Hubris.co.nz

Right now I kinda wanna tweet “Hey weirdo, my window is open again. At least if you rape me while I’m sleeping I’ll get a proper hard good dicking & stop being a lesbian…” But I can’t. Because that’s 141 characters. And also that wouldn’t fit in a “oh wait, too soon?” or a #iamdeconstructingyearsoffeministtheoryandalsobadpeoplejudgementandtakingthepissbecausethisissuchawrongopiniontohave,andalsoitkindafreakedmeoutsoofcourseiammakingjokesaboutit hashtag.

And in things that would only make sense if you’ve figured out the secret code of this site as opposed to the old one (it is no longer the source code and as another hint it rhymes with what Glen and Rebecca and Amy are) I had a wall-touching moment just before when I was peeing just now. It was kind of amusing. But let’s backtrack back up to this morning, when I discovered that although webstock satchels are awesomely strong and enabled me to carry two bottles of wine to dinner at Emma and Simon’s last night, but apparently they did enable those two bottles to crush the leg off my new sunglasses. And you know how fucking difficult it was to find those glasses!

But oh yes, in further backtracking, dinner was a magnificant thing. I ate amazing mushroom bourgouin, and delicious bread, and average green beans (I don’t want all the praise to go to Emma’s head TOO much) while I heard the most adorable D&D related story that I’ve ever heard. And then there were cats on my lap, and faces in Emma’s pudding, and Simon did his sexy dance for me, which LITERALLY (my loud English neighbour says “literally” a LOT when she’s not necessarily meaning figuratively, but the literally is sort of superfluous. But in this case, I know I say I do things a lot, like omg I totally died,  but I didn’t actually die etc) made me go “tehehe!” and almost blush but not quite. There were a lot of eyebrows.

And now we come to the total and utter degregation and humiliation of a WINZ seminar. I was in a group with two people who maybe aspired to work for a supermarket, maybe. This should not have been a group discussion, no way, no how. It wasn’t fun for me and I’m sure it wasn’t fun for them either. Hey, did you know that jobs are advertised in the newspaper? And also online? And sometimes places aren’t hiring? I wrote UGH in my notebook in a very steady stream.

After that I felt disgusting and gross and violated and so fucking dirty and disheartened and untalented and every other bad adjective in the world, but luckily, it was time for me to text Megan and go and meet her for lunch. Because the day was so gorgeous, we went to Beach Babylon on Oriental Parade. We basked in the sun, and the food was tasty, but the service was pretty terrible. I’d almost call it appalling except that I know they were dealing with a broken till at the time. Megan is one of my current favourite people right now because I get to gossip with her about other people and she knows almost all of my secrets but not quite all. I still haven’t told her that I’m actually Batman, for example.

Tonight was Karen’s dinner at Miyabi and it turns out that their chicken teriyaki is battered and deep-fried beforehand. Excellent. Then there were drinks at Watusi and I got to see Jane from Green Land who I miss insane amounts and is  one of my main motivating factors for kind of wanting to work in Molesworth Quarter again, even if it means work drinks at the Back Bencher, but if it means Green Land coffee and Green land scones, and love from Paul and Jane then maybe it’s worthwhile? I mean, apart from the actual job of course, which would be great. Speaking of jobhunting in a not related to WINZ way, I got a call from someone I’d interviewed with a couple of weeks ago, inviting me to go to WOW, so that was nice. I like people who like me.

My ambition was always to use the time between jobs to come off the zopiclone, so for the past month I was gradually cutting down my dosage. I’ve talked before about how my shrink has gone AWOL (as Shirley put it the other day “trust you to get a crazy shrink”) so I can’t get new prescriptions, and so about a week ago I ran out completely. I had been on half pills for a week, so I was ready for it. Or so I thought.

The other day I didn’t get to sleep until 11. That’s 11am. Last night I was still awake and making sandwiches around 4am. When I finally do sleep, I do so until all hours of the afternoon because I don’t have a solid reason to get up in the morning. I think I might become a phone sex operator for a service in the UK or something, I might as well use my powers for good, right?

