The Exaltation of the Average

Post-Flight Blogging!

2010-05-01T21:30:00.011+10:00

I'm baaaaaaaaack!

Sorry for the lack of updating- I didn't get much chance to use the internet while I was overseas, and when I got back I had to complete a take-home exam for consumer law...and that sort of involved actually learning the about the examinable topic while I was completing the exam. Multitasking for the win!

I was actually extremely fortunate to get the chance to hand in the exam at all, because the Iceland volcano (it's ICEland...where does it get off having gigantic heat explosions?) shut down operations at Heathrow Airport the day I flew out from London to Singapore. However, our pilot made the decision to take off an hour early, meaning that we literally got out of Heathrow forty minutes before they shut down. Ironically, when we got to Singapore I flicked through the cable channels and 'Dante's Peak' was playing on the cinema station :D

It feels weird to be back in Melbourne, tugging on gloves in the cold when only a few weeks ago, I was wandering around Spain in the Andalusian sunshine. It also feels weird to be facing a giant pile of law readings when a few weeks ago, my only concern was whether eating a Magnum for lunch would elicit a sense of loss for not getting the limited edition Cornetto sitting next to it in the ice-cream freezer. Such dilemmas were easily solved (the Magnum was purchased for lunch; the Cornetto for an afternoon snack) but alas, the giant pile of law readings currently sitting on the table downstairs cannot be vanquished merely by the provision of three euros.

The trip was amazing. It was my first trip to Europe, and I was stunned by the amount of history behind everything. Earlier this year, I was reading a collection of 19th century Australian essays and stories- and one of them noted that although Australia lacks the history of European buildings, our beauty and value lie in the natural wonders of our landscape. And that's true. Australia is lovely. Australia has much natural beauty to offer to the marvelling eye.

BUT EUROPEAN HISTORY KICKS ASS.

I walked along 2000 year old walls in York, built by Willliam the Conqueror. I wandered through old Moorish palaces and centuries-old Cathedrals. I saw the tombs of English monarchs in Westminster Abbey, and saw busts from Ancient Greece and paintings from the Renaissance in the Prado.

And it was freaking awesome.

I'm just going to post a photo or two up for fellow blogger (and now fellow Aries 22 year old!) miku, as she was recently in Barcelona and it was ridiculously exciting to look at her photos and squeal, "Ooh I've been there!!!" The salamander says happy birthday- and I hope the salamander of your dreams comes along and picks you up and takes you over his salamander shoulder! :D (Photos are smallest size as takes me a while to upload!)

(The photos above were taken in Park Guell, one of Gaudi's architectural creations. I love the gingerbread house on the left side- it even has little button candies along the windowpanes.)

Before I pop back downstairs to resume my readings, a few tips I've picked up:

Daph's Travel Tips for Spain and England

in Spain, when people say 'I only speak a little English', don't believe them. After saying this, they will then wax lyrical in fluent English to the point where they could probably write a 2,000 word essay for English Literature and surpass most high school students in Britain, America and Australia.
in Spain, when people say "Muy poquito" when you ask them if they speak English, they actually do mean that they don't speak much English.
Spanish coffee is amazing. In Spain, ask for a 'cafe con leche' (there are accents there but admittedly I'm too lazy to format the plain text, sorry!) and you'll get a lovely strong latte. Ask for a 'cafe solo' and you'll probably get knocked out by the intensity. In England, coffee mostly needs a bit of improvement before it can be classified as coffee. Ask for a double shot, or a strong latte, or you'll just get very nicely foamed milk.
take a travel pillow on long flights. Otherwise you'll wake up with the Neck Crick to End All Neck Cricks.
'American Psycho' is not a relaxing book to read on a flight. However, it will keep you awake, and horrified, if you need to stay up to switch time zones.
They have one pence coins in England. Run away before the service assistant can give you a wallet-clogging bronze coin after buying your 99p Ribena.
If you are regret not buying something from Zara or Mango in Spain, don't sweat it. One will magically appear every 20 metres down the street across the entire country.
If you're around Andalusia at Easter and you see people in white cloaks and white pointy hats with eye-holes marching past, they're being pious Catholics and not racist redneck Americans.
If your hotel offers a laundry service, be aware that they will charge about three euro PER PAIR of underwear. It is much more fun to construct a shameful makeshift washing line in the bathroom- even though the maid will think you're a cheap bastard, it's awfully fun to get a calculator and add up just how many euros you've saved...my calculations for one load came to at least 150 euros.
Hotel tea in England is frightening and makes strange dymorphic forms that creep up the teacup when you add hot water. Be wary of new British tea-based lifeforms brewing in your cup. High tea, on the other hand, is most excellent and quite free of strange liquids trying to grope their way up the side of your cup.

Hope you've all had a good past month or so- will hopefully update a bit quicker this time! :)

Pre-Flight Blogging!

2010-03-26T00:16:00.007+11:00

I'm flying to Barcelona tomorrow.

Well, today really, since it's 12:17 a.m on what is technically Friday morning...but in approximately twelve hours I'll be grabbing my backpack and heading off to the airport.

It still hasn't sunk in yet that I'll actually be heading overseas for the first time since 2004- I did go to New Zealand in 2007 but I don't count New Zealand as exactly 'overseas'...it's more like popping across the Tasman to visit Australia's weird dorky cousin :D On that trip, I embarrassed my family by collapsing into a hysterical fit of laughter in the airport queue because the New Zealander who checked our passports said quite seriously to my American aunt, "Oh, you've come from the Oo-Iss?" and I ended up having to leave the queue because tears were leaking from my eyes and every second breath was being inhaled as a strangled, "Hee! Hee! Waaaaah hah hah hah....New Zealanders...funny....talk....funny....HEEEEEE!"

Don't even ask what happened at the supermarket when the attendant asked my Dad to confirm that he wanted 'six' slices of ham.

Anyway, I think that there's much more scope for potential humiliation in Spain, as my Spanish is nothing short of horrendous (as evidenced by what was possibly the most pathetic attempt at conversation I had the other day when I phoned our accomodation in Spain- I think I coughed out a 'Como estas?' in reply to a torrent of indecipherable Spanish before I blurted out the inevitable, "Usted hable Ingles?!")

Hopefully I'll get the chance to blog while I'm over there- tomorrow I've got the epic 22-hour flight extravaganza which will be alternately spent eating, sleeping, exhausting my inflight entertainment and fighting over what constitutes a legitimate word in travel Scrabble with my sister. (The Official Scrabble Dictionary would be too heavy to drag along in our backpacks :P) My long-suffering sister gets to put up with me in a confined space for 22 hours, and I'm pretty sure that at some point during those 22 hours the two of us will end up like this:

Catch y'all in Europe!

xox

Dresses and (Achilles) Heels

2010-03-08T23:21:00.004+11:00

I'm meant to be doing adminstrative law right now- in fact, I have four subjects to catch up on and about 20 job applications to write- but unfortunately that all had to take a backseat this evening.

You see, the Oscars were held earlier today. And whilst I actually care very little for the Oscars (I'm probably part of the 1% of the population who thought Avatar was completely overrated) I do have a weakness for the red carpet fashions- and so it's damn near impossible to resist when presented with a link to an Oscars frock photo gallery.

Dresses are my Achilles heel. Well, one of my many Achilles heels- I suppose you should really only have two Achilles heels (one for each foot) so I suppose if I had to pick two, one of them would be food and the other would be dresses. I suppose if I had a superfluous third leg (and therefore an extra heel to be bestowed with Achilles-like properties) the other one would be lip glosses. I'm not exactly sure why I'm drawn to lip glosses as I don't really wear them all that often, but they're just so slim and pretty and well, glossy...and they're the first thing my hand snakes towards in the cosmetics aisle.

But with regards to dresses...I have about 20 formal dresses in my closet, which in my opinion isn't that many considering roughly 95% were purchased for $20-$50, with the median price probably hovering around $30. I have a strange ability to ferret out discounted clothes (I think it's encoded into my DNA at an Asian genetic level), so almost all of them went through a 70% markdown at some stage. My sister once suggested I sell a couple, but I felt a sudden rush of horror at the very thought. I have a connection to every item of clothing in my closet. If you point at any item, I can tell you where I bought it, how much I paid for it, and the shopping companion I was with at the time.

I liken it to the scene in Pocahontas where she's running around singing about colours of the wind and trying to explain the concept to John Smith (substitute my sister for John Smith, or any hapless male really). Or since this post is Oscars-related, probably also the bit where Zoe Saldana's Na'vi character in Avatar is showing Jake Sully how their world is interconnected with nature. (In fact, Pocahontas and Avatar are practically the same movie, so either analogy would be appropriate.) Because to an outsider, the connection that I have with my wardrobe is completely unfathomable. But I know every skirt and dress and T-shirt...has a life, has a spirit has a naaaaaame...

Of course, this connection means that I hardly ever throw anything out- I always feel a sudden twang of remorse that makes me clutch at that item of clothing (imbued with memories and probably several dust-mites) and place it back in the closet. I am planning a spring-clean eventually...but in spring. And since I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, I'm safe for a couple more months :P

But I had a look at this Oscars slideshow, and was struck again by how awesome Mariska Hargitay looks on the red carpet. All the time. I still remember the dress she wore to the 2008 Emmy Awards (again, I was procrastinating at the time) and she managed to pull off this amazing bright yellow dress which inspired me to go on the hunt for a yellow dress this summer (I didn't find one though.) Even if you Google Image her on the red carpet, she looks constantly impeccable- bright fuchsia, aquamarine, cream, pale pink- the woman just pulls it off with such elegance every single time.

And now that I've indulged in my celebrity gossip/procrastination/girly moment for the day, I feel that I can now go back down to the plain text drudgery of administrative law :D

B**tch, Run That

2010-03-03T19:40:00.007+11:00

Job-hunting is driving me crazy.

Granted, quite a few things drive me crazy. Like double negatives, or triple negatives in the one sentence. Or how every Rob Thomas song that comes out sounds exactly like his entire back catalogue but with random concepts like mockingbirds and diamonds thrown in. Or the fact that some bitch today almost ran me over in the university carpark because she decided that because she was in a 4WD this somehow gave her the right to DRIVE OVER A NATURE STRIP PARKING DIVIDER, WITHOUT LOOKING (I feel the need to capitalise every single one of her driving transgressions) WHILE HOLDING UP A MOBILE PHONE TO HER EAR AND CHATTING AWAY, LIKE PLAYING CRAZY TAXI IN THE GROUNDS OF A TERTIARY INSTITUTION WAS A NORMAL EVERYDAY THING BECAUSE HEY, HEAVEN FORBID THAT YOU PAUSE YOUR ENGINE IN AN EMPTY CARPARK TO TAKE YOUR STUPID CALL.

And then the bitch smiles at me as she's bouncing down from the curb and I've stopped in my tracks with my mouth agape at her stupidity.

This is actually the second time I 've almost been run over at university- the first was a bus driver who didn't stop at a pedestrian crossing- and he had plenty of time to see me crossing with a few other students. Fortunately I saw he wasn't stopping in time, but one of the other students screamed out, "You could've killed her, you fucking idiot!" after it roared past.

Oh, and there was also the time where some creepy git hid under my friend's car- most likely waiting to assault her but there were two of us so he didn't emerge- so we almost killed him when we reversed over him. I saw his legs flailing under the car out of the passenger's side window and I thought we'd killed somebody- and that is an image that will unfortunately always stay with me. (He ran away though while we were completely freaking out, and I don't think they ever caught him, although I'm not sure whether the police would even bother to tell us anyway if he had been nabbed.)

Yes, my university is a lovely, safe place to be.

Anyway, I've wandered off topic...scrolling up, I believe I originally started off talking about job hunting.

Ah, yes.

I'm pretty keen to get out of university- not just because bad traffic-related things seem to occur in threes on campus, but because I've just started my fifth year and really, I'm sort of over the whole study thing. I've been trying to apply for graduate positions recently, but it's just form after form after form of questions asking me about times I've demonstrated leadership/teamwork/problem-solving/initiative...and then I have to figure out ways to tweak my CV to demonstrate these key skills without sounding like a tool.

Sigh.

I went to an information session today for a certain organisation that was recruiting graduates- and although the actual presentation was fine, everyone was schmoozing in the foyer afterwards with glasses of OJ and champagne and these weird little things that looked like retarded vol-au-vents, and I just felt distinctly uncomfortable.

I'm not a born schmoozer. I hate schmoozing. I'm one of those unrealistic, naive people who likes to have a conversation without a self-serving agenda. Which means, really, that I would be squished like a bug in the corporate world. I just happen to hate trite conversations that aren't genuine. So I chatted to a random Engineering student who was standing next to me like an extremely awkward statue, had a spring roll and an OJ, and wandered off to have dinner with my family.

So out of interest- any born schmoozers out there? Any anti-schmoozers? Or any tips on how to surreptiously stand in front of the good canapes tray without looking like you're monopolising it?

N.B- Blog post title is from M.O.P's 'Ante Up'...but I'm not normally that mean unless you try and run me over :P

Also, a shout-out to the lovely 'Anonymous' commenter who is reading through my old posts and leaving me feedback- thank you- your comments really make my day :)

Tooth. And nothing but the tooth.

2010-02-17T15:42:00.010+11:00

Hello! Sorry for the lack of updates recently- I had my wisdom teeth removed last week, and despite my sister cheerfully suggesting that I blog "while the pain is still fresh!" I wasn't really keen on writing a post detailing the blood spitting and the mouth-numbing and the tooth-doucheing.

And no, that's not a typo- on my review two days ago, my surgeon stuck an irrigation syringe down the gum cavity where my wisdom tooth (or teeth, rather) had been, and flushed the cavity. It was so disgusting. And painful. And then he popped the syringe in a bag and told me to do exactly the same thing, six times a day.

I call it the tooth douche. It's my new friend in the pursuit of dental hygiene:

Anyway, despite the pain from the intubation (they stuck a tube down my throat for the general anaesthetic and it created an ulcer) everything is peachy. Except for the six-times-a-day tooth douche.

And despite my best efforts, I just spent a goodly paragraph detailing the tooth douche after all. Oh well.

In other non-tooth-douche-related news, Happy Chinese New Year, and a happy belated Valentines'...Chinese New Year actually started on Valentines' Day this year, so I actually got money for being single. It was brilliant!

And judging by the fact that I've just written an entire post about tooth-doucheing, I expect that my 'single' status really isn't likely to change any time soon, unless I find some handsome young maxillofacial surgeon who finds that kind of thing absolutely fascinating :P But that's fine by me, cos all I need in this life of sin, is me and my tooth douche.

Gong Xi Fai Cai, bloggers! :D

'Ow' Is Our Not-So-Secret Word of the Day

2010-01-21T21:09:00.009+11:00

I would like to personally bitch-slap the person who invented squats.

In fact, I would also like to personally bitch-slap the person who invented 'burpees' (see a delightful animation here of what this entails) although I strongly suspect that the person who invented that particular brand of physical torture would be able to slam me through a wall with one flick of his well-defined beefcake finger.

I suppose it's not really their fault for making up the individual exercise...the fault lies with the sadistic bastards who string them all into one big hellish routine and make you do them for 1.5 continuous hours with only three 45-second breaks.

You can probably guess what I did yesterday in my boxing class. And you can probably guess why I was staggering around Melbourne today, unable to use the full function of my legs because the muscles in my thighs kept screaming, "You did this, bitch!" over and over again with each painful step. I looked like an extra who'd escaped from the set of Dawn of the Dead- each jolting, staggered step was taken with my legs straight out, and I probably had a constipated-looking, gaping-mouthed expression of pain on my face to match even the finest zombie acting.

It was only my second boxing class- I went last week with my friend, K, and that was at her university. This time, I suggested we try my university's gym.

Oh God.

Y'see, last time we went we were actually recruited by a boxing instructor at K's uni who was really short on participants. There were six people in the class, of which K and I made up 1/3. Furthermore, there was also an overweight Asian guy so there was at least someone who was lower than our current level of fitness (yeah, schadenfreude, I know...but admit it, you feel a bit better when you're not the most unfit person in the room...)

This time...the class was full. Full of regulars, and each one of those regulars had a ripped six-pack. Even the girls had bulging deltoids in their arms the size of rolled-up socks. There was an Asian guy next to me, and when his singlet rode up all I saw was rock-hard, rippled abs that made him look like Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat come to life. It was terrifying.

It's hard to describe exactly what they did in that class. First off, there was a bit of boxing. After that, Person A had to do 10 punches (caught by Person B), run to the other side of the room, do 5 squats, run back, run back again and drop the ground, run back, and then swap with Person B (who all this time had to jog on the spot.) After this, we had to do the whole thing again but with 20 punches, then 30, 40, 50 all the way up to 100...and then count down again to 90, 80, 70 all the way back down to ten.

Our sadistic instructor was also adamant that we all do this continuously and without a break- although he said that if we were first-timers we could take a drink. K and I grabbed a drink at the 100 mark- and the instructor actually came over and suggested that we start the count back down at 60 instead of 100. Even with this pity discount, we still finished at the same time as everyone else. Oh, and you know what? Always wear a sports bra when boxing...because as I discovered, you can't actually pull a wayward strap back up WHEN YOUR ENTIRE HAND IS ENCASED IN A GIANT PADDED GLOVE.

Anyway...

After that, we had three rounds of what could only be described as pure torture. I'm not exactly the fittest person in the world, but K at least is pretty good, and we were both driven the point of near-collapse. I wasn't sure if I could properly describe this in words, so I took the liberty of drawing a highly detailed, beautifully crafted diagram:

And yes, that was my exact expression the entire time. I don't think I've hissed 'son of a bitch!' that many times under my breath- I achieved a new personal best.

Anyway, the diagram above shows what the instructor could call out- we were at opposite sides of the room, and we'd be doing simulataneous but different exercises from that group in the middle. Again, continuously. And timed. With no breaks, except 45 seconds between rounds. And it wasn't a matter of just going through the list- he could pick anything from that list, as many times as he wanted. It was hideous. The pathetic thing was the 'crawling'...I dropped, exhausted, to my hands and knees and started to drag myself along the ground using my fingernails as claws. I looked like a demented overgrown toddler. Then I realised that everyone else had their butts in the air and their knees off the ground (cue another "SON OF A BITCH!") so I had to follow suit. There was more than one point where I considered just smacking my face into the ground and breathing in the smell of sweet, sweet carpet rather than get up and go on.

After the three rounds, an hour had passed and we thought that we were finished. But oh no...there was something else called the 'Circle of Pain'...but since we were first-timers we didn't have to do it with weights. I can safely say that the Circle of Pain was NOT a misnomer.

After the Circle of Pain, where my arms had gone numb, we had to do 50 sit-ups, followed by 20 splices. On the 29th sit-up, I looked over at K, where we had both flopped back on the mat trying to muster up the strength to keep going, and we started giggling hysterically from exhaustion. Fortunately, after the splices the sadistic instructor called time, and we picked ourselves off the mat and staggered out (after I had finally unleashed another torrent of "SON OF A BITCH! SON OF A BITCH!")

And that is why I am in a lot of pain right now.

But I came to a sad realisation after boxing. Although I may possibly go back to that particular class when I get a bit fitter (i.e a year at least from now) I may have to give up on my dream of being Kitana. Probably not achievable if I have to urge to flop down on the floor after only one round...

Changes

2010-01-20T16:07:00.006+11:00

I must admit the title of this post is quite deceptive- 'changes' is such a dramatic word, full of anticipation, trepidation, promises, or even dread preceding some major announcement...but in this case, I'm merely referring to the fact that I've been attempting to change the look of my blog on this lovely Wednesday afternoon, and it's driving me freaking crazy.

Despite being fairly computer-literate, my knowledge of programming, HTML and general blog stuff is about on par with my algebraic skills. That is, if I manage to somehow fluke my way into getting a solution, it's by sheer dumb luck and I can't actually backtrack and tell you how I did it. Plus, both programming and algebra elicit the same reaction from me- frustration and the desire to smash something. So far, I've changed the layout three or four times, trying to find something that fits, and trying to figure out how to edit the fonts in HTML. Just to warn y'all in advance, I'll probably be playing around with formats for a bit in the new few weeks- you'll probably be able to get a new template every time you press F5 on your browser :D

I quite liked the simple layout of my old design, but it was a stock-standard sensible Blogger template that I had for about three years. Figured I might as well get a new one, considering it's a new decade and all.

Hope you all had a great start to 2010!

New Year!

2009-12-31T11:16:00.006+11:00

Greetings!

From everyone here at TEotA (and by 'everyone' I really mean just me, and by TEotA I just realised that I've coined a really weird acronym for my blog that sounds like an alien name from Avatar) we wish you a very Happy New Year and a fantastic 2010.

(And I'm dropping the royal 'we' now as this is just getting too confusing.)

Anyway- thank you to anyone who's perused, browsed, followed or stumbled across this blog, to anyone who's ever left a comment or even just browsed anonymously, and to those whose own blogs have given me inspiration in the past year. Your support means a lot :)

Have a safe NYE, and I'll see y'all in 2010!!!

xox

Daph

Why My Family Is Awesome

2009-12-09T20:10:00.003+11:00

Came home from work the other day and found that my family were celebrating my exam results :D

(For any international readers- my mother absolutely loves puns, and those little round candies around the edge are called 'Smarties'. The rest of the joke is pretty much self-explanatory :P)

Kickstart

2009-12-01T00:37:00.008+11:00

I'm kickstarting my blog back into action, because I tend to have a bad habit of neglecting my blog for a month or two on end- and my poor little corner of cyberspace is left to sit fallow for a bit, until a spell of I need to blog sorta moseys on over and whacks me with a little prodding stick, and my fingers hit the keys.

Oddly enough, in this case it was John Mayer who inspired this update.

Yes. John Mayer.

Okay, okay, I know he's mostly in the tabloids for his reputation as a ladies' man, and I confess that I had not purchased a single one of his albums up until last week- but I heard Who Says a few weeks ago, and something in that prompted me to buy his new album, Battle Studies. And so I did. And I have to say that it's a beautiful album- simple, yet somewhat exquisite in its crafting.

I buy albums for different reasons. I have a strange fondness for commerically crafted pop- I love the familiar four-chord progression of a predictable ballad. For me, it's like having the aural equivalent of a nice warm comfort blanket. This is why you'll find that quite a few of the CDs on my shelf are of ex-Idols (Kelly Clarkson, Jessica Mauboy, Jordin Sparks). The cornier the ballad, the better. I also love hip hop/rap. Jay-Z's The Blueprint 3 was one of my favourite albums this year.

Sometimes, however, you find albums that speak to you, the ones where you connect on some strange level. I think Battle Studies has fallen into this category, along with Anna Nalick's Wreck of the Day.

Anyway, my long and rambling point was that I got onto John Mayer's website and onto his blog (and say what you want about the guy, but he has a wicked sense of humour- there's a video of him attempting to mix some hip hop where his lyrics consist solely of "I like sex, and I'm good at it...I like sex, and I'm good at it...") and he had this post here.

