November 30, 2005

Okay okay

I was actually planning on writing something tonight anyhow. I've lost my mojo though. No inner burning fire to write. I wonder if it's on account of pumping hormones in to my body for the first time since mum got sick, flattening me out. The timing would correspond........

Anyway, I hate to pack. I hate to unpack. But I am packing with gusto this evening. I have packed all my most impractical underwear, (I surprised myself with the quantity I own after the inventory this evening. I thank Auckland sis for that) I also have a nice dress and tomorrow I am going to buy a new bikini. Which i'm a bit terrified about, because it is only held up by a knot, and I may actually be held criminally responsible for blinding people...probably would qualify as assault I'm so honkey-assed white.

Oh, so where am I going? Christchurch, Akaroa and then Hamner Springs. Maybe Nelson. I'm leaving tomorrow night on a plane and ferrying back late Sunday night. And i'm so excited I could go stand in front of my mirror and dance to Barry White....or pee. Probably wouldn't need to pee to Barry White....

What else has been happening?

I pretended for a brief period that my work inspired me by writing the beastly paper to beat all papers. 300 plus submissions condensed down into five. Then it was finished and I went on to cruise control again.

Ate a chickens foot yesterday. After my boss spilt chicken feet juices (steaming hot) in my lap.

Had Antipasto (a very all-encompassing genre according to monsieur bear) with the Bears and Laurie on Saturday night, got a bit boozey and crooned to 80s singstar. Which is soooooo much better than ordinary singstar. And i've decided singstar is like pool. I improve with intoxication.......

Went to a wedding invitation working bee on Sunday. Was quite labour intensive, but very fun, in an oestrogen-brimming way.

Have gotten used to the haircut. Still no photos on record.

Hope you all have wonderful weekends. I will try very hard to do justice to my own on my return.

xx

November 22, 2005

Today I got told I looked like a little boy

and I laughed. Genuinely. So that's good I suppose. But stop asking me for photos. Not going to happen.

Conversation in our kitchen tonight

(Mr Bear is sucking on a tea bag)
Miss Pix: that is the grossest thing i've ever seen, ever.
Miss L: It reminds me of Samantha off Sex and the City
Mr Bear and Miss Pix are grimacing with distaste at this point, Miss L has been lowering the tone of our lofty Kelburn home as of late.
Mr Bear: I still don't know what tea-bagging is (feigning innocence).
Miss Pix: Uggghhh (knowing what's about to come)
Miss L: I think it means sucking balls (she says with relish)
Miss Pix: (Giggling hysterically, she would never say anything so inappropriate)
Mr Bear: (looking at Miss Pix with a decided air of superiority about him as he departs the kitchen) Well see, that just implies that sucking tea bags is something people do all the time

So last time my hair was short, it wasn't soooooooo short, but it was pretty short. And when i did that Abel Tasman walk, I know I wrote about this, but I don't know if I got to the part in the tale where I hadn't showered for five days, and had done quite a bit of walking and sweating, and was in a long pair of shorts with my black army cap on, and on the bus trip back to Picton, a little four year old girl befriended my friend Corinne, and spent ages talking to her, learning all our names, and telling Corinne about her and her little brother (who was so fucking cute).You can see where this is headed.

Anyway at some stage in the voyage Delwyn and I switched seats because the bus had emptied of people somewhat, I think it was in Blenheim, and we were sitting right behind the little girl. And she spun around in the seat and started talking to us....i hope i haven't already told this story. And I, loving children as i do, responded warmly to her question, and she exclaimed in a very innocent, genuinely surprised way:

You're a girl!

Ha ha ha, all round.

So then we were on the ferry across the Cook Strait with the same little girl and her mum and brother, and the ocean was viciously rough, and people were spewing all about us, and little cups of ice were being handed out for people to suck on, but when it had calmed down a bit the little girl found us again, and began to cement her newfound friendships.

Little girl to me: I know what your name is
Me, feeling a benevolent surge of forgiveness for questioning my femininity: Do you?
Little girl to me: Yes, it's Brian.

Ha ha ha ha ha, all round, again.

That kind of stuck. And i haven't even seen any of the girls from the tramp yet. Oh no, wait, I saw Delwyn at Toast Martinborough, and she was kind....

