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.
You will be pleased to know that I officially don’t have tuberculosis. I had my follow-up follow-up today and I’ve been given the all clear. This means I don’t get to die romantically of consumption while Anne of Green Gables nurses me, but I suppose that’s for the best.
You will hopefully also be pleased to know that I am the very grateful recipient of some funding from The Midnight Note which will partially cover the cost of my attendance at Webstock. I know of three people who wrote lovely letters for my nomination, but there may have been more. I am well-loved by my community, apparently, and that is a beautiful thing.
I have discovered over the past couple of weeks just how lucky I am to have the wonderful friends that I do. There was a thing that happened, and it brought back all the anger and emotion that I’d covered up last year and it was a really really difficult time. I seriously considered moving to Auckland just to get away, but luckily attendance at Princess Camp made me play “Run this town” many times in my head and I realised that actually, fuck yes I do.
Miss Kim Cupcakes & Mace stayed here at Immoral Terrace on and off for the past couple of weeks while she was looking for a flat, and it was so lovely having her here. We had LAN parties and cheese and watched DVDs and stayed up late giggling about boys every night. It’s a bit weird not having her here anymore, to be honest. I am really glad that I could help her out of a jam, and she definitely helped me out too, not just by buying Seb cat food when I was broke but also making me a happy Jo again.
If I could find my other knitting needle, I would use it to remove my uterus right about now. I cried every day last week, including two different occasions at Hooch, and today I am in total fricking agony and bleeding like a stuck pig. I should go to the GP to ask to be refered to a gynocologyst, but that’s money that I don’t have. It wouldn’t be a hubris update without me talking about my period though, would it?
A lot of my friends have been going through difficult times. We had decided that the first two weeks of the year didn’t count because they were just the hangover from 2009, but two thousand and zen has taken a while to get going. My main drama, apart from the thing that knocked me flat on my ass for a couple of weeks is the ongoing job hunt. I got very close to a job that I really wanted, reference checks and everything, and because they took a while to get back to me I dared to dream about what it would be like to actually have an income again, which of course became a big let-down again. I hate that my friends have had crappy-ass times, but if it had to happen, I’m glad that we’ve had each other to go through the crap with.
I almost left the house for a night this summer to go camping, but it was raining in the Hutt so we camped in Amie’s lounge instead. Princess Camping for the win! We had tremendously good times.
I went to a random hipster party in Roseneath where we sat in an empty room and played a variation of Truth or Dare. I went to a keg party in a big flat on Cuba Street where goths went without makeup, a kitten romped around and that nice girl from last year kissed me again although it’s against her rules, which I don’t understand. I went to a couch-surfing gathering in Mount Vic where I drank gin and played Animal Motions. There have been tiki shacks here, and macaroni parties at Laura’s. There’s also a Pretty Pretty Party coming up on March 6. It is hard to be as entertaining as I want to be when I lack the funds so drastically.
My family has continued to be awesome and supportive. BAMJI took me for my first swim of the year, and last night we had a bigass dinner at Hazel for Mum’s significant birthday. It was lovely. I should review it for the Wellingtonista sometime soon.
Still loving my flatmates. And I’m super excited that Kat & Kane are coming down next week. Not to mention WEBSTOCK! And I have a fabulous frock from Megan to wear, and I leant one to Sue. What goes around comes around, hurray!
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..
I twittered today that I’m about two weeks away from sucking cock for crack, financially speaking, and that’s pretty true. I’d say that I’m also about two weeks away from taking up sucking cock for crack just for something to do because I’m so fucking bored, but yet I keep finding myself way too busy, no matter how sexy and appealing It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia makes crack addiction look.
My period has been fucking with me, resulting in many nights of not sleeping until 5am, and thinking too much about things that are in the past. Consequently, when Megan was over yesterday, I cried a little, and then she made me laugh, so that was good. I’m just so tired of things not going my way, of the endless having to deal with stupid things like bills, and police, and letterboxes, and landlords, and applying for jobs, and no doubt WINZ soon, and finding a new flatmate (El’s moving to the beach), and just ugh. URGH! I need a PA, like, so bad. And also a salary with which to pay said PA.
