Hubris.co.nz

I think it is fairly safe to say that I am addicted to fairy lights. I set up our Xmas tree today (it is named Sam, because it’s a fucking prick. Although it is yet to insist that I must have diabetes). In the process of getting this in place, I also cleaned off our buffet! There are empty flat surfaces in my house! It is very very exciting!

Yes, that’s right, I don’t update for a month, and then when I do, all I write about is tidying my house. This is how I roll, yo. Oh okay, I will talk about how I’ve been Xmas shopping, and making plans for the dinner that I want to cook, and preparing secret potions and all that kind of thing.

I’ve been feeling a bit thoughtful the past couple of days. As you may have seen me twittering about yesterday, it was ten years since I first had sex. So that was the guy that I had my first relationship with. It’s been a year since I began my second relationship as well, which I call a relationship because he did, and because it was more than just fucking, even though it shouldn’t have even been that. Although I didn’t want the first one to be, the second one is most definitely a secret. In 2010, I’m going to meet someone who will love me so much that they will shout from the rooftops that they’re with me. That’s going to be really fantastic. Oh yes indeedy.

I don’t really have that much else to say, because it’s been so long that all the stories I wanted to tell you have been forgotten. Instead, I will grab some photos of me from Flickr with which to start conversations, okay?

SPICEWORLD

Still the greatest movie ever made. We had a most awesome night of watching it and then I stayed up til 3.30am talking to Amie. She cleaned up in the morning! Best houseguest ever until the next lot showed up.

ROLLER DERBY!

Richter City (Wellington) played Pirate City (Auckland) and three of Auck girls stayed with us. Turns out one of them was Hannah who was Iva’s friend when we lived at Volcanic, so she’s also slept with Lance. Hilariousness ensued. Also, Roller Derby was AMAZING, even though we got creamed. It was edge of the seat jumping up and down and yelling and cheering and fantasticness. And look who happened to be in town for it and managed to get in on the sign and fascinator-making?

Yeah that’s right, that’s motherfucking KateH! It was very very nice to see her again after years overseas. Plus, I am now the Popular Kate of Wellington, which makes me feel allpowerful. In fact, I’m the Empress of the Internet. Bow down.

I went to the Havana Club cocktail championships and wrote about it on the Wellingtonista. Speaking of, holy fucking shit, next week it is the FOURTH ANNUAL WELLINGTONISTA AWARDS. I am crazybusystressed sorting it all out plus I don’t get to buy a new dress which is sad but hopefully it will all go smoothly enough.

Oh yeah, duh, flickr reminds me that there’s this:

I got an infected ingrown hair on my stomach, and it developed into full-blown cellulitis and I spent 48 hours in the hospital. Almost two weeks later, I still haven’t finished my antibiotics. Kind of a bit bored of talking about it, so here’s this:

o, so 48 hours of IV antibiotics and crazy Syrian ladies yelling in the bed next to me and NO WIFI (omg death) and so many things beeping and being woken up at 4am all the time so they could change my drip and then at 7am because apparently that’s when they wake up usually anyways later, I cried and begged them to send me home so they have with lots of codeine and also fuckloads of antibiotics, and now my stomach is much better but my arm is in immense pain from where my veins collapsed under the harshness of the antibiotics and it all leaked into my tissue instead. Moral of the story: ingrown hairs are not a good idea.

Many people were wonderful and came to see me in the hospital or afterwards and it made me so happy to have such lovely friends and family and flatmates who provided me with food so I didn’t have to eat the hospital slop and so I had clean laundry and access to technology to keep me from going crazy.

So yes, even though things are far from perfect (I still don’t have a job or a flatmate), the awesome things in my life kind of outweigh the sucky, and that’s the way I would like to keep things, thanks.

