We’re having problems with our lights at the moment. We have to replace the lightblubs for one particular light on almost a weekly basis, but now it just won’t turn on at all. The fuse must have blown or something. Torana came around to visit us and immediately started laughing at us because we were stumbling around in near-darkness, because the main light in the living room had gone.
Torana: (looking at roof) Oh my God.
Me: What?
Torana: That has got to be the gayest light I’ve ever seen.
I think Adam took that rather personally, because now all the lights in the house are gone and we just have bare lightbulbs. They do look kinda funny now I think about it… sort of like a giant porcelain breast with a golden nipple.
*****
I’ve found another way to really annoy Adam. He has a violent reaction every time he hears the keypad noises on Nokia phones. You know, that little ‘beep… beep… beep’ noise you hear every time you press a button. He’s got a Nokia, and he’s disabled the little beeps, but I reckon he’s the only person in the country to have done so. I make sure the volume on my beep tone is always turned up as high as it will go.
I watched Who Wants To Be A McGuirenaire the other night. I see the Australian edition of the show has changed the rules so that we’re now in line with every other country’s version of the show. Apparently all other countries require 15 questions for the million bucks, and we only used to have 10. That’s so Australian, isn’t it? We managed to half-arse our way to a million bucks.
But now we have the ‘new, faster, more exciting’ format. In the new format Eddie seems to hurry the contestants on a little more (basically he doesn’t ask them ‘Is that your final answer?’ ten times over anymore). If I was hosting the show I’d hurry things up so much I’d put unecessary pressure on the contestant:
Contestant: Hmm, I’m not sure…
Me: HURRY UP GODDAMMIT WHAT IS YOUR FINAL ANSWER WE HAVEN’T GOT ALL DAY WE’VE GOT LOTS OF MONEY TO GIVE AWAY HURRY THINGS ALONG FOR CHRIST’S SAKE AND DON’T TELL ME YOU WANT TO PHONE A FUCKING DIMWIT FRIEND
*****
I rang up my mum this week to tell her I’ve secured a 6 month contract with my work.
My mum: Oh that’s so good… that’s just what you wanted, isn’t it?
Me: It sure is, I’m really pleased.
My mum: Oh, that’s just fantastic. I’m… I’m going to have nervous dihorrea for you because I’m so excited.
*****
On Wednesday morning, I got up and had a shower, but ran out of hot water halfway through. Adam went to go and shower, but I told him it wouldn’t be worth it. Determined to prove me wrong, he went in, then emerged fifteen minutes later from a bathroom filled with steam.
Adam: Mmmm, I’m so toasty warm.
Talk about bathroom discrimination.
*****
On my way to work on Wednesday, I walked past one of those homeless drummers. You know the homeless guys who find a bucket and a stick, and ‘busk’? This guy was cheating. He was standing outside a store that had a stereo system outside playing a techno radio station, and he was just beating his bucket along to the techno. He was making lots of money too! But stick him in front of a set of Technics turntables and see if he’s any good THEN.
*****
My new role at work is quite difficult. Very very technical stuff, and to make matters worse, most people who ring me up know more about my company’s products than I do. I have to try and hide the fact that they know more about it all than I do. Luckily I had Jen to help me on Wednesday but on Thursday and Friday I was all on my own, and had to try and answer as much as I could.
I wore blue and green all mixed together again by mistake on Thursday (see last journal entry). This reminds me of when I was living with my druggo flatmate at uni. I remember one particular day we were going somewhere, and I’d just woken up. I wore my red tracksuit pants (it wasn’t anywhere important) and a yellow tshirt.
Druggo flatmate: Oh, for fuck’s sake, you look like a walking McDonalds store. Go and change into something else.
Me: (changes into a white tshirt and walks back into room)
Druggo flatmate: And what’s this? Now you look like a KFC outlet.
Me: (swearing under breath, changes into jeans)
Druggo flatmate: (strokes goatee thoughtfully) Hmm.
Me: There is NO fast food outlet that uses the colours of blue and white.
Druggo flatmate: Well…
Me: There’s NOTHING.
Druggo flatmate: You could almost qualify for a bottle of Pepsi.
Me: For FUCK’S SAKE. I’m going to go and wear something that doesn’t have the colour scheme of ANY fast food outlet or ANY soft drink. OKAY?!
Druggo flatmate: Go on then.
Me: (walks out of room, changes into hawaiian shirt with 101 colours on it, walks back into room) See? You can’t possibly come up with something for this.
Druggo flatmate: Well…
Me: Hmm? Go on.
Druggo flatmate: You know what you do look like?
Me: What?