In case you don't read it (and in case you're bored of what seems so far to be a John Mayer plug), he was talking about conscious composition, and the importance of it in keeping him focussed and able to keep writing. That got me thinking about how much of what can be loosely deemed as the 'creative process' is a product of conscious, focussed thought. Most people would agree that overthinking a situation can have detrimental consequences, and perhaps too much of this self-awareness can have a negative effect on creativity as well. There's no doubt that most of my planned, considered essays have failed where my last-minute, hysterically-written essays have succeeded beyond even my most optimistic expectations.

One of my university tutors, a poet, once described the creative writing process as almost being in a different state of consciousness, where you let go of all your preconceptions and inhibitions (or words to that effect). This always reminds me of Samuel Coleridge- as the story goes, Coleridge saw the course of an epic poem in a dream, and as soon as he woke up, he started to write the entire thing down before he forgot it. Unfortunately for him, a person on business from Porlock came and interrupted him, so he never got to finish it. The poem was called Kubla Khan, and if you ever hear the expression, "person from Porlock", that's where it originated from. (Hopefully you're not being described as one, as I don't think the expression is meant to be terribly flattering in its present form.)

There is also a theory that this 'dream' of Coleridge's was actually an opium-induced haze, but regardless of what it was, it was still an altered state of consciousness which seemed to spark this sudden burst of creative brilliance. And quite a few writers were high as a kite when they wrote their own works of literary genius.

Then again, writing cannot be easily read without structure, and a melody line can't just run without some semblance of rhythm, so an element of technicality and conscious thought is required. I'm just curious as to whether the creative process depends on being able to suspend reality, or alter our perception of our current reality, in order to really work.

And perhaps that is why so many artists are crazy.

And that's my random thought of the evening :)

The Waiting Game Sucks

2009-10-19T23:50:00.002+11:00

Earlier this evening, my Arts tutor sent out a group e-mail explaining that by midnight tonight, we would all get an e-mail with our marks and feedback for the subject.

It is now 11:51 p.m, and if you think that I'm sad enough to sit by the computer hitting F5 on my browser for 20 minutes while blogging about the whole sorry experience...

...then you're right.

*twiddles thumbs*

The Devil's Marsupial

2009-10-03T19:17:00.014+10:00

I hate possums.

Most people look at their tiny little faces, their cute furry noses, and think aww.

I look at them, and think THIS:

Look at his demonic eyes. The pink, twitchy nose. The cold, calculating expression of a KILLER. (Feel free to click on that picture and view it in its full horror.)

Look at that butt. Look at that massive possum ass. Look at Mr and Mrs Psycho Killer, lurking behind the door. You want to know why I hate possums?

Look at the picture. Those are my boots. Those are my black MG boots right before their retirement, and those are my friend's runners being held hostage by the little blighters. And those were the two huge monostrosities, the devil's marsupials, who were holding us under siege in our teepee in Tasmania when all I wanted to do was BRUSH MY TEETH.

IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK, YOU ACCURSED ANIMAL? CAN I NOT PRACTISE NORMAL DENTAL HYGIENE IN THE MIDDLE OF A BUSH RETREAT WITHOUT YOU STALKING AT MY HEELS?!

Do you remember me, demon possum spawn? My (braver) friend Kris tried clapping her runners at you. She almost threw a shoe at you. She hollered. And yelled. And you stood your ground, anchored by some kind of evil spirit force.

And I was so traumatised that I was forced to revert to one of my most basic and favoured coping mechanisms.

(Photography Credit: my friend Kris. I still cop flak from her every time the 'P' word is mentioned.)

(And yes, that is actually me. Behold the brave and valiant author of this noble blog.)

More proof of demonic possession, again FROM THE SAME TRIP. ON THE SAME NIGHT.

ALL YOUR PANS ARE BELONG TO US.

So as you can see, friends, I am not exactly a fan of trichosurus vulpecula. Or as I prefer, demonicus furrecula.

Possums just enjoy making my life miserable. Because why else would they start MATING IN THE CEILING OF MY HOUSE DURING EXAM TIME?

Exam time is stressful. Law school is stressful. All of this is stressful enough without having THUMP THUMP THUMP HISS SQUAWK THUMP THUMP *RABID POSSUM NOISE* THUMP THUMP SNARL HISS HISS HISS THUMP THWACK echoing in the roof.

Earlier today, my father conceded that perhaps it was time he called in someone to get rid of the possums before they caused any structural damage to the house, or caused insomnia.

Unfortunately, in the temporal space between 2 p.m and 7 p.m, he got on Google and discovered that there are entire forum threads devoted to the best methods of flushing out possums. My father enjoys a challenge. Possibly even more than that, he also enjoys saving money. The very concept of DIY Possum Extraction proved to be almost irresistible in combining two of his favourite things. This is why he was quite happy to spend half the afternoon bashing at the walls, climbing up on the roof, checking for possum holes and trawling the 'net for tips. Apparently one such tip on flushing possums out involves using moth balls, or any kinds of incense.

And this is why the downstairs guest bathroom now has a saucer of burning incense perched atop the shower, with the the ceiling fan plate removed and the exhaust turned on, with incense wafting up into the roof cavity.

And this is why the downstairs guest bathroom currently smells like a Chinese temple.

My father thinks he has won this battle. But we shall not underestimate our enemy.

The war has only just begun.

Culinary Disasters #1

2009-09-07T00:49:00.003+10:00

Twenty minutes ago, I thought I detected a rather unpleasant burning smell.

It took a few seconds of bemused deliberation until the colloquial penny dropped...and I bolted downstairs to find out exactly what happens when you leave a pot of homebrand pasta boiling for forty-five minutes in a small pot.

The answer = half a centimetre of charcoal.

So I'm timing myself as I write this post, because it's already 1 a.m and that pasta was actually meant to be for my lunch tomorrow- well, today I suppose- so it's going to be an even later night than per usual, and now I can't make fun of my Dad's Great Pudding Explosion so much anymore.

Cooking FAIL.

I partially blame my sister. She initiated a spontaneous game of charades at midnight and so whilst I was earnestly pretending to be a house, then pretending to be an arsonist burning down the house (it was 'song names') my own flame-related disaster was merrily boiling away downstairs.

Irony FOR THE WIN.

And this is why being a crazy cat lady will be so much easier when I'm older. All you need to do is get a spoon and scoop out some jellied fish into a bowl (or one large feeding platter for my one hundred and twenty-six feline friends) and that's it. No preparation required.

Although knowing me, I'll probably end up snapping the pull ring off or something and then the cats will all turn on me and it'll be me fighting against a swarm of 126 cats and I'll run out screaming into the street clutching a can of Snappy Tom with cats clinging to my cardigan as I scream incoherently with several sets of claws in my face.

*coughs*

Righto, down to check on Pasta V2.0...

Don't Phunk With My Heart

2009-08-07T13:36:00.003+10:00

Yesterday I went to see my GP over a few minor concerns with what Captain Jack Sparrow would fondly refer to as his "thump thump."

My thump-thump has been...well, thumping rather erratically recently so I figured it was better to veer on the side of caution and see a doctor. However, I couldn't help but feel like a bit of hypochondriac when I was sitting in the office trying to explain exactly what was freaking me out.

In layman's terms, I believe I garbled out, "It sometimes it goes thump...thump...thump...paaaause...gurgle.....thump thump...."

And all credit to my doctor, I think he managed to decipher this (including my lame tapping demonstration on his desk). He said it could be a combination of factors, including lack of sleep, caffeine, stress, thyroid problems, or heart defects (tick tick tick for the first three) and then followed it up with the cheerful question, "Has anyone in your family ever dropped dead for no apparent reason?"

To which I said that there was no history of Long QT or anything like that, which made him ask me if I'd been Googling. To this, I indignantly replied that no, I was not one of those people who print out a whole list of their symptoms off Ask Jeeves and take them into their doctor....but I sort of left off the fact that I learnt about Long QT Syndrome from a storyline on Neighbours.

Anyway, he then ordered a blood test and an electrocardiogram (ECG) and I toddled off next door to get all the Pathology stuff done.

And then as I was sitting there holding my waiting line number, I realised that this was my first ever blood test.

Eep.

I'm not good with blood. I don't dissolve into hysterics, I don't scream, and I don't faint, but I dislike needles immensely. I can normally sit there quite calmly but there is generally a lot of panicking beforehand. Fortunately, I only had seven minutes of panicking before the nurse was passing me vials.

Vials.

Vials in which to hold my blood.

Oh, God.

See, there's just something about the thought of blood being drawn from my body which makes me very very uneasy. When the nurse actually stuck the needle into my skin I was fine, but then I heard this gurgling as my blood was being drawn up the syringe and all I could think of was AAARRRRGGH! AAARGGGGGH! AAARGGGGGHH! AARGGGGH! AAARGGGGGH! AARRGGGGH!!!!!

I tried to toughen myself up my doing Work Experience seven years ago at a veterinary clinic. And I found out that I'm okay with operations, and blood, and seeing a dog's innards on the operating table, and having the vet chat happily about his new Lord of the Rings DVD with collectible Gollum figure while his scalpel was poking at an infected doggy spleen in front of him...but when it comes to things like papercuts or needles on humans it's something different altogether.

What I did do was concentrate very very hard on the radio that was playing some kind of obnoxious ad for Harvey Norman. So I sat there and focussed on the fact that Harvey Norman were having some kind of sale, and this sale was offering 24 months interest-free....that's right, 24 months interest-free and that this had nothing to do with the gurgling...OMG PLEASE STOP THE GURGLING...of my blood being drawn up into a needle.

It was over quicker than I expected, so then I had to lie down while the nurse ran SANDPAPER over my skin and stuck electrodes to it. Then she began clipping leads to all these electrodes, so I felt like one big human component switch as she plugged me into the ECG machine thingy.

So now I'm waiting on the test results. On the upside, my doctor didn't tell me to lay off caffeine or anything like that, which was quite a relief, so I had two very large cups of coffee in the afternoon. The nurse sternly told me that I wasn't allowed to lift anything heavy with my left arm for the rest of the day (where the blood had been drawn) and as I rose to shove my tote bag over my left shoulder she squawked at me "I hope you're not going to put that on that arm! Put it on the other one!"

This made things quite irritating when I had to go to work in the afternoon...I ended up dragging out a 700VA uninterruptible power supply out using only my right arm, and that was all kinds of not-fun. And because I am physically uncoordinated and have issues wearing things over my right arm, I accidentally smashed into the toy keyboard stand at work on my way out and knocked the entire thing over with my handbag.

Obviously I'm not an ambi-wearer.

But since I have no restrictions on my caffeine intake as yet, I'm going to go and have a nice afternoon coffee :)

Mmmm. Coffee. How I thump thump thee.

Why I Should Be Cast as Kitana...(are you listening, McG?)

2009-06-20T23:15:00.007+10:00

I pulled my pyjama top over my face earlier this evening- I don't know why, I just felt like annoying my sister while she was using the bathroom mirror, and pretending to be a masked bandit in bright pink Chupa Chup PJs and waving my hands in the air behind her head just seemed the best way to go about it- when I realised something.

I could totally be Kitana if they ever made another horrible Mortal Kombat movie.

(Kitana always wears a mask that hides everything but her eyes. Thus, it hit me like a lightning bolt when I was mucking around in the mirror.)

I have given this considered, educated thought (mostly because the alternative to this train of thought was going back to a large pile of legislation and national employment standards) and have come up with the following reasons why I could totally be cast as Kitana:

1) I'm Asian. She's Asian. In fact, Kristin Kreuk got cast as Chun-Li for Street Fighter and she's only half-Asian. Therefore, am TWICE AS QUALIFIED as Kristin Kreuk for this role. (Am still irritated at Kristin Kreuk and the fact that she got to star as the love interest of Tom Welling AND Jensen Ackles in Smallville. That's just plain greedy.)

2. Drop-dead gorgeousness is not a deciding factor. She wears a mask over most of her face.

3. Even acting is not an issue. Of course, I do have the unrivalled experience of having a minor speaking part in my Year Six school play, but at any rate, Kitana's voice comes out muffled in MK v DC...quite possibly due to having an entire scrap of blue fabric plastered to her jaw. So I could botch my lines and no one would notice!

4. I really like the colour blue. It's meant to be.

5. KISS OF DEATH! KISS OF DEATH!

And as you can see, my study for the next exam is not going so well....:P

It's What I Go To Work For

2009-06-18T23:08:00.006+10:00

GFC.

It always takes me a little mental minute to process acronyms. Whenever someone mentions the GFC my brain kicks into overdrive. Does it stand for Games For Consoles? Gluten Free Cooking? Grease Fried Chips?

Alas, the rather prosaic answer is the Global Financial Crisis. Nothing quite so fun as the other food-related alternatives my mind tossed up.

Anyway, the 'GFC' has meant that consumer spending has dropped, which means that retail stores are laying off staff, cutting hours and slashing wage budgets. Which means that when I walked into work today for my first shift in two weeks, I was apologetically informed that I wouldn't get another shift until the 10th of July. And this shift would be a grand total of three hours. Huzzah.

However, given the lack of consumer enthusiasm, it meant that my Thursday night shift was very very quiet. This was basically my night:

(M is my Manager, AM the Assistant Manager, 3IC the third-in-charge).

5:45 p.m- Arrive early for shift. AM has downloaded two episodes of Season Four of Supernatural on his iPhone for my viewing pleasure, so I stand in the backroom annoying M, making little squeaky noises when the little Jensen Ackles on screen lifts up his shirt. I get an inordinate amount of pleasure turning the iPhone upside-down so the image rotates too. Why doesn't everything come with built-in accelerators?!

5:55 p.m- M and AM start humming. They enjoy stringing my name along to the Spiderman theme, probably because my full name has three syllables and the tune is as catchy as anything.

6:00 p.m- Shift starts. 3IC is having a teary argument because apparently the Area Manager noticed her very frayed pants hems and told M that 3IC must buy new ones. M informs 3IC that if she doesn't get new pants and comply with uniform standards he can send her home for her next shift. 3IC threatens to call the Union, because obviously the Union does not have better things to do with its time than look at people's trousers.

6:25 p.m- M gives 3IC way too much leeway. I make a mental note that tears will get you out of anything. M and 3IC leave.

6:45 p.m- Colleague is stuck with an Asian woman and her two kids trying to haggle down the price of some kind of robot kit with Bluetooth capabilities. In three years, I have never seen a customer successfully put that thing together. The control box always karks it or something.

7:00 p.m- Am stuck with someone looking for Components. Crap it.

7:05 p.m- Have located a crystal earpiece, but am now combing the Components area for bloody ferrite rods.

7:10 p.m- I emerge triumpantly from the midst of fuses and resistors with three ferrite rods, only to be told that they're not suitable because they lack coils. Why do ferrite rods have coils?! It's a rod! It's ferrite! Why add coils to it's rodly goodness? AARGH.

7:15 p.m- Am now stuck looking in the diodes section for some kind of obscure diode. I hate diodes.

7:18 p.m- Asian woman still haggling.

7:20 p.m- Find a dude roaming the tools section looking for an AV switch. Dump him in front of the right section while discreetly checking him out. Final verdict: nah.

7:25 p.m- Asian woman still haggling.

7:30 p.m- Another customer wants to know if he can ask a tricky question. I say sure- he's holding a SCART-3RGB adaptor, it's not like there's anything else he needs to know about. Except:

"Is it bi-directional?"

EH?!

7:32 p.m- Apparently bi-directional is just a fancy name for input/output. Point-of-Sale database, how I love thee.

7:45 p.m- Boss brings me giant coffee, latte with two sugars. Wish my favourite barista was working so we could bitch about the trials of law school during the coffee-making process. Ooh, it's a large coffee. Daphne the Caffeine Squirrel ain't gettin' any sleep tonight.

7:50 p.m- AM hooks up his iPhone to a 22" Samsung in the back room and Jensen's glorious visage fills the screen. Were my life a Stephenie Meyer novel, I would be gasping at his smouldering dark eyes and chiselled chest, thinking how sweet and intoxicating his breath would be and bemoaning my own feeble insignificance next to his heartbreaking beauty.

AM tells me to stop drooling.

7:53 p.m- Jensen is sharpening a knife. How manly he looks in his singlet and his gun arsenal.

7:54 p.m- AM asks me if I can blow up some more balloons for the sale display.

7:56 p.m- Have filled the last two minutes with blow-related jokes.

7:59 p.m- I attempt to earnestly give a brief etymology lesson to AM by arguing that the word 'erect' cannot be used in relation to a balloon, as 'erect' implies something being built from foundations or rising up, and really, the word 'inflate' is more appropriate. What can't you do with a B.A in English?

8:00 p.m- AM decides to test out iPhone and component cable on a larger LCD screen. Am impressed that such a compressed file can be shown in clear 576p. Have reevaluated my scorn of the iPhone, but I still wouldn't get one.

8:30 p.m- Remember that my coffee is still sitting out the back. Coffee is duly sculled, luke-warm and all, but still coffee.

8:45 p.m- Almost home time!

9:00 p.m- End of shift.

And they pay me $21/hr for this* :D

*Well, in the good old days when I had weekly shifts

Attention Span FAIL...

2009-05-26T12:42:00.003+10:00

My attention span has actually decreased from when I was a kid.

I used to be able to sit through long, painful school assemblies. Chapel, every week (although I once copped detention for sliding with my friends on the pews.) Speech Nights. Double periods, sometimes triple- of the same class. Hours of let's-go-through-every-line-of-Romeo-and-Juliet in English. Yet now, I am unable to sustain my concentration for more than 20 minutes at a time.

And just to prove a point, I am writing this in the middle of my Equity lecture.

It's only one and a half hours and I am so painfully bored that I have actually exhausted the distractions of all other websites, including Facebook.

Currently, the lecturer is talking about 'equitable monetary remedies' and I am blogging about not paying attention.

Sigh.

Beast

2009-05-18T15:58:00.008+10:00

I am currently hibernating in my Study Cave.

My Study Cave generally looks like the kind of underground lair that you see in horror films- where the creature drags the remains of their meal and lets it rot in the corner while it goes out to kill more innocents. Currently, my Study Cave looks like I've gone out, killed something, dragged it back and fed it to my young because there are piles of clothes forming a strange kind of nest around my bed and coffee cups strewn all over the desk.

(Rule Number One of my studying habits: if it requires more work than adding boiling water, don't drink it.)

Anyway, one of the main rules that outsiders must understand is that when the Beast is studying, the Beast does not enjoy having unannounced visits by stray humans such as the "Have you ever considered switching from Tru Energy to AGL?" man, the "Have you ever considered switching from AGL to Tru Energy?" man, and the Avon Representative (the latter of which has been taken care of. Permanently.)

This is mainly because on Study Days, the Beast finds getting out of her pyjamas is a pointless exercise and that makeup is not necessary if her waking hours are spent in the Study Cave. Therefore, the Beast looks like...a beast. Especially when she wakes up.

In my Beast form, I have already managed to permanently frighten off the Avon cosmetics representative- all it took was a 9 a.m visit with unbrushed hair with no makeup and my bunny pyjamas squinting at the hideous sun behind the Avon lady's head...(plus I generally can only splutter out monosyllables before 10 a.m) and from now on, she just leaves the catalogue at the doorstep before presumably running for her life. I think she now understands that sometimes, there are faces that cosmetics just can't fix.

So this morning I heard the doorbell ring. My sister had just left two minutes before, so I assumed she'd forgotten something and come back for it.

So I stumbled downstairs to the door in my little Soho cotton stripey PJs and my V-neck pullover and made my way to the door. When I opened it, I realised that:

(a) if I'd had put my glasses on I probably would have seen that this was NOT my sister; and that
(b) I was about to encounter another species of stray human that would have to be taught a lesson.

"Hello," the human said. He was medium height, skinny, male, probably would have been quite attractive looking if I'd had corrective lenses of some sort over my eyes, except all I saw was a tall blur in a suit.

"Hello." That's it. Be the sparkling conversationalist that you are before luring him into a false sense of security...then we rip out his innards. Bwah hah hah.

"How are you this morning?"

"Good." Very good, in fact, human. How would you like to be strung upside down by your ankles while I GO BACK TO BED?

"I'm from...*insert agency here* and we just sold a house in your area for a very good price, and I was wondering whether you were interested at all in putting up your house for..."

He trailed off as I squinted at him.

Boy am I good at that. I really think that being Asian lends my eye-squints an extra squinty charm.

I continued my Death-By-Squint technique. This probably would have worked had I been a ninja. Or an assassin in black latex. Or Julia Gillard. But in my morning state, I just looked like I was half-stoned and trying to blink out some kind of flash code with my eyelids. I think that just confused him because he said, "Um...are your parents home?"

ARE MY PARENTS HOME?!

Excuse me, but I just turned 21! I'm a big girl! I'm an ADULT. A MATURE ADULT WHO JUST HAPPENS TO BE WEARING PASTEL STRIPEY PYJAMAS BECAUSE YOU THINK THAT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD ENJOYS WAKING UP BEFORE 10 A.M?!

Little girl? I'll show him little girl! So I called for backup, like the mature 21 year old I am.

"Daaaaddy!"

And I stomped off to let my father deal with him.

If he comes back, there will be a price to pay. And if he comes back during SWOTVAC, he will never cross our driveway again once the Harpy in Pink Flannelettes has seen to his trespassing.

If You Seek Huxley

2009-05-07T23:25:00.009+10:00

I smell like wet dog.

Possibly because for the last forty-five minutes, I have been chasing after one.

My sister had just shut the door to go to her night shift at 11 p.m when she opened the door again and shoved in a lost dog that she'd found roaming on the street- because not only is it cold, our area is prone to people hooning around the streets and it is not safe for a little pup to go trotting around at Hoon Happy Hour in suburbia.

Off she went to night shift, and I was left staring at this random, damp dog in the hallway.

And then I heard an outraged "Meow!" coming from the other side of the door where the cat was now demanding entrance.

Great.

Just great.

I had to let her in, and I quickly grabbed her before she could pad into the hallway, but halfway to the laundry and her basket, Huxley trotted into view. I had to leap away to separate them, because Anna stiffened in my grip and let loose the most venomous, furious hissy snarl that I've ever heard from her, and I hastily stuffed her in the study before a full-blown animal war took place.

The dog was obviously well-cared for, since he had a nice little collar and a registration tag and even a little bone-shaped engraved tag with a phone number and the name, "Huxley". (Most excellent name, by the way. A most excellent author who wrote a most excellent book. Classic.)

Rang the owner four times. No response.

Looked like Huxley was staying for the night.

