Hubris.co.nz

Thursday August 8th

Very very very much did not want to get out of bed today, as today is a Low Self Esteem Day. Or rather, a feeling that I am just very incompetant and untalented. Realising that there’s actually a boy in my class who’s kinda cute and intelligent made me perk up a little (I told Terri the other day that I’m currently at the stage where I’m almost developing crushes on Door Knobs and other inanimate objects). Plenary meetings brought me down again, just for a change, cos they’re so boring and frustrating and time wasting. Luckily this one ended twenty minutes early, so I was half an hour early to work, and I had Robyn’s zine to read on the bus on the way in, which was good. Choice even.

I bought donuts for Skew Terri and Bridget for our WIP meeting. No really this doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that today I also did my application for Terri’s job. Actually it doesn’t really. I just have the feeling that Skew doesn’t like me and that I hassle him too much, and yeah, donuts seemed to be the easiest way to fix that. I had to make like 30 phonecalls too, checking contact details before we put out our second majorest publication, and mostly got people’s answerphones so I had to leave the same message over and over and over again. It made my head hurt a lot.

And then I was walking home across the Grafton Bridge and it was freezing cold when suddenly there was a girl yelling at me out of a car, and I was like ???? but it was Annoushka (I’m sorry, I can’t spell your name), of course. I mean, it’s just logical that my sister’s best friend would be in Auckland, when I haven’t seen her in years, since waaay before she got married. But anyways, her and her husband gave me a ride home, cos they were staying in the same street, and it was much warmer in their car. And it also gave me the chance to test out my hypothesis that it’s quicker to walk home than face traffic at that time’o day – verdict is that it’s slightly shorter in a car.

This evening I was moping at home alone cos my mind was just mush from too many meetings nad hten having to do horrible job applications and freaking out about the implications of me not getting the job (I am NOT going to have another bout of what I was like the last time I was on the dole, i am not i am not i am not (also, side note – I dreamt about K sometime last week, and in the dream she was telling me that she never gave up on me, i just got it wrong)). Bo was out babysitting and Clay was off filming some random short film somewhere (apparently our house is going to be taken over by vines tomorrow) and I was all Meh, so I was just parked on the couch, although there was nothing on TV and reading would have taken too much brain power. Anyways, BradC showed up, and I was like “clay’s not home” but then he pulled a piece of cable out of his pocket and was like “I can do your network now!” and looked all forlorn when I said that it was already done, so I invited him in anyways, and we had multiple cups of tea. So that filled in a couple of hours, and then he went, adn then I boiled kidney, haricot and pinto beans to make kickass chilli, and Bo came home and there was love and laughter again, and now I really should go to bed.

On Saturday night, I am going to go to a hotel room at the Duxton to have drinkies. I receieved the invitation via web-based txt and I had no idea who it was from, but I conditionally accepted anyways, then got very worried when the person who sent it identified themselves by their first name only, without any lastname initials or preceeding adjectives or abreviations, and I was like WHAT THE FUCK? cos I thought it was someone else, but then it was just Jezza, so that’s cool. And then on Sunday, I’m going to play dressups with Kyla – yay! i like makeup and clothes and stuff. Planning ahead, it’s Bo and Clay’s birthday on the 22nd, and so we’re gonna have party-type things on the 23rd so that I can go to Matakana on the 24th. And that’s that.

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…..