Hubris.co.nz

It’s Friday, I’m in love at home
Last Friday night, I didn’t go out. Yes, I know. I was pretty sure that the world was going to implode too. But the one boy left at work who goes out drinking had some mysterious function on (he refused to tell me what it was, apart from a gay pride parade, but I don’t believe him. I am instead suspecting that he’s been drafted in to sell Amway), and I didn’t want to have to make contact with the ex-cows, because eww, boys have cooties (or BIRD FLU) and all that. However, my being lame at homeness provided me with the opportunity to do the supermarket shopping, tidy the house in preperation for vacuuming the next day and spend some quality time with Bart, so that was nice.

Big in Japan, alright / pay, then I’ll sleep by your on my side
It was quite exciting to get up on Saturday morning and start preparing for a Country Club whilst not being hungover. Yeah that’s right, I said morning. And I also said not hungover. You can faint now. But yes, I managed to be so organised that I even had time to go and have coffee with Karen during my errand-running to pick up Singstar Original, ’80s and Rock and bottles of Asahi and Kirin and sexy big cans of Sapporo from Regional Wines and Spirits. Can I just put out a huge big pile’o love for Regional’s website, which is so damn handy when it comes to planning Country Clubs since they list all their stuff by region? Even if the guy at the checkout did pick up my beer bottles and examine them to say “oh, this one’s made in Thailand, this one’s made in Australia…” while I put my hands over my ears and went “LA LA LA LA LA”. Apparently he also did exactly the same thing to Mike when he and Kart were stocking up.

I dressed up as a slutty schoolgirl (gee, that was hard), and went to pick up Lisa and Beverly, and then Karen who was dressed as a ninja, and then Anji and Delwin who were Harajuku girls. We started out Country Club in the dining room, where I handed out specially purchased pieces of paper and pens and instructed people to write Haiku and give Tentacle Porn a go while Karen and I threaded up sticks of yakitori (LITERALLY barbecued chicken, but we also made vege skewers) in the kitchen. What exactly is tentacle porn, you ask? Well I will answer by sucking Lisa’s “bandwidth” (heh) to repost images of her artwork. I hope she doesn’t mind. She shouldn’t, because you can’t even see her hands in these pictures:

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Then we ran out of chairs, as more and more people arrived, so I moved everyone through to the lounge to watch My Neighbor Totoro. I think people were perhaps a little too drunk at that stage to appreciate the simple beauty of the movie, and the absolute radness of the Nekobasu. Philly-steins (Hells yeah, cheese steak and beer. This is my special shout-out to Brad, although I don’t think he reads Hubris, so I can cut’n paste it into an email for him.)! But they were of course, drunk enough for karaoke, and oh how we all rocked that microphone mightily. Well, Katy mostly fell asleep. But others rocked it long and hard. Lisa as the last person to leave left just after 5am. In the time inbetween, glass was broken, many things spilled, so many wacky snacks were consumed, I punched Bart in the face after he took off his glasses and asked me to, and he showed Lisa his Chuck Norris tentacle. I’m shocked. SHOCKED. It was a fucking kickass country club, that’s for sure.

In the cold light of morning afternoon while everyone’s yawning cleaning you’re high tired

The next day I ran away to hide at my parents’ place instead of cleaning up, under the guise of feeding Pixie and doing laundry. I discovered that they had Live8 on their DVD hard drive, so I went through the whole thing, going “fucking wow” at many of the performances (Pink Floyd, Bjork, ummm some others) and scratching my head at many others. And I wondered why the hell they didn’t set out to collect money along with names, because surely they could have raised some amount, even as a side project. Yeah I know i’m nearly a year late to this party. Shoosh.

I’d been just about to cry when I left the house because I was tired, and hungover, and I couldn’t find my glasses. In the grand search for the glasses, however, Bart finally unearthed my long-missed camera cables, so I’m proud to present a selection from the past couple’o months, although you might be best to go look at them directly in Flickr:

Random people who were also at Kai in the City when we were there with Sarah’s Hens’ Party

The Chocolate Mooooooooooooooooooooooooooosse from Canadia at the Country Club

Karen, Bart’s friends and Bart at his Mexican party. As it says in the notes in my flickr account, one of the girls is wearing a note that says “in case of fire, I put out”, which I think is awesome

Russ and Smoo, looking somewhat worse for wear

Spent the afternoon whole day in bed, trying to figure out what it was you said
Queen’s Birthday Monday was dedicated to listening to Tommy which I had pinched from my parents’ overflowing record cabinet, and devouring The Method Actors, which is a book about a fucked up bunch of people living in Tokyo, and it makes me want to box up all my possessions and stick them in storage, and go live the high life over there, teaching English or hostessing or some such nonsense. Just as well I’m not a skinny blonde or I would actually be seriously considering it. I don’t know how I clicked over from hating Japan and all it stood for in my life to craving it. Perhaps it’s because in the book people meet at Hatchiko, and go to Almond Corner in Roppongi, and they draw maps that go past the 109 building, and Tokyu Hands, and Seibu Loft, and oh oh oh I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’m hoping that they will at some stage need to visit the New Zealand embassy so I can see it again through the author’s eyes.

Working nine to five nine twentyish to five thirtyish, what a way to make a living
I have now seen a cow-orker naked. Unfortunately, it wasn’t any of the ones that I want(ed) to see with their clothes off though. Stupid Peti suggesting another woman from work should join my gym. I hate people who talk to me at the gym. I’m there to escape, to replace the noise in my head with the Arcade Fire, or Shihad, or the Walkmen or Britney Spears or whatever else spins up on my ‘Work it out’ playlist, not make chit chat. Yeah that’s right, I said stupid Peti, and I’m glad that she’s leaving. You hear me, Rebbecca? Heh. Boo-urns to the last person on my floor that I have regular conversations with leaving. Sigh. But like, good for her and stuff.

Something’s cooking, I’m at the griddle electric wok
Tonight for family night, I will be making Papas Garbanzo for Bart and Smoo and Lisa. And then we’re going to play Pictionary, cos that’s what families do. Assuming that I do actually have Pictionary. I’m not sure if the board is in the box. Or indeed if I even have the box anymore. And Twister might not work in these jeans. Or even these genes.

One week and two days until my birthday. Woo!

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.