It’s been interesting though, watching twitter falling silent as first NZ and then Australia goes to sleep. I’ve learned that listening to pod casts doesn’t help me, and that there are only so many hours one can watch Whedon shows or read young adult fiction. I’ve learned that if you know you’re going to be sneaking out afterwards  because you’re not going to sleep that you should make sure that you throw all your clothes in the one place to make finding them in the dark easier. I’ve learned that the benefit of having friends on random morning shifts or up with babies is that occasionally you’ll get to pass twitters in the night and that’ll help you not feel quite as alone as watching the sun come up by yourself tends to make you feel.

Other than the sleeping thing, and the unemployment thing, time is passing rather nicely. I mean, it would be nice to sleep properly so I could achieve more during the day, but my social circle is pleasing right now, and I have numerous events to look forward to. People are providing me with delicious food and delicious company, and that is nice. I am struggling to not spend money which is annoying now that I have so much more time in which to spend it, but I’m cooking more for myself at home which is pleasing and cost-effective. I made some killer blueberry & almond pikelets the other day, for example. And with the eating of the vegetables, and with some photos of Jon Hamm on vacation that Jezebel did warn me would tug at my ovaries came a brief day of bloodening, and I’m still glassy and stomach-crampy when I orgasm so I know that there’s another period coming soon, which means two in the space of a month, which is like, woah, that’s what normal people do. It’s somewhat pleasing to me.

I still have miles to go on tagging all my hubris entries and getting that squared away, and I need to build my portfolio site as well. But there are so many upcoming events! Flatwarmings and Word Camps and Bar Camps and Bad parties, and birthdays of Karen and so  on and so forth. Oh, and Vanuatu, in less than three weeks. That pleases me tremendously.

Because I’m trying to get everything tagged and tucked away and imaged and stuff here on Hubris, I have been reading through many many many entries, and woah, I sure have a lot of angst, don’t I?

I don’t, so much anymore, or at least not all that much today. It is nice to start your day with lunch at the Med Warehouse with Megan, and gossip your hearts out, and then to cruise the aisles looking at tasty things you want to eat, and then do the supermarket shopping, buy healthy vegetables and stuff and make huge big pots of dhal. It is also nice to have a Lisa Fur visit you and to watch Flash Dance together and sing along and twitter incessantly about Sassy Black Friends.

This unemployment thing is handy in that now I am coming off the zopiclone I am not sleeping at night at all so I am sleeping all day, but trying to be financially responsible means that my going out is severely curtailed. That is probably for the best, I suppose, because I am running out of people to drunk text. Getting cease & desist emails was a good thing, and the reaction that I had been pushing for.

Being home during the day means more amusing conversations with Smoo, and also being beaten by him at both Wii Tennis, despite my Williams-y grunting, and at bowling although I’m normally good at it, but beating him at Wii Baseball. It also means that I get to spend more time with Sebastian:

It sadly does mean that I’m churning through bandwidth at alarming rates, although I’m defaulting to simple things, rereading Harry Potter (I have lust for young boys, who knew?) and rewatching Angel.

I’m excited that I get to attend the cheese celebrations of Miss Harvestbird in October, and I’ve booked my flight on airpoints. Nothing good ever seems to happen to me in Christchurch (sorry Good Tom), but perhaps three times is a charm.

Why hello there! How attractive you are looking today. Also, I am too, right? Behold the new Hubris. It’s all shiny and stuff. And in wordpress. This means that commenting should be very very easy for you, and so will subscribing to my RSS. It makes updating a little easier for me too, and I can tag everything, as you can see.  2001 and 2002 are still WIP, as are fixing links and adding in images, but you should still be able to access most stuff. Enjoy! And let me know how it goes for you. The party to celebrate 10 years of Hubris went swimmingly, thanks for asking! There are photos all over the internet, obviously, but here is one of me, dressed as Marie Antoinette, with the kissing booth in which $29.90 was raised. Hurrah!

xojo

I am very busy with party preparation right now, but oh my stars, Karen just wrote me an awesome poem, so I will share it with you now, and see you tomorrow for Ten Years of Hubris, right?

