Yesterday I re-read my last blog post - the one written with half a bottle of white wine running through my veins - and I learned something about myself: my spelling and grammar go to shite when I'm drunk.

For the spelling, I don't know why it should be; there's a decent check-as-you-type spell-checker in my browser from which I write these posts that underlines every misspelled or suspicious word with squiggly red lines that grasp my attention more effectively than any sexually-suggestive advertisements on TV (or it seems any word not part of popular culture since before 2003 - case-in-point: in the paragraph above, the word 'blog' is underlined in red).

As for the grammar: no Firefox extension as yet exists for giving assistance to my inner grammar nazi, so I'm left to rely on my own proof-reading ability which apparently also takes a back seat when the communicative hemisphere of my brain is fuelled by fermented grapes instead of reason and H2O.

So as I was reading what I vaguely remember writing the other day, I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and then I cried some more. I was tempted more than once to hit the Edit button on that post, but I thought it best that I leave it as is, thus turning that post into a lesson for my present and future selves of what had transpired here.

Bah, drunk again. I don't mean to make this some sort of running theme of posting blogs while I'm inebriated, but at the moment it feels like the best ideas are coming to me when I'm not thinking straight.

Once again, the reason for my slight intoxication is because there's some leftover wines at my place. No, a friend didn't leave it behind like last time - I finished that one off pretty quickly. This time, I bought this one myself. Why? Because I was told white wine was an ingredient in a good pasta sauce htat I oh so enjoyed.

If you haven't already figured-out from my food-related blog posts, I strive to make a lot of Italian dishes because I like Italian food. Oh 'like' is too weak a word for it: I've been to the same Italian restaurant for my birthday since my 21st, and when I was making travel plans for Melbourne for a friend's wedding and was told about Lygon St - a street lined with restaurants serving all manner of Mediterranean cuisine - I almost kissed my travel agent right then and there (oh nevermind that Lygon St is now in the news because of all those gang killings; that can all happen in the background while I'm chowing-down on some epic gnocchi dish for all I care).

Nom

Much like with my documenting of Pizza 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, I'm trying to do the same thing now with a white pasta sauce: create something which contains all the parts I love most about pastas based on white sauces. With Pizza 1.x, it was easy to list my goals because all of the things were based on very tangible parts With the pasta however, it's all a matter of taste.

I did however come across a pasta dish which approximated what I was after when I was at one of my favourite cafes one Friday lunch time, and so I asked one of the staff if they could maybe ask the chef to share with me the recipe so I could make something like that myself. She came back and relayed the words of the chef back to me: "...it's the same as your usual cream-and-bacon sauce, but with some white wine added."

Now I should've asked WHICH white wine they used, but because I'm not a wine connoisseur (holy crap I spelled that right while my head is swaying side-to-sode out of my rational control and in time to the music playing right now) and to my unsophisticated palette all white wine tastes like all other white wine and all red wine tastes like all other red wine - yet I can tell the difference between regular Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero... go figure - because the next time I went shopping I was planted in the middle of the wine section surrounded by more bottles of wine than there are stars in the sky, and without a damn clue as to which one to buy. So I picked one and hoped for the best.

I didn't hope hard enough.

The next time I tried my pasta sauce, I added the wine and, while it did add that little something that my normal sauces had been missing, it didn't add the right flavour, so now I'm stuck with this bottle of wine which I am now drinking down like water (and if my guitar buddy read that part right now she'd tell me off because she's trying to get me to slow-down my drinking since I still drink anything, alcohol included, like I do my Coke). I should really throw it out of just give it to somebody else who might actually enjoy it more than I, but there's another overriding part of myself that really hates being wasteful and throwing things out. So, down the gullet instead of down the bin it goes.

I don't know where it came from, but I really hate throwing things out or being wasteful. Back at my family's house my dad keeps a compost that helps fuel the garden he keeps in the back yard - I really like the idea of having our food scraps being put to good use. Also, they participate in the city's recycling program. The apartment building I'm in however, doesn't even participate in the recycling program, so every time I throw a piece of recyclable paper/plastic/glass into the massive bin at the side of the building I feel like I might as well eat a new-born baby for all the good I'm doing the world. So you know what I do to absolve my soul? I actually save-up my paper (all my utility companies still love sending me paper bills no matter how many times I click the 'e-mail me my bill' option on their websites) and when the pile is large enough, put it in my bag and TAKE IT TO WORK where they have a some semblence of a recycling program.

(I haven't even verified if the sort of recycling my work does is actually good, or if all it does is collate our various piles of waste into neat bundles of similar material and then ship it off to some overseas developing nation's slum where they drop it on unsuspecting children. If that's the case, then I might as well just throw the rubbish out and eat a new-born baby to spare the transport company all those wasted travel miles - cut-out the middle man.)

Get in my belly, I'm a terrible person

I did come to some sort of conclusion in my white pasta sauce endeavours recently, and I made a variation of that recipe (one that didn't include the wine which is why I still have so much of it to waste on myself) for my family when I stayed with them for dinner last weekend. Hell the meal even included ciabatta bread with pesto on the side. It was the most Italian my family could ever get and I swear I was peeing olive oil the following morning.

2 days after my return from the ski holiday, my first day back at work today, and I'm surprised how easy it is to slip back into my old routine: I went to work buying breakfast from Wholly Bagels on the way since I hadn't re-stocked my pantry/fridge/freezer yet (something I usually do on a Friday when waking-up late), I cleared-out a billion e-mails sitting in my inbox (something I usually do on a Monday to start my week clean), I went to the library at lunch time and got too many books again, and when I had finally cleared-out my backlog of e-mail love I went straight into programming like I hadn't left at all.

Sure, there were changes - new people brought into the team at work, my apartment mailbox filled with mail not addressed to me, and there was a note from the property inspector thanking me for leaving my apartment in such a nice clean state - but it's like there was a gap in the city just waiting for me to come back and fill it in.

I know, I've only been gone a week (or 7 working days if you count the Friday/Monday I took off before/after the ski week) so I can't really expect a lot to happen in that time, but having to wake-up in the morning in what was effectively 5 different beds over one-and-a-bit weeks and then coming back all relaxed (albeit sore - I was limping around the city today) made me look at everything a little bit differently as I walked to work this morning.

I guess what I'm experiencing is a little bit of disappointment; although the city had let me go to recharge my batteries, the city itself didn't recharge one iota. It isn't helped by the fact that the weather is still exactly the same as I had left it: grey, gloomy, as wet as a fish and as inviting as putting your hand on a hot element. And while I wore a bit of a 'ahh, I've just been on vacation' smile, it only made me notice the lack of smiles on the faces of others as I walked by.

So while the city may have left an opening for me to return to, it isn't so much a gap made by open arms as it is a gap left by grabbing-hands as it tries to fit this cog back into the machine. But unlike the feeling of being a rusty gear when I left for my vacation, I've returned a well-oiled cog.

The daily grind will get to me again - it always does - but not for a while; I'm going to make sure of that.

It's that time of year again - mid-winter and the school holidays for primary/secondary students have just ended meaning less people to crowd the mountain - time for another ski week! :D

Just like mentioned in last year's blog I set my out-of-office reply to something not-entirely professional (can't remember the exact words, but it had something like "...I'll revel in your e-mail love when I return" in it.), but unlike last year's blog I'll have a bit more skiing practice under my belt when I hit the slopes from Monday (provided the weather is good). I really enjoyed last year's ski trip, and I hope to repeat that wonderful time I had with this year's one.

What I don't want a repeat of however:

• Having the bus I took to get there hit a cow on the way up (we had to stop for another bus to come get us while we sat there in the dark with a blood-spattered and smashed bus. Sure the cow was much worse for wear (it died) but it was an inconvenience I think the passengers, the driver, and the cow could have done without)
• breaking my tailbone when I was learning to snowboard and not knowing it was broken for a month after coming back from the trip

For my friends and family, I'll do like I did last year and post daily injury stats to Twitter/Facebook. That way they'll know whether to have an ambulance waiting for me when I return.

Have you ever rung those toll-free phone numbers that food companies put somewhere on the packaging of their products so you can ask questions / give feedback / make complaints? Well, for the first time in my life, I actually rung one of those today: I rang Nestle/Maggi to find-out what happened to their Devilled Sausages Mix.

Devilled sausages have been a mainstay of the family dinner table for as long as I can remember: a meal enjoyed by all with its sweet sauce and soft apple slices, and a meal which I've taken to cooking for myself when I'm out of ideas yet still want to feel good about putting a little effort into preparing my own dinner. Using the sachets provided by Maggi (and yes, that specific brand after some time spent trying-out the others and not liking them so much), my family, and now I, have been able to churn-out a delicious meal within a short time and with almost minimal effort.

(OK, that last paragraph reads like something one of those advertising personalities that gives you meal ideas during the ads just before dinner time would say)

I thought I'd make devilled sausages for myself some weeks ago when I noticed some flavoured sausages at the back of my freezer that hadn't been touched for a looong time (let's just say the word 'months' is adequate to describe it; thank God for the refrigeration/freezing process!). Looking to the pantry, I couldn't find any devilled sausage mix, so added it to my shopping list and resolved to buy a few packets of the stuff the next day.

There wasn't any at the grocery either, and all I succeeded in doing was spending countless minutes standing like a statue before the section of the isle dedicated to all of those just-add-hot-water meals and sauces while I looked for something that just wasn't there. A trip to a larger grocery in the suburbs when I spent the next weekend with my family also proved fruitless, and when I relayed my story to my mum, we both started to worry that Maggi had discontinued the product.

Another pass at the local grocery gave me the same results, so I finally decided to ring-up the company and find-out what happened to one of my favourite meals:

"Unfortunately, the site we use to check stock availability is down at the moment, but I can ring-around, find-out if any stores in your area still have some." said the lady on the phone.
"OK, thanks." I replied.
"But don't worry, it hasn't been discontinued because it's one of our most popular products." she assured me.

I left my details with her and hoped for some good news.

Good news came in the form of a phone call the moment I returned to my desk after lunch.

"Hello." I said, answering the phone.
"Hi, is this Emanuel?" said the lady - the same Nestle/Maggi customer services lady who helped me earlier - on the line.
"Yup, that's me."
"Hi. I still can't check stock as the system is still down, but I checked our staff shop and we have some there which I can send to you to help you out in the meantime."

!!! I was excited! I gave her my address, thanked her at least twice, and put down the phone thinking ohmigod they're gonna send me free stuff!!!

I feel almost silly being so happy to receive a few packets of what is essentially powdered ingredients, but it's free stuff, and it's free stuff that I WANT. After all those weeks of trying to find this particular combination of powdered ingredients, and given my recent disappointments, it feels good to end on a high note for once.

I believe the sound I should be making at this very moment is *squee* :)

I said to expect an influx of blog posts last week. By 'influx', I did mean more than just the 2 posts that followed, but the break between was with good reason: I attended my friends' (both bride and groom are long-time friends, so is that the right apostrophe placement?) wedding over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Heck, I was even asked to share in reading a cute poem from Winnie the Pooh during the ceremony!

So while I was there, listening to the lines that bride and groom recited to each other about affirmations of their love to last until the end of time, or until a meteor strikes the Earth and exterminates all human life, I began to notice that my cheeks started tingling, and then aching. Ow, I thought, what's going on? It didn't take me long to realize that my cheeks were aching because I was smiling.

I'm not one of those stone-faced never-smiles types, but having my cheeks hurt because I'm smiling too much isn't an everyday thing for me. I did recognize the feeling though, and thought back to the other times that this happened:

• a wedding in Feb 2004
• a wedding in Feb 2008
• another wedding in Feb 2008

A very visible pattern starts to emerge.

So while some people cry at weddings, I just smile a lot more than usual; so much it hurts.

