Entries from April 2004 ↓

I went for a decent ride today. I did about 400km or so over the afternoon, and while my ass hates me for it, every time I go out I realise how much I love doing it. If I hadn’t gone out I may have had to nominate myself for some level of Darwin award. I was attempting to use some deodorant, and while my finger on the can was pointed under my arm, the nozzle it seems was not, and suddenly I found myself with the same scent, but noticably less depth perception. However much loud cursing and some eye-washing later, all was well. Over the rest of the weekend I looked at more of this living in Perth stuff and I’m regularly assaulted by the fact that living is expensive (yet somehow maintains incredible popularity in the open market) and while my attempts to land another job so far have been quite reasonable, they’ve yet to really acheive much. But something underwent the thought microscope for the umpteenth time when I was in the Socmobile with Glen discussing my vocational deficiencies when we drove past some web development company’s offices. “You should get a job there” he proclaimed, “you could slip right in doing the whole long-haired hippie thing”. Now while he was suggesting it as more of a covert operation to wilfully exploit the promised land of some hippie corporation’s back pocket, it got me wondering about my hair again.

There’s something there you see, and on a couple of occasions in the past couple of months I’ve wondered if losing the locks would up my chances of getting employed. I mean this might sound microscopically paranoid or something, but it’s happened before. I mean there’s something that clicks in people when they see the thing attached to my skull. I went to one interview, asked for the interviewer, sat down, got up, did the handshake and thought for some reason “This interview is over.” Like I said before, I’m aware that this sounds a little farfetched, but the thing is I do a lot of sitting and watching, I sit and I watch people’s faces and eyes when things happen and when they’re changing subjects or spinning some untruth or other. The way this man’s face moved just shot down the deal from the start. We shook hands, “Dwight, was it?”, and his pupils shift to the left as he tries to get a better view over my shoulder and his face just does this ‘thing’, the way peoples faces move when they’re not thinking about it seems to say a lot sometimes. All I could think of in my head was “crap”. The rest of the interview went very dryly and there were sentences like “Yes, well, I mean you’ve got all the right things here and the experience…” that just trail off when he decides not to finish them. Old guys seem to be the worst. Males under 40 seem to be reasonable in general, they’ve all grown up being teenagers in the seventies and eighties and have had some rock music hero with long hair or they’ve toyed with the idea of growing theirs out when all the girls in high school swooned over some heart-throb movie star, and some have been there and done it themselves. Women are probably the best about it as a large percentage of them (similar to the percentage of say, people that have nipples) have had long hair and many still do, so they think nothing of it. I mean a lot of women don’t find long hair attractive on men, but I’m looking for work, not a date. Most of them just continue on, but some get wide-eyed and stop me in the street and bars to ask if it’s real and paw at it. Some of those go on to ask if they can have it, with the intention of attaching it to their own scalps somehow, which is really quite flattering, in a quirky, silence of the lambs kind of way.

But sometimes you run into people that have something to say about men with long hair and have some uncontrollable urge to let me know about it. I once worked somewhere where one of the managing staff turned to me after I’d done something useful or handy and said thankyou, commenting that they “usually didn’t trust guys with long hair”. I think the best response to that one is “Oh.” and that’s in a declarative sense, not questioning. Questioning would probably lead to some discussion of imbecilic stereotypes that would either lead to one of us leaving, or him being lit on fire. I can only compare it to the kind of comments that send you wide-eyed like “wow, the girls with big tits are usually pretty bad at this” or “yeah, asian women make good housewives.”. Another fellow a few weeks ago mysteriously appeared breathing heavily in my ear while I was on an escalator and thought it was his duty to tell me I was lucky that he wasn’t “The Ponytail Bandit”, then proceeded to tell me a story, complete with actions, about some fellow in Melbourne that supposedly snuck up behind people with a pair of scissors and lopped off their hair and ran away with it. Obviously my facial expression conveyed my thoughts on the matter, but he assured me he’d seen it on “Australia’s Most Wanted”. He closed with “Just thought I’d let you know”. While I was of course incredibly appreciative of my newfound knowledge, it would take more of a pair of bloody great shears than a pair of scissors to start hacking at my hair, and even then it would probably be a simpler task to remove my head entire than try to sever the hair itself, unless of course you have one of those El Paso pawn shop Hattori Hanzo swords in which case you could just do the lot in one fell swoop (yeah, I saw Volume 2). I might save the anecdotes about being mistaken for women for some other time. I don’t really know if looking like a long-haired lout is jinxing my job prospects, but I don’t think I’m in the mood to cut it quite yet.

