Short Pieces

Short pieces because I don't want to think so hard today.




--

Mystic Meg is reading ND's palm.
MM: You're going to have four kids.
ND slowly swivels to look at me.
Me: Not with me you're not.

--

Jamais vu: the opposite to deja vu. you've done this before but for some reason you have the sensation that you haven't.

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"All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You'd better run, better run, outrun my gun"
- Pumped Up Kicks, Foster the People

It's rather highly disturbing that commercial radio is releasing this song so close to the aftermath of the Oslo massacre. On the other hand, it's a ridiculously fun song to dance around to and quite possibly no-one is paying attention to the lyrics. I mean it sounds like 'run faster than my brother' rather than 'run faster than my bullet'.

--

Dyl: They do the Greek thing,
Me: What are you talking about. What Greek thing?
Dyl: ............ what did the Greeks invent?
MD: Wine?
Me: Math?
Dyl: Rear Entry.
Me: ...............................now you're just making stuff up!

--
--

And he said: My boyfriend works in a catholic school and he can't tell them he's gay. They might suspect, but there's this don't ask, don't tell policy happening.

I said: What does he do there? (and why is this still an issue in Sydney 2011?!)

He said: He's a religion teacher. A theologian.

The irony. It's killing me oh so hard.

--

Oh.. they've decapitated her... I don't know how to feel about that. I wish for those brushes though.

Bad Habit.

I have two bad habits:

The first is that I somehow chronically always get the bathroom floor wet after I shower. It doesnt matter how dry I am, I manage to leave puddles everywhere. I get that it must be irritating for lovers/families/flatmates.

The second is that I don't do well in phone fighting and so if you exasperate me enough, I will hang up on you without fail. There'll be a brief tense silence on the phone and then you'll just hear a click. You may think that my hang-up is silent but deadly but often its just because if I don't hang up on you, I'm going to say something that I'm never going to be able to take back. Don't worry, you'll have enraged me to the point that after I throw my mobile across the room, I'm still going to head outside and kick something small and fluffy.

I recall that SB used to call back to yell at me for hanging up on him and I would just pitch the phone into the freezer for a good three hours. My phone has been remarkably ice-free for the past few years.

At any rate, ND and I had our first fight tonight, and it wasn't anything too serious but it was enough for my finger to reach for that little red button and end it pretty damn abruptly [don't tell me to grow up! what the hell!] and so now I'm sitting here mulling over history repeating and my inability to break old bad habits.

And the thing is right, that that is the way that I fight. I slam doors and I hang up phones and I wave my arms around like a windmill. I'm a ridiculously melodramatic drama queen. And I am who I am. What remains to be seen is if he will be okay with that.

Mugs 2#

LA Noire. Ever so slightly boring.

• Team Bondi took seven years to make it- with over 100 creatives involved.
  
  
• They've mapped out the entire 1940's city of LA including hotels, landmarks, train tracks, suburbs..
  
  
• The graphics are without a doubt phenomenal (and you can run people over! It's awesome!)
  
  
• IGN has given it a rating of 8.5
  
  
• I've spent something like a year waiting for it to come out
  
  
• Plus paid 90 big ones to own a copy (at a time when I am not rolling around in disposable money)

And still the entire thing puts me to sleep faster than dropping a 40kg mallet on my head in a doorway. At first, I was afraid to say it out loud-because I had waited so long and paid so much money and it was clear that so much effort had been put into it - that voicing it would be kind of a sacrilege.

But here I said it first: LA Noire is boring. It's boring. It bores me to tears. Pretty graphics do not a game make. You actually have to have gameplay that involves more than walking around and waiting til the controller shakes. Hell even my beloved Mario steps on Goombas from time to time in the 64 version.

And yet I have to finish it. I have to finish it because I already spent 8 hours of my life trying not to doze through it [and according to reviewers.. it's 30 hours of gameplay so I only have.. 22 hours of not-dozing left] and I just keep hoping it gets better. Maybe something interesting will happen. Maybe some zombies will show up and eat Cole Phelps. That might be too much to ask.

