Extreme makeover

I haven't had one, I was just watching it and it pissed me off and I had no one to tell that it pissed me off, so I decided to vent my anger through the medium of blog.

This mother and daughter who were both pretty ugly got given the works - brow lift, nose job, lipo, rhino, teeth straightening, breast augmentation and in the case of the daughter lessons on how not to walk like a hippo. At the end of it there were loads of tears and both were clearly far happier than they had been and I couldn't help but think what a couple of lazy wasters. I, irrationally perhaps, hated them for being so happy for each other, which seemed to imply they didn't really like to look at each other before. The daughter's husband (a big heffer) was there for the reveal crying his eyes out like he'd finally got the wife he always wanted and I enjoyed the moment because it was obvious that they would be divorced within six months and she'd be sharing the new beautiful body with someone far more attractive and more manly at which point he'll have a reason to cry. Fucking americans.

So apart from wasting my time in front of the TV I've been down to Wellington for a few days last week. The event is known as Webstock, but you can call it geek-fest. It's two long days of seminars on all sorts of web related fun. There was certainly some big names and good talks - the standout being a tech guy from Google talking about how, if you do something on a big enough scale, you can get away with a massive lack of accuracy as the two cancel each other out. But no one seemed to want to talk about anything practical, some people even ventured into philosophy while others just made no sense at all and at 4pm on the thursday afternoon I had to walk out when a woman from Goto Media decided she could help everyone in the room get unstuck by showing two slides - one of a squiggly line (stuck) and one of a straight line (unstuck). But in amongst the more abstract modal jazz and newton's apple references there were some gems of information being tossed about and for those it was almost worth it.

I also got to experience Wellington weather and am no longer so keen to move there. It rained a lot, the wind blew a lot and it is a lot colder that Auckland. Or was...today Auckland is blowing a tropical storm past my fifth story apartment and I'm worried the building hasn't been designed for these conditions.

I'm not sure if it's standard practice to use pseudonyms on blogs when talking about people who might get upset. I haven't up to now, but I'm a blog novice - I could be doing it all wrong. So I was sharing a room with a work colleague of mine - let's call him Marshall - and being a younger guy he maximised his time by partying until the early hours of the morning every night. It depressed me. I am not so young and value my sleep too much to be able to keep up and will have to come to terms with the fact that in six months I will officially be middle aged... like a castle. Marshall is a fag and as such requires a ready supply of TRESemmé maximum hold hair spray and cock. And I think it was the latter that led to him rocking in at 4.30am the night before we had to get a plane at 10am. For some as yet unexplained reason he spent the night giggling to himself before we eventually got out of our hotel at 9.35. But this being NZ, where security is something other people have to worry about, we still made the plane on time.

So back to reality and I've spent the weekend working away on nothing too exciting. The shift process is glaringly innefficient and frustrating at the coal-face. I need to get it changed. But I probably won't succeed.

I saw a clasic NZ movie the other day called Sleeping Dogs. It's a hard hitting docu-fiction on fascism in New Zealand in the early seventies. If you haven't seen it I recommend leaving it that way unless you are a big fan of Sam Neill - I think it's his first acting role. I suppose, looking at it in context this was how New Zealanders saw things kicking off over the oil crisis and just after the cuba missile thing. So it's understandable that there was a fear of guerilla action and government crackdowns and curfews however ridiculous this seems today. But if only they'd had a few more dollars to spend on props and actors.

And that pretty much brings you up to date. I'm feeling melancholy today. Restless. The weather being so bad I am stuck indoors. I want to play cricket or do something that takes my mind off thinking about what ifs but I won't. I'll wallow in it for the afternoon.

Life goes on

I feel like life is moving too fast at the moment. Not in my usual depressing way; it doesn't overly concern me i don't think. I am just starting to realise that I probably won't have time to do all the things I want to do. I don't mean here. I don't mean in 2008. Just generally. I have lots of ideas - Wellington, South America, Easter Island, living on a farm and riding horses on the east cape, Antarctica, retirement in luxury, Kamchatka, Japan, writing a bestseller. Those are just the ones of the top of my head. Until I started really looking at the years I have left and the realistic time these things take I just imagined there would be plenty of time to fit it all in. But now I am hitting the realism that I probably won't. Should I prioritise and plan? I don't like plans as a rule. I don't like rules as a rule either. I like to rock up in Tibet and bumble my way across a mountain range. I'd like to end up in Easter island and hitch a ride to Santiago. I'd like to know it's all going to happen but not how it's going to happen.

Work has been hard work and has kept me far too busy. This summer has been the best on record as far as the weather and number of murders go. The two may be related - I vaguely remember a panorama that showed violence increases with temperature. But sat in the office I'm protected from both. I did eventually manage to get to a beach on Waitangi day (the day that celebrates or recognises, depending on your point of view, British sovereignty over the Maoris). And I got down to Napier to see Luke, Becs and Becs's Mum for a bit of Hawkes bay wine tasting yesterday. The five hour drive down on thursday evening was fun. They put massive long stretches in place to help you drift off and then throw in a switchback corner in front of a ravine at the end to wake you up. Fortunately my little Hyundai was aware of the danger I posed and gave me very little in the way of acceleration but plenty in the way of braking. Great weather, great wines and a great day which just reminded me that I meant to move to Hawkes Bay at some point. I wonder why i haven't.

I feel settled when I come back to Auckland. I'm meeting Dad's friends Roy and Gaynor tonight for dinner. They have been here for three months and it's pleasant to hear that they would like to live here, or at least could live here. It's reassuring that it isn't just me, that there is something better than what I had, that I haven't just been telling myself I made the right choices. I have some good friends here now and I'm making new ones even just last week. And all these things help make a place a home which is what New Zealand if not Auckland is starting to become. But on the flip side my regular chats with people in the motherland remind me that it isn't. More intriguing is Lauren. You may remember her from a previous post. She hated me when she first met me apparently. I persuaded her with unnatural amounts of charm that I was in fact a nice guy and that was that, but for no real reason we started chatting again recently and I find myself missing someone who I really only knew for a week, a couple of weeks? something like that. I don't know what that means...perhaps she has interesting stories, perhaps she is my soul mate or perhaps I'm just lonely. Whatever, I'm just enjoying it for whatever it is.

But I'm trying very hard not to really think about things too much. The breathing specialist I see tells me my irregular breathing is due to anxiety. I wasn't anxious until she told me that. But now I see anxiety on the horizon frequently and I have found a few simple ways to deal with it, like slowing my breathing and not thinking about anything important. The gym, contrary to what I initially thought, helps and I always feel better after a session. I don't think it is the training so much as the focusing my mind on what I have to do in that hour which means forgetting about all the other stuff. I still have to stop thinking about things more, but I'm getting there. The next step may be yoga. I just think the anxiety of being the only guy in the class may do more harm that good.

It's a busy week ahead of me. I think I'll be sleeping or working and that will be it. Hopefully I can get a day off the week after and get stuck into my writing - another thing that helps the anxiety.