I got a text on Monday night from a guy I know asking me to go for a drink with him and his wife because she had a proposition for me. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I’m pretty sure that it will be of the blog promotion variety type proposition, but because my weekend was somewhat interesting, I chose to assume the most sordid scenario. I was hugging my heater, however, and didn’t want to wash my hair, so I didn’t leave the house.
On Saturday though, I left the house for about 15 hours straight. I played Urban Golf. It was tremendous fun!
Fore!
I’m not feeling particularly articulate right now after very long conversations about other people’s lives tonight, so instead I recommend that you read Phil’s description of the day. I like dressing up, and taking back the streets, and chatting to the people we met along the way, and also the meeting new people part of the day, indeed. It was more sober than I expected it to be though.
I fixed the sober part afterwards when I went and met up with that girl and we had drinks at Pollux and The Garden Club which weirds me out because it used to be the Repertory Theatre where I did drama lessons and now it’s a gay club. I suppose they’re practically the same thing though anyways, right? The night ended with me sitting topless in someone’s living room eating Burger Fuel, which is the way most nights should end, right? I think most nights should involve less of other people’s drama though, maybe. But for my last occasion of spending substantial amounts of money, it was pretty good.
Schedule-wise, there’s roller derby coming up (we have tickets to give away on PPP!) and then then the PPP Girlie Party & Clothing Swap, and then I go to Harvestbird’s wedding, and then there’ll be the Halloween toss-up between rasslin’ and derby. Then I may end up going to Auckland for a couple of days with Lisa in November if I am not gainfully employed before she drives up for Pearl Jam. I suspect I will need to hold the wheel steady for her, so great will her excitement be. Oh, and you should suggest nominees for 4TAWA.
Blah. I have been on a big downloaded TV glut lately (thanks The AV Club!) and so I will return to that now if you don’t mind.
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 didnot 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 sleepoverswithgirls, 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.
I really have been having the most excellent week, and it’s kind of making me go “how did I get to be so lucky?” I love the post period period. Period. Lols.
On Wednesday night, I built myself a new site, based on an old zine of mine called You Are So Entertaining. Dot Com.It’s a party/recipe/stuff site, and I hope you like it. It will continue to grow. I could build another site based on my other zine, but really, this site is pretty much BOYS BOYS BOYS BOYS BOYS and 101 Stories That I Want To Tell You anyways. And I don’t get to tell You & Me in the Last Days of Bush ever anyway.
Then I headed home to prepare Miss Fur’s birthday dinner. We had papas garbanzo, and Karen made PANDA CAKE (based on this bread) and Megan made raspberry umm cobblers, and Shirley just sat and looked pretty. Even though it was her birthday, I still beat Lisa at some singstar songs. Go me!
Yesterday I did some serious work on a comms plan for my old workmate Ros, faffed around with stockings and got dressed up, and then Miss Emma picked me up. I spooged coconut cream all over her house and we had cocktails. Simon did his sexy dance for Lisa, and went to spank me which I found rather awesome, except for the whole being someone’s husband thing. We had tremendous fun and I didn’t even have to use a coaster.
Today I woke up with a hangover and a big pile of compliments (god i ADORE Fatshionista so much! I’m having trouble keeping my clothes on these days). I had trouble starting my car because of the rain, which served me right for asking how many Brents it took to change a lightbulb because he was struggling to fix his headlights, but when I got to Hadyn & Amy’s there was coffee and pastries waiting for me, and it was almost like being in Vanuatu again, only with better coffee and less tropical fruit. Amy and I discussed secret PPP business (we’re coming close to 1000 comments and so the 1000th person will be getting an awesome prize. Also, we’re having another girlie party, possibly on Oct 17ish), and then she cut my hair. Hurray!
