Entries from November 2003 ↓

Well I’ve had a particularly lively few days of late, which if nothing else, have given me a bit to think about and the time to think about them in. Over these days, there were a lot of things that went on, but two were a bit more profound than the others. I moved house, and I had a car accident.

Moving house was a pretty straight-forward affair, and although it took several days of back-and-forth-ing, I have most of my stuff with me again, and I’ve begun to acclimatise to the new habitat. I have deeply seeded internal routines in my brain, programmed to tell my body where the john is in my home, which constantly have me ending up on the other side of the new house in the living room when I need to go. The toilet is about four feet from my bedroom. Obviously I’ve faced greater obstacles in life before, but I imagine it would seem odd to my parents watching TV, who ask what I’m up to only to be told that I wish to go to the john, something it would seem I’d come the entire length of the house to tell them. I also have no shelves, leaving my CDs and DVDs nowhere else but boxes to live in for the meantime, but in exchange I have ended up with a cupboard in my wall, and I find it an ingenious and useful device which well overshadows my previous shirt-hanging arrangement of a broken towel rack held to the top of a refrigerator with paving bricks.

And now, about that car accident…

Firstly I’d just like to say that I hate having car accidents. It shits me. Big time. Not because it ends up costing me money, or time, or I end up hanging around the side of the road and without transport, none of those things are really of any consequence. What shits me is that I had an accident at all. I’m an elitist asshole when it comes to driving, in that I think I’m a pretty competent driver. This doesn’t neccessarily mean I think I’m better or worse than anyone else, but I believe that I’m a decent driver and am able to deal with pretty much all things that might come up while I’m driving. I’ve driven and ridden a reasonable amount of kilometres in the four years or so I’ve been driving and year I’ve been riding, I know it’s no superhuman feat, but I like to think I’ve got a reasonable amount of driving experience. It just shits that something like this happens and shows me that I’m not perfect, it belts around my ego or pride or whatever you want to call it, and it hurts.

But anyhow, enough superfluous angsting. The story goes a little like this; I’d been at my place loading my old man’s car with things from the old house to bring over to the new house, and was on my way to the new place in a car laden to the brim with various boxes and bags of things. For those aware of it’s existence, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say I was approaching the Eelup roundabout from Sandridge Road, for those unaware of it’s existence, it’s a ridiculously large roundabout seemingly two lanes wide but with no line markings. Intending to go through the roundabout, I got to roughly 1/4 the way around and whacked on my left indicator to exit. At the same time, a bargearse orange schoolbus approached the roundabout from my left (Koombana Drive) at what seemed a bit much speed for a bus coming into a corner. The passengers, as schoolchildren on buses tend to do, were waving at anything that isn’t a log, so I quickly waved back. Looking over at the bus, I decided I was a bit close, being adjacent to the rear right quarter), so I edged over to the right a bit. At this point the bus came closer still, now a fair way into what I would consider “My” section of the road (i.e. The bit where my car currently is), and looking at the bus coming towards my car, complete with even more madly-waving children (since they now knew a response was possible), I edged off a bit more and started to hit the anchors since I didn’t want to run the possibility of running into the front of the bus, which was even more in “My” part of the road. It was then that I flicked my glance between the bus and the road again, just in time to see my right wheel come up on the kerb. Now normally hitting your average mildly angled kerb wouldn’t be a big deal, even at the 30 or so k’s an hour I was going, but for some reason, the Statesman decided it was too much work for it’s pompous arse and conveniently had one of the strut supports give way, meaning my front tyre was now rubbing furiously against the base of the spring housing, making some toasty rubber and thus gobs of thick oily smoke. At this stage the bus sped off and I made my way across and off the road a couple of hundred metres up (pulling the car off the road and into the river didn’t seem like a good an option at the time).

In summary, I got run off the road up the kerb by a bus that wasn’t cornering enough, and hitting the kerb made the car decide to throw in the towel. Now while this seems like a pissy thing to call an “accident”, it still shits me that I didn’t avoid it. Of course everything I’ve just told you happened in the space of a few seconds, but it annoys me that I didn’t nut out a way to get out of the situation at the time. With hindsight I can only guess that I was focusing on (a) quickly decreasing area of road available for car in front of me, (b) incoming behemoth of steel and mutant children incoming from left and (c) exiting roundabout. If I’d have thought of it at the time, I guess I could have pulled back out of the marked exit lane and tried to rejoin the roundabout and taken off, but that might have cause another accident anyhow. Of course I don’t know this bus from a hundred other orange buses, and the fact that there are no marked lanes on the roundabout also wouldn’t help if I could be bothered jumping up and down hollering about justice and all that rot. I say he was too close, he says there was plenty of room, some kid says I waved to them a moment before, and you’re not getting a nobel prize for predicting how things would pan out. So that’s the extent of the actual incident. More entertainment ensued however.

