Reunion or Silence

Some people I went to high school with are organising a 10 year reunion at the moment and they've been contacting everyone to see if they're interested.
For me, high school was an experience best forgotten and in all honesty, most of it has been. I couldn't stand 90% of the people I went to school with and I was indifferent to most of the remaining 10%.
There were only a handful of people that I spent any time with and that I had any vague interest in knowing. I'm still in contact with most of those people, but there is one person that I often think of and wish that I still knew.

He was probably my best friend in my final year of high school. We spent a lot of time together and as a result I think I am single-handedly responsible for him failing history. I had a free period at the same time as his history class, and he more often than not cut class to keep me company. Quite selfishly, I never stopped him because I enjoyed the company too much. Sorry about that JM.

I lost contact with him after high school. I remember the last day that we spent together and the strange kind of finality that there was about it all. I distinctly felt that the moments that we were spending together were going to be the last. I've never felt like that about anything before, or again. I'm not sure what that feeling was, but I recall sitting on some playground equipment in a school near my house and talking to him. I don’t remember what we said to one another but I recall that we were alone and I was trying to draw out the conversation a little so that it wouldn’t be over because I had this feeling that this was the end. I think maybe I was waiting for something to happen, and i'm not sure to this day what it was, but it didn't and now the actual moment that we parted is a little vague in my memory.

Since they contacted me about the reunion, I’ve been having incredibly vivid dreams about him and they've made me wonder whether I should try to contact him. We got along so well once and it seems like such a wasted friendship. I’d like to see what he is up to because I very much believe that he will be working hard to achieve what he always wanted - to be a writer - and it would make me happy to see that.

One of the main reasons I haven't tried to contact him is because of a conversation we had some time after that last day. It gave me a glimpse into the fact that he was becoming a very different person and it left me with a strange feeling that I think is what prevented me from reaching out to talk to him.

One day not long after school finished, I received a brief phone call in which he asked me for the phone number of a high school friend. It was short and to the point and it seemed like a regular, calm conversation.
I don't recall how I found out, but later someone told me that the phone call was because he thought the high school friend might be able to help him out – he and a friend had been experimenting with drugs and something had gone wrong - an overdose or something - and they thought this person might know what to do.

That episode left me with an odd feeling that I think is one of the reasons why I’ve never contacted him before now. I can’t really pinpoint what that feeling was, but I think it was partly the fact that he was doing things that I wouldn’t do myself, partly that he would call me when he was high and act like everything was normal and partly that he wasn’t honest with me about it. I felt at the time like it was a little like a betrayal of friendship – we were always honest with each other (as far as I recall) so it hurt a little bit to be lied to about something like that. It’s the kind of thing you hide from your parents, not your friends.

I wish that I could remember more of that final year of high school and the time we spent together, but it’s hard to reminisce alone. I think that if I knew he was going to be at the reunion, I might consider going along. I’m just a little concerned that it might ruin what are very fond memories by bringing me back to reality a little.
Then again, 10 years ago I was a different person too. I was a lot more naive and a lot more oblivious to the reality of other people’s feelings. I don’t know his reasons for not explaining the call. But I would really like to know his thoughts on that last day and if he had that same strange feeling of finality that I did.

It seems a little pointless to ask, knowing that very few people ever come across this page, but do you think that I should contact him? Or would it be a mistake to try to clarify memories that have the happy haze of time across them?

Not even lunchtime...

And today is not turning out to be a very good day.

An Apology to my Thumb

Last might I did a Michael Scott and burnt myself on a George Foreman Grill. Luckily, I wasn’t frying bacon on the floor at the time, so it was my thumb rather than my foot, but it was incredibly painful. Just a word to the wise – Don’t grab hold of the appliance without first checking whether the part you’re grabbing is part of the hotplate or not.

I did that stupid thing where you grab something hot, but because your mind was expecting it to be cold, you hang onto it for a little while before your brain registers and screams “Let GOOOOO!!!!!! HHHHHHHOT!” So now my thumb has a strange grill mark across it and has gone kind of numb and shiny looking.

You don’t really realise the true importance of your thumb until you can no longer use it. Try unbuttoning your jeans without using your thumb – not an easy task. I also never realised how often you push buttons on things until my thumb was out of action. The microwave, the TV remote, the car key, the spacebar as I’m writing this...
Your thumb is really a very hard working part of your anatomy and I think it deserves a bit of credit for this.

So thanks, Thumb. Sorry about whole burning incident – I’ll be more careful next time.

Hangovers, Angels & Demons

I’m going to see a movie with my mum tonight. I can’t even remember the last time we did something like this together. Probably when I was 14 – so I guess that makes it about 13 or 14 years ago. That’s half a lifetime ago. I guess as I got older, the sort of time spent with my mum changed. We do more things as a family group and less as a mother/daughter; More family dinners and less of the one-on-one stuff. We go shopping together sometimes, but usually only with a purpose, never just for the fun of it.