After that, she told me many things about her vacuum cleaner, such as how it has a motor in the head as well, that it can stand up by itself without needing to lean on anything, and that she can push it with just one finger. I was entralled. I know I am supposed to say that Beatles Rockband was much more awesome, but really, who doesn’t like a good suck?
Beatles Rockband was fantastic though. I like that there can be harmonising. I also loved singing ‘Here comes the sun’ because of the aforementioned happiness, and how it feels like the ice is finally melting and all. They bought me fish’n chips and I had a very long conversation with Amy about my uncomfortableness with any lack of financial independence, but she said that I give back with generousity. And I did a panda dance for her.
Then! I went out to Newlands to pick up Lisa and also got Shirley and we went to the James Cabaret to see HEAD LIKE A HOLE. Oh my, they were so very awesome after Luger Boa finally got the fuck off the stage. The crowd was all old school, and there were people stagediving, and the bass was all rumbling and my skirt was vibrating, and they played all the songs that i love, and they had a hot girl come out and play the trumpet, and oh, it was just the most giggy gig I’ve been to in a very long time. Love.
And yes, because of all the good feelings that I’ve been having lately, I’ve resolved to try and go a week without saying anything nasty about people I know. I can do this, right? After all, the things I hate the most in other people are the traits that I’m worried that I myself exhibit. And honestly, all this snarking that I do is partly because I’m trying to impress Megan and Emma since they’re both fairly new friends to me, but putting other people down doesn’t really make me happier (although it can be entertaining!) so I might make a conscious effort to stop, for a week, and see how I feel about that. Of course, this only applies to people I know. #TV3news is still very much an open target.
Since I last wrote, the intense bruise on my knee has faded somewhat, but it’s still pretty sore and spectacular.
Since I last wrote, we have opened up the Tiki Shack for summer, and consumed our own body weights in frozen fruity drinks. Well, perhaps just Anna Jane’s bodyweight.
Since I last wrote, I got back the photos that were taken of me in the shack and the back yard. Friends of mine on flickr can see a sampling of them under this tag (warning: I am in my bra in some of the pics, and I look incredibly hott), but because I am so in love with it, I’ll post one pic here:
What else? I have been busy on PPP adding in an Outfits of the Day page, which will hopefully soon display any flickr picture tagged with “PPPoutfit”. I have been obsessed with looking at what people are wearing lately. I blame the LJ Fatshionista community, and also Megan for making me do things on Polyvore.
In career pursuits, I have applied for a surprising number of jobs lately, written my first blog post on Open Govt, and I’m working on some advice for Community Central including how not to be a dick on Twitter. That last post was on my portfolio site, which I’ve also spent a lot of time working on. I have been writing a lot on a lot of places. I have been having many thoughts.
In more important news, it’s the Miss Fur‘s birthday today! Lisa it’s your birthday, happy birthday Lisa! Tomorrow night I am cooking dinner for her and a gaggle of girls. And in exciting lady news a) I’m going to see Martha tomorrow because I am helping to organise the opening of her new store b) I’m getting drunk with Emma on Friday and c) I’m going to HLAH with Lisa on Saturday d) there’s roller derby next Saturday e) Kat & Kane are coming down next Sunday! And at some stage in all of that, Amy may be cutting my hair for the first time in a million years. Joy!
If only I had an income so I could maintain this hectic lifestyle for always. It is nice having leisurely lunches with entertaining friends. If only I had a sugar daddy or mammy. Hmmm…
The Pretty Pretty Pretty party was awesome. I do need to figure out a better way to manage clothing swaps in the future though so that everyone has a fair chance to get good things. I met some lovely lovely girls though as the house was crowded with new people. Shout outs to my homies!
The day we got our official letters at work about how we’re losing our jobs, we were given a speech that tried to compare it to Napolean’s retreat from Moscow, like that was a good thing, because hey, 22,000 people survived that. 380,000 people died, but…
I dropped a frying pan on my toe before. It’s really sore. I’m hiding out in bed, consequently.
Kat & Kane are coming down next week, hurrah! Heather came down the other weekend and it was fabulous.