Druggo flatmate: A total fucking idiot.
*****
I was sticking reference notes up around my desk at work on Wednesday.
Me: Jen, do you have some scissors, sticky tape and a ruler?
Jen: Sure. Just let me bend over and pull them out.
Jen thinks I’m a hero because I explained to her how to block calls when she’s using call waiting. This totally defeats the purpose of call waiting, but I don’t know… whatever makes her happy.
I told Jen that I’m worried I’m getting man boobs.
Jen: Oh, I don’t know. You’re pretty skinny.
Me: But that’s the whole problem. I don’t want to be skinny with a beer gut and man boobs. You have no idea how scared I am of this.
Mail girl: Show me one of your boobs then.
Jen: Yeah, show us your boobies!
Mail girl and Jen: (chanting) Maaaan – booobs! Maaaan – booobs! Maaaan – booobs!
Me: (genuinely scared, runs away to go and have lunch)
*****
I bought some fast food this week. When I went to empty the contents of my tray into the bin, the paper tray mat wouldn’t slide off the tray. It just stuck there. I’m sure we’ve all been in this situation before. Do you stand there and keep flapping the tray about until the traymat dislodges itself? Or do you just put the tray on the top of the bin and not worry about the traymat?
Or you could do what I did this week by mistake – throw the contents of the tray AND the tray itself into the bin.
If you think McDonalds is a crap restaraunt, well there’s plenty worse. Two particularly bad restaraunts come to mind – both of them in my hometown, Geelong.
The Smorgy’s restaraunt in Geelong has got to be one of the worst places to eat that I can think of. This is like a nautical version of Sizzler – you have to walk out all the way along a pier (usually battling gale-force winds from the ocean surrounding the pier), and then you’re at Smorgy’s. Their smorgasboard has almost every kind of food you can think of – except it’s all battered. The place is usually full of screaming children running around the dessert bar. I also don’t like the suspiciously sticky floors of Smorgy’s.
When you go to Smorgy’s, a waitress assigns you a table. Whenever I visit (it’s never by choice) I pray like hell we don’t get stuck near the animatronics installation. There’s this giant fucking robot seal in the middle of the room. Every fifteen minutes strobe lights flash around the whole restaraunt and every child in the joint runs screaming over to the robot seal, and it starts talking to them about how great Smorgy’s is, jerking its head around in a very authentic simulation of an epileptic seal.
There have been worse restaurants in Geelong, though. I’m not sure if they still exist in Australia but there used to be a chain of cafes called Johnny Rocket’s. Johnny Rocket’s was a theme restaurant, in the style of a 60′s American burger joint. They suffered the fifteen-minute-intermittant-crap Smorgy’s syndrome though. Every fifteen minutes, some 60′s song would start playing really loudly, and all the staff would roll their eyes as if to say ‘Oh Christ, not again’. Then all the lights in the restaraunt start flashing, and the staff get on top of the counter and run around in the restaurant, and they all dance. The problem is, they all do it with such long faces that they look like they’re really hating it. To make matters worse, it’s painfully obvious that they were hired for their cooking skills and not their dancing skills. I always used to make sure I finished anything I ate at Johnny Rocket’s in less than fifteen minutes, because the whole dancing thing was just so embarassing.
*****
At work on Friday, I had to get one of the tech support guys to come and fix my computer. Halfway through fixing up whatever was wrong with my computer, the techie’s mobile phone rang. Normally this would be excused, but he’d programmed his phone to ring to the tune of Shania Twain’s ‘Man, I Feel Like A Woman’. Jen took his phone from him and threw it at the wall and told the techie he should know better than to listen to Shania.
The techie had a remarkable similarity to someone I knew. I couldn’t put my finger on who it was, but I just realised yesterday. I went to Japan for a 3 week student exchange when I was in year 11 – this particular techie reminded me of someone I met during my time in Japan.
My Japanese host student had an English tutor – he went to this guy’s house once a week. My host student thought I might like to come along to his tutor’s house with me, so off we both went. The tutor was an American who’d moved across to Japan.
The tutor said that for my host student’s lesson this week, he could sit and listen to himself (the tutor) and me talk in English. The tutor asked me to make sure that I spoke in very clear and simple English, so that my host student could understand.
Everything was pretty stock standard, the tutor was asking me what I thought of Japan and my impressions on everything. However, he had this rather unnerving way of linking almost everything I said to Jesus.
Tutor: So what has been one of your favourite places in Japan?
Me: (speaking really slowly and clearly, for the sake of my host student) My favourite place was probably the Golden Temple in Kyoto. It was near a waterfall and was very beautiful.
