Hubris.co.nz

You know how maybe you’re a horse rider, and you’re pretty good at it, and you’ve ridden a lot of horses, and then one throws you, and you don’t know how the fuck you’re ever going to get back into the saddle, or if you even want to? And in fact, you kind of start to be afraid of horses? Well a good friend would tell you it’s okay to go for another a ride. A really good friend might try to help you up into another saddle. But the best kind of friend of all is the one who gets down on all fours to let you ride them instead.

Or alternatively, another kind of amazing friend is the one who tells you that they will beat up the horse that threw you, and even though you know that they never would – and you wouldn’t want them to either – it’s still very sweet.

Other good friends will buy you lap dances in unrelated incidents. I have some pretty awesome friends. I have also made new friends on the internet of a feminist bent. I like them.

What else? Kane came to stay this past weekend, and Heather’s coming tomorrow. There’s derby on the weekend and apparently there won’t be any of the slow derby bullshit, which is good. There have been  a lot of parties. Thanks to Sunday movie nights with the Lovehawks, I’ve done pretty well on the #11in’11 front. Work is busy. Social life is busy. Money is tight due to car repairs and continuing to pay off my credit card debt and just, you know, life. I like that it is turning into autumn, although I like sunshine too. Gin has become the drink of 2011, apparently, with all the G&Ts at New Year’s, and now the Gossip Ginger Gimlets and Gossip Girl Wednesdays.

Webstock was amazing but of course you already knew that. It was so great to see all the good people from out of town that I only get to see like once a year like Walter, and to learn so much and talk so much that I thought my jaw was going to fall off. Turns out, $100 trip to the dentist later, that it’s stress which makes me square my jaw. Ahh well.

I don’t really feel like I’m accomplishing a great deal, but I don’t feel like I’m not, either. I’ve dealt with all this uterus bullshit. I’ve got my work back on track after stuff that we won’t go into. My protective streak for people may cause ruckuses, but nothing that’s not fixable. I am managing to hold on to and repair relationships with people who are important to me. I am doubtless behind in my communication with people, but hopefully this post will help. Essentially, apart from the horse-riding metaphor, there isn’t really all that much to say. And that’s okay.

Yesterday I was on fire. I discovered that my doctor had given me a three month prescription so she obviously doesn’t think I am at risk of taking all my pills at once.I went to the gym and wore a singlet instead of a tshirt because it was so fucking hot, and you know what? The world didn’t end. After work I met Karen and Anji and Lisa down by the lagoon. It was my intention to dive off the plank that’s up on the wharf there, but it was surrounded by squealling teenagers and much higher up than I realised, so Karen and I swam from the floating dock instead. The water was reaaaaaaally warm and nice and it was fun. But there were SO MANY PEOPLE THERE, I felt kind of watched. Eventually I decided that I’d hate myself if I didn’t jump off the plank – especially since it was my ambition to give it a go whilst sober and it being light outside in preperation for inevitable drunken night-swimming, but when I swam to the ladder I discovered that it didn’t go into the water and I didn’t have the arm strength to pull myself up onto it. And it would have been a dreadful hassle to go all the way around and back over the bridge just to jump in again, and while I am becoming more confident, the idea of that much walking around in my togs – hott as they are – in front of so many people wasn’t too appealing. So instead I will steal a photo that Lisa took to show how beautiful it was down there in the water:

Lisa is teh awesome photomagrapher

Then it was 6.30, so Lisa and I went up to the Boatshed for the Great Blend. It was too hot inside, so I got a glass of wine from the ladies at the bar who got nicer and nicer as the night went on, and while I shuddered at the fact that they only had Chardonnay, at least it was unoaked, but I will still blame it for my feeling so seedy today, and we ran away to sit in the shade outside and await Martha and talk about Hanson for some reason. We couldn’t think for ages of what the name of the ugly one was, and Lisa called him Baboon Face. I said that if there was a Q&A session in the talks, and they said did anyone have any questions, I would stand up and say “what is the oldest Hanson brother called? Can you tell me? No you can’t, because you don’t know, you don’t knooow oh oh oh” and then I laughed at myself lots, partly because I had some wine at work before I left. As it happens, Lisa was right and his name was Issac, which I didn’t think it could be because there was a Zack, but that’s short for Zachary. And then we went to meet Martha. I was briefly dismayed at how quickly she brushed me aside to go and meet a puppy-eater, but she came back and fufilled her BFF duties. Plus, she introduced me to fun people like Sally and Sue. And Glen bought me a glass of wine when I already had one, so I quickly looked a lot like a lush. Which is of course not at all how I really am. I talked to Tom and Kim about the magical transforming properties of a lei to make one fit in a tiki environment, and made fun of Stalker. The Back of the Y stuff was hilarious, and it was interesting to see what they’d done for MTV in the UK and how it was exactly the same stuff but much more expensive. I remembered watching it when I was living in Mt Roskill and thinking how awesome it was. I laughed a lot. The second panel was not quite as interesting to me, so I spent a while whispering stupid things to Sarah like “you have to marry one person on the panel – who is it?” (the answer is of course the guy who works for Google, cos duh, rich), before I decided to take myself outside and stop annoying her. So I talked to Joel for ages about what year a particular magazine was worse. We had very different opinions.Mostly I just drank and told everyone how much I wanted to jump off the plank. Sue told me she liked my blog and I was like “!!! I don’t have a blog!” but she redeemed herself instantly by saying that she had ordered the same swimsuit as me because it is so awesome. I introduced myself to Russell and also asked Che about his heart. Good times. The bar ladies seemed to love me even more. In fact, I’m pretty sure that everyone was digging my vibe. Eventually I slipped into the bathroom and slipped into my togs again, so when I left with a group of people I’d just met (I think), I strutted over to the plank and plunged in, followed by Sally. Hurrah! Night swimming is the most awesomeness. Sue carried my bag down to the lower dock for me, and I got changed in public. Lovely.

Then we went to Mighty Mighty and once again more good times were had. I wasn’t even embarrassed seeing Baby Hitler there and remembering how I’d asked him to dance and told off the DJ. Feeling good about yourself really does have positive flow on effects, it’s quite perplexing. I mean, it’s entirely possible that everyone did think I was a dick, but I don’t think so. I had lots of fun. On an extension of that topic, a while ago someone tried to insult me by leaving the comment “but I was just expressing my dismay at your blog [sic]; the purpose of which seems to documenting your desperation for a meaningless pash” and I was like “umm… duh! That’s the whole point of having an online journal, right?” – so in that vein I should declare that I “shared a taxi” home with a boy, which meant he had to wait with me on Ghuznee St while I called a Combined Taxi and babbled about my bad experiences with other companies. Later on the boy told me he saw my left boob when I was getting changed on the dock, which struck me as a most amusing thing to say, and then I laughed at him for a while teasing him about how he didn’t evne know what my name was – before I admitted I couldn’t think of what his was either. And tonight I bought Smoo pizza to make up for the fact that he said he’d gone to sleep with his eaphones in playing music and yet we’d still woken him up. Heh.

Maree emailed me this afternoon to rave about the article in Next with me in it that has apparently come out now, but all I could find was the February issue, not the March one. She said I sounded intelligent and that the photo was gorgeous. Hurrah! That made things more gooder today. I was grateful that I had many mindless web updates to do (adding in div id=”page” tags to about 20 pages and so forth) because I was somewhat tired and not feeling in the best health. I also seem to have bruises on every part of my body, a hole in the bottom of my foot, a cut-up toe from last Friday night when I peed under the X-Air hump, and a lump in my arm. I also had a couple of knots in my hair about the size of my fist that took half an hour of brushing to get out. I like salt water in my fringe, but man, I really should have combed my hair a little more often this week. Tomorrow Lani’s moving in, hurrah ,and then I am going to Ngaio for my Mummy’s birthday party. All in all, things are pretty fucking awesome. Everyone loves me. Including me, right now.

Once again, I have been neglectful, and for that I apologise. But look outside. Do you really expect me to be indoors at my computer when it’s as gorgeous as it has been for the past week? Well yes, as a matter of fact, I spent all day at my dining room table typing away, because I slept very badly last night and consequently felt like shit this morning, and so asked permission to work from home. And that’s not even “work from home” as I did a page by page analysis of our site, proofreading, editing and planning for the future – and there’s about 100 pages on it. I was particularly impressed with one page that has “Image: please supply an image and caption in landscape form” developed as part of the text body, in title tags even, becasue um, hello, wakey wakey whoever developed it. Which wasn’t me. It was a long long boring job, but it was made easier by the fact that I was in my pyjamas, and Sebastian was curled at my feet, and all the doors and windows in the house were open to let in some air. That was much better than being in the office. It was also great that I managed to do three loads of washing whilst working hard, and also in my lunchbreak I went for a swim.