‘twas the night before hubris & all through the house
A creature was purring – was it Seb with a mouse?
The stockings were strewn on the floor without care
In hope that somehow knots would vanish from her hair

She sprang to her tray, to her team gave a titter,
And away they all flew just to giggle on twitter.
But I heard her exclaim, ‘ere she hove out of sight,
“Happy hubris to all, and to all a good-night!”

- Karen McLeod, 2009.

There’s things. I mean, right now, mostly there’s 2-for-1 Tigers, and also Zopiclone, which makes me want to talk about how I ran out of it, and didn’t go to work that day, so I couldn’t go to the pharmacy underneath (have you figured out yet where I work?) and I knew from after one night – umm maybe it was Romania/Fetish that no matter how much I’d had to drink or what time I went to bed I can’t actually sleep without pills, so I busted out a halcyon that I had leftover from my breakdown in 2003 (I’d like to link here but old Hubris isn’t online right now, I need a personal computer with a CD drive and a good net link to sort all that out), and Halcyon made my scalp feel weird, and I woke up half a dozen times in the night, rather than just once when Seb bites my toes at 6am, and the dreams weren’t quite as textured, and while they were horrible I didn’t wake up and feel all the things that’d happened to me in my dreams (zopiclone dreams make me miss work, that’s how real they feel), but maybe I felt a bit fuzzier? I dunno, I’m trying to restore proper work days that would give me a chance to do proper exercise in the gym at lunch that would help me feel more normal. I’m also asking for a wii and wii fit for Xmas (and a big chilly bin, an outdoor recliner, books by David Sedaris, John Hodgeman and umm other Daily Show people, no doubt). We just finished Bowling League. I know that doesn’t really count as real exercise. but it was fun.

I launched Sausage Quest, and also Mike has saved your future for you, if your future is in entrepreneurship, anyway. He dropped a tarot card between the slats of my dek and then asked for a hammer to take the whole thing apart. Manly. So yes, now if I read your cards, it may end up that you may be an entrepreneur when you grow up. Thanks Mike! My card readings are pretty accurate. Also, a nice way to talk to boys. I think I might have missed that part in my coverage of Kowhai’s party last time I wrote.

Next week I’m going to Canberra for work, but with the way my flights have worked out, I’m going to have a bit of time to explore, My hotel’s near Parliament, but I’ve been warned that the city is not at all as easy to work out or as small as it appears on maps. I’m planning on cabbing (on my visa, not work’s!) to the National Museum one day because for me museum > art gallery, but do any of youse have any other hot tips? Hit me back just to chat, yo!

Celebrity issues: I am so gutted that Holly and Hugh have broken up. Makes me want to cry, like for serious.

Web stuff: Amy and I are kicking so much ass right now on Pretty Pretty Pretty. Enter our Delicious competition now. And the Wellingtonista Bowling League has just ended, but we’re moving towards our annual awards – or rather the TAWAS!!!! (third annual wellingtonista awards). And! As a secret surprise few people know, I’m planning a scavenger hunt competition for January sometime.

Other things I’m organising in part is the catering for Kat’n Kane’s wedding. I figure I’ll drive up on Jan 9 in time for the Hen;s Party, and on the 11th I will book a room in Hamilton to stay in so I don’t have to cross-country when I may be hungover. And that way I get to see Maree and her stretchy vagina, and maybe Chelsea’s real tight one. Heh. Oh text message jokes, how I love you.

I’m still crazy, a little bit. But with travelling for work, pages of wikis to edit (and I’m gonna break Code of Conduct and say FUCK YOU, G S N! Everything you touch turns to crapness!) and my very own private intern starting in November, I feel more connected. Hell, I even blogged yesterday. And watched a whole episode of Gloss but uhh, not at work, obviously.

