We have survived another Christmas! All limbs and eyeballs intact. No relationships were damaged in the making of this year's Christmas, and everyone seems suitably gifted out and happy and a couple of kilograms fatter, as is usual. JW and I did the orphan Christmas thing and it was rather nice just to stay at home and lie around in the living room (the only room with air conditioning) watching DVDs.
My parents, however, had a sucky Christmas when three little shits broke into their shop at 3:30am Christmas morning. Clad in gloves, caps and with makeshift masks tied around their faces, they arrived in a stolen car, pulled up out the front, leapt out and smashed the front window, and made and awful mess in the shop.
And what, you may ask, did they steal? A Mars Bar fridge stand, some chips, and a packet of Red Drum tobacco. This loot was later found untouched in the stolen car which had been abandoned in a paddock. Total damage was only a few hundred dollars for the window and the hassle to my family.
Dullsville's police officers are doing their usual stirling job too: they found the car then left it where it had been abandoned. At which point the kids who stole it in the first place came back, stole it again, and drove it around for another hour or so before getting it bogged at the weir. We don't hold up much hope of anyone being caught let alone charged, though my Dad reckons he can recognise one of the kids from the security footage at the shop.
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Ps: I am in a much better mood than I was when I last posted. I am not a big fan of change, to the extent that I almost prefer to be miserable and static than open to the possibility of change and relief. It helps having the blogosphere here to spill one's metaphorical guts to. Of course I am a bit scared and anxious about a new job: it's been five years since I was in this position, and it is scary. But it's exciting too. Especially the bit where I get paid, like, regularly! W33t!
I just got offered a full-time job. As a journalist.
I said yes.
First I cried and walked around the house and contemplated throwing up, because saying yes to the job meant saying no to some other stuff. Cool stuff. Fun stuff. But stuff that might not have worked out and that wasn't quite going to happen soon enough and stuff that would only be for a week here and a week there, and stuff that would have seen me still being home by myself all the time, stuff that didn't quite pay enough so that I wasn't always worried about the what ifs and the future and all that ephemera.
So I said goodbye to those things to take this other thing up and I have no idea if I've made the right decision. This will be a hard job for me to do. It will require learning a lot and there will be deadlines and long hours and travel and I won't be able to just go to the beach with the dog when I want.
But it will be a work-on-weekdays in an office job, and I will be paid a good amount of money, enough to live and save and maybe do some stuff other than pay the rent and watch DVDs, and I will have to wear office clothes, and there will be colleagues. There won't just be me and the computer and my thoughts.
In the end, I said yes, because if I hate the job I can always pick up the freelancing again and give this another shot. But if I said no to the job, and the other things didn't work out, I'd be stuck in this place I've been all year, and it hasn't been a good place.
Still. I'm shit-scared. I don't know if I made the right decision or not. I am angry at myself for being who I am and not knowing if I've made the right choice and for feeling fucking ambivalent about everything. I'm sad to say goodbye to those other things too, even as I try to think about how I can still fit them into my working life in a reduced capacity.
(Also, my dog will be lonely without me. I hope she'll be okay. Do you think I should get another puppy to keep her company? And I promise to take her for two walks a day.)
So here I am at the end of a tough year and I've got a whole new one ahead and as per usual I am over-thinking everything. At least I am reliably neurotic and difficult to please. And right now I have to overcome the 'what have I done?' feeling with a walk in the park.
Elsewhere made up a meme and since I am procrastinating madly, I thought I'd join in. Plus I love TV. (Oh, I decided to make this the 'with added BtVS edition of the meme.)
1. Earliest remembered television?
Watching Sesame Street is my earliest memory of TV. Events-wise, I recall watching Charles & Di get married and seeing the news about the Challenger disaster.
The earliest Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode I remember seeing was The Pack, where Xander is infected with the hyaena-demon spirit and he and the cool kids run riot at the school. They even eat the school principal. I was hooked.
2. TV series you would want on a desert island?
Northern Exposure. I really enjoyed this show when it was on and I think it would be just the thing to distract oneself from the realities of being stranded somewhere and having to eat raw molluscs and coconuts for every meal. All those lush Alaskan landscapes could drive you mad, though.