This is Huxley, by the way, looking somewhat demonic:

(Don't you just love the digital era? One hour of lost-dog guardianship and I'm already uploading his image onto Blogger.)
Anyway, he LOOKS scary but he's actually a real sweetie. He also looks like a Maltese x Bichon Frise from this angle but he looks to me more like a Poodle x Bichon Frise because in reality, he's about twice the size as Maltese and the shape of his underbelly is oddly whippet-like. But you be the judge:

It soon became apparent that Huxley was hungry. Not having any dog food in the house, my mother cooked up a bit of chicken and rice, as I was slightly worried that the dog might be allergic to something, and then we'd have some kind of hideous anaphylatic fit on our hands without the canine version of an EpiPen. (Paranoid? Yes. But you never know...)

We lured Huxley into the spare bathroom with the food, left him an old bedsheet with a nice patch of old carpet, and some water before shutting the light off to let him sleep. Then I yanked the cat out from the study, dumped her in the laundry, and went upstairs.

Then I heard whining.

Then scratching.

Then meowing.

Then whining again.

Followed by more anxious scratching.

With more outraged meowing.

In the end, I finally had to move Huxley outside, because property damage to our door was not something I had factored in when sheltering the dog for the night. Huxley quite enjoyed taking a turn about the lawn- he attempted to pee in our vegetable patch, then in our rose bushes, and had a merry trot around the grounds.

Looking at his happy little doggy face, I really wanted to have a dog again. They're just so adorable and cute and happy.

Thanks to Huxley though, my studious efforts at doing my workplace law essay have been thwarted. I shall endeavour to change out of my now-smelling-like-wet-dog-pyjamas and attempt to locate Huxley's owners on the morrow.

The Miracle Cure-All

2009-04-25T00:09:00.005+10:00

Today, I had a headache. I blamed it on the early morning start at the legal centre and the fact that we had NO clients, so I was doing filework all morning, staring at the computer screen while trying to figure out how superannuation works in matters of divorce.

In the afternoon, I tried:

1. Drinking more water
2. Drinking green tea with lemon
3. Eating
4. Eating something with sugar
5. Eating something high in sodium
6. Eating something else just because I wanted to
7. Taking paracetamol
8. Playing Rainbox Six Vegas 2 and getting myself repeatedly killed
9. Eating (again)
10. Sprawling on my sister's bed interrupting her study session and thumping my head repeatedly on her mattress to the sound of my own wailing

Then I had to go to work.

Now that I'm doing an average of 3-5 hours a week, instead of 30, I'm finding work much more relaxing- a sort of antidote to law school. Of course, working full-time in the holidays really did suck, so I suppose absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that jazz. I don't know how my managers put up with the weekly tirade that follows their innocent question of, "How's uni?"and I sure as hell don't know why they bother to listen, but it's nice to get an outside perspective on things.

Anyway, headache persisted until I was about to get another paracetamol from my bag- it's a giant tote that I discovered is actually giving me back pain in my left side, that's how much crap I stuff into it on a daily basis- when my assistant manager (bless him) shoved a $20 note and a loyalty card at me and told me to get coffee.

Coffee.

COFFEE.

So we got coffee.

And headache DISAPPEARED.

Gone. Dissipated. Goooooone.

Which just goes to show that coffee is a miracle panacea and the most amazing thing ever.

(And also why I'm awake and blogging at 12:48 a.m in the morning.)

And yes, this is yet another of my 'Coffee is the Best Thing Ever' posts...prepare to see quite a few of them in the lead-up to exams...

21 Going on 60

2009-04-15T14:06:00.003+10:00

Boss: So what are you going to do today?

Me: Study. Oh, and Target are having a sale. On cardigans.

Silence.

I didn't mention, "And I need to buy toothpaste," because that would have just been WAY too much excitement for one afternoon. Although considering the way my social life is going (thank you, stupid workload that is threatening to break my fragile spirit) I might as well have said I was going to get soaking solution for my dentures before going off to play bingo, thank you very much.

Then I stood in front of the toothpaste aisle for 15 minutes (I was texting, in my defence) weighing up the advantages of Cool Mint with Mini Breath Strips versus the 12 Hour Antibacterial Protection offered by Colgate Total, just because handing over the $3.99 at the checkout meant that I had no more excuse to linger in the shopping centre- and that meant I had to go home and open my books and study, and hey, that didn't work either because I am now procrastinating by blogging.

Sigh.

Freecell and Snookums

2009-03-24T16:44:00.009+11:00

I had seven hours of lectures today and I absorbed nothing.

There is a very good reason for this- several in fact, so I may as well break it down for you:
Lecture #1: Played Hearts on my eeePc for two hours

Lecture #2: Played Freecell in Equity for half an hour, then spent the remaining hour making a formula spreadsheet template to calculate just how much I spend on coffee each week. Luckily this is only Day One of the spreadsheet records, and even then I had to fight not to get a coffee half an hour ago, even though I had to pass the coffee place downstairs wafting the sweet sweet aroma as I miserably went up the escalators.

Lecture #3: Chose the stupidest spot to sit (middle row, right smack bang in front of lecturer) and almost fell asleep. Gave up on dignity and had a ten minute nap during the lecture break. Drooling over your eeePC is not a good look.

Lecture #4: By this point, I was in no mood to sit there and ponder the great intricacies of double-entrenched restrictive legislative procedures, so I did an entire cryptic crossword.

Lecture #4 was a Constitutional Law lecture. And unfortunately, I ended up sitting two rows behind The Lovey Dovey Couple.

Oh, you've seen them. Or people like them. Two inseparable things clinging to each other all the time...they're the kind of people who will make you swerve to the side and almost whack into a pole because they refuse to let go on each other's hands when walking in public, thus creating the dangerous kind of human barrier normally only seen in playground games of Chain Tiggy.

Not to mention the saccharine displays of public affection.

Kris and I had to put up with an entire semester of Property last year with Lovey Dovey Couple. Unfortunately, we ended up either sitting behind them or near them, or next to them, just because we are all creatures of habit and also, it's easier to sneak in late if you slip into the back row. I mean, they're nice people. Really. They just make me want to retch slightly.

Now I know what you're thinking. And I'd like to point out that I'm not the bitter, twisted little ball of cynicism you might think I am. I just find it extremely annoying having to sit behind two people who are cooing at each other FOR HOURS IN A LECTURE and tugging each other's noses.

*shudder*

See, there's cute. There's really cute. Then there's the so-cute-it's-bordering-on-obnoxious. And then the saccharine okay-just-stop-it-cos-it's-annoying-and-obnoxious. (See? I have a defined, objective scale.)

(There's also 'vaguely pathetic' which I sometimes employ when I'm listening to Richard Mercer's Love Song Dedications.)

Lesson to be learnt: PDAs are only bearable in the technological handheld device sense, or unless the object of your affection is Jensen Ackles.

I wouldn't begrudge anyone for that.

Week Four Breakdown

2009-03-23T23:54:00.003+11:00

Congratulations, Law Faculty.

Taking four of your subjects concurrently has now accelerated my normal Week-Seven-Hysterical-Breakdown, so now I am experiencing the first stages of a panic attack in Week Four.

At this rate, next semester will see me hyperventilating into a bag in my very first class.

A Litte Night Schadefreude

2009-03-10T23:44:00.008+11:00

I haven't blogged in a while.

As in three months. Three and a half months even. And I don't really know why I stopped, but suddenly I wasn't getting that weird bloggy feeling when I hovered my mouse over the 'Publish Post' button. It didn't feel the same, somehow.

Well, screw that.

I'm back.

I do sincerely apologise for:

(a) my absence (well, if anyone missed me. anyway..I think I'm being rather presumptuous here); and

(b) leaving you with the saccharine taste of a Twilight-related blog entry as my last post. Please be assured that I was mostly cured of this smouldering-intense-amber-eyes phase after watching the Twilight movie, which is enough to make put anyone off Stephenie Meyer. Or teenagers. Or mascara.

So anyway, I figured that since I've been so slack in updating, I owe you at least some kind of humiliating story, or a little piece of schadenfreude to brighten up your day (if you enjoy painful or embarrassing things happening to other people...but I'm sure we all do, since the trash that is Australia's Funniest Home Videos is the top-rating program in peak TV season.)

So.

I've had a bad week. A very bad week. In fact, make that TWO very bad weeks, which can all be traced back to when I started university- I'm doing STRAIGHT LAW for every. single. unit. It's like the Four Subjects of the Apocalypse. Pestilence and Famine, meet your brothers-in-arms, Equity and Constitutional Law.

The most depressing thing about starting university (aside from my Arts-less course) was the fact that I had to face it all after coming back from the most amazing five days in Tasmania...and the dull knowledge that instead of eating fresh fried prawns on the dock in Hobart with Kris, I was stuck in a Constitutional Law lecture with only a slightly warm muesli bar for company.

So yes. I've done some stupid things this week as a result of this lack of sleep. Like hit my head on the sink tap. Like stab myself in the hand trying to recap my pen. Like lather my face in shampoo because I thought for a moment that it was cleanser. (I figured this out when I noticed the total lack of exfoliating beads.) Plus, I think I get extra bonus points for pissing off a nightclub bouncer when I gestured a bit too energetically and my phone flew out of its sleeve and smacked him in the chest. (He looked at me like I was a moron. Or dirt under his shoe. Then he just yanked my hand and stamped me a pass-out, and I scampered outta there.)

And just to top things off...

...I went shopping the other day for a few 21st presents. I decided to stop in and visit my old boss at his new store, so off I went to say hello. Although he wasn't in, I did manage to find a copy of Supernatural Season 3 for $20 less than RRP. This roughly equates to 16 episodes of Jensen Ackles. Sort of relaxing viewing if you take away all the screaming and the stabbing and the blood and the killing.

So anyway, I found my little DVD precious and dug out my wallet. On that day, I was pretty damn tired. And really not with it. So when I got to the counter, I looked up and wilted.

You see, my old boss happens to have a mixed bag of staff. I can only equate it to getting one of those random cellophane-tied candy bags at Christmas- most of them are full of weirdly wrapped chocolate that you're not quite sure about, but sometimes you get something that's Cadbury and actually is pretty good.

And this boy is like the brand-name Cadbury chocolate you find in that little bundle of cellophane.

Please keep in mind that I have only ever spoken to this person thrice, and all three times were when I was purchasing something so the conversation wasn't exactly scintillating. I just like stalking him with my eyes whenever I get something from that store. Because he's cute. And seriously, our company is not really into hiring guys that cute. Last hot casual I worked with was in February 2008.

But tiredness does stupid things to you.

And that is the only explanation I can give for the fact that I momentarily seemed to have lost my power of speech and my right hand was fucking SHAKING.

In fact, the whole exchange was just downright painful, as not only did I gape at him for a full three seconds before he scanned the DVD (oh come on, as if you wouldn't) and he read me the completely wrong price, which forced me to use my vocal cords and ask him to repeat it, which caused him to apologise and shake his head at his mistake, and then it took half a minute to choke out that yes, I would indeed like a small bag, and after this excruciating exchange in which I was mentally shouting at my larynx to operate properly, I rushed out.

Then I went to stare at 21st cards, wishing that I could just bash my head against the lavender and pink Hallmark stand.

Subtle-Perving FAIL.

So there you have it. It is now 1:27 a.m on the 18th of March (Happy Birthday, Loui!) and I can look forward to another night of about four hours sleep. To make my week even better, one of my teeth is impacting on the gum, and the reason I had 4 hours sleep was because I woke up in tears in the early hours of the morning with the right side of my mouth feeling like bloody murder.

The earliest dentist appointment I could get is Monday next week, and I swear, this is possibly the only time I've ever looked forward to having something done to my teeth.

(And so The Exaltation of the Average comes back from a brief hiatus...I promise the next update will be a lot quicker...)

Mush

2008-12-01T20:22:00.003+11:00

After the rather tumultuous events of last week, my brain has decided to counter all that over-stimulation by only absorbing happy squishy stuff that doesn't require hard thinking. Or any type of concentration.

Don't get me wrong, I had a most excellent week- I got to achieve my dream of eating a grilled rump steak for breakfast, was almost suffocated on a dancefloor with shirtless guys slicked in foam, played with a heck of a lot of glowbands, failed an extremely important pre-requisite subject, drank an espresso martini on fake grass, had a lovely Devonshire tea at a friend's place, was woken up by a mighty rendition of My Humps (AGAIN), woke up almost screaming from a nightmare in which I was pregnant with Kevin Federline's third child (I CANNOT DESCRIBE HOW HORRENDOUS THIS WAS), watched Mulan at a video night and heard this young lady shriek with uncontrolled excitement when a two dimensional cartoon cartoon character took his shirt off, and I worked four shifts and was forcibly reminded of why I HATE SELLING IPODS.

Oh, and the morning after the foam party I was woken up by the sound of a chainsaw next door.

Anyway, my brain has decided that over-stimulation and little sleep makes Daph a very very crazy girl. So you know what I've been doing to recover?

I've been reading teenage romance novels and listening to The Love Album by Westlife.

Oh, Daphne, how low you have sunk.

It's Kris' fault, really. She recommended Twilight. You know that series which teenage girls (and as one journalist wrote, "women who should know better") are all obsessed with? It's about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. It's about as badly written as you might expect and full of bizarre subliminal messages about the virtues of abstinence...but it's also very very easy to read and requires very little thinking. Furthermore, the guy the protagonist falls in love with is like the vampiric equivalent of Mr Darcy...all moody and broody yet female readers cannot help but swoon over him.

If it lessens the disgust you must be feeling, I really am only listening to the one track on the Westlife album (All Out Of Love) because their rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart made me want to scream and smash the disc into tiny pieces. And it's the property of my local library so I can't.

In an effort to dispel this mushy, swoony why can't I find unconditional love without the vampirism crap, I went and borrowed the DVD for the ULTIMATE ANTIDOTE to the lovey teenagey-ness of Twilight.

I borrowed Blade II.

I'll be back after I've watched Wesley Snipes decimate a whole lotta shit.

Are You Still Having Fun?

2008-11-28T17:29:00.005+11:00

I just failed Property Law.

I think I'm still in shock. That's another $1200 I need to raise to pay for it, it's another semester tacked on to an already lengthy degree, it means I can't qualify for two of my chosen electives next year and most of all, I was pretty sure I'd done okay. I wasn't expecting a particularly good mark but I thought that I had at least passed.

I'm still in a kind of shock. I've just been too tired to be bothered crying over it, and my self-esteem was already at quite a low so I don't think anything can really drag it down further. Luckily, I was out with friends last night when results came through and I refused to look at my SMS results until I'd had at least three standard drinks. So when I actually did look at my phone I spent the rest of the night downing even more alcohol in an attempt to cope with it.

And hey, it helped...in a head-pounding kind of way.

See, I deserved to fail Torts. I did nothing for that subject, I skipped almost all my classes. Conversely, I went to almost every single one of Property, did all my readings, took copious notes. Yet I passed Torts and failed Property. Not sure how that works, but there you go. Life is cruel. Crueeeeel.

I suppose the shock of it will hit me later, and I suppose the inevitable bout of tears will hit me at some point...probably when I've been given the 50th conciliatory sympathy speech, because I actually feel strangely calm.

But a big part of this goes to my friend Kris, who was just so wonderful about the whole thing and knew exactly what to do to make me feel better. Besides making me down a few buckets of water to balance out the alcohol, she went out in the morning and got me a Sausage and Egg McMuffin, a hash brown, and what has to be one of the best coffees I've had in ages.

(Dude, you're the bestest.)

So...time to get on with it. I think I might actually do that Honours year in English now, if just to take a break from the horror that is law school.

And if I guess I had to repeat a subject, I'd rather it be Property Law because I did actually quite enjoy it, failure or no failure.

But if anything ever mentions the word 'caveat' within my earshot they will get brutally stabbed with a pen.

Insert Witty Burn-Related Song Title Here

2008-11-18T00:14:00.003+11:00

For the first time in a very very very long time, I have a rather prominent swathe of sunburn on my back.

And of course, ths WOULD be at the start of summer- when 80% of what I wear consists of backless tops or dresses.

My skin is already quite dark, so it takes sunburn a little differently. There's no prominent red patches or anything, it just turns incredibly, incredibly dark.

Today at the gym, my friend exclaimed with a gasp, "Your back...did you get sunburn? It's like chocolate."

(When I said I wanted to be cool and black, this is not what I envisioned.)

However, as I pointed out rather ruefully to my mother, the one bright spot is that the sunburn has actually spread itself out across my back in what I think looks like a kick-ass Phoenix pattern. Jean Grey, eat your heart out.

I actually got the sunburn two weeks ago at the races on Oaks Day. I didn't even realise that I got burnt until the day afterwards when I glanced in the mirror after my shower and went, "Oooh boy." The little dip between the Phoenix wings, so to speak, is where I slapped on some sunscreen with my palm. Proving that sunscreen really does work.

My back currently looks angry. And peeling slightly. I have a party on Friday night so I'm hoping that the mottled did-you-just-melt-the-milk-into-the-dark-chocolate look sort of fades a bit by then. If not I'll just have to wear my hair down and hope for coverage of some sort.

Let this be a lesson both in vanity and sun safety.

Slip, slop, slap.

Therapeuticness

2008-11-14T20:43:00.009+11:00

Yesterday I decided to get a massage.

Fifteen weeks of hunching over a computer, study, stress and sitting cross-legged on my bed with an XBox controller have not helped my back muscles any.

I decided to try an Eastern health clinic, just for something different. One of those places which does acupuncture and stuff like that.

Of course, being an Eastern health clinic, they don't really speak English.

So I started reading the signs out the front, and within five seconds I had encountered what I call the 'Hopeful Asian Expression' sales tactic. It simply consists of an Asian person standing in front of you with a hopeful 'you buy?' expression of his/her face.

And dammit if it doesn't work a charm every time. (I should try that in my own sales pitches.)

The Hopeful Asian Man had already pushed a brochure into my hands so I chose a neck, shoulder and head massage for 35 minutes. The place was very professional and had the cool weirdo beds and curtains and stuff, but I had one of those "Gee, I wish I spoke my ancestors' mother-tongue" moments when the two guys started going a mile a minute in Mandarin. It's sort of awkward standing there when all you can hear is a rapid-fire mix of something that sounds only vaguely like "Nizhixinwoyoumeibuzhi...ahhhh...."

Then they showed me to a cubicle and pulled the curtains shut with absolutely no instructions.

So I stood there for a moment, not exactly sure what to do. I assumed I was meant to get undressed, except was it just my top? Could I leave my jeans on? What about my bra?

No information was forthcoming.

However, I heard an equally bemused voice from next door call out, "I've never done this before...what do I need to do?" This was followed by a brief, "Take top off," so I followed suit and shucked my shirt into the plastic bucket.

The guy came in and said something mostly unintelligible, so I said, "Pardon?" and he repeated, "I give you little bit extra," and at this I said, "PARDON?!" and he explained, "Other masseuse running late so I give you more time."

(Phew.)

Anyway, I'm still not sure whether I like massages or not. They tend to be therapeutic rather than relaxing, and I can safely say that the Western ones hurt- the last one I went to was actually quite painful and the one I had at the physiotherapist left my skin raw. The Chinese one that I had today was actually not too bad. The 'little bit extra' that I got was an extra ten minutes- not anything else suspicious thank you very much- and they threw in a back massage as well as neck, shoulders and head.

I could definitely have done without the butt-kneading (what the hell that was about I will never know) but it was okay, although I ended up smelling suspiciously of weird Chinese massage oil for the rest of the day.

I think that's enough of a foray into alternative therapies for me.

The Election Post

2008-11-05T17:34:00.003+11:00

Welcome to my obligatory post on the U.S election.

Judging by the number of jubilant Facebook status updates mentioning either 'Obama' or 'yes we can!' I figured it was the topic du jour so I might as well jump on the bandwagon.

Unfortunately, I'm like the yokel who's just clambered onto the bandwagon only to realise that it's full of intelligent people in suits tapping on their iPhones while I'm holding my pitchfork. In fact, sort of like Sarah Palin dipping her moose-killing toes in the big great ocean of world politics...ouch, that was wee bit harsh.

If you asked a normal person why they were supporting Obama, they'd probably tell you that the man represents hope. He represents change. He's breaking down barriers and taking one huge step forward for the civil rights movement and African-American citizens everywhere.

However, if you asked me...I'd have to be honest and tell you that I'm supporting Obama because he's cool and black and he likes Jay-Z. Plus his stepfather is Indonesian and he used to live in Jakarta...so he's cool and black with Asian ties. And for me, this is HOPE that this goes both ways...perhaps I can be Asian with cool and black connections! Hope is not lost in my quest to be cool and black!

Furthermore, John McCain can't use a computer properly. And if you're going to be leader of one of the most important countries in the world, you sure as hell should be able to open your Hotmail without a community volunteer gently guiding the mouse over your shoulder.

So.

If you were looking for an insightful view into the U.S election...this ain't it.

But whether you love him or- well, like him because nobody seems to actually hate Obama- just be happy that the citizens United States of America have elected a President that isn't a pretzel-challenged dimwit.

Is they learning?

Yes.

Let's Go Stalking, Stalking, Stalking...

2008-10-29T20:21:00.004+11:00

If you've ever Facebook-stalked somebody just because you met them once and you thought they were kinda cute, say 'aye'.

Aye.

*tumbleweed rolls past*

Right. Now I feel like a total absolute stalker.

And he wasn't even all that cute. In fact, his Facebook profile is really not very encouraging. So now I am wondering what my own Facebook profile says about me.

Probably nothing very flattering.

In fact, judging by my applications and info you'd think I was some kind of Jensen-Ackles-crazed anarchist nut.

Oh wait...

Damn you Facebook.

Exam Ponderings #1

2008-10-24T20:27:00.004+11:00

Picture this: you're walking along on a happy sunny day, and out of the blue, a cricket ball hits you on the head.

The normal reaction would be to swear. Maybe get an ice pack.

Of course, you could also sue. Dragging it through three courts and setting a very irritating legal precedent for generations of law students to come.

All because some dude hit a six in a cricket game.

I hate Torts.

Hark! The Builders Have Escaped!

2008-10-22T16:44:00.004+11:00

THE BUILDERS HAVE GONE HOME.

Thank the Force.

Until 3 o'clock today, I had to suffer impromptu renditions of classic rock hits being butchered (LOUDLY) by the builders next door.

There's nothing wrong with singing. Except there's a time and place, and some things are better behind closed doors. With sound-proof walls. And preferably without an outdoor radio. And frankly, if you have no rhythm you shouldn't be shouting it out to the entire bloody neighbourhood BECAUSE I AM TRYING TO STUDY AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOU MASSACRE DURAN-DURAN AT A VERY UNPLEASANT VOLUME.

It's incredibly hard to focus on the irregular Spanish verbs of the preterite tense when you can hear someone yelling, "Are- you- gonna- be- mah- girl?" followed by some very loud hammering, some even louder drilling, and then a lovely duet of profanities between two other builders.

AARGGGH.