Sebastian is still my favourite smoodlepoodle, his curling up in my armpit the highlight of every night, In the mornings if it’s cold he’s even more adorable and occasionally n peeds to the day=be reminded that I need to go for work before he’ll start biting me enough to make me get up. It’s a hard enough life for us. I still so totally think that poverty > creeeeeeeeeeepy.

Dates to remember:

Saturday Oct 26, Beer Quiz at my house 1pmish. Bring some mysterious beers (enough for a good tasting for ten people or so, and then extra for later boozing) and also salted snacks for sharing. You need to write 3 multi choice questions about your beer and bring them along too, ala: (example)
November 8: Tom”s Mad Men Election Party. Just as in the show, we will (probably) be drinking mass amounts of Crème De Methe from water-cooler, and we’ll be dressed ala 1960 – points & lust for the best Joan Holloway representative;
December 6: Country Club “South Pacific” – and there’s a secret awesome amazing surprise due at this party. It will be AWESOME. Clues later to titillate you but stock up on bikinis. hawiian shirts, pineapples and multiple rums please.

Sometime; I wanna do a PPP clothing and products swap before AND after Xmas. What do you reckon Amy? We’ve made $9 US so far so please keeep clicking our google ads!

The TAWAs – third annual Wellingtonista Awards are on Dec 18, so far: I have a terrible fear that Hadyn will hate me with a firey passion by the time it’s over, because he’s project-managing but I have no off-switch.

Also, I have secret projects going on, so if you get me asking for power tools, please don’t get confused with a rabbit when I[m really asking for a mouse sander (although wanking helps me realise while I bowl better with my 3rd and 4th fingers in the hole rather than my pointer. You can totally wear out the pointer on my masturbating habbits. But you know, if we all get SausaageQuest right, we can end that. Tonight I had a couple of “really? her? really? moments, but I guess that’s just me and i’m a lamer and there are things that were a million years ago and weren’t even things. So anyways, what’s your favourite fact about monkeys?

The idea that I will push you away from me long before you will even have a chance to start to dislike and then reject me is not a new one. I remember way back in the olden days, like ’02/03, talking to (Good)*Tom who assured me that there was nothing I could ever do that would ever make him move away from me. I asked if sleeping with his brother would do the trick, and he said it wouldn’t. Maybe I should have said his sister. Hi Mary. Heh.

Anyways, my narrative thread, my reason for getting out of my nice warm bed to go and find my computer (my new eeePC, so so so cute) wasn’t to talk about Tom at all. I think my thread was supposed to start with how I was texting Tingle “If you want to make your life less complicated, stop replying to drunkass random dumbasses who aren’t your girlfriend” and perhaps try to explain about how we (you and I, my dear reader) got to this stage in my storytelling, but I’m not entirely convinced that it will work out that way. So perhaps I could make a bulleted list of what’s what?

* There is Good Tom because his last name starts with a G, and Bad Tom whose name starts with a B, but as to whether or not their names are deserved, I am constantly divided.

Bullet point lists make the world go around, right?

• The everscrumptious Miss Heather has switched over my site design for me, so bear with me while the kinks are ironed out. My semi-secret RSS feed seems to have temporarily vanished, and of course Twitter is blocked at work, so I’m not sure if that’s feeding in properly, but now at least if you run my site through a validator (don’t!) you should only get four or so errors and not sixty like the old one. Goodbye to the hump though, sadly.
• If you receive a text message from me that sounds a little strange, it’s because I no longer have an ’8′ key on my phone, so therefore I have no ‘t’, ‘u’ or ‘v’. It makes things like giving directions to Superfino read “On Ghznee s, opposie Bdg Cars, by Bicoria S”. That makes perfect sense, right? Also, do make your way to Superfino, please. We spent a very pleasant Friday night there. I recommend the Pear & Vanilla Punch especially, but not reaaaaally the Blood-Orange and Cinnamon Martini.
  