It keeps me a little bit entertained watching my automatic knee-jerk reactions in which I actively seek out validation from a number of sources if I’m feeling let down or neglected by one. There has been a lot of feeling like I don’t get any attention lately. That’s a consequence of no longer sleeping with someone of course, but it’s taking a long time to get over. Mostly I miss the friendship though.
I tried out for Full Code Press but didn’t make the team. I was a sad panda but the divine Tash suggested that I come along as a volunteer instead, so I’m going to Sydney on May 11-14.
I had other things to say, but I can’t remember what they were. I say a lot of things on Twitter these days. I also don’t say a lot of things. Oh you know what I mean.
My dreams are still far too vivid and encapturing. I feel like I’m smoking opium or something, or at least what I imagine it might be like.
I’m trying to do a good deed a day but in typing that out I realise that I haven’t done any good deeds today.
And finally, after years of looking, I bought some new sunglasses yesterday. This means my old ones which I bought on May 1, 1999, can be retired after almost ten years of hard work. I don’t want to say goodbye, but they’re so scratched and beaten up that it really is time. So here, let me present a digital tribute of my old sunglasses all around the world from as long as I’ve had a flickr account:
In Fiji in 2005
At Hyperion Wines in Matakana when we went up for the BDO in 2008
Last Tuesday I was on the bus home, and I was texting Kat saying “I hate everyone in the whole world. Except for you” because I was having a really horrible shitter of a week/month/year, and all I wanted was someone’s shoulder to cry on. Then when I was stumbling down my street trying not to cry, I suddenly thought “Well, why the fuck don’t I just go visit her?” and decided that if I could get flights for under $500, I would. A quick flick through the Air NZ site and a text to confirm that she was free for the weekend later, I found myself with flights booked for Friday-Sunday, and as she told me that they live in a bedsit, I searched wotif.com for a hotel, and then ended up making a booking straight through the Hotel On Devonport site as it was cheaper – $130+gst for a deluxe room. Plus, they emailed me back almost instantaneously saying that they saw I requested a 10am check-in, to let me know that if my room wasn’t ready at that stage I could still park and leave my suitcase there. Very impressed with that.
That made the rest of the week a little more dealable-with-able, along with sending a series of “this is why I am angry with you” emails to a series of people. And so on Friday morning I found myself up before 7am, with the shuttle picking me up at 7.20am. Golly gee, that was an early morning. Air NZ has gone all super high tech at the airport, where you check yourself in at a kiosk, print your own sticker for your bag, and just biff it on the conveyor-belt yourself. At this stage I would like to mention that the Caltex in the Newtown shops still sends an attendant out to pump your gas for you. What is happening to service in the rest of the world? Won’t someone please think of the children? Anyways. I had heaps of time so I got a coffee from Fuel and read the paper, but if I’d known that they wouldn’t give me a stamp for the coffee, I would have gone to Wishbone.
The flight itself was uneventful, and touching down in Tauranga was pretty. As soon as my taxi driver found out that I’d never been to Tauranga before, he proceeded to narrate everything, which is what I hoped for. He gave me so much information that I was constantly able to pull it out over the weekend and impress Kat & Kane, or at least make them start calling the taxi driver my boyfriend. He answered my questions about how much a taxi to the Mount would be, pointed out where the buses went from, explained that the Strand went off on Saturday nights (his words) and lifted my suitcase out of the car for me. The reception staff at the hotel were just as friendly and nice, finding me a room that was available then rather than making me wait, and asking when I’d like my complimentary drink delivered. My room on the fifth floor was absolutely lovely:
However, I couldn’t make the lights go. And yes, I saw the large plastic key thing that you’re suppose to slide into the switch, but it wouldn’t go in. I rang reception, and told them, so they sent someone up, who couldn’t make it go either because there was something jammed in the hole. They found housekeeping who unjammed it, but the lights still didn’t go on and they blamed a broken fuse. Five minutes later, I had electricity, and they checked to make sure. Hurrah! Kat wasn’t due to finish work until 2pm, so I decided to venture out and find myself some brunch.
