Me vs. The Universe

As my lack of posts lately can attest, I have been incredibly busy at work. I have been so busy, in fact, that this weekend I found myself working on Saturday.

I had the building all to myself for most of the day and I had gotten huge amounts of work completed by the time one of my co-workers showed up around 4pm to pick up some stuff he had forgotten on Friday.

He seemed shocked to see me there on a weekend, and when I confessed that I was indeed working, he just shook his head.
You’re crazy! He told me, incredulously .

I’m not crazy, I told him. ‘I’m just a machine. A well-oiled playground designing machine.’

He just shook his head again and walked away. But I was on a roll; even his absence couldn’t still my rant.

‘Nothing can stop me!’ I trumpeted. ‘I’m slowed only by sickness, stopped only by death!’ I declared into the Universe.

The Universe didn’t like this.

‘Right’ it said, ‘I’ll show you.’

And it began to plot.


The universe hatched its dastardly plan early on Sunday afternoon as I headed outside to wash my car. My nose began to tickle a little. I put this down to the vast amounts of pollen in the air and got on with things.
I finished up and headed inside. I sat myself down on the couch and was immediately punched smack bang in the face by a cold. Bam! One moment I was fine, the next I was a wheezy, watery mess. There was no lead up. No feeling of an oncoming illness. One moment I was fine, the next I was like a character out of a cold and flu medication advert.

So now, courtesy of the Universe, I finally find myself with the time to post something. And while having a cold is incredibly annoying, I can only thank God that the universe chose the ‘slowed by sickness’ part of my statement to refute and not the other half. Because I imagine that blogging from the hereafter is probably a hell of a lot harder than blogging while sick.

Broken Dreams

For as long as I can remember, I have woken up every morning after having a very vivid and usually bizarre dream. Some dreams are more vivid and realistic than others, but it’s very rare for me to wake up without remembering a dream I was just having.

On occasion, like everyone does, I’ll have a nightmare or one of those dreams where your partner or a friend does something so irritating that after you wake up, you stay annoyed at them for the rest of the day. But mostly they’re just random events strung together in amusing and interesting ways.


Earlier in the year, I was taking some medication that made my dreams even more bizarre and vivid than normal. That was weird, because I kept dreaming that I was having conversations with friends and they were so vivid that later I would remember them as almost real, except for the fact that we would be talking about something totally crazy – like how the best bait to catch fish with is strawberries, or why I decided to paint my house with Clag.

Last week, I started taking a different medication, and as with the medication from before, its only side effect has been to affect my dreams - only in a completely different way to last time.


For the past week, I have had the longest, most mind-numbingly dull dreams I have ever had. I’m surprised that my brain can stay awake for them really. Last night, I had a dream that stretched on for what felt like an eternity in which I taught my sister how to play Canasta. In great detail.
The night before, I dreamt that I was typing an email. And it wasn’t even an interesting email! Just a ‘please find your files attached’ sort of thing.

Do you have any idea how long a day feels when before you even wake up you’re doing something incredibly dull and monotonous? Why can’t drugs have regular side effects on me, like headaches or nausea? Then I could just take some aspirin and be done with it.

You can’t take anything for boring dreams. You just have to suffer through them, and keep on playing canasta with your sister. Or dream an entire, dull day at work, right before waking up for an entire dull day at work.

It seems kind of weird to wish that your brain would be more crazy, but I do. Because well organised and logical dreaming is just weird. I get enough of that stuff during the day, I don’t need it at night too. Night-time is for floating through the air talking to a ladybug in a room that is your Lounge room but looks like your Nanna's kitchen.

Being Anti-Stalked

I like Facebook. It keeps me amused when work is slow. It feeds my scrabble addiction. It lets my best friend show me what her new boyfriend is like before I meet him.

What I don’t like about it is the school yard politics of it all. The controversy of deleting or rejecting a ‘friend’. The things that people post that they seem to think the rest of the world can’t see. The light-weight stalking that can go on.


I think I am being anti Facebook stalked. There is a girl who is a Facebook ‘friend’ who has added every single one of my friends that she has met for more than 15 seconds to her friends list. Now she is sending them all public wall posts, trying to make plans to go out with them. Without me. On Facebook. Where I can see.