Of course, that's if I couldn't have Buffy.
3. TV that made you laugh
This is, of course, highly contestable but I reckon Blackadder was one of the funniest things ever. I particularly enjoyed the second series, possibly because I am the sort of person who thinks jokes involving madrigals are teh funny.
One episode of Buffy I remember as being particularly funny was Halloween, where everyone becomes their Halloween costumes thanks to a curse by the evil costume-store owner. Zander's transformation into an arse-kicking military man was genius. Once More With Feeling also gets an honorable mention -- though you swing between cringing at SMG's singing and laughing at the whole over-the-top mess.
4. TV that made you cry
Tough, as I am prone to crying for no good reason at all, given the right combination of mental state and tear-jerk sentimentality.
Of course I cried during the last ever episode of Buffy because I was so sad it was all over, even though I knew it was time. Even I had had enough of the Buffy-Spike sado-masochistic co-dependency thing. I also cried when Tara died and Angel went off to the city after his whole bad-dead-alive thing.
5. TV crap that you enjoy.
Once I loved Idol, but then there was Kyle Sandilands, who ruined it just by having his smug beady-eyed little head on the TV. Now I enjoy, um, that show? With the people being stupid? I know this must make me sound like an insufferable snob, but I just don't watch a lot of 'trash'.
Then again, I'm sure my normal TV watching habits would count as brain-rotting rubbish for many people anyway, and it has been suggested my Buffy obsession is sign of a disordered mind.
6. TV you'll never forget.
I watched a BBC show called Sex Traffic earlier this year that was pretty rivetting and unforgettable.
When Jon is away I tend to stay up watching weird TV which has lead to some very odd moments on a Friday and Saturday evenings, watching late-night SBS. This has taught me FAR more about human peccadillos than I would have ever dreamed possible. Like the one about the woman who wanted her legs amputated? That will stay with me forever.
Unforgettable Buffy episode: it's a tough call between Hush and Once More With Feeling. Both episodes came from patchy seasons but both are absolute classics in the context of the show and TV itself. A whole hour, well 45 minutes, of TV when no-one speaks? Brilliant.
7. Favourite TV adaptation.
El hated PnP , I loved it. It came out when I was in year 12 and my nerdy friend C. and I would watch it on Sunday nights then phone each other to talk about how great it was. Watching it as a grown-up wasn't quite the same, but it was still good, especially the bit with the pond. El says bowdlerised, I say inspired.
I can't really think of many other novel-to-TV adaptations I've enjoyed, but if you go for the film-to-TV option I can, of course, mention Buffy again. The original film really wasn't much chop, though it had its moments.
7. Favourite nerdish program
Nerdish as in Firefly and X-Files , two of my favourite TV shows I have not had the chance to mention? Or nerdish as in Carl Sagan's Cosmos or David Attenborough's classic 1980s documentary spectacular Life on Earth?
Sadly, you don't get much more fan-girl obsessive nerdish than a Buffy watcher. Ooh, I wrote 'watcher' in a sentence about Buffy!
I am so lame.
8. One TV program you are currently watching.
I'm not currently viewing any Buffy, but I know it's always there if I need it.
I am currently watching BSG (we're still in the first season) and though I am enjoying it, it's not as great as I had hoped. There are a few things that bug me about it. Sometimes the dialogue is a bit cliched and it suffers from the usual lack of non-white diversity. I find Apollo and Starbuck the least interesting characters, and the show suffers a little trying to incorporate the one-off shows into the wider story arc. Still, it's exciting and fast-paced and from what I can gather the second season is pretty good.
I am also watching Love My Way, which is enjoyable and soapy, even if I do want to smack Charlie and Julia, both, very hard, repeatedly.
Here it is again. Sorry to my 22 or so readers. I hate to be a drama queen. But sometimes I am a bit timid with my feminism and scared of the name-calling that comes when you utter the word 'patriarchy'.
But seriously, if you want to call me names, go right ahead. Sticks and stones and so on. Just actually READ what I say before you start throwing insults, okay?
