Popcorn Overkill

I've just been to the movies, where I ate a carton of popcorn that was roughly twice the size of my head. I feel a little sick now.

The Land of Guns, Convenience Stores & Erotic Books

In half an hour I'm heading for the airport for a weekend trip to Sydney. I've been to Sydney several times over the last few years, but only ever on business - never as a giant tourist like I will be this weekend! Ok, admittedly I do have to do work stuff today, but that’s only half a day and then the rest of the weekend is all mine.

I’m going to spend the weekend trying to discover if there really is more to Sydney than adult book stores, gun shops and convenience stores (people keep telling me there is). Mostly the convenience stores intrigue me. I’ve never been anywhere else where you can walk past two 7-Eleven stores in one block. That’s just weird. But very convenient, and I suppose that’s what it’s all about. And I suppose you need lots of snacks and stuff after all the gun and erotic book shopping.

Wish me luck!

Happy 100th!

Welcome to my 100th blog post! Ok, so 100 posts isn’t a huge milestone when you take into account the other 150 or so posts that are here at my old blog, but I’m celebrating it anyway because if I count it as 250 posts, the next big milestone isn’t really until 500, and that’s a long way off. Plus I like celebrations. Any excuse for a party.

Because this is such a milestone post, I’m going to make it a bit special by sharing 10 things about me that you may not know. Ok, so maybe that’s not special to you, but it’s my blog and my 100th, so I get to say what’s special around here!

I was going to list 100 things, but I don’t think I could come up with that many things (I’m really not that interesting) and it would also take forever.

1. I could live on Indian food. It is my all time favourite and I could eat it for every single meal. We have it at least 3 times a week. Oddly enough though, I have no desire to travel to India and eat the food – I think it would spoil my love of the flavours by being too hot. I also believe that the pappadum is one of the greatest inventions EVER.
   
   
2. I have an incredible relationship with my sister and it makes me very happy. We had some insanely evil fights when we were younger, but have somehow grown to have a very close relationship and she is one of the few people that I trust completely.
   
   
3. I’m a brunette - and regarding blondes having more fun, the only thing I think blondes have more of is bleach. No offense to any blondes reading this.
   
   
4. I play online scrabble and bejewelled blitz almost compulsively. It’s pretty much the main reason that I have a Facebook account.
   
   
5. I thank God every day for giving me a metabolism that has kept me slim despite my serious addiction to good food - because I am way too lazy to exercise.
   
   
6. I can’t imagine myself ever having babies or being a mother, but will eventually do it anyway because it seems like something I might regret not doing when I’m older. After all, I need someone to check me into happy valley when I’m too old and decrepit to look after myself.
   
   
7. I love painting – and while that sounds all clever and creative, I don’t mean the arty kind of painting, I mean the house kind of painting. I find it therapeutic and relaxing to paint walls, but I don’t do it very often because I can’t stand the prep work.
   
   
8. My house had brown shag carpeting – a relic from the 70’s when the house was built. It’s quite worn and needs replacing, but secretly I don’t really want to get rid of it because it’s warm and comfy and makes the house feel lived in.
   
   
9. I hate winter because I can’t stand being cold, but I love it because it means I get to wear scarves, which I adore. I have about 10 or 15 of them, mostly knitted woollen ones. I’m currently wearing a grey wool scarf that is twice as long as I am tall.
   
   
10. I started blogging because I wanted to take the thoughts out of my head and get them into some kind of order so that I could think things through more clearly. Publishing them online seals the deal by casting them out into the wide open so they’re not just my inner thoughts anymore. Also, the occasional comments are nice because you don’t get those if you keep it all in your head (unless you’re schizophrenic, of course).

So there you have it – 10 things about me that I’m pretty sure you didn’t (and maybe didn’t want to) know.

Happy 100th!!!!

Psychic Lunch

There are several food shops near work and we rotate between these for our lunches. It’s a very healthy choice of Noodles, Fish & Chips, Pies, Chinese, Kebabs or Charcoal Chicken (which a friend recently told me is a store concept that hasn’t caught on in America - but that’s a whole other story.)

There are about 5 of us in the office and we all eat lunch together (awww, like a big family!). A co-worker asked me earlier to think about which shop I wanted to eat from. I thought about it for a little while, and decided on a kebab, because even though kebabs are usually hangover food the kebab shop near work is absolutely stellar and you can almost pretend that it’s healthy because of the salad.

Just as I was about to pick up the phone to let him know, my mobile rang and it was KJ, whose first words were “Hi, do you want a kebab for lunch?”

How did he know!!?? Is it possible that by spending so much time together, our brains have tuned into the same wavelength in some way? This sort of thing happens to us all the time. Or perhaps I like food so much that I’m subconsciously sending out psychic brainwaves.

Either way, I’m happy because I get my kebab.

The Over-Exaggerator

I have a friend who over-exaggerates. She’s always been a bit of a drama queen, but it was ok, because it tended to take your mind off your own problems. Trouble is, now it’s getting out of hand, and we’ve let it slide for so long that it’s hard to tell her that she’s become totally unbelievable.


I had another friend who did the exact same thing, and it pretty much ended our friendship. You can’t go on talking to a person like that, because it’s hard to base a friendship on fairytales.

I think the downfall of that particular relationship was the phone call I received from her one evening. She seemed upset and I finally got it out of her that she thought she might be pregnant. I asked her if she had taken a test to be sure, and she then proceeded to tell me that she had been to the doctors, where the physician had prodded around on her stomach and told her that he was 99% sure that there was a dead baby in there!

That’s right, you read it correctly. Apparently this doctor poked her in the guts once or twice and told her, despite the fact that he hadn’t done any tests, despite the fact that she would only have been 2 months pregnant, despite the fact that the 2 month old foetus would only be the size of a peanut, that he could feel a dead baby in her stomach.

Slightly implausible wouldn’t you say?

She told the same story to my best friend the same day, and then we never heard anything about it again. She avoided the topic after that and I think she realised that her story was a little over the top because when we questioned her about it a little later on, she mumbled something about the doctor being wrong and then changed the subject pretty quickly.


I’m a little concerned that this other friend is going to end up going the same way. Well, not specifically the bizarre pregnancy way, but more that she is going to become so caught up in her exaggeration that she is going to become someone I don’t want to be around.
But how do you slip that into general conversation without upsetting someone?
“Hey I think everything you’ve just said is a BIG FAT LIE” probably won’t go down so well...

Things I have learnt so far

Things I have learnt so far today while searching for things to read and music to listen to:

• The Easybeats were an Australian band, therefore making Stevie Wright an Australian and Evie an awesome 11 minute Australian song.
• Daddy Cool – Also Australian
• The Masters Apprentices – Australian
• Dragon – Australian!

To summarise – I know a lot of great songs, but absolutely nothing about the artists and even less about Australian music.

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.

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.