• We’ve taken to going to the Quiz at the Southern Cross on Tuesday nights. By “we” I mean sometimes some Wellingtonistas, and sometimes my sisters & Bambi. I am, just for a change, in love with the Quizmaster. You know how I fancy people who know more things about something than I do (music, depression, computers or – in the olden days – drugs), that rule of course applies to someone who has the answer sheet on quizes.
• Before you come up to the Cross for the quiz, I’d like to recommend Le Metropolitain for dinner, and I’d say that even if I hadn’t been called “Madame Jo” on the phone in a hot French accent that I discovered was attached to a hot French waiter. He brought me the wine list when I was waiting by myself instead of making me wait, and was efficient, friendly and good. Everyone’s favourite public servant blogger might not approve of their cassolet, but damn my cow face (read: beef cheeks) were tasty, and since Bambi ordered snails I got to try them for the first time. They tasted like mushrooms, while the mushrooms that they were served with tasted like garlic and cream.
  
• You might have gathered due to the increase in the number of photos that I’m displaying that I’ve taken to carrying my new camera with me everywhere. That’s because the batteries don’t fall out, and it’s got a 1 gig card in it. And I like taking photos, of course. I’ve started to take a series of portraits of people with ‘my eyes’:
  

  

  

• I’ve been watching Season One of Veronica Mars with my lovely new flatmate Kat. She guessed who the killer was correctly, which I didn’t manage to do the first time I watched it. She’s a smart one, that girl. I love watching shows with big reveals that I know are coming up with others, although her little shriek when the killer was in the back seat was nothing compared to Lisa on finding out who killed Laura Palmer. Kat’s fiance Kane is a pro-wrestler! How awesome is that? It means he has no fear of cavorting around in tights, which he demonstrated in his costume as a ballet dancer at Country Club: Back in the USSR on Saturday night.
• I haven’t downloaded my photos from Back in the USSR, but once I do, you’ll be able to see a steady progression from tipsy into disturbingly intoxicated, despite all the food – I made pierogi, and potatoes, and sausages, and Frances and Karen both brought blini, and there was caviar as well, and chips, and really disgusting solid rye bread, and kisial – which was of course vodka jelly, and Moscow Mules, and by the end of the night there was white rum as well. Some people had splendid costumes – Anji brought along a bear so I had to hump him. I also gave lap dance versions of the panda dance to the boys who were complaining about the poor service at Dream Girls that they’d got the night before. My heart bleeds for them. The party was lots and lots of fun, and I was stoked with the turn out. I gave someone a big long speech about how I am not what they need, and how they really shouldn’t fancy me. I thought it was a pretty convincing speech, and it was the right thing for me to do, so I was a little disturbed when I woke up next to the speech recipient. I would be later more disturbed to discover that somehow a glass of water had managed to get knocked into my underwear drawer, leaving me with moist panties everywhere. It was a much nicer discovery, when I finally got up at 6pm on Sunday though, to find that the whole house had been cleaned. WOO! And then last night over flat dinner I heard that people had been spraying my new Cinderella Coconut Bathroom Cleaner into their mouths as it is billed as being so very non toxic. Disturbing!

So, I went to Bar Camp today, and this is how it was. Accordingly, I must highlight the point that hi, this is Joanna McLeod’s show, and so duh, I’m not going to talk directly about whatever whosesever my political opinions are. Instead, I will present you with my Twitters from today:

1. 15 hours ago: 1 ex-work nemisis, 2 ex work fucks, 3 workmates, 4 threadless tshirts, 5 wellingtonistas
2. 13 hours ago Hadyn says the guy sitting next to him at bar camp was surfing Hubris during a presentation. Awesome! He wasn’t cute though
3. 9 hours ago: Finally have a drink in my hand, phew! Oh, and Hadyn loves Supertramp. Haha
4. 4 hours ago:It is strange when it’s been a million years & a million hours of shit & therapy & life in betwn but u have too many drinks & go “your body &I used to be 1″
5. 3 hours agoAt Lisa’s, in my princes dress, destined for Lani’s party at some stage.”