So while the rest of the country was out enjoying their holiday by being far away from their places of residence and causing traffic congestion on all the major highways, I spent Easter at home with family where we went out to watch Clash of the Titans and then order pizza for dinner. OK, that's pretty average-sounding, but our family doesn't watch movies together very often nowadays so the movie was a plus for us (we actually wanted to watch The Hurt Locker but it isn't in NZ cinemas yet. Clash made for a good substitute and we were thoroughly entertained by it).

On top of those activities, I used an afternoon to roll an egg down a hill.

Despite the Wikipedia article claiming the world-wide appeal of the tradition, I had never heard of egg rolling until about 2 weeks before Easter.

I was having lunch with a friend (the one who inspired me to write the Dirty Laundry story e-mail) and when we got to talking about what we were gonna do for Easter, she mentioned her home-country (Scotland) tradition of egg rolling. I responded with an inquiring look and the words "Egg rolling?!?" in a high pitch voice that you'd more likely find in a pre-teen child. She answered with basically what it says in the History section of the Wikipedia Egg Rolling article - that it was a symbol of the rolling away of the rock from Jesus's tomb - adding that it drew strange looks from her New Zealand friends when she did it last year.

Me being one to try new and silly things, I said I'd give it a go.

So fast-forward 2 weeks to Easter weekend. It was the afternoon and already I was screwing-up because I dropped my egg too hard into the pot of water causing a small crack to appear when it hit the bottom which let seep a little yolk. I kept telling myself that the crack added 'character' to the egg, making it look like it was battle-hardened and prepared for the challenges it was going to face.

When I had a cooled-down my battle-hardened egg, I took it outside with me and started surveying the neighbourhood for steep inclines.

I should have probably researched the topic a little more before I even began. When egg rolling was explained to me, the first assumption I made was that it was done using uncooked eggs that would splatter when they reached an obstacle or the bottom of the hill. My second assumption was that the rolling was unassisted and that you had to find a hill steep enough so that with an initial push, gravity and science would take care of the rest (Wikipedia article instead showing children pushing the egg along a non-steep lawn).

When I told her of my first assumption, 'laundry lass' said that you could use hard-boiled eggs and I felt a bit stupid at not having thought that. I didn't tell her of my second assumption because she probably already suspected I was lacking a few brain cells with my first assumption and I didn't want to give proof to her suspicions.

So while I couldn't find a nice steep grassy hill, my family's house was on a nice steep concrete road.

Steep roads - Wellington is full of 'em

Lesson learned: concrete wreaks hell on an egg shell. I pushed the thing once to send it on its way, and I could see the egg falling apart as it went down the road. The egg never made it all the way to the bottom, more often stopping by veering left or right and hitting the gutter, but when I picked it up to take back up the road to roll again the shell was badly cracked, even peeling in places. The initial crack that it received in the boiling process didn't seem so bad any more.

So I did this countless times on several streets around the neighbourhood and subject my poor egg to a lot of stress, resulting in what you see below.

"They see me rollin'..."

Like laundry lass, my actions drew several stares from people, namely strangers and passers-by: a group of girls just walking down the street, my neighbour washing his car, and the drivers and passengers of every car that narrowly missed my egg; pretty much everybody except my family who really didn't want to be associated or seen with me at that moment. It's not every day you see a guy taking photos of an egg and rolling it down a suburban street.

So, how did you spend your Easter?

Mid-March came along, and I started wondering if there would be a Blog Every Day April (BEDA) this year. In anticipation, I started stockpiling stories and topics to write about, which explains the 3-week gap since my last post. That, and I kinda directed my creative efforts into 2 story e-mails: one of which is the Dirty Laundry story mentioned in the last post, and the other which I'm holding-off from posting until the fallout it created has died-down significantly.

However, as April crept closer, the proponents of last year's BEDA movement (young-adult fiction author Maureen Johnson and a tonne of her fans of which I am one) made no mention of it, and Google doesn't seem to point to any bandwagon for us lost BEDA-2010-hopefuls to jump on.

And as March 31 became April 1st, and all I got was a bunch of sites doing the April Fools' thing, my hopes for BEDA faded, and a part of me breathed a sigh of relief while the rest of me made a sad face.

I really enjoyed BEDA last year: the challenge, the semi-rushed creative process, and the reading of blogs of other BEDA participants, particularly those of my BEDA Buddies - people grouped together to read and comment on one another's blogs in an effort to keep us all going for the whole month.

Then again, I also enjoy getting a good night's sleep and wasn't looking forward to updating the 'Blog Every Day April' category on the sidebar since modifying categories is still a bitch without the site updates I'm still working on.

So, without BEDA as an outlet for my stockpile of stories, expect an influx of blog posts over the following days as I work through the backlog in my brain and the photos I've collected on my phone.

Ad for a building, not your mum

In a previous blog post about a certain donut from my childhood, I made the following observation:

Everything is a lot larger back then compared to now (that's what she said?)

Last weekend, I managed to do something else that proved this claim: I walked through my old primary school.

My family moved around New Zealand a bunch when I was younger, so this primary school / grade school / whatever-the-hell-you-call-the-educational-institute-you've-been-enrolled-in-at-the-age-of-9, was the second-to-last primary school of mine before I moved on up to intermediate. Anyway, when I was there, I really liked the place: I made a lot of friends, the teachers were nice, and there was a lot more tree-climbing variety here than my previous school (which only had really tall trees and a policy of cutting-off the lower branches so that adventurous children like myself would be discouraged from trying to scale them). The neighbourhood and life in general around that time was really good too, so a lot of stuff from then, including the school, really stuck in my mind.

I also injured myself a lot on the school grounds that year (a remark from one of my teachers at the time in a student evaluation form: Emanuel needs to learn to control his movements more) and so made several trips to the sick/medical bay from wherever it was I happened to get injured. So I became very familiar with the distances that needed to be travelled from all corners of the school. Sometimes, a blood trail would be involved, and once I got patched-up, I would follow the the blood trail back to where it was I got hurt, familiarising myself with the distance I walked (or more likely rushed in a mild panic).

Good thing vampires didn't lurk in schools back then

So, on the way to a BBQ which was very close to my old school, I decided to take a small detour and visit the playgrounds, buildings, and trees that composed much of my life at 9 years of age.

The first hurdle was trying to actually get into the school as the entrance that I had used all those years before was now blocked-off by recent (whereby 'recent' I mean 'anywhere in the last 16 years') housing developments. After following the perimeter of the school fence some way while trying to not look like a dodgy guy who stalks schools, I found a new entrance into the main field, and from there started my exploration of memory lane.

Ah, there's the tree I fell out of, and there's where I got a bleeding nose... And after getting from the field to the netball/tennis courts: And there's where I grazed my elbow really badly. That left a good mark for several months.

It wasn't all reminiscing about injuries: I walked passed my old rooms, remembering how much bigger I thought they were when I was 9. One memory in particular was when we put a rain gauge on the outer wall of our class, having it secured to the building by means I couldn't remember. I remember placing it at what was then shoulder height and seeing how close it was to the ground. Now I stood there looking at the same spot, my mind creating a phantom of my younger self in-front of me, my shoulders now much further above the ground.

All the old buildings seemed smaller, and the distances between points were much shorter too as my longer stride let me cross what I used to believe were large concrete/grass expanses. I was a giant in a small person's memory; several sizes too small for me to fit in, yet I felt oddly at home.

I finally walked out of my old school through the teachers car park where my classmates and I once left thumb tacks behind the tyres of an unknown car on April Fool's Day, feeling like for the first time in years that I had really come a long way.

(continued from Strawberry Fare(well) - part 1)

So in part 1 of this story I explained that I was at Strawberry Fare for a goodbye dinner for an overseas friend I had met through dance classes, who was returning to their home country the following day. Actually, I lie - I spent most of last blog post explaining why the Strawberry Fare restaurant was such a big deal for me and the weird way in which my stomach finds new places to store food when it's overflowing - but that's where I left off, saying that it's the second overseas-friend-goodbye I've had to do in the span of a month.

The first goodbye had no fanfare surrounding it because a terrible rainstorm and hurricane-strength winds decided to defecate all over the plans we had for their last weekend in New Zealand with us. I had to settle instead for a very long conversation from my cellphone in which I must've spent 3-months worth of my normal cellphone credit just talking about pretty much everything while avoiding the saddening topic of their imminent departure.

For that person, the whole 'I miss you' feeling didn't really kick-in until they were back home (Belgium) and had a go at me over Facebook chat, berating me for not having Skype and a webcam/microphone like a good IT person should.

Now synonymous with my feelings regarding friends who don't live within a 20-mile radius of me

Of all the lessons I've learned as part of the 'growing-up' process, having to say goodbye to people is still the one that gets to me the most. Hell, the first time I learned it, it spawned my first space pic and started my whole foray into using the digital space art medium as an outlet for general angst.

Despite the years since then and the number of people I've had to say goodbye to, it never really got any easier.

So there I was, dinner at Strawberry Fare, already feeling a bit tired because I had been at work all day (and on a Saturday too FFS!), and being all selfish about how this farewell was going to impact me.

"My social calendar is gonna be empty now with you going away." I managed to say to the goodbye girl sometime during dinner when she sat beside me. "You're 1 of maybe only 2 people from dance class who ever invite me to anything!"
"Aww, you'll be alright Em." she said.

Will I? I wondered. The only reason I have anything on my calendar now is because I've signed-up to keyboard/piano classes to fill-up my free time. While relearning a long-rusted skill is particularly exciting, it's no substitute for general hanging-out with friends.

So, hugs were exchanged, a kiss on the forehead was made, and I tried ever so elegantly to walk out of the restaurant, after paying for my epic dinner/dessert of course, when said meal was sitting in my expanding stomach and causing me to waddle once again like a penguin.

It made for an awkward exit, made even worse by the fact that I walked into the door when I turned-around to leave.

Meh, close enough

Well, making people laugh isn't the worst last impression you could make right?

I went to Strawberry Fare last night! :D

OK, so I guess I should explain why that is such a big deal for me. It started a long time ago, back in high school...

*cue flashback sequence harp tune*

Back then, I had a friend (still have, although I don't see her much nowadays since she moved city, although I'll be attending her wedding come April!) who often went to Strawberry Fare. Now, her family didn't go there so often as to think that Strawberry Fare was all they ate every Saturday evening, but enough times to make you think that it was one of their favourite places.

Strawberry Fare is a dessert restaurant, specializing in gigantic meal-sized desserts - yes, you can swap-out your dinner for one of their desserts and feel full. Every time my friend would come back from this place she'd regale us with tales of how decadent the dessert was, or how sweet the cakes were, etc etc ad infinitum. The stories fed-upon my curiosity and my sweet tooth, building atop each other from high school through university, and eventually my mind painted a picture of a place bathed in glowing reviews and surrounded by an aura of good times to be had.

The details of the stories faded once my friend moved away, but the feeling they left inside me stayed for a long time, and were still with me when I would finally eat at Strawberry Fare in late 2008.

(Note: I have mentioned the Strawberry Fare story before in my post: Too. Much. Food. as part of Blog Every Day April 2009. If you've already read that one, then think of the following paragraphs as filling-in the gaps of that story)

I was with a bunch of people who I knew mostly through work. We had eaten dinner at a nearby restaurant already, and were actually pretty full (we ordered and shared food expecting 1 extra person who didn't turn up until near the end). That late guy though, having not eaten as much as us, said he'd stick around for dessert. Somebody came-up with the idea of going to Strawberry Fare for dessert, and all of my senses heightened (imagine a dog's ears going up in alert) and focussed on that suggestion.

"Yes!" I said, not heeding the fullness of my stomach. It's only dessert, I thought, it can't be that much, despite what everyone else has been telling me for last almost-decade.

So the group all headed for Strawberry Fare, anticipation building inside me like a child on the eve of Christmas.