I'm sure some people read it and it's still out there in cache land. But it was an ill-tempered response to someone attacking me, and I just don't feel like doing that sort of thing right now.
Instead, I have news: I have conquered bloglines. Huzzah for me.
I am trying to distract you from that no-doubt far-too revelatory last post, so... that Nick Cetacean dood sure is teh funny!
A new entry from the upcoming second volume of Stephanie Alexander’s famous Cook’s Companion: W is for whale.
"My
first taste of whale came as a girl on the coast at Eden in 1960. My
mother had dragged a still-thrashing southern right whale calf from the
beach and artfully flayed it with a nine-foot blade. I still recall the
dark, slightly oily meat which my mother had lightly sautéed. Magic!"
I don't write much about my family or my relationships with my friends all that much here. Despite revealing to you, dear readers, my depression and anxiety and my fears and thoughts about a great many other things, writing about my family is not something I care to do that much. Like all families, we have our good moments and our bad, our fraught relationships, and a shared history of love and anger and joy and disappointment.
One of the interesting things about being a Southern Hemispherean knitter is how our knitting trends map out against the knitting trends of our Northern neighbours. For instance, about six months ago, at the end of the Northern winter, it was all about the fingerless gloves. Here's my 'fetching' gloves from Knitty:
The only problem was that I finished them at the end of August, so my window for wearing them was hugely limited. But at least I can see myself wearing fingerless gloves here, on cold wintry mornings walking the dog, or of an evening when the wind is very brisk.
Now the big thing seems to be mittens. Check these out at Eunny Jang's blog. They're BEAUTIFUL. Just the project for my first ever colourwork. When I first started knitting I probably would have hated these, but as my understanding of the craft grows, so have my tastes. Fair isle and other colourwork, which once I would have scorned as being a bit daggy, is really growing on me. Same with cables and beaded knitting.
But anyway, what in god's name am I going to do with mittens? I could always take the 'wind god' motif Eunny created and incorporate it into something else, but the mittens. Oh the mittens.
I just got a phone message from a big important client about an urgent job-related meeting for Thursday. FROM WEDNESDAY. It is Sunday. Please excuse the gratuitous caps but I find they ease my crankiness. I don't know what possessed my phone to keep hold of this message and only deliver it to me at 6:25pm some four days later, but there you go.
Normally I would use this an excuse to begin some excessive moaning of the 'why me' variety, but I watched Kenny last night and frankly if ever there was a movie to metaphorically kick you up the arse and convince you that hey, your life is pretty good and really you need to stop whinging, it is this film.** It is also funny and sweet and somehow they modeled Kenny's dad on my grandfather.
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*Strangled sounds I made when I got the message.
**I was very skeptical about Kenny because I seem to recall the film became a bit of a conservative weapon of choice a little while ago in the war between the elites, aka, you and me and everyone else who votes for Labour, and the good honest hardworking people on the right like Christopher Pearson and Andrew Bolt and John Laws. I can't find the essay I recall, or who it was by, but basically it accused us elites of hating people like Kenny and finding the film an embarrassment.
I am not sure how this could be so, because the film's message is that the people who do the 'menial' jobs in our society are actually human beings too, and if it weren't for them we'd be swimming in our own shit. So we need to treat them as such, and not pretend they don't exist, and in fact we should be actively grateful for their existence. I am not sure how the Right thinks this maps out with Howard's nasty IR reform agenda or the slashing of public services, which seems to me to actively hurt people who aren't on the top of the income and social pile; or how the Leftist agenda of free health care and education for all really equates to 'hatred' of people who don't drove BWMs.
But anyway, as I watched Kenny I was reminded of the toilet-cleaning I've done, and how I vastly preferred cleaning the loo to dealing with customers. Cleaning the toilet was a quiet, simple job and once it was done it was done, and you had the satisfaction of looking into the gleaming white bowl and knowing that you'd achieved something. Customers, on the other hand, are different. And frankly, the less said about my customer service skills the better. Suffice to say, hell really is other people.
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