The Phantom of the Couch

This past four day weekend should have been a great opportunity to get out and do a few things that I’ve been meaning to for a while; a chance to have a few drinks with friends and maybe have one of the first barbeques of the year. Instead it turned into what I’m now calling my ‘Phantom of the Opera’ weekend.
It’s less of a musical weekend and more of a ‘being too hideously deformed to go out in public’ kind of thing.

I had a bad reaction to some medication, and ended up swollen and rashy (lovely, I know). Of course as luck would have it, the reaction was limited to my face and neck. So not only did I have to live with the irritation of side-effects, but they left me looking like an obese, pimply 16 year old.

I sulked at home on the couch all weekend, refusing to leave the house and making KJ go out without me whenever we needed something. I have watched so much television that I’m finding real life kind of strange – I can’t understand why there isn’t canned laughter whenever I make a joke, or why bizarre and amusing things aren’t happening to me in mundane situations.

Now the weekend is over and instead of sulking on the couch at home, I’m sulking in my office, trying to avoid talking to anyone or drawing attention to myself until I’m totally back to normal.

At least I have virtual me – my online presence that is much more well spoken, swears less, is about 3 inches shorter and most importantly, looks less like the Phantom and more like the chick that the Phantom fancies.

Friday Night Plans

KJ is away for the weekend, as he has been for most of the week, and with no plans tonight I have well and truly managed to exhaust the list of things I'm capable of doing to keep myself amused.

So far I've watched tv, read the end of my book, eaten the entire contents of my fridge (which sounds bad, but was basically just some leftover pasta and a box of chocolates); slid up and down the kitchen in my socks 'Risky Business' style, straightened my hair, played several mindless iPad games and beaten both my mum and my sister at online scrabble.

I am so incredibly bored! I think I might sit down with a glass of wine and watch a movie before I get tempted to do something really crazy like ironing or cleaning the house.

Celebrity-Free Election

I despise politics with such intense passion that I've completely blocked all knowledge of it from my brain - even the most basic things that you learn in primary school. Left Wing? Pretty sure it's the one on a bird opposite the right wing. Caucus? Is that some kind of exotic fruit? Bicameral? That's an animal with two humps, right?

What I can say though, is that I feel a little upset that in the upcoming election, there isn’t a single celebrity candidate for the new head of the country.


In the USA, people like Arnie, Gary Coleman and Clint Eastwood have all delved into the world of politics, and I think that it helps to spice things up for people like me, who find politics incredibly dull and could use something to make it all a little more interesting.


The closest thing we have here is Peter Garrett, front man for Midnight Oil, and even that’s not quite as big a leap as having someone like Arnie step up because Peter Garrett is the Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts, which, if you’ve ever listened to a Midnight Oil song, isn’t that big of a leap.



So instead, this Saturday I’ll be handing down to the local primary school to vote in the federal election to choose between our first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, who proved herself to be a true woman with a bit of bitchy back-stabbing of K-Rudd, or Tony Abbott, a man who willing appeared in public wearing budgie smugglers.

Would you want this man running your country?

Where are the celebrity candidates when you need them?

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.

Cats

The weekend before the Easter long weekend, I went to see Cats the Musical. I’ve wanted to see it ever since the 80’s. I can remember seeing the ads on TV and hearing all this hype about how great it was and how everyone loved it. I had no idea what the show was about, of course – other than that it was about some Cats. Fair assumption, really. I think that’s probably the extent of most people’s knowledge of the show - that it’s about people prancing around pretending to be cats, and that it was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. What else do you really need to know about it? It’s a musical after all; everything that you need to know they’ll sing about in the opening number.

One of the main reasons that I’ve wanted to see it for so long is that in the 80’s, you couldn’t go a week without hearing someone singing ‘Memory’ . You can’t hear something that regularly and not have it stick with you. It’s a pretty good song as far as musical numbers go, so I figured the rest of the show to be just like that – A lot of pretty good (if slightly 80’s-ish) musical numbers.

No such luck. It turns out Memory was the only song that was written from scratch for the musical. Everything else is just a bunch of TS Eliot poems set to music. What the hell! That’s just lazy! The poems themselves are reasonably amusing, but you can’t just string a bunch of poems together with some vague attempt at a plot so you can actually call it a story.

The costumes were phenomenal. The set was impressive. The choreography was great. The show, however, was terrible. There was no real plot. It was basically just a bunch of cats introducing themselves through long, drawn out songs that I couldn’t understand the words to.
I’m not sure if maybe I would have liked it more if I had of known what it was about before I saw it, but I didn’t, and because it was so hard to understand what they were singing about it was two of the most confusing hours I’ve spent in a long time.