November 21, 2005

To Martinborough

Saturday night was spent with some of my favourite people in honour of Becky's 25th birthday (of the Pencarrow lighthouse bike trip fame). Her and fireman hubbie have moved to Johnsonville, and we got to see their new love nest for the first time. In her (self-acclaimed) Martha Stewart style she had cooked up a storm (yes, it was her birthday, but we had been under the impression it was a pot luck tea, not a banquet of medieval monarchic proportions). According to the fireman my pizza was more suited for prehistoric caveman consumption. Then we played cranium. I have to admit after six hours at work that day reading 300 pages of submissions from a doctor for the next meeting my brain wasn't gagging for the stimulation, but my abs appreciated the workout from the unrelenting hilarity. I'm quite stoked with the fact that I have bought Jacob the kiddies version for Christmas....

Afterwards the anticipation kicked in, as I waited for the boy to arrive at my place having been in town with some workmates watching a play. I'd been losing sleep over him seeing the mopchop for the first time. And he hated it. And with all fairness to him, he didn't try to hide it and say something lame like what i've been enduring recently - it'll be good for summer. Or trying to turn it back on me - do you like it? But after I got all stroppy and we'd both had a bit of a sulk it was okay, and I realised he wasn't as shallow as I'd sold him out to be. I started feeling really good about the whole thing. like maybe it was a test..... Once it gets a little bit longer and I get some of the curl back i might even like it. Because who wants to be conventional and boring....

I went to Toast Martinborough yesterday. The bus trip was hilarious - both there and back. And i really liked the group of people we were with, who weren't the usual gang. And we bumped in to heaps of people we knew. I didn't even get that boozed, enough to get up and have a boogie with the oldies at one of the wineries, but by midafternoon the mid 20 degree heat was sizzling my bare bald little head, and I had had enough. But it was a fun day.........laughing at all the trashed people - and there was a huge cross section of trashed society. The upper echelons, middle aged men overweight and wearing over-sized hats, and their women too thin and too tanned with short highlighted hair and white capris and too much gold jewellery, blending in surprisingly fluidly with all the young tarted up things who could have been transported straight from one of the bars on Courtenay Place on a Saturday night.

My favourite wines were the 2004 Te Muna Road Vineyard Pinot Noir and the Claddagh vineyards 2003 Merlot.

November 17, 2005

I have spent an exorbitant amount of money tonight to look like a boy. Or a nana. Or a dyke. Or a barbie doll belonging to a sadistic five year old girl. Or the victim of some horrific lawn mower accident. I hate it. I will have to spend more money to invest in hats. And I will have to spend all day tomorrow at work fending off well meant compliments that will make me grimace and shuffle uncomfortably. I never tell people their hair cut looks good when it's shite. I wish people could do me the same courtesy. I wish people would stop using the word cute. Dammit!

I may also have earnt myself a constructive dismissal.......I wish I wasn't such a stubborn little fuck.

November 15, 2005

I'm not in an introspective phase. That is why this is not coming easily. In fact it's hard. But it's still light late now. The build up to Christmas inevitably means there is more going on. And i'm just not psyched about anything enough to write. I'm content. In tune. Just humming along.

I got an email back today from the director of CPAG. I had emailed her with my condolensces over her husband's unexpected death (as if death can ever really be unexpected.....) and she wrote back this lovely email. And i felt ashamed at some of her questions because i'm not doing anything love love with my life. Her daughter, another lawyer who didn't want to be a lawyer, who I worked on the monograph with, is currently doing work for the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Which makes me think maybe I shouldn't just be pissing my time away when i travel. Or teaching english just so i can pay off the wretched student loan. I want to sell my soul to a cause. I'm so goddamn putrifyingly idealistic, and if i have nothing else to offer i feel that that must be something. Fuck it all.

I was in the bathroom at work this morning, not for any huge amount of time, I don't think, but I came back upstairs and my team had completely cleared out. It was like a morgue. I checked my calendar and there was nothing scheduled. I walked from little green cubicle to little green cubicle poking my head in at desolate desks. I even ventured a wavery little 'hello'. Silence. I sat back down at my desk all jittery and jumped when the PA blared, calling me to the boardroom. I scooted down the hall and saw my Manager downstairs looking panicked. She locked eyes with me and this huge wave of relief washed across her face. The new CEO had asked for a pop meeting with my team. While I was sitting on the loo. And so i skulked in to the boardroom feeling very sheepish with all eyes on me, thinking, great first impression. Sigh.

Disclaimer to previous post. I do not love the boy. I do fall in 'love' quite easily, but it is presently a glowing coal sensation, a toasty form of potential, a bit more than the butterflies and vertigo of the very beginning. I feel a connection and excitement with him personality wise that i don't think i ever had with the ex. Maybe that's just the benefit of hindsight. But it's not safe yet. Love is big, right? Huge.