Yesterday I sent out a twit saying “Oh man, I cheated on Jane & Paul this morning and my punishment was a latte made with trim and a very blah scone. I’m so sorry! #whitewhines”, and that clearly demonstrates both my crime (in my defense, the scone came from the cafe in the Dom Post building where I having my photo taken, all zoomed in on my hands like L** S*** except I didn’t have dirt under my fingernails and the focus was on my sugar scrub instead of my open vagina and I did it for Kimberley instead of NZ Idol). Anyways, today I told them about my infidelity and they still made me the most awesome coffee ever, and I got to have a roast vege sandwich with feta, even though I had to run off to a depressing meeting about the economy while I still eating, but then I had lunch at Cellar-Vate and their dip had salmon in it which I hate, and meanwhile Green Land was giving out rum. So the punishment lingers.

Also yesterday I was twittering about how I was wearing my “I love Helen” badge that Bad Tom gave me for Christmas (hey, so it turns out that public servants are actually allowed to have their own thoughts and opinions! Who knew?) but as punishment from the gods, I was working on a comms plan and I had to emphasize the value for money and the outputs for the public in it. As my (life-long public servant) father had said right after the election and I’d been missing work to stay at home and cry “awww it’s so cute that you think things will actually change with the change in government”. It is still the same project that my intern and I have been working on. It still has the same purposes, ideas and findings. We just have to wrap it up in different language, because apparently, that’s value for money. Retch.

Other crimes and punishment themes that I meant to expand on. I still need a spanking. Wait, what’s the line between want and need these days, in this post 9/11 world? And when will Austrians find Nazi jokes funny?

On that note, I spent the day working from home on Wednesday because I wanted to concentrate on doing some serious writing on case studies instead of being distracted by wiki issues, which meant that I was in theory about to watch the Inauguration, but without Sky there were too many people talking on TV3 so I went back to sleep and read Gawker media commentary on it later and cried. Then I went to Lisa’s to watch Skins 2 and hang, and in the car on the drive home I cried when Roxette played on the radio, and then I cried in joy watching The Daily Show coverage, not least because of all the joy that was so clear in them, not just because it was change that they could believe in, but it was challenging comedically too to capture those moments that were so amazing but to still be all Daily Show all up on them.

Kowhai says that she wishes she could be as in touch with my emotions as I am, but this is me with total motherfucking eat a bag of dicks PMS and I feel like the world is ending, and I want to eat all the bread in the world and oh my fucking god, could I just start bleeding already please? Please? Tonight I was bitching furiously to Good Tom and Good Anita (did we decide to call her that?) about my period’s control over my body and how like, nine years ago KateB told me to have a keep-a-nigga baby when Ass was doing the very long drawn-out breaking off, and I was like “OMG TERRIBLE” but I think there are too many signs of an imminent period (not to mention the whole thing where I’m probably infertile) to think that there was something amiss, especially since my last period was two weeks long.

I was going to go home and get drunk and cry by myself after work today, but I needed to buy a new cellphone charger cos mine has died, and also potentially a new remote control for the lounge dvd player cos that bitch is a fucking bitch, but then there was TCD store open which I’ve never seen before and it was so pretty and shiny, and there was this sexyass dress, and then on the other side of the shop it was available in purple, and I didn’t think it was right and then I thought “what about if I had a belt?” and I thought “what would Joan Holloway do?” and just as the shop assistant was asking me if i wanted help, Good Tom rang to see where I was at, and I asked him if I should buy the dress, and he said “does it make you look ugly?” and I said “no” so he told me to buy it, and the shop lady complimented me In on my whole outfit with it, so I bought it. And now I am poor. #whitewhine. In fact, I’m feeling like an exceptionally poor mother right now, because we’re out of cat biscuits, which means I’ve been giving Sebby extra wet meat, which of course he loves. Also that last expression sounds so eww.

Also, there’s things and there’s stuff, of course, and historians – or rather me reading this two year from now will go “what history? what stuff?” but for now I will nod smuggly. Mostly, being pre-period makes me totally feel like there’s the end of the world arriving, and I know that it’s not, but it’s like you try playing “So here we are” as loud as possible by Bloc Party and put your head down on your desk and see if you don’t cry. I’m considering creating a fictional list like the FCC fictionally assembled after 9/11 of songs that are all no-gos. Pretty much the only things I am left with is hip hop. I know that all things considered, that was as best and as good as it could be. But like still, I’d rather be in Samoa eating snails right now, if you know what I mean.

