Hubris.co.nz

Sorry Wellington, I blame myself. I promise I won’t write about summer again so prematurely. The hot water bottle tucked into my bed right now is a sign that I’ve learnt my lesson.

This week I have become a Lady Who Lunches. I’ve spent my time off still waiting for my security clearance (they must have found out about Mum’s communist background. Or perhaps googled me. Try it. I’m number one! I’m number one!). On Monday I went out to Petone because there is an abundance of clothing shops there for ladies who have an abundance to spare. All I ended up buying was a 1940s’ style turquoise short-sleeved blouse and an electric pink mesh hoodie though. Yes I know. And you’d probably hate it too, but I adore it so. Then I went to Martha‘s house and we had civilised conversations, coffee and her delicious, delicious ginger crunch.

On Tuesday I……. um… I must have done something. Oh yes, I went for a drive around the south coast to The Empire to see Katy. I spent a long time reading the paper and then Rolling Stone, and had a most pleasant time. On my way home I did the grocery shopping in Newtown, and purchased actual fruit and vegetables, which was very exciting. Then Bart and Karen came over to share in the bountiful flat dinner of kickass roast pork (one day I will master the art of getting crackling to actually work properly), apple sauce and all the goodness that many kinds of roast vegetables can deliver.

On Wednesday Smoo and I had hilarious hijinks trying to get Briar’s coffee machine to work, I spent a very long time making empanadas with lentils for Food Baby and I cleaned my room. Yesterday I went in to my new work to check out the offices, pick up a fuckload of reading material and decide when I want to start (Monday). Then I oggled ridiculously expensive clothes in the new Zebrano’s and went to Mummy’s house to set up her new laptop for her. I battled their weird modem (Telstra Clear drilled holes in their floor. Huh?) trying to get their new wireless router to play nicely with it, but I was hampered in my efforts by lack of another ethernet cable and also by the unbelievable amounts of mess piled around the computer. You know how some parents downsize their houses after their kids move out? Mummy and Daddy have just put in a new storage room under the house that’s apparently not for hiding Jews in, despite my best efforts, and they’re also planning on putting in an extension. I made “you’re overcapitalising and spending my inheritance!” type noises over lunch at the Ngaio Villas (So. Many. Children. Yelling. Oh. God. The. Pain) but she just laughed at me.

Then last night in the disgusting weather I made my carefully planned way to Kristen and Chrisana’s for Food Baby. They live in a pedestrian-only street in the middle of a big hill, and the only other time I’d been there, I’d walked up from the bottom when I was really drunk and’d had an awful day at work and was exhausted from the gym anyway and so I’d sat down halfway up and cried. This time I was cleverer and started at the top. I’ve been really dumb recently though and haven’t been to the gym in about two weeks, and my taking of St John’s has decreased in regularity as well, and I found myself feeling somewhat awkward again, and that makes me shitty with myself. I don’t know where my insecurities come from, there certainly isn’t any justification for it, as far as I can see. Bah, nevermind.

Today I am sobbing over Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as I dearly love to do, and tonight I will go out for drinks with the old workmates, no doubt. Well, maybe some doubt, but not very much of it. I’m currently gutted because I’ll be working during the Zombie March next Friday but maybe I’ll work my way up to go watch it, even if I can’t participate. Must. Eat. Brains. Now. Or go and make some tea to try and thaw out my fingers. Or maybe both.

EDIT: Oh, and apparently today is Catmas, therefore behold my four-legged hairy son’s tummy in all its glory:

I came home about 10.30pm last night, and the kitchen was absolutely spotless, so I immediately asked Bart to marry me. He said yes so I walked back out to my parents’ car and they gave me a cheque for three grand, and I showed it to him and he said “well, I guess we’d better get a wriggle on then”. But then I decided to pay off my credit card with the cheque instead, since he hadn’t actually caught the mouse that we apparently have in the kitchen which was the reason for his cleaning. And yes, that’s right, I’ve had a credit card for under a month and I already have over three grand on it. But I also have tickets to America figuratively in my hot little hands, so that’s okay.