It’s like the opposite of Facebook stalking. Instead of stalking me, she’s stalking all my friends and making it very clear that she is specifically not stalking me. Which in a lot of ways is more irritating than actual stalking. Because it’s hurtful rather than obsessive.


To be honest, I think she’s gone slightly crazy. She dated a friend of mine, and because of that, she thought we were best mates. She would ring me all the time and make plans to catch up without her boyfriend - which seemed slightly odd at the time, but I put it down to her just wanting to get along with his friends.

Then for a little while, she suddenly stopped calling or texting me. I didn’t think much of it, until I found out later that she was angry at me because I didn’t invite her to be a bridesmaid in my wedding. Because apparently you’re supposed to invite people you hardly know to be a part of stuff like that.


Then she and my friend broke up. That’s when the weirdness started. She rang my phone at 2am one morning and with barely a hello, demanded to speak to KJ. She demanded that he go and get all of her stuff from our friend’s place, and harass him for some money. When KJ said he couldn’t, she demanded to know why, as though he owed her an explanation for not jumping when she asked him to do something.
The next day she called me again, and when I told her that I didn’t think the phone call was appropriate, I got accused of being a bad friend. She said a lot of really mean things, and then she told me that I should be on her side. As if I want to take sides in someone’s relationship breakup!


And now the Facebook weirdness is starting. I’d like to just de-friend her, but I’ve said it before - I’m no good with confrontation. I would feel guilty about it for months.


I can’t understand people who cling to petty arguments or hold grudges for juvenile reasons. I’ve come across a few people like that in the past couple of years and I just can’t deal with them. They’re high on drama all the time. I don’t like drama ever really. I might be a little tightly wound at times, but never dramatic. And I don’t have time for people who want to turn everything into a big production.
But I always come back to this problem where once they’re in my life I can’t just cut them out, because the guilt slowly eats away at me until I feel sick from it.
I’d like to just go on with life only knowing people who are so laid back they’re almost horizontal. Instead I keep coming across these people who make everything into what feels like the script of a bad sitcom.

I think my best bet is to employ a front man - like the corporate face of Torrygirl. Someone to have all the awkward and angry confrontations for me, so that I’m just kept in the dark. That way, I can be crazy person and guilt free.

Back at it

I’m back at a work and already it feels like I never even had a holiday. It doesn’t take long to slip back into all the old habits –singing out loud on the way to work, 5 hour long meetings with no point, too many cups of coffee and secretly wearing my slippers under the desk where no one can see my feet.

The only thing that felt any different yesterday on my first day back was that I was a little more relaxed than on a regular working day. It took me most of my 3 and a half weeks of holiday to wind down and by the time I did, it was time to go back to work.

That relaxed feeling has been obliterated now from being thrown headlong back into pointless tasks by my doddering boss. I feel as though I spend a great deal of time humouring him and his crazy ideas while trying to get my real work done. It’s like some movie where the multi-million dollar corporation is owned by the crazy old timer in the wheelchair and they nod and smile at him while some sleazy manager is making all the real decisions behind his back. Although that would make me the sleazy manager, so maybe it’s not like that at all, since I’m not a manager and I’m reasonably sure I’m not sleazy.

Actually I shouldn’t be saying all of this, because if there’s one thing those sorts of movies teach you, it’s that the sleazy manager always gets his come-uppance.

So.....Work is fine. My boss is wonderful.
Really.

Drive me Crazy

I’ve uploaded 3 out of 5 of my photos for the Photo5 comp. Nearly there! I have a fourth photo sort of completed, but the fifth....well, I might not make it in time for that one. Oh well.

I’m still a little short of time this week, so I’ll make this a quick one.


On the way to work each morning, there is a section of road that I drive on with a speed limit of 100km/h. But for as long as I can remember, it has been next to impossible to drive at the limit – for some reason, everyone (except me) feels the need to go 20km’s under the limit, and it’s not often that you find yourself with no cars in front of you. It’s weird because it’s a straight piece of road with good visibility, so there is no reason at all to not do 100.

