tales from an ordinary world
2001-02-01
"Planet earth is blue
and there's nothing I can do"
David Bowie.
As usual, it's all a matter of waiting. Despite the urgency of the situation, you can't do anything else. Get out for a while to go to an optometrist appointment, but it's useless, there's no way of relaxing, no way to switch off, no way to stop the imagined voices of the angry people who just won't understand that the circumstances really are beyond our control.
Please put your tray table up.
Please use the vertical hold knob to adjust your set.
Please do not move.
Please do not speak.
And please, please do not bother the man behind the curtain.
2001-02-03
"Just give me a hard boiled egg
and three minutes of your time"
Stephen Cummings.
Right now, it's about energy conservation. Making it through the last few days until I can vanish for a while. And then...
2001-02-05
It's easing up, things are improving, even if last night's bleached hair looks a little less optimal than usual. The week's off to a good start - the leisurely pub lunch, the solvable problems at work, and so forth.
2001-02-10
"I was a stranger
when I came to town
just yesterday
i was a stranger
they dont come much stranger..."
Smog.
So happy birthday. I can't help thinking of that old Lloyd Cole song - "does it feel so bad to be twenty-eight ? when you were twenty-three, you could do anything...". I figure I'm doing ok all the same, but today's wanderings through Auckland did seem a little more pointed - even a little desperate - because I wanted it all to matter somehow, just a little. Sunburn at the Devonport food and wine festival, I didn't hang around too long because it just seemed to be a growing mass of people trying to find somewhere to sit down to eat and drink.
I'm still trying to find my Reason To Believe. Right now I'm looking for it in a city with a downtown bungy-like experience, a couple of Burger Kings, no visible KFC (even though all the buses advertise it, and on TV there was an ad where you could win a year of KFC), helicopters flying banner ads for "More FM", sequentially numbered television stations (one, two, three, four - I mean, how quaint...), where the train plays exactly the same musak CD that they were playing in the Novotel restaurant the other night, and where the TV guide mentions such exciting shows as "Target : hidden cameras expose bad behaviour in the carpet-laying industry", where you can still buy a Toyota Corona or a Ford Escort, but where nobody's heard of a Macchiato.
I had some voice mail - the first one, surprisingly, from an ex girlfriend saying "oh...um...i'm not sure if this is the right number...you sound so different...but anyway, I didn't get around to sending you a card, so happy birthday" - the other one from Darren, calling from Steve's housewarming party, with voices in the background wishing me a happy birthday.
2001-02-12
The well-stocked minibar in Wellington's Museum Hotel even thoughtfully has some Berocca. It's raining, and misty, and the sea's out there somewhere across the road, behind the museum, apparently.
2001-02-16
It seems impossible to go to the airport without running into someone - on the way, Skud was (finally) heading off to a new job in Ottawa. On the way home, I ran into an old ex-Unico colleague, who must've spotted me by the hairdo or something, even though I was hiding behind my sunglasses. Curious.
2001-02-18
The rampant spending spree of my New Zealand holiday obviously wasn't enough. The score this weekend :
5 bottles of wine from 2 Yarra Valley wineries, after we escaped from the hot and shadeless "Jazz in the vines".
A new discman.
A new office chair.
2 more CDs.
Perhaps it's a form of denial, to avoid thinking about the return to work. But it's here already, just hours away. I'm putting up my tray-table and assuming the crash position...
2001-02-22
"I guess it was all a dream...
...or an episode of Hawaii Five-O"
Zippy the Pinhead.
The coincidental life. I hopped off the tram somewhere to wait for the next one. Up in the sky, an aircraft had written "ana marry me".
At lunch, one of the waitresses seemed to be having a bad day, dropping a few things, on different occasions.
Someone else said to me "it's not that I totally hate where I am. It's just that... I wish I could be a different person."
I'm overflowing in weddings and engagement parties over the next few weekends.
...what does it all mean ? I used to believe in the interconnectedness of all things. I'm not sure.
2001-02-26
"I've been an alleycat and a bumblebee
to your panther and your wasp"
Smog.
They said I looked tired, and they weren't talking about my hair, which certainly is a tired shade of red...more pink these days, in the wrong light...
mmm
I thought I was supposed to feel better after a holiday, but I'm in that post-fun slump. Something needs to change, but I've yet to work out exactly what. I want to push in some other direction, give to something new, and all that sort of stuff. So far, everything I see before me is already familiar - paths I've walked before, or ones I know I don't wish to travel. But I know if I move my head just a little bit in the right direction, I'll see things in a much better way...
