It was my mothers birthday yesterday (happy birthday mum) and I suppose it's those events that make you miss home more than usual.

I'm not the introspective type. I prefer to not ask the tricky questions, bypass the issues and if you want to cry my advice has always been to swallow it, file it away and hope that all that repressed emotion will gradually dissapate rather than boil over one day in a postal moment. But work is finished for the year and the prospect of my last nine days of 2007 is a healthy chunk of alone time in which questions must be asked. Like just how late can I stay in bed with nothing to get up for? Do we really need to eat to survive? That sort of thing. Work has kept me so busy the last month that I haven't had time to do anything but work. On top of that I seem to be having anxiety attacks and hyperventilating, which seems odd to me since I am not in the least bit anxious. But the doctor seems to think I have forgotten how to breathe and need to learn again, so rather than going to yoga I am hitting myself in the stomach with anything heavy - that's a man's remedy. No improvement yet but I'm not ready to chuck the spandex on and salute the big gay sun just yet.

So perhaps the next nine days of alone time is just what I need to relearn certain things people take for granted and to also figure out what I'm doing here. I'm not too concerned about christmas day - it's not a real christmas day in this heat anyway. I just need to make sure I've got enough food in to last me through the bank holidays. To be fair, a large number of work colleagues have invited me to theirs for christmas, but I decided that a couple of days marooned in a strangers house would not be good for my anxiety and the prospect of passing out at a colleagues house and ruining their families christmas is also a fairly good reason to shut myself away for a while.

Mum is arriving in the new year and the prospect of getting out of Auckland for a week or so has seen me packing already. It's a lovely town in the summer, but somewhat claustrophobic. And after months waking up to a different view in a different room, the three months I've been here actually feel a lot longer. I think Wellington is calling me. Shift has an office there and moving down shouldn't be too hard, so I'll check it out later next month and see if it's the next stop on my journey. But there are rumours that Shift may be swallowed up by the global advertising machine Omnicom. My path crossed with theirs at Tequila and I don't have any fond memories of them from that so I'm not sure I'll be hanging around to see them stifle another company.

I can't decide what I'm looking for in life, or whether I've found it. It would weigh on my mind more if I didn't have the internet to distract me. Every time I stop moving I feel I'm treading water which I don't think is how life is supposed to feel. Day to day I enjoy the things you are supposed to enjoy...work, hanging out with friends...is that it? The magic thirty has crept up on me simply because I didn't care that it was coming, but now I feel like I've lost a decade. When I left university someone pressed the fast forward button on my remote and that was my twenties gone. If I hadn't left London I may have carried on like that until retirement and by then the regret would probably be overwhelming. As it is I think I'm making time count a little more, but I'll still be growing old at the same time, losing my mind at approximately the same time and ending my days at the same time regardless. So if the destination is the same, and it takes the same amount of time, does the journey matter? I still can't decide. I like having the memories and I like getting out of my comfort zone and seeing what the world can do to you...but you can't do it forever, life catches up with you and around comes another cycle of 'how long can I take it?'

I'm rambling, and you have probably given up reading this nonsense long ago, so perhaps I should get back to the internet and ignore the swell of doubt in my mind.