Devonport St is the main shopping street in Tauranga, apparently, so there were lots of places around. There were also lots of vacant shops, but mostly it was a pleasant little high street full of chain stores. A block over and down I found a little plaza area, and decided to eat at Bravo because they had lots of sunny outdoor tables. I had mushrooms on toast with super crispy bacon and enjoyed the sunshine. I found the city art gallery and marvelled at the collection of NZ paintings that BNZ bought during 1982-1987 before they went bankcrupt or whatever, and talked to the attendant about how patronage of the arts will no doubt suffer in this current R-Word climate. After that, I strolled around a bit more before heading back to the hotel for a lovely nap on the huge big bed. Even Damian Christie recommends the hotel, and that says a lot.
Then it was KAT TIME! She came to meet me at the hotel and I hugged her so hard I almost went all Mice & Men on her. I offered to buy her a pedicure, so we went off in search of a place that would take us. The first place we tried right across the road was busy, but the second one we found (there are nail salons EVERYWHERE in Tauranga, it’s a little weird) the woman said she could do us both at once. Oooer. So we clambered up into the massaging chairs and soaked our feet while she slid back and forth between us. I know we didn’t have appointments, but she was really rushed because as we discovered she had another client coming in, and I just don’t think we got a very good deal. I was really disappointed that we didn’t get the dead skin razored off our feet, or any kind of massage (in fact, she only rubbed lotion into one of my feet!) and the nail polish job was patchy, and since my toenails are unnaturally thick, I always put polish on their edge, but she didn’t. For $48 each, I thought it was seriously lacking (although looking at their site now, what they list is what we got). Still, I bought some bright yellow nail polish as well, and it was relaxing to have the soak and the electric massage, and that’s what I was after. Perhaps I was spoiled by my only other pedicure experience in New York. And in fact, looking at prices of other places on the net right now, maybe that’s pretty standard or actually fairly cheap. Ahh well.
Then we headed to a convenience store for snacks and a bottle of wine, and sat out on my sunny balconey until it got too hot and then we flopped all over my bed. We booked dinner at Cafe Versaillies for 8.30pm so we could watch NZNTM first, and Kane came and joined us in my hotel room for television watching, napping, and making sex-faces on the big suede headboard to confuse the housekeeping staff:
Eventually though, we were so hungry that we decided to change our booking to 7.15pm. We were seated in a corner that if we’d been on a date we could have had butterfly-adorned curtains pulled around us.The very French man at the restaurant was very accomodating, even though we felt obliged to try and thank him in French, which made me want to speak Japanese, as that’s my default “not English” language, and Kat was the same with Spanish. I tried very very hard not to make any “aw haw haw Baugutte!” exclamations, which was hard, because I was very very giggling, and also our napkins were arranged thusly:
And how can you fight that? Especially if you’re a cheese-eating surrender monkey. YOU CAN’T! It’s NOT POSSIBLE! So instead we surrendered to the duck in orange sauce and eclairs with incredibly intense chocolate sauce, and some beajolais and potato gratin. What did the French person say when they’d eaten a lot of amazingly delicious food, including eggs in Kat & Kane’s chocolate mousse? I’ve had an oueff!
After that we adjorned to my hotel for more lol-ing and lolling around on my big bed before they finally went home, with plans to pick me up at 10am the next day. I slept fantastically, the double-glazed doors keeping out the sound of street hooliganism that I expected but never saw. If I could change one thing about the hotel though, it would be that they didn’t have aloe vera-flavoured moisturiser because I don’t like aloe vera scent. But that’s just me being super picky. I should have remembered to pack my own lotion.