Whatever. I'm going to get through to the end and then sell it on eBay lauding it as the best game I ever played. And then take the money I get from that and spend it on shoes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you haven't bought it and you're interested, I have a very high boredom threshold. You would probably misunderestimate the time I spend playing spider solitaire in my spare time. So if I think it's boring and you still decide to go ahead, don't say I didn't give you fair warning.

It really is a spectacular looking game though.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm going on about, don't worry it's nothing- Here's a picture of cakepops.

Poison Pens

And I'm clickclacking away when my phone beeps and I stop working for a minute to see that it's a facebook message.

I was expecting.. a haiku, a question, an events notice.. what I wasn't expecting was a poison pen letter.

A ten paragraph epistle on why this person didn't want to be my friend and I was to put it short, a little stunned. [I'm still a little stunned actually, it might explain why I'm typing in such stunted sentences]

The reasons being:

She was uncomfortable around me. (And couldn't wait til I wasn't around)
I sucked all the fun out of the room?!
I'm too negative to be friends with and that being friends with me is such an effort
She feels sorry for me
No-one wants to hang around me someone like me

This is a girl who I haven't seen for months. So if we had a beef, I didn't know it.

I could tell by the way she wrote- that she was looking for a fight. That she wanted me to slang back at her. That if I just returned that volley, I would be giving her permission to be out and out vicious towards one another, that what she wanted was a leeway to tear each other to bits.

And then I looked at my work, my 1000 word article on car radiators -which I know I have to finish tonight and I just felt tired. We are not in high school, I am not in high school and this is not the way that I deal with things when I am twenty eight. I don't facebook message fight- And truly I think that way of behaving is just.. pathetic.

But maybe if there was one thing she was right about, it's that there are some things in life that we just don't need. Right on? Right on.

So I clicked delete. All gone.

Fortune 2#

Sunshine on a winters day, dumplings, good friends, hand in hand with the amazing ND. So who me worry?
Shut up stupid fortune cookie.

A pink room.

My perfect house has a library with bookcase with several ladders that move back and forward on wheels. It has high ceilings and wooden floors and lots of natural lighting. I have an open courtyard and in this courtyard, in the middle is a large oak tree which has a little rope swing, which I can sit upon on summer days.

But sometimes (and this will never happen) I dream of a pink room with a big old Hello Kitty mirror with chequered walls. Uninterrupted and unfettered girliness- you could never be miserable in a room like that.

We all need a little change

I haven't seen Speedy in three months

Speedy: What happened to you? Where have you been? Why didn't you call me?
Me: I thought you were mad at me ................
Speedy: Wait, what. So if I didn't call you, you wouldn't have called me?
Me: You were mad!
Speedy: No, I wasn't! What happened to your hair?!
Me: Oh, you just noticed it? It's a little darker than before.
Speedy: It looks nice. You look like a grown up.
Me: Oh, thank you.
Speedy: Let's go for a coffee and cake.
Me: Cool!
Speedy: (horrified) I was just kidding. Coffee? Cake? It's a Friday! What happened to you?? What happened to my party girl friend? I miss her.
Me: .................... I got old. Real old.
Speedy: Do you blog anymore?
Me:...... Not much.
Speedy: You better blog about this. About how you almost abandoned your Mexican friend and about how you changed.
Me: Were you really kidding about coffee and cake?

Ba-dump

And when he thought I wasn't looking, he starts to dance to Edge of Glory, I spotted him on the outer edges of my mirror and it was probably the cutest thing I have ever seen.

I straightened up, turned around and grinned at him. "Baby, what are you doing?"

He stops mid-motion "Uh. Nothing! I have an itch. Itchy back."

"I believe that you were just dancing to Lady Gaga"

He starts to blush and laugh. "No, I wasn't. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go be manly and play LA Noire."

I corner him "yeah you were! Do it again!"

And in that moment, it occurs to me that I love him. He's so charming and goofy and he makes my heart go ba-dump at unexpected moments. And help me God, he secretly dances to Top 40.

I don't know quite how to say this to him, those three words that I throw around so easily with other people.

He gives me an aggrieved look before throwing himself facedown on the bed: You're still grinning at me. It never happened.

