Entries from January 2004 ↓

It is now officially Day Two of operation Degree Completed and Unemployed and I’m already getting antsy to go and whore my corporate services out to the highest the lowest any bidder. Money may not buy you happiness, but I’m already reasonably happy, and money certainly does buy shiny things. It also pulls you out of a desperate downward spiral of ever-increasing debt now that you have no source of income whatsoever, so I’m sure you can appreciate my desire to get my ass employed in as short a time frame as possible.

In entirely unrelated news, Pixar is making a break for it away from Disney, apparently in the hope that they can find a pimp distributor who treats them with a little more respect when it comes to the bottom line.

While in general I’m very cautious of and go to great lengths to avoid cliche things like old men in easter bunny suits, mothers day television specials and new years resolutions, I’ve been thinking a bit recently (which of course is strictly against the orders of my GP) and I came to a kind of conclusion that I guess you could call a resolution. Time flies by and all that rot, and we’re already creeping up on the arse end of January, so with great conviction, I have decided that this year, my ultimate plan is to… “Get some shit done”. At first I was worried that ’some shit’ might be too specific and I was considering substituting it with ’stuff’, but I pondered on it and I think I’m up to the challenge. Of course, even as we speak I’ve already finished my bachelors degree this year, which is a reasonably substantial milestone, so even if I accomplish precisely jack squat for the rest of the year, I can fall back on that and put it at the top of my list of this years acheivements, making it quite spectacular from the get-go. The plan is foolproof.

To take off on a dramatic tangent, I’ve also recently been in contact with a fellow who was taking photos and hauling around a large camera with big shiny lenses in billion degree heat at the track day I went to in December, and he emailed me a couple of pics he snapped. Once I’m no longer too poor to put fuel in my petrol tank, I plan on sending the man some volume of cash and getting some nice shiny prints of one or two of them.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, C is for cookie, and that’s good enough for me…

Come wednesday, if all things go according to plan, my bachelors degree will finally be finished. It’s a nice feeling, there’s been a lot of work and loss of sleep that’s gone into it and it’ll be nice to finally have soemthing to show for it all. On the other hand however, it does mean that I get to do another one of those life-mode changes again, high school to uni, uni to work, work back to uni, and now it’s uni back to work again. The odds of me not having to wear a tie to work are moderate, the odds of me not having to wear a shirt with a collar are pretty much nonexistent. I’m gonna have to be all fashionable and professional-looking again, so much for utility and comfort, but them’s the breaks. Hopefully I wont end up somewhere too monotonous.

On the upswing though, there’s a bunch of concerts coming up that I’m looking forward to. The budget doesn’t currently allow for going to the BDO, but I’ve already got the tickets for Korn, Fear Factory and Static X on the 9th and David Bowie on March 1st in my hot little hands. Hopefully I can manage to scrape together some source of income reasonably quickly so I can manage to go and check out A Perfect Circle on the 27th of February. There’s rock coming out the wazoo around this place.

In unrelated news, it seems I’m getting so old and rusty that I’ve lost my touch completely. I went to pick up Nathan from the airport on Friday afternoon and approached the security entrance. I put my phone, wallet and keys in a container and walked through the gate and… nothing. I even had my shoes on. So, disappointed, I picked up my things when a middle-aged female security guard started coming my way saying something about additional random securty checks and grabbed the waif-like young girl next to me. Denied. I guess I’m just not as suspicious-looking as I used to be. As a side note, don’t buy coffee from the airport cafe at the Perth domestic terminal, it’s the caffeinated equivalent of aeroplane food.

Nothing greatly adventurous or even anecdotal has been happening lately around myself though, I’ve been mostly finishing up my study and doing a lot of pretty boring paperwork. Hopefully I’ll manage to get myself into a reasonable amount of mischief or some kind of adverse circumstances to make my presence more entertaining on the whole. But for now, there’s some coffee on the agenda.