At one point, the stage was full of people pretending to be cats pretending to be dogs and I couldn’t understand a single word of what they were banging on about – so it was really just a bunch of people in spandex with cardboard boxes on their heads chanting and occasionally barking like dogs. You don’t have to pay money to see that; you just have to find the right area of Melbourne and you’re bound to come across someone doing it for free.

So it was a total waste of time and money really. How sad. It did, however, confirm for me that my days of being amused by musicals are well and truly done.

Internet Dating

After my old lady experience this week, I was looking forward to Saturday night where my best friend and I were planning to undo all of my very old-lady-like behaviours with copious amounts of cocktails. Ok, in all truthfulness, because I don't drink that often any more she would probably have had copious amounts of cocktails and I would probably have two or three and then spend the rest of the evening drunkenly telling the couch how much I've appreciated it's faithful service over the years then getting upset when it didn't respond.


However it would have ended up, Saturday night was going to be my young person night. Crap, that sounds like something an old lady would call it. Well, you get the drift. I was going to be silly and care free and kill some brain cells with brightly coloured liquids in margarita glasses.


Sadly, at 11am on Saturday morning, my best friend called to say she had to cancel. It was for this reason that tonight I find myself debating whether or not a solo trip to the local pub is worth it.

The thing is, when you go to a pub on your own on a Saturday night, two things are guaranteed to happen. 1 – you'll get drunk and talk to anyone who will listen, and 2 – you will get hit on. You are pretty much guaranteed to be chatted up by some guy, because really, why would you be at a pub alone on a Saturday night if you weren't looking to meet people?
Since I'm not looking to pick up and KJ is away all weekend, I decided against the pub and instead am spending the night at home painting the house.

Score check:
Young Torrygirl: 0
Old Lady Torrygirl: 2


The whole situation got me to thinking about what I would be doing right now if I were single. I would probably go to the pub; although to be honest, being such a nerd I think that if I was looking to meet someone, I would be more inclined to give online dating a go.


I feel kind of ripped off that I never had the opportunity to use internet dating. It's only really become a regular way to meet people over the last 5-10 years or so. Before that it was a bit taboo. I know couples who met online back when it was considered an unusual way to meet people, and they still won't tell most people how they met. The embarrassment is too deeply ingrained.
But nowadays it's completely normal and not even mildly embarrassing. I feel ripped off that my dating days were done before I had the opportunity to embrace my nerdiness and meet people in a way that I'm comfortable with. I think back to all those nights in bars and clubs trying to start up conversations with strange men and I realise that life would have been so much easier with the ability to just meet people online.


Thinking about all this made me wonder what I would put in my online dating profile if I were to need one. What do people put in them now? How much information is too much information?

With a whole lot of spare time on my hands tonight, I decided to browse around, see what the norm is, and have a go at writing my own. Everything I found seemed to have 3 sections. The first was a spiel about yourself and what you're doing on a dating website. The second was a basic profile, and the third was a section listing your interests and what you're looking for.
I omitted writing a big intro spiel about myself, because it would only seem false and stupid, since I have no real intention of internet dating, but I came up with my basic profile, and a list of interests.

So here it is, the online dating profile that will never be...

Profile
	My details	My ideal partner
Gender	Female	Male
Age	27 years old	27 yrs - 42 yrs old.
Location	Melbourne	Earth
Body type	Slim-ish.	Preferably not morbidly obese or skinnier than I am.
Smoking	Non-Smoker with a slight passive smoking addiction	-
Relationship status	Single	Single
Has kids	No	No
Want kids	Maybe	Maybe
Personality	Socially retarded. Expect me to say stupid things, but know that there is no malice behind them	Must have one.
Eye colour	Brown. Feel free to call it Hazel or Coffee if it makes me sound more alluring.	-
Hair colour	Dark Brown	It doesn't matter, but while filling this in I realised that I have never dated a blonde. It wasn't on purpose. Blondes are perfectly acceptable.
Zodiac Sign	Aries	-
Lifestyle
Drinking habits	Mostly socially, but also on Fridays for no real reason.	If you have more drinks every night than there are days in the week, then we just weren't meant to be.
Have pets	No	Preferably not, unless they're the kind that require no feeding, cleaning or attention
Education level	A bit of this, a bit of that.	Must be able to spell properly. No text speak. Don't say LOL unless you're actually laughing out loud. And if you say RFLMAO, you better have the carpet burns to prove it.
Career industry	Design	No jobless bums

WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR
A PC user who detests Mac smuggity.
Someone who will make me laugh and who values family.
Someone who puts the toilet seat down after using it without having to be asked – it's the little things that count, you know.