After jacking the car up in the vain hope that a good solid belting would detatch the tyre from the bottom of the spring housing (which required the emptying of the boot to get to the jack), I resigned myself to calling my dad, seeing as I didn’t have the RAC number on me. It was pretty noisy and windy next to the highway, so I figured while the phone was ringing that I’d stand behind a tree to quieten the wind noise. Coincidentally at the same time, your friendly neighbourhood bee decided to launch a kamikaze attack on my person for approaching what I assume was the tree housing a nest. Being an intelligent warrior species, the bee knew to go straight for the biggest threat to the nest and the colony, my right earlobe. Simultaneously my dad on the other end of the call picked up, only to hear what can be roughly recalled as “CRAP! aaaAAaahh! lousy bastard… bee… damn… mother…”. After several more seconds of thorough insect cursing, we sorted out getting a tow truck to come pick up the car, and myself, sitting on a pile of housewares on the side of a highway with a right ear now closely resembling a billiard ball.

After I’d finished watching a girl in a red hatchback plough up the back of some woman’s AU falcon wagon, the tow truck arrived, at which point the driver decided his truck wasn’t up to handling the wieght, and called in another truck. After explaining what had happened and having the driver tell me how great for business buses are, featuring regularly in stories he heard at pick-ups, the second truck turned up and they managed to pick up the front end of the Statesman, I jumped in the truck, and we were off to a guy we know’s workshop with the first truck in tow. We got a few hundred metres up the road and turned the first right in front of Waldecks, when there was what can only be described as one seriously nasty sumbitch of a sound, as the cable holding the tow mechanism up snapped, dropping the car and the metal frame it was sitting on back to the bitumen, carving some nice trenches for about ten or fifteen metres before we came to a halt at which point the driver let out a very fitting “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?”.

After several more minutes of dialogue reminiscent of the sound of a pack of drunken sailors being dropped off of a balcony, the tow guys went to fix the cable with their tools, which consisted of a single small adjustable wrench and a pencil. Things went along much quicker after I got my toolkit out of the car (which I was conveniently shifting in this load) and gave them a hand. Once that was all honky-dory, the car got jacked up again and we took off. A chat with the driver revealed he’d never had that happen to him before, the closest thing he knew of was when a mate of his was towing a car between Mandurah and Perth when the car came off the frame and rolled into traffic, causing a six car pile-up. So things could have been worse, though I was now sporting a small tomato from the side of my head.

Thankfully Dad was waiting at the workshop when we got there (with a drink no less), and so after the workshop owner telling us how good buses were for his bottom line (as he gets a lot of work this way), I was able to get home only a few hours after setting off, and with only one car out of commission. Once I got home I was also able to get some assistance in removing the bee sting from the back of my earlobe (read: abominable head-growth).

It was an interesting Friday. I also read a book.

I’ve finished Uni for the year. Yep, that’s it, all done, exams finished, kaput! So now it’s time to sit back and enjoy what makes being a Uni bum such a delectable undertaking… holidays. Well, at least for a week or two anyhow, before I run out of casheesh and nab a short-term job. Of course considering the time of year, I doubt that will take very long. Not only is it phone bill season, insurance renewal season, registration renewal season and costly-end-of-year-uni-get-together season, but in a devious plot spanning several decades, a somewhat large group of couples decided to mate in sequence so that when October rolled around, I personally would be bombarded with friends and familys birthdays on a near-constant basis in order to drain funds out of me for close to two solid months. However I can’t complain *too* loudly seeing as how almost all of them also coincided with distinctly party-like antics, but the conspiratorial aspect of said events still remains.

In what is a completely unrelated matter, I recently saw Kill Bill, or at least the first half of it. Now I managed to try not to get too many or too high expectations for the movie before going and actually seeing it, but there was always the niggling little guy in the back of my head getting all fidgety and anxious sitting there waiting for the kind of dialogue goodies that Tarantino had dished out previously on several occasions.

What I got when I sat down for the movie however, was something that in a lot of ways was rather unlike any other thing of his that I had seen.

The opening credits and the music had me convinced that I was in for another good ol’ Tarantino flick, but after the first fifteen minutes, my brain started to go into convulsions trying to comprehend that I had been watching a Tarantino film for a quarter of an hour and noone had said “motherfucker” yet. In fact, I’m quite sure that the word, which seemed to be a delightful topical seasoning in flicks like Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, wasn’t uttered a single time through the entire movie. But regardless of how much I noticed that it went missing in the dialog, I noticed more that the kind of wisecrack, witty and endlessly quotable lines I usually associated with Tarantino movies were for the most part missing as well. I mean it could just be that I’ve been spoilt over his last two films by having Samuel L (whose innate ability to seemingly turn every line into gold would have any grown alchemist packing his bags and running home to mother) delivering the goods with style, but overall the dialog seemed a little lacking.