Today is my birthday. My family have been awesome, as have my usual Tuesday crew (including the Quiz Master, who smells delicious, but could use some hand cream). My birthday party on Saturday night was an awful lot of fun too.

On my birthday last year I woke up in bed with a nice girl, and then Anji showed up and brought us coffee, we all went to brunch and then cleaned Karen’s apartment. The year before that, I was fucking relieved not to be having vagina surgery, and was possibly still really stoked to have been felt up by a boy who was one the best pashes evah the night before, we went to Cafe Istanbul for dinner and I saw the Real Hot Bitches for the first time ever. And I think that last link does a good job of summing up other years, but I will point out that on the day I turned 20 I dumped my boyfriend (ala, the ASSCUNT of twitter from the previous entry) because he wouldn’t make an effort to see me, and ten years ago, I had a really sucky 18th birthday in which people I cared about said nasty things about me because I drank and (shock horror!) smoked pot (one of those three people is now one of my best friends, one of them does far too many drugs now, and the other is in Australia) and it turns out that another one was sleeping with the guy I fancied at the time. Etc. So today’s not really being able to sleep until after 6am and all the voices in my head speaking in Scottish accents ala Anna from This Life, then workshops, dinner at Caffe Italiano and Quiz Night is really not that stand-out-y.

Has it become apparent to you via this post that birthdays are actually very important to me? I hope it has, because I’m living in a flat who fail to notice that,and it’s weird. Actually, this is the third birthday in a row tat I’ve had in which one of them will fail to pay it any attention. Oh, but, on a non-flatmate note, I haven’t had a birthday cake of my own on my actual birthday since I was 17 – until this year, when Anji and Bambi bought over a beautiful delicious cake for me with champagne bottle corks. I’ll put in photos at some stage. And also creepy video of karaoke. Karaoke was SO fucking awesome, it was such a good night, I love me some friends, and also Yvonne at Longxiang who dealt with me having 18 friends at dinner and that not even being close to all of them. I’m not always entirely sure why anyone likes me sometimes, but at dinner I totally got it and it was lovely.

Also random blah blah. Something about sex. Oh yes, the twitters on Saturday night. I’ll tell you, I am SO fucking horny right now. Like, there’s the usual depression thing of wanting to lose yourself under someone, having them thrust aside all thoughts in your brain even for a couple of minutes, the validation of having someone wrapped around you, and then there’s pre-period hormones, in which everything is a turn-on (see above quizmaster love from tonight, although of course that’s not a new thing because of course I fancy the rare people who appear to be smarter than I) and oh man oh man oh man sometimes all you can think about is getting a pounding.

Then there’s the decision that if 27 was the year of debauchery, which it hardly was, then maybe I wil make an attempt to make 28 year of health (starting tomorrow of course). Even my taxi driver tonight asked me if I suffered from Anxiety, which holy fuck yes I do. I should defend myself in saying that he asked because he had it, not because I appeared totally buttfuck crazy, honest. Anyways. Full circle. I hide in bed to avoid the world (read: flatmates going “oh, not at work today?) then hate onthe world (read: flatmates) for not doing anything for my birthday. Yes, that’s right, you can’t win with me at all, anyone. Haven’t I made that clear already? I should I suppose clarify here: I fucking miss Kat’n Kane, and Bopha and Brad, and Kateb and Clayton and Simon like, so much. I am deeply deeply nostalgic for flats of yesteryear when they were more than just a collection of individuals under one roof.

Except, you know, if you give me a good fucking right now. And that won’t happen because I am far too anxious. Joy! Yes, cycle, yes, I will get out of it. Man, I am looking forward to sleeping tonight.

Oh, and finally, have i mentioned lately that I think Sebastian is gay? There’s always bitemarks on the back of his neck. I wonder if the gay cat world has bears, because he is big and hairy. But he is also poised and handsome and constantly grooming. But the cats he talks to during the day look like twinks to me. I reckon that’s why he kept trying to do Sammy when we lived with Iva, even though Sammy was actually (sort of) female. Ahhh cat sex, that’s a good note to end on, right?