I rang my boss this arvo, and he said, "How's the studying going?"

"GAAAAAH."

"I take it...not so well."

"There's workmen next door. And they're singing along to Jet and Wolfmother."

"That's not good...did you tell them that this isn't a bloody neighbourhood audition for Australian Idol?"

At which point I had to crack a smile.

"Tell me," says my boss, "Do you have a lemon tree in your back garden?"

"Yes."

"Well," says my boss, sagely, "This is what you need to do. Go to that lemon tree, grab a whole lot of lemons, and start throwing them randomly over the fence next door. You might even hit a few of the builders."

Had they not gone home at 3, I might have actually taken that advice and started readying an army of citrus missiles.

If they start up again tomorrow and subject me to six more hours of Triple M played full blast, I'm going to bring out the big guns and hook up my iPod to the amplifier.

Let's see how much they like my Ultimate Girlband 90's playlist raping their auditory canal.

But I said, "No, no, no..."

2008-10-12T17:49:00.008+11:00

Tomorrow, I am doing a little moonlighting as a computer technician.

Actually, 'technician' is the wrong word. 'Technician' would be implying that I am actually competent in that field.

And that is a LIE.

So let me rephrase that- tomorrow, I am masquerading as a computer technician.

So this could go down very, very badly.

And this is why I should just keep my mouth shut.

So why take on the job, you ask?

Well...let me tell you a story...

When I was but a lass of seventeen, I was desperate for a job. Even McDonalds didn't hire me, so I really only had two choices- prostitution or telemarketing...cos really, those are the only two careers where you don't really need experience to get a foot in the door...

...needless to say, I chose the latter :P

Please not that I really only suffered through five days of telemarketing, only two of which were on the phones. It was, quite frankly, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," with emphasis on the 'short' part. I actually did quite well, but I hated it with such a passion that I quit immediately after I'd finished the five-day training sessions.

Except...my mother was deeply affected by my plaintive tale of telemarketing woe. So much so that now she actually exhibits sympathy for telemarketers. In fact, she now exhibits sympathy for anyone trying to sell her anything. As she said to me, "Oh, but I was thinking, 'This could be Daphne' and I felt really sorry for her..."

"Mum, I only did five days of telemarketing. Not even that- only TWO days on the actual phones!"

"It doesn't matter, I still thought of you with your little childish voice asking for donations..."

And that mentality has just made her WEAK.

Let me just cite three examples off the top of my head:

The first incident happened when she got a young girl on the phone asking her to sell tickets for an epilepsy raffle. "I thought of you in your telemarketing days," says mother, and so she caved.

Now, the Epilepsy Foundation will not leave us alone.

Secondly, one day she returned from shopping with a bizarre chicken strudel.

"This is random," says I. "Why'd you get one of these?'
"They're new. The girl at Lenards was trying so hard to get me to buy one. I thought of you trying to get a sale and I felt really sorry for her."
"Right. So you bought a strudel."
"Yes."
"Oookay..."

Probably the most impressive one was when she was swayed by the over-eager desperation of the commission-based World Vision girl at a shopping centre- "She was so desperate, and I thought of you trying to get a sale..."

So she adopted a child.

And now I have an adopted little sister in Bangladesh.

Anyway, the point of my story was this- I've been ridiculing her for this weakness, but today I was coerced into saying yes simply because the desperate woman in front of me was my Mum's age, also Asian, and completely hopeless with computers.

Just like my Mummy.

And I thought, "What if it were my Mum seeking out computer help and everyone wanted to charge her $98 just to look at her PC?"

So I caved.

Sigh.

Anyhow...from what I gathered, her computer just seems to be low on virtual memory. So I figured that all I have to do is delete some shit on her hard drive and browser cache and increase the size of her paging file.

I think.

I mean, if it turns out to be anything harder than that I am royally, royally, screwed.

At any rate, it wasn't just the fact that she reminded me of Mum that made me say yes...she also looked at me desperately and said, "I'll pay you whatever you want. Anything!"

And y'know, that might have swayed me.

Just a little.

Awake is the New Sleep*

2008-10-08T00:47:00.003+11:00

It's 1 a.m in the morning and I am about as sleepy as a squirrel on Red Bull.

I'm not a morning person. This much is obvious from anyone who has seen me in my tousled, bunny-pyjama-clad, squinting glory at any time before 10 a.m. In fact, I once frightened our local Avon representative when she dared disturb my slumber at 9 a.m in the middle of my summer holidays.

I opened the door in my pyjamas and blinked half-lucidly at the horrible sunlight behind her head.

She didn't come back after that.

I've often wondered if my morning beauty would be strong enough to repel a Mormon.

Anyway, Daylight Savings started on the weekend, and I'm still fighting to adjust to having that extra hour of daylight. It would normally be midnight right about now, but of course, it's now 1 a.m and I am still absolutely awake.

However, I am also quite cold right now, so I might attempt to grab some shut-eye before I frighten my Torts tutor with my scowling visage tomorrow morning.

I also plan to get some decent coffee. Ever since I stopped part-time work, paring it down to 4.5 hours a week, I had to make certain sacrifices....and the coffee was the first to go. I've been living, albeit miserably, off instant cappuccinos and Jarrah and Robert Timms instant granulated, and it just isn't the same.

Four weeks. Four weeks until I finish exams, four weeks until I recommence part-time work dispensing tired advice, four weeks until I get that part-time income back and I can get access to my caffeinated precioussssss...

* kudos to Ben Lee for the blog title

Daphne and Lee Go to the Airport

2008-09-20T00:28:00.004+10:00

Today, I drove to the airport for the first time.

It was horrible.

I wasn't alone- I had my mother with me, and I had Lee- but it was still a stressful driving experience.

Lee and I have been together for two weeks, but I really can't imagine life without him now. He's always so calm, so collected, he never, ever yells at me, and he's always there to steer me back onto the right path whenever I freak out.

But today, we had another argument.

I suppose it was inevitable- it happens in every relationship, but I thought...I thought we were solid, you know? But no...Lee tried to tell me to take Citylink despite the fact that I didn't want to take a tollroad. I suppose it was faster, but I wanted to take the freeway- it being FREE and all- but Lee wouldn't have a bar of it and kept whining on about it for six kilometres.

I told him to shut up but I couldn't really take my eyes off the road while I was driving.

My mum was of no help whatsoever as her sense of direction is worse than mine- which is really saying a LOT- and at the third intersection from home, we'd already had a massive argument and so she stayed snarky and silent at me for the whole trip.

I took umbrage at that fact that she cried, "Stop stop STOP!" when I moved the car forward in the 'hover' lane to turn right, despite the fact that it was pretty damn OBVIOUS that I wasn't going to jump out into oncoming traffic and was bringing to the car to a stop.

Furthermore, she leant forward and blocked my view completely so I cried out, equally panicked, for her to sit back.

I pointed out that (a) I was not an idiot; and (b) she didn't have to shriek like I was some kind of moron.

She said, "I didn't yell 'stop stop stop!' I said to you, 'There's a car coming.'"

Uh huh.

It's like the difference between going, "Hmm, that Jensen Ackles is rather a fine specimen of male," and going, "DAMN IT HE'S HOT!"

Luckily, my Rihanna CD is rather good at breaking awkward silences, and Lee chimed in every so often. Mum didn't trust Lee at all.

However, I realised after detouring through the city, that something was wrong. Lee still kept insisting we take Citylink, until at the traffic lights, I checked his setttings and found out THAT HIS DEFAULT SETTING MEANT THAT HE WASN'T AVOIDING TOLL ROADS.

"Aww, Lee honey, no wonder you got confused."

"Recalculating," Lee said, and off we went again.

Not a peep from him about taking the tollroad. He got me to the airport (although it took extra due to the fact that I didn't realise he wasn't avoiding tolls until we were like 45 min into our trip) but my Dad's flight was 40 minutes late.

After a long time circling and waiting for my Dad to call, I finally went, "I'M PAYING FOR PARKING. BLAAAARGGHHH AAAAAARGGGHHHH AAARGGGGGHHHH."

(Well, words to that extent.)

And you know what? When you hook up my Nokia 6300 to Lee, both support voice-activated dialling.

So I said, "Dad."

"Dad," Lee repeated, and it DIALLED.

COOL.

I introduced Dad to Lee. Dad didn't really say much, but I get the feeling that he didn't disapprove. He even got him to navigate for the last ten minutes, just to put him through his paces.

So Lee and I cleared things up. We've had a couple of minor disagreements and few hurdles, but I'm sure that if we spend a little more time together, things will be smoother.

Cheers to all non-tangible male electronic voices everywhere.

So Much For My Happy Ending...

2008-08-11T22:42:00.004+10:00

I'm not a huge fan of chick flicks.

Watching a shallow, vacuous but ridiculously attractive woman stumbling to find love through a series of comical escapades does not exactly spark my interest. What WOULD interest me is if the woman, stumbling to find love through a series of comical escapades, also happened across a giant Autobot and got caught up in an epic alien battle of good and evil.

(However, the obligatory 'James-Marsden-in-a-wet-shirt-scene' would still have to be retained, even if Optimus Prime was stomping all over him.)

But I'm beginning to appreciate the sugary value of chick flicks a lot better now...because you're assured of a happy ending. I used to find the predictability of chick flicks annoying- the girl always gets the guy, they live happily ever after...but now, it's an expectation I'm growing to depend on, against the tide of realist literature and cynicism burning away at our concept of the happily-ever-after.

At the moment, I'm studying both Romantic and Renaissance literature. I thought it would be a nice foil to my law subjects. And it is. Except that almost all of my texts are extremely depressing.

Doctor Faustus makes a pact with the devil and goes to hell to burn for all eternity.

Frankenstein creates a monster which then murders everyone that his creator holds dear.

Macbeth ends with the protagonist's head being waved around as a lesson to those who commit treason and regicide.

Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage tells of a war widow eventually pining away until she dies.

Blake's The Book of Urizen tells of an alternate creation and the bastardisation and dumbing down of humanity.

Yup. Laughs all round.

I was up until 2 a.m the other night, finishing For the Term of His Natural Life, a novel about convict Australia. It has been on my 'to read' list ever since Year Nine history, but I'd heard tales of how long and boring it was. However, ten pages in and I was absolutely hooked. I kept reading and reading and reading, through pages and pages of convict torture and lashings and betrayal, hoping to get to the end where sweet redemption hopefully awaited.

The truth it, sweet redemption was not the lot of Rufus Dawes.

Which made me extremely sad. And frustrated. Especially because the sheer brutality of the book makes you hope against hope for him to be pardoned and live happily ever after with the golden-haired young nymphet of his dreams.

The man who wrote Atonement, Ian McEwan, also wrote a novel called Saturday. I'm not even going to get into my rant about Atonement- you can see it here if you have a particular hankering to revisit the depressingness- but Saturday was a particularly interesting book. I remember reading an interview featured Ian McEwan, in which he noted that many people hated the protagonist of Saturday because he was happy. The protagonist has a loving wife and a wonderful relationship with his grown-up children. He finds his job stimulating and enjoyable. He plays squash every weekend. He revels in the comforts of domesticity.

And readers DIDN'T LIKE HIM.

So do we resent happiness in others? Or, perhaps, do we hate being presented with the arguably false hope that there is always a chance for a happy ending? I had a chat to a friend several months ago, and she was just so happy at that point in her life that she seemed to almost hesitate when she said it out loud. And that's the strange thing. Much like C-3PO, we're always quick to whine and complain about our lot in life, but less inclined to tell the world if we're happy. It's almost as if we're ashamed of our happiness when so much of the world is still living in shades of grey, or if we're afraid that people will resent us for it. We're all too quick to criticise, yet never give credit where credit is due.

I don't think it's unusual to resent happiness in others. I guess it works much like material jealousy, except instead of eyeing the wealth of others we covet that which is so much harder to obtain.

But alas, I think this girl doth protest too much. Lack of sleep of my part generally results in drowsy introspection. Also, this has helped me somewhat in nutting out the subtext of Doctor Faustus, so if you have anything to add, please do.

And if you haven't already, go out and get yourself a copy of Disney's Enchanted. It'll make you believe in happy endings again.

(And if you got the blog title reference, I do apologise. I will refrain from using Avril Lavigne lyrics in blog posts in the future.)

The Filler Post

2008-08-01T01:17:00.004+10:00

It's 1:18 a.m.

And I am still awake. Very very awake.

I blame my friend. I blame my friend and her wonderful coffee machine. I blame my friend and my friend's wonderful coffee machine and the fact that when my friend makes a mocha, she uses chocolate and cream instead of powder and pours freshly ground and brewed coffee over it all.

I also suspect that she may have given me a double shot of espresso as I am wide awake and blinking at the screen in the early hours of the morning.

*taps fingers*

But mostly, this is just a filler post- I apologise for the lack of blogging, but uni's started up again and I'm knee-deep in constructive trusts, negligence, the preterit tense in Spanish, and the works of Shakespeare and Wordsworth.

And oddly enough, lovin' it.

I'd also like to say that I've tried cutting down on coffee for the past two weeks. It's made me utterly miserable- and since there's a Coffee HQ on the university basement level, I've had to put up with people gliding up and down past me on the escalators with little takeaway cups of molten espresso heaven, the smell of roast coffee beans wafting past me as the escalator makes its inexorable way up to Level Four...

(Screw coffee abstinence.)

I make an exception on Sundays, where the time seems to slow to a crawl on work shifts- and in the morning, my voice is reduced a series of guttural grunts unless I get some form of caffeine in a little takeaway cup.

Oh coffee, how I love thee.

On Broadway

2008-07-07T23:23:00.002+10:00

Earlier tonight, I went Broadway Dancing.

Like Jane Austen's Mr Darcy, I don't often dance. I don't think moving my feet on a Dance Dance Revolution gamepad or jamming to MC Hammer in the privacy of my own home counts- so it's been a while since I've submitted myself to public humiliation of the dance-dance kind.

My friend Kris had gotten us a six-class pass from a silent auction, so off we went to the dance studio for a class of Broadway dance. We figured it wouldn't be too challenging as compared to say, Argentinian tango- surely Broadway just involved some mild clicking of fingers and stepping of heels?

WRONG.

We went at Beginners Level. Y'know, the EASY level. I hate to think of what intermediate, let alone advanced, must look like.

As soon as the class started, the entire group of 40+ people suddenly launched into an explosive, maddeningly fast routine which involved not just finger-clicking, but stepping and swinging and pointing and oh dear God, we were terrified.

Swing, step.

Fuuuuck.

Swing, step, cross, lift, point, step...

(Woman on my left glares at me as I almost swing into her)

Step, up, step back...

(Kris, from my right: "We're dooooomed....DOOOOOOMED....")

Our instructor was a short, perky blonde thing with too much rhythm and too much bare midriff.

Kris and I somehow stumbled our way through superfast routines involving Cabaret, A Chorus Line and Saturday Night Fever, whilst all the practised members of the group glared at us (possibly because after screwing up the moves, we went into fits of quiet wailing.)

Oh, and they made us pretend to have a bowler hat and do chorus line dancing, which was exceptionally bad as it involved flailing of arms and it took everything in my power not to injure any other innocent dancers in the vicinity.

Next on our list is hip hop/funk. Surely pretending to be cool and black will not be as hard as pretending to have a imaginary bowler hat in a chorus line...

Detoxing Is For Chumps

2008-07-06T23:48:00.005+10:00

I got back from Sydney earlier tonight, after one week of sunny bliss, massive overspending (mostly on copious amounts of food) and the company of two very, VERY patient friends.

And yes, I should probably be sleeping but today they had this COFFEE FESTIVAL at the Rocks. They had Segafredo lattes for only ONE DOLLAR. ONE DOLLAR!!!

(Thus, why I cannot sleep.)

Anyway...I will not regale you with the full details of my trip tonight, because I probably need some measure of shut-eye (I'm going for a Broadway dancing class tomorrow night...I haven't taken a dance class since my early attempts at hip hop in second year so this is going to be highly amusing...) but there is just one aspect of my trip which I just had to share.

Our 'detox'.

On Friday night, the three of us (myself, Kris and Katherine) hit the streets of Sydney. We went for cocktail happy hour first (two for one!) then trotted off to this pizzeria/gelataria where we had some Baileys and Kahlua, then ate our way through two pizzas and then one extremely large Kahlua soaked gelato sundae each.

Anyway...after our sundaes we made a slightly drunken pact to detox for 24 hours. This was probably not the smartest idea in the world because we cut out every single food group from the food pyramid except the fruit and vegetable part. Oh, and salt. In fact, this was a stupid idea, period, except we shook on it and agreed not to renege on the pact unless it was a mutual, unanimous decision to break it.

To use the old defence, it seemed like a good idea at the time. We had been eating pretty badly for the past five days, and ingested quite a lot of junk and a fairly decent amount of Strongbow. AND IT WAS NOT MY IDEA. Never promise to do anything without:

(a) being 100% sober
(b) clarifying on what exactly the pact entails

(Are we beginning to see why I almost failed Contract Law last year?)

Anyway, we met up with one of Kristine's friends in the city afterwards. We celebrated our last detox-free hours by shooting tequila. As the clock ticked into 12:01 a.m into the first minute of our detox, Kris' friend sat there with a giant brownie sundae calmly digging in with a spoon. (To be honest, our massive dessert at the gelataria meant that we weren't tempted anyway.)

The next morning, Katherine and I decided that the best way to cope with our self-imposed detox of stupidity was to sleep through as many hours of it as possible. We woke up at 11:30 a.m. Kristine had already gone to breakfast with her cousin, and faced terrible trials of self-restraint (which I am sure she will cover in her blog at some point) and came back with fruit. Lots of fruit.

We each had a lovely little fruit salad for lunch. It wasn't exactly the same as ripping into a steaming hunk of meat but we coped quite nicely until we wandered down to the markets, where they were selling hot waffles, hot dogs with fried onions and fresh pastries.

This was the first test of our detox.

The only thing we were able to eat at the market was corn-on-the-cob. This was safe as it involved no dairy, no meat, no salt and no sugar. Although we could have probably chowed down on some vintage threads...they probably would've been full of fibre. We ordered three corns-on-a-stick:

Woman: Would you like butter on that?

(Dairy was forbidden. Thus, so was butter.)

Us (somewhat morosely): No.

Woman: Would you like salt?

(Salt was also forbidden. In fact, anything that made FOOD WORTH EATING was forbidden)

Us (even more morosely): No.

Woman: Would you like pepper?

Us: No.

(This was merely a taste preference. Pepper was allowed.)

Kath and I were so grateful to have something that wasn't cold, or fruit, that we went back for another one.

We last five and half waking hours into the detox.

Then we cracked.

At the bus stop, we formally reneged on our pact, with the words 'screw this' featuring prominently. Food was made to be ENJOYED.

Detoxing is for chumps.

I broke my detox in spectacular fashion. It involved fries, schnitzel and cream sauce. Kris had been fantasising about bacon for the past 15.5 hours so she broke hers with that. Kath had raisin toast with butter and jam. On the way home, we picked up another bottle of Strongbow. So in the end, we broke our detox in STYLE.

Hours spent in detox: 15.5
Hours spent awake in detox: 5.5

Conclusion: Detoxing sucks balls. We only did it as a little personal test, because we've never ever dieted at all and we wanted to see if we could get through 24 hours of excessive-veganness without breaking it or stabbing each other with forks.

And in the end, we could not.

Sometimes, failure is a very, very good thing.

Jerks and Dickwads

2008-06-29T18:04:00.010+10:00

"Well, animals are not like people, Mrs. Simpson. Some of them act badly because they've had a hard life, or have been mistreated...but, like people, some of them are just jerks."

Today, I was forced to serve a pompous jerk of a customer.

Firstly, let me just say this- I have a lot of respect for the elderly. Really, I do. And yes, calling an elderly person a pompous dickwad really does not sit right with me, but in this case I think I was somewhat justified.

So this man comes up to the counter, and wants to get a personal digital recorder. Fair enough (except I hate digital recorders with a passion. For some reason, that sale category just seems to attract morons and incompetent people who CANNOT READ INSTRUCTIONS. Even when the manual comes in seven different languages.)

Anyway, I try to open the cabinet- but the work cabinets often stick and they're difficult to get open. The old pompous guy stands behind me and says something like, "You shouldn't force it, you're young, you should know better."

Meantime, I'm pushing at the glass door thinking, "What the fuck is he on about?"

(Had this been spoken by my 3IC, it would have probably devolved into an extremely immature conversation about sticking things into slots.)

Then later on, as I'm asking him whether he wants the extended warranty, he says, "You've got to be kidding me about that stupid marketing bullshit."

I said, very politely, that I saw no problems with extended warranties and that I actually do take them out myself. Which is absolutely true- they're brilliant for iPods, and I bought one for my Xbox 360. They are a total waste of money on stuff like small radios and printers, and if you get one on a television that doesn't cover dead pixels you're practically throwing your money away...but they come in handy for other things. The XBox warranty was actually a tactical decision- I figured that if anything went wrong, the replacement might end up being an XBox Elite. Tee hee hee.

Anyway, the old guy's response was something along the lines of, "Well, then you're a gullible idiot for falling for that marketing crap."

This made me a little pissed off.

I take very, VERY badly to people insulting my intelligence. I also take very badly to people who address me in an extremely rude fashion. And I can make my own damn decisions, thank you very much. Especially when it comes to the electronics industry, which I have worked in for the past two years.

Except that I work in the retail part of this industry. And you have to be nice. So I pointed out, POLITELY, that I have a sharper marketing sense than that. What I wanted to say was something along the lines of I'M DOING A FUCKING LAW DEGREE YOU ASSHOLE, D'YOU RECKON I CAN FORM MY OWN BLOODY LINE OF REASONING?!

He also read my name badge and said, not in a particularly polite way, "You don't look like a Daphne."

Which coming from him, sounded fairly perjorative, with possibly racist undertones. In my old branch, I used to have to put up with moronic dialogue like:

"Daphne...is that your real name?"
"Yes."
"No, is it your REAL name?"
"YES." (Are you an idiot, woman?)
"No, but is it the name you were born with?"
"YES. IT'S ON MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE, I'D SAY IT'S MY NAME." (Politely.)
"Because sometimes Chinese people come over and take a different name..."

AAAARGGGGHHH.

Born. Here. In. Australia. Get. Over. It.

Do I SOUND like I'm fresh off the boat? Nooooooo.

Except I bit my tongue and said, "Well...that's the first time anyone's ever said that."

(YOU MORON.)

I don't care what race you are, how old you are, what religion you are...a jerk is still a jerk.

On the other hand, towards the end of my shift, six hours later, a Chinese man came in with his little three year old girl, clinging to his leg. When it was time to leave the counter, I waved down at her. She stopped, then smiled, and waved back. (My heart melted. Right then and there.) But she didn't stop there- after another moment of deliberation, she smiled shyly and blew me a kiss. I blew her a kiss back, in front of the entire waiting queue- because if a gorgeous little child like that can show such affection for a complete stranger, the dickwads and jerks of this world have a lot to learn.