November 11, 2005

If you compare yourself to others you will become vain and bitter because always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself

What do you do when you love two things, but it just so happens that those two things are incompatible? And there is nothing to blame or necessarily fix, just the need to accommodate those two things as best as you possibly can.....because you probably love them both for the very things that make them completely incompatible. I guess you just accommodate the two of them as best you can....

The quote is plucked out of Desiderata, that my Bursary English teacher who thought the sun shone out of my ass and was very sensitive about whole plucked chickens because they reminded her of small naked babies quoted at the end of my final year at highschool. It is also reminscent of a speech i listened to tonight on some philosophical principle, the Eastern- something principle or theory, about how the increasing wealth of whole nations or populations doesn't necessarily result in a corresponding increase in their level of happiness, because we all compare ourselves to others and basically are ungrateful shits. Pause for reflection.

If you were to rate your current level of happiness right now on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being deliriously happy and 1 being utterly miserable, what would your rating be?

On that note, the following picture is by request. Feel free to keep them coming in......

Kick me while i'm down

why dontcha?

The above post was written by laurie. A very boozed Laurie. In reference to comment 2 of the post below. My identifying her defeats the purpose of her writing a kick ass post posing as me. And i guess i should feel bad revealing her when she has just spent the better part of an hour and a half entertaining me with booziness and chocolate.

It is now dark outside. And for me, the night has been neglectful, tardy, swollen heavy with wind, hindered by a cloak of cobalt blue. Oblivious to the need for extinguishment. Ambivalent towards aching consciousness. Time treads ponderously, for insubstantial unconstrained moments, painfully.

Yes, boring. Yes, painful.

So it's been nine days since I last wrote. That's probably the longest period of silence since I hatched this puppy. I think i've lost all my internet friends. I'm like one of those terrible girls that drops their buddies as soon as there is a boy on the scene. Except, it hasn't been because of him that i haven't written. Well, not solely.

I suppose I should have something to say after such a lengthy inhalation - so be it something both painful and boring. But I actually am ready for the blissful balm of sleep. And I don't want to create a drama if it isn't there. For once, I really mean that.

This is my late HNT entry. My friend made the skirt for her niece. I put it on and didn't want to take it off. I would have posted it last night, except i was busy contemplating when eggs became such an unattractive accessory.

November 02, 2005

Scent: jasmine; word: subterfuge.

I had too much sleep and woke up grumpy. The kindof grumpy where I want to throw my toys just cause I look down on the way to work and my shoelace has come undone. The kindof grumpy where I do precious little work all day. But eat quite a bit of junk food. The kindof grumpy which can only be shaken by some serious mock ass kicking at a tae bo class. There's this one set she does, like 12 minutes of solid cardio, one of the songs is the prodigy i think, and the lyrics have 'smack my bitch up' or something to that effect. Very motivating.

I got home afterwards and it was the most gilded evening. I could hear the gentle weeping of my bbq, the regulator is lying forlornly on my bedroom floor waiting for the tender caress of the fireman. So I took my beer out there and strip it down and scraped out all the kitty litter shit soaked in fat and wiped the body down with some soapy water and ooohed and aaaahed over the rust and mould and reminisced about what once was. Then I went inside and the male bear was making an apple crumble. Of course, holding my beer and smudged in black grease, I had to pass some snide comment over the irony, and got a pretty cute smile for my efforts. And some apple crumble....

Then I made some noise Monty Python styles and quickly regreted it, laurie is still not recovered from the airborne market umbrella and has been home from uni with concussion.

Conversation I just had:

Male Bear: Bridie, did you buy milk for me?

Me: yeah

Male bear: where is it?

me: in the fridge

Male bear: oh, okay

(he is a law lecturer.......)

How cute is this photo? I'm going to save it for his 21st.


Just in case you can't read what it says:

Dear tooth fairy,

today one of my teeth came out, I think it fell down a crack. I will sleep with mouth open tonight so you can have a look.

from your friend, Jacob

Then there is a drawing of a boy lying down on a five dollar note. I think that is what it is...

November 01, 2005


song: the dandy warhols - we used to be friends

word: gregarious

Makybe diva won the third melbourne cup in a row. Just shot out at the end. I didn't wear a hat but ate scallops wrapped in bacon and giant strawbubbies wrapped in chocolate. I don't like bubbles.

I want to walk the Heaphy track. Soon.

Elvis made a comeback on Saturday night. He has learnt that the secret is to keep reinventing yourself.