Entries from March 2005 ↓

It’s half past one on Monday morning, and I have to get up in about five and a half hours time to go to my uni lectures, but too much has happened lately and I’m far too tired to sleep just yet.

Two days and two nights of my life have been spent purely lifting heavy things, sweating and feeling generally physically and financially exhausted while we moved house. Friday nights collapse was well earned and certainly not wasted as I decided to extend its girth to what is most normal folks’ lunch time on Saturday.

It started off kind of surreal. I had a stoutly portion of time to kill before it started, but none the less I started pressing my shirt and contrasting neck ties. So, fully dressed, I sat there in some kind of abstract moment on the edge of the lounge chair, not knowing what to think, let alone what to do. And there I passed quite some time.

We arrived and chattered and smiled, like any other day, but when the procession arrived and I slid in beside my brother, it was something else. If I’d have known what to expect, then maybe it would be more appropriate to say that it was not what I had expected, but not having such knowledge, it was simply new.

I, having trod my share of paths for age, am probably more battered and jaded than should be prudent, and maybe it is because of this that sometimes a little magic is lost on me, and what others attribute to emotion I sometimes think of purely of abscence of thought. But on occasion someone who knows what’s in the middle of my calloused parts decides to break off a part and remind me of how beautiful the little things inside really are.

I’ve spent more than two decades with my little sister around. Through haunting and heartbreak, from roller coasters to ball nights, but I had never seen the kind of smile I saw on her face when she walked down the aisle… and it just cut right to me. Any sliver of doubt I’d had about her time and her choices and the folly of youth seemed like they couldn’t drop a slight of shadow on the two of them when they were so happy. It felt right.

The honour of speaking for their wedding reception was something that I don’t know if I deserved, but it came together in a way very naturally and it was all so terribly beautiful. It made me cry to see my father dance with her on her wedding night.

Maybe parts of me aren’t what they were after all.

If my writing seems a bit flustered at the moment, it’s because that’s the kind of feel and flow of my life right now, lots of things are flopping on top of each other all over the place and it’s hard for any of them to get a look in edgeways.

Busy would be about on par as far as adjectives go, I’ve been dragging my ever-sorer body around to social gatherings in the midst of Uni, organising moving house and all manner of other distractions. The most recent good news however is that we’ve found a place to move into, so I can finally give up my habit of enviously eyeing off fridge and washer packaging on the side of the road in the lead up to an accommodatory crisis. So myself and Katy are moving a little closer to the river and a little closer to the city in an old-school planned pad in Maylands, complete with high ceilings, chubba rooms and the added modern convenience of blessings like ducted air con and gas water heating. So it’s all good, and not a moment too soon, considering the current house of rock has to be cleaned and vacated before Monday morning.

Of course none of the cofuffle has managed to interrupt my riding schedule, and I managed to get out for a blat on Wednesday night as well as a day trip on Sunday with some friends up to Lancelin to go faff about on the dunes and ride a bus. And when I say bus, think yellow school bus, then tack it on top of a monster truck drivetrain being hauled along by a four hundred cubic inch Chevy V8. So after driving off the tops of dunes that decide to suddenly drop off at sixty degree angles, being thrown around like bobble-dogs and routinely fearing for our lives, we stopped to do some sandboarding down said dunes and then hooning back again to the carpark, which involved a seemingly close encounter with our eourmous mechanical host sand-drifting towards a somewhat substantial fence. Much terror was had, but one must see the inherent humour in the fact that fifteen motorcyclists could’ve suddenly died in a yellow school bus with their collective last words being a booming chorus of “you look so fine that I really wanna make you mine”.

And even after being worn-out, burnt to a nice crispy finish, getting sand in places I didn’t know I had places and it deciding to rain on us on our trek home, it was a cracker of a day. I also managed to get along to Stuart’s bucks night on Friday and Luke’s engagement party on Saturday night, so when my Monday morning came, I was well and truly rogered.

Saturday was a new experience as well, after our regular play rehearsal space was commendeered by an art exhibition (and its accompanying paint fumes), we checked out a park before relocating to one of the home of one of the actresses, who, coincidentally turns out to be the daughter of the United States consulate. So after getting through boom gates and being eyed off by burly men with large guns, I was drawling out my bad cockney accent in a three storey villa opening onto kings park and the most fantastic view of the Perth skyline and the Swan that you could ever hope to see with your feet on the ground.

Thankfully it turns out that Steve is still alive, despite having ready access to automatic firearms. And on the topic of survival, my little sister is going to be married in under a hundred hours time. Spending the rest of your life bound to another person. Me, I have trouble deciding socks in the morning.