I have been doing much swimming lately, sometimes in my totally hott new togs, running to the beach after work, or on the weekend when I got totally sunburnt on Sunday. But let’s talk about the total and utter joy of last Friday first. In fact, let me paste in my drunken summation of it:

So, today I was clever and took my togs to work. But sadly, at lunch today as I wasn’t going to the gym, I ended up spending $50 at Farmers on lip gloss, tweezers, handcream and eye shadow. Then I thought I would pop into Zebranos cos they were having a sale, amnd I found a dress that I thought would be okay to try on since it was two sizes smaller than I thought i needed, but it ended up being fucking hot, if a little Twee-able, so I ended up buying it, on the rationa that it was $250 cheaper than usual on account of the sale (skipping that it meant it was $200), and then I had to go to Farmers again to buy a slip to go under it. Then at 5pm I ran away and took at #15 and went to the children’s playground near the Tugboat and found AWESOME private changing rooms and put my togs on and then Karen was there and we went SWIMMING! She pointed and made “want to?” motions at me, and so we decided that yes, we would swim out to the raft anchored in the harbour. It was about 100 metres out, and I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to make i, because while I am an excellent frolicker and floater, actual swimming isn’t actually my thing. But I paddled out there, and clambered on board, and felt my heart go bang bang bang, and we hung out there until we saw hordes of wetsuited people heading for us, so I dived in, and OW, must have done a booby flop cos while I thought it was a good dive, it hurt my tits like woah, but I swam back to the show mostly, and woah like FUN!

PS my dress is AWESOME

It is good when things are awesome. When I saw my counsellor last Tuesday I told her I kind of didn’t even want to come and see her since I was feeling so good and I knew that talking to her would be hard, and we talked about that some more. She asked me about my relationships and I laughed, and later she said “do you think you deliberately go for unavailable men?” and I laughed and laughed and laughed, not just because it’s funny because it’s true, but also because it seems like such a counselling cliche. I feel a little like she’s trying to tick every box with me, because now we have decided on something she says that many of the things about me are typical of that thing. But the thing that is grand is that she made me realise that while the pills have started to work, and the sun plays a part in lifting my mood I can also be proud of all the work that I have done to get myself into this state of being mostly okay again. So hurrah for me! What a clever girl I am.

What else do I have to tell you about? Tomorrow I am going to the Great Blend where people will no doubt refer to me as a blogger, and I will no doubt cringe. On Saturday February 10, I will celebrate ten years of Internetting. Yes, I surfed before, but that was the first day that I stumbled upon IRC, and therefore became addicted. In July I will have had a personal site for ten years. Ten years. Imagine that! And on that note, it must be time to put away my computer for the night. I am tired from doing so many loads of washing, and work, and making pesto, and cooking Papas Garbanzo for Lisa, and then going for a sunset swim at Lyall Bay. But before I go, I must throw mad props to Tori Spelling, because Donna Martin in Season One? Fucking hilarious.

I was sitting on a stool at the bar in the Kings Arms, with KateH and her flatmate Karen, waiting for the Heavy Jones Trio to come on when the girl next to me looked at me. “Excuse me,” she said, “but are you Joanna?” Yes, yes I am. “You don’t know me,” she told me as I racked my brain trying to think of who she was, “but I used to read your journal all the time. I even submitted mine to the Breast Club”. Ohhhhhh. I didn’t catch her name and I thought it’d probably be out of line for me to ask her to pull up her top and see if I remembered her that way, but still. And then the girl she was with knew KateH from her job, and so we both laughed at Karen because she wasn’t famous. Exciting! Oh, and if you did decide to start reading me again and you’re here, the singer told you to have a horrible night as y’all walked out, which was mean of him but ever so cute. I think the last person who fan-spotted me was Secret Passage Robyn.

And so as cool as that was, it paled in comparison to how cool the Heavy Jones Trio were. They opened with “Straight Into Your Arms”, the song of oh so many mix tapes, and I instantly fell in love with the singer. Later when they played “Special” it was so beautiful I almost started crying, and that of course led me to thinking about how nice it is to actually have feelings again, having completley wasted the last six months feeling numb, drinking too much, smoking too much pot, watching too much shit tv and having empty boring sex. I can do so much better with myself! Really! But back to the Heavy Jones Trio, unless I get too distracted watching the Westpac Trust Helicopter land outside my window. Yeah, anyways. I hope they get a record deal real soon, although they did mention their EP a couple of times, along with trying to get us up off the floor and dance. He was looking at me the whole time, (I swear!) and he did this funny leg jiggling thing that was so fucking endearing. I swear, I have such a fatal weakness for scrawny boys with very very short hair who look like they need mothering. The old soup&blanket theory, if you will.