And you know what? I don't have to even think about work for the next week. As of tomorrow, I'm on ANNUAL LEAVE.

No customers for an entire eleven days.

Off to sunny New South Wales, then four glorious days off for sleeping in, coffee-drinking and relaxing.

Current mood? Happy :)

In A Perfect World...

2008-06-27T22:39:00.006+10:00

...all guys would have a ten-minute conversation disclosure on the existence of a +1.

(As in...I would not have even thought of jokingly flirting with you if I'd known you had a girlfriend.)

You could've, y'know, mentioned her at least once in the past three months.

That is all.

Ye of Little Faith

2008-06-24T17:42:00.010+10:00

I officially finished exams yesterday morning (woot!) so in the afternoon, I hopped into my little car and drove off to visit a friend who lives about ten minutes away. It was the first time I'd ever been to his house, but I checked whereis.com.au before I went and the route didn't exactly look like rocket science.

Twenty minutes after I set out, I called my friend.

"Hello!" said I, brightly.

"You're lost," said he, matter-of-factly.

It wasn't a question. It was a STATEMENT. Somehow, he knew.

I honestly wish that I could have taken umbrage at this...unfortunately, he was absolutely correct.

(I did get slightly lost. But in my defence, I was only 1 1/2 streets away. Let's not even go into how I parked 2 feet from the curb. And couldn't reverse out of the driveway properly.)

I don't know what's wrong with my spatial skills. It's not like I can't read a map- I can do so when I'm stationary, sitting calmly at a table without a steering wheel in front of me, and carefully turning the Melway upside down at each turn.

But when I'm driving? Different story.

I like to blame the Asian-Female-Driver-Gene.

Otherwise, I just have to admit to my own basic incompetence....

SWOTVAC LIMERICKS!!!

2008-06-11T02:10:00.005+10:00

AN ODE TO INANIMATE OBJECTS!!!

(It's 2:30 a.m...am feeling the panic starting to build...)

There once was a laptop computer,
Who wanted a fine-lookin' suitor-
And one day she fell
For a slim notebook Dell,
Who had to run Norton to root her.

There once was a hot water bottle,
Whose rubber was starting to mottle
So he found a car dealer
And bought a four-wheeler
And raced off while pumping the throttle.

There once was a pair of pyjamas
Who flew off straight to the Bahamas.
She met on the plane
A singlet from Spain
Who said to her, "Como te llamas?"

(In case you couldn't tell, I'm sitting at the computer hugging a hot water bottle in my pyjamas trying not to think about my Spanish exam.)

love to y'all.

xox

SWOTVAC HAIKU!

2008-06-08T00:01:00.009+10:00

I think the multiple coffees I had at work have KICKED IN!!!

An ode to Victorian legislation everywhere!!!

Domestic stapler
Has met unstapleable foe-
Transfer of Land Act.

Forestry Rights Act!
Printing you destroys good trees
This is ironic.

The Sale of Land Act
Is irrelevant to me-
I'll live in a tent.

New laser printer
Sounds like a TARDIS humming
(No sexy doctor.)

The Mysterious Allure of André Rieu

2008-06-07T21:08:00.004+10:00

A funny thing happened at work today.

An elderly man came in wanting to swap his faulty DVD player for a better one. "No worries," says I, "Try this LG one if you want to play DVD-R discs."

Elderly customer would like to test out his DVD-Rs (which he has conveniently brought into the store). The LG player was set up next to this massive 50" Samsung LCD in the front window. It's a beast of a screen...and he tested out a burned copy of André Rieu in concert.

Yes. André Rieu.

André Rieu is a concert violinist. I'm not sure how or why he is so popular, but every woman above 65 seems to think he is sex on legs...sex on legs with a fiddle. (I use the word 'fiddle' in the most literal sense.)

As soon as I popped in the disc of André Rieu, every elderly person in a 10m radius GRAVITATED towards the screen like moths to a flame. Flies to a honey pot. Me to a stocktake sale.

And they just stared.

Stared at André Rieu waving as he wandered his way up to the stage. Stared as he flashed his pearly whites and waved once more. Stared as he started to play.

It was really odd, watching all these elderly people standing transfixed in front of the screen.

Especially because André Rieu is just. not. attractive. (dodges barrage of flying handbags and walking canes)

Especially not when his image has been upscaled in a most unflattering way on a large television.

Strange. Very, very strange.

The Magic Pudding

2008-06-06T23:26:00.006+10:00

My dad just exploded a pudding in our kitchen.

Literally, it looks like a pudding bomb has gone off in spectacular fashion- our entire stove is coated in brown debris and the roof is charred black above the stove where the pudding blew up.

(This, incidentally, is what happens when you leave a tinned pudding boiling in hot water on a stove at high heat, and you forget all about it and leave it there for two and a half hours.)

Unfortunately or fortunately, I was in the shower at the time of the explosion...in hindsight, maybe this was a good thing, as I didn't really fancy having to explain pudding-related burn lesions on my face at work tomorrow...

At any rate, downstairs now smells entirely like fragrant, albeit charred, brandy pudding. I just stood there and laughed, then finally offered to clean the walls .

(I also took some pictures of this momentous occasion...it's not every day you get an edible re-enactment of Pompeii in your humble household.)

I couldn't get a very good view unfortunately- I had to lean over the bench to snap some shots because the floor was covered in three millimetres of pudding crumbs...

It's all Spanish to me...

2008-06-04T18:41:00.009+10:00

I slept in until 1 p.m this afternoon.

Most of this can be attributed to the fact that I've been sleeping at 3 a.m for the past few nights, thanks to that stupid essay. I finished writing it and realised that I'd just written a 1, 500 word babbling exegesis that made absolutely no sense and was completely non-cohesive, and furthermore, I'd just written 1, 500 on a fiction piece about a romance between a gay Russian and a gay Englishman that also MADE NO SENSE.

See what stress does to my brain?

Anyway...my studying habits are shocking. So far, in my second day off, it has been:

Sit at laptop. Type. Wander off for a snack. Sit back down. Stare at screen. Wander off to make instant coffee. Sit down. Type. Get up to check e-mail. Go on Facebook. Check other people's blogs. Get on Facebook chat. Get distracted. Get another snack. Look at the paper...ooh, it's already afternoon. Get back and type. Get on Blogger. Get another snack.

And the vicious cycle continues.

I was wandering through the house at 11:30 p.m the other night, wondering at how little television I watch these days. Which is actually a very good thing. I couldn't remember the last time I had sat down to watch something stupid and mindless without feeling guilt, so I flicked open the Green Guide to see if anything was on at 11:30 p.m besides Lateline.

And lo and behold, there was a random Spanish film called Buena Vida Delivery on SBS.

I figured that I might as well grab a beanbag and watch it, since my voluntary exposure to foreign language films has thus far consisted of Godzilla and Gamera marathons on SBS as a kid, and you really don't pick up much of the language at all when all you hear are terrified Japanese people screaming "GOD-ZILLA!" and "GA-ME-RA!" while running for their lives from a giant radioactive fire-breathing turtle.

So I sat down to watch this Spanish 'comedy', hoping that this would broaden my horizons.

It's not uncommon to automatically lump the term 'foreign language film' with 'arthouse'. They're not synonymous at all, but in this case, I had the same reaction to the end of the film as I would to an arthouse one:

"What the f**k was that?"

I just sat there as the credits rolled at 1 a.m in my little bunny pyjamas feeling rather un-cultured and wondering whether or not I had gotten the point of that film.

Most people would have viewed it as a black comedy cleverly satirising the state of the Argentinian economy in that particular period of history, but I saw it as a depressing exploitation of other people with not one blackly humourous moment in it.

I understood, on a purely objective level, what they were trying to say. I appreciated the cinematography, the cleverness of the repeated dialogue...but I just didn't connect with it. It was like when I read Chekhov for the first time, and I just sat there blankly wondering why it was left open and struggling with the lack of a finite conclusion.

(But then again, maybe some things are better left open-ended...like that awful epilogue from the seventh Harry Potter book which read like a snippet from a 15-year old girl's fanfiction.)

I got to read Chekhov again this year. In fact, I cannot actually escape him- I always end up studying The Lady With the Dog in some form. This was the third time I'd done it, and admittedly, it has grown on me the more I've read it. True to life, there are no definitive conclusions (except, as the old saying goes, death and taxes) and having grown up watching happy Disney films where everyone lived happily ever after, it was a bit of wake-up call.

(At this point, I must cite Pocahontas as breaking the trend. They had a slew of Disney movies on TV earlier this year, and I disconcerted my entire family by singing along somewhat loudly to Aladdin, so much so that when I left the room to do some work, my Dad called me on the intercom to tell me that they'd reached the flying carpet Whole New World part so I could flounce around the room doing my best Lea Salonga impression...anyway, the fact that Pocahontas gave up John Smith almost made me weep with frustration. Hot blonde English chappy who can sing like Mel Gibson? What is wrong with you, woman?!)

Back to whatever original point I was waffling on about...

Realism, and surrealism, are basically reflections of reality, although surrealism likes to pick out the more grotesque aspects or twist them in some way. Surrealism unsettles me, but it makes me think. Realist material is difficult, it's slow-going, but at the end it always reveals something to you...like chewing very slowly on a hard caramel.

(I felt this way while reading Love in the Time of Cholera and 100 Years of Solitude...but in the end, seeing the entire book as a whole, you realise what a beautiful, albeit pathetic, love story it is.)

As you can see from this fractured post, my brain is somewhat muddled at the moment. Expect a more cohesive post in the not-too-distant future, and stay away from foreign movies....

Rub It in, Why Dontcha?

2008-06-03T21:27:00.006+10:00

There is always a little ad box on side of my Facebook page. They rotate the ads regularly, so I often I see ads for hair extension or Nandos or whatever they decide to throw on, but the most common one keeps trying to get me to join whatever dating site they have set up.
They are actually bluntly cruel about it- there's always a '20 AND STILL SINGLE?' and a picture of an extremely frightening male that I probably would happily stay single NOT to date. Like this one time there was this a picture of this guy with tattoos who looked kind of Chopper Read-ish.

Anyway, I was on Facebook just then and the stupid ad was there...

...but it had JENSEN ACKLES.

SERIOUSLY.

Don't believe me?

Here's a screenshot grab:

See, I thought they were just posting photos of random everyday people. But I guess they're just scrounging the net blindly collecting random male images.
If I could meet Jensen Ackles by joining SinglesNet....hell, I'm there.

Unfortunately, I doubt that the gorgeous picture of Jensen is actually representative of their true clientele. More's the pity.

Ah, well. I still carry him around in my handbag as the background for my phone.

Obsessive fangurl? Not moi!

No Milk Today

2008-06-01T22:33:00.005+10:00

It's 11:52 p.m.

I have a 2, 500 word assignment due tomorrow that I am currently utterly f**ked for.

I have already established that I am going to be pulling an all-nighter, because unfortunately, exegeses do not write themselves. Thank you to the incredibly intelligent and considerate person who decided to make my 35% essay due in the week AFTER the final Week 13, and the other assessor who figured they'd make another one due IN THE MIDDLE OF THE EXAM PERIOD.

(Really. That was awfully considerate. Perhaps I can repay your kindness by gouging your eyes out with a spoon.)

Anyway, my laptop screen was playing up so I reset the entire computer and wandered off to the kitchen to get supplies for this horrendous essay-writing extravaganza. I wanted soup. So I went to the fridge...

...and there was no milk.

Normally, the lack of liquid lactose-based products in the fridge would not send me into a homicidal rage. However, it is now 11:58 p.m, my local Safeway obviously does not hire 24-hour-party-people so I cannot sneak out and get milk (at any rate, I'm wearing pyjamas and an oversized Oxford hoodie and that's just not a great look at any time of the day or night) and I have also just realised that THERE IS NO BREAD.

At least I have water.

But the urge to smash something is rising.

Unfortunately I was working all weekend, as is my wont, so I was unable to detect this LACK OF BARE BASICS until now.

Want.

Milk.

NOW.

I'm beginning to see why everyone thinks we're the 'instant gratification' generation. But obviously these generational sociologists have never been trapped in the house without milk.

DAMN ESSAY. DAMN LACK OF MILK. DAMN LACK OF SOUP.

*sobs and pounds keyboard*

To make matters worse, I am also out of instant coffee sachets. Which means that if I want coffee, it will be, sadly, sans milk.

AAAAAAAAARGGGGGGHHHHHH.

I think that if a Scientologist approached me with an e-meter right now, my emotional levels would blow it up.

I promise that the amount of hysterical pre-exam posts will drop down after June 24th. Until then, I am going to be doing DAILY MILK CHECKS OF THE REFRIGERATOR to ensure that terrible incidents like this never happen again.

Pre-Exam Period

2008-05-21T23:03:00.002+10:00

I have never been this stressed out.

OK, I take that back.

I HAVE been this stressed out before, but I've conveniently blocked all former periods of anxiety from my mind, repressed it deep down inside where it will never bother me again (points if you can recognise the Simpsons episode with that quote).

It's like childbirth. If women remembered the horrendous, terrible pain, we'd all be only children. And if we could properly recall the horrendous, terrible pain of bi-annual exams there'd be nobody enrolled at universities.

Except for that irritating know-it-all who seems to pop up in at least one of my classes (whether it be English or Law) every semester, and who would probably happily camp in the law library cuddling all five editions of Australian Real Property Law to soothe himself to sleep with sugarplums and legislation dancing in his head.

And no, I'm not at all bitter with having to put up with him in my tutorial this semester. Nooooo, not at all.

My exams this year are Spanish (oral and written), Torts, and Property Law.

Property Law has a 30%-40% failure rate.

My tutor explained this in a cruel and matter-of-fact fashion in my first tutorial.

And she wasn't exaggerating.

And I am VERY far behind in everything. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGH.

Not to mention the Spanish film essay that has to be done with a partner. And we couldn't get the film we wanted today in reserve so we ended up watching this black-and-white 1961 film called Viridiana which one critic called "the ultimate feelbad film" of all time.

So not only was I slightly DEPRESSED at watching the nun get almost-raped for 91 minutes on a small TV with MONO SOUND, I also had a major headache.

Now I have to write 1500 words on it. Relating it to Franco's regime.

And submit a short story with an exegesis of the writing process next week.

And do the cultural test.

And try to not fail my third year first semester of law.

And for once, coffee has failed to calm my nerves.

Oh sweet, sweet caffeine, why hast thoust forsaken me?!

Bleeding Love

2008-05-08T22:18:00.004+10:00

It has come to my attention that along with that dude from One Republic, Jesse McCartney was also responsible for penning Bleeding Love.

I am...not exactly fond of Bleeding Love.

I am possibly the only person on the continent who is not in love with that song, but to me it's just four minutes of a continuous, unchanging percussive beat with Leona Lewis wailing over the top. About her heart. Bleeding. Over and over again. And I get grossed out every time I hear the song because of these particularly graphic lines:

"My heart's crippled by the vein that I keep on closing/you cut me open and I/keep bleeding."

Keep, keep bleeding.

She keeps bleeding love. Or so the girl claims. From watching three seasons of House I'm pretty sure that if you cut a vein open blood comes out. Otherwise we'd just have love transfusions instead of a blood bank and they're be none of this O/A/B blood type stuff. Unless of course, everyone had certain TYPES of love that they could only accept in their veins, so say, you couldn't transfer maternal love to a patient who needed an urgent transfusion of unrequited love.

(Sometimes I think too much.)

Anyway, back to the Song-of-Much-Gruesomeness, I also realised that she makes a pun in the first verse:

Closed off from love
I didn't need the pain
Once or twice was enough
And it was all in vain

In 'vain'. Get it? Hah hah hah. Oh, Ms Lewis, you joker, you.

Still, I was shocked to hear that Jesse McCartney co-wrote it. As if I couldn't find enough reasons to bag out the pre-pubescent, helium-voiced lad.

And for me, the credibility of Bleeding Love sank even lower when I heard that little tidbit of information.

This blog post was also a good way for me to get all that Bleeding Love frustration out of my system, because when I was in New Zealand they were very fond of playing it. And when I got back to Australia it had somehow hijacked every radio station and every single work shift I was forced to listen to it until I wanted to scream. And then I'd turn on the radio when I got in the car and THERE IT WOULD BE.

And that's when I gave up radio and started listening solely to my own mix CDs.

Oh, and just in case you were having a nice evening, I am now going to ruin it for you by linking to Jesse McCartney's very own hideous helium-voiced version of his LET'S-REACH-FOR-THAT-BATHROOM-RAZOR song:

Listen to the horror.

Worst. Morning. Ever. (A Comedy of Errors)

2008-04-30T23:49:00.004+10:00

Today was a truly bad morning.

One might even call it a truly shit morning.

In fact, one might go as far as to say that this morning sucked balls.

I woke up late this morning. Again. This in itself was not breaking news, as I'm pretty much late to every single class five days a week, but this was especially bad because out of 18 lectures for Tort Law, I've only ever been to three this semester. I really shouldn't have picked the 8:30 a.m time, it's pretty much all my stupid fault for having too much faith in my own moral and physical stamina.

Anyway...I figured I'd still have time to get to my all-important English tutorial, as this week the entire class was dissecting my crappy little short story and humilating as it was, I was required to be there to receive feedback and be assessed (and probably humiliated). So off I trotted to open the garage door.

I pressed the big green button.

Silence.

Pressed it again.

Nothing.

Tried the other remote.

Nothing.

There was this little blinking red light on the so-called 'automatic' door system, a little blinking light saying, "Hah! You're trapped! I've got you my pretty, and your little Yaris too!"

(insert cinematic cackling)

I was already running late. But as I kept poking desperately at the door control, I tried to keep my panic under control. Never mind that my car was effectively trapped.

Okay, Daphne...don't panic. You're a thinking woman. Not one of those helpless little damsels in distress...c'mon, you work with electronics, what's the first thing you should do?

Aha! The manual override!

Manual override was duly executed, but during this whole ordeal, I still hadn't put on my little black boots, and I'd just scuttled around in a festy old pair of blue garden scuffs. I ran to put the alarm on, totally forgetting that I didn't have shoes, and then I locked the door.

It was then that I looked down and noticed that I was still wearing the festy pair of blue garden scuffs. And these slippers, aside from being totally old and dirty and hideous, were also five sizes too big as they belonged to my dad.

No problemo. I'll just get my house key and open the...

...oh.

Bugger.

I had left my key in the house, and LOCKED MY SHOES INSIDE.

Idiocy could go no further.

In my defense, I've been sick for the past few days (like pretty much everyone else, really) and was extremely tired and stressed and wasn't thinking straight at all. However, I do concede that there was a fair amount of sheer stupidity inherent in the act that wasn't sickness-related at all.

I stared down at the horrible pair of garden slippers, which clashed hideously with my hipsters and jacket, and decided that life was indeed, terribly cruel. I couldn't DRIVE with them because they were too big (I ended up having to press the pedals in my besocked state) and I certainly would not be caught dead at uni with them, and I couldn't also go up seven flights of stairs without tripping over my own feet.

And because I like to keep up my own running internal commentary to stop myself from panicking (I also talk out loud to reassure myself while driving), the inner monologue continued...

Okay, Daphne. Calm. You have a mobile phone.

So I rang my mother.

Unfortunately, my mother does not have a mobile phone. (This is all going to change tomorrow night, when I will forcibly drag her down to my workplace and I will personally buy her a cheap prepaid phone so that this does not happen again.)

Anyway, I figured that if I rang her I might be able to stop into her office and pick up her housekey. And then drive back and rescue my shoes. Unfortunately, she has the most useless receptionists ever.

The first one said she'd put me through.

Then she hung up on me.

The second one said dismissively, "Oh, I'll send her an e-mail and tell her."

"But it's URGENT-"

"I said I'll send her an e-mail."

Funny, last time I checked, my Mum's office WAS THREE BLOODY DOORS DOWN FROM RECEPTION. SURELY IT WOULDN'T KILL YOU TO GET UP AND PASS ON A FREAKING NOTE?!

So I sat there for fifteen minutes in the driveway. In my car. Alone. (It would have been nice if there'd been pouring rain and some atmospheric symphonic music, resplendent with doleful violins, but y'know, you can't have everything.)

And then the cat got her revenge for me neglecting to feed her that morning, and so jumped up on my car bonnet and stared at me through the glass.

I was meant to go shopping with a friend at 11 a.m, but obviously plans had changed- so I rang her and offered to pick her up from the station, as I was sick of just sitting there in the driveway watching my cat groom herself on my pristine metallic paintwork.

I told her what had happened. She said, "Wow, I'm so glad that I'm not the only one who's done that."
"Really?" said I. (I felt a sense of camaderie at the thought that at least someone else had locked themselves out shoeless at some point). "Oh, I don't feel quite so loser-ish then."
"Well, granted, I was quite drunk at the time..."
"Well, I'm plain cold SOBER and I still managed to do something this dumb."

I picked her up and decided that we'd go shopping- well, that I would shuffle into Chadstone as quickly as possible in my ugly hideous never-meant-to-see-the-light-of-day 'shoes' and buy new ones. So we ran into K-Mart and she kindly started seeking out Size 8s for me to try on.

You know how they say 'beggars can't be choosers'?

Well, they can.

I COULD have purchased $8 ballet flats in a hideous shade of plastic royal blue with BOWS, but I figured that if I was going to spend $40 on emergency shoes they might as well be decent ones...so we scampered upstairs to Target and I grabbed a pair of brown boots and bought them on the spot. Then I tottered out and we got a coffee.

And then to cut a long story short, we both shared a plate of dumplings from the food court and got food poisoning.

So after we met up with some friends at Camberwell, I had to scurry her back because she was literally about to throw up in my car.

I offered her the bag with my stupid garden shoes in it if she needed to hurl, because frankly, I couldn't have cared less if they'd been coated in vomit. Stupid shoes.

And that was my day.

On the upside, when my sister came home at night after a long day at the hospital, she had stopped in at Safeway to buy me a 'cheer-up pie' as she had gathered from my hysterical SMS that morning that I was having a shit day. So at least there was the comfort of apple berry crumble. I love having siblings.

I thought the trauma of the day was over, until I realised that I had lost the sore throat from last night and developed a cold instead. So now I have no sense of taste and I sound like a human foghorn.

On the upside, I just realised that in my congested state, I can do a really bitchin' Tracy Chapman impression.

Like, a really good one.

I think I'll just spend tomorrow doing Cher impersonations.

The Facebook Debate

2008-04-29T00:31:00.006+10:00

Facebook.

That's a fun word. It provokes different and stimulating reactions. Much like 'Iraq'. And 'Bush'. And any other word that smacks of world politics. You get the rabid devotees, you get the 'no-way-in-hell' crowd, and you get the neutral little fence-sitters (like me.)

