i need a better place, or a better way to fall
I'm going to talk about Simone. For those that don't know, Simone is a pretty 24-something blonde anglo-saxon with an outgoing personality and an impeccable dress sense. She always waves and says hi when she sees me, even if it's the 10th time she's seen me that day. I can't talk to her. Like, literally. Ever seen
Idle Hands, where Jessica Alba smiles and says hi to the guy, and he sort of looks at her wide eyed and then proceeds to run away? That's
me. Everytime she says hi to me, I look at her like an idiot, burble a few unintelligible words, and walk away really fast. It's very, very, disconcerting. Hell, most of the time, it's hard for me to
stop talking. Yet with her, I reach deep inside and get
nothing. A complete blank. There's a mental picture of a guy representing my brain looking back at me, shrugging his shoulders, as if to say,
you're own your own buddy. It's not that I
like her, I think. While she is a great person, her interests of clubbing, coffee with friends and shopping and other such facets of the upwardly mobile young professional generally don't tend to synergise with the indie music & film/videogames/bookworm/pub crawler category of person that perhaps I fall into. And while I say she's pretty, she isn't the drop-dead-penis-awakening beauty that might elicit such a reaction from me. I don't look at her and think,
I wish she was my girlfriend. Yet, her effect on me has so disturbed me that this past week I've caught myself deliberately avoiding her to avoid the self-esteem destroying awkward burbling that results from my encounters with her. She has me
completely baffled.
God's gonna cut you down
Well it's been two weeks since the reunion, and I can safely say, to my disappointment, not much has changed. Half the school that was the "good" group moved on, got educated/employed. The other half, with the jocks, sluts and their general "too cool for school" attitude had stayed that way. So pretty much each half socialised with themselves. Very disappointing. I spent half of the night by myself watching ESPN paintball to be honest, don't count on me to go to the next reunion, even though it was my idea to go to this one. Though apparently I'm more mature and stylish, according to several girls. Which means that I was terribly dressed and immature in high school. Hah! The only real highlight of the night was an altercation with one inebriated person who had an issue with me destroying our valuable river ecosystem. Long story.
One problem I've been having recently is the increasing disconnect in my language between work and play. That is,
corporatespeak vs pub language. At work, conversations and meetings revolve around corporate buzzwords, like "
touch base", "
value adding" and "
critical deliverables". At the pub, the buzzwords are more like "
wank", "I" and of course, "
cunt". More and more it seems like I'm building divergent personalities in the way I act and talk to people. I've always tended to change the way I talk depending on who I talk to, but increasingly this has expanded to include interests, thinking and actions, though the core, dare I say,
boyish, aspect of me remains true to both. On one hand, the corporate me thinks of building excellence, achieving objectives. I read the
Financial Review, the
Australian and the
Economist (granted I used to read them before, but not as much). Yet on the other, with the guys, I've taken interest in
sports (gasp!), both watching AND playing. I think about organising the guys for games of cricket, or kicking the footy. I've just started Soo Bahk Do lessons with Pete. More active is the word. And although I've been doing all these things before,
amplifying the contradictory sides of me would be a more accurate way to call it. I guess maybe I'm becoming a more well rounded person. I feel myself going through great changes that began the day I finished uni, just like the changes during uni and high school. And while I think I've reached that age where a sense of
me, who I am, what kind of person I am, has already been reached and understood, I feel that the way I go about
living with this identity is something I'm still exploring. I feel like I'm becoming a better person. Even if I still say things to women like "You can vote now, isn't that enough" and call Indians "currymunchers". I guess some parts of me will never change :P Isn't it weird?
That said, during a meeting today I was absentmindedly doodling in my notebook while listening to the discussion. When the meeting finished, I looked more closely at what I'd drawn. While I wouldn't call it a
penis, it was unmistably (in my eyes anyway) phallic in nature. That's not all. As I walked to the busport after work, I was thinking about the guys (if we were going to do something this weekend etc). As I did so, I started unconciously singing (quietly),
I Touch Myself by the Divinyls. Now to sing that anywhere in public while sober is a crime in itself, but while thinking about the
guys? My mom was right, lower your guard and the
gays will get you. There I did it again. Someone needs to kick me :P
By the way, in response to the comments in the previous post, yes I have a myspace account, and have had for quite some time now.
Here it is. As you can see, it's still a little work in progress.
One sentence reviews
Roots + Crowns, Califone - More an evolution than a revolution from their breathtaking last album Heron King Blues, Califone once again merges poetry, electic folk beats and electronica to form a spectacular album, cementing their status as one of the world's premier alt folk bands.
Futuresex/Lovesounds, Justin Timberlake - "I'm bringing sexy back" he croons boldly, but even with another colloboration with producer supergroup the Neptunes, it sadly fails to top the his phenomenal debut album
Justified, being merely good instead of great.
Britney Spear/KFed Divorce, recording new album as we speak - While nothing brings me greater joy than seeing a poser like KFed falling from such enormous heights, this divorce is sadly 2 years and 2 kids too late.
The new O.C -,
Jumped the shark, end it already.
Milton Friedman: RIP at 94, a man who wasn't just about economics, but advocated the advancement of political and personal freedoms through free market capitalism, and helped shape my (libertarian)beliefs on the role of government and capitalism as a tool of social reform.
Oh yeah, I preordered a Nintendo Wii, hence the below hilarious video
College Reunion
The Corpus Christi reunion is this saturday night, a chance to go there, have a couple of drinks, still hang out with your friends and see if the people you hated are worse off than you. Sure, it's going to be nice to see some old friends again and all that. But seriously, reunions are just one big penis measurement contest (or the girl equivalent), where instead of penis its job/car/partner. No one can truly say "oh I'm going there to catch up with old school friends I haven't seen for awhile", because if those friends were so great, you wouldn't have stopped hanging around them. Yes I am a cynical bastard, but the only things I've heard people tell me about the reunion is something along the lines of "Man I can't wait to show those dicks how big a tosser they were". And that quote was paraphrased, not made up.
I must confess a guilty pleasure of mine - no, nothing like that.
IvyGate and
Sex and the Ivy are two sites I've been frequenting more and more. As a young collegiate slacker mortgaging my future on a combination of rampant alcoholism and just damn plain
laziness, I really enjoyed my uni life. The Romanesque architecture, sprawling lawns, idyllic lifestyle and most importantly,
heavily subsidised campus tavern made for a really great...
learning...experience. UWA, and universities in general, are also unique in that they serve as microcosms of the world around us. The political movements and politics("
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small" - Henry Kissinger), the campus rivalries, the mix of different backgrounds and ethnicities, and how sometimes we took ourselves too seriously over what are ultimately trivial things. Hence, those two blogs really bring that nostalgia home to me, despite the fact I only left last year. It's funny how I found every excuse to sleep in, skip class and go drinking when I was there, but now that I've left, it's the campus I miss most of all.
And yes, Curtin still sucks (but not as much as ECU). Cheap parting shots are highly underrated.
"
If you were a function, I wish I was your derivative, so I could lay tangent to your curves" - yes, we have a
winner