And with that last (incomplete) sentence, I can nicely link into the big discussions we had about grammar in Persuasive Communication today. I LOVE class discussions. I don’t so much love speeches about umm fuck,I can’t remember which one it was that made me feel really bad about myself. Probably the drinking age debate one. Italia spoke about how AUT is a university and I was just laughing to myself, especially when she said (to paraphrase) that it’s only wankers who have inferiority complexes who like to stress that we were originally a polytech. Te he he. Discussions about monarchy spilled out of the classroom and into the lift all the way down to the ground. I love Com Students. I hate the lifts which steal at least 15 minutes of my life a day. My speech went pretty well, I’m gonna send a copy of it to my notify list, and then eventually one day I plan on having an academia section on my site, so I might put it up there too.

In the evening, KateH came around after her work, and invited me to dinner at her house,and told me that the HJT were playing at the Kings Arms. I was so fucking stoked, because they’d opened for the Proclaimers, and I so badly wanted to see them that if i’d been given a free ticket, I would have gone. And then they played at an Industry gig that some of my friends got to go to, and I was very very jealous, but now YAY finally I’ve seen them live,and apparently they’ve moved to Auckland so I will be able to see them more often. Now all I need is for them to get a record contract so I can buy their album, and everything will be special…..

Friday June 16th, 2000

There’s a little red balloon in my ICQ box, which must mean that it’s after midnight, and it’s now my birthday. Happy Birthday me. Yay me. Yay. The big two oh now. I can legally drink. Oh no wait, that’s 18 now. So I guess there’s nothing special about it. I’m feeling very old all of a sudden. Actually, I do feel a whole heap wiser too, so that’s a good thing.

Mum gave me a set of mixing bowls for my birthday, and a rubbish bin. Sure, they are very cool mixing bowls and rubbish bin, but….. well, I guess I am going to Australia partly funded by her, so we’ll forgive her. But next year, instead of having a breakdown, I will spend my time writing a complete list of what i want, like I normally do!

Turned in my final graphics assignments today, which was a biiiiig relief, even though it was fucking annoying trying to get them colour printed – Trumps wanted TEN DOLLARS to take them off a floppy disk, so I was just like “no”. So i printed them in black and white instead, let’s not talk about this anymore. Then I went shopping to get Shirley a birthday pressie, and I got her a pair of satin pajamas, and a travel/work overseas book. So hopefully she’ll like that.

This afternoon, Brad slept through Hollywood Squares, so we didn’t get to play. This means that the final score was 8-4 to me, wuha! We love our afternoon tele, oh yes we do. Then this evening, I was sitting around thinking maybe I should call Maree, but then I decided that she’d probably call. I tried to make a bet with Brad over whether or not she’d show up on our doorstep, but he wouldn’t accept my odds. Half an hour later, low and behold, she rang to say she was coming over, and we laughed lots. But she made us fudge later – no, not fudge packing. Apparently my mind is in the gutter, despite the fact that she calls me a “light horse” (as opposed to a dark horse, obviously). The fudge didn’t set, so we have to eat it off spoons.

I was going to go to the supermarket tonight, but Juice is back on. I discovered that by accident, and sat watching the music video that was on for a couple of minutes before I realised what i was doing. Then I started shrieking in joy, of course. But with the good comes the bad, and in this case, the bad is the news that Dawson’s Creek is going to be moved to Friday nights. There goes Tuesdays at Garland! Cos if we host people on fridays, then they’ll want more entertainment than a bowl of soup or stir fry. What’s a girl to do? Oooh I know! Leave the country for two weeks, and then the city for another two. Brilliant.

So, if I don’t write anymore tomorrow or sunday morning, miss me heaps. You can still email me, and I might be able to get it even. I will definately be online in Welly, and probably in Seedneey. Depends whether or not Kini ever lets me out of bed. Personally, I’m not too fussed – I just wanna sing Dusty Springfield! So yeah, don’t worry if there’s no new entries, it’ll just be cos I’m busy and not in the vicinity of the computer. I’ve handed in all my assignments, exams are over, I’m eating properly, I haven’t thrown up in a week, and the biggest stress in my life now lives in another city. I am doing so much better, and I expect to get even better still.

Hooray for everything!