The desserts all looked pretty expensive, so at first I thought this place was overcharging. I stuck with a pretty safe bet - a cheesecake, elegantly described in a blurb that contained more words than there were actual ingredients in your average cheesecake - and when I made my order the little cynic inside me started disbelieving that a cheesecake could cost so much.

The little cynic quickly shut up when I got served THAT MUCH cheesecake.

Not the cheesecake I got, but to help you with the scale of things, imagine each pixel up there is a centimetre in real life, and that the plate it's on is the size of the moon

I was full, but somehow that didn't matter anymore. I had to go on because a) I was finally at Strawberry Fare and was learning that all the legends were true, and b) I am going to have to pay for this at the till later.

So I ate. I got through half of the cheesecake before my stomach reached capacity and started calling-in favours from the nearby organs to use them to store any excess food.

*return from flashback*

So what was I doing there last night? I was there for a goodbye dinner/dessert for an overseas friend returning to their country of origin (USA); the second overseas friend I've had to say goodbye to within the span of a month...

(to be continued, because I really shouldn't be up this late when tomorrow is Monday and I gotta go to work; Monday is bad enough already without me adding sleep-deprivation to the mix)

Question: what the hell is FQ?

No-longer-on-dial-up girl's Facebook status made mention of her being exciting about it being out. FQ? I thought, WTF? Last time she did this, it was ANTM, which, thanks to Google, I was able to find-out meant America's Next Top Model.

So I started thinking that maybe it's another TV show, but nothing that came to mind had a 2-word title with the first word beginning with F and the last word beginning with Q. Google wasn't much help this time either, pointing me either to fashion publications, or letting me know that it's the SMS version of "fuck you".

So I just asked her what FQ could possibly mean, and she dodged the question by pointing-out one of my eccentricities instead.

There are just way too many acronyms for me to keep up with now. I don't know whether to blame computing (where almost every new technology or idea conceived can be shortened into a TLA (three-letter acronym) or XTLA (extended three-letter acronym)), or the trend towards laziness in our written language that I mentioned in my last blog post, for this over-abundance of acronyms.

There was a time when I used to refuse putting my written words into acronyms. This was when I was first introduced to the world of IM when a friend of mine suggested I install ICQ on my computer, circa 2000 AD. From then I was exposed to a new language; a language of LOLs, ROFLs, OMGs, and emoticons. For a long time I replaced LOLs and ROFLs with "hahah" and the like, and expanded every word I could because I thought I was 'above' degrading my English. (Looking back, I realize I was just being a pompous jackass in the same way some people say "I don't have a television; I read.")

I did eventually succumb to the use of acronyms in chat messages, texts, e-mails, and this blog. Hell, I even say LOL in real life. I did draw a line somewhere: I continue to refuse using those kinds of acronyms and smilies in more important communiques, like essays, reports, documentation, or other formal messages. And in all of this I continue to use proper punctuation and grammar, because nothing makes baby Jesus cry like reading a headline that says: Students failing because of Twitter, texting

lolcats definitely haven't helped the situation either...

Aside: the first acronym ever given to me over ICQ was ASL (age/sex/location), by some random Australian girl who found me just 1 day after I had installed ICQ. I had to ask her what it meant, because Google didn't exist then. She was the only random IM chat buddy I ever had.

So I still don't know what FQ means in the context of no-longer-on-dial-up girl's status update. Ideas?

Number of acronyms in this blog post: 23

It's a bright sunny day in my little corner of New Zealand. I'm looking out the window on this lovely Saturday morning and up above are blue skies and white fluffy clouds, the Metservice says it's 22.9 degrees Celsius, and my watch is telling me that now is a good time to go fishing (yeah, something to do with setting my longitudinal position and the phases of the moon, don't ask me to go into detail).

The only problem with this picture is that the window I am looking out of is not any of the ones at my apartment, but rather the ones at my work building. Yep, I'm at work today :(

While I'd rather be anywhere but here, I don't hate coming to work on a weekend. On the rare occasion that I do find myself walking to work, it's usually morning when the streets are pretty empty, and when I arrive at the building it's nice and quiet and there's usually nobody else around. I find that the quiet of the weekend and the feeling that this city's population has magically been cut in half help me sort-out my thoughts for a much more productive couple of hours than the busy office environment usually does.

The office may be empty, but today, and for the last couple of days, the streets are anything but.

There are a bunch of big events going on: 2 AC/DC concerts, a Them Crooked Vultures concert, Wellington Cup Day (horse racing, although the focus of such events is never on the horse racing), next week we play host to the Rugby Sevens, and to top it all off, docked at the harbour are some very VERY large cruise ships with LOTS of tourists.

So the streets are packed, it's hella busy outside, and when I walked around during my lunch break the other day my ears honed-in on several foreign accents, mainly American. Accents weren't the only odd thing that day; a massive line coming-out of the Wellington Cable Car was the other:

I don't think anybody in this line is from around here...

Long lines aren't a very common sight around here. When they do appear, they're usually leading towards an upper-middle-class retail/department store with some sort of epic store-wide sale going on. We don't often get 60 metre lines streaming-out from what is effectively a 7-minute tram ride between the CBD and this city's gardens.

But maybe I'm just being too cynical. Tourists aren't a bad thing - I even enjoyed being one the last time, despite being mistaken for a local and asked which way to the immigration offices - and my lack of enthusiasm towards The Cable Car is probably because for years I used it as one of my methods of transport to/from university, thus relegating one of this city's best attractions to the background of public transport vehicles that help this city function.

Maybe I've just lived here too long.

A friend of mine, upon learning that I live by myself, made the claim that I either had to: a) lose some part of my sanity, b) develop a coping mechanism, or c) find some strange hobby, in exchange for my solitary living situation. He was of the mind that only eccentrics live by themselves, and that by choosing to live by myself, somewhere along the way I have unwittingly sacrificed a part of my facade of 'normal behaviour'.

Of course I denied everything, distancing myself from his crazy theory, particularly option A, as hastily as I could. That of course left me with options B and C which, if you stretch it, aren't really that far removed from option A.

Thinking about it though and looking back on the things that have happened since moving out (the first time), it turns out that the guy wasn't completely wrong.

Coping mechanisms developed:

• talking to myself
• singing out loud
• blogging more often
• watching Home and Away
• joining, using, Twitter

Hobbies developed:

• baking
• giving-up on baking
• bringing baking back into my life, but in a very reduced capacity
• renewing my guitar playing
• making meals, and having some pride when doing so

So with that last bullet point, I didn't actually develop cooking skills after moving out, but before that moment cooking always felt like a chore. Now though, it feels more like something I need to perfect; a skill I need to improve and which I really enjoy doing so. The dinner I made for myself tonight is one such example.

Motivated by the idea that I could never get everything I always wanted out of a pizza, or that if I could I'd have to fork-out extravagant amounts of money for it (OK, so pizzas aren't expensive, but the combination of all of the things I liked would have made a pizza more than I would be willing to pay for it), I decided to combine all of my favourite parts about the pizzas I have ever eaten, into 1 epic pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

My epic pizza prototype: Pizza 1.0

Throughout the pizza-creation process, I read-aloud the pizza base instructions that I've pretty much already memorized, and sang-along to whatever music was playing through my TV/Xbox. And after putting the pizza into the oven, I was so excited about it that I told the world via Twitter.

(Unfortunately, in my haste to try-out my new creation, I forgot to take photos of it after it was cooked. Whoops.)

The verdict? I need to work on the cheese-stuffed crust part of it - I either didn't use enough cheese or the right kind of cheese because what I had inside the crusts melted and thinned-out, leaving a not-very-cheesy hollow crust - but everything else was exactly how I liked it.

A quick internet search has given me some ideas to try for Pizza 2.0 (use mozarella cheese, or cheese strings), but today has really illustrated just how right my friend was about what has happened to me since living on my own... and here I am blogging about it.

*sigh*

First of all: I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

I've missed my soap *sniff*

And for those of you who didn't understand what I mean by that, I've moved back into the city this weekend, meaning I can get back to watching Home and Away, enjoying showers that have water pressure high enough to actually penetrate my hair and reach my scalp, and not have to worry too much about train timetables. In short, the things I wrote about when I left the city the last time in this old blog post, are back in my life. (Except I may have missed the boat on the Home and Away front since it'll go on a break over Christmas / New Year's, leaving me to watch something else in its stead, most likely The Biggest Loser if last year was anything to go by.)

During the move though, I discovered something quite interesting about my dad: he can't hear some common high-pitched noises.

As we were both waiting in my new place for the movers to come along with the rest of my stuff, we got to playing-around with the glass-top (or maybe it's some kind of ceramic?) kitchen hob. The buttons on it are touch-sensitive, and as I discovered how to turn it on, my dad read aloud the passage in the instruction manual that said that each press of a button is "...accompanied by an acoustic signal." ie: a beep.

"Acoustic signal"

"So where's the noise?" my dad asked.
"There," I said, pressing a button, "can't you hear that?"
"No."
"OMG WHAT?"

I continued to press buttons to try evoke some oh-yeah-I-heard-that facial expression from him, but he could not hear the thing! I brought this up with the rest of the family at the next lunch, and my brother was equally shocked. My mum wasn't however, and regaled us with a tale of how he tried to search for his watch while the thing was beeping and driving her crazy, all while he was unable to pinpoint its location with his ears.

In his defence, my dad blamed years of New Year's fireworks celebrations in the Philippines (a valid excuse if you ask me: if you've ever been to the Philippines at New Year's, it sounds like being in a war zone, or at least the war zones that movies and video games have been presenting me).

As for me, I've been reminded just how fragile these ears of ours are, and will be ever-more vigilant with the volume of my mp3 player and computer headphones, so that hopefully, by the time I reach my dad's age, I can still recognize when my appliances are trying to get my attention.

I ran into a lot of people I know over the lunch break today:

• a husband-and-wife couple from work
• the friend of one of my own friend's sisters
• someone from ceroc
• another workmate
• an ex-girlfriend of a friend's friend (lol)
• an old classmate
• and another person from ceroc

Of those 7 meetings, the first 5 were all on my way to lunch. And with the exception of the first ceroc person, all those encounters went smoothly.

We didn't spot each other until we were fairly close, and by then it looked like it was going to be one of the usual wave-at-each-other-as-you-close-the-distance-between-you-then-continue-walking-in-opposite-directions kind of street meetings. We gestured at each other, said hello, and continued walking. Either by accident or on purpose she touched my arm as we went passed each other. I took this as a sign that she wanted to say something, so I stopped and turned around.

She continued walking. So, fixed to the ground and watching her walk away, I was thinking, Huh, maybe she doesn't want to talk. As soon as that thought finished, she looked back and, seeing me standing there, probably started thinking that I wanted to talk. So she stopped, turned around, and walked back towards me.

What was supposed to be a simple street meeting turned into an misreading of signs followed by me awkwardly trying to explain my way out of why I stopped.

If only it ended there

I ended-up explaining myself twice, and even then I wonder if she understood what I was saying because nerves and general silliness were running things by then making me talk a bit faster than usual; maybe too fast to understand.

After that incident, it got me thinking about other meetings that should've been simple, but have been screwed-up because I was being myself.

The example that came to mind was something made possible by my short-sightedness (physical, not figurative). Being short-sighted means I've learned to recognize people from a distance using other visual cues than just one's face: their clothing, hair, the way they walk, etc. Despite the additional clues, this method still has a pretty high failure rate.

A few years ago, I was meeting a friend of mine for lunch at the bookstore outside my work. Inside, I spotted somebody who, from behind, fitted the description of the person I was looking for: short girl, long straight blonde hair, skinny, and wears the sleeves of her jersey up to her fingertips so she can curl the ends around her knuckles. The colour of her clothing also matched stuff I've seen her wear before, so I was pretty sure this was the person I was looking for.

To grab her attention, I threw my jacket at her head.
The girl turned-around, my jacket still on her head, and she wasn't the person I was looking for.

