Hubris.co.nz

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I have been busy. I mean, I did write about it a while ago. But occasionally you get the disconnect between what you say and what people actually pay attention to.

It is strange being in an office again, having to sit in an uncomfortable squeaky chair and digest piles and piles of new information. It’s no six-page site that I’m rewriting, unlike other work that I’ve done for So Content before. And there’s a whole office full of people who all have their own working styles and customs, and I’m the stranger here so it is me that has to adjust to other people’s music. At least my eyes are starting to be able to deal with the florescent lights now. But for all my complaining about the superficial things, it is good to be working again, to feel smart and clever and valuable.

Other changes are happening, with the lease being up on Immoral Terrace at some time in the near but not near enough future. Paying for the rent on the whole house by myself will not be fun. As a consequence, I will be having to move home with my parents for a couple of months in order to pay off that debt, and also the rest of the debts that I have accrued over the past year without a steady pay cheque. I can’t wait until I don’t owe anyone money again, even though that’s a couple of months away. And then I’m going to be subletting a room in my Vitamin Cupcake’s house for a couple of months while the adorable Kate and Jason travel. I am making lists of where all my furniture and possessions will be heading – into storage, to Ngaio or to be shipped out to friends. Tom is taking the bar out of the Tiki Shack, so that will live on a little bit. We had a goodbye shindig in there the other weekend which was lovely, piles of people piled onto each other basking in the warm glow of my heater. That mattress has served hard time, alright. The lovely Smoo has promised to come back and help me move things to the tip later. He’s gone too. End of a long era. I think I miss him already if you will allow me to get soppy for a second.

People from the past have popped up recently at odd moments. I discovered something about someone and it’s still on my mind. It was somewhat of a headfuck.  Heather is coming down for my Triple X party, which I am very excited about. Less exciting is turning 30 in two days’ time. I have the grey hairs to prove it. However, at least there’s a Webstock Mini on my birthday to ease the pain, and then on the following weekend I will be helping out at FullCodePress again like I did last year. I have to meet up with Sue tomorrow to get a dress to wear to it – either one of mine that she’d borrowed, or one of Megan’s. It is handy having a wardrobe extend like that.

Along with the cold and various housing issues has come an increase in the number of television programmes I’ve been watching. Of note lately have been marathon West Wing sessions that just make me miss Good Tom and wish that I was Alison Janney, as well as contemplating becoming a cater waiter due to Party Down, and wondering if I am more pathetic than Kenny from Eastbound And Down or not.   I think that I am not, because I continue to have people who love me, and also people who want to do me, occasionally. Ask me sometime and I will tell you a very amusing story about polylove and children and how I don’t believe that the two should mix. Oh, and speaking of casual sex, you should come to this:

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

Lisa is teh awesome photomagrapher

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

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

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