Hubris.co.nz » halloween

You and me in the last days

johubris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:45:59 +0000

So tomorrow, or sort of todayish, it will have been a year since I cried and I screamed and I hoped and I begged and I cried some more in joy and Obama was voted in as president. There are plenty of people who will write about the political implications of all that, and about the terrible puppy-eating thing that happened a few days later in NZ when my hair looked all amazing and I was pretending to be Joan Holloway, but I will pretend that night never happened. And I suppose that’s where it would be easy to start the fantasies, to pretend that the things never happened, but lately and for very little reason other than maybe getting my period and the associated END OF THE WORLD right before it, I am reminded of all these things and all these touches, and I react funny, and I cry in strange places and contact people that I shoudn’t because I just want some kind of attention and I know that mostly this is me, not you, and yet I have come to the conclusion that it’s not that I am still in love with you, but rather that it has gone out the other side and I hate you for what you have done to me, and for what I let myself become and that maybe it is easier if I loathe every single thing about you. But of course, that’s not actually that much easier. It just took me by surprise a couple of nights ago when I was just totally overcome with thoughts of the things that briefly were things, but not for very long and anyways, let’s end this paragraph. I am not good at dealing with anniversaries of things that are teh sux0r.

Now I have a a toss-up between good or bad. Let’s go with the bad, then the good.

I will try to keep this paragraph relatively spoiler-free, but I have been watching a certain show set in 1963 on torrents, and so yes, you can expect that Mad Men WILL deal with the assassination of JFK (oh, spoiler alert, apparently the president got assasinated in November 1963..) and I was watching that episode last night and because of course, much like you, my moment of “This is history happening right now” was 9/11, and so it was all played out in flashback sequences last night, the starting on Fluox, the Buffy episode at 3am, the flicking to the news channel, the “oh wow, what movie is this?”, the text messages to Kateh and Thomas, the wondering whether or not to wake Clayton, and then the flatmate hunt in the weeks after, but most relevantly, EM’s letters about what he told his son about the bad men when his son’s cartoons were taken off the air. It’s 2009, EM, shouldn’t you be emailing me right now?

But oh, the happy anniversaries! They can wipe out all the badness. And this is where the glee comes in, with going to Christchurch for one night for Harvestbird and Ned’s wedding. I feel very tongue-tied and inadequate and actually quite useless in recording such a lovely mellow event (although I can say that some dumbass Kwikimart clerk gave me terrible directions and it took me 30 minutes to walk to the bar instead of two), but what I can do instead is embed a drunken video for you that I took of the crazy lights in my crazy hotel room:

Apart from that, Christchurch was AWESOME! There was the girl on the plane who recognised me from a rollerderby match (“you’re Jo from Pretty Pretty aren’t you?”) who gave me a tour around the city to my hotel and an adventurous trip back to the airport the next day. There were hungover drinks with Emma Hart who managed to make ME blush which is practically as unheard of as the word “squozen” and the brunch the next day with Kebabette at C1.

I know Kebabette from PPP, so this is a good time to say how awesome the Pretty Pretty Party was. Also awesome? The Pride & Prejudice & Zombies ball. There are great pics on that link, by the way. I do so really love to dance, and the girls and boys at that dance swept me off my feet and all over the floor and I really should have hitched up my skirt better so I wouldn’t have slipped over so much. The fact that I ended up crying behind my (Theresa’s) fan at Motel later that night and sending texts to inappropriate people because I wanted some attention is clearly irrelevant. Honest!

I had a period for like, almost two weeks or something? Which was annoying but at least it kind of made my body make sense. Now I’ve got a three-week contract working from home but all I seem to want to do is take naps, so my hours are a little sporadic and off the standard chart. I have Fridays in the office to ground me however, and I feel really good and confident about the work I am doing. It is very much aligned with my skill set and close to my heart. Someone commented to me on Facebook the other day about how they can’t believe that I still don’t have a job yet and I feel pretty much the same way that they do, only more so.

El moved out but a lovely girl from Twitter who is on Brutal Pagaent (boo!) at Roller Derby (yay!) will be moving in. Brent’s going to move in with his girlfriend so I still need another flatmate. My social calendar is insanely busy. Hubris wasn’t updated for a while, but now it is. Good. Gossip Girl time now, right?