But ah, Facebook...

...tis something of a blessing, yet the bane of my existence.

After mostly neglecting Facebook for months, except to use that nifty photo sharing feature, I dove back into the tangled web of online networking earlier tonight. And then I remembered exactly why I spent so much time on it last year during exam time.

Torts...versus...Facebook.

Property law....versus Facebook.

No contest. It's a time sapper and the ultimate procrastination tool. I wandered around the site posting random crap on people's walls instead of working on my tutorial problems.

And the thing about Facebook is that everyone is literally at your fingertips. The RSS feed in particular is pretty much the ultimate stalking tool and a voluntary offer to relinquish your privacy. I'm trying very hard not to shout out to my beloved s21A of the Crimes Act, but there, I did it...21A 21A 21A....

Facebook is sort of useful, in that I've caught up with old friends from high school and primary school, and it's handy if people are overseas.

On the other hand, it is, once again, a poor substitute for face-to-face contact. I keep hearing about the whole '90% of communication is in your body language'- now and then, that little factoid tends to pop up in weekend magazines and the ever trusty adhesive backs on Libra pads. But people nowadays, including myself, are so time-poor that it quickly becomes a cheap substitute for human interaction. Kind of like missing breakfast and drinking an Up-And-Go instead. Cheap nutrition that won't last.

I strongly believe that the anathema to Facebook is...

...coffee.

I love coffee. I love the aroma, I love the fact that a grande size latte can lift my mood right up, I like doodling on the little paper cup in lectures while Kristine gives me odd looks, I like cradling the steaming cup to my lips and breathing in the steam, I like clutching the mug on morning shifts at work (assistant manager: "Quick! Scull it before a customer interrupts you!") and the other day, I skipped my lecture and just sat in the little garden behind the law building with a little plastic cup having a little moment of Daphne-introspection.

But most of all, I like sitting down for a couple of hours with a mug at a cafe with some good company. Most often it's just one person, sometimes two, but I strongly believe that sustaining an easy conversation over three hours with one mug is the best way to get to know someone.

If I had an ideal date*, it would probably have to involve coffee. Because if there's going to be any awkwardness, it'll be ironed out straight away once the cup is drained.

And sometimes companionable silence is a good thing.

I will give two examples here from personal experience- one, where I caught up with a friend in the city (and the coffee was absolutely terrible) and after four hours over one cup, we realised it had gotten dark and we hadn't even noticed, we were so caught up in the conversation. The other example was when I rather unwillingly accepted an offer for coffee (but I was being polite and couldn't say no) and I personally felt so uncomfortable that I wanted to run away screaming.

But that was a one in a million occurrence.

So you know what? Go through your Facebook contacts. Weed out the random ones, look at the ones that you love, the ones whom you're close to, the ones that you've lost contact with but still care for...and go get a coffee.

It beats a Wall Post any time.

Or a freaking Super Fun Wall Post.

Or whatever the fuck they're called.

And if it's a total disaster, I give you permission to spam my wall.

Just no Viagra offers, please.

*And by this, I mean any ideal date that DID NOT involve Jensen Ackles, Tom Welling or John Barrowman. Or all three at once...

Little Mucus Update

2008-04-27T23:35:00.004+10:00

I just thought I'd give you a little update on my Week-Of-Unwanted-Contact-With-Other-People's-Bodily-Fluids.

Because one of my colleagues SNEEZED on me today.

And not just a general sneeze in my direction, I felt a disgusting splattering of wet droplets on my left cheek.

Did I freak out?

Of course.

I also might have shrieked something along the lines of, "I hate you!" but y'know, I didn't really mean it.

After he'd sneezed on me, after I'd recoiled in absolute horror, my assistant manager told me he'd take over my customer and to go and wash my face.

But I couldn't, because I had carefully-applied foundation on my left cheek that was also concealing a spot, so it was really a toss-up between vanity and hygiene.

So I dabbed water (oh so carefully) on my left cheek, hoping that it wouldn't make the foundation go all weird, and patted it dry with a paper towel, mentally reminding myself to disinfect my face in the shower when I got home.

(Be assured that cleanser and exfoliater was duly applied later that evening.)

First blood, then two days later, nose mucus in droplet form. And these things come in threes...

Why are people so disgusting?!

Bloody Hell

2008-04-25T22:01:00.004+10:00

Customers are disgusting.

An Asian woman came in to buy a phone cable today. At the counter, I picked up the item and thought "Huh, why is this wet?"

And then the customer brushed some hair out of her eyes, and left blood on her forehead. And on her chin.

And I was about to say something, but then I looked down at my hands and realised that the wet stuff was in actual fact, her blood.

Her blood.

On my HANDS.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH.

Then she realised she was bleeding. While I was mentally hyperventilating. At her blood. Smeared on MY HANDS.

AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.

So the stupid twit had cut herself while cooking. And she hadn't realised it. And despite the fact that it was bleeding quite happily, and it must have hurt, she still hadn't realised it. And so not only did she get to smear some on her face, but also when she picked up the phone cable, thus transferring the blood to my hands. Oh, and the EFTPOS machine. And the pen she used to sign.

I said to her, quite calmly, "I'll go get you a Band-Aid from the First-Aid kit."

And then I ran to the staff room and did a Lady Macbeth, running to the sink and scrubbing furiously at my hands with antibacterial gel, because who knows what kinds of things people harbour in their haemoglobin?!

Plus, I was seriously, seriously grossed out.

Bodily fluids just do not belong on a store counter.

I got her a Band-Aid, then scampered away to the storeroom to have a hysterical bitch to my assistant manager, who kindly provided me with several strips of 70% isopropyl wipes so I could disinfect the counter.

I cleaned the EFTPOS machine, the counter, and the keyboards with that wonderful wonderful cleaning alcohol.

You probably think I'm being paranoid, but it was just feeling that wetness and then realising what it was that made it all the worse.

And the moral of the story today is: Beware customers with open wounds.

Also, some people are twits. But count that as obiter.

Update!

2008-04-20T19:07:00.006+10:00

After several threats from Kristine (both physical and electronic, which could very well amount to a course of conduct in stalking under s21A of the Crimes Act) I am finally updating my blog.

Sorry.

However, the lack of blogging means that Kris hasn't been able to use it as an excuse to procrastinate, so really, SHE SHOULD BE THANKING ME when she gets her high distinction in Property Law at the end of the semester.

Unfortunately, I just haven't had time in the past few weeks- or to put it another way, saya tidak punya cukup waktu. (I've been trying to keep up what little language skills I have by chatting in Malay with my mother, but all we've been doing is insulting each other, then giggling hysterically.)

But yes...time management. Not going well.

If I'm not at uni, then I'm at work. If I'm not at work, then I'm banging my head on the large dining table with my laptop attempting to study. If I'm not banging my head on the large dining table with my laptop attempting to study, I'm standing in the kitchen with my head stuck in the pantry scavenging for food.

And the vicious cycle goes on.

And so, that leaves me here at 12:47 a.m still with my unfinished homework to print off and a little bundle of anxiety that likes to build up in my chest until I end up trying to get rid of it by panicking or hopping on one foot and sticking my head in the pantry again and wailing.

Because I am a mature young woman and I like to resolve my various personal crises in grown-up, mature ways.

Like wailing.

But yes...tomorrow I am screwed for my law tutorials. Oh, so screwed. How I wish the week were over...

A proper update will be forthcoming...

Days of Ugliness

2008-04-01T16:55:00.004+11:00

I had an Ugly Day today.

I consider this profoundly unfair, as I already suffered through an Ugly Day yesterday, but it looks like that maybe Ugly Days, like many things, come in threes.

For the perpetually beautiful (and thus ignorant) people who have never had one, an Ugly Day is when you get up and look in the mirror and something akin to the monosyllable, "BLEEEAAARGH!!!" bursts forth upon seeing your hideous visage.

Then you close your eyes for two seconds.

Then you crack one eye open, just to make sure that what you saw wasn't a sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination.

If you still look horrible, then yep, it's an Ugly Day.

It's a combination of factors- bad skin, bad hair, bad make-up, painful application of corrective lenses, your favourite top is in the wash...and all you want to do is hide under the covers and shout a muffled defiance at the world.

So I had one yesterday, but luckily all I had was Torts (where I sat right up the back by myself in a little huddle where no one could look upon me and be turned to stone, Medusa-like) and my Spanish cultural class, which is generally in a darkened theatre.

I then went home, where Dad was setting up digital set-top box #2.

Except he didn't have any spare RF cables. I found that a bit hard to believe, considering the jungle of cables he keeps around. And Dad being Dad, just said: "Why don't you go and get me one now?"

Two main things wrong with that:

1. I was having an Ugly Day
2. There's nothing more loser-ish than going into work WHEN YOU HAVE A DAY OFF

Except I didn't really want to explain to Dad that I was having an Ugly Day, because in my opinion, Ugly Days are a purely feminine concept, and men just don't get why you're hiding in the house with your trackies and ugg boots all day and hissing at the prospect of human contact. Plus, men just go out and get things done regardless of whether they look shit or not.

But after 40 minutes of discussion, we finally settled upon getting a 2.5m cable and some spare TV coax solder heads, just as backup. Plus, Dad agreed to teach me to strip and solder coaxial cable, and we still haven't tried out his newest toy, a temperature-controlled soldering station.

After a really nasty bout of Daphne v Foundation, in which the defendant, Revlon Flex, would not apply properly to the plaintiff's face without drying it out, I slunk off to work. Looking like someone had rubbed sand on my cheeks. If I'd been able to sue a semi-liquid inanimate object, I would have cited emotional trauma.

After the initial "What are you doing at work on YOUR DAY OFF?" from the girls, and after "giving shit" to my boss, as he likes to call it, I got the RF plugs and cable and went home. But not before browsing for some new glasses frames, which was even more humiliating, as 99% of the frames looked like they were attacking my face instead of helping my little eyeballs see clearly.

Oh, the horrors.

Not to worry, I thought. Because tomorrow is a new and exciting day!!!

To quote Borat...

...NOT.

I woke up this morning- actually, strike that, it was sometime in the afternoon- padded to the mirror, and internally, I screamed.

That stupid healing purple spot on my forehead had decided to reverse the healing process so it looked like someone had squashed a munted blueberry on my face and stuck it there for all posterity. To add insult to injury, it had somehow procreated overnight and so I had two matching companions for the damn thing on my left cheek, and oh, what I would've given to have Photoshopped my face right then at that moment.

OK, Daphne.

We are not going out today.

Luckily, it was 'Reading Week' for English at uni. Which is pretty stupid, because I only have TWO CONTACT HOURS a week for that subject, so I just don't understand why a Reading Week (read: Bludge Week) is required. Not that I'm complaining, because I got to stay home and bemoan Ugly Day #2.

I was making a pumpkin soup in the afternoon, and I'd got it all nice and blended and smooth when I realised that I was missing cream.

"Dad, I need cream. And we're out of milk."

"Why don't you go get some?"

"Because it's an Ugly Day."

"It's a beautiful day outside."

"No, I know the weather's nice. But I am having an ugly day. I refuse to go out."

(Dad didn't really have a response for that. Probably too befuddled as to the illogical workings of the teenage female mind. Plus he'd already commented on the hideousness of The Spot earlier in the afternoon, so he probably did understand.)

"Awwww come on Dad. I went and got your RF cable for you yesterday didn't I? Your turn."

So Dad went and fetched my cream and my milk, and that was that. I am currently holed up at home until soccer tonight, but all of my friends there have seen me at some stage in my little pink and blue bunny pyjamas and if that isn't a trial of friendship I don't know what is, so I never really feel self-conscious around them at all. It's quite liberating.

I even think that I radiate some kind of negative electromagnetic energy on Ugly Days, like Jack Black in Be Kind Rewind- my phone froze when I tried to answer a call and I had to hold down the off button until it blinked off, and the home PC froze up completely last night as well and had to be manually shut down.

Even technology doesn't like reflecting my face in its LCD screens.

Oh, and you know what was playing as I got into my car yesterday?

"Unpretty" by TLC.

And that, Ms Morissette, is irony.

Earth Hour

2008-03-29T20:34:00.004+11:00

I am currently observing Earth Hour.

Well, sort of.

I mean, I am using a computer. But I'm sitting in the dark. I haven't touched a light switch for 36 minutes and counting.

I was going to turn on my XBox except then I figured that using a high-wattage LCD screen with it would be even worse than using a PC and thus defeat the whole point of it. From what I gathered in the publicity reports, you're meant to sit for an hour in the darkness in a sort of contemplative silence.

Except seven minutes into Earth Hour, I got wholly sick of sitting in contemplative silence so I trodded downstairs to read bad fanfiction.

Anyway...our house is currently divided, as the upper storey is an Earth Hour zone (my mother is currently making phone calls by the light of a candle) and my father is enjoying his television program on the bottom storey with all the lights on.

My father, who actually drains the washing machine water to recycle precious H20, who demands I recycle frozen food boxes even if they have bits of frozen mozzarella stuck to them, who went out and swapped our showerheads for the Government water-saving ones, and who uses energy-saving globes with the creepy white alien light...has refused to observe Earth Hour.

To be honest, he does his bit for the environment every day by taking short showers, recycling water and such, whilst I am merely participating in a symbolic yet token gesture of global unity, and he's not really big on symbolism.

Except that this isn't just about turning off the lights for an hour. Apparently, it's about committing yourself to reducing 5% of your carbon emissions for the year, and that's certainly not an impossible target.

Post Earth Hour note: My mother said that using the computer during Earth Hour is really not observing Earth Hour- I suppose she has a point, but at least I did think about my own little environmental footprint for 60 minutes, unlike my neighbours- whom were obviously ignoring it, judging by the warm orange glow emanating from their curtained windows...

Stop Press

2008-03-14T14:27:00.002+11:00

"Court convicts bear of stealing honey."

And this, friends, is why I do law.

More City Driving Escapades/Movie Review: Juno

2008-03-11T00:26:00.003+11:00

"In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with."

I loved Juno.

I saw it on Saturday night in pitch darkness at the Moonlight Cinema. It was quirky and bloody hilarious, although I think I MIGHT HAVE A PERMANENT ELBOW MARK IN THE SQUISHY FLESH OF MY RIGHT SIDE because my Alias-obsessed friend Kris kept nudging me in the side everytime Jennifer Garner came onscreen, and she kept making this funny noise that I normally associate with hyperventilating.

(N.B to Kris: Hey, if I didn't embarrass you on my blog, what kind of friend would I be?!)

Anyway, it was all peachy once we were actually seated on picnic rugs in the botanical gardens, but we hadn't realised that the Moomba festival was also going on- and so parking was, to put in succinctly, an absolute bitch. My friend Loui drove us in, as I am possibly the worst city driver ever- in fact, I suck at reading maps full stop. I must say, I was in absolute awe of Louise's parking skills- she was driving The Family Car, which was a very large station wagon...a very large MANUAL station wagon.

We couldn't find a parking space ANYWHERE, even though we circled for 25 minutes like a big white station-wagon-esque bird of vehicular prey. Up down, up down, circling, through the slip lane, back again, three phone calls to Kris later...we attempted to park in a permit zone, we deliberated on whether we could get away with obstructing an old and unused driveway, and we ended up in a very tight residential court with no room to swing a cat, attempting to park whilst not blocking a residential driveway.

Louise ended up doing some kind of three-point correction which was nothing short of spectacular, if you minus the crunching sound of her towbar hitting something in the dark- and then, we heard a voice out of the darkness like an angel of parking mercy:

"Hey, did you guys want our space? We're moving out now."

And that was that.

Kris drove me back to the initial rendezvous spot where I'd gone in with Louise. She knew exactly where to go and exactly how to get there (one day I hope to achieve this kind of zen-like clarity) and off we went with no navigational problems whatsoever, singing blithely along to TLC, but with the windows rolled up because earlier in the night (or rather, early hours of the morning) someone had seen fit to throw a bottle at us as we were standing on a street corner. And pumping JoJo out of a little hatchback doesn't quite cut it with the hardcore teenage homies, even though the bass in Kristine's car is probably capable of moving one's bowels.

In comparison to Loui's reversing skills, I was forced to drive my version of The Family Car on Sunday morning- which is a freaking MASSIVE Ford. My dad had taken my hatchback but neglected to reverse the car out- which sits on what is actually a little patch of grass which is at a perfect NINETY DEGREE ANGLE to the driveway. To further complicate things everything is bordered by some concrete steps and a rather painful edge of decorative rocks. It's like one of those horrible trigonometry problems where you have to calculate the angles of reversing.

I can do it in any other small car (albeit with MUCH difficulty) but The Family Car.

The only good thing about the Family Car is that when people see the P plates, and see my Death-Star sized car ("Look at the size of that thing!") coupled with the fact that when they squint, there is a terrified looking female Asian driver clutching the steering wheel...they give me space.

It's like being one of the Four Horsemen of the Vehicular Apocalypse. If I had to choose three other fellow Horsemen, they'd be Old Person Driver, Bloody Volvo Driver and Stupid-Young-Man-With-Subwoofer Driver. (Honourable mentions to people who own a Dodge. How the hell do you get enough fuel to run that TANK?!)

Anyway...so I was running late for work as I had to open up the store- and I had spent ten minutes looking for my hatchback's keys and freaking out when I saw the garage was empty before remembering Dad had taken it- and so I was very stressed. And then I hear this almighty CRUNCH and oooh look, I think that was the back fence.

No wuckers, Daphne. We'll just try it again, but slooooower...

...CRUNCH. CRACKLE.

There is now a rather nice little fissure in the wooden slats of our fence, except my mum insists that it was there before already, so no one actually cared.

In the end, I had to call Mum and get her to come down and reverse it for me. Which was pathetic, but necessary.

And that, friends, is why I like to drive hatchbacks.

The Joys of Real Player

2008-03-08T00:46:00.004+11:00

I just only realised that RealPlayer 11 downloads videos from YouTube.

Free.

For offline viewing.

I've only just discovered this. And I feel like such a n00b.

However, I am now regretting discovering this, as this means that I can waste my download quota (and my study time) downloading lots and lots of clips. It's going to be worse than Facebook. In fact, I am considering getting a timer fixed onto the screen of my computer just so I can monitor my internet usage, as I am spending entirely too much time on this machine.

However, I felt like slightly less of a n00b when I realised that my Dad's PC was probably running RealPlayer 10.5 or under, which is why I never discovered this feature...and it never occurred to me to download a third media viewer on this PC, y'know, just in case Windows Media Player and iTunes fail. And who uses Real Player anyway?! Except my uni, which is why I had to download it in the first place...

And now I'm rambling again. But I'm so excited I just had to share :D

Now I can watch "Dick in a Box" over and over...and sing along!!!

N.B (I know that this probably belongs on Technobabblement but no one's going to notice it there, so I am announcing it over here!)

Work Ethics

2008-03-03T23:06:00.004+11:00

Labour Day is not a university holiday.

I almost wept from the sheer injustice of it all, as I have lectures on that day.

And then I thought very hard about this, and realised...

Lectures are not compulsory.

Duh.

We are 'expected' to attend. It doesn't mean I HAVE to attend.

Right?!

Because that is 2.5 my normal pay rate. That is $30/hr as opposed to $12. That is $200.

Versus two and a half hours of lectures. Which are TAPED and put up ONLINE.

However, I was also faced with a slight moral dilemma. Which is stupid, because I once skipped out on a three hour lecture to have a picnic in the park, and didn't feel a twinge of guilt. But there are actually staff who CAN work on Monday and I am thus taking their shift away from them.

However, I am the youngest member of the team. This means I am also have the lowest pay rate of anyone else on the staff. I have already been compensated for my managerial stint with the prime weekend shifts...but frankly, I do more work than anyone else and I get paid less. So screw that, I'm taking this shift and I AM GOING TO TAKE MY $200 (-15% tax) and I am going to....

...give it to my mother to pay back the $2800 HECS debt I owe her.

Perhaps this is why she encouraged me to skip uni and go to work instead. I really did think she'd be the voice of moral reason.

In fact, she brought up a very valid point:

Mum: If you skip the lecture, can you catch up?
Me: Actually, they're all taped and put up online for me to download.
Mum: Oh. So...why do you even go to lectures then?

*silence*

And that is my deep and profound the question for the day.

The Way That I Love You (With Knives!)

2008-03-02T20:48:00.003+11:00

I was pottering around on YouTube when I discovered this new video from Ashanti:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hayE_ZP0rI&feature=user

I like to think of this as a homicidal version of Beyonce's "Irreplaceable".

I love it.

Things I've Learnt From the First Week Back

2008-02-29T23:53:00.004+11:00

Things I Learnt From The First Week Back At Uni:

1. Parking went up 10%.

2. The law faculty consists of over-groomed boys who don't quite meet the requisites for the classification of 'eye candy'. Unless they are under 50 k.g and appear to be suffering from malnutrition, in which case they meet Kristine's criteria...

(Being the mature, un-judgemental people that we are, we have been using an eye-candy rating system out of 10 in our first week, so Torts was a 5/10 and Constitutional was apparently a 2/10. What a bust.)

3. "Spanish men are not shy about adjusting their...equipment...in public." (Spanish lecturer taking my class on Hispanic culture and society.) So apparently we should not be alarmed at the sight of an Hispanic man with his hand down his trousers "to make sure that everything's where it should be."

4. Spanish people seem to have a preoccupation with testicles. Although you might have gathered that from No. 3.

5. Tort law is a glorified version of the Blame Game, except it's only fun when the person you're blaming is loaded with money. (Otherwise it's like taking candy away from a diabetic baby.)

6. My English tutor for Fiction Writing was my old Year Seven/Eight teacher, back in the days when I was a wee lass starting high school. Awkwardness.

7. Asian people CAN make good coffee. Sometimes.

8. My Spanish teacher makes the word 'Senorita' sound sexier than when Justin Timberlake says it. Which is really saying something, since aforementioned teacher has at least a decade on JT and is not quite so attractive.

9. If you do Neuroanatomy, your textbook will be packaged with a 12-PACK OF CRAYOLA PENCILS for you to colour the different sections of the brain. Which is why we offered to do April's homework for her :D

Movie Review: "Jumper"

2008-02-18T23:11:00.003+11:00

I saw 'Jumper' last night.

It was terrible.

Really, really bad. (This being the general definition of 'terrible'...)

I'd been really looking forward to it, since it had all the makings of a good sci-fi/action movie- teleporting, lots of explosions, and Hayden Christensen.

However, it was as if fifteen people had all sat down, thought of one scene each without consulting the other, then patched it all together in a random editing sequence.

IT HAD NO PLOT.

And by this I mean '27 Dresses' had a better plot. Linear and predictable though it was, it still had a basic plot. Unlike Jumper, which literally did 'jump' around from scene to scene, leaving many unresolved plotlines and with a black hole where character development should have been.

