tales from an ordinary world
1999-12-02
Droo was laughing his head off in the office. "It's y2k, I'm telling you !" he joked. Our box (where this webpage lives) had gone down the afternoon before, because of a loss of power in the building where it lives...Then this morning apparently Monash Clayton and Glen Waverley lost power for a while. We couldn't even buy an ice-cream in Chapel St last night - the shop said "closed, no power" or something like that. So we went to Globe and had some insanely huge pieces of cake. Mavis tried bringing home the huge slice (or whatever it was) of chocolate that was tacked onto the side of the cake. I think it melted by the time we got all the way back to toorak road...
I hear it's illegal to buy a gas mask in Seattle now. Scary.
Dang. So Mavis called me a little earlier, saying her laptop's broken. "The dog ate it" (well, it ate the power cord or something). Argh. I guess I'll have to find something else to do at night when I'm home, for a while :-/ It's funny how you fall into these little routines so easily, and so quickly. And it's especially...I dunno...disappointing ? Annoying ? Whatever. Because I'm at that intensely curious stage, where I want to know everything about my new friend. It's one of those things that keeps me going in life - wondering what makes people tick. What keeps them going. Why they wake up in the morning. What they want to do with their lives...I want to know all this about people. I'm not after the profound, award-winning tear-jerking answers. I just want to know. And the most important thing is that it comes from their hearts, and not their heads.
Now hold that thought - that least sentence up there. If that's so important to me, then consider what I tend to do when I'm Listening to a friend (by Listening, I mean, providing an ear to bend, when they need someone to talk to) - I tend to fall back on logic. Maybe not quite all the time, but do tend to counter their "what am I going to do ?"-type questions with a (fairly) logical answer. The heart versus the head. The eternal battle. But even when I am taking the side of logic, I still take in the emotion. It churns about inside me for days or weeks afterwards. Worrying about my friend's problems. And not, of course, in the same way that they worry about them, but in whatever way I perceive their problems. The weight of the world (or some imagined one) on my shoulders. Ouch.
Of course, I don't claim to be the only person like this. Far from it. You can tell who we are by that slightly pained slouch, hidden behind an attempted kind smile.
Yow. I feel like that guy in the toothbrush ad with the fliptop head. Open it up and pour all the words out...
1999-12-03
Current/Recent Listening :
Logos Live, by Tangerine Dream.
u.f.orb, by The Orb.
Sail me away on a river of synthesizers. It's been so long...
Oh, and I dyed my hair blue again. No photo, 'cause Lennie still has Droo's camera. Sorry dudes.
What an odd week it's been, especially in the feelings department...
1999-12-04
I've spent too much time in the same places lately, so I avoided all that today, and wandered down to Carnegie, where there used to be this great little café I'd waste heaps of time at when I used to live in the area, a couple of years ago. A few months ago, I'd come along and walked past it (there wasn't any room inside), but this time it was gone. Just like that. It had so much stuff in there too, all over the walls...lots of little postcards and photos and other random memories all stuck there. And all gone. Replaced by "Kafka's art gallery" or somesuch place. The other cafés in the area have about as much character as a fish & chip shop, in comparison...
Still, it was too nice a day to mope about lost memories, so I wandered off to other places, sucking in the sun and whatever atmosphere there was.
Today's listening recommendations :
Hello Halo, by Pollyanna.
Starstruck - music for films and adverts, by Ed Kuepper.
1999-12-07
Recipe for a Quiet Night at Home
Ingredients :
1 bottle of Gin (not to be consumed in whole, mind you).
Tonic water, chilled
Ice.
A few net.friends.
CD jukebox (200 CD capacity).
Small fan, to supplement air conditioning.
Block of chocolate (again, not to be consumed in its entirety).
What To Do :
Make the Gin & Tonic.
Set CD jukebox to "random". Play.
Start the fan.
Relax.
Garnish with the occasional small piece of chocolate, or short conversation with a net.friend.
1999-12-10
I got up at 4:55am to go to the 3RRR-FM Breakfasters final show for the year, which was done live at Revolver in Chapel St. Michael showed up eventually, then Haiyan and some other people, who I didn't quite get around to meeting since I was far too comfortably curled up on the sofa with a certain other person. I felt kinda bad being so antisocial, but...well...
There were a lot of people there, too. No space in the back room where it was all happening, so we'd grabbed a sofa early on and resigned ourselves to watching it all on the projection screen. It was quite good, and I guess I'd go next year if I remember...