This may not sound like a particularly rational explanation of what’s been going down lately, but here it is anyway; a lot has happened, but nothing much has been going on. Like I said, it’s a tad nonsensical, so the only real solution is probably to elaborate somewhat.

Starting off with things I remember physically doing, Easter weekend was pretty cool. Nathan and Tash came down on Friday, Saturday morning I took off up to Jarrahdale to meet up with some riding friends and do a few loops around here and there and one hell of a lunatic road down near the Canning Dam. Got back home around 5pm, which gave me plenty of time to clean up before the family went out to a chinese restaurant for dinner seeing as how it’d been Dad’s birthday a few days previous. Nathan had to head back up to Perth while Tash and myself went to play a round of golf with Dad on Monday. Tasha wanted to get a buggy to hoon around on and carry the clubs with and I swear to god, it is the laziest machine ever invented. I felt more lazy driving it than I did riding in the passenger side, it’s just not right. But laziness aside, I had a few good hits and made a thorough butchery of a couple of bunkers and ended up with a 71, which would be an awesome score if I had actually played 18 holes and not 9, but it’s a start. Tiger woods wouldn’t be any fun to play with anyway.

The weekend just gone was pretty much enveloped by reload, which went pretty damn well, and my sleep patterns have just about adjusted back to moderate regularity. I took off for an hour or so in the middle to go and drop in to pimpmaster Su Leng’s birthday lunacy in town, and he seems to be keeping pretty well. Most of the other days in the past couple of weeks that I can remember involve getting up, cleaning the house some, applying for jobs and lavishing attention on the dog in quantities that would traditionally drive any normal being insane.

While all of these things have been relatively entertaining or mind-numbing respectively, the more interesting side of what’s happened is that I’ve decided to make a move to Perth in an attempt to try and muster a better slug at getting myself employed. If all goes well, all would be well, however if things don’t quite go to plan, I’ll probably be sitting on the floor with the lights out eating two minute noodles out of a hat. But I’m working on the optimistic side of things here for a change, so I’m gonna leave hat noodles out of things for the meantime. At the very least, it oughtta be an experience. And you can’t ask for much more than that.

Today I remembered some of the reasons I get out of bed in the mornings. I have newfound inspiration to beat the teeth out of whatever gets in the way of me doing what I’m meant to do. Rolling on.

No matter what or who you’ve been
No matter when or where you’ve seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain

You’re not alone

My last-minute birthday shenanigans (I really do love that word) turned out to be rollicking good fun, even if my birthday itself consisted of a significantly more plain breakfast than the past twenty or so years. Friday night involved mostly vegging out on the couch watching a few movies, with a bunch of south side friends which was really nice, then after some shopping on Saturday it was off North for more surly adventures in partyland, which, on the whole, went awf (“awf” beign a derivative of the term “off”, but with emphasis on pronunciation). There was much eating and drinking, I got to catch up with wads of people I hadn’t seen in ages and I pretty much lost my voice telling The Longest Story Known To Man™ about the day Doc and myself spent getting sun stroke and hallucinating while becoming ever-later for a basketball game we were meant to be at (it’s much more amusing than it sounds, you’ll just have to trust me on that one).

For those of you who couldn’t make it, suffered last-minute alien abductions, were overcome by the necessity to go cow tipping or just want to have a looksee, there is some miscellaneous photo evidence of the proceedings over this way. If anyone needs me to remove any of the photos so that their parole officer doesn’t get on their back, you know where to find me, just remember to use a land line. I really appreciate everyone breaking out of prison, getting dressed up and returning to an extradition treaty country to make it, as well as everybody else that just had to to find the place. I had an awesome time.

On a completely unrelated note, in case you’ve not come across it before, todays time-waster is The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, which is well worth a look-in.

I feel somehow guilty when I come to put an entry in my journal and I haven’t anything of earth-shattering consequence, like I’m somehow letting my journal down by not doing anything interesting enough to tell it about. It’s been almost two months now that I’ve been doing casual work and looking for jobs. I can’t say I expected to take this long. Still, I had three interviews last week, one of which I had a callback interview for earlier today. But somehow all the colour has gone out of the job hunting process for me, I’m beginning to numb up to it, rejections aren’t bumming me, calls and interviews don’t get me hopeful, it’s all very calloused now. I mean it’s not the worst thing in the world, but I can’t say it does a great deal for my optimism either. One of the application packages I received involved a questionnaire, question six of which was In around 50 words describe a melted snowman. This was after the page one explanation that the employer offers positions to people on the basis of merit. The person judged to be the most capable of undertaking the functions of the position will be selected. I don’t bother attempting to understand such things anymore.