I was quick to apologize, explaining she looked like somebody I knew, and it was then I saw my friend... just to my right, watching the whole sad exchange go down.

Because it isn't enough for me to make a fool of myself in-front of my friends, I have to involve strangers too.

Before entering October, I told myself that I'd hold-off the blog posts so I could save-up some interesting stories to write a birthday-themed story e-mail to my friends. It's been over a year since I last wrote one, mainly because in place of writing short stories every couple of months I've resorted to writing even shorter blog posts every couple of weeks. I guess if you do a word count comparison on either method, it kinda balances out.

Thus explains this month's lack of blog activity; I don't wanna repeat stories both on this site and in my e-mail, but at the same time I don't really know what stories will make the final cut, so I'm hoarding everything to myself right now.

It does kinda say something about the pace of my life though: it's pretty slow. So much time between fun and exciting things that I have to take an entire month's worth of events to come-up with a decent length story e-mail.

I mean, when I was in primary and intermediate school, one of the first assignments you'd get at the beginning of the school year was to write an essay (with the word count of said essay steadily increasing with your age) about what you did over the summer break, which for us southern hemisphere folk is over December/January, so you always had a lot of material to draw from: Christmas, presents, the special meals, New Year's, visits to/from (extended) family which often meant going overseas... you get the idea.

Still an exciting time of year, although I'm the one playing Santa nowadays

Of course, when I was younger, everything was exciting and worth telling the world (or your teacher and friends) about. Nowadays, being all grown-up means that you fall into a routine, and things that form a part of the routine aren't always worth telling others about.

In my own efforts to keep the happenings of the grown-up world just above the threshold of boredom, I keep a running thought at the back of my mind to try mix things up at the most mundane of times, eg: thinking with my stomach, writing "hilarity ensues" in my bug reports, spinning in my chair... little things to remind myself and others that it doesn't have to be "same shit different day" all the time.

But it's not my everyday life which will make it into my story e-mail - I doubt my friends want to read about me installing large software packages over the course of a day again. Nor do I think they want to read things like:

Today, I heard quacking from the street. I looked outside my window and saw a lone female duck walking along the grassy part of the footpath of our street. In spring, you usually see ducks paired-up, so I wondered where the male duck was. The thought bothered me for the rest of the afternoon.

My life is average.

Looking back through my previous posts, I'm quite surprised to see that the books I read haven't really been mentioned. There is no Books/Reading/Library category (well, there will be one after I write this up) despite books, reading, and the library being the things I carry most often, the thing I do in my spare time, and one of my favourite places to just kill time in Wellington, respectively.

(Hell, it's books that propelled me to write all the sorts of stuff I keep in the Writing section of my site, which in turn transformed the main page of this site into more of a blog than just updates of my projects like it used to be. And it's authors like Maureen Johnson who got me into Blog Every Day April. Suffice it to say, books, writers, and writing have definitely made things more interesting around here.)

Authors and their blogs do get mentioned here or there on occasion. Today's mention will be Scott Westerfeld, a science fiction author whose more popular works actually live in the young adult (YA) section of the library: the Uglies "trilogy" (4 books, with a 5th as a sort of companion of the Uglies universe to be added), and the Midnighters trilogy.

The author is also in talks for a possible movie adaptation of the series

I actually came across Scott's work when it was just stuff in the vanilla-sci-fi section of the library (The Risen Empire, and sequel The Killing of Worlds). I've been meaning to read his Uglies trilogy for a while - I even had it down as something I might buy for myself last Christmas - but only got around to it now because the popularity of the series means the books are always on loan.

I managed to get a hold of the first book in the series, Uglies, last week, and was so hooked that I used every spare moment I had to read it and finished just yesterday. When I went to return the book today, I looked-up the sequel, Pretties, in the library database to see if it was available. Just my luck - the 3rd copy of the book was available! So I made a bee line for the W authors in the YA section of the library... and couldn't find it there :|

Hmm, must be in one of those special displays or other sections that highlight good books, I thought, so I started going through the entire YA section of the library, searching for this one book.

So that's how I spent my lunch break - looking like a lost soul, travelling many times over the same ground, drawing stares from the seated readers as they watched and wondered why this grown office-working adult male is wandering around the section of the library filled with books mostly aimed at teen and pre-teen girls...

I eventually found it after referring to the library database once again; seeing that the book was just returned today, and finding it in the Recently Returned section of YA. But my discovery-of-the-day award would actually have to go to this new category of YA books that I came across.

On the same shelf as long-running YA series' with categories such as 'detective stories', 'chick lit', 'horror', and the like - each separated by a vivid appropriately-labelled yellow bookend - was a category so specific that I was surprised to find it filled with just as many books as every other category:

Exclusive academies for rich kids who form cliques

The kind of stuff you'd find in there? Gossip Girl.

As a sort of follow-up to an earlier gripe about the difference between my perceived and actual age, just last week I got ID'd when buying a beer... *sigh*

Upon complaining about it, one person suggested I grow a beard, one person showed some sympathy by saying she gets ID'd at the supermarket (can't link to it as it's on my Facebook profile), and another person suggested growing a beard. See a pattern there?

And over a dinner with friends just this weekend, growing facial hair was brought-up again - although in the context of the recent ski week and the things we did to keep warm.

"So why don't I try growing a beard?" they asked. My response is that, even if it will solve my age issues, it brings with it a whole new raft of problems; if I let my facial hair grow a bit, I start to look like a Mexican car thief.

I don't have any photo evidence of this, but there are plenty of photos of my dad in the family photo album from his facial hair days, and boy does he look dodgy. One photo in particular sticks with me, an action shot taken of our whole family at the Auckland Zoo soon after we moved to New Zealand. In it, my mum and dad are walking together with my mum pushing a stroller, and both my brother and I are running ahead of the 2 of them. Every time I see that photo, I look at my dad and think, Man, I wouldn't trust that guy around my kids or car, and then let the irony of my thoughts slowly sink-in as I realize that I am one of his kids, and that I don't own a car.

I don't really look like my dad, but I tend to see a lot of my parents in myself. eg: musical ability from my mum, my aptitude for chess and choosing cooking meals over baking from my dad, etc. So when I forget to shave for a while and see a 5-o'clock-the-following-day shadow on my face, I keep seeing my dad from that photo...

Since I'm from a country filled with stories about how people dig up and steal phone cables from the ground only to sell them back to the phone companies they stole them off, or about how you can get scammed and stabbed on the buses/jeepneys, or how everyone drives with their doors locked lest somebody open it and steal from you while you're idling at an intersection, I tend to put a high price on my perceived trustworthiness in an attempt to differentiate myself from my crazy little country of birth.

So I'll just have to put up with the young 'un treatment, because given the choice between that or looking like I'm going to jack your car and entice young children with candy, I'd rather deal with the former than hinder my friend/career/life prospects.

For whatever reasons (probably dance classes... yeah, I blame dance classes) this last year has had me meet a whole lot of new people who span a whole range of ages. And for whatever other reasons, one of the things new people like to find out about another person is how old they are.

I often use age as an indicator to figure-out how much silliness I can get away with (older people) or how much restraint and maturity I should show (younger people). (Dunno why it's that way around; if anything I should be sillier amongst the younger like my nieces, and show maturity with those older like my grandparents.) I'm sure others use age to gauge other things, but one thing that happens to me over and over again, and with increased frequency as of late, is that people underestimate my age.

'Everyday' examples include getting ID'd at bars, purchasing alcohol from stores or the grocery, or even the occasional R18 movie. During my recent ski trip, when I hired ski pants from a ski hire shop, the day I hired them I got asked if I was 18 or under. When time came to return the ski pants, I got asked again. I really should've said yes because that second time the salesperson had an item vs days hired price chart in-front of him and I could see the difference in price between 18-and-under and adult hire. If only I had lied, I could've gotten almost 50% off the hire price! Dammit!

Stuff for cheap and all I have to do is reinforce others' assumptions? Sweet!

But for 'non-everyday' cases, when it's encountering new people who I see often and who get enough time to form all sorts of opinions and impressions about me before I even work-up enough courage to find them on Facebook, things get a bit more annoying.

At a big dance party last year, a friend from ceroc (not amazing baking girl, so that really only leaves 1 other person at that time) and I were discussing our high school years, when she said "That should be easier for you to remember, since it can't have been that long ago for you." I looked at her weird before asking her how old she thinks I am, and then giving her the answer. Signs that my response threw her off could be easily observed: an almost-awkward silence followed, during which time I could see the cogs slowing inside her head and her thought processes coming to a bit of a halt as this new fact didn't seem to coincide with everything else that she thought she knew, and so the operators inside her brain had to take the system down for a while to remove the spanner I had thrown in the works.

The same thing happened again more recently with another new ceroc friend (different topic of conversation, same blank response), and again just last week with a complete stranger who, to her credit, was just asking everyone their age to get a range and find-out if anybody else there is her son's age so she can go back to her son and tell him that yes, people your age do indeed take dance classes.

Then of course there was the door lady at dance class who asked if I had a student card...

As great as it is to learn that everybody thinks I look young, it does come with some caveats: not only does my age get underestimated, but my abilities get underestimated too. In the case of getting ID'd, the bouncer or salesperson doesn't pass any long-term judgement; they only require I pass the age test, and all I have to do for that is throw some government-issued photo identification at their face. Undoing the damage caused by the impression that you've just left high school however, is a little harder - I spend half my time copping young 'un jokes, and the other half trying to prove that I do indeed have a full-time job and a university degree.

The long-term challenge however, is that if the stereotypes are to believed, my Asian genes are going to ensure I look like this until I turn 60 (provided I even live that long), at which point all my hair will immediately turn grey, I'll grow a long beard, and whenever somebody asks me a question, I will stroke said beard sideways, speak in riddles, and in the process give out sage advice.

Why do they call it 'taking a dump', when you're actually leaving one?

When you're young, your age is an indicator of the number of years you've been around, the amount of stuff you've seen and done, the percentage of the multiplication tables you're expected to know, and the bigger that number, the cooler you are. When you're older (and heck, you don't even have to be that old before you reach this tipping point) it's an approximation of the years you've got left, the amount of stuff you haven't seen or done, the percentage of mathematics you've been taught and since forgotten, and the bigger that number, the less-cool you seem to feel.

Age sure is a strange thing.

Recently, I haven't been given much of an opportunity to watch the Aussie soap opera that had captivated me during my short stint of living on my own: Home and Away. In that linked blog post I said that the TV station here did a Home and Away omnibus on the Sunday morning so people who come home too late from work on the weekdays (ie: myself) can catch-up on the whole week in one sitting, but given the events of the last couple of weekends (an out-of-town ceroc dance party and a ski week covering 2 weekends), I haven't had a chance to watch the omnibus either.

I've missed so many omnibus Sundays that I find I'm no longer looking forward to waking-up Sunday morning to watch the show, and so I think I've been weaned off Home and Away.

Missing a month's worth of Home and Away will make it hard for me to get back into it; I remember missing a few days once, and when I returned I found myself asking lots of "How did that / When did that happen?" questions. Sure it won't be hard to fill-in the gaps by making assumptions here and there and just hoping that those puzzle pieces fall into place when the characters bring-up things from the past as they often do (that's pretty much how I started-out when I began watching at the end of the 2008 season), but it's my interest in the show that has waned so far into the 'meh' section of my own personal Care Metre that what's left isn't enough to motivate me to do that.

Meh

Now this piece of news will delight some of my friends, particularly those who saw my watching of the show as an epic character flaw (one person even decided to wait until we next met to call me a douche upon learning this fact). Oh you guys may be dancing around happily, but don't count this as a major victory just yet; remember I still watch American Idol with an almost religious fervour! I even bought David Cook's album! (winner from the 2008 season) Hah!