So yes, anyway, Saturday. They picked me up and we went to Grindz on First Avenue for breakfast after we flagged walking up to Fifth for some sort of market. They said that the staff at Grindz can have bad attitudes, but my french toast and coffee were great, even if the toast was more eggy than I personally prefer. Plus I love that Grindz has a whole dedicated playroom for kids to keep them out of my ears. We did some shop-browsing, then jumped on a bus over to the Mount. Kane wanted to go to a particular op shop, so we went to the “bad” part of the Mt Manganui shops. It all seemed a bit sad and shut down. I tried on a thousand pairs of sunglasses, but I still can’t find any I like as much as the glasses I wear these days which I’ve had since 1999 (May 1, 1999 to be exact! Which was also the first day I told someone to their face that I loved them is how I know that for a fact) and they’re all scratched up to hell. Eventually we got to go and plonk our asses down on the beach and watch a family learn to surf. I couldn’t help but cheer every time any of them caught a wave, especially the 10 year old girl. Kat also made me laugh and cheer and clap by performing the chicken dance from Arrested Development for me and also for Lisa, except that it was too high-res to mms to her. But here it is for you. Turn your head!
And if that video doesn’t make you happy, then you are officially (OFFICIALLY!) the lamest person on the face of the planet. Now, when I twitted that I was going to Tauranga, I asked people what I should do. Almost everyone who replied told me I should go for a walk up the Mount. Here is a picture of the Mount.
I don’t walk up shit like that. In fact, I was already starting to develop a blister, as well as having one on the back of my heel still from my stupid new shoes, and my arms were banged up from walking into a pole. So it was nice to sit on the beach and chill for a while, but eventually I declared that I needed scheduled relaxing free time, and we made a plan to go and get a bite to eat. I picked Slow Fish at random, and it turned out to be a very clever thing to do, because the haloumi that came with my greek salad was the best haloumi I have ever ever eaten. Because I feel bad for you because you didn’t get to share my haloumi, here is a bonus picture of a tree with big bouncy branches that we rode like ponies:
Then we went to the Hot Pools. Because I mysteriously found myself in possession of a Tauranga library card, I got in for $6, but it would have been worth the outsider rate of $14. We sat in the passive pool for a while because it had a shade sail over it, and I impressed K&K with my sign-reading-and-retention knowledge by telling them that it was called the passive pool, and that it was 35 degrees. Then we switched over to the active pool in the sun, but it was a much cooler-feeling 33 degrees, and so we were more active. We did interpretive water dances about our jobs. Apparently my job involves me typing with my toes. The salt water made me super extra buoyant. I couldn’t help but float, so I impressed them with my abilty to float with my legs crossed. My sunglasses are so big Kane could wear them happily over his glasses, but they did get salty. We finished with a soak in the spa pools (38 degrees) and then went across the street for Copenhagen ice cream. I discovered that a Black Cow Soda Shake is made with coke and chocolate ice cream, but since I’d already had coffee and a coke my heartrate was being a bit racy (like a Victorian lady showing off her ankles!) so I settled for a lemonade & chocolate concoction. It was weird and tasty but I don’t think I’d want to have one every day.
Back at the hotel (my room was apparently aproximately the size of their house) there was more napping (I LOVE napping with people, I could totally be friends with Bret and Jermaine) and many episodes of The Simpsons before we strolled off to the fish dock for dinner.
It’s very nice eating 100 metres from where the fish comes in. People in the know bring along their own picnic sets and booze, but we just ate out of the paper. The fish was amazing, so fresh and crispy and yum. It made me a very happy Jo to be sitting with two of my favouritest people watching the sun set. Kat says that one of the reasons that i like them so much is that they don’t make me do anything, that we can just be still in each other’s company and not have to be rushing around doing anything, and maybe that’s true, and we proved it when we went back to my hotel to watch Grand Designs and Richard E Grant being awesome in Miss Marple. We giggled with glee a lot and told stupid jokes and just generally had an amazing time, and then they left and I was a bit sad. So I changed the time on my cellphone for daylight savings ending, and then I went to sleep.
