Hubris.co.nz

First, off, in elsewhere links, I got my hair done at  a new hair salon on Cuba Street and I liked it a lot. And you like food reviews? Here’s one of the Cellar-Vate dinner for Coney Wines.

Now some pictures so that if you disapprove you stop reading there.

This picture of Kane's enormous penis is because he's coming to stay this week

My ass, my gash.

I think the reason that I tend to only update my journal when I’m about to get my period is because this is when the noise in my head , that occasionally dies down to the faintest whisper if I’m exercising and taking my lexapro and happily employed and not financially struggling etc, tends to build up into the loudest roar which comes at me like being in the ocean on a windy day at Lyall Bay but without the bracing feeling of really being alive that comes with the cold cold water. See, even that sentence – so fucking belaboured and over the top. Shut up, Joanna.

And more than the normal pre-periodness, the past week has been clusterfucked with intensity. Wellington is too fucking small. I found myself last night telling someone who doesn’t really know me about why my Friday had ended up with me having a lounge room dance party with Kim and Kelly and Kate and why I was so fucking drunk that I ended up falling over and sitting on a wine glass and consequently have gashes in my ass, but the explanation of why I felt the need to get so drunk was really ridiculously complicated like “he abandoned his family and left his underpants on my deck and we tried to set fire to them” and “she’s a whore although I had a week of trying not to say nasty things and Mean Girls says calling her a whore doesn’t make me any more pure” and “in ten years she’ll show up and get the black baby I’m trying to adopt” and “and I was having an affair with him but then he hooked up with her” and “I hooked up with him a bunch of times to try and get over someone else but it didn’t work, and then there was this crazy girl” and  ”he used to make me cry every day at work” and really, what one should just say is “why the hell were you drinking with all these people anyway?” to which the inevitable answer involves the smallness of Wellington, and something about Rihana. And of course what I was saying in my head was “shut up Jo shut up shut up shut up” but because I was tipsy when I had this conversation but not drunk, I just kept babbling.

So my current theme is I should run away from Wellington as far as I can, but then today of course was a series of highs and lows. Most of the highs initially revolved around Piako yoghurt, which is of course the drug de jour for my set of friends. And Wendy at Cultured gave me more cheese. And Amie gave me petrol money when I drove her home tonight after the Girl Geek Dinner when of course I asked a question of the woman from Park Road who spoke about 3D about the impact it’s having on the porn industry and was rewarded with a Google notebook for my trouble. And I won a prize I’m going to give to someone who deserves it much more than me and will make much better use of it. And I pledged to join more community projects. So there are many good lovely things about Wellington, of course. It’s just that in the week before my period I struggle to remember them sometimes.

The lows are financial and no one wants to hear about that, and also dealing with this email that I got yesterday which just makes me want to bawl my eyes out. I’m worried that I’ve given up faith in myself and if I don’t have faith in myself, how could anyone else? Trying to explain to someone who doesn’t really know me that I’m terrible at freelancing because I’m so shit at talking myself up, he was all “but you seem so confident and able to sell yourself” but alas, Jo Hubris may have the ability to talk people into bed (after all the angst of all the issues of the weekend, being able to use a very simple “hey I want to shag you” is very refreshing) but Joanna McLeod is a pile of failure in getting anyone to pay for her services, although she has been rather busy lately providing expert advice and guidance in the S***** M**** area to friends & acquaintances in exchange for coffee and pints. And she still has some work to do tomorrow, so really she should go have a shower because she has coconut body wash, find some clean sheets (side effect of slicing your ass open when you’re drunk – waking up covered in blood and having no idea what the fuck happened until people tell you on twitter) and PJs and watch Dorota & Vanya get married on Gossip Girl and hope that she actually will sleep tonight before 7am. And stop talking about herself in the third person.

Last time I wrote, I was planning for Martha’s new Wanda Harland opening, and now that was a couple of weeks ago. I had a tremendous amount of fun. There was the most amazing cheese in the whole wide world there (one was called “OMG Triple Cream Brie” by Over The Moon) and because I was so in love with it, I get to go to eat more of it tomorrow at a super secret cheese tasting. More details will come on YASE at some stage soon, I’m sure. It is a great space, and there are many pretty things in it that I want to buy.

After the shop opening, Karen and Megan and I went for dinner at Arashi, and then up to Hooch for a quick drink. A couple of bottles later, we’d had enough of old men from Nelson who were up for the rugby and decided to hit on us but accidently showed us picture of their wives. We really should have stopped drinking earlier though so that I could have been less hungover in preparation for the roller derby on that Saturday.

The roller derby was fucking amazing! I wrote about it on Pretty Pretty Pretty and you can also see photos of how hot I looked. Sure, the leopardskin bustier gave me bruises, but it was totally worth it. I was really happy that when I was taking photos of the girls afterwards they’d mostly all heard of PPP, and so I felt totally full of love for Wellington and the internets.

Afterwards, we went up to Hooch for a Cowboys + Indians night. There was a guy in a horse’s head! Behold!