MY INTERESTS
Music
I'll listen to pretty much anything except grunge and thrash metal. I like something I can sing along to in the car/shower.
Reading
Anything and everything except politics.
Movies & TV
I'm a TV series addict. I love Lost, Alias, Northern Exposure, MASH, The Office, Brothers & Sisters (don't judge me, Sally fields was allegedly hot once so you probably love it too) and a heap more.
I'll watch pretty much any movie although I'm not a huge fan of horror. I can't start watching a movie and not see it through to the end – the only film I've never finished watching was 'Old Dogs' and to be honest, I'm not sure why I started watching it in the first place. Big Mistake.
Sport
No thanks. I don't run unless something is chasing me.
Other interests
I am an internet nerd, a blogger and I really like to dance, although I find that having a few beers first tends to improve my skill.



Now add to that a suitably saucy username and my profile is complete! I could just sit back and wait for the emails to pour in.

Mysterious Injury

I have somehow mysteriously given myself a back injury. It's not mysterious in the "I know exactly how it happened, but it's not for public knowledge" kind of way, it's mysterious in the "I sit down all day and when I got up to get something from the printer, my back was mysteriously agonisingly painful" kind of way.

So here I am at home today with nothing to do but trying to avoid moving as much as possible.


Back injuries really only have one purpose, in my opinion. It's to make you feel old. Because when your back is killing you and you can't really move, you feel like an 80 year old woman who has to spend all day in bed.


I need to come up with some un-old-lady things to do today to keep myself amused. The trouble is, these things need to involve as little movement as possible, so it's very possible that anything I do could feasibly be done by little old ladies as well.

The first thing that comes to mind is drinking. It's helpful in making me feel younger, and it has the added side effect of reducing my back pain.The problem here is that drinking and pain killers don't generally mix. Which makes me wonder if little old ladies generally don't drink much because they don't want to, or because their medication forbids it. When I put it that way, the most un old lady thing I could do would be to drink anyway, because it's the less sensible (and therefore less old lady) choice.

Then I thought maybe getting online might help. Old ladies aren't really big on using the internet, right? But then I remembered KJ's Grandpa, who is 88 years old and a massive computer nerd. And I realised that when I really am 80 years old, I will still know how to surf the web, therefore making it a pretty stock standard old lady thing to do.

I briefly thought about prank calls, because they don't require any real movement, but I realised that the novelty of prank calls wore off for me about 20 years ago, and to be honest, they weren't even that fun then.


So I guess the only thing left to do is to either get really drunk, or to give in to my old lady-ness. Obviously I'm pretty much there already,right? All I need are some knitting needles and an overbearing, demanding demeanour and I'll be set!

February - The Blah Month

February is such a Blah month. That’s right – Blah with a capital B. Nothing good ever happens in February, hence there is never anything to write about.

The highlight of my month is that my mum is cooking a roast for dinner tonight. She’s promised me lots of vegetables as well - this should go a long way in ensuring that my horribly low fruit and veg intake doesn’t give me scurvy or something.


Mum makes an awesome roast. She always has, but ever since my brother and sister-in-law moved back to Australia, it’s been even better. My sister-in-law doesn’t eat red meat, so that means that when we have a roast we have either lamb or beef as well as roast chicken.

Mmmm, I’m drooling just thinking about it.

I like dinners like this, because it’s good to see all of my family. My niece is 5 now and is an absolute crack up. She’s at that age where she’s still cute and little, but she’s starting to become an independent person which means she comes out with some hilariously grown-up sounding things. You don’t realise the stupid grown-up turns of phrase that you use until you have a 5 year old repeat them back at you.

Sad, really, that this is the highlight of my month.
The only good thing I can say about February is that there is only 2 and a half weeks of it left. Then we’ll be in March and the year can really kick off.

Internet Withdrawl

My internet connection at work has been dropping in and out for the last two days, and when it is working, it’s super slow. This is a very bad thing. The days are incredibly long when I don’t have the wonder of the internet to entertain me while I wait for my computer to complete processor-heavy tasks.
I don’t even have solitaire on my computer, so every 10 minutes or so, I find myself staring blankly at the screen while I wait.

I notice lots of little things that I didn’t before. For example, the guy who sits opposite me clears his throat at least 15 times per minute. The guy who sits next to me has a mouse that clicks really really loudly. The guy sitting opposite me often sings along with the radio at a volume which I’m pretty sure he thinks no one else can hear, but which allows me to hear that he’s bordering on tone-deaf.

These are all things I’ve blocked out by using the internet to distract me. The big question is, once the internet is working again, will I be able to go back to ignoring these things? Or am I doomed to slowly and surely go crazy from the constant “Ahem, click-click, La-la-la”?

And even more importantly, what the hell can I do to keep me amused without the internet?!

Long Days

The nature of my job is that the work fluctuates. This means that some weeks I’ll be flat-out, working from 8am until after 6 with barely a break. Then, other days – like today – I’ll be sitting here twiddling my thumbs (however the hell you do that) and trying to think of things to do to keep myself amused.

