Dance Music, Glam Metal & Boy Bands

The new formula for my life this week:

Illness = Medication = Insomnia = Me in a very grumpy mood today

I guess you could say I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I’m in a terrible mood, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason other than the fact that sleep is eluding me this week.

I think what might really be getting to me is the fact that having been ill for the past 3 weeks, I’ve barely left the house. I’ve had to cancel a lot of plans and I think I’m going crazy, like a prisoner thrown into solitary confinement for just a little too long.

Even thought going to work isn’t much of a social occasion for me given that every other person in the place is male, I’m even starting to miss that tiny bit of human interaction. Up until the last few days, I haven’t even really had the energy to spend much time online, which means that even online chatting has been out. My lifelong dreams of becoming a hermit are getting closer and closer to becoming a reality.


Luckily, this weekend marks an event in my calendar that no illness could stop – that’s right, it’s Eurovision time again!! This Sunday Night, a group of my friends and family will be coming around for our annual Eurovision party, where we will which the tackiest best musical talent that Europe has to offer.

The best part about watching Eurovision (aside from the complete and utter dagginess of it all) is that it transports you back about 10 or 15 years. For some reason, Europe seems to be a decade behind the rest of the world musically. Obviously there’s the occasional modern song which will usually fail dismally, or something traditional which fares well with the countries located nearby. But there is an overwhelming abundance of what I would call imitation retro music.

Last year’s completion saw a lot of bad 90’s style dance music:



with a bit of what I’m pretty sure is classified as glam metal thrown in:



as well as a few 90’s boy band-ish love ballads (I call this one Danish Ronan Keating):



It was like a trip down memory lane – that is, a trip down a foreign and slightly confusing lane where everything looks sort of familiar, but the signs don’t make any sense and you have no idea where the lane is leading.

As always, I highly recommend that everyone watch Eurovision. It might not be quite as funny since Terry Wogan retired from doing the commentary, but it’s still pretty amusing, and this year should remind you of a lot of music in the early 2000’s.

Now all that is left to be decided is what kind of foreign food I’ll serve at the party. I was angling to make something Norwegian since this year’s competition is being held in Norway, but it turns out that from what I can find, Norwegian food is slightly less than exciting and also pretty heavy on the flatulence inducing ingredients. Not ideal for a small room full of people if you ask me. I’m thinking maybe I can just go with a Scandinavian theme and do a bit of grocery shopping at IKEA. Maybe meatballs will do the trick – they seem appropriate.

I’ll leave you with last year’s winner, a guy that freaks me out because he looks a lot like a boyfriend I had in high school.

Back to work - sort of

Today, after over a week of being disgustingly sick, I attempted to head back to work. That was a bit of a failure. By 2pm I was so tired I had to head home again. It was the longest 30 minute drive of my life - I thought I was going to fall asleep at the wheel the entire way.

I'm trying very hard to just pretend that I'm not actually sick, but it isn't working that well. I'm a lot better than i was last week at least. After seeing 3 doctors and taking what feels like every drug eveer invented, they finally managed to work out what was wrong with me. Then I got to do fun things like have a throat ultrasound. That was pleasant.

The only redeeming thing about having a doctor pressing an object the size of an electric razor into your throat and rolling it around for 20 minutes is that my doctor was kind of hot. That NEVER happens. Doctors are only hot in movies and on TV - real life doctors are always old and have ratty looking beards and spit a little when they talk. Ok, maybe that's a generalisatiion, but in my experience hot doctors are few and far between. So I could kind of forgive him for 20 minutes of extreme discomfort.

I'm off to see yet another doctor tomorrow - a specialist - so hopefully after that I'll be back to feeling my usual self. I can't wait - illness sucks.

Back soon

I'm feeling pretty bad that I haven't really blogged this week, but I am so sick at the moment that I'm not really capable of writing anything that isn't about how utterly and completely crap I'm feeling. So at the moment I thought it best to just write a post to say that I'll hopefully be back soon and feeling a bit more like writing things that are a bit more interesting than talking about how sick i am.

The Uncommon Cold

I think I've managed to invent a new kind of disease. It's like the common cold, only rarer - so let's call it the uncommon cold. Its main symptom is that you're freezing cold ALL THE TIME. Either that or else my constant coldness could be related to the fact that my central heating is broken, and has been for a couple of weeks now.

The heater guys are coming to replace the unit this morning which is good because it's 12°C in my house this morning and that's just a little bit cold for my liking. It's not the greatest living temperature when you have a bad cold either. My illness of last week has gotten better only for me to get even sicker this week with the good old winter bug that's doing the rounds.