But to the others who I found-out also watch Home and Away and with whom I shared moments of conversing about the plot and the people, it looks like we'll have 1 less thing to talk about, and that makes me particularly sad :(

Circumstances do change however; I expect to be in the city again some time this year. And maybe then, just maybe, I'll be back to a place within walking distance of my work, finishing-up at my usual time, strolling home at a steady pace, and just happen to find myself in-front of the TV before 5:30pm on a weekday.

Tomorrow, I catch a bus to a city some 4-and-a-half hours away to stay with friends for the night, before all of us head for the ski fields to enjoy a week-long snowy vacation :)

It's been a long time since I last went skiing, or played-about in the snow. Last time I ever did both was... *thinks about it* ...1999. Damn, 10 years! I've been looking forward to this for a while, and have used it as an excuse to make several sweet purchases in the past couple of weeks: new jacket, beanie, socks, and sunglasses.

However, I'm wondering if my workmates will actually notice my absence.

No, I'm not being emo about things. Rather, I was noticing how embedded and automatic some responses or phrases are in some of my workmates that they either forgot that I'll be away next week, or forgot that we don't work weekends in this country:

Workmate farewell #1: "Enjoy your weekend."
Workmate farewell #2: "See you next week."
Workmate farewell #3: "See you tomorrow." (it's Friday today...)

I guess I'm just reminded of those images of Socially Awkward Penguin when it says something along the lines of: Taxi driver drops you off at the airport. He says, "Enjoy your trip!" You say, "You too!"

I love you internets...

If, come Monday morning, my empty chair doesn't remind them, then I hope my out-of-office reply will remind them where I am. Here's what mine's set up to say:

If you're reading this, then I'm out enjoying the snowy slopes of my ski trip... or faceplanting into the snow. Given the winter we've been having, you think it'd be smarter for me to go somewhere sunny eh?

I'll be back in the office Monday 27th July, hopefully in 1 piece, without too many bruises or leg/arm/neck braces.

Very professional, I know.

What I don't know though, is if I'll get internets up there, but I'll try remember to Tweet / update Facebook status daily from my phone with my injury statistics.

So... see y'all in a week-and-a-bit :)

I've just come back from watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with some friends. I organized the get-together and screening as a birthday present for one of those friends, Claire (the same Claire as previously mentioned in this old story e-mail), and wow, much better than all the previous Harry Potter movie adaptations that came before it.

I give it a thumbs-up for the story-telling: where all the previous movies had a rather disjointed method of telling the story (eg: the 5th movie using those newspaper-esque montages to advance the plot, yet still relying on your prior knowledge of the book to fill-in any gaps), this one cut-out the right bits from the book such that what was left was a good enough story it's own right.

So Happy Birthday Claire! I hope you enjoyed it - I certainly did :)

Anyway, today turned-out to be an interesting and fun day. Not just because of said movie screening to end my day, but also because of the way the day started...

---
I visited my doctor this morning! Yes, exclamation mark! It's been years since I last saw the family doctor - whenever I get one of those run-of-the-mill illnesses (winter cold, the flu, SARS) I tend to just let the illness run its course and cheer my body's defences on. I'm still familiar with the whole process of visiting the doctor, but with the swine flu scare gripping the country and wringing every last modicum of usefulness from the national health system, today's visit was a bit more... interesting.

It started like any other early morning visit to the doctor. I entered the building to the reception and waiting area, a little surprised to see that there were many others here already. It may only be 8:35am, but it looks like things are already in full-swing. I made my way towards reception to let them know I've arrived.

Me: "Hi, I'm here for my 8:30 appointment [yeah, I'm a bit late] with Dr Watson."
Receptionist: "OK, I'll just add that in here..."

*receptionist types/clicks a few keys/buttons*

Receptionist: "Now, have you been experiencing any flu-like symptoms?"

Well that's new. I don't remember having to answer questions like that, or any questions at all actually, when signing-in before. When I rang-up to make this appointment last week, it was about some itchiness in my joints. But in the weekend between then and now I developed a headache and sore throat. Headache's gone, but sore throat is still there.

*cough cough* Flu-like symptoms? Me?

It makes sense they'd ask that, being worried about swine flu and all. I better answer the lady's question.

Me: "Well, I have had a sore throat recently..."
Receptionist: "OK, I'm gonna have to ask you to wear a mask then."

*receptionist brings up a box of disposable mouth/nose masks*

For a sick person being condemned to wear something that would advertise my sickness - I might as well have worn a sandwich board with "Swine flu party right here!" written on it - I didn't actually mind complying. In-fact, I pulled the mask out of the box with too much enthusiasm, and then proceeded to ask the receptionist for instructions on how to properly wear the thing. Sure, I knew how it works, seeing all those pictures on the news with people wearing the masks, but I was so stoked at the idea of actually putting one of these things on and joining the millions around the world who also have them.

So I took a seat in the waiting area and put the mask on, wearing it a bit too proudly - probably just as well that it covered my mouth so that nobody could see the stupid grin on my face. I looked around at the other patients in the waiting room, and found myself somewhat alone; the only other person in the room with a mask was a small boy who didn't really wear it, but had his mother put it up to his mouth when he was coughing.

I turned to look at the the children's playpen which was situated next to me, only to find it devoid of all books and toys. A sign above the pen stated that: "Books and toys have been removed for the duration of the flu season." They're really taking the whole flu thing seriously.

I wasn't all by my lonesome for very long. No, the next few incoming patients didn't declare any flu symptoms, but one of them turned out to be my friend and sort-of neighbour (she lives up the street from me) Clare (not the same person whose birthday it was and who I'd be watching Harry Potter with later tonight). After she told reception that she was here for her appointment, she looked around the waiting room for a place to sit, and overlooked me... twice! The damn mask has made me all but anonymous, reducing me to a member of the generic group of Sick People Who Need To Wear Masks.

Where's Waldo?

I pulled down the mask, said her name, and waved at her. Then she noticed me and sat down in the chair across from me.

Neighbour Clare: "Hey Em. I didn't notice you with your mask on."
Me: "Heh, I'm actually finding it a bit too fun! I'm expecting news cameras to show up any minute."
Neighbour Clare: "Haha, yeah. I wish I had my camera here so I could take pictures of this."
Me: "I already tried to do that with my cellphone, but the battery's low. And to think, I got this mask when I was just coming in for an itch!"

We talked for a bit until the doctor came out to find me. I followed him into his office where I immediately noticed that he was wearing a mask too, albeit much cooler looking than mine: his looked to be made of much tougher material and had what I'm guessing is a filter (a small cylinder that jutted-out the front of the mask just a little).

After seeing the doctor, I made my way to the pharmacy about a block away to get my prescription medicine. Not only did the doctor get me something for the itches (turns out it was some pretty weak eczema) but also the sore throat (tonsillitis, whoop whoop). I handed over my prescription to the pharmacist, and as I was killing time by browsing the products at the pharmacy, I came across something called "mp3 gel douche".

Play your music, and become a douche, in gel form?

When time came to pay for my medicine, I was expecting to have to fork over epic amounts of money for each of the meds. I was just taking out the credit card when the pharmacist said, "That'll be $9".

NINE DOLLARS! NINE NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS!! I quickly stuffed the credit card back into my wallet and paid in cash instead! Looking at the invoice, the government subsidy on prescription medicines reduced each item to $3. Yay for state-funded drugs! :D

For just 9 bucks I was able to transform my backpack into my own personal medicine cabinet, with supplies to fight bacterial infections and skin irritation for a month! Just like when I bought a McDonalds Apple Pie to discover they had cut the price of it in half, the $9 price tag for all this medicine made me feel like I had just won something. And to top it all off, I managed to get away with a souvenir: when I was paying for the visit to the doctor, I asked the receptionist if I could keep the mask.

She said yes.

My new Facebook profile pic

These 2 weeks have been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me: lots of highs, lots of lows, and not enough time for things to sit still so I can take stock of everything that's happening.

Example of high: ceroc weekend / dance party at Palmerston North and probably everything associated with it: I got to put on a waistcoat and bow tie, visited the Tui Brewery as an aside, and the road trip to/from the event put me in a car with 3 beautiful girls - and no, I'm not just saying that because there's a good chance that at least one of them will stumble across this post (damn Facebook).

Example of low: having a talk with my folks about my apartment-hunting situation and then it dawning on me that I may not be being honest with myself about what it is I really need.

So the low as described above doesn't have a paragraph as large as the good thing I listed, but it really sewed some doubt into me; not just over the apartment-hunting, but over every other shitty little thing which has gotten to me since the dawn of time. Some of those things were really stupid complaints (like this damn itch behind my knee that refuses to go away) but once the doubt crept in, it opened the flood gates behind it and I took a downward spiral into emo-dom.

Throughout this whole ordeal, it feels as if my mp3 player - a Creative ZEN (I got the black 16GB model, not the pink 2GB that seems to show-up by default) - has been able to gauge my mood and put on the appropriate songs to match.

At the beginning: Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone (yes, I, like everybody else, broke out their old MJ collection), Lifehouse's Simon, Four Letter Lie's A Place Called "Further".

Yesterday, from when I posted "Doesn't know what to do anymore." on Twitter: Lesley Roy's Thinking Out Loud, Maroon 5's Makes Me Wonder, Gary Jules's cover of Tears for Fears' Mad World.

And just this morning: Queen's Under Pressure.

You can of course argue that depending on your mood, you can attach any meaning you want to any song - I'm certainly having that little debate in my mind right now - but I was more surprised at that my mp3 player didn't need any prodding or song-selecting-button-pushing from me to find something that worked at the time. Usually the shuffle function on this thing is really annoying in that it picks the same songs in the afternoon that it played in the morning, making me question just how 'random' the shuffle really is.

You could also argue that maybe my music collection is just so full of songs that cater to a crappy mood that my mp3 player had no choice but to play seemingly appropriate music... which is a worrying symptom of a potential closet emo.

Regardless, I'm working my way through things, mainly thanks to good people who have noticed my mood, shown concern, and have pointed me in the right direction. It's also just as well that I've got a ski trip coming-up in a week: just me, some friends, the snow to break my fall, and a mountain that won't talk back.

The mp3 player will be coming along too :)

---
On a side-note, I should really start listening to the lyrics of songs - only this week did I discover that Queen's Save Me is about a breakup!

(The first real test for my can-update-this-blog-from-anywhere update. Fingers crossed...)

I've just come back from a ceroc weekend in a city not too far from my own. I was going to write a bit about it, but I noticed I had the stuff below on backlog. I thought I posted it before I left, but it seems I didn't. Silly me.

Well, I'll get that one out of the way first, then maybe write something about "making it big" in Palmerston North ;)

---
On my way to work on Friday morning, I was walking alongside a little girl and her mother. As we approached a crossing at an intersection, the little girl pressed the button to light-up the Walk / Don't Walk lights on the opposite side of the road. The girl was then reminded by her mother to wait by her side until the "green man" (Walk light) lit up.

The traffic in either direction was non-existent at that time. I could've walked lazily across the road without encountering so much as a gust of wind, but I stood my ground. When several others who were walking behind us reached the intersection, they continued forward, jaywalking onto the path of incoming nothings. Tempted to follow them, I continued to hold my ground.

I was rooted to the footpath by a resolution I made with myself several years ago...

The streets can be rough

During my high school years I often walked with some of my friends after school - they had to board a train at a station which was on the way home for me. After one such walk, I said goodbye as their train was approaching and continued on to a crossing some hundred metres away where the railway barriers were down and the bells were warning of an incoming train. Across the tracks from me were a bunch of kindergarten children being held-back from the tracks both by the loud bell noises and by the instructions given to them from their kindergarten teacher.

Now the train was visibly stopped at the train station, so I thought it safe to cross the tracks. So I did, in-front of all those little kids, in obvious defiance of what their teacher just told them.

After crossing, I looked back at the train and was surprised to see my friends walking my way. Curious as to why they weren't on the train, I half-ran back across the tracks to meet them, then we all ran across the tracks again before the train had a chance to accelerate.