Do you notice the time, like, all the time? Because it was 11.11pm when I started this post, but then I had to reply to twitters, read an article on cock that Harvest Bird sent me to cheer me up (I think), and then fast-forward the ads of today’s episode of The Simpsons, and now it’s eight minutes later. Does that sound like a lot to pack in in seven minutes? Because I think I’ve mentioned before that my brain is working overtime these days, and how sometimes I think that I’m on speed instead of citalapram.

And that might explain today’s total mood crash, and why I just fucking wish I could get fired so I could go on the dole or the sickness benefit and how I could stay in bed where everything is warm and safe and okay. It is ridiculous how scared I am to go to work, and how much I feel like I am letting the team down just for existing, but at the same time the assumption that because I took a couple of days off and because i am taking my medication regularly that all my problems have ceased to exist. I cannot get to work by 9am. I just can’t. I can’t sleep, I can’t wake up, I can’t get out of bed. How does the rest of the world do it? I can’t function like that. And holy fuck how much do I hate using the word “can’t”?

This weekend was good. We had a bit of a beer sampling here, with a sausage fest, and then tucking people up on the couch and in the spare room. On Anzac Day I hid, and then on Saturday Heather arrived, and I went to Bar Camp, and then that night we went to Shirley’s for the Unofficial Pretty Pretty Pretty launch party, which was all beauty products and amazing food, and videos, and Lisa Fur gave me a handrub that made me purr. And then the day after Heather and I had brunch at Elements, and then had BLOGFEST 2008, in which we sat down at my dining room table, and blogged for three hours straight. In that time I uploaded a fuckload of photos to flickr with tags, fixed all the colours on Pretty Pretty Pretty since the original purple that I changed the images of the template to weren’t in sexy-hexy-decimal, posted to the Wellingtonista, changed the Aucklandista template (my awesomeness was further enforced today when I managed to do what Heather failed to do yesterday – get images and links to work on the front page (in her defense, she thought I wanted exerpts instead of full posts, but I didn’t), and THEN I figured out the php to add in tags to posts and THEN I built (read: stole) some php to make it have rotating header images. SO AWESOME. I like being productive. But that did of course emphasise the suckiness of having a full time job that is not blogging, at least not blogging for the things that I love. And I know that work has been very accomodating of my recent bout of craziness, but it’s just not as easy to shake as you might think. Or probably don’t think, because you’re on the internets and therefore you’re probably already crazy too.

Miss Amy came over tonight for MakeMonday, and we wrote up our big post about our first PPP party, and while she had to go, she left me and Heather with an awesome foot-care package, so we poured ourselves a glass of bubbly and barricaded ourselves in the bathroom with zabuton (flat Japanese pillows) to perch on the sharp edge of my bath and soak our feet in mint & lavender goodness. It felt lovely, and so I decided to have a huge big bawling sob session. Awesome. Half the time Heather thought I was laughing when it was actually guttural sobs, but half the time I was laughing too, because I am pathetic and lame, and far too fucking hard on myself. It is hard to be me, and yes, that’s fucking stupid, I’m this educated smart girl with these fantastic support networks and a job, and a family, and flatmates, some of whom clean the kitchen every night, and this cat who knows that I am the centre of his universe, and a fantastic counselor who I obviously need to go and see, and yet, it is hard for me.

Some things shake me a lot from out of nowhere. Like, what happens when something happens to someone you used to love? Something awful, and when you find out about it, it throws you for the whole afternoon, but of course, it is not about you, it’s about how best to respond, to say something, to do something if it’s needed. How do you be there when you haven’t been there for many years, no matter what the reason?

I have found that lately there has been a reoccuring theme, and you know what? It’s not even lately. I just want to fix all of my friends’ lives. I want everyone to get their fucking happy ending. I don’t know how to procure those endings though, and I know that I’m not even supposed to. Just, oh, I don’t know. Can’t we all have happy endings? Please? And I don’t mean a happy ending like Jill will deliver you. Well, maybe that.