This will be the second time in the last week that I’ve been to see a movie. For a long time we were saving like crazy for the wedding and we had zero spare time, zero spare cash and therefore zero social life. It’s nice to be able to do things like this again.

A friend and I went to see ’The Hangover’ last week and honestly I was pretty surprised at how funny it was. You sort of expect movies like that to have a few funny moments and a lot more questionable moments, but this was pretty consistently funny throughout. The session we were in was packed – there were very few spare seats and quite often you couldn’t hear what was going on in the movie because everyone was laughing so much. I think an atmosphere like that adds to how funny the movie seems – it’s a little odd to laugh out loud in an empty cinema because it makes you seem kind of crazy.

Tonight we’re going to see Angels and Demons. Honestly I don’t expect it to be all that good but it’s what my mum wanted to see and it does hold a little bit of interest for me.

I’ll read pretty much anything I can get my hands on and Angels and Demons was one of those books. I like to try and see films that are based on books just to see how the casting stacks up against the way I imagined the characters would look. I’m also hoping that the film flows a little better towards the end than the book did.
I guess we’ll see tonight.

Hand Signals

I can't stop thinking about the woman that I saw this morning on the way to work. She was standing by the side of the road, watching the oncoming traffic. She had her arm extended out as though she was hitch hiking, but instead of holding her thumb out, she was pointing with her index finger.

I looked at where she was pointing, but there was nothing there. I looked at the road, but there was nothing of note on it. She didn't seem troubled or anxious in any way. She was just calmly standing by the side of the road, pointing into nothing.

What was she pointing at? Was she trying to tell me something? I can't work it out because I am a complete failure when it comes to basic hand signals. I would never make it in the army, because all of that tricky hand motioning that they do when they're hiding in the jungle waiting to surround the enemy would go straight over my head. It doesn't matter how much you point at your eyes and the ground and try to mouth words without saying them - I just don't get it. Write it down or say it out loud if you want me to understand!

This woman was obviously trying to convey something to the people passing by and it's driving me crazy trying to work out what it was!

A Serious Question

Is it possible to think about a person so much that you inadvertently draw them into your life? How is it that after not thinking about someone for over 2 months and hoping that they were out of your life they can suddenly re-appear? It’s like the second I let her slip into my thoughts her evil little mind heard her name and materialised to continue wreaking havoc.

Ok, whingeing about evil women aside, I have a serious question:

Why is my spam always in Russian? How am I supposed to know what means of increasing my manhood are available if it’s in a foreign language? How am I supposed to understand the pleas of the Russian diplomat who wants me to help him transfer millions of dollar if I can’t tell what it is that he is saying? If I can’t read it, then it really is just junk and as such, the junk email folder is living up to its name in ways that it never really did before.

Social Problems Solved!

While discussing my total and utter social retardation with my boss, he came up with the idea to take me out on his sales calls so I can see his small talk in action.

It could be good, I might be able to learn how to answer questions about pus without being sick all over the person I'm talking to.

Third time unlucky

I think the general level of driving skill has deteriorated quite seriously of late. It seems that there are more random and dangerous drivers around than ever before. What i can't seem to work out is whether this is because people are getting worse at driving, or if it's just because the number of drivers on the road in total has increased, therefore the number of bad drivers has increased.

My sister has been run into twice in the last week - both times at the same intersection. The first was a taxi driver, who did a very sharp (and very illegal) left hand turn out of the right hand lane – then proceeded to get out of the car and abuse her for not being more careful!

The second was a woman who was stopped behind my sister at the same intersection. She kept creeping forwards whilst looking at the oncoming traffic instead of the car in front of her. Luckily she only tapped the bumper. On getting out of her car, she said “oh, I thought I’d hit the kerb for a minute there!” Which is a bit of a worry, considering she was nowhere near a kerb at the time!

Let’s just hope that bad things don’t really happen in threes, because that would mean an accident with an even more stupid driver, and I’m just not sure that’s possible.

A Little English Giggle

I've mentioned before that foreign accents tend to make me a little bit giggly, so you can imagine how I feel at the moment, while the only other people in the office are three Englishmen. They're talking serious business and I'm trying very hard not to giggle out loud.

An EBay Experience

I had my first EBay experience last week. Despite my super nerdiness, I’ve always resisted the urge to purchase on EBay - firstly because I am an addict by nature and I know that if I start, I’ll find it hard to stop; Secondly, because I’m spoilt and I like there to be a newness to my purchases. I like to be able to open an item and know that it has never been used before. That’s not to say that I’m opposed to second hand items, because I’m not. I just like the experience of unwrapping something new. It’s like a birthday present that I’ve bought for myself, but it can happen any time during the year. What can I say? I’m a big child. I LOVE birthdays.