And I can't say it still, my throat closes over and so I substitute instead with"I think you're the greatest".

Too Much

"Do you like your new job?"
"Meh. It's okay. It's probably temporary."
"What? You just started."
"Well it's not what I want to do."
"..... What exactly do you want?"
"I want to love the job"
"You ask for too much lady."

Goodbye Card

My work presented me with a giant goodbye card today. It's funny the things you remember about people.

Edge of Glory

Dancing around madly in my apartment to this. Toothbrush doubling up as a microphone. I fucking love it. I'M ON THE EDGE WITH YOU!

Mugs

So I am pulling myself off Facebook/LA Noire/Season 6 of Criminal Minds and a backlog of Mental Floss articles to come here and post this. Between the two of us, we spend a lot of time pulling funny faces at each other and on camera.

So if you ask where I've been working, going to interviews [sigh for the Gen Y in me], trying to get a life in this miserable weather and doing lots and lots of mugging for the camera.

Fools

"You might actually be born with the most beautiful features in the whole of the world, you might have the best intellect, you might have all of these wonderful qualities and characteristics but in make-over culture you won't be seen as perfect, you'll always be seen as someone that can be improved upon.. and I think that's the most detrimental part of make-over culture- it doesn't allow us to rest, we can never be perfect, we can never say to ourselves - I'm okay now. Once we do that, we're accused of letting ourselves go."

I don't know who this video was from but I guess it's something for you [and me] to chew upon. Should we not always be striving to better ourselves and if we don't, are we not just being complacent? But are these standards [and in particular societal beauty standards] too high? Are we reaching for something that doesn't exist and if so, does that make fools of us all?

Talking to children

[Reading out her childcare report card to me]
Mum: But she must always remember to speak to a child at their level. What does that mean?
Mush: That means you talk to the kid like an adult. You're supposed to talk to the kid like a kid.
Mum: Oh, do I?
Mush: Yeah, but don't worry -it's a very specifically Asian thing to do.
Mum: Huh. And you? How did I talk to you as a child?
Mush: Like an adult.

Actually now that I think about it, I do that a lot too- talking to toddlers and babies about definitions and concepts. You will never find me in front of a pram cooing 'it's a teddy-weddy-weddy-bear!' Maybe it's genetic.

Just smoke the damn cigarette already

And so lately everyone has been pointing out vanilla I am. And you don't have to really know me that well to know just how much I hate this. Just because I'm not snorting things up my damn nose every night and sleeping with Tom, Dick and Harry at the same time doesn't mean you should put me in this damn goody-goody box. I resent this damn box.

RR: something something drugs.
Mush: Oh that's not how it is.
RR: How would you know? As if you've ever taken drugs.
Mush: ........
RR: Look at you in all your vanillaness.
Mush: [glaring at her from my stupid nerdy glasses] Oh yeah? And how can you tell?
RR: [exasperated] You're a good girl. You just are. You never would.
Mush: I am not a good girl! (if I punch you in the head I think you would stop calling me that)
RR: There's nothing wrong with being good you know? It's okay.

RR really knows how to push my damn buttons. And of course she's right- recently I'm going out of my way to be reasonable and sensible. I'm sleeping at ten. I'm not showing up late for anything. I'm not drinking.. at all, I've turned into some sort of ghastly teetotaller. I don't throw Veruca Salt like tantrums. I mean for Og's sake- my hair is a nice nominal black colour and not the candy floss pink that I originally wanted - in short it's like I've been dialled back to minus five.

Which must be nice for my parents. I'm not so sure how I feel about this.

And that might go a long way to explaining why I'm constantly craving cigarettes lately. I want to pick them up and twirl them in my fingers, I want to take a damn cigarette break in front of my work and not give a shit what anybody walking past thinks, I want to smell them on my hands when I lift them to my face and most of all I want to inhale. The hilarious thing is I don't smoke, not really. I am well aware that this is my self-destructive streak rising to the surface like a kraken heading for the buffet.

I guess if chaining out my window is the most rebellious thing I do in the next few months, I truly am vanilla- I'll give up and own that title.