All through the post-grad education building there are printed out A4 signs on the wall asking people to speak softly because it’s a learning area or someone is working or some similar rot. Today however, during one of my oh-so-stimulating ICT lectures I noticed that (aside from that the lecturer had worn the same Hawaiian shirt two weeks in a row, I am hypothesising that it may be his Tuesday shirt) there was a particular sign that took my notice:

At first I just smiled to myself. Then someone likened it to the pseudo-elitism pent up against the Surf Science students from when we were studying at ECU in Bunbury. Strangely enough, you could be forgiven for mistaking one for the other if their dress, volume and mannerisms are anything to go by (however as far as I know, no Phys Ed majors have fallen through the roof of computer labs when playing ‘hide and seek’).

So why is it that I seem to have no hesitation in clumping them into the same cliches… granted that they don’t make it any harder by cliquing together like… well.. something that clumps together a lot… mercury, no, that’s a crappy example… oh, sod it. You know what I mean. Still, what’s with this strange immediate grouping of them into these buckets in my mind that I seem to have such immediate disdain for? And it strikes me that so many that I’ve spoken to just seem so similar. Why is that? Am I just not noticing the differences because they’re outside my field of specialty? Are they just being boring toward me because I’m just so devastatingly handsome that they couldn’t stand it if I were to stand next to them more often? Or maybe it’s the same peer-driven character-bleaching that seems to happen in groups of teenagers…

I think maybe I would think more of people if they weren’t so afraid of showing a little character. So many people seem completely terrified of revealing any personal information about themselves or volunteering any real thoughts of their own for fear it will be incriminating and be held against them by all of their similarly outwardly-plain cohorts (of course there are completely contrasting examples of obnoxiously loud people who bounce off walls and break things in order to sustain themselves with the attention of others, regardless of its nature). But what can you do, beat it out of them?

But maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect every person to be distinguishable from the next, or to expect them to openly share parts of themselves with other people. Maybe it’s just a world of quiet intellectuals and I’m a complete thug for just reading what people give off on the surface or are willing to volunteer to strangers, and I’m even more the devil for thinking that there’s not so much more to them than that.

But that’s polarising things a bit too much, it would be completely remiss of me to paint so many people with the same brush. I simply wonder, if such brilliance exists somewhere in these people beneath the dull veneer of chain-store catalogue existence, why do they hide it with such consistence?

So it’s gaining on two weeks since I last posted, but granted it’s been a pretty solid time for me. I’ve been up to a lot, so much so that even my digital crack habit (as doc so eloquently puts it) has been almost entirely sidelined.

The biggest change is probably that I’ve now left my job for good. I served out the last of my four weeks notice (which I thought was a bit rough considering I only had a 6 month contract) and handed in my keys. Considering the high turnover rate of staff in the department (out of 17 staff, only 7 were there longer that I, and 10 had left during my tenure), my nine-month stint made me a practical veteran and as such, worth celebrating the departure of. So to all Australian taxpayers, I thank you for your contributions to the funding of my going away cakes, scones, fruit platters, slices and so on. After work we all headed down to the pub up the road and I was shouted drinks to the point of excess, regardless of my regular pleading to stop for the sake of my poor bladder. But a few hours later and at least four trips to the mens room later, we finally wound up.

After some filming on Saturday and stopping in to have dinner with my folks, I tore through to Bunbury for Steve’s Joining-the-military-and-leaving-on-Monday do, which, as it turned out, was also his Proposing-to-my-girlfriend do. So congratulations to Steve and Abbi for the umpteenth time. It was great to bugger around and yak with a lot of the guys and see Steve off. I also bought Steve’s old bike in a flight of fancy, which, after sitting in the middle of the street while we abused and took to it with large tools to try and fit it in a car boot, is now sitting in pieces in my yard. The plan is to re-assemble it into something resembling a two-wheeled transportation medium and use it for personal propulsion as well as the expulsion of energy primarily fueled by chocolate doughnuts and coffee.

Monday saw me hitting my first uni lecture in my new course. Actually, it saw me hitting three lectures. Then another three today. It’s kind of funny really, everything actually seems to interest me and I’m looking forward to attending the classes (aside from the IT unit which bores me into a drool-spilling coma), which is a totally different feeling from when I was doing Comp Sci. I’ve also already been able to trick plenty of folks into believing that I am not in fact the devil incarnate and have made a wad of new friends. I have also scouted out almost all caffeine distribution points on campus. In honour of taking up studies again and considering the usefulness I saw most every other student getting out of them designing projects, I also picked up a new toy (don’t worry, I didn’t pay retail ;), which I’m getting quite fond of.

I won’t bore you with the intricate details about my time at Uni, but suffice to say I’m already sick of the word pedagogy, however the post graduate education faculty building does have some of the best designed porcelain urinals I have ever had the pleasure to micturate into.