The reason that I moved past these reasons and finally made a purchase was because I wanted to purchase something that has a totally unrealistic retail value. My new car has a USB connection and I wanted the manufacturer’s iPod cable so that I can control the iPod menu using my stereo buttons. Sadly, this tiny little cable retails for over $100. For a cable. Crazy! I wasn’t really keen on the idea of forking out that much money for a piece of wire, so I searched around to see if I could find somewhere else to purchase from, and eBay was the only result I came up with.

The fact that this item isn’t going to be purchased new is ok with me now, because I came to a realisation that negates all of the second-handed-ness.
This item will come in the mail. And not just the regular mail, but international mail. And if there is one thing as exciting as a present on an un-birthday, it’s opening the mail box to find a package that has travelled 12,000Km to reach me.

Frozen Seat

It's on days like today, when the temperature in the building is hovering around 5 degrees C, that I envy the male ability to pee standing up.

Belated Thanks

I’ve finally managed to write all of my thank you cards for the wedding. Better late than never, right? It was painful trying to think of unique and meaningful things to write. I sort of wish that I had just printed a generic thank you note and posted that out the week after the wedding. At least that way it wouldn’t have reached the point where people just assumed that the thank you’s had been forgotten. But I wanted to be specific about thanking people, so that it was all a little more personal. I just didn’t expect that it would take quite this long. I suppose a late thank you is better than no thank you at all.

Now all that’s left is to lick 52 stamps and send them out. Yum. Can’t wait for that. Ok, I’m lying, I don’t intend to lick ANY stamps. Not after finding that the wedding stamps for the invitations weren’t self adhesive and I had to lick over 100 of those little buggers. I suppose that’s the price I pay for being a perfectionist about my wedding invitations. I might just lower my standards a little for the thank you cards – you know, In aid of getting them sent out sometime this year.

Gobal Warming?

It is so cold today that i'm going to petition that it be renamed 'Global Cooling'.

Past, Present and Future

On Friday, I had a little preview into my future and my past all at once. We stopped on our way home to have dinner at an all-you-can-eat place that we used to go to a lot when we were kids. To be honest, when we drove past, I was surprised to find that it was still there. It's probably been 15 years since I last went there, and prior to that, it would have been another 5 years since I last visited. It was a Polynesian themed chain store that I thought had gone out of business a long time ago when all the other all-you-can-eat stores fell out of favour – around about the time that salmonella poisoning got a lot of media.

We stopped at KJ’s request, not my own, because I’m very anti all-you-can-eat. There are a whole heap of reasons why, the most prominent being that I don’t like to eat anything that looks as if it has formed its own protective coating in the indeterminate amount of time it has spent slowly congealing in a bain-marie.

I was shocked when we walked in to find that in the last 15 years not a single thing had changed. And I mean NOTHING. It was as if time inside the restaurant froze the second I walked out 15 years ago, and re-started when I walked back inside. The same 80’s carpet, same half-hearted Polynesian ‘artefacts’. The same old boat shaped salad bar, same plastic plants, same padded wicker chairs. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the same customers as there had been when I last left. Everything looked exactly as it had 15 years ago, not even the regular telltale signs of age showed. No fading, no patches, no replacement parts – 100% pristine, preserved buffet splendour. Even the food hadn’t changed (although that’s pretty typical of an all-you-can-eat restaurant).

As we were seated, feeling like we had stepped into a time capsule, I suddenly got a glimpse into my future. The reason we had stopped there was because we needed to have an early dinner and it was the best option available. It was 5:30pm, and as we sipped on lukewarm, soggy vegetable soup, the seats around us filled up with senior citizens. I suddenly came to the realisation that maybe I wasn’t looking into my past so much as straight into my future! I never thought that life coming full circle would involve a return to dodgy all-you-can-eat restaurants, but I guess the future is unpredictable!

Work vs. Slacking

Lately I'm finding that my work to slacking ratio is tilting in favour of the slacking. It's especially noticeable on a Friday, when two of my co-workers have the day off and the others conveniently have appointments with customers outside the office.

This leaves me alone at my computer, weighing up between working or slacking. Inevitably, i realise that the fact that I'm staring blankly at the screen weighing up these options actually constitutes slacking, and thereby my decision has already been made for me.

I do try to use my slacking time somewhat constructively, by doing things like increasing my vocabulary (playing facebook scrabble), honing my culinary skills (deciding what to have for dinner) and advancing my technological know-how (shopping for cool new gadgets online). So it's not really slacking when you look at it that way.

I guess you could say that my slacking is a vital part of my everyday routine. In fact i think i could go as far as to say that my Friday slacking is essential to my growth as a human being. Now all I need to do is convince the rest of the world about this and I'll never have to waste valuable slacking time worrying about whether or not to do some work.