I have this kind of crazy subconscious thing that means if the sign says 100, I need to do 100 or I might quietly go insane. So every day, I spend 5 frustrating minutes driving at 20km’s under the speed limit while I feel the desperate need to put my foot to the floor and just drive over the sloooooow drivers in front.

At the start of this week, a new sign went up on this section of road stating that the limit had been reduced to 80km/h. Traffic continued to move at 80, just like it had done before when the limit was 100. But suddenly I found myself with a profound sense of inner calm. Everyone was going the speed they were supposed to. It didn’t matter that the council had changed the speed limit to make this happen. It didn’t matter that I was driving at the exact same speed as I always did. The magical power of that 80 speed sign had completely removed that 5 stressful minutes of my life.

Does that make me totally nuts?

Crazy Over CCTV

A week or so ago, this horrible and kind of odd thing happened here in Australia where a woman on a train platform got distracted for a second, and the pram with her 6 month old baby in it rolled onto the train tracks just as the train came into the station – and the baby survived without barely a scratch on it.

Yesterday I finally saw the CCTV footage of it happening and I must be going crazy because I had nightmares about it all last night. I’m not sure what it is about it that bothers me so much given that the baby survived – I think it’s the fact that I’m a bit weird-ed out by babies and their fragility. Maybe it was watching the mother freak the fuck out after it happens (understandably). Or possibly it’s because of that hopeless feeling you get when you’re watching something horrible about to happen and knowing that you can’t stop it. Either way, who wants to see that happening no matter how fortunate the outcome was?

I’m pretty sure that what makes me even crazier than having nightmares is that my other thought on seeing the footage was ‘Damn that must have been a super strong pram, I wonder what brand it was?’

My Quirky Nanna

I think my Nanna is going a little senile. She’s about to turn 80, and although she is surprisingly healthy and sane for her age most of the time, sometimes her behaviour defies explanation.


Take for example this week’s greeting card incident. My niece is turning five next week, and this year she’ll be spending her birthday in England with my sister-in-law’s side of the family. Because she won’t be around on the day, my Nanna did the good and proper Nanna thing and sent over a birthday card for her. It was a nice little card with a picture of snow white and the seven dwarves. In bed. Together.

You’d think that would be the tip off for her that it wasn’t exactly a kids card, but no - somehow she missed the writing across the bottom of the card that said “snow white still hadn't worked out how to tell them she was looking for someone a little taller...”


Nanna is full of little gems like that one. Her favourite trick is to use her mobile phone to call you and then forgetting to hang up, so that after leaving you a message on your answering machine, you can hear her complaining about your machine message or the fact that you never answer your phone.


Once, she bought me a ‘romance novel’ for Christmas. Now I’m not much of a romance novel fan, but when I’m short of reading material I’ll read just about anything I can get my hands on, so I thought I would give it a go. It turns out that it wasn’t so much a romance novel as an erotic novel. There were things in there that would make a porn star blush! I can only hope to hell that she didn’t actually read the book before she gave it me!


That’s just a small taste of the wonderful weirdness that is my Nanna. She’s my last living grandparent, and I’m happy that she’s still around to share her quirkiness with us.

Crazy Confused Magpie

Crazy confused Magpie is back. I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned him here before. He's a bird who is confused about what time of the day it is. He warbles the way magpies do in the morning – only he does it all night instead of in the morning like regular magpies. He graced us with his wonderful noisy presence all of last winter and has been un-noticeably and pleasantly absent until last night.

When I headed to bed at about 11:30 last night, he was warbling his merry morning song as if the sun were peeking over the horizon for a new day. It wasn’t. It was cold and dark and bleak outside. I was tired and he kept me awake until about 2am.

He is ruining me for spring mornings. Soon, when spring rolls around and I wake to one of those fantastic mornings where the warm sunshine filters through the curtains and you wake to the sound of bird song, I will become irate and get out of bed grumpy because I will have spent all winter being kept awake by a bird whose internal clock has a flat battery.

Do you think if i turned on all the lights outside it would trick him into thinking that it was the middle of the day and he would stop singing?

Working on a weekend is the worst idea ever.