"Geez Em," one of my friends said, "you just crossed the tracks 3 times, and in-front of all those children! What kind of example are you setting?" he joked.

Not a good one I reckon. There I was, blatantly defying what the kindergarten teacher had just told her charges. Their little minds must've been brimming with the unfairness of the situation. I could imagine their questions to their teacher:

Little kid: "You said we shouldn't cross the tracks. Why did that guy just cross the tracks over and over?"
Teacher: "Because he's a bad person and he's going to hell."

OK, so immediately jumping to calling some stranger hell-bound might be a bit of a stretch, but it's the simpler choice when the alternative is having to explain to sub-5-year-old minds the concepts of depth perception, velocity, and perceived risk.

Still, I felt guilty. One of the last thing I want on my mind is the knowledge that some of the numbers in the next generation's pedestrian injuries/fatalities statistics may have been caused by my terrible example.

As an episode of Joan of Arcadia once taught me, "it's not enough to feel guilty. The guilt has to be accompanied by change." And so my change was this:

At designated red/green man crossings, and when children are present, to not cross the road until the green man is lit.

It's not exactly New Year's Resolution material, but it's stuck with me for years; so long now that some friends and family think I'm coy when it comes to crossing the road and are actually getting quite impatient with me.

So there I was that Friday morning on my way to work, waiting for the light to turn green and being responsible for young lives, simply by being more responsible with my own. It made me feel very grown-up.

The other day I was talking with somebody who had very recently joined Facebook (yes, seems some people don't have Facebook, I'm shocked too). Not having been a big user of social networking websites until that moment, she talked about feeling very exposed: having photos of yourself up there for the world to see, and how the social aspect of your life is now visible to work colleagues or potential employers (as many people do like to keep those sides of their lives separate).

This isn't the first time I've heard these topics brought up when it comes to the social web - one friend in particular mentions these points as arguments for not joining Facebook, which kinda sucks because that person lives in Australia, so the keeping-in-touch stuff is all done through e-mail. Maybe it's time I gave these subjects a bit of thought, I said to myself.

Time to put one on. Actually, time to find a brain to make this thing of any use.

Personally, I haven't had too much fear of putting myself out there on the big bad internet. I run a personal website with my name plastered all over it so that Google can index me, and my e-mail address is just 1 click away from potential spambot loving.

My Facebook profile isn't any better either; everyone on my friends list sees the same thing: photos of me being stupid at parties of weekends past, my sometimes-personal Twitter-sized status updates, and work mates can just as easily read my posts about my latest work-related gripes.

Maybe it is time I started taking the face I show to the internet - which is the face I wear in real-life - a bit more seriously by putting some leash or restraint on it, because throughout my online life (some 14 or 15 years now) it's probably only dumb luck that has protected me from the consequences of being this open. Or maybe, I'm just not a good target: I'm not a big company, I'm not a famous person, I don't have lots of money, I don't wield any power, nor am I any combination of the above.

And I'm definitely not an Attractive Young Female.

OK, let's be realistic: I'm not even 1 of those 3 key words in the paragraph above, but because of what I'm not, I reduce the size of the pool of potential people I could be afraid of on the internet. Creepy old men don't want me, I'm too old for paedophiles and cradle-snatchers, and straight-guy stalkers ain't coming here for their fix.

As for my current employers or anybody in my future to whom I look to for work? Well, lets just hope that they not only want to add some programmer / web designer to their teams, but also want to inject some personality and honesty into their company (because with my ugly mug, those 2 traits are all I've got going for me now).

I was at work just a moment ago - grabbing my headphones (which I left there Friday evening because I had other things/people on my mind) and sending status reports to team leaders (also forgotten for the same reasons as the headphones) - and the city is noticeably full of Frenchies, or at the very least supporters of the French rugby team.

There's an international rugby match going down in the city in just a few hours - New Zealand vs France - and supporters of the away team are doing a good job of letting everybody know they're there. Bright red/white/blue wigs, face paint, clothing, flags and capes are standard fare. So are loud French songs which I can't understand, although I think that's mostly the point.

One group in particular was heckling anybody, in a friendly (ie: non-soccer fan) way of course, that obviously looked like a New Zealand supporter. And, for those who didn't at least look like a supporter of France, sung to loudly and in their general direction. As I headed to work, this group's and mine paths were going to cross.

Ah crap, I thought, I may not look NZ enough to be a New Zealander, but I'm definitely not a Frenchie. So as I neared them, I prepared myself for some form of undecipherable sports chant.

The chant however, never came. Instead, they looked at me approvingly, like a fellow Frenchie, hands raised in greeting to what they must've thought was a fellow France supporter. Hmm, maybe they reached a gap between the verse/chorus of their song I thought, except that the group proceeded to sing to the guy immediately behind me.

As I reached work and sat down at my desk, I was still thinking about why I had been skipped over by that group of France supporters. So I set my red/white bag on my chair, took its contents out, then took off my blue/off-white jacket and draped it over my chair. And when as I had these 2 items in-front of me, it finally clicked.

I am a big fat walking French flag.

The colour of my stuff

Walking through the city for the rest of the day felt a bit weird. Where previously my new winter jacket told all polar winds and sub-zero temperatures to fuck off, it and my bag were now in cahoots, broadcasting my treason in 2 different languages. I guess I should be glad that I didn't run into any groups of NZ supporters, or that I'd be going to the game tonight - a speck of red/white/blue in a sea of black...

Personally, I didn't feel too bad. I'm not a big rugbyhead, but I know NZ has lost all the major games to France in the last 8 years (ie: 2 World Cups). So no guilt on my part for accidentally supporting the team that beats NZ when it matters.

Go France! :P

(a sort-of sequel to my BEDA post, Mother's Day ahead)

Mother's Day (and my mum's birthday) was over a month ago, and what I ended-up getting my mum was a 2-part present to cover both occasions:

The first part was a book, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger. The second part of the present will be that, provided she likes the book, I'll take her to see the movie adaptation of the film coming out later this year.

I've never read the book myself, but have been meaning to for a long time; it's just that it's always on loan whenever I visit the library. Now that there's a copy on hand, I'll be sure to borrow it from my mum when she's done reading it.

So what should I happen to see when I made my way to work last week? As I walked through the book store from which I bought the book to reach the lift I needed to take to my work, I saw an entire shelf of The Time Traveller's Wife for sale at 50% off...

F*!@$!

For 50% off at Whitcoulls at the moment

When I got the book so many weeks ago, it was the last one on the shelf! It wasn't overly expensive or anything like that, but this has happened to me so often: I buy something, only to find it at a reduced price a week or so later! Most often this happens with clothes, which sucks because I just bought this sweet new jacket for an upcoming skiing trip at full price.

If history chooses to repeat itself - which it often does just to mock me, probably because I never took it seriously as a subject during my high school years (lesson learned: don't shun your studies lest they come back and taunt you later in life, especially physics which will find very mathematical and cold-hearted ways to screw with you) - then I should see this exact jacket on sale a week or 2 before my skiing trip.

The other types of products this happens to me a lot with is computer stuff. Although with the speed at which technology evolves and the prices drop, a certain amount of "it'll be cheaper next week" is to be expected.

I guess it's the world's way of getting its money back off me; because I don't spend a lot or buy things very often, the economy finds some way to take it all back, thus evening-out my semi-frugal nature.

So around the time I was coping with my own battle against swine flu, I spent a lot of time just sitting at home and doing nothing. I tried to do some programming, but thinking on that level became tiring. I thought I could give my art a go, but I wasn't feeling particularly creative. All that was really left for me was to vege out on video games, so at my brother's recommendation, I played Dead Space on his Playstation 3.

To summarize, Dead Space is a sci-fi survival-horror action game set on a large spaceship that seems to have been overtaken by grotesque alien monsters. If you need comparison materials, think Doom 3 meets Event Horizon.

Anyway, as is expected of games in the survival-horror genré, you see a lot of blood, strange writing on walls, undecipherable symbols on walls, said writing/symbols drawn in blood, and any other combination of the above. When the blood on the walls started showing-up in Dead Space, I didn't really think much of it. But when the blood-soacked writing and strange alien symbols started showing-up, I began wondering: "Where are the pictures of dicks?"

As gay as that sounded, let me take a step back to write about an observation I made several weeks before.

The internet is notorious for its childishness. Given the chance, people will create usernames which allude to sex or dicks (case in point: my brother has registered the username 'PhallicThunder' on some forums), create banners depicting dicks (eg: first time my friends took Mario Kart DS online, they competed against others with dicks on their banners), or creatures shaped like dicks or boobs (eg: Spore Creature Creator).

While this isn't a dick creature, it turns out boob creatures aren't allowed

This obviously isn't an internet-only thing. Just the other day I walked past a construction site with grafitti of dicks on the walls. And when taking the lift up to my floor at work where the covers used to protect the walls against scratches are installed, those covers have their fair share of phallic pictography (same thing at my mum's work I've learned).

When I saw our elevator covers with their dick pics, I started to wonder, who in this building would do this? I mean, this is a workplace where the average age of employees is somewhere in the late 40s. If I had to accuse anybody of drawing those, I'd quickly point the finger at myself because a) I'm one of the youngest there, b) I'm pretty childish myself, and c) I really have a hard time imagining my middle-aged managers taking out a pen and scribbling pictures of dicks on the elevator wall covers while they giggle childishly.

So there I was, playing Dead Space, staring at a wall of blood-soaked words, wondering where the hell the dick graffiti was...

I imagine that, with your dying breath, writing warnings or hints to potential survivors about 'cutting off their limbs' or how to survive certain alien attacks takes precedence over posting phallic imagery on the walls of a spacecraft. But then again, when you're on your last legs, why the hell not?

(slightly unrelated, but my favourite example of vandalism has to be the one where they removed some letters from the sign PUBLIC PARKING, such that it read PUBIC KING)

A cold southerly chill straight from the antarctic - and maybe even the cold vacuum of space - is currently blasting my poor little country into submission. As an avid fan of cold days, I've prepared myself to handle the temperatures. Right now I'm wearing with my usual attire, socks, another long-sleeved tops, fingerless gloves and a just-purchased-today beanie, with my legs resting on my 9-fin oil heater while I chow-down on chips and chocolate biscuits. On any other day, this moment would exist in some permutation of my own personal heaven, but there's one more details which puts a big fat dampener on whole situation: I'm sick.

It is approaching winter, it is getting cold, and it just happens to be the month when my sick leave gets reset, so of course I would get sick. This particular sickness has been lingering at the back of my throat for several days now, waiting for the perfect opportunity to rear its ugly head. It started-off as a pretty weak thing, but I think it's been fueled into the major annoyance it is now because of my state of mind this past week.

"It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black."

You see, on Wednesday morning as I was reading the paper while eating breakfast, I came across an article which said the Dymocks on Lambton Quay is closing down (for those who don't know, Dymocks is a chain of bookstores throughout New Zealand, and Lambton Quay is a street name). There have been a lot of retail closures throughout the country because of the recession, but Dymocks, "The booklovers bookstore" (as their motto goes), came as a major surprise to me. Dymocks has been as much a part of Lambton Quay as blue is to the sky and as far as I'm concerned has existed in that spot since the English settled this country.

Not only is it a landmark, but it's also a bookstore. While I'm no bibliophile, my love of writing is fueled by my enjoyment of reading and the feeling a good book gives me that is the urge to go out and start telling my own stories. I don't even buy books that often (I'm more of a library slut, and my last book purchase was from a competitor), yet to hear that this particular bookstore was closing down was like a stab to the book-loving part of my heart, and so without the kindle for my writing fire, I began to despair.