So far I’ve exhausted all my usual avenues – facebook scrabble, blog surfing, daydreaming etc. – and now I’m just sitting here watching the hands of the clock tick over.

In fact, today is so dull that I don’t even really have anything to write about, but am writing purely for the sake of killing time. So any suggestions for ways to kill time would be much appreciated – otherwise I might have to resort to locking the door to my office and napping under my desk.

Highlights of a Coma

It’s nearly 6pm and I’m still at work. I’m waiting for KJ, whose very expensive 2000 model luxury sports car has broken down yet again. That car is the biggest money pit ever. It has broken down more times than my 1970’s car ever did.

So just to cap of the coma-inducing day that I’ve had, I get to hang around here for another hour or two while I wait for the car to be towed back. Yay for me!

Is it possible?

Is it possible to have a day that is so dull that you might actually lose consciousness? Because if it was, I think today would be that day.

Weeds

I'm watching a guy try to weed the empty lot next door in 100km/h winds. Quite unsurprisingly, he's not having much luck. Did you know it was possible for a person to be standing up while almost horizontal?

Photo5

This has been the absolute dullest week I’ve had in a very long time.

The only redeeming thing about this week is the fact that registration for the Canon Photo5 competition opened on Monday.

Without going into too much detail, the general gist of the Photo5 competition is that it’s a photography contest where Canon sends you out a box with 5 mystery items in it and you can take and submit 5 photos, each featuring one item.

I’ve been taking photos for quite a while as a bit of a hobby, and late last year I finally got myself a new camera – a Canon 40D. At that stage I had just missed out on registering for last year’s competition, so I’m pretty happy to be able to give it a go this year.

I should get the box in the next couple of days and hopefully that will kill some of the dullness around here. I can’t wait to get started!!!

Not much going on...

Next weekend, if all goes to plan, I’ll be going with a friend to see the The Whitlams play at the Corner Hotel in Richmond. It’s been forever since I went to see a band play, and I’m a bit excited about seeing The Whitlams because Eternal Nightcap is one of those albums that just sort of lives in my CD stacker because it’s perfect for when you can’t decide what you’re in the mood to listen to.

Life is being suitably boring at the moment otherwise. My entire family has run off to various countries around the world for a holiday while I’m left here to keep on working through. My parents have headed to Malaysia, my Brother & his family are in England, my Cousins are in Europe, Aunties and Uncles in the Greek Islands. Even my grandmother has headed off for a holiday to Merimbula! And while Merimbula isn’t exactly an international destination, it’s still one more person who is on a holiday while I’m at home watching re-runs of MASH and trying to live off 2 minute noodles because I’m too lazy to cook a real meal.

At least I have the Whitlams to look forward to, although I shouldn’t get too excited yet because I don’t quite have my tickets yet and knowing my luck lately, they’ll be sold out already!

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?

Something for the Eyes and Ears

I was going to start this post with the sentence “I’m starting to get really desperate for new things to read and new music to listen to” but I thought it didn’t sound too great announcing my increasing desperation in my first sentence. Having said that, I can now say that I’m starting to get really desperate for new things to read and new music to listen to.

I subscribe to about 60 or so blogs that I read regularly. In my brief hiatus from stalking the internet while I was busy slaving over my wedding, it appears that about 50 of those 60 have either stopped blogging or are now blogging infrequently. This leaves me with a lot less reading material than I like.

I miss working in the city where I was only 60 seconds walk from the nearest second-hand book store. They were big stores too, with a lot of variety. The suburb where I live now is technically defined as a ‘rural’ area, so stores like that are a little hard to come by. We have 2 op-shops, but they’re pretty much useless unless you want to read Mills & Boon novels.

I need something to read!! Any and all book suggestions would be welcomed (excluding Mills & Boon novels of course).


On the music front – I lost all of the music on my iPod when it did something weird and had to be reset. I’m terrible with song and artist names, which means I’m spending a lot of time saying things like “you remember that song where the guy sings about the girl, only she’s not a girl and it’s kind of old and has something to do with coke, but not actually coke coz they changed it at the last minute to something else so they wouldn’t get in trouble from coca cola or whatever?”

I’ve decided that rather than rebuilding the same collection of songs on my ipod, I’m going to find some new music. Well, new to me anyway. I’m not sure where to start with this new music search, but as with the books, any and all suggestions are welcomed. I found this site which will suggest bands similar to whatever name I type in, so I guess I’ll start there.

I might stop my rant here, because I can sense already how dull this post is and I think it’s best kept to a minimum number of words. I might have to post again later when my brain can muster up something slightly more interesting – it’s been a very dull week.