Yay ! Lennie finally brought back the camera. But if you can't wait for a photo of the Boots, you can always go look at New Rock's website and get some idea.
Going by the random discussion I've been hearing between co-workers and friends and such, I'm getting the impression that I probably ought to go and see Fight Club one of these days. Of course, it'll probably have finished by the time I remember :P
1999-12-11
I took a few photos of places I go to in the city (and yes, it really is summer, despite how it looks...) :
Missing Link, a CD shop I frequent, as it's just across the street from...
...Tonkatsu Joshu, a little Japanese place I'm quite fond of.
Facing the same way as the above photo, but moving forward and to the left a bit, we look down Degraves St towards the Degraves Espresso Bar.
For the first time in positively ages, I sat down and watched a few videos. I chose Irma Vep (odd, but not too bad), Mavis wanted to watch the most recent version of Lolita (hmm), and we also grabbed My Own Private Idaho which I'd seen once before about 6 years ago, with a friend who picked it up because she liked River Phoenix, and she didn't really deal too well with the gay bits. But there you go. It was good to see it again, I'd almost forgotten some of the wonderful country imagery, even if the story drags on a little. I must watch Drugstore Cowboy again sometime, too...
1999-12-12
Some more photos, while I had the camera on hand :
Mavis. Since you were all asking, and stuff. Down on the Esplanade...
In the evening, I wandered over to Sue's for dinner. We sat on the balcony all night with food and wine, swapping stories about grandparents and stuff.
Looking down the street from the balcony, towards the railway station. One of Melbourne's more prominent brothels is down the end there, too.
Sue even let me take a photo of her, too.
1999-12-14
The office christmas party. Yow. People all dressed-up like, and forming conga lines to the band's music. We all escaped to the foyer with a bottle of wine or two, and drank and smoked and talked. Our own little party. It was great fun.
1999-12-15
We wandered around Chadstone for a while, the first time I've been there in...hmm...ages. Shopping centres just don't do it for me these days, and Chadstone's almost large enough to be its own suburb now. There were a few nice shops in the new area, like another Made In Japan shop, with plenty of completely random objects to drool over, even if you can't really imagine yourself doing anything with them. And another instance (if that's the word) of a tea shop I'd been to in Brunswick St a few years ago and quite enjoyed browsing in...
I'll be Mavisless for a week while her parents visit for her graduation and then go off for a short holiday. This is probably good, because maybe I've been having too much of a good thing over the past few weeks. Not in a bad way, of course, just...I should really let things settle down to a more normal pace, I guess.
Anyway. I really ought to catch up on...stuff. I dunno. Finish that Christmas shopping and so on. And I haven't seen Terry in ages, even though he lives about 5 minutes walk away. We saw more of each other when we lived suburbs apart. Friendships are weird like that...
1999-12-18
dream : I'm in some meeting room(?) but it's also a shop...on the lowest shelf is a sort of box of biscuits I'm looking at - I'm hungry. They're made with corn (nb. I really like corn or corn-flavoured things)...then, somehow, we're on a bus. The biscuits are in a bag under the seat - did I buy them ? I wasn't sure. Someone else nicked a biscuit, so after a while I did too. I don't remember how it tasted, but I remember being curious about the use-by date, so...
The bus was driving past some huge...hole in the ground ? Like a big quarry, except that now people were living in it, they'd built homes in the side of the rock, all around the edge, and on multiple levels...We stopped at some traffic lights at the entrance to this...hole...(we were driving around the edge, it seems). But there were flyways going over us, and it just seemed like we were in some kind of concrete jungle, of a sudden...
Tonight we went to the CEO's house, off in the outer surburbs, for another company party. The house could've almost been its own suburb, and we joked about how they didn't need a holiday house - they could just move to the north end of the house for winter...But it was pleasant enough. And somehow I even ended up playing tennis with Droo. Foo was his usual...er...self, for which we are all thankful. Really.
1999-12-19
"So drunk in the august sun
and you're the kind of girl I like
because you're empty, and I'm empty"
Pavement.
And so begins quest number 2. A few more christmas presents to find, and Adrian tells me that the café I mourned the other weekend has actually just moved up the road a little (of course, I'd walked up the other side that day...).
I'm beginning to wonder if these red sunglasses are affecting me somehow - for instance, if I look at the sky through them, it's purple. But of course, everyone knows the sky is blue, and so despite appearances my mind keeps telling me "look, it's blue, ok ?". I'm reminded of someone's anecdote from when they were at high school back in the 60's or so, when their headmistress, during prayer, said "we thank the Lord for making the grass green. Imagine our displeasure had He made it red."
