What I Did Today

I know that it’s 2007 and one does not really post blog entries about why one hasn’t had time to write recently anymore; I just still, after however many years it’s been, feel guilty and itchy and weird when I don’t write a couple of times a week. I wrote a list of everything I want to write entries about today when I was at this work training thing but it’s almost midnight and I just got home and I just ate a some yogurt with honey and then, why not, some koko rice for dinner and I really need to go to bed right now and I don’t have time, really, to write about any of those things I’ve been thinking of writing about. But I still feel guilty and itchy and weird about not writing, and so you’re going to hear about what I did today.

I don’t know, do you want to hear about the part where I got up and took a shower and used my new leave-in conditioner, which is fully eight times cheaper than my old leave-in conditioner, but also possibly eight times not as good? How about the oatmeal I had for breakfast and what I wore today? No? Shall we just skip to my getting on the bus WITHOUT MUSIC, just as I’ve been doing for the past month because my iPod broke like a month ago when I was in Tongariro? And then shall we cut to a shot of me making a sort of anguished and silent scream because I don’t ask for much, my friends, I just ask for the opportunity to listen to Lily Allen on my walk into work. I am not gadget oriented at all so it’s embarrassing to even admit to you how much my quality of life has been effected by this loss.

Yeah, blah blah: basically the iPod broke in the car on the way to Tongariro, right in the middle of “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, and I took it in to the Mac shop and they charged me thirty dollars to tell me “It’s done broke” and then I thought it was under warranty but it’s not and I had to call Australia but I got a discount on a brand new one which is awesome except that my laptop is old enough that it won’t sync up with it and so I had to get Leopard or whatever the hell and then I had to get some more RAM or whatever else the hell and I tried to install Leopard the other day–so looking forward to plugging in the earbuds, let me assure you!–and now I need more hard drive space and then I had to call my friend Nahum and he’s out of town until next week so he can’t have me come over to put all my stuff on his hard drive and ON and ON and ON and ALL I WANT is to walk down the street and be able to listen to the newish Laura Veirs at the same time on my new black MP3 player that I had engraved with, I’m not even kidding: “I Heart Octopus.”

Oh, and? This morning before I got on the bus? I…and I don’t know what I was thinking or how it happened or what, but I put a TradeMe bid on a very cheap and crappy camera from like 2000 and I immediately regretted it and this is all very unlike me and meanwhile the cheap and crappy camera I currently have, in lieu of the less-cheap and less-crappy one I used to have and liked very much and which my friend Amy had made me a special little pouch for, but which got broken in Australia and which I have had to bid goodbye, causing me to miss no end of awesome photo opportunities because I hate the new camera so much. And hence I was making irresponsible bids on TradeMe and feeling like a complete idiot.

This feeling continued when I got to where I was going, which wasn’t work, as you might expect, but a benefit rights training course I am doing for work. New Zealand has a ton of social services we don’t have in the States (Independent Youth Benefit! Caregivers Benefit! Sickness Benefit and Disability Supplement!) and I have to learn about the system as quickly as possible so I can actually be some use to my clients. Today it was just me, one other guy, and the tutor, so it was actually a little weird, but I did learn a lot and even got all the story problems right. I didn’t think there would be story problems, when I signed up to be a social worker, but story problems there were nonetheless. I hate story problems.

And I know it’s against the law to talk about what you ate for lunch on the internet, so please avert your eyes while I extoll the virtues off veggie mee goreng from Satay Kingdom on the Left Bank off Cuba Mall for all your lunchtime noodle needs.

After the course (two days down, four more days to go) I went over to the library to return my book and some CDs and read BUST for twenty minutes before running over to Fidel’s (I ran into one of the Italians who works at the Italian cafe on the way there) to meet Alice and Amy, who were just digging into some Kahlua cheesecake when I panted up. I am not a huge Kahlua fan but I am a fan of cheesecake, Amy, and Alice, and so we had a nice chat before heading over to Mighty Mighty to meet Ken, Alice’s new awesome housemate, and to see some live theater.

It was two short plays and then a sort of long-form improv thingy (based on Magnum PI, I’m guessing from the mustache). It was fun to see all the hipsters in the audience and some of the actors were really cool (I was a fan of the one who played Icepick) but it still wasn’t quuuuuite my style. We had a good time talking and laughing though and weren’t quite ready to go home afterwards–it’s light late now so we still thought it was like 3PM when we got out–so we stopped at some weird bar on Courtenay Place I’d never been to. Ken just moved to Wellington so he hadn’t heard Alice’s arm story yet so we told him all about it, and then Amy told us a story about being on a bus with chickens in Bangladesh, and then I told the can-I-paint-you-nude thing, and then Ken himself told a story that was so hilarious and dirty that I am shuddering just thinking about it, and then it was time for us to leave the bar and for me to watch my bus pull away from the bus stop.

Sweeties that they are, the other three agreed to wait with me in yet another ridiculous Courtenay Place bar that was, unfortunately, playing exactly the kind of stupid poppy booty-shaking grind music that I don’t want to like but of which I am inescapably fond. I say “unfortunately” because we were just sitting there out of the wind while we waited for my bus (they all live in Mt. Vic so they are not slaves to the capricious Metlink schedule) and not dancing or anything. Instead we had to watch lots of skeezy guys with ill-conceived facial hair perv all over young drunk girls, and if that wasn’t bad enough, we also had to live with the knowledge that we were all much better dancers than the aforementioned young drunk girls. If only it wasn’t a Wednesday night and if we didn’t have buses to catch and day jobs to go to the next morning! If only we’d been wearing our going-out tops and had put a bit more product in our hair! We contented ourselves with creating some new dance moves that can be done completely in a chair and also discussed the name of the various songs to be sung by the new band we’re putting together; so far we only have two or three, based on a couple of topics of conversation that came up over the course of the evening: “What Do Straight Men Talk About?” and “Sweet As, Bro.” I plan to start work on a soulful love ballad dedicated to the dude who played Icepick called “You Have Curly Hair And I Have Curly Hair (Clearly We Are Meant To Be).”

My bus came, I got on it, and as soon as I got home I ran to my laptop to see what had happened with my stupid, stupid camera bid–and I lost! Someone else outbid me! Yay! I immediately texted Alice with this exciting news and she replied “Good! I hope you learned your lesson,” and oh trust me, Alice, I have.

I looked at some pictures that Anna sent me of her recent masquerade party and answered an email asking me to be a pirate in this year’s Santa Parade and then I started this entry and forgot to take off my shoes and then Steven in London was online so we chatted a bit (“I’m writing an entry about what I ate for lunch today,” I told him, “but you’ll just have to wait to read it like everyone else”). I just checked out the ticket price for the Fat Freddy’s New Year’s Eve show and now I’m going to brush my teeth and put on my facial toner and moisturizer and get into bed, just as soon as I hit Publish, my guilt assuaged, my itch scratched.