So there I am at mid-week, both sick and sad, one possibly the cause of the other, but I have no idea which one it could be. On the one hand, I become more susceptible to illness when my mood is particularly negative; it's like being emo allows my immune system to become more porous and thus permeable to bad bacteria and viruses. On the other, being sick causes me to feel worse and tints my entire world and outlook with a drab palette; unejoyable days at work feel longer, every wind chills to the bone, and even my favourite foods can lose their taste. One paves the way for the other and vice versa, creating some sort of feedback loop that decided mid-day Friday to explode.

Friday night had a dinner with friends to use-up 2-for-1 dinner vouchers we had accumulated before they expire, and a sort of well-wishing for one of us who is headed-off overseas to represent New Zealand in some sport I still don't completely understand. I was looking forward to it the whole week, but around lunchtime on Friday everything started to go downhill from there.

Lunch didn't feel all that great because my throat started to feel like it was swallowing sandpaper, and the shopping afterwards for a new beanie, gloves, and jacket for an upcoming ski trip left me noticing how cold it was getting outside and how useless my jacket was to protect me from the elements.

Back at work, the new project I'm currently assigned to just didn't hold the same excitement as it usually does, and so the afternoon dragged. When work ended and it was time for dinner, I didn't head straight to the restaurant. Instead, I took a bit of a wander in an attempt to lift my mood before I had to face everybody. It wasn't a complete success.

Long story short: I managed to muster enough energy, sarcasm, wit and one-liners to last dinner without looking too ill, but after that I had to take a back seat to proceedings lest I collapse or something.

Spent

That, and told myself I had to get home and let whatever sickness I had run its course. I've already been nicknamed 'ebola monkey' at work for my ability to be the most cold/flu-stricken person and the most likely vector for infecting others with said cold/flu. I didn't want to give this group a reason to continue the nickname here.

So I'm looking for a scapegoat, but it's like asking about the chicken and egg situation. Now I've just been told that I should get some more sleep because I look like a zombie. That compliment just made me notice my throat flare-up again.

It's a vicious cycle...

"Before you sue me for defamation, in my defence, teasing or joking is one of the ways I show my affection. It's only with my friends that I joke about their mothers, so the fact that I just joked about yours, and written about you twice in the past 2 weeks, goes to show how much I like you."

And those were my last words before dial-up girl - tired of being misrepresented in my blog - killed me with her cold hard stare. Yup, I'm blogging from the afterlife which, oddly enough, looks a lot like work, so I must be in hell.

SPARTAAAAAA!

So what do you do when you're in a temporarily ethereal state? I dunno about you, but I start thinking about the hard questions: Why are we here? If you were given the opportunity to travel back in time and talk to yourself when you were much younger, could you go through with it? What would you say? OK, so I never really thought about that stuff, but instead I thought about how I've slipped under the radar.

All this reflecting was started by a dream I had a few nights ago about my dance classes.

Come the end of May I'll have attended ceroc lessons for a year. In the dream, everybody whose name I know and is still attending classes (which isn't a lot) is going to some private dance party that I didn't know about. When I went to ceroc last night, several things hinted that my dream might actually be true; a couple of people asked me if I was going to some dance party that I had never heard of. I intended to ask my ceroc friends about it, but just forgot. So when I got home I did a bit of Facebook stalking and it turned-out that yes, my ceroc friends were going to this previously-unheard-of dance party.

I didn't really feel surprised - not getting blindsided by surprises is a skill that comes with age - but I did kinda feel left out. It also reinforced a slight 'on the outside looking in' feeling I've had when I see some of the groups at ceroc.

My 2 ceroc friends have managed to make a big impression with many of the others there and so are very much a part of those groups. I guess it helps when you have some redeeming or memorable traits: one of those 2 is the ever cheerful hug nazi, the other looks like the spitting image of Edward Cullen from Twilight. As for me, I don't exactly do anything to draw attention to myself: I dance well enough, I don't look like any actors, and I don't grope my dance partners or stare at their chest all day (I've been told of some creepy guys who do).

That's not to say I haven't been a total social failure: I've made another 2 solid friends through dancing (one of whom is amazing baking girl), and maybe twice that number in acquaintances who'd I'd stop to talk to if we ran into each other on the street. But the rest of the time, I'm just another familiar face.

I'm not really complaining here - just stating facts - as I do bring this upon myself: I don't go to every event on my calendar, I tend to stick with the people I know, and I do enjoy a quiet night at home. I'm more of a 'go where I'm needed' type.

I think I do this because I focus so much on the few friends that I do have. It's this core bunch that I will travel long distances for, re-organize my schedule to meet with, or go to a movie or exhibit again despite having seen it myself so that they have company when they go. Sometimes it requires a lot of effort, which is probably why I keep the number of friends I do have to a low number lest I get gray hairs or other sign of aging from trying to make too many people feel like they're worth their weight in gold.

So yeah, I think about them a lot. I try not to give them too much to worry about when they think of me, but I can't really stop that when it comes to it. The last time I ever think I worried them was several years ago when I had a seizure. My friends were organizing some get-together, and when they were unable to reach me, one of them tried ringing my house:

*phone rings*
My dad: Hello?
Friend: Hi. Is Em there?
Dad: Uh, no. He's in the hospital.
Friend: Oh...

The thing was, my dad never elaborated on why I was in the hospital, letting my friends' imaginations come up with all sorts of possibilities. The truth of it was that in my flu-induced state, my temperature reached an almighty high (40C / 104F) to which my body responded by shutting-down and resetting itself, a by-product of which was the seizure.

I tended to downplay the seizure because, well, it wasn't that bad. Before the seizure: my head hurt, I felt warm, colours and lights were swirling in my vision, and I couldn't even guide a spoonful of food into my mouth properly (the seizure occured over breakfast). Afterwards: my head was clear, my body felt cool, my vision was restored, and I could tie my shoes - the seizure was the best thing that happened to me during my flu!

I'm not suggesting everybody who's sick go out and have a seizure. A few years after that incident, I witnessed what a seizure looked like from the outside when a lady at my favourite bakery (which I have dubbed 'The Pie Shop' for having won a Best Pie In NZ award) collapsed and seized-up while making an order. It didn't look pretty - it was actually quite frightening - so it's not the sort of thing I'd be encouraging people to go out and experience.

I like to show I care by making jokes and sharing a laugh - I basically live by the motto "the day your friends stop making fun of you, is the day they stop caring about you." But to prevent myself from imploding, I only extend this philosophy to a close-knit bunch of people.

So I'm one of those quality over quantity freaks; sue me.

In a previous post I talked a bit about the concept of Three Thirtyitis. After that, you should understand what I then mean when I'm suffering from 10am-itis.

My Twitter update sums it up rather well:

Woke-up early to meet friends for breakfast, is now fighting sleep by blasting American Idol tunes through headphones d(O_O)b

So this morning I woke-up a lot earlier than usual (1 whole hour! *gasp*) so I could meet-up with friends for breakfast before work, and on a Monday morning too! The attraction of such an early-week early-morning get-together was to see people we don't often see. Well, that was the premise from the point-of-view of the organizer. For me, I'd been lucky enough to actually see the others rather recently.

Despite that, I made it through the cold, the rain, and the soul-crushing darkness that is the overcast cloud cover which has blocked sunlight from the city for several days now. I and one of the other train-riding guys caught the same train and made it in early. The next to come along lives a couple of suburbs away. The last person was actually the one who lives in the city and is the closest to the breakfast venue... typical. It was good though: breakfast was alright, company as always was great, lots of lols were had.

But wow, I feel so drowsy right now: my eyelids are being drawn to the ground by more than just gravity and my concentration is so far detached from my mind that it's almost like having an out-of-body-experience. I would normally eat something sugary to keep my consciousness afloat, but this doesn't feel like a blood-sugar thing. If this were after lunch, maybe I'd try sneak-in a power nap, but that's not gonna look so good having just gotten into work. So instead I've settled for playing tracks from this seasons American Idol contestants a bit louder than usual through my headphones.

How non-coffee drinkers wake up

Surprisingly the volume therapy is working wonders. The only downside was when a phone call came through and I picked up and put the receiver to my ear while my headphones were still on.

Unfortunately for me, I'm one of those people that needs about 8 hours of sleep a night to function at 100%. I'm not somebody who can either operate on less sleep or supplement rest with coffee or a wide variety of energy drinks. I came across several of the latter kind at university, or at least discovered that a lot of my friends could also fit into that category. One of the guys always kept a 6-pack of V energy drink at their workstation and ended-up collecting them to create a massive tower. Wandering around my floor at work, I see one of the older guys doing the same thing with his takeaway cofee cups.

Achievement unlocked

All that's left for me is to catch up on lost sleep tonight. I only fear that I'll fall asleep on the train home - gently rocked by the moving carriage, lulled by the sound of the electric engine - and miss my stop. I've done that before...

m(_ _)m ZZZ

First of all, I have a Miley Cyrus song stuck in my head because after watching this parody, I went and watched the original, before watching the parody again. So technically I have a parody of a Miley Cyrus song stuck in my head. Hmm, still doesn't help my case.

Secondly, I was walking to work yesterday morning with a friend - the same friend who has dial-up and mocked me for writing about My Feelings on this blog - who found even more reasons to divorce herself of my friendship. Last week she said my life wasn't scandalous enough to warrant us hanging out. This week, as a consequence of my non-scandalous life, she complained that our walks together are so draining that she needs to grab another coffee afterwards to wake her up for the second time for the day (she feeds on scandal like a plant feeds on sunlight. My presence obviously starves her). "What, is there not enough caffeine in my breath to keep you awake?" I joked.

So along the way, whenever a coffee shop passed us by I offered to buy her a coffee. She refused of course, knowing that I was only doing this to annoy her, but after maybe the 3rd coffee joint she came up with an excuse for her refusals: "I can't! Because if you spend money on me, and I haven't got any money to spend on you, then it creates an imbalance in the bank of friendship." (OK so that's not the exact quote, but it went something like that).

In response I asked if she wanted to apply for an overdraft, or hear of various loan repayment schemes (I would have taken payments from her mum, but I kept that line to myself), but it got me thinking about whether or not there was something more to her choice of metaphor; whether there is some sort of economic model I could apply to this situation.

Where my friendship could be headed

I looked to the internet to see if somebody else has tried to do a similar thing, and several people had. Some were more philosophical than others, some were very technical and I even came across a few scientific papers on the subject. One page seemed to sum it up best with our good friend, the law of supply and demand:

One of the first things they teach you in introductory economics is the law of supply and demand. A price equilibrium is reached at the point where supply and demand intersect. All that means is that both parties are getting what they want for what they think is a fair price.

I guess you could say friendship is established at that equilibrium point where both parties are happy with whatever they're getting from the other person.

The kind of relationship between dial-up girl and I is simple, but there is a mutual equality to it. We don't really organize to see one another but talk when we do, usually at friends' parties or when our paths happen to cross. Dial-up girl however has a tendency to feel a tremendous amount of guilt at the smallest infractions, and so my joke of buying her a coffee to make-up for the boring-ness that is my life was perceived as throwing a little - but just enough by her standards - imbalance into the equation.

[L]ooking at friendship as an economic transaction might seem a little cold and callous, but really, it's what we were all taught when we were younger. Life is about give and take. You can't just give give give or else you'll burn out. It's also the trademark of a sucker. And if you take take take, eventually people are going to realize that they're not getting anything out of your friendship. We should always be aware of what we're offering to other people. If we look at it like that, it'd be easier to understand why people interact with us in a certain way.

http://qnzalvin.xanga.com/624082638/economics-of-friendship/

I can think of a few people who could learn a little from watching what they offer. Hug nazi in particular used to give too much, and then started feeling bad when people stopped accepting her generosity, thinking that people didn't want her help anymore - she failed to understand that those on the receiving end started to accumulate some guilt at having taken so much. Several younger siblings of families I know often take too much, and then become ungrateful when the charity comes into question or stops - they fail to realize the effort being made by the gift-giver.

