing “oooooh Dreamweaver, I believe…” AAARGH! Okay, sorry – you can kind of tell that lately I’ve been spending 90% of my awake time in the labs at tech, can’t you?

I meant to change my sheets and stuff tonight, and maybe even do a load of washing, but when you get home at 10pm, the inspiration’s really just not there, is it? Ooh I just made my back crack something lovely. I’m sure it wasn’t healthy, but it felt good. I’m not very healthy, and I intend to change that. My body’s so completley unable to cope with stress that it gets really really sick whenever I need it the most.

The link to my journal page is maybe likely to disappear off my front page sometime soon. This is in keeping with the fact that we’re soon going to have to make our answering machine message less offensive too as I go jobhunting. Damn conformity!

I’ve drank about three litres of water today. I’m pissing on the half hour. If someone was to give me a neck and shoulder massage, I would sell them my soul.

Think my “Night” capsuale is kicking in yet? I took two last night and still didn’t sleep. Too much running through my mind, plus I can’t breathe with a blocked nose, and I can’t sleep when I can’t breathe. My parents are coming up to Auckland next week to go to the Expo. Anji may or may not come. It’ll be nice to see them. I think I must also borrow money off them, unfortunately. I’m looking forward also to getting gloriously drunk on Wednesday night after the expo is over. And going to Hamilton on Friday to see Andee and Shihad and Fur Patrol.

Brain mush brain mush brain mush.

Oh, and just cos I was showing them to Annette, here are the last ten search engine thingies that people used to find my journal page:

• delivered baked goods
• flame test ion
• coloured gifs and jpegs and wizard
• piss jpegs,
• gifs of eart,s rot jpegs,
• gifs of eart,s rot jpegs
• hot jpegs
• fuck her very badly
• Nipple Licking

“You got nipple licking? I’m so jealous!”

Tuesday August 29th, 2000

I’m too lazy to plug in my scanner, but I did wanna show you my marvelous pen that I got today. But then again, I’m too lazy to find it too, but do believe me, it is cool. I went to some Macromedia conference thing today. Well, I’m not entirely sure what it was. Conference, seminar, infomercial, or something. You can go here and it might tell you what it was. They gave us the pens. I was hoping for a tshirt that said “FLASH!” across it, but I didn’t even get a coffee mug.

My morning started a bit badly, as things do when it’s not even 7 o’clock and you’re up, and was threatening to get worse when Kate told me she wasn’t going in straight away having fallen asleep while working on her seminar, so I thought I had to run to catch a bus. But then it was sunny, so I mellowed out. I’d arranged to meet Andrea and Karen at some place called the Bakehouse Cafe at 8am. The cafe was really nice, although the name was funny for me since I used to work in a place called The Bakehouse Gallery. Anyways, Nick and Jeremy and Helen and Charlotte were there too, so that was cool, we went off enmass. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from it, or what kind of crowds I was expecting to be there. We were trying to spot the biggest nerd, but we gave up because there was this guy with the most amazing mullet ever, and he just took all our titles. I was dozing off in the first part of the presentations, and so my loving friends kept hitting me. Meanies.

But then they gave us morning tea! We’re so going to start hanging out at the Aotea Centre more often to see what we can gatecrash. I was more intrigued by later presentations. Dare I say I’m even feeling a tad more inspired now? Well, it was fun learning about new features in Dreamweaver. The guy doing the presentation was fantastic, a real Tony Robins. When he gesticulated with his feet together, he looked like a Backstreet Boy. He made fun of programmers, and did his own sound effects (whooshes and clicks mostly) for every exciting thing he did. He kept tossing out Flash Balls to the audience, especially to girls he thought were cute. I was sitting at the back, so I guess he didn’t see me. Flash balls light up when you bounce them. I don’t think they do anything on the Internet. He talked about “sticky websites”. And magnetic ones too, but that doesn’t sound as funny. Some guy from Apple did a slide show too. What the HELL is a gigaflop? I mean, I guess it’s some big measurement of speed processing or something, but that word is just wrong wrong wrong. They didn’t give us lunch, but they did give us afternoon tea. And purple and black jellybeans. And cds of stuff – skite demos I imagine. They gave away software in a draw too, but I didn’t win. Still, it was fun. But I don’t think I will be purchasing any Macromedia software anytime soon. I tried to convince someone to go halves with me on the $1000 ultradev, because you got two free macromedia coffee mugs with it, but apparently my friends don’t keep that kinda spare change in their pockets.