Oh, but in happy ending news? Here’s a clip from the RASSLIN’ I went to.

It was so fucking great to see Kat’n Kane. We had Rock of Love marathons, and just quiet time together, much like Heather and I are having right now. No alarms and no surprises. Lately it takes MGMT or the Deftones to wake me out of the fog on tthe bus to and from work. I don’t have solutions. I do know though that I missed my meds on Sunday, and so I will blame this on that.

And somewhere out there, unrelated to this, you’re turning 40, or you’re 40 already, and I look forward to your email next year, because that will be another three years, right? And in a thousand other stories, there was a thing that I thought was a thing. Well, not even a thing. It was a tingle. But if I’m honest, it was an amalgamation, it was so many people together. My friends could draw you a picture sight unseen. Still, it was a tingle which was nice to have.

So, I went to Bar Camp today, and this is how it was. Accordingly, I must highlight the point that hi, this is Joanna McLeod’s show, and so duh, I’m not going to talk directly about whatever whosesever my political opinions are. Instead, I will present you with my Twitters from today:

1. 15 hours ago: 1 ex-work nemisis, 2 ex work fucks, 3 workmates, 4 threadless tshirts, 5 wellingtonistas
2. 13 hours ago Hadyn says the guy sitting next to him at bar camp was surfing Hubris during a presentation. Awesome! He wasn’t cute though
3. 9 hours ago: Finally have a drink in my hand, phew! Oh, and Hadyn loves Supertramp. Haha
4. 4 hours ago:It is strange when it’s been a million years & a million hours of shit & therapy & life in betwn but u have too many drinks & go “your body &I used to be 1″
5. 3 hours agoAt Lisa’s, in my princes dress, destined for Lani’s party at some stage.”

So then there were drinks at the Loaded Hog, and discussions about me declaring Feminism on the situation, before I got Lisa to pick me up, and eventually we went to Lani’s party and then no taxis showed up and fuck, aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh, but finally I manaeged to get home now, phew!

EDIT: and some more slightly coherent takes on the above information, now that is is morning and my neighbour has woken me up all worried, I can say that Smoo broke a window last night – I’m not sure how it happened cos I was asleep on the couch and maybe he woke me up climbing in it? But consequently the curtain is molesting me now in the wind. And also, my twitters really didn’t do a good job of conveying how many actual useful conversations were held at BarCamp about things that are really very very applicable to my new job. And strangely enough 140 characters didn’t let me say what I meant which was ‘it is strange that there was this level of intimacy with someone that I haven’t had since then, and it was a long time ago, but I got a reminder of it because I saw someone I hadn’t seen for a long time, and we are strangers now and I want it to stay that way, but I want to find that level of intimacy with someone else sometime soon please, where you know their body as well as you know your own, and occasionally you’re not sure where you end and they start’. Yeah. That’s a bit better.

So this is the thing. It’s 11.37pm, on Tuesday August 7, 2007. I just got home from Wellingtonista Quiz League, on the last #2 bus, and while I listened to melancholy music the whole way home, that does not do enough to illustrate the terror I feel at holding an A5 envelope in my hand from Robyn. Yes, obviously, she has replied to my calls for someone to send me a copy of BOYS BOYS BOYS BOYS BOYS which I wrote, since I’m going to be selling it at Craft 2.0 along with my mother’s pottery (check out the blog)- anyway. But that was so long ago. I finished it in 2002, anyways, so you have to hope that I’ve changed since then. I remember glancing through a copy in August when I had dinner at Annabel’s house but that wasn’t a full-on confrontation of the way you were five years ago. But I suppose now that there are Korn videos on the TV, and Sebastian curled up on my lap, I should confront it now.