I'm about to spend this afternoon working at home. Can you think of a worse way to spend a Sunday?

Ceiling vs. Floor

Why would anyone in their right mind put a heater vent into a ceiling? It makes no sense at all - and I will tell you exactly why.
1) How can you sit on it to keep warm if it's in the ceiling?
2) How can you use it to dry your clothes that didn't dry on the line overnight when you're running late in the morning?
3) How can you put your underwear on it to warm up on a cold morning?
4) I could be wrong here, but I think basic science tells us that hot air rises - so you're denying the warm air the right to fulfil it's scientific purpose if it's already at the top of the room
5) How can you find that last 50 cents to pay the pizza guy on Friday night when the number one storage area for lost poo-change is upside down and hanging from the ceiling?

Craziness, I tell you.

The Midnight Shopper

Since it's the holidays and I've spent most of the last six days sleeping, I decided at about 10pm last night that it would be a good idea to head to Chadstone Shopping Centre, which is open for 34 hours straight over Sunday/Monday. I don't have any shopping left to do, but I figured that because it was pretty late in the evening, it wouldn't be too busy there and it would keep me amused for a couple of hours.

Ok, so it was a stupid, totally unoriginal idea. It seems that every other person in Melbourne had very inconsiderately left all of their Christmas shopping until the last minute and were managing to ruin things for those of us who, by some miracle, finished their shopping early.

It should have a been a good sign that we should turn around and head for the hills when we got to Warrigal road and the traffic was absolute chaos. Three lanes of traffic, all trying to merge into the right hand lane was not a pretty sight. It's amazing how many people think they can just sneak a tonne of metal into a 10cm gap between cars - and that sticking out across two lanes of traffic is a-ok.

It's no wonder people get so road rage-ey at Christmas.

We stuck to the left lane and headed around to the other side of the shopping centre, which was relatively tame - although it did take four changes of lights for us to get into the carpark. We fluked a parking space almost immediately, without even having to stalk anyone, which made a nice change.

Inside it was more crowded than I had thought - the walkways inside Chadstone are pretty wide and the centre is absolutely enormous, so I figured that even with the crazy traffic, things shouldn't be too bad. Again, I was wrong. Someone had the brilliant idea of filling the walkways up with vendors stalls, so it was chaotically busy. I was belted with so many boxes of Barbie scooters and train sets that I expect my shins to be solid purple this morning. Kids presents are dangerous when placed in the hands of frantic, last minute shoppers.

Don't these people know that Santa does home delivery?

We stuck it out as long as we could, but had to bail out after about an hour as the throng of people just seemed to swell with every passing minute. It was bizarrely hot in there with all those bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder and 20,000 people all talking at once in stone corridors is loud.

Leaving was a lot easier than getting in, and I didn't even mind being stalked to our parking space by a desperate looking man with a car full of kids. I guess my great idea of a late night shop while everyone else was asleep was not really as great as I hoped.

Christmas shopping really could kill the Christmas spirit in even the most dedicated holiday-lover.

Crazy Lazy Déjà vu

I keep having these little déjà vu experiences this week, where I am in the middle of doing some intensely mundane task like punching holes in paper and I suddenly realize that I had a dream about this exact thing months and months ago – sometimes even years. It just pops into my head that I recognize this exact moment.

This has got me thinking about time. Time is a funny concept really and the more of these freaky little déjà vu things that I have, the more I’m beginning to believe that maybe everything has already happened and I’m just sort of remembering it a bit at a time. This would explain a lot of things – like why people inexplicably hate some things without any valid reason – maybe it’s from a future memory of something that put them off that item. It also explains why I’m so lazy. It’s because I’ve already done everything.

I think it might also vaguely explain psychics but I’m not 100% certain on that one because I haven’t quite worked out how they know stuff about other people rather than just themselves.

Quite disturbingly, Wikipedia tells me that apparently there is a link between déjà vu and schizophrenia and anxiety. I prefer the time theory, because it means I’m not crazy or stressed out – plus it explains my laziness a lot better than anything else I’ve ever thought up.
Is it crazy to be lazy because of déjà vu?