When I woke up to my alarm, I looked at the time on the alarm clock that I’d also adjusted, and realised that MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A BITCH my cellphone had ALSO changed its time, and there was 25 minutes until my plane left. I grabbed all of my shit and rang a cab and dropped off my key. After waiting ten minutes for my taxi to show up, the driver tried calling the airport for me, but the flight was already gone. At the airport they offered to put me on the next flight to Auckland, but it was only going to save me $20 or so and I would have had to wait around there too, so I decided that I’d just take the next flight to Wellington – at a cost of $370 extra. I waved my arms in pretendish-fiero when I found out that at least I’d get air points for that flight so that I wouldn’t cry. I took my complimentary Herald On Sunday to a picnic table outside and waited three hours for my flight, really regretting not having taken the time to call the airport before leaving the hotel so that I could have showered and had a decent coffee and breakfast in town. Sigh. And then the fucking shuttle in Wellington went all the way around Oriental Bay and then back into Newtown while I sat there fuming and just wanting to be home and clean and with my kitty. Grrr. Bad way to end a holiday but oh man, it was a glorious time, so chilled out, relaxed and pampery. It was exactly what I needed and the perfect time to have it too. I will go back.
Other things in very very brief format that I have been up to: getting better at Hottest Dance Party Ever! on the wii, even though my knees might disagree / organising the Pretty Pretty Pretty First Birthday Party for April 18 (come along!) / discovering that me and much of my team are being made redundant at work / stressing out about Sebastian when he got a big nasty abcess and was in a lot of hurt at the vet’s / freaking out my new GP with all kinds of crazy questions and cut-up arm from falling against the evil wall outside the National Library while she was giving me a smear / trying to figure out ways to expand my circle of friends because I’ve been having Wellington claustrophobia because everyone has slept with everyone and it’s kind of stressful keeping it all in balance / having a million kinds of difficulty getting ahold of my shrink before and after my prescriptions ran out / making the married man sit at the back of a cafe and watch me cry for 45 minutes just to be sure that it registers with him how much I’m hurting but neglecting to ask the things I wanted to ask / buying a new laptop and becoming obsessed with season two of Gossip Girl / being perplexed by people who have different values than mine to the point where I was going to call my journal entry “My cunt: who’s in it and who’s not” before I went to Tauranga, and it would have gone into more detail about my smear and no one really wants to read that do they? / going to the most fantastic Steam Punk party ever where everyone was dressed up, there was a whole ballroom and a Klemzer band playing and pashing the woman that I pashed at Kowhai’s party last year again / I think that’ll do for now.
I should warn you that I am a barrel of all kinds of emotions today. Webstock is the highlight of my professional life each year, because so many of the things I learn are so directly applicable to the work that I do, but it’s also about my extra activities and communities like the Wellingtonista (I wrote the Beginner’s Guide to Wellington for the Webstock Site). I have been pleasantly surprised over the course of the day and also last night at pre-drinks at the Southern Cross to have people go “ohh, you’re in the Wellingtonista!” really excitedly, or even “OMG you’re JO HUBRIS!” from Twitter. The latter girl was rewarded with spare trading cards (my wad is so big it hardly fits in my envelope any more, if you know what I mean) and then when she suggested that I should have my own card because I was such a personality, I was like omg, let me give you all the cards I have in my hand. Except I won’t, because we have a community of shared knowledge that we need to build on.
That paragraph above appeared to be very long. I did have some free drinks before (trading surplus cards for drink tickets was a great idea, and yes I’m that confident that i can do that) and then there was sake at dinner, but mostly if I sound slurry, it will be because of the zopiclone fighting it out with the two coffees.