Wow, so that wasn’t quite as bad as I expected. I suppose because I wrote it in 2002, things have changed so much since then. I mean. looking at who read Boys, Boys, Boys, Boys, Boys, in so-far as who was in it, *IV said it was the sexiest thing he’d ever read, although, you know, that was after we’d had sex another time. The ex boyfriend (you know, of all of those ex boyfriends that I’ve had) has read it, but didn’t comment, surprisingly enough, for all the speaking out that he ever did when we were together and afterwards.

I had other things to say. I had photos in my flickr account to link to. I would have talked about how my new home project was Lisa and I watching Firefly at home. I would have talked about a buttload of social events that I’ve been to with the Wellingtonista, partially revolving around the Wellingtonista Quiz League and partly with awesome fresh fish at the Port Cafe last Friday, and oh, you know what? Whatever. Maybe I’ll post tomorrow or maybe I won’t. But hurray for Robyn, and now things will be awesome. Oh, and hopefully there’ll be new Hubris as soon as Heather can do it!

So Cheney is briefing Dubya on the events of the day, and of course Dubya isn’t paying much attention because he’d rather be playing with his toy cars, but when Cheney says “…oh and three Brazilian soldiers were killed today in Iraq,” George looks up and his eyes seem terrified. “Dick,” he says, “how many is a Brazilian?”

Aha ha ha ha ha. Yes, that’s right, I created a whole Country Club theme just so that I could tell you that very lame joke.

But before there was Brazil there was driving out to the airport in the crazy wind to pick up KateH on Friday night, and then cooking her rare sirloin steak sandwiches in fresh french bread with tamarillo chutney and caramalised onions, and then being picked up by our (and everyone’s!) chauffer for the night, the everylovely Miss Lisa who took us to San Fran to see Sam Flynn Scott play with Lawrence Arabia. They sounded good, but I was tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired and coming down with a nasty sore throat and cough. Katie meanwhile had enough energy to get up and sing on stage.

The next morning she and I went and had brunch at Elements before picking up more party supplies, and she vacuumed while I made Brazilian rice and finished off the feijoada. Then we jumped on my bed (Smoo declined our invitation to join us – wtf?) to listen to the Wellingtonista on Public Address Radio, which you can download here and I giggled at the fact that I got bleeped once but I mostly sounded fairly articulate. The mp3’s not online yet, but I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up. I think that we sounded like pretty smart, on-to-it people, and that’s good, because that’s who we are. And I sounded less nasally and cackly than I expected to.

After that it was nap time before finishing off preparations and heading off to pick up Lisa and Jimmy. I was planning on dressing up all fancy in my hott green dress, and fishnet stockings, and my 4.5 inch wedges, but by the time I’d found my suspenders I’d lost my stockings, and given how low cut the dress is, I thought it was also a bit short (boobs or legs, not both, after all. Not that I’d normally go for legs, until I get to the bit where I write about my day today) so I wore jeans underneath, and didn’t risk breaking my ankle on my shoes. One day I’ll find an occasion to actually wear them. Honest. Maybe when I act out a Tori Amos lyric with someone sometime – “he liked my shoes / I kept them on”. Speaking of Tori Amos, I discovered that someone most unexpected is really in to her music, but I will keep his secret. I was very very surprised though. Anyways.

Brazil turned out to be really good. Caipirinhias are a fantastic drink, especially mixed with copious quantities of cerveza. Rice’n beans is tasty, and Jimmy had made some fantastic sweets that went along with his fact that Nestle stole all the cocoa in Brazil in the 1940s and imported mass amounts of condensed milk instead. Who knew that Nestle could be so tasty and so evil at the same time (well, me, since I’m currently writign a piece on Fair Trade – and calling it Free Trade 70% of the time. Whoops)? I had bought planes, trains & automobile lollies to illustrate my facts about Brazil’s capital Brasilia having been laid out in the shape of an aeroplane and built from scratch in 1960, and also the fact that someone else snaffled, that 40% of Brazilian cars run on ethanol made from corn. I also found tasty ranch-flavoured corn kernels in the scoopermarket bins that went with the theme very well. We didn’t get around to eating fried bananas, but I did scoop out a pineapple that Karen had brought along and serve communal pina coladas in it. In fact, as the night wore on – and oh lordy, did it wear on – many, many more cocktails were served up in that same pineapple and delivered to the boys who were outside playing “soccer” and to the girls sitting civilly on the couches using many many words starting with ‘C’ for some reason. I tried to pressure people into joining the Wellingtonista Bowling League, and since everyone except Barbara, Jack and Nicole were Country Club veterans, there were many facts to be shared. Blair showed up with his iPod so we could listen to CSS and Sepultura instead of our very inauthentic attempts at Brazillian music (One Million Dollars), but no sambaing was done.