Except Lisa has me watching a Pearl Jam clip where they’re singing ‘Black’ and I expect him to start singing “We…belong…together” like he does in the Unplugged video, not altogether too different from Campbell Scott (that’s right, isn’t it Jessie? I get the two confused) in Singles but then he sings lines from ‘Good Woman’ instead about how he’s lying when he says he doesn’t love me no more, and oh, they’re too much like a text message when someone said that they were going to say that they were over me because they were weak, and oh, fuck you Obama, I am holding you entirely responsible for this, apart from the parts that are Guy Fawke’s fucking doings..

Tricks and Treats

johubris — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 02:34:41 +0000

When I sat down and thought about a date to have my belated birthday party on, I texted the three people that form the core of my friendships in Wellington, to make sure that they’d all be free that night, and to reserve them in advance.

On Saturday afternoon, I got a call from one of them saying that he’d had to go to Auckland, and therefore wouldn’t be coming. Okay, two out of three is fine, and I was more concerned for his welfare. Then later, the second one called me, and said that surprisingly enough, complications had come up with something that was bound to get complicated anyway, and so he wouldn’t be coming. Righto. I’m aware that I’m being very much less than supportive here, and that makes me a bad friend, but when I hear through my SISTER about another friend being ***, when my sister doesn’t even know that girl, I get more than a little shitty. And this isn’t about the *** friend, it’s about the inevitable feeling of being replaced (ie: it’s all about ME. And also about the vicious circle of me becoming more pissy and less pleasant and therefore less desireable as a friend). At 9.30pm when no one had showed up and Anji and I had tired of taking photos of each other’s boobs (we were both in corsets, making us go “kaboinga”),

I decided that if the third person from that original trio didn’t show, I would move back to Auckland.

But then at 10pm there was a big rush and everyone (excpet for Karen) arrived within ten minutes of each other, of course. And then it was choice, and mostly very civilised, except for setting off fireworks in the backyard and forgetting that there’s a grannyflat with a very nice nurse called Eve who lives under us. Here’s a photo that doesn’t feature my boobs – or in fact, me at all:

Karen stumbled in very drunk very late and so I made up a bed for her in the study, and Al and Korina were the last to leave around 2.30am. I had a really good time, although someday someone’s really going to have to teach Joel that when you say “oh and this is my workmate”, the correct thing to say is not “but you don’t do any work, Jo, you just post on your site all day long”. Nevermind. There’s glitter on my sheets and also on Sebastian from my very good imitation of a pirate (everyone said I needed an eye patch – I said “I’m a good fighter and I’ve managed to avoid getting poked in the eye”). Miss Lisa Fur and I got to exchange Knowing Looks about something else too, and that was very amusing.

There’s also oh so much mess now. How can fifteen people trash a house so much? It just doesn’t make sense. And cleaning is something I’m pretty much very very over right about now, given that on Thursday night I broke into Mummy & Daddy’s house (oh okay, I used Karen’s key) and cleaned their kitchen and lounge for them as a nice surprise cos Mum’s been very stressed out lately. She rang me today and was very grateful, so yay, good times. And then I cleaned lots on Saturday to get ready for the drinks. Our house looked fabulous, by the way, with fairy lights and candles everywhere. Very civilised. It functions very well as a house for entertaining in, which is great even if my couches are so comfy that Al fell asleep for hours on one. So instead of cleaning yesterday, Anji and I camped out on the couches after a hearty lunch, eating leftover food (there’s still chocolate crackles and garlic bread and wedges if you’re interested, but sixty something jelly shots have been shot) and watching the last five episodes of Buffy Season VII, both of us crying our little eyes out over ‘Chosen’, of course. Keeping it spoiler-free, it’s the final speech that kicks back in as a flashback, with Buffy walking around in her living room wearing a fancy blouse that I can’t figure out if I love or hate, and then the girl with the bat and oh oh the tears they bucket out at that point, every single time I watch it.

I had a long conversation last night with Miss Fur about how dorky I am, in terms of how much trashy television I watch, and the Buffy obsession, and the reading of tabloids, but she says that my dorkiness could be endearing. Hmmm.

EDIT: Here’s another picture of me that Anji must have taken at the party and I rully like it. Please note the partial throwing of goats.