And I had hoped that Hayden Christensen would finally shake off the abysmal acting of Star Wars: Episode II (Episode Three not being quite so bad) and prove that he could actually act.

Unfortunately, his role in Jumper consisted of three facial expressions- Happy Anakin. Sad Anakin. And Angry Anakin.

Rachel Bilson wasn't much better, as I spent the whole time looking at her going, "Weren't you NOT THAT THIN in the O.C?'

Even Samuel L. Jackon's coolness was totally wasted. It was hands-down the stupidest movie I have seen all summer. Not only did it not have a plot, it didn't even make any sense- if you've watched it and seen the ending, you'll understand the sheer idiocy of it and the total lack of any plot explanation.

I saw it with my friend Alice, and admittedly, we were kinda hoping to just sit there and perv on Mr Christensen, but his shirt was off for a grand total of seven seconds. And he had all the charisma and acting ability of a plank of wood. At the end of the movie, we were just so utterly dazed by the ridiculousness of it all that we couldn't actually comment on the movie itself, just the weirdness of it all.

So yeah...keep your $12 and go see Alvin and the Chipmunks or something.

Soap!

2008-02-16T00:09:00.003+11:00

I have a weakness for luxury soaps.

It's not an addiction or anything, but I just find the idea of spending $4, $10 or $20 on a bar of soap kind of odd- it's not something I'd normally think to buy if someone gave me $10. But I like soap. And when someone gives me good soap, it's quite exciting. And yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that that was an absolutely pathetic statement, but y'know, someone people get their thrills from sky-diving, some people get their thrills from drag-racing, and IF I HAPPEN TO GET MY THRILLS FROM SOAP THEN THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

Well, actually there is something wrong (and lame) about that, but let's just pretend that there isn't and move on, shall we?

...

Anyhow...I got this 'Calming' lavender soap for Christmas in a pretty shiny mauve box, and the lovely round cake of soap inside was a soft lavender colour wrapped in tissue and encircled with a pretty purple ribbon...except I ripped all that nice pacakging off with my fingernails because I had to scrabble for it in the bathroom drawer in the middle of my shower, when I realised that the cheap 5-for-$2 Palmolive soap I'd scabbed from my parents' bathroom had withered away.

And I know that it's probably some kind of placebo soap effect, but I do feel calmer. And I smell like lavender and citrus.

I just hope that this lovely soap was not scrounged from whale by-products, because then I would be smelling like lavender, citrus and the innocent blood of practically sentient aquatic mammals.

I don't condone Greenpeace's methods, which are illegal and completely irresponsible, but at least they're bloody well doing something, unlike our little Government boat, which just follows around like a little puppy going, "Please sir, perhaps you might like to cease murdering those whales? Or....not? That's...that's ok, we'll just follow on behind sir, carry on..."

On a totally random note, SOAP also happens to be the acronym for a super-cool movie, Snakes on a Plane.

Ahhh, will the wonders of soap never cease?!

Reign of Terror

2008-02-13T23:25:00.004+11:00

I am currently acting as assistant manager at my workplace.

This is not because of some predatory desire to climb the ranks of retail glory. Nor is it borne out of any benevolent willingness to help out the company.

It is simply because my assistant manager is a twat.

The girl walked out on the job two weeks before her official resignation date.

I generally try not to judge people too harshly, given that I'm aware she had some boyfriend/family issues going on in her life, but she could at least have waited two weeks before lumping all her responsibilities onto my puny little shoulders.

I wasn't just the default choice- I was the only choice (our normal 31C is on much-deserved annual leave, and if you even mention the word 'overtime' to the other full-timer she's already out the door). And desperate times call for desperate measures, so my boss gave me a crash course in procedural admin and handed me a key.

I have mixed feelings about this quasi-promotion. On one hand, it's really good management experience. I've made so many mistakes in the space of only one week, but both boss and colleagues have been ridiculously patient. On the other hand, I'm still getting only $12.23 an hour and that is blatant exploitation.

Admittedly, it's been good to not have to focus on the sales so much- I get other people to run around doing that- but the overtime you have to put in is ridiculous. The tills were $100 down the other night, and I ended up staying 1 1/2 hours overtime counting out $200 in change. It was truly a teeth-gritting experience.

However, I did have a happy time one morning when the man who fills up the candy machine came up to us and gave us 20 cents each to be his candy machine 'testers', and one particular morning where I sat in the quiet stillness of the back office with a Sausage and Egg McMuffin and a latte and pondered on the absolute wonders of Sausage and Egg McMuffins and the state of the world in general.

(Breakfast muffins with weird sausage meat induce a hallucenogenic state when I ingest them.)

I also have more of a say in the inner workings of the store- to give all credit to my boss, he isn't treating me like a fill-in manager, and actually values whatever lame contribution I come up with. The other day he called me in to ask my advice on what kind of television to order in for the store- my boss was considering another plasma, but I pointed out to him the ridiculous power consumption of the average 42" plasma (roughly 350W) and so upon my advice, he ordered in a 40" Sony Bravia LCD. (I sincerely hope it sells, otherwise he'll never take my advice again :P)

Although quite frankly, I'd also had my fill of plasmas after crawling into the back seat of a customer's Honda Civic trying to pull the damn thing through. Owww.

I have one and a half weeks left of responsibility, but when this is over I'll be happy to crawl back into my little part-time niche. I'm almost looking forward to starting uni again just so I can get out of iPod Land and back into my little uni life. Because Property Law is like, so exciting. *snort*

Honesty. Brutal, brutal, honesty. Rant Warning

2008-02-04T23:57:00.000+11:00

I shouldn't have picked up the phone.

There was a call flashing on my mobile- a private number- and even though I had misgivings, I figured it might be a friend or family member calling from a foreign phone.

So I picked it up.

Unfortunately, the voice on the other end was the one person I've been trying to avoid- and had been successfully avoiding, I might add, for about three months.

To put it simply...I am a bitch.

I could've probably said, a long time ago, that I didn't really want to be friends. I could have just stopped it then, but I have problems with saying 'no'. Instead, I took the 'bitch' route, where I just ignored every e-mail, call and SMS, thinking that maybe this would just cut this person off from my life. Person in question is...I'm not sure what to call him. A friend? An overzealous acquaintance? Whatever he is, I suspect him of wanting more than a friendship, although I'm so inexperienced in these matters that I really can't tell. I suppose repeatedly inviting me out for a drink is a symptom of that. But the last time this happened with someone, I kept ignoring it until I got a text suggesting a movie and dinner, and then I freaked out completely, snapped off a quick and apologetic "I-had-no-idea-you-wanted-a-date-', received the most lovely and courteous response, and never heard from him again.

And you know what? I felt like a bitch.

Saying 'no' to anyone is hard. I can't possibly imagine how hard it must be to ask someone out, so it tears out my guts to say 'no' to a guy (thankfully it is VERY rarely that I get asked so that's OK). But going back to this phone conversation, he did ask me whether or not I was avoiding him, given that I'd ignored every single attempt at communication for three months.

And you know what I did? I lied.

I couldn't face the thought of hurting anyone's feelings that much, even though I probably deserved to suffer that, so I lied. Lied lied lied. No, of course I wasn't avoiding you. Yes, I rarely use my phone, and don't check my e-mail. You know, work and all has been so demanding for, y'know, the past nine weeks...

And that's what's so difficult about relationships of any kind. At my workplace, I have several colleagues- and even though I truly do not like several of them, I keep up the pretense that I do. Again, a lie. However, I am somewhat excused by the fact that I work with these people day in, day out, and it IS imperative that I get along well with them. Which I do. I just don't like them.

There is one person whom I work with who I particularly do not like- I refuse to expend any energy on 'hate' because it is an unproductive waste of time and emotion- but I dislike her for the fact that not only does she have an inferiority complex which makes her constantly talk herself up all the time, she is also jealous of me (or my position, although WHY you would covet being in my work role is a mystery) and that simply annoys me.

Fine, honey, talk yourself up all you want, but if you constantly hang over my shoulder trying to point out mistakes and undermine me, THEN I get pissed off.

And yet, she believes that we are friends. I have never given her reason to believe otherwise. Which makes me quite the hypocrite.

It's all about the masks we wear, the varied fronts we present to our friends, to our family, to our colleagues, even to customers. I think sometimes I can get a little too manically happy-looking at work whenver I present my 'HELLOOOOOOO CAN I HELP YOU?' front, which collapses as soon as I get in the front door at home and put my feet up. But whenever I see my friends, it's always a huge mood lift.

As my friend Kris so eloquently put it, there are people that you are sure that you will love for the rest of your life. To me, there is nothing sweeter than finding a friend with whom you can share exactly what you are thinking- unfiltered and unedited. Blogging is personal, but in a way it's also contrived in that you can twist your words and hide behind the shield of language. My favourite bloggers (Rosy, Kris and Jenai) are wonderful because they tell their own stories in a unique way, with everything included, nothing left out. As someone once said (George Orwell perhaps?), beware the man who writes his autobiography with no accounts of his own failure, humiliation or shame.

Although I love going to meet people in groups, it's the one-on-one outings that I also treasure. Most of them involve coffee or chocolate of some kind- and that, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to get to know someone. Because there's no one else around that would cause you to put that front up- the only thing between you and that other person is a sweetened latte.

(Or a chocolate lick. And a croissant. And an Italian hot chocolate. And maybe some gourmet handmade chocolates to boot.)

I guess there's a time and place for honesty. And thanks to that guy's phone call at 10:30 p.m, I now have lost precious sleep time. I have half a mind to send a brutally honest e-mail tomorrow, just because I don't think I can keep up the pretense of this any longer.

I feel morally pathetic. And sleep-deprived.

Tomorrow, I shall face the world with a giant vat of sweetened barista coffee, which always does wonders.

To Put It In Perspective...

2008-02-02T17:54:00.001+11:00

A colleague and I were discussing wages after work- my colleague whined about having her $20/hr casual rate cut down to $15 part-time, and I countered that I first got $9.65 when I started- and then my boss simply said, "Please don't complain about wages- when I worked at Hungry Jack's, I got $5.50 an hour."

That shut us up good.

So there you go. Not a peep of whinginess from now on- at least until I forget all about that anecdote.

What a Difference A Nap Makes

2008-01-31T22:49:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I slept for 15 hours.

Given, that sleeping time was broken up when I fell asleep at 8ish, woke up at 11 p.m, brushed my teeth and had another good lengthy snooze until noon the next day...but then I had another good nine/ten hour sleep this morning and I felt...I felt good. I didn't have a headache, I wasn't feeling vaguely dizzy from lack of sleep. I felt fine and dandy.

In fact, I was really quite disgustingly chipper. I even felt sorta cheerful about my 8 1/2 hour shift. That was, of course, until my very young, very immature assistant manager decided to walk out on the job at 1 p.m and not come back.

Don't ask me why. I guess she was in a snit or something, because her mother came in to discuss her hours with my boss (who sends their parents in to negotiate work times?!) Or maybe it was for personal reasons. Whatever.

So they left me in charge. Left me in charge from 6:30 p.m- 9 p.m with ONE lone casual. And a whole lotta customers.

Gaaaargh.

See, the casual who was working with me is very patient. He is such a nice obedient young man that people take advantage of him and completely monopolize his time, which means that I was pretty much stuck by myself facing looks of pity from customers going, "Are you the only one on duty? Your poor thing."

It was at this point that I seriously started re-evaluating why I put up with $12.23/hr for this kind of thing.

I recently applied for a job as a audio transcription typist, and got a call back today for the screening process- they mentioned their rates, which ranged from $19-$27 depending on whether you can hit 100 wpm (my average is 92 wpm with 96% accuracy.) The hours are a bit demanding, and they're probably unlikely to accept me since I probably can't fit it in around uni, and not to mention how INSANELY BORING it must be to just sit there and type all day...and the fact that I'll probably develop Carpal-Tunnel syndrome or the most hideous RSI in the history of RSIs....but I just thought of the money and the fact that I wouldn't have to deal with customers.

Take Douchebag #1:

D/B: I need help with a rechargeable battery.
Me: Sure. How can I help?
D/B: I have an old amplifier.
(At this point, he hefts a small and ancient amplifier up on the counter.)
Me: Yes....?
D/B: It takes rechargable batteries.
(The batteries in question are two large black boxes situated at either end.)
Me: OK...looks like they're 6V sealed lead acid ones...
D/B: I already KNOW that.
Me: So what did you want to know?
D/B: There's a DC port here. I want to know if it will recharge the batteries when I plug it in.
Me: Well, I'm guessing so. Considering you have rechargeable batteries and a DC plug.
D/B: Can you be sure?
Me: Well, no...there's a probability that it will.
D/B: I don't want a PROBABILITY. I want to know if it WILL.

(It's YOUR equipment you moron. Surely in the bazillion years you've had it, you never thought TO REMOVE THE ADAPTOR AND SEE WHETHER IT FUNCTIONS OFF TWO 6 VOLT BATTERIES?!)

D/B: Does anyone else round here know?
Me: I'll ask my manager...

(D/B repeats the question to my manager)

Manager: Well, it probable that it will. Being rechargeable batteries.
D/B: So you don't know?
Manager: No.
D/B: Can you test it?
Manager: No.
D/B: Why not?

(BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU PAY TECHNICANS FOR, YOU TIGHT-ARSE. WE SELL BLOODY LABEL-MAKERS AND CD SPINDLES!)

Manager: Because we don't do that kind of thing here.
D/B: So you can't tell me for certain if it will charge?
Manager: Look sir, there is a very strong probability that it will charge.
D/B: I don't want a PROBABILITY. I WANT TO KNOW FOR CERTAIN.
Manager: Yes, but I can't really say for certain.
D/B: Oh, I see. So obviously SOME people at *insert company name here* are technically-minded and OTHERS are JUST SALESPEOPLE. *scoffs*

At this point, the Douchebag snapped out at me, "Thanks for nothing!" and left.

You might think that this was mostly a normal exchange, but this guy was extremely rude and dismissive in the way he treated us, and the fact that he was trying to get us to do what trained electricians are paid for was ridiculous. You wouldn't take a piece of crap like that to the laptop section at Myers and expect them to be able to test a piece of equipment that wasn't even bought from them in the first place. Let alone the last decade.

After he'd left, my manager said to me, "If I had a bloody degree in electronics, do you think I'd be working here getting paid nothing?"

And that was a very fair point.

And after that rather cathartic rant, I have a ten and a half hour shift tomorrow.

I think I need another nap now.

Movie Review- '27 Dresses'

2008-01-23T16:19:00.000+11:00

For the first time in probably about two years, I saw a chick flick at the cinema today.

I seriously needed an antidote to the UTTER DEPRESSING-NESS of Atonement, so I thought it might cheer me up. More so than say, Alvin and the Chipmunks. (I heard the Chipmunk rendition of Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" on the radio at work. I thought my head would explode.)

It did actually cheer me up. Mostly because we were getting a nice eyeful of James Marsden, who scrubbed up quite well. OK...he scrubbed up VERY well. There was also the obligatory scene where he appeared dripping wet from a strategically plotted thunderstorm, so I was happy.

As for the plot...it had as much plot as you'd expect it to have (i.e none) but I'd forgotten how good it is to see an utterly pointless movie where you don't have to think.

And did I mention James Marsden?

:D

Unfortunately, I did wake up to the news that Heath Ledger had been found dead in his Manhattan apartment, which was quite a shock. I think that anything I say here is just going to sound trite, so I might leave it at that.

But it's going to be strange watching that new Batman film.

Movie Review: Atonement

2008-01-16T23:26:00.000+11:00

I saw Atonement today.

And cried.

It was the most depressing, tragic film I have ever seen, and I sat there for two hours on the verge of tears until the final scenes, when my eyeballs could no longer cope with all the tragedy and I finally caved.

I read the book in my first year of uni, when no one else had really read it despite the fact that it was shortlisted for the Booker- although my criminal law lecturer did make a reference to it when we were discussing statutory rape- and I fell in love with Ian McEwan's writing.

Then I heard that they were making a movie- oh joy- and that they were casting Keira Knightley as Cecilia.

Grrrr. Oh, I raved for a while over that.

However, she was actually GOOD, as Rosy had told me. And Briony's casting was good. In fact, the casting was excellent all round. And the acting. Except since I knew that the storyline was a total train wreck of tragedy from start to finish, it made the movie even more depressing.

Now I feel like seeing Enchanted. Again. Just because there are birds and princes and vermin that do the house-cleaning to happy songs, and everything turns out peachy in the end and EVERYONE LIVES HAPPILY EVER AFTER.

Happy!!!

The last time I felt this way was after I saw Miss Saigon, where my whole family was in floods of tears the entire way through and it was the most depressing ending to a stage musical ever.

I need something happy. HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY....

I'm Tap Tap Tap Tap Tapping, Along...

2008-01-09T17:05:00.000+11:00

After two weeks of waiting on spare parts, I fired up my PDA for the first time today.

The PDA was my little summer project. It's a little HP iPaq RX1950- I bought it for $49 from work because it had been sitting there naked in the cabinet for TWO YEARS unable to be sold as it had...

...no box
...no packaging
...no BATTERY
...no AC adaptor
...no synchronisation cable
...no instructions
...no CD software

On the upside, it still had a stylus :D

It was still in new condition, it was just that we had no more use for it as the whole box was AWOL. So when my manager offered it to me, I bought it.

What use do I have for a PDA, you say? Erm...not much. It does do video, music and photos, and the screen is actually pretty good for that kinda thing, but the main attraction was the built-in WiFi and the fact that you can store Word files and PDFs on it.

And admittedly, I did buy it for perhaps the most pathetic, dorkiest reason ever...I thought it would be useful for downloading law cases to read in my lunch breaks.

Hey, YOU try hefting a damn Contracts book into work and eating Maccas around the 700+ pages of boredom. This way, I can read legislation and case notes wherever I go! Ooh, the joy!!!

I managed to scrounge up some spare parts by searching eBay- I sourced an aftermarket charging/sync cable and a leather case from Hong Kong, and an aftermarket 1000mah battery from a supplier in Brisbane...all for just over $50 including postage. The lack of software wasn't the hurdle I thought it might be- I just downloaded ActiveSync 4 from CNet and everything was a doddle.

So now I'm tappity tap tap tapping everything with the little stylus just for the sheer fun of it.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap tap tap.

Hip Hop Is Not Dead, Part II

2008-01-05T10:58:00.000+11:00

It appears that my ambition to become cool and black has struck yet another hurdle.

Dad: Why are you listening to that crap?
Moi: What crap?
Dad: All that black music with the obscenities-
Moi: Eh? Ohhhh...

Then I remembered that I'd accidentally left my CD with the uncensored version of 50 Cent's P.I.M.P in the car. The G-Mix.

Whoops.

Y'know, that song that goes, "I ain't that nigga trying to holla cause I want some head/ I'm that nigga tryin' to holla cause I want some bread..."

Eh heh heh heh...I love that line...

So yes, my mag-ni-fah-cent pimp-ing didn't go down so well...and thus, I will have to wait until I move out to achieve my dream of becoming cool and black.

Sigh.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T00:29:00.000+11:00

Happy New Year!!!

I figured I'd blog now, because:

(a) it's way too hot to sleep...(today was meant to be 42 degrees!!!)
(b) I also figured that I might as well sort of my New Year's Resolutions right now

For New Year's Eve, I went out for dinner with my family (which included two uncles, my aunt and my younger cousin) to this restaurant in Fitzroy famous for its Peking Duck. It was good duck, even though the waiter who carved it at the table seemed to be extremely hyper or extremely high- "Anyone here a Peking Duck virgin? No one? Who wants a leg? Who wants the bottom? If you want another just ask, we've got plenty of arse to go round...NO YOU CAN'T PUT TWO SPRING ONIONS ON ONE PANCAKE, IT IS STRICTLY ONE CUCUMBER AND ONE SPRING ONION IN A 3:15 POSITION!!!"

I am NOT kidding.

He actually threw a rather melodramatic fit upon seeing my cousin's sprig of spring onion matching the cucumber angle in a 12:00 position instead of 3:15.

Of course, it was all an act, and it amused me somewhat, but I didn't quite feel comfortable in reaching for the mandarin pancakes whilst he was waving the giant chopper around, slicing and dicing with a lot of gusto.

After the duck (in which we had Peking Duck, then the leftovers were stir-fried with bean sprouts, then the bones were made into soup) we tramped back to our place for the countdown.

Earlier in the day, I worked from 11 a.m to 6 p.m, although I was officially the acting manager between 3:30 and 6:00 p.m, which I personally found hilarious because as a youngest child, I'm extremely bad at giving orders or taking any kind of responsibility. It didn't go too badly either, although I'm sure my boss will arrive on Wednesday morning and find out that I've done something really stupid.

Anyhow, I'm going to post up my New Year's Resolutions here, and watch with a kind of detached amusement at how long it takes me to break them:

Daphne's New Year's Resolutions for 2008

1. I will make an effort to actually catch up with people

See, I suck at this. I really really suck. I'm sick of exchanging 'we have to catch up' - it should be we WILL catch up, and I haven't seen some of my La Trobe friends for...well, a year. Since I left. Anyhow, I will also be a better texter...I issue an apology for anyone who has received one of my '24-hours-after-you-sent-your-message' texts...my phone memory caps at 150 messages and I have to delete them all one by one manually.

GAAAAAARGH

I need a new phone.

2. I will actually do the readings for uni

Hah.

HAH.

Let's see how long THAT one lasts...

3. I will exercise

This, friends, is partly why I spent $100 on getting Dance Dance Revolution for the XBox 360. It has a Workout mode and a Calorie counter, so I can dance dance without the pain pain.

Supposedly.

4. I will stop eating crap. Or at least, spending ridiculous amounts of money on food.

This is a pretty important one. Stoopid attractive food court at work! Oh, and that coffee addiction!!!

5. I will not dress like a tramp

I will make an active effort to dress nicely.

Gaah.

This will probably involve sorting out my wardrobe and spending ridiculous amounts of money on clothes. Sigh.

6. I will keep track of my spending

Take note, Point 5.

7. I will be grateful for what I have

I think a lot of useless energy is spent comparing one's self to the status quo, which just breeds discontent. I'm living a life of privilege while others in the world are suffering. I have nothing to whine about.

8. I will keep my room clean

My mum recommended this one, not me.

9. I will be more pro-active.

I'm not quite sure what I meant by this, but I suppose it could be taken to mean that I need to muster more enthusiasm for whatever it is that I'm doing. Like studying. Or work. Or cleaning the house.

10. I will be more culturally-minded.

Xia, if you're reading this, I look forward to more mad dashes to the MSO. My Llama-like fishbowlin friend, I think it's time I set foot in a proper arthouse theatre with a proper arthouse movie that no one but the director can decipher. I'm also going to read all those books I've always wanted to read. (Loui, I shall make that one of my next posts.)

So yes...let's see how those all pan out.

I hope you all have a fantastic start to 2008, and best wishes for the New Year!!!