So what did I learn? 1) I shouldn't have joked so much about the coffee. 2) I totally should've said I'd take repayments from her mum. 3) No more coffee for dial-up girl :P

My last and final gripe with having moved back to the suburbs: the slow slow internets.

I always suspected that the kind of broadband we were getting out in the suburbs was slow, but I never really knew how bad it was until I moved into the city. On a good day in the suburbs, if you wanted to watch a YouTube clip that was 1 minute long, you would have to load the page, then pause the clip at the beginning, and return to it 4 minutes later so that you can get smooth playback from start to finish.

That was the general formula: multiply the video length by 4 to get the average loading time. We didn't even bother with high-quality or high-def clips, for streaming anyway; we always downloaded those with some multiple-connection download manager.

Anyway, when I made it to the city, one of the first things I had organized was the broadband (I actually had it set up before I got a fridge in... priorities, I know) and once the computer was set up, did a YouTube test. The difference? I could stream low-quality YouTube video!

I could load videos left and right, download podcasts, and have a torrent running in the background, all at the same time. I had finally caught up to technology as at 3 years ago, and it was great.

So what self-respecting IT guy would be caught with a slow internet connection? Unfortunately for me, that's kind of out of my hands, and no amount of shouting from the citizens of this country at the national telco has done any good to get it sorted.

And although it's not my problem, the slow internet thing got me thinking about other kinds of IT guy myths which I've been doing wrong. I mean, I don't have a digital camera, I don't have a smart phone (my cellphone doesn't even do + code dialing...), I'm not an early adopter (I only got the Xbox360 a couple of months ago) and I don't have a USB flash drive. I was probably the last of my group to get onto Facebook (a year of peer pressure finally got the better of me), I don't have any shirts which make references to internet fads, and I got a Twitter account only 2 months before Oprah did.

I think I'm just too cautious in my ways. While that doesn't explain the lack of digital camera, I often take the 'wait and see' approach to things such that by the time I've waited and seen, the thing in question has already hit the mainstream. Now that I'm looking for an apartment to buy in the city I just left, I think a cautious approach is a good thing to have. Who knows, maybe a cautious approach could've averted the subprime lending collapse.

So, I've taken my time, I've thought a lot, thought of everything I got and apart from blatantly ripping Cat Steven lyrics I've learned enough about what it is I am looking for in my own apartment. Amongst those things: high speed internet and a high-pressure shower. Everything else, as my favourite quote says, is negotiable ;)

Following on the back of yesterday's blog post, here I thought I'd mention a couple of other things that I'll be missing from my time in the city (and looking forward to when I return).

High-pressure water for showers

This was something I never knew I had until I moved into the city: shower water that can cut through my thick mop of hair and reach my scalp. At first I thought the water pressure at my old apartment was too strong, but, as with everything else, I got used to it. Then, when I spent a weekend with the family soon after moving out and had a shower, I was surprised at how weak the old shower was.

For years I had been showering with this water pressure, but only in that weekend did I notice that the rain does a better job than this! The water just hit the top of my hair and then slid away as my slightly oily hair built a protective shield over my hair which this low low low pressure water couldn't penetrate. No wonder I like rainy days; it's because only then am I properly washing my hair!

Now that's my kind of water

No more trains

No longer having to schedule my life around the train timetable was probably the biggest plus of city living. It meant I could spend more time out when I was with friends, most of whom live in the city too. Dance classes were also something I could extend without the trains; previously I'd cut the classes a bit short so I could catch the train home at a reasonable hour of the night. Although one thing I learned was that soon after the time I would normally leave to catch a train, my dancing would start to deteriorate. So maybe it was a good thing I caught the train when I did.

I could also enjoy other events held in the city a bit more when I didn't have to think about how long it would take for me to get to the station.

Don't let that smile rule your life

Home and Away

If you told me that I'd end-up getting hooked on a soap opera if I left home, I never would've believed you. But that's exactly what happened.

I normally leave work just after 5pm, and with a 20 minute walk to my former apartment, it positioned me perfectly to watch the pre-news show, which happened to be Home and Away - before that it was The Biggest Loser. After work, sometimes I just wanted to vege-out in-front of the TV, and given the timing of my return, Home and Away became the show I wound-down to.

With the train schedule, I can't watch this show without leaving work early, but I don't exactly feel like going to work earlier to make up my hours. Luckily for me the national TV station has a Home and Away omnibus on Sunday morning which plays all the previous week's episodes back-to-back, so I don't have to miss a thing!

So I'm out of the city - back with the family in the suburbs as I make my next move for buying a place - and having now spent 2 nights back in my old bed and room, I've noticed something here that I've been missing during my time in the city: hay fever.

The family house isn't like some sort of rural setting surrounded by rolling hills without a neighbour for miles; it's a pretty average suburban setting, but the house has it's own Lawn in both a Front and Back Yard, as well as Bushes and Trees around the back. When you wake up you hear Birds and can see Trees out my window. Whereas my now-former-apartment was a massive concrete block with just 1 big tree outside (probably only there because it was there before the building was built and so resource consent couldn't be obtained to cut it down) and the sounds of chirping have been replaced by the sirens of emergency vehicles. But in the city I never really get hay fever.

It's kind of sad to think that my body is better suited to an environment where the air is full of cigarette smoke and car exhaust than it is with whatever stuff nature throws into it. It wasn't always like this though: I remember when cigarette smoke used to make me physically ill. As a child when I spent too much time around smoking adults (like when my parents went to a friend's house and brought me along) I'd spend the next day vomiting into a bucket. Now, the only consequence of spending time with smokers is that I have to send my clothes to the laundry because the smoke has infused itself into the fabric.

Chain smoking++

It's too bad my body can't do the same thing with pollen or whatever it is in the air that throws my immune system off-kilter.

Short blog post tonight as I should get some sleep; I have to get used to catching the trains into the city again O_o

Oh, and I have, in just this month so far, surpassed the the most number of posts I have made to this blog in a single year (26 posts this month now, 25 posts in 2006).

And so we enter the first day of Blog Every Day April. Like Maureen Johnson, this'll pretty much be a day-by-day account of my life this month.

So what exciting things happened to me today? Well, today I walked to work with my neighbours.

I was late to work as usual, waiting for the lift to get to my level, when I heard the door opening to the only other apartment on this floor. Out came my neighbours, also ready to go to work.

There are 2 of them: a girl who I've encountered several times and keep calling "neighbour" since moving in to this apartment, and her boyfriend who I have seen before but never really met until today. I gave them my usual greeting - "Hey neighbours" - and we all walked together to our respective jobs.

We spent the walk talking about things that people who don't know a lot about each other talk about: work, work hours, being collectively called girls by one of the girls' friends as we passed-by, having my brother mistaken as a girl on his plane ticket, etc. The guy and I properly introduced ourselves to one another, and once they went their separate ways, I walked the rest of the way to work thinking, WTF, I actually don't know her name!

I tweeted that thought during the day (you can probably see that item in the Twitter feed to the right unless you're reading this via RSS) and found I wasn't completely alone when it came to nameless neighbours that you frequently encounter. One respondent referred to their nameless neighbour as "#12".

So I resolved to find out her name the next time we met, and as fate or co-incidence would have it, while I was waiting for the lift to take me back to my apartment this evening, I heard the lobby door open and in came my neighbours, also ready to get back home. After greeting the unnamed one - "Evening neighbour" - I found out her name.

I haven't written anything up here since before Christmas '08, so I felt compelled to put something up here just to fill the silence and pre-emptively dispell any rumours about my death. Now it's pretty much Valentines Day... cripes.

So what have I been up to in the month-and-a-half since my holidays? Working on a website redesign.

It's a new year, it's time for a new look I thought. And so, what was supposed to be a new look for 2009 which was supposed to come out in mid-Jan, is now looking at being more of an early-March thing. Or, if I wanted to be more sarcastic (or more realistic), an Easter thing.

I've been trying to add a bunch of new tricks I've learned since the last makeover (circa 2007). One of these things is something fairly new to me: Twitter. OK, so that thing has been around for a long time, but only recently, through listening/watching other podcasts of other members of the IT industry plugging their own Twitter URLs, have I felt compelled to join up. I'll be working on adding my tweets to my website (another sidebar?!?!), likely integrate it with my Facebook as well, and start getting into the micro-blogging habit.

So you can find me at http://twitter.com/u1traq (note the 1 instead of an L. 'Ultraq' was already taken, under the guise of ultraQ... bastards), and apart from updating the world with whatever inane activity I'm doing at certain points in time, I think it might actually be useful for site-related mini updates, particularly when I get back to working on Red Horizon.

Tweet tweet.

One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time. Oh how wrong I was.

When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things. Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be. Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate. Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.

Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking. Yes, cooking.

Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some. The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers. The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.

Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.

I was a bit over-excited the other day when I received the first piece of mail addressed specifically to me. For the past couple of weeks it's been letters for at least 4 different people, and whether they be the owner or previous tennants, I haven't been able to tell. So when I got it, I was all "Hey, it's addressed to me! Oh wait, it's from [my electricity company]. Dammit, it's probably a bill." And it was.

Even when all the correspondence I make with friends abroad is done via e-mail, a good old letter still grabs my attention. An e-mail nowadays is a couple of sentences and a lol here or there. A letter is a page-turning short story. An e-greeting card is like a 5-mouse-click Christmas fruit cake; it doesn't take a lot of effort, and you don't feel that great about receiving one. An actual card requires a visit to the store, forking over some money, writing something in it, then dropping it into a post box.

With the saying "it's the thought that counts", I think they need to add that effort is a pretty big player too, and then maybe from that you can extrapolate a 'value of the gift is proportional to the amount of thought and effort put into it' equation.

Although there are some things that should stay as e-mails. I don't imagine that a letter version of a Facebook notification that someone has responded with "gaaaay!" to my status, could be made any better.

So yay for the letter, but meh for the anti-climactic discovery that it's just a bill. I'll probably end-up choosing to receive my bills online from now on so I don't face such disappointments in future. Thus, freeing-up the mailbox for general junk mail and niche items to people who don't live here anymore, like a Christian version of Guitar Hero.

I wasn't really going to write anything about this, but then I got an e-mail from someone wondering if my RSS feed was broken because I hadn't reported on it. So what happened to me? I moved into my own place in the city, and celebrated my birthday with friends (in that order too).

Over the past couple of months I'd been looking at places to live in the city as pretty much everything going-on with me right now is there: work, friends, your mum, etc. I used to live out in the suburbs and rely on the trains to take me between these places. I remember when my train buddy (a friend of mine who by sheer coincidence ended-up taking most of the same trains I did for all of our years at university) started talking about how much she hated the trains. After having taken the train for more years than I have fingers, she just got fed-up with them. I didn't understand her then, and soon afterwards she and her husband-to-be moved to Australia.

Earlier this year, I think I finally understood where she was coming from.

Somewhere between the beginning of this year and the date of this post, I got tired of having my life revolve around the public transport system's schedule. Running after trains, waiting at the station, leaving parties early just so I could catch the last train home... small frustrations that just started adding-up. I thought it was about time to do something about it, and so here I am, recently-relocated into an apartment in the city, when I had my birthday.

So my birthday isn't usually something I post about, but it has been a long time since I actually celebrated one of mine with friends. This year's one was a simple affair; dinner at my favourite Italian tratorria (a place I had been going to for every one of my birthdays since turning 21), talking about matters close to our hearts: AIDS monkeys, ginger kids, your mum, etc. I got presents too!

The most notable would have to be the flying alarm clock. And yes, it works as well as the web page suggests: the clock does have a loud shrieking alarm, it does have a propeller that flies off to some dark corner of your room, and it does require you to retrieve the propeller and return it to the clock otherwise THE DAMN THING DOESN'T SHUT UP!

I haven't been late to work ever since.
I've also been a lot grumpier than normal.
Go figure.