I'm taking so many different drugs to fight it off that it's a wonder I'm actually able to function. I've had to work two very long days this week without even a lunch break to get a very important presentation finished and as a result, today I've just fallen into a heap after getting out of bed. So it's pretty lucky that i had to stay home anyway for the heater to be fixed. 

I'm hoping the heater wont take long to fix, so that my cold will disappear and my brain will begin to function properly again. Then i wont do stupid things any more, like i did last night.

After a very long day, i was sitting on the couch trying to find something to do. Following who knows what train of thought, I found myself assessing the need for shaving my legs. Do i leave them unshaven in order to preserve some warmth, as the growth of hair on our legs was presumably intended to do, or do i shave them anyway? After a handful of various pills to try and make myself feel better, i decided that shaving them was the best idea. I guess i decided on beauty over comfort, or something equally as shallow.

I can now tell you that one thing you should never do when you're zoned out on cold medicine is shave your legs. I'm not talking about cutting yourself, which I've never been able to work out how people manage to do. I refer instead to the fact that in a spaced-out frame of mind, it's easy to forget that when shaving your legs, you need to do both the front AND the back.

At least the back of my body is warm this morning.

Impulse Buy

The reason for my total slackness in posting this week is that I've been pretty sick. I've had tonsillitis or something, which means pretty much feeling like crap all of the time. Thankfully I'm heading back to feeling alright now.

After feeling half dead for the entire start of the week, I finally got around to going to the doctors on Thursday and he gave me a prescription for some drugs. I went to the pharmacy to get it filled and as per usual I had to sit down and wait for it to be ready. As I sat there, I found myself facing a wall of products. After a while, I noticed that they seemed to have a kind of common theme in that they all seemed to relate to issues of the bowel/intestinal kind. They had regular-ish things for upset stomachs and what not, but also some odd things like some kind of liquid that helps stop excessive farting and things for haemorrhoids and constipation.

I had to wonder what kind of pharmacy would put this crap right in your eye line knowing that you would have to stare at it for so long. Then the elderly fellow who was sitting next to me got up when his name was called, and on his way past he grabbed a bottle of antacid. That's when I realised - this is the pharmacy version of the impulse buy item! In a supermarket, it's candy bars and magazines, in a pharmacy, which is frequented by more elderly people than any other age group, the impulse buys are targeted at them and their weak bladders and excessive cabbage consumption!

How did I never notice this before? Now I have to wonder what other places have impulse buy items targeted at specific markets like this that I've never noticed before. I'm going to keep an eye out everywhere I go now just to see if there are other businesses that do this same thing, or if I've just come across a pharmacist who also seems to be super business-savvy.

The price of a haircut

I had a haircut last Thursday. It’s a pretty long process, but it’s a routine that I don’t think too much about because it’s one of those things that has always taken a long time, so I never really think it through too carefully.
Basically, I spend three hours sitting in a chair, during which my hair is fondled, coloured, foiled, washed, trimmed, dried, straightened, fondled some more and then trimmed again. For this amazing experience, I get to fork out around about $110. It’s a massive amount of money for a haircut. But I’ve had a lot of bad haircuts in my life, so now that I’ve found somewhere that leaves me walking out feeling like I’m starring in a Pantene ad every single time, I don’t question it.

But on Thursday, being that I was pretty bored and extremely tired from a very busy week, rather than reading to pass the time I stared blankly at my reflection in the mirror and pondered my hairdressing experiences.

I get my hair cut once every seven weeks. I know it’s always exactly seven weeks, because I’m lazy and useless at making appointments for things, so I always book my next appointment while I’m there. That means that I get approximately 7.5 haircuts per year. So on average, I’m spending about $825 a year just on my hair.

Kj, on the other hand, has his hair cut about once every 10 weeks. His haircut costs him about $18. That means he spends about $93 a year on his hair. That’s less than one trip to the hairdresser costs me. Granted, it takes him a hell of a lot less time than it takes me to have a haircut, but still! It would take him around 7 years of haircuts to work up to what it costs me for 1 year.

Truly unfair.


The other thing that I find weird about getting a haircut is that for three solid hours you stare at yourself in the mirror. It’s quite vain really. I never look at myself that much at any other time. Even when I do my own hair at home I probably don’t look at myself for more than a few fleeting seconds just to make sure everything is in place.

The other thing is that my hairdresser is a guy. He’s not one of those overly effeminate male hairdressers – he’s a kind of ¼ goth, ½ emo, ¼ nerd combination. Having a haircut is pretty much one of the few times that you can have a guy running his hands through your hair and have your husband be ok with that.


I’m not really sure what I’m getting at with all of this. I guess I’m just pointing out that it’s kind of crazy that I can spend $800 a year on haircuts when KJ can get away with a great haircut for about an eight of the price. And getting a haircut is actually an odd kind of experience, if you really think it though.