Stop for a moment

My eyes are so wide like you reached into my head and turned on a light inside- Be Mine, David Gray.

I'm standing here on the street corner, four blocks away from my house. And I can't explain the stillness, I don't have the writing capacity to explain stillness. My feet hurt and I'm tired but that's ok. Because the world is so quiet that all I can hear is the gentle tapping on my keypad and my own footsteps in the leaves and I think that if this is as good as it gets, for five minutes, for ten, for fifteen, then that should be all I ever ask for. Momentary stillness.

Priorities, priorities.

Well see here's proof that I'm alive and eating cake. Cake with dessicated coconut so maybe not so much alive.

I guess I'll return when I have something concrete to say. At this point I feel like if I analyse my life, I'm going to find a gap and poke a hole right through it. I am that superstitious. Or maybe I'm just too old to care about everything and everyone all the time. Right now, I'm focusing quite a bit of energy on one person and I'm finding it reallly damn hard to spread myself around when [certain] friends have mental crises. And you know? that's strange to say even for me, if you call for me I'm the first one out the door for you- no questions asked and lately I have a hard time picking up the phone or even just summoning the energy to roll out of bed. [In fact, my bed is eyeing me now but so are my sink of dishes. The dishes win.]

I'm not twenty one anymore and nowhere is this more evident than my inability to give people equal time. As Coconat so eloquently put it "We're too old for this shit. And we're too old to deal with crap that's really not that important."

And so it is. I was talking to my mum about ND and she as always shoots straight from the hip.
Mum: SB once said to me that you always put your friends before him.
Me: He said that to you? Why the fk would he say that to you? When the hell? What the heck!
Mum: Are you still doing that? Maybe you should reconsider doing that.
Me: [defensive] well it's true. I don't admit that it's not true. I knew it, he knew it. It was the way things were done. Friends are forever and boyfriends are.. transient. Case in point. I'd just like to point out that if I leaned on him hard, where would I be? I'd be Wiley Coyote'd all over the ground.
Mum: Aren't you tired? Don't you just want to lean and be taken care of? Would it not make your life easier?
Me: You brought me up to be completely self-sufficient and independent. What are you asking of me?
Mum: Maybe too much for your own good.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I think I'm just in a roundabout way trying to say that my priorities are getting a total reconfiguration and I'm still in the process of trying to figure it out myself. Which is not really the reason I'm neglecting the holy moly out of this blog.

I swear I'll be good and offer you more cake pictures. Amateur cake photographs. There'll at least be a lot of those coming up

Try thinking before you speak

Betty asked for more posting, so hi Betty! *waves*

--

I was absorbed in creating a mixtape on the computer and he was sitting behind me just watching me mess around, when I noticed the time was getting close to midnight so not moving my eyes away from the screen, I felt around for his face and said absently:

You know I love you but you have to go soon.

Uhm. It took me about several beats to realise what I just said and then the room went completely silent in a death pall. Who the hell makes random love declarations two weeks in while multi-tasking? Me apparently. Oh I fail sometimes, I really do.

I swivelled around in horror and almost knocked him off the seat in the process.

"I.. uhhhh. OH MY GOD. I didn't mean that. I mean I like you a lot but that's not what I meant. I was distracted. I say that to everyone. I tell everyone I love them, it's not personal. I don't know why I said that. ..... uhhhhhhhhhh....." [smooth Mush smooth! You missed out on an incredible public relations career!] By this time I'm quite sure my face is fire engine red.

He starts to laugh, he's finding it hilarious. "Should I just pretend I didn't hear that?"

Dumbdumbdumbdumbdumb! Argh! Stupid mixtape! "But it's true. I say I love everyone." This is sounding lame even to my ears, but it's TRUE. "Forget it! It didn't happen!."

I don't even know if there's a moral to this other than: Dear God, I need to relearn when to start and stop talking.

At least I'm still making an effort to write something.

There once was this blogger who used to WRITE give or take three times a week.. and then one day she just ran out of things to talk about. Completely flat. What the heck happened? She was probably too busy posing in front of mirrors. Probably. I'm not trying to show off my new jacket or anything.