Wow. Adrian mentioned it was bigger, but I didn't quite expect what I got - it's at lesat 4 times bigger inside, with the same "lots of random objects" feel as before, but now there's cool armchairs and stuff, instead of a few tiny tables. I can't imagine how cafés really make much money in general, but these guys must've been doing something right, I guess...In any case, the wonderful cakes are still the same, and my long macchiatos still come with the napkin lovingly tied around the glass. All of this makes me feel so much better, somehow. The other people sitting outside near me knew the waiter, as well as a few random passers-by, and it all seemed like an episode of Cheers. Or something.
(Coincidentally, whilst finding the above link, I also found this. How odd, and almost circular...)
1999-12-24
Janine said yesterday that when she was walking to work in the morning, it seemed like "earthquake weather" - not that we have them in Melbourne, but apparently she'd had similarly odd feelings before a few earthquakes back in New Zealand...
...then I woke up this morning and got a phone call from Mum saying that Dad apparently had a very minor stroke - he came home from work saying he'd been feeling kinda odd all day, and once they got hold of a doctor, he suggested that it'd been just that.
I wandered over in the afternoon, and we went to visit him in the Monash Medical Centre, where he was basically waiting for the doctors to do whatever tests they decided they'd need to do. Every time someone spoke to him it sounded like he'd be in there longer and longer - maybe even over new year's eve. We sat around the bed, just like I remember sitting around other people in hospital, making slightly awkward conversation and wondering if there's anything really useful you can do to help. As we were going, I asked "so like, how do you feel ?". He told me it's a bit like having a slight hangover - a bit of a headache and stuff...but also his left hand was feeling a bit odd, and maybe his left leg too. And his mouth feels a bit numb, kinda like when you go to the dentist. It could've been a lot worse. But all the same, it's...odd...
It's hard to know what to feel in these situations, and I tend to worry that, because I'm not really around much anymore, perhaps I'm not quite living up to my familial duties or something. I don't know.
1999-12-25
We had an understandably sedate Christmas, despite the fact that had he been home with us, Dad would've done his best to avoid being festive. We went to visit him again in the morning, which reminded me of last Christmas morning, where Dad, his mother and I had gone to visit Dad's father in the nursing home where he'd been bedridden for a few years. I didn't know then that it'd be the last time I'd see my grandfather - he died a couple of weeks later, in early-mid January...
So after our quiet lunch, I went for a walk up the hill towards the Police Academy, in between the old people's homes where there used to be BMX tracks, tadpoles, heaps of blackberry bushes and other untamed wilderness when I was a kid. I sat under the power lines, looked out to the west at the view (you could see one or two buildings of Monash Uni, and if you tried hard you could even see the city). A few stray flashes of lightning poked their way through the sky every now and then, and I contemplated the cyclic nature of life, amongst other things. First my grandfather, now my father. Next Christmas I suppose it'll be my turn to be in hospital...
1999-12-27
So I gave in and indulged in some retail therapy, as Nicola calls it. Five t-shirts later (plus another one for my housemate), I figured I'd done pretty well, although since Mavis only managed to find one thing, I wondered if I was being bad luck for her or something...A random coincidence or two later I found myself in Greville Records buying a Gang of Four CD I'd never managed to find before. How odd.
1999-12-30
Being John Malkovich was way cool, even if other friends did tell me previously that it wasn't what they hoped it was, or whatever. I guess it helped that I wasn't expecting it to be anything in particular.
And I saw my first Hal Hartley film today, on video. Thank you. I believe. And Martin Donovan looks so much like Lloyd Cole it's amusing.
1999-12-31
You know that Strange Things are afoot at the Circle K when the woman at the local café compliments you on your dress sense. Or at least, I did. I thought she might've been taking the piss, but she doesn't seem the type...Bizarro. I should learn to accept compliments without being suspicious.
I walked home past the local video rental store, and saw someone had painted their old car, a Mitsubishi Sigma. It had "2000" on the side, an infinity sign, and then on the bonnet there were some blue waves and a red sun. There should be more of this kind of stuff, instead of it just being done on panel vans and volkswagen kombi vans. Yes, your face is a canvas. But why stop there ? Your hair, your body, your car, your keyboard, your desk, your walls. The world is our canvas. Fight the beige !