And I was home that late at night because Anji and I had gone to Capitol for a bottle of wine (I <3 Capitol, the service is outstanding, and the toilets smell so good, and the bruschetta is yum), and then we'd joined up with the rest'o the family at Hazel, where much more jolly awesome wine was drunk, and mountains of tasty tasty food eaten. I am currently craving more squid rings from there, and I don't even like squid. Perhaps I am pregnant. With the second coming.

If you're wondering why I am so much more chipper in this post than I was in Tuesday's, well it appears that the one/two emotional gut punch of watching 'The Body' and 'The Gift' together paid off. Well, that and large doses of the Arcade Fire, St John's, exercise, listening to 'Kim' on repeat (geez, why are you so angry, Marshall?) and all twelve episodes of the unbelieveable hip hopera Trapped in the Closet, which is just so fucking wow that it deserves another round of Holy Fucking Crap!.

Other things of note that I have been up to lately? Hosting the work quiz last Friday. After much debate about the amount of wine we were to have, we did end up running out. My arms ached from carrying eight bottles one block, so in a way maybe it’s better we didn’t have more. The quiz went well, even though I was having initial “no one likes me!” thoughts at the number of attenders, although we ended up filling the room very well. On Saturday I went to see the Dukes of Leisure play at the Carter Observatory, and I was drinking straight vodka from a small bottle, and it was all misty with lamp posts on the way there like Narnia, and we had pillows and got to lie down, and I got to have snuggles with first Anji and then Karen and we all know that I’m a Romanian orphan starved for physical affection so that was nice, and I fell in love with the man who gave us a star tour, because I love story-tellers, and they made us popcorn in the middle, and the music was good too and oh, it was just great and I was crazy giggly, and that amused me muchly. On Sunday I went to a private screening of The Imposters which was hilarious, and found out various bits of gossip that I might reprint here if I could be bothered footnoting it but I can’t, and I just felt choice.

Tomorrow is Canadia, as I’ve mentioned before, and then The Phoenix Foundation at Indigo, and then on Sunday Luke Buda at Caberet. And now it is nearly 5.30 so I must put on lip gloss and harrass the boys downstairs until they come out for a drink with me. My feet hurt from being an escort to a group of people who came to look at the clever things that we do at work. And then one of the directors referred to me as a handmaiden. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen…

We could say that this bout was kicked off by the email “I’ve got some bad news – apparently he’s seeing someone, my friend said he was out on a date” but I think we – or at least I know that it’s actually about me, not about him. The crushes are interchangeable. What remains constant is how I cope – or don’t, how personally I take every rejection (cos duh, rejection is a personal thing), how much I worry about how much this will close me up even more. So I’m cocooning. I don’t want to be told “oh well at least you ahve a new friend”, because so fucking what? I don’t particularly feel like torturing myself with hanging out with someone I can’t have, that’s generally not my style (and yes, there’s always exceptions). I don’t want to be told “I told you so” because believe me, I’m telling myself that enough for two. All I want is a shoulder to cry on, one that’s not going to try and figure me out or puzzle it through or offer trite cliches because I’d rather tear out my womb and eat it than listen to the same old things over and over again, which is of course somewhat ironic on account of how you suckers are reading the same thing over and over again, on a montly basis. I hate my womb. Maybe I should tear it out. If I could reach it with tweezers or hot wax in the socially acceptable way, I would inflict the pain like that.

I worry that I cannot communicate my thoughts and feelings clearly – not only the hesitantness that I metaphorically dipped my toe in with in this particular scenario, but also in the way I describe the after-effects. I suspect this wasn’t helped by venting about a different thing on a particularly stupid-in-these-kinds-of-contexts workmate, who totally missed the point of a discovery that the ex girlcrush had only been with her boyfriend for a short while and therefore I wasn’t actually as stupid as I thought I was not to know about it. But there are plenty of other things that make me go “well, am I really that dumb or not?” And again, sure, some of this is in relation to that boy, but remember, I was never that sure if I really liked him or if it was just the thought that maybe he liked me that made me like him. This could be me being all in denial, so to offer up proof, I will tell you that I never thought of him whilst wanking. Assuming I’ve crushed on him since February 19, and my journal will back up that date, that’s at least 140 times that I haven’t thought of him.