The horse is made a million times more awesome by the guy in the background

I ran into the girl from #madbad and ended up pinning her to the bathroom wall and pashing her until one of the female bartenders came in and told us we were too drunk and she would lose her bartender’s license. I think that was somewhat of an exaggeration. But I went home and did not accept her text invitations to go up to the duck’s house. I had to get up at 9am to go to the airport to pick up Kat and Kane, after all!

The airport mission was pretty heinous but then Kat and I went into town to meet up with the Wellingtonista at Mac’s Brewery because we’d finally managed to literally organise a piss-up in one. We drank our tab we’d won at the Webstock Quiz the year before, hung out in the lovely weather, introduced new people to the delights of knowing the best people in town, and many people brought along their kids. It was thoroughly delightful to sit in the sun afterwards, eat gelato and plot starting up our own crocodile bike business.

Having Kat and Kane around always makes me feel very mellow and content and full of love. I cooked a big old lamb roast for nine people that night, and we crowded around the table stuffing ourselves, drinking red wine and having hilarious conversation. Kat did all the cleaning before and after, which I felt bad about but I didn’t want to fight her on it too much! I was really happy with the way that everything went, that it reminded me what fantastic lovely people I have in my life. Awww.

But I didn’t have too much time to reflect on it, because on Wednesday, Miss Harvestbird was in town, just in time for the RASSLIN! The rasslin’ was being filmed for TV, so it was held in a warehouse here in Newtown with tiered seating and great lighting for taking photos, but of course I didn’t get around to downloading my pics before my camera was stolen. However, the lovely Miss Fur took pics, of course, so you should check hers out. It includes this gem:

Chris DeLorean and Lazarus Volt - bum pinchers!

After that, it was time to go to the Watusi to listen to some lovely drunk girls read out Olsen slash fiction in bad Russian accents. It was very very entertaining. I got somewhat drunk and melancholy afterwards, which was a bit weird, given how happy I’d been previously. I got to spend the whole day in bed on Thursday though, which was a great way to unwind in preparation for the madness that was to follow.

On Friday I went to the Montana World of WearableArt, which again, you can read about on PPP. I got to go in the media room to hang out with Kowhai and Robyn and Russell Brown and Fiona from Public Address, and drink free wine and stuff my face with spicy nuts. It was a really great show, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Afterwards I went to Hooch with Kowhai to have a heart to heart, and apologise to Johnny for being snapped the week before in the bathroom making out with that girl. He just laughed.

I’d texted Smoo to see if he wanted to share a cab home from work and he told me he’d been robbed, and I was thinking he meant his restaurant, but no, it turns out that our flat was broken into, two days after the neighbours had been burgled. They took my laptop, my eeePC, my iPod, my camera, his playstation, El’s camera and iPod. Needless to say Saturday was somewhat of a blur of phonecalls with the police, talking to the police, being told that we need to be more social in our flat, crying down the phone to my mother, welcome visits from Anji and Bambi – who told me that I’d sent him a drunken email on Wednesday night asking him to tell Tingle to call me and that actually it wasn’t Tingle who tried to climb in my window. Naturally because Bambi is smart, he saw the 2am timestamp on the email and decided to wait until I was sober before he replied to it. I think I might put the math goggles thingie onto Gmail. And my lovely mother came over as well, and then Lisa came by in the evening to watch 21 Jump Street. Sure, the cops who came over were nice, and seemed to know what they were doing, but they weren’t no Johnny Depp. Le Sigh.

On Sunday I went to buy a new laptop (no, I don’t have insurance), and spent the afternoon fighting with Vista. Firefox wouldn’t install, so Chrome is totally my new lover for life now. Then a boy said he’d buy me consolation beers so we went to Hashi Ogazeke, and I bought him a beer from Invercargill that tasted like bacon. He was still there in the morning – and then the afternoon – which is something I am very very unused to, and I didn’t know how to act. Plus, I really wanted to check my email. There have been sleepovers with girls, but the last boy I woke up with would have been Good Tom, all the way back in 2004. Apparently when you have sex with married men, they go home to their wives afterwards and don’t spend the night. Who knew? And I don’t like sleeping in other people‘s beds either. Etc. Anyways. Today continued the lesson that Wellington is a very small place, and that I really do know everyone and everything about everybody.

Yesterday I went to the new bar Betty’s with the lovely Amie to try Tohu wines and find out all sorts of gossip. I will write about that sometime on YASE – the wine and venue, that is. And then I went to dinner at Thai House and Quiz Night where I got to have a good gossip with Anji, which I really do need to update. I didn’t manage to sleep at all though, so I was still awake at 11am waiting for the tsunami. I don’t know what to say about that without sounding trite. The place where Karen and I had an amazing holiday - Coconuts Resort is apparently completely destroyed as are of course many other houses and lives that I have no connection to other than, y’know, having  a heart. So I baked cupcakes for Megan instead, and now I am wondering who will get to see my amazing new dress first.