Instead the night wound down around 4am with some highly amusing and rather disturbing antics that involved a lot of mocking, bluff-calling and toe-sucking. When are people going to learn that I will always call their bluff? And when I laugh at changes in morality, I am taking the piss out of myself, as I watch myself acting out in jest parts of actions that I’d used in previous lifetimes but then in a serious capacity. This is what happened in that bathroom. This is what happened after the Placebo concert. This is what happened when you so conveniently happened to leave your laptop at my apartment and came back to pick it up at 3am. This is what happened when the boy I was hooking up with at the wedding wouldn’t come home with me so I decided to substitute you instead. And it makes me laugh, and I will always, always go for the cheap laugh.

Sunday was very slow. I went for coffees and the paper and sat and read it on the front steps in the sun while the house was cleaned up behind me, hurrah! Brad came over and did the dishes on Monday as well, so it was like, easiest party evah! We watched a million episodes of The Simpsons off the hard drive and it made me remember how horrible the time around New Year’s was for me. Shirley came down visiting from Palmy in the evening, and we all went and had dinner at Cambodinia in Kilbernie (it’s Cambodian, in case you couldn’t tell), because I wanted something more interesting than the very bland Nahkon Thai in Hataitai. Then we played DVD Cluedo and I went and finished reading the Anthony McCarthen book that I think is called The Death of a Superhero but I’m not entirely sure. If only there was some system of tubes that I could type into that could deliverme the answer…

On Monday I was still coughing up my lungs – assuming that my lungs were dry like wheatbix, so I didn’t go to work. Instead I lay on the couch and napped on and off and moaned with sickness. Brad came home and cooked us dinner and I thought about breaking Katie’s legs so she couldn’t leave but instead I took her to the airport. Today to work I wore my new green dress from Torrid with my new black opaque tights and boots. The dress is, like all my torrid dresses, too short to wear over bare legs (but not bear legs), but I thought it would be fine with the tights since there was no chance of my vajayjay showing. I was super paranoid about the dress coming up, and the tights rolling down – although being footless helped them keep their crotch in the right place – but I like the way it made it look like I had legs a million years long as I strode purposefully down Lambton Quay to meet Jessie for lunch at Kapai. We walked down to the waterfront and sat and shot the shit, and watched the Water Whirler whirl. Good times. Tomorrow I have the day off, hurrah!

So you know how I said that I’d try to update every day this week? Well, okay, so I’ve royally sucked at that. But it’s not my fault! Anji blew up my computer on Tuesday night when she was over to watch The Amazing Race so I couldn’t. So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend – trying to track down my warranty and a place to take my computer to, which hopefully won’t involve driving out to Johnsonville where I originally bought the computer.

A while ago, I started a Mixtape Club on NZM. The first assignment was a mixtape based on other mixtapes you’ve received. It took a fuck of a long time to get everyone’s submissions in, but finally I (kind of) did. Here are the linear notes that accompanied mine, so you can play along at home!

1. Patti Smith: ‘Free Money’
This song should be on every mixtape ever made, it?s just that awesome. My number one fantasy until recently has been based around sitting on someone?s floor while they play me all their favourite records which would definitely include this from Horses. But then I decided to stop waiting for the fantasy and to just buy my own bloody record player.

2. The Dead Souls: ‘One More Little Death’
“Oh yeah Jo, we all know why you put this track on”.
“Shut up, voice in my head. I really like this song”.