So then there were drinks at the Loaded Hog, and discussions about me declaring Feminism on the situation, before I got Lisa to pick me up, and eventually we went to Lani’s party and then no taxis showed up and fuck, aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh, but finally I manaeged to get home now, phew!

EDIT: and some more slightly coherent takes on the above information, now that is is morning and my neighbour has woken me up all worried, I can say that Smoo broke a window last night – I’m not sure how it happened cos I was asleep on the couch and maybe he woke me up climbing in it? But consequently the curtain is molesting me now in the wind. And also, my twitters really didn’t do a good job of conveying how many actual useful conversations were held at BarCamp about things that are really very very applicable to my new job. And strangely enough 140 characters didn’t let me say what I meant which was ‘it is strange that there was this level of intimacy with someone that I haven’t had since then, and it was a long time ago, but I got a reminder of it because I saw someone I hadn’t seen for a long time, and we are strangers now and I want it to stay that way, but I want to find that level of intimacy with someone else sometime soon please, where you know their body as well as you know your own, and occasionally you’re not sure where you end and they start’. Yeah. That’s a bit better.

Right now I am getting my photo taken. Yes, RIGHT NOW. Actually that’s a lie.Technically speaking, right now they are roaming my house trying to decide where the best place to shoot me is. I’m sitting on my bed right now, but they’re worried that since I’m sitting down they lose all the things that makes my room unique to me. When I say “they” I mean Nicola Edmonds and her friend/assistant Adrian. So yes, it’s somewhat more than a snapshot, but there’s no makeup or racks of clothes or catering or records playing or interviewer from Q or Jane tagging along or any of the things that I will no doubt have one day. But I am having my photo taken by professionals for an article on blogging (yes, i know), which is quite nice. And also funny, because THIS IS NOT REAL! The Arch Hill poster in the background does not actually live there on my wall! And normally I have Xmas lights rolled around my bedhead, pretending like there could actually be an occasion in which I would need to light up my bed. And it’s funny because oooh, they have one of those big shiny silver things which is bouncing the light or something. I dunno. I will pretend for the next ten minutes that I am a Spice Girl. I think the martini that I had before they got here will help with that. Who knew that vermouth actually freezes? Not I. But it was like shaved ice in my gin. I made up for it with an exra olive.

I like that they are trying to get an essence of who I am in the photo (oooh, essence of Joanna, they should sell that in bottles. And then people could make cocktails with it and a lot of vodka. Although there would already be a lot of vodka in my essence, no doubt. Or apparently today gin). After overhearing debate in the dining room about whether or not the Xmas lights would be applicable if the photos come out in March (I should have pointed out that they’re somewhat of a permanent fixture, but nevermind) and perhaps a discussion about the interior of my house being somewhat younger than the magazine’s demographic – but I might have misheard – I ended up standing in my room in front of my Bic posters in most of the photos, carrying my laptop under my arm, one hand leaning on the cabinet that usually houses my record-player but today was historically unaccurately cleared of clutter and dust, and the other with my thumb hooked into the pocket of my dress. I have taken some self portraits before they arrived, so here you can see an approximation of what I looked like:

I’m hoping of course that her photos will actually have proper light in them, or it will turn out that the shiny silver disc was all for nothing! They were kind and said that I was pretty much the only person all year to actually want to have my photo taken, and when they said I was photogenic I said “well that’s why I don’t mind having my photo taken” instead of just saying “thank you” and blushing. Thanks Martini! Perhaps it will be a new New Year’s Resolutions to take compliments and run with them. Or perhaps I should pass a resolution to not come across as so hubristic to people I’ve just met who might not know that I am making fun of myself. But I’m not sure I’ve got the votes to get that through congress, let alone the senate.