I FUCKING LOVE WEBSTOCK SO FUCKING MUCH. There, I’ve declared it. I won’t be doing the point by point all my notes here assessment. In fact, I might just step out of webstock all together, and talk about how on Tuesday I took my car in for my warrant. The place was right opposite a Dick Smith’s, so I thought I’d go in and buy a universal remote control because my DVD remote is so completely fucked it physically hurts me to make things go on it. Anyways, so I got it home, and it was all “Dude! Check out my DVD! It’s like, SUPER EASY” so I was all like, okay, sure, so I put it on, but I had to use my old remote to get it to go, and that was aaaaaargh, and then it turned out that manual was much more helpful than the DVD anyway. I managed to tune in the power on/off button, but none of the other keys were working, and while I was sitting on the wood floor in front of the tv, swearing madly at it, George decided that would be an appropriate time (when El and Smoo were off to Aussie the next day) to tell me that he has found a cheaper flat and he’s moving out.l
I swore at the remote control, went to my room, and had one of the worst breakdowns I have ever had, in terms of condensedness. I was hyperventilating and the lack of oxygen made my scalp tingle and the front of my face go numb. I had the metallic taste in my mouth, I was howling out loud along with the tears that did not stop for half an hour, I thought at one stage that I was going to black out and kind of hoped that I would. the thoughts going through my mind was “I am such a fucking smart girl, why can’t I figure out that remote?” which of course was linked to “I am such a fucking smart girl, why was I not capable of delivering a better performance assessment at work, why did I not support my intern better, how could I have allowed myself to fall for someone completely wrong for me, why have I subsequently been begging them for attention when obviously they are trying to cut off my air supply like I’m a troll, why can’t I keep a flat together, what the fuck is wrong with me?” and I howled and howled and every time I thought I’d settled down a bit, my body locked up, so I’d make a move, and I just started crying more and more, The part that was fun though, that I texted back to a concerned sisterly text was that I was blowing my nose on my really big really heavy dark brown Egyptian cotton bath sheet, so I was like “I’m blowing my nose on a bear!” (and speaking of which I so need one of these bags!). The physical aspect of the crying was kind of terrifying, the input of the oxygen and the way it wasn’t going out again, and I was high, and I thought about putting my head between my legs, and my boobs got in the way, and that didn’t make any sense, and quite frankly, it was really not a good time. Until I was like “umm, actually, I think that remote control was actually officially uncompatible with my DVD player, since it’s a DVDr, and then it was easier to see that no, I’m not actually a complete failure at everything, and I actually had a conversation out loud, taking the voice of my counsellor on.
So it was a good rich cleansing cry that has been building up for a very long time (readers of my twitter have obviously seen that), but still today, in Ze Frank’s presentation he talked about how one of his readers asked him to write them a cheer-up song for a situation that sounded really similar to the way I’d been on Tuesday night, and he started it up, and I cried and cried because it was exactly what I needed Luckily the lights were off in the hall at the time, and of course I twittered about it and saw everyone else saying that they’d cried too. Powerful. I shook his hand later and told him he made me cry. Looking at Twitter, an awful lot of people feel that way.
I want to talk more about other things, like venn diagrams (people at the conference that I’ve slept with, people at the conference I don’t want to talk to, and how they overlap but only a little bit and so I’d have to throw in another ring about something), and how much Star Wars sucks, and the free coffee, and the free ice cream, and how much I’m caught up in the trading card game because I’m going to win a baby dinosaur, but it’s like, midnight and tomorrow is going to be INTENSE and I have to replan my outfit since the motherfucking thong in my birki jandal broke, but i realise that I haven’t even mentioned how AWESOME the last half of the Fur Patrol gig that I made it to was, and how I cried again when they were singing ‘Silences and distances’ which is all “Please don’t make this hard – at least be willing to try” and the night was perfect, and the air was blowing hair, and everyone was lovely, and we humped Lisa a lot and I just so adore getting Alan drunk, and Craig Terris has cut his hair to look like Carlos D, so I’m wondering if he also likes to bang fat chicks, and therefore I can get herpes off him and give it to the whole iPhone world. These jokes will make no sense to you, I’m sure, but as my final “this is how awesome Webstock is” for the night – I bitched on Twitter about how i had no handcream and I was twittered back to inform me that there was 8 Hour Cream at the front desk. SUCH BRILLIANT CUSTOMER CARE. <3 <3 <3 and there’s a whole ‘nother day to go tomorrow in which I may just marry Tom Coates. Watch this space.