During the day, I got a text message from a number I didn’t recognize going “so quoted in the herald now huh” and I was like “what the fuck?” so I texted that person back (except I got the # wrong) going “um, say what? who are you?”. When I got home, I picked up the Herald, and discovered that actually, it was true. You can read it here. It’s really nothing much, but hey. Despite the fact that they were quoting my journal, they didn’t bother putting my URL in. What bad journalism!

After the thingie was over at 5pm, I went to Global Sandwich and hung out with (Kate) Morrison for about half an hour, cos she said Brad was on his way down. So I took the bus home with Brad eventually, babbling about the Tony Robbins guy. I was soooooo tired when I got home, I just sat in the lounge not saying anything. But then we had to go supermarket shopping. Brad’s car is still at the garage, and Kate decided she was oging out swimming, which meant I was driving. Or rather, I would have been, if Clayton had turned off my headlights last time he drove my car. Mmm. So I called the AA, and the guy came and jump started me about five minutes later (we live just up the road from an AA base, luckily. Then I drove out of our street, and up the road a fraction, when my car stalled stopping at the lights. Now, that’s not an unusual occurance, because it often stalls at night when I’ve just started and it’s cold. However, it wouldn’t start again, it was totally dead. Luckily I could roll it down the hill in reverse and off to the side of the road. Then of course, my cellphone wouldn’t work, and brad and clay didn’t have theirs on them, so I walked home to call the AA man again. We got a different guy, and this one informed me that there was something wrong with my battery charger or something, and that it’ll probably cost up to $400 to fix. This a minute after I’d been mocking brad needing $500 worth or repairs to his car, going “hey, that’d buy a third of mine”. (Karma!). So that AA man charged me up completely for like ten minutes, but just to be on the safe side, I decided we’d go for a bit of a spin on the motorway before doing the shopping. Brad was like “Let’s go to Hamilton” and I said okay. We were just about at Manuwera when he was like “you know I was joking don’t you?” and I was like “don’t you know I always call everyone’s bluffs, Bradley?” But I didn’t have enough petrol, so we turned around and went to Big Fresh in Mount Wellington.

Goddam what a skanky hole it was! I mean, Big Fresh in general is skanky, but this one was all run down and stuff as well – although I guess it does get props for being 24 hours. But I just felt so….. lower class shopping there. I love our Foodtown Greenlane, I really do. However, we DID manage to buy an 18 pack of toilet paper at Big Fresh. This means, apparently, that we can do a whole lot of shitting. Or play that game where you stick toilet paper up your arse and light it (I’m so glad Kate spent a year in Dunedin!). Or we could tp someone’s house. The possibilities are endless.

I should stop listening to Placebo because it makes me want to take drugs that I haven’t taken before.

Thursday the 17th of December

So today, everyone’s favourite American President is killing civillians because he doesn’t want to be impeached. Don’t even TRY and tell me it’s a coincidence. I voted for him in the mock elections we held at school back in Seventh grade – yeah, like I’d choose Ross Perot or Bush. I didn’t think that having an affair would in any way make him not be a good president – unless he’s going to declare war like this to get the heat off himself. The thing is, I’m not an Iraqi, and I’m not American, so whatever’s going on ovre there really shouldn’t concern me too much, but it does.