The second big thing that struck me was the style of the film. Tarantino seemed to be so focused on putting together so many styles, scenes, actors, tributes, homages, costumes and so on from a collection of literally scores of other films (mostly eastern kung-fu style films, but with some westerns, hollywood action and exploitation thrown in for good measure) that the film seemed to overflow with styles, but didn’t have a lot of style on it’s own merit. Almost like there was too much stylisation and not enough style.

But don’t let my little criticisms give you the impression that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy myself seeing the film. I thought it was just spanky and I had a lot of fun. I can’t remember laughing so hard in the cinema since I saw The Emperor’s New Groove years ago, and there was a lot of smiling and quiet giggling coming from my vicinity during the showing. I hadn’t seen so much stage blood since The Shining and I haven’t seen it used in that fashion since Dracula: Dead and Loving It. I liked it a lot more than the last couple of other films I’ve seen at the cinemas and I’ll definitely be ready and willing to shell out the clams to see the second half.

Hopefully I’ll be able to use these holidays to get a few things done. I need to gather some cash to pay some bills, do a Uni unit through the summer school, do a lot of riding, buy some shoes, do some slacking off and hopefully put a reasonable sized dent in my “Things you’ve gotta see” list of movies, which is currently hovering around the somewhat ridiculous quantity of 168.

Well after some general uncertainty, Tom decided to have a barbeque at his place last night for his birthday which went down on friday. Now generally setting up for a barbie’s a pretty straightforward job, you put out some chips, grab the tongs and drag out the barbie. Unfortunately Tom got stuck when one of these elements became a bit of a problem. One can have quite some trouble when one goes to pull out one’s barbeque, and one does not in fact have a barbeque. Apparently Tom’s barbie was thrown out in some unholy cleanup where it was deported to the tip because it was getting a bit on the old and on the crusty side. So Tom is holding a barbeque, and Tom has no barbeque. This presents a mild dilemma. After interrogation about the wherabouts of the old barbeque, his folks also realised that there was in fact, no barbeque, a fact which negated the actual existence of their otherwise perfectly good australian home.

This is where things get peculiar. Presented with a similar set of circumstances, I see a picture of me holding an arc welder with half a 44 gallon drum and a few star pickets lying around. However in a quite dissimilar fashion, Tom’s folks went out to purchase themselves a barbeque, which turned out to be less of a barbeque, and more of a kitchen on wheels. This, was a real man’s barbeque, assuming that a “real man” needed to cook enough snags to dispose of an entire sheep station in one hit (sausages may or may not contain traces of sheep and/or sheep station). The thing was enormous. I’m not kidding, you could easily spit roast a grown man inside of this barbeque, it even comes with the fittings! And at several times during the night we were in fact tempted to test this theory, but then we remembered that we were all very, very lazy.

So after a decent feed and what was a relatively disappointing experiment in the manufacture of Skittlebrau, we ended up heading into town. Stangely enough, I didn’t find going into town as generally repulsive as I sometimes do. This probably has something to do with three major factors, firstly that the whole caravan into town was really casual, which was cool. Secondly, I did not have my person violated, in that noone tried to get my shirt to hold the contents of their drink for them, I was not grappled by portly old women, and I even managed to leave at the end of the night without my clothes and hair smelling like someone had vomited in an ashtray. The third contributing factor being that someone played House of Pain at a reasonably hefty volume at one stage. Though if you’re feeling all soft and gushy I guess you could interchange House of Pain with having decent company, but that would probably make you a bit of a blouse.

A fair number of other reasonably intriguing developments have… well… developed, over the past few days, but any blathering about those will have to be saved for later, as it is rapidly approaching time for lunch.

More and more things have been being resolved lately. Well, resolved, finished, completed, done, you know the drill. I have no more uni assignments for the rest of the year, and in a touch under seven days time from now, I’ll have no more uni to do this year, period. And yes, I’m well aware that placing the word “period” at the end of that sentence was rather superfluous considering the fact that a period directly follows it, mentioning nothing regarding the travesty of placing the comma before the word before the punctuation mark, but I’m just in one of those grammatically rebellious moods.

While I may be terribly jovial about the end of Uni for the year, this does mean that it’s about time I did the unthinkable and actually went and got a day job again. The other day I was offered a very respectable full time job, but unfortunately it was doing something far too similar to my last job in terms of work and people contact and it would’ve driven me crazy, that on top of the fact that it’s a really a graduate position and I’m not a graduate yet. But regardless, after exams are over I’m going to go through the ham-fisted task of whoring myself out for some base-wage slave labour some place or other for the next month or two to get some extra cash together. Limiting factors being I can’t work anywhere that requires me to wear gloves a lot because I end up with eczema, and I also take particular exception to prison sex. But those things aside, that still leaves me with a lot of places to go and people to harass.