Thanks muchly for reading, btw :D

Contracts

2007-12-20T19:39:00.000+11:00

Y'know that teaching position I mentioned in my last post?

Well, they e-mailed me the contract.

And what a contract it was.

Onerous terms? Yes!

Cheap pay? Yes!

Complete lack of paid leave or other benefits? Yes!

See, I'm currently getting $12.23/hr. I get $16 on Saturdays and $24 on Sundays. And this is fairly menial work- sure, it's repetitive and often frustrating, but at least it's in a field that I'm interested in.

However, this job paid $18-$20/hr, with no annual leave. No sick leave. No paid leave at all. I don't even think it included super. You needed to work as an independent contractor (and I assume this involved having your own ABN) and they had some bullshit about client exclusitivity- you had to solemnly swear to not teach anyone you'd taught during your employment for THREE YEARS after employment with the company had ceased.

Oh, and the usual forfeiture stuff if you...well, forfeited.

Did I mention the $100 bond?

And having to drive out wasting your precious petrol?

And the $40 penalty fee if you were sick and couldn't inform the parents of the child within 24 hours?

I'll pass, thanks.

The Screaming Jets

2007-12-19T23:14:00.000+11:00

I have a very nasty temper.

People don't believe me when I say this. Ever since I was a kid, I've had what one might call a short fuse. A very illogical short fuse that is prone to blowing unexpectedly.

Generally, I'm okay. I'm a lot better than I used to be, but occasionally stress will trigger a sudden screaming fit (a cathartic screaming fit) and I undergo a frightening transformation, becoming a hysterical Queen of the Harpies.

I'm not sure why this happens, but it does seem to occur around the same time every month, which means that I'm either part lycanthrope or that I'm at the mercy of hormones. I can always tell for the latter- there'll be one day of complete and utter woe-is-me-oh-the-angst!-the-angst! self-pitying depression and then the next day I'll be as narky as a wounded bull.

Today, I had another sudden violent explosion of inexplicable rage (again, at the appropriate time of the month). See, I need the car on Friday night because I am working until 12 a.m. Yes, 12 a.m. Because, naturally, EVERYONE WANTS TO SHOP FOR ELECTRONICS AT MIDNIGHT.

I didn't think this was such a big deal, considering that I don't know what time I'll be finishing up, and I'd rather drive myself home than inconvenience someone else. That, and I absolutely detest being 'picked up' like a schoolkid by my parents. I'm not four years old.

But no, both parentals require one car each for Friday night. And I would much rather drive myself home than have to be picked up after midnight. This should have been a rational point of discussion, but I was suddenly overcome by a fit of pure anger- mostly built-up frustration that I can't do anything without having to run it through my parents first- and of course, I had a fit.

It's not my parents' fault. I am living at home, and certain responsibilities and limitations govern the household. Obviously, freedom was always going to be severely compromised by financial security. But to my addled, sleep-deprived, hormonal mind (plus I'd just staggered off a ten hour shift at work) it was a national calamity.

Ten minutes later, I figured that I could ask one of my colleagues to drop me home.

That would have been the logical, sensible, non-yelling solution.

But that's not nearly half as interesting. And I'm still absolutely furious for no reason at all.

Which makes me wonder...what's your worst fault?

(Remember you can remain anonymous...so SPILL!)

Thinking...

2007-12-18T19:44:00.000+11:00

My parents do not think very highly of my intelligence.

Admittedly, I haven't given them much reason to disprove this opinion, but that's not the point...surely the 'I-Trust-My-Child-To-Be-Sensible instinct outweights the I-Am-The-Parent-And-Thus-Am-Always-Right mentality?

Or...not.

Today I had a job interview. Again. For a music teaching position. (Again). Only this time, they pretty much offered me a twelve-month contract after fifteen minutes of chatting.

Which was kind of strange, considering the other music school made me jump through several hoops to even get to the bloody audition part...but this seems okay, it's teaching children in primary schools. The only problem is getting around my university timetable...which is going to be interesting. Very interesting.

Anyhow, I rang Dad before going to work to tell him the good news.

He said, "You didn't sign the contract did you? Did you even read it?" etc, acting like I was nine instead of nineteen...before I cracked it and finally pointed out, "YOU KNOW I DIDN'T SUFFER THROUGH ONE YEAR OF CONTRACT LAW TO BE TOLD THAT I NEED TO READ A BLOODY CONTRACT."

I even remember the bloody precedent- L'Estrange v Graucob, although this knowledge is about as useful as the little random facts that come printed on the back of Libra sanitary pads.

Secondly...my grand plan, as I explained to my interviewer, is to take a year off in 2009, and do music. Just music. Ideally, I'd like to teach for a year, complete my A.Mus.A, learn voice and violin, and travel to Greece. And possibly South America. And possibly Alaska.

My mother does not like this idea. In fact, she violently disapproves. She thinks I am being insensible, and she pointed out that time is money, and I could be earning money in that one year blah blah blah...she tried to use the opinion of one of my siblings as back-up for her argument, except I'm perfectly aware that that particular sibling thinks of the world in seven-minute billings...so that really had no weight.

Oddly enough, my father gave me some spiel about superannuation when I first floated this plan, but then shrugged it off, saying, "It's your life..." which would have been quite nice of him if he hadn't added, "...you can muck it up if you want."

Without sounding like a petulant five-year old, I wish I were financially independent...because then no one could tell me what to do. But since I can't afford to move out, no matter how much I wish I had my own space, I am somewhat restricted by certain limitations.

But never mind.

All I want for Christmas is one week off. I have a 9 a.m- 7 p.m shift tomorrow and I think I am just going to retire to the back room with the biggest vat of coffee I can find, and drown my misery in sweet-smelling caffeine.

Mmm.

Coffee...

Edit, post-evil-shift: I bought one extremely large cappuccino during my lunch break but it didn't make me even a smidgen more alert...when I woefully pointed this out to my colleague, he went and bought me an additional cup in order to wake me up. This didn't work either. Which makes me wonder...AM I BECOMING DESENSITISED TO THE MIRACULOUS RESTORATIVE POWERS OF COFFEE?!!!

Tweens and Sexuality

2007-12-12T22:44:00.001+11:00

I was at work the other day when I saw a little girl standing near the GPS systems.

A little girl, maybe eight or ten years old.

A little girl, wearing a scrap of fabric about 15 cm long that could generously be defined as a 'skirt'.

It was bloody ridiculous. I set my teeth and retreated into the back room, muttering darkly to myself and admittedly, feeling just a little old-fogeyish.

I also happened to chance upon another young girl about her age, tottering off to the bathrooms in knee-high brown boots, clutching a Louis Vuitton handbag. (I'm hoping that it was a fake...because the only Louis Vuitton thing I could ever afford to own would be maybe one square centimetre of leather with the corner of the logo imprinted on it).

Kids should dress like kids, not like miniature hookers. When I was little, I had knee length dresses, I happily wore oversized 80s hand-me-downs, and I even had bright pink leggings with saddle straps. Actually, let's face it, I'm still a horrible dresser. But I get seriously pissed off when I see all the crap out there that's marketed at pre-pubescent tweens.

On the rare occasions that I dare venture into Supre, I sometimes see little girls dragging their mothers around the store, dressed in hideous fluoro miniskirts or high-heeled boots. But that still doesn't beat what I saw whilst shopping in New Zealand a few weeks ago- a whole dance troupe of little girls, from some kind of performing arts school, were dancing to some hideous Christmas carols in the middle of a shopping mall.

Innocent enough, you say?

Except that they were dressed in short little red dresses trimmed with fake white fur with bright red hooker lipstick, dancing around provocatively in the middle of a public place. As I remarked to my aunt as we passed by, it was every pedophile's dream.

Sweetheart, you can dress like a slut all you want when you grow up. But you're a child. Go and play chasey, or cops and robbers, and for fuck's sake I will BURN that Dolly magazine if I see it in your hands.

And that, friends, is my message to the children of Australia.

I'm Baaaaaack...

2007-12-09T19:53:00.000+11:00

Sorry for the lack of updating...I was in New Zealand for two weeks and internet cafes were ridiculously expensive ($3 for 15 minutes?!)

We did a whirlwind tour of both the North and South Islands in 16 days, going through Christchurch, Dunedin, Queenstown, Twizel, Auckland, Napier, Wellington...plus a whole host of smaller towns. I can't quite explain the sheer number of sheep that whizzed past through the car rear windows, but I was quoted something along the lines of 14 million sheep happily residing in the country's rolling green hills and sunny pastures.

(Really, 'shag' was almost inevitably going to be attached to the word 'sheep' when talking about New Zealanders. They're EVERYWHERE.)

Highlights of the trip were the Shotover Jet in Queenstown, the helicopter flight around Fox Glacier, landing on aforesaid glacier, and watching the glaciers melting (which was actually rather tragic, but utterly spectacular.) I also went rolling down a hill in an 11-foot high inflatable sphere filled with water, squealing all the way...if you ever go to Rotorua, you have to go Zorbing. Admittedly, I wasn't too fond of Rotorua because the whole town smells like one big sulphur pit. To further exacerbate this, we went to see the sulphur pits at Wai-O-Topo, which hitched up the stink rating from 'sulphur pit' to 'boiling sewage' level.

I felt like retching.

Onto sweeter-smelling highlights, I also got to see this awesome rose garden in Wellington at the Botanical Gardens, and saw a Maori Haka.

On a more prosaic note, I also got immeasurable joy from the fact that almost all New Zealand supermarkets have a MUFFIN CABINET DEDICATED TO FRESH MUFFINS AND PASTRIES.

For $1.99, you could get a triple chocolate muffin smothered in chocolate with a chocolate Flake stuck in the middle. Or a lemon crumble muffin for 95 cents. Or a black forest muffin.

*drools*

Their pies really really sucked, except for the one steak pie I had at the top of the Gondola centre in Queenstown. I'll have to post up a picture of a Memphis Meltdown ice-cream, because the one that I opened had the most disturbing, phallic-looking chocolate protrusion at very top that I was forced to bite off. Even more disturbingly, it was filled with raspberry goo. But it was very tasty :P

Anyway...when I got back I was thrown into a 29-hour working week, followed by the boss asking me to go full-time until Christmas. It just meant that I got 9 more hours on top of my current roster, so I thought I'd give it a shot. So for the past week, I've been talking myself almost hoarse to customers- the pre-Christmas influx made last weekend absolutely insane, but I found myself actually enjoying it, mostly because I didn't have to go around stalking potential customers.

I know this hasn't been much of a post, but as I once said on my first blog, more Daphne-madness is pending...

P.S- Rosy, I hope you have a fantabulous time in London and thank you for your kind words on your blog. I almost apologise profusely for saying Happy Birthday in your Christmas card but I had to send it immediately because I was afraid it wouldn't get to you in time!!!

Auditonus Horribilis

2007-11-13T14:34:00.000+11:00

Humiliation comes in many forms.

On Tuesday, I completely and utterly screwed up my audition with my failure to sight-sing. I've never had a strong aural sense, and I was actually one and half tones OUT and quite possibly in the wrong key.

Suffice to say, I didn't get the job.

There were other horrible moments of course- like when I tried to take a 'shortcut' before Glenferrie Rd and ended up shrieking hysterically at a particularly stubborn red light with only four minutes before the audition. Like when I started my Mazurka with an extremely heavy bang, having not played on a grand piano for years. Like when I mucked up what should have been a basic 3/4 rhythm in the harmonisation, and almost missed 'Do' by a semitone in the lyric singing. And how was I to know that the interviewer's pet hate was people who play without shoes?

I felt vaguely disappointed at the end, but it wasn't exactly what you'd call crushing. I knew from the start that I could never compete with the psycho-technical-tertiary-level-music-people and the audition also reinforced the fact that I have lost any performing ability I once had.

Plus, it was end-of-exams. And after a night of bar-hopping, I didn't even think about it.

Woot!

When You Know The Notes to Sing...

2007-11-07T15:50:00.000+11:00

Today, I booked myself in for an audition.

It's for the job I'm stuck in the middle of applying for- and when they first advertised it, they required applicants to possess a 'comfortable singing voice'.

I said I did.

I lied.

Thus, I am quite in a predicament.

Singing the shower? Fine. Singing in choirs? Great. Singing by myself? Teaching others how to sing? Not so crash hot. And by 'not so crash hot' I mean disastrous.

Of course, there are still tons of things I'm crap at in my current job. Resistors, trimpots and capacitors are my downfall. But this audition...it requires me to learn Solfege. Y'know, that 'Do, Re, Mi' stuff Maria does with the children in The Sound of Music?

Easy, right?

Hell no.

I'm used to the SAME syllable being applied to my notes. Like "LA". Or "DOOOO". And I tried the other day, and I kept going, "Re....no...MI...no...LA? TI? AAAAAAARGGGGGGHHHHHH."

Plus, the Von Trapp children all appeared to have perfect pitch and a perfect ear for aural work, not to mention the ability to break into spontaneous harmony. Brats.

For the audition, I need to:

- perform two contrasting piano pieces at an 8th Grade AMEB Level
- accompany myself and sing along to a piece they've given me
- accompany myself and sing along in Solfege to three different melodies they've given me
- tranpose 'Waltzing Matilda' into any key up to 2 flats and 2 sharps, whichever one they choose
- sightread a piece of music in any key/tempo
- improvise a harmony
- make a chordal arrangment for a given melody
- sight-sing in Solfege

SO AS YOU CAN SEE, I AM SCREWED.

On the other hand, my utter humiliation should only be confined to a small room of a couple of interviewers.

You Might Be in Law School If...

2007-11-02T20:04:00.000+11:00

To help combat my current bout of law-school-induced depression, I visited one of my Facebook groups, "You Might Be in Law School If..."

I almost cried at the painful accuracy of this list. And I felt slightly better.

Kris, I dedicate this post to you. Even though I have unashamedly ripped it off Facebook:

You know you're in Law School if...

You know all sorts of sneaky and creative ways to steal from clients thanks to your Professionalism and Ethics class.

You consider dropping out of law school approximately every hour, but after that first semester you realized you were already in too much debt to be anything other than a lawyer.

You aspire to one day own Blackacre.

Substance abuse becomes you.

The drama in your life now rivals that of high school.

You make adverse possession jokes.

You can name without hesitation at least three people who make you want to throw things when you see them raise their hands in class.

You think IRAC and CREAC are just code for saying the same thing over and over.

You are truly and deeply unnerved by the thought of some of your classmates becoming attorneys.

You think tequila shots are essential to ordered liberty.

You wonder if that one professor who always seems angry and irritable and treats students’ minds as his personal playground is actually a sociopath or just didn’t get enough hugs as a child.

Sometimes during disagreements you are tempted to 12(b)(6) the offending friend or family member.

You know and understand the complicated epistemological and metaphysical differences between a conspirator and an accomplice.

You know and understand the complicated epistemological and metaphysical differences between coffee and red bull.

You can’t remember if you decided to come to law school because you wanted to help people and make a difference in the world or because you hate yourself.

You think whoever first introduced the Socratic method into the law school curriculum should have his face lit on fire and then beaten out with a rake.

You can’t think of any legitimate reason why a law student would need access to certain public records, but you can think of a whole lot of illegitimate ones.

After the first semester you realized that “briefing a case” need only consist of looking it up on Lexis or Westlaw.

You’ve given yourself carpal tunnel from all the spider solitaire you play in class.

When someone is expressing their frustration or anger about something that is in any way related to the law, you can’t be sympathetic because you’re too busy figuring out in your head if they have a cause of action.

You hear about the death of an elderly friend or relative and wonder if they died intestate.

You have considered changing career paths to hot dog vendor, stilt walker, or career alcoholic.You're pretty sure the reasonable prudent man is a friendless tool who still lives with his mother.

...

You may not be surprised to know that I also joined the Facebook group, "I've Thought About Dropping Out Of Law School At Least Ten Times Today."

The Horrors of Contract Law

2007-11-01T22:49:00.001+11:00

Y'know, whenever I watched "JAG", the wonderfully clean-shaven, square-jawed American lawyer Lieutenant Harmon Rabb never got caught up in little things like contract law cases.

He was always defending Marines under fire, or arguing on exculpatory evidence, or heightening the sexual tension over eight seasons with Colonel Mackenzie...but I don't recall him ever fussing over something like contracts.

Probably because contracts don't really make for exciting TV.

Of course, half the time I was mostly admiring how handsome he looked in his nicely starched and iron white Navy uniform, but I did pay attention to the storylines. Let's be honest- half the reason I went into law was because of that show.

Anyhow, I had my first written exam for Contracts B today and it was, hands-down, the WORST exam I've ever sat.

I knew NOTHING.

NOTHING.

Nada.

Squat.

I got to the Policy question, took one look at 'good faith in termination' and 'legitimate interest in affirmation' and almost cried right then and there.

I had a look at Question One and also almost went into hysterics.

I didn't even touch on remedies. Or damages. And that was one third of the course, as somebody on the train helpfully pointed out to me.

I'm relying heavily on the supplementary exam. Assuming there is one.

Just to make things worse, cute guy from 'X, Y, Z' happened to be sitting exactly two rows to my right and one seat up, and let's just say that was a terrible distraction. After the exam finished, he rested his head on the table, and that was pretty much how I felt at that moment.

I went into the city afterwards to meet up with my sister for dinner at the Leveson, which is famed for its Parma- it's meant to be rated #1 in Melbourne. And it was- it had actual chicken breast in it, which is a far cry from the horrors of the food court parmagianas I've encountered in my takeaway travels.

To get through the utter pain of failing Contract law, I steadily made my way through one parma, side salad, chips, lemon lime bitters, Turkish bread/dips, and a chocolate cake with white chocolate ice-cream and raspberry caramel, finished off with a cappucino (full cream...I don't know how my sis drinks that skinny stuff.)

It helped. Somewhat.

Except I've just discovered that you need 45% minimum to sit a supplementary exam.

This isn't like Chinese last semester, where they scaled the marks WAAAAY up (I wouldn't have passed otherwise). This is bad. Very, very bad.

BAD.

Had I the energy to weep, I would. But I can't be stuffed. The only good thing is that I've got a basic knowledge now, so repeating it shouldn't be as bad the first time round.

The only thing that would cheer me up right now is my square-jawed American hero, David James Elliott.

And possibly some Prozac.

The Monster Mash

2007-10-28T21:48:00.000+11:00

Thanks to Daylight Savings, I have now turned into the Puffy-Eyed Sleepless Monster.

This transformation generally occurs by the light of the full moon...or within several days of an assignment deadline or exam.

The temper of the Puffy-Eyed Sleepless Monster knows no bounds. It will snap at anything that comes within fifteen feet. It will stalk to the pantry and ransack what meagre vittles it finds. It hisses and snarls darkly over sheets of looseleaf and heavy textbooks, and will be likely to attack if the words 'liquidiated damages' or 'natural law' are uttered within earshot.

The Puffy-Eyed Sleepless Monster has a menacing appearance that is often frightening to young children. The most common form sports hideous cotton Big W pyjamas with an unkempt, unbrushed mane of hair, and is characterised by large, dark shadows that hang under the beast's puffy eyes. It has sharp, unmanicured nails and a high-pitched, klaxon-like wailing voice (which rises in pitch and frequency depending on the proximity of exams).

If you are confronted by this fearsome beast, it is better to back away slowly, avoiding eye contact. The Puffy-Eyed Sleepless Monster loathes bright sunshine and equally bright, happy people (however, if you smile winningly at the beast it may be stirred into a furious rage and rip your throat out.)

If you are cornered by the Monster, it may be less likely to attack if offered a strong pot of coffee (with a big dash of milk. And one heaped teaspoon of sugar.) Generally, it is simply best to avoid the beast in its natural habitat. It prefers to reside in self-imposed exile in a private room, where its terrible wailing cry cannot be heard.

If in doubt, simply offer the Puffy-Eyed Sleepless Monster a hug.

After all, there is a human being underneath.

Somewhere.

The Joys of Group Interviews

2007-10-24T17:39:00.000+10:00

Group interviews are stupid.

Stupid, but extremely amusing.

I toddled off to a group interview today for a position as a music teacher. Upon entering the waiting room and meeting some of the other candidates, I quickly realised something.

Everyone was VASTLY more qualifed than I was.

As in, half of them were actually students doing a dedicated music degree- actually devoting their life to music- or they'd taught music in the past. I felt like an imposter.

I believe that there are two types of tertiary music students. The first type tend to be creative, laidback souls who generally happen to be the most lovely people you'll ever meet. The second type tend to be poncy little elitists who you want to smack over the head with a music stand. Thankfully, there are relatively few of the latter, but when you meet them you want to...well, hit them over the head with a music stand.

Left to their own devices, these people will grow up to become those irritable old patrons who sit behind you at MSO concerts, muttering about obscure technical points and giving you death glares if you think to even whisper.

Unfortunately, there happened to be one of these poncy people in this interview group. Because it was a group interview, and group interviews happen to be ridiculous affairs with equally ridiculous team-building activities, we had to write down five things we would wish for if a genie appeared to us.

(Considering that the entire interview consisted of these ostensibly random and pointless exercises, I'm assuming that the selectors apply their uber-awesome 1337 psychoanalytic skills to examine our answers.)

Anyhow, we had to read them out, and this is what poncy-boy started out with. In an equally poncy manner:

1. "First, I would wish for every child in the world to have the same opportunities I have had."
2. "I would also eradicate world hunger."
3. "I would wish for my girlfriend to feel the kind of happiness that I feel from being around her."

(Everyone else: "Awwww....")

4. "To be the best musician and pianist and composer in the world."

I forget what his fifth answer was, but I think it was something to do with world peace.

Because I am an evil and selfish person, world peace only made it to #3 on my list. The rest were purely self-indulgent. I figured that with endless money I could probably work on eradicating world hunger anyway. My list ran as follows:

1. Yamaha Grand Concert Piano. (They can even make 'Heart and Soul' sound good.)
2. A bank account that never dries up
3. World peace
4. Good health
5. An albino pet koala (or possibly a penguin)

As you can imagine, everyone simply stared at me like I was mad when I read out the fifth request. But as Neesh will attest to, I've wanted a baby albino koala since Year 11, when I saw a picture of one in my Biology textbook.

I'm also rather fond of penguins.

Anyway...

...group interviews are also amusing because everyone chats to everyone else, but really, everyone's just trying to prove to the observers that "Yes, I can work in a team! Look, I'm communicating! Seeeeeee?!"
Also, one of the girls on my table simply walked out and didn't come back after the first exercise. She was meant to be helping us in the group exercise, but she simply said, "Excuse me for a moment," grabbed her bag and then never came back.

I seem to have that effect on people :P

Anyhow, it was an interesting break from my long hours of not-doing-anything-when-i-should-be-studying.
So, SO screwed for these exams.

Blaaaaargh.

I need a nap, a Frosty Fruit and an albino koala.