And as always, I am terrified that the state of my mental health is crumbling. Three nights of heavy drinking over the weekend didn’t help, nor did yet another blast-from-the-past getting in contact via the internet. FUCK YOU INTERNET. I am scared that I’m going to relapse into being utterly dependent on other people, and I fought for a long time to not be like that. I’m scared that I am trying to alienate myself from my friends right now in order to fight that. I’m scared that I will cease to be entertaining, and that I try to buy friends, and that I won’t be able to sustain current friendship circles, because until this bout kicked in I was feeling glorious and popular and content, and we all know I can’t have that. I’m scared that I make excuses, I’m scared that bring all the scaredness upon myself. I’m once again longing for celepram, but I’m supposed to have all my shit together now.

Then Humpy went and sent me a job ad for a position in Auckland and I went “fuck this sounds like a really good job, content editing music sites” and then I freaked out about the thought of having to move to Auckland just when my homelife is all working out so well, and then I thought about how I might apply for that job and they might reject me, and then I wondered where exactly my career is taking me, and what if we don’t get the new tender for the site that I manage now, and then I came up with reasons not to apply for the job, and then I hated myself just a little bit more and I just don’t know what to do about it. Exercise. Take St John’s wort. Pray for my bleed. It can’t be far off. I’m mangoing and I think I felt the start of a cramp last night. Cross your fingers for me. Do the blood dance. Can I ask you to humour me a little longer?

In the “and I’m sure you’ll totally be keen to hang out with me if I’m still like this then” news, I’m coming to Auckland in July, from 14-16. Hurrah for impulse buying and credit cards. I’ve also paid for my flights to the States in October, hurrah.

Karen McLeod to me, Angie McLeod
Eats, drinks and no leaves
Ok: how does this sound: I make:
Foodage: pesto frenchbread crostini; pita bread & carrot sticks with hummus for dipping; chippies; cracker mix; brie.

Sound alright? There’s probably going to be approx 20 people for drinks, 12-14 for dinner.

My Saturday night is going to be yummier than your Saturday night. And there will be vegetable tempura in the middle of that. Not that I always order the same thing at Hede, oh no.

Now my big dilemma is about what to wear. I have two tops in mind, and they’re both a gift to the world (in terms of twin views, y’know), but one of them is very hard to sit in. I might wear it for drinks before and after but not to dinner. We’ll see. Dressing up is fun! Also, I’d just like to apologise for constantly writing ‘dilemma’ as ‘dilemna’. I just looked it up and I promise to try to do better in the future.

I took a Mental Health Day yesterday cos I hadn’t slept (again) and it really really helped. It made me remember that duh, I haven’t taken St. John’s Wort in weeks, so of course I was spinning out. I have taken it now. Next time I talk about going on antidepressants again, can one of you please remember to ask me if I’m taking my St John’s? I’d really appreciate it. Chur.

So this week there’s been some aaaaaaarghing on my part, but there’s also been some entertainment. I took Dave to dinner at my parents’ house on Wednesday night because he kindly volunteered (or was pressganged into) to retrieve files off my old computer for me and reformat it for my parents in exchange for a roast dinner. I don’t think he knew quite what he was in for – cue me not knowing what password I’d put on my bios, and my father having decided without telling Mum that he was going to build himself a new computer and blah blah blah blah. But he was very patient and good about it.

Last night Anji and I took her (STUPID DUMB AND I HATE IT) surprisingly heavy (AND STUPID AND DUMB!) small ridiculously small couch over to Karen’s place for Karen’s party. My vitriol at the couch is based on a) it’s not big enough to stretch out on, and I needed to stretch out with my leg up when I was sick with gangrene and it didn’t deliver, and b) damn that couch is heavy, and I was just so uncoordinated last night I could hardly lift it, and it was just ridiculous. I suspect this is about me being a spaz in my pajamas rather than the couch, but I don’t care. What, are you from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruel Words about Couches or something? I don’t think so. Fuck off.

Okay stalkers, time to get your diaries out. Next week I have dinner for Karen’s birthday with the Olds on Monday, and then The Wedding Crashers on Wednesday, and then Brad in The Seagull on Thursday, and then possibly a very expensive dinner on Sunday. In between you’ll find me on the couch. loving ‘Rockstar: INXS’. It helps that I never liked them as a band much so I don’t mind the trainwreckness. Plus: NO R.KELLY! EVER!