My mood seems to be perking up by the day, regardless of the weather being obscenely hot the past few days. I mean I’m all for summer and everything, it rocks the casbah, but sitting on a motorcycle in the sun wearing leather when it’s 37 degrees in the shade gets a little uncomfy sometimes. I’ll have to go buy some new shorts soon and start invading the beach, my only currently surviving pair are getting a bit long in the proverbial tooth. I also have to go buy some shoes… hmm… shopping… ahh, consumerism in air-conditioned comfort.

but for now it’s back to studying

Once again I am back to my regular existential state of no longer being particularly tired, but continuing to be relatively lazy regardless.

This morning after rising, I sallied forth on an excursion with young Tom to go see The Matrix Revolutions. We decided to wander over for a look at around ten o’clock when all the good people of the world and their detestable offspring are either doing their jobs or being detained in government strongholds respectively. Once we got in, triumphant over the cinema ticket systems evil plan to malfunction and hold us back, we found the place was maybe a quarter to a third full, with no raucous teeny-boppers to be seen, the plan succeeding brilliantly. I’d also just like to take this moment to extol the virtues of being able to grab a decent hot coffee and take it in to the cinema. Mmm… coffee…

Of course the setting is all well and good, but I’ve got to proceed to mentioning the film, ahh the film. To try and describe it in a single word, I would have to say that it was “okay”. “Okay” on the Dwights Universal System of Film Ranking®, lying just below “Satisfactory”, which in turn is just below “Alright”, however “Okay” sits one level above “Pretty Bad” which is one step up from “Not quite bad enough to make my eyes bleed”. In summary, I was not particularly impressed. With the exception of the odd sparkle from Weaving, the acting was decidedly bland, it’s caliber generally on par with the slapped-together dialogue, which was spattered with forgettable one-liners and quotes that I suppose were intended to sound ominous or prophetic, but were about as philosophically pertinent as “Sometimes I eat the cheese, sometimes I do not”. There are tiny glimmers of hope for the films salvation, particularly a fellow in a train station who begins to speak about the boundaries between man and machine and the nature of emotions, but unfortunately any potential for intrigue is quickly quashed by some slow motion footage and a hundred million or so dollars worth of computer generated things that go *boom*. I thought Reloaded opened an ugly can of worms, but had the potential to make things interesting if the third movie could make the grade.

Unfortunately, sometimes there are things that just should never have been.

But that’s me, and I’m not everyone.

Today so far has been pretty damn good, I haven’t had this much closure and relief from something since I finished high school. Yesterday we had the third year project presentations and early this morning I dropped in both volumes of documentation, and while I’ve still got a couple of assignments left to do that have a lot left to be done on them, it feels pretty damn good to finally be done with project. You’ll have have to excuse me while I exhale with the collective force of several thousand sighs.

I’m also pretty short on sleep and cohesiveness at the moment, but if all goes well, I’ll be back to my all-too-familiar state of begrudging caffeine-powered assignment down-smacking shortly. I’ll be done with Uni for this year in fourteen days, ooh yeah.

Somewhere in between the agony of getting project finished however, I managed to head out to Steve’s 21st on Saturday night, which was great fun. No salmonella was involved, no frontal nudity or being hurled upon, no bones were broken and no felonies committed (at least none that I was witness to). While I can understand that to some this might make it sound like it was a bit of a boring gig, I can assure you that there was still lots of indecency and other general shenanigans that your parents and anyone else of reasonably respectable repute would disapprove of, not to mention enough inebriation to make Jack Daniels blush. It only took David around four or five hours of rabid promotion to get a posse together of anyone still managing to stand to roll into town once the party had subsided. I don’t know how things went for them since I didn’t tag along, but noone I’ve talked to can remember anything that happened, so one can only assume that they had a very respectable time. And while seeing a man’s mother trying to get one of his male friends to dress up as a woman to strip for her son to see if he was plastered enough not to notice was particularly disturbing, It was still a good night, as I’m sure can be attested by Dave, who, apparently not wanting to be outdone by a teenager who managed to gather some attention by skulling a beer, quickly affirmed his intestinal fortitude (or at least a distinct lack of intestinal respect) by proceeding to snap up an open bottle and gulp down a rather disturbing quantity of straight tequila. Understandably enough, he was shocked and impressed to learn of this turn of events on the following Monday morning, having lost recollection of a reasonable proportion of the evening. All in all, a lot of good, if not particularly clean fun.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a particular brew of coffee calling my name…