3. Liz Phair: ‘Fuck and Run’
When I started ninth grade, the American school I was at had a Big Brother/Big Sister programme in place. I’d circled that I didn’t want either a big brother or a big sister, and had listed ‘Grunge/alternative/weirdo music’ as my interest in life, which meant that I got matched up with one Brittany Tobiason, who wrote me a letter going “you seem about as interested in this as me, so how about we team up?”. It was 1994, and Brittany was from SEATTLE. She was basically God to me, the way she wrote lines of poetry on her cigarettes, drank rum from a Superman drink bottle and discussed philosophy over endless cups of coffee. She also made me my first ever mixtape called Jerry, which introduced me to many bands that would be incredibly important to my development, like Liz Phair, and PJ Harvey and Hole. Brittany was so fucking awesome.

4. American Music Club: ‘Last Harbour’
I once received a 23 page letter from someone who reads Hubris who’d emailed to say that since he read my site every day and it made him feel happy he wanted to send me a present for my 21st. Some people would go “freeeeeaaaaak” in reply to that, but I said “hell yeah” and he included this song on one of the compilations he sent me.

5. Bright Eyes: ‘Lover I Don?t Have to Love’
As the divine Miss Fur said on NZM “It seems to win Joanna’s affections musically you need to include songs about sex… see Bright Eyes – Lover I Don’t Have to Love…” well, that?s what she did. I heart this song and while I am of course not a shiny Emo rockstar boy, I can relate somewhat.

6. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood ‘Summer Wine’
All good mixtapes should have some auld-skool gem on it. That’s the rules. I remember singing this song on long long family car trips, and more recently I resurrected it for a compilation of summer songs I gave to everyone I was friends with that summer. I’m sorry if it puts Jessica Simpson in your head though.

7. Augie March: ‘Asleep in Perfection’
When my friend Annabel had to borrow an episode of The Secret Life of Us that I’d taped off me, she made me a mix CD called Cherries in return. This waltzy song from the Australian band who were played on the show quite a lot ties it all together.

8. Ani DiFranco: ‘Soft Shoulder’
“I will say I have saved / every letter you ever wrote to me”.
I am a prolific letter-writer, but what I hate is that if it’s an actual pen and paper affair, you give it to someone when you’re giving them metaphorical pieces of your heart, and then you don’t get it back afterwards, when it turns out that the letter receivee totally wasn’t worth your words. I don’t think the boy who used to play me this song ever kept my letters. He made sure I had very few physical momentos of him as well. But you can read all about that in my zine 101 Stories That I Want to Tell You. Haha, advertising myself in linear notes. So classy.

9. The Cure: ‘Fascination Street’
Yeah, you’ve probably heard this one many times before, but have you ever heard it loud enough? I don?t think I have. This is one of those songs that needs to be turned up so loud that all you can do is drown in it ? and “move to the beat like you know that it’s over”. It gets to be included here because the man mentioned in #4 put it on a mixtape (an actual tape!) of songs about lust. Ahhh long distance impotency, how amusing you are.

10. PJ Harvey: ‘A Perfect Day, Elise’
The boy from #8 gave me Is This Desire? with a note taped to it saying “Yes!” and I thought that was the most romantic thing in the whole wide world ever. Then he left, and I lost this CD, and when PJ played the BDO she didn?t play anything off this album, and for a while I started to think that maybe it didn’t exist at all. But of course it does, and this song is so awesome that it makes me hold my breath while it’s playing, and then I get all light-headed and that makes the song even more awesome.

11. Fur Patrol: ‘The Lover’
This song is so underrated. I put it on a compilation of all my favourite Nu Zulland Music for someone a long way away, and they said they loved it too, and that’s good.

12. Big Star: ‘13′
Phew! After all the intensity of most of the other tracks on this mix, I thought it’d be good to finish off with something incredibly sweet and simple. This came from a CD called Pimpu wa doko desuka? (Where are the pimps?) that arrived in my old work PO box, and I had no idea who the hell it was from for a long time, because it had someone’s real name on it, when I only thought of them by their online nickname. So there you go.