Labouring Day

johubris — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 02:21:55 +0000

Okay, I have a lot more work to do that I really should get around to doing (damn you, Julie/Julia blog!), so I’ll do a bullet points update. That’s okay with everyone, right?

Please come to this:

Truth be told, I kind of wish that it was Sunday and that it was over already, or perhaps the Saturday afterwards so I wouldn’t have any more “Oh, how was your party? Sorry I couldn’t make it” type smalltalk to make. I haven’t had a big successful party in Wellington EVER. Trying to have one is making me a little crazy. I am terrified of no one showing up except for a few suckers who have to try to put on a brave face and me wanting the floor to open up and swallow me before getting too drunk and abusive at the people who actually made an effort. That said, there’ll be great music and snacks and atmosphere, and costumes, and so please, do come along. If you don’t have my address and you’re not a Level 2 Hubrette and therefore able to read the secret footnotes that have my address in them, just drop me an email – anything @ hubris co nz – and I’ll tell you where it is and that will be choice okay rock.

Thanks to the ridiculously hott boys in The Edukators I have decided that I will buy No Sweat shoes instead once my chucks finally give up the last gasp of ghost that they have left in them, which won’t be long given that they are only held together by their stench right about now. Yum. The other thing that was they played song association in it, and by virtue of a) being raised on tracks “Greatest hits of 1985″ records that my parents brought in Germany when we were living there (which featured Nena, amongst other songs sung in German) and b) having Anji tell me about the joke beforehand, I was able to laugh when they talked about “Tausend-und-eine nacht”. Okay, no one else will get this paragraph. Nevermind.

Anji and I – but mostly me – went homeware crazy on the weekend, during a very pleasant drive out to Lyall Bay (which coupled well with what I’d said to my workmates on Friday night when we were having some jugs – “I had my first ever pash at the house of the bar manager here” – since that was the last time that I went to Lyall Bay, to the best of my knowledge). I bought tealight holders galore along with little candle lanterns at the warehouse, and we spent aaaaaaaaaaaaaages trying to choose wine glasses (we’d gone to the ware whare with the intention of purchasing a box of 18, but since they didn’t have those, we got six very large ones and two very large ones in a different shape) along with assorted tumblers destined for gingerbeer & vodka and handtowels at Briscoes. I agonized over bed linen and ended up getting some at Spotlight the next day. We also had lunch at The Empire – the new/old movie theatre in Island Bay, except that my friend who works there had the day off. Nevertheless, their gelati is fucking OMG mouth explosion.

Speaking of fucking OMG, Miss Lisa Fur had sought shelter at my house on Saturday night, and after Moulin Rouge she was like “It’d be so cool if you had Spiceworld” so I was like !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and nearly fell to my knees to perform cunnilinguis on her, but since I was not sure about the spelling, I instead got out the video and we watched it together and it was great. 27 times and counting and it still feels fresh. And now I hear that Ginger Spice is preggers? Woah!

And speaking of fucking brilliant rock star biographies, I got sunburnt on Saturday sitting outside reading The Dirt again. I still want to fuck Motley Crue. I’d even take the time out to learn how to umlaut their name if they’d just umlaut me.

Oh that’s right, the umlaut made me remember that after Anji and I had brunch at The Realm on Saturday, as we tend to do every fortnight or so, or at least often enough that the staff recognise us and seem to laugh at us a lot, we discovered that the bottle store across the road was doing a wine tasting. Who doesn’t like free wine? Well, certainly not us anyways. There were three ladies there with varying degrees of product knowledge and professionality (the last one raved on about Jacob’s Creek being $7 when she was ‘promoting’ a very different brand), and they were a little bored, so I tried thirteen wines or so in a short space of time, and got rather lightheaded. Most of the wines were things like Sacred Hill and Gunn Estate that I’d tried before (indeed, Gunn Estate seems to be the default wine at all the bars around here, so I’ve had quite a lot of it), but one that I hadn’t was a sparkling sav from Mount Riley called Savee, so this is where the umlaut comes in, because it’s actually Sav’ee, and given that my mother’s name is Aim’ee you’d think I would have learnt how to put in accents – but I can’t. Nevermind.

Corpse Bride, which I was able to furnish 19 people with free tickets to, thanks to the lovely KateH, is absolutely fantastic and you should go and see it and also buy me posters for it. Hurrah.