UI moved to Japan right after the Gulf War, into an American based society. I didn’t really think the war was such a big deal, because I was only 10, and all I knew about it was the odd headline or 20 from the Evening Post, and those fireworks images from CNN, that TV One piped in especially. In Japan however, apparently there were major threats of terrorism, so much so that the school buses had the “American School In Japan” logo taken off them, and students were told to tell everyone they were Canadian. It’s a fucked up world we live in. Then at 2.30am today, just before I went to bed (yeah okay, I’m writing this entry the day after) I thought I heard the distant roar of air-raid sirens, but figured there was nothing I could do anyways.

Why the hell am I talking about all this crap? There’s so much today that’s my own life that I could talk about. It’s December 17th. Those of you that know me will know why I’m moping. Those that don’t can hang on for it while I get through my basic day.

I worked two hours at my aunt Leonie’s house this morning. I did some typing for her (her keyboard was too clacky, so I made so many hidi errors, not like on this speedy wee baby) made some changes to her address database, and started cateloguing her collection of Japanese books that she bought off my grandfather’s collection (other side of the family)for her Nakano group. All terrific fun of course. Luckily I’m getting paid $10 an hour cash.

That was probably about as ragey as I got all day. I spent a lot of time revamping my website, trying to use Dreamweaver. For those of you who didn’t spot it, there’s now an extra table of contents. And there’s a couple of new sections too, maybe. I spent ages trying to get rollovers to work. They worked first time when i was just playing,but now I want them they don’t. Ain’t that just typical? That’s okay, cos apart from hurting my wrist, it also managed to keep my thoughts off other things. I guess I should probably explain, huh? This day last year is when I lost my heart. And my head too.

I guess it sort of serves me right, cos I’d mainly started talking to him cos he was always so flirty in the room, and that made another guy I knew jealous, which is always fun. It got to the stage that I was talking almost exclusivly to him on IRC – I stopped going in rooms, and only messaged my girlfriends to tell them things he’d said to me. I was so fully smitten, I guess because people told me that he had a crush on me, and we were labeled as a couple even though we weren’t. The week before, on the 10th I’d gotten heinously drunk at my friend Amy’s house, and had come on IRC going “I looooooooooooooooooooooooooooveeeeeeeeeee you” (I only know this from reading logs of it) which was just disgusting. I managed to get away with that though, by blaming it on Amy and Fiona. But yeah, back the 17th. I was up late chatting to him, and talking to Andee too, when he made some sort of comment about how I didn’t want him to say that he loved me until we’d met. I started crying, being the sap that I am, thinking there was no way he could mean that in the way I wanted him to, but when I finally got up the courage to ask him about it like an hour later, it turned out that yes, he did have a crush on me. There was no way in hell that either of us wanted to have an internet relationship, so we were going to wait till we met at the Gathering (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah you say, more pieces falling into place) to see what the story was. I stayed up all night talking to him then, only leaving because my dad was getting up in ten minutes. It was the most amazing glowing feeling, despite the fact that it was obviously a doomed situation. I’ve never had someone like me mutually before. The whole next day was bathed in gold. I couldn’t stop smiling. He made me the most gorgeous site for Xmas, with this picture on it that he made – featuring the glowing orb of the sunrise we saw together in different cities. Sigh. So sappy.

Of course, in the two weeks leading up to the Gathering, we had a big really stupid fight, and he also revealed that he was still in love with his ex, but aaaah well. There was still enough there for me to be scared shitless of meeting him. So yeah, and then he thought there was no spark, but he still came to stay with me, and I fell head over heels in love with him, and he just didn’t care. Maybe I should post the letter I wrote him. At the time, it was so important and special to me, but that WAS a year ago. I just like telling stories which is why you’re all hearing about this now. That and well – he is still sort of in my head, just because I still feel like it’s last year sort of, because I’m on holiday again. That’s okay though. It can be fun reminiscing. To quote myself:

Replaying the past is like having all these good (and bad) movies to watch, that you don’t have to go to the shop to rent so they’re heaps cheaper and slightly more interactive