Things have had a bit of a different tune of late. I’d almost say hectic, but hectic’s too fast of an adjective for what I’m looking at. Stuff is are going on, things are going down, but the pace has been pretty lax. I’m roughly two thirds of the way through my summer school classes, and so far it’s been a bit of a cakewalk really, which I’m certainly not complaining about. The campus reminds me of my old high school in Bunbury, which isn’t really a good thing, considering my old high school closely resembled a gaol. A girlfried of mine was once convinced that it was in fact the Bunbry gaol and that I was having a lend of her when I told her that it was where I went to school at the time. Three cheers for the public sector’s architecture.

Uni’s only been occupying my mornings however, so I’ve had a bit of time to go perusing the city, paw at the windows of bike dealerships, people-watch and so on. There’s never really been a lot different in the city to the country, just little things mostly. The traffic lights change a lot slower, the air isn’t as fresh, some things are more expensive, some things are cheaper… and today I found out that the rain smells like smoke and wet dogs, which kinda sucks. One other thing I’ve noticed is the roaches. Whenever I’ve gone walking, I’ve seen roaches scuttling between bushes and gutters. In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I loathe roaches. I mean I can appreciate the life of most creatures, I don’t even go out of my way to kill most insects, sometimes I’ve even been happy to share my living space with them (some spiders eat a lot of the other bugs), but when it comes to me and cockroaches, I’m afraid that if you’re one of them, you’ve gotta die. They’re disgusting little swines of things. Can’t stand them. I’ve got nothing against worms, snakes, spiders, ants, bees, wasps, slugs and snails, but there’s something about roaches that makes me want to crush the little critters into oblivion. But zoological matters aside, I don’t mind the place at all really. I’ve also been living by myself the past week and a bit in Nathan’s apartment (since he’s off at Groote Eylandt), or “housesitting” if I want to sound like I’m responsible when mentioning it, and it’s not a bad setup really. I could easily get used to it, and it isn’t anywhere near as lonely as I’d always invisioned it, but I still prefer a bit of company, that’s just me.

And while I’ve slowly been acclimatising to using nathan’s PC (that’s running linux and thus a myriad of crazy-ass linux applications), I’ve responded to a few job ads last week and I butchered a few more from the weekend papers to get onto this week as well. I’m a little bit anxious at the moment, the Grad Dip thing ended up in the “No chance in hell” pile (at least for this year), which has left me not knowing where I’m going or even where I’m at really, kind of like I’m wandering around in the dark and all of a sudden realising that I’m not where I thought I was at all. Many years of introvertive youth have my isntincts all telling me that this is a good time to curl up in a little ball and wait until I see something familiar or accommodating-looking toddle past, but I’m getting tired of all this uncertainty and obliviousness (I think oblivity sounds better but it turns out it’s not a real word). It seems the only way I’m gonna figure out what I’m going to do is to go do something and just ditch it if it doesn’t pan out. So if anyone hears of any work going anywhere doing pretty much anything I’m remotely qualified for that doesn’t involve supermarkets or namebadges, cooking oil and hairnets, yell out.

So here’s to running around in the dark hoping you’re not about to hit something painful.

p.s. go see Lost in Translation, it rocks the casbah in all sorts of fashions.

Well I’m just about to take off up to perth for the rest of the week to go get edumacted with this summer school thingo. Made a couple of phone calls yesterday and it looks like the chances of me getting into this secondary dip ed are pretty damn slim, the words “fiercely competitive” were used, so I might end up working again before I know it (*ugh*). But I may as well try and harass some folks in the education faculty while I’m up at the uni this week anyhow, so I’ll see how things pan out. On the bright side, jobs mean money, and money means shiny things. Mmm…. shiny.

don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere
Look at that sky, life’s begun
Nights are warm and the days are young
There’s my baby, lost that’s all
Once I’m begging you save her little soul

I’ll stick with you baby for a thousand years
Nothing’s gonna touch you in these golden years