Tutor: Ah, it is a beautiful temple. The water cascades down just as our lord Jesus Christ willed manna to cascade from the skies hundreds of years ago.
Japanese host student: (bewildered look as he attempts to translate all this to Japanese)
*****
If you’re from Australia, you’ll be familiar with the ABC’s logo. If you’re not, this is what it looks like:
I’ve noticed that if you stare at the logo for ages it looks like an evil sparrow. The two black gaps on the left and right are the eyes, and the gap in the middle is the beak.
*****
I realised recently I’ve been getting the organisations Unisys and Unicef mixed up. Charity organisations and hi-tech computer organisations couldn’t be more opposite.
*****
There wasn’t a lot of work to do earlier in the week, so Jen entertained myself and the Mail Girl with tales of her old job.
Jen used to work at an airline before her current job. Apparently the staff there played a lot of pranks on each other. The packing tape they used to secure packaging together was extremely sticky and hard to remove – they used to creep up on people sitting on chairs, tape them up to the chair and put them in a cupboard. Hilarity!
Most entertaining were Jen’s celebrity encounter stories. Her job required her to escort celebrities through the airport. She told us all sorts of stories.
She told us of the time Olivia Newton-John arrived at the airport carrying her baby.
Olivia Newton-John: Where are the complimentary baby strollers?
Jen: We don’t actually have any baby strollers.
Olivia Newton-John: (thrusts baby at arm’s length in Jen’s face) What am I supposed to do with THIS then?
Jen also told us she’d escorted Madonna through the airport. The cone boob version of Madonna, too. She’d also escorted Mel Gibson around the airport:
Mel Gibson: I don’t want to talk to anyone at this airport. Do I make myself clear? I don’t want to talk to anyone.
Jen: Er. Okay.
Jen then went duty free shopping with Mel, but Jen had to make all of Mel’s purchases on his behalf because he refused to speak to any store attendants.
It was the following story which sparked debate:
Jen: Then there was the time a friend of mine at work wheeled Colonel Sanders in his wheelchair through the airport. He gave her $100 for doing that.
Me: Hang on. Isn’t Colonel Sanders dead?
Jen: No! I swear this was the KFC colonel she wheeled around in the airport.
Mail Girl: Hmm… I’m not sure if he’s dead or not.
Me: He was born in the 1800′s wasn’t he? He can’t have been alive. When was this?
Jen: Oh, I don’t know. 1985 or something.
Me: That’s crap. I don’t reckon it was the Colonel.
Jen: I think there’s actually two Colonels. I think they were brothers.
Mail Girl: I think that’s right, actually.
Me: Buuuullcrap. There’s only one Colonel.
The argument over if there was one or two KFC Colonels raged on for a good half hour. Mr Marketing walked in halfway through it, and suggested we look up the KFC website to find out the truth. I checked up on the KFC Colonel’s life story and what do you know? He’s dead, and there was only one of him.
When I read the Colonel’s biography, I also read the story of how he became a Colonel. I thought he must have served in the army or something, but apparently someone just gave him the title of Colonel because he made really good chicken.
*****
Jen offered me an after-dinner mint that afternoon, and I politely declined. I know in some past journal entry of mine I’ve discussed my Rules Of Food. One of the rules is that meat and fruit should not be mixed together (eg – those meat and apricot meals I’ve seen). I can’t remember if I made a note of it at the time, but another Rule Of Food is that mint and chocolate should not be mixed. A bold statement, I know – but mint is for freshening your breath, and that’s it. Keep the chocolate out of it.
*****
When I went to lunch on Friday I noticed that my shaved hair isn’t so shaved anymore. It’s slowly growing back, which is good. I think I’ll grow it long again, I preferred it that way. On Friday my hair started tufting up though. The tuft still hasn’t gone away.
It’s like the time I fell asleep at a friend’s birthday party 2 years ago. I had long hair at the time, and some girls thought it would be really funny if they put my hair in rollers. I can take a joke as much as the next guy, but it really pissed me off because I still couldn’t get the curliness out of my hair two weeks later.
*****
The Mail Girl is known in our office for being a bit of a fan of beer. Almost every morning she’ll turn up to work and have shitloads of Berocca before she can even think about working. I love the way she makes excuses every morning for the previous night’s drinking:
Monday: I was waiting at the bus stop with the Mail Girl, when a friend sent an SMS text message to her mobile phone. ‘Meet us all at the pub’, it said. The mail girl told me ‘I’m not sure if they’re teasing me or not’. After five minutes consideration, she advised me that she’d ‘better go to the pub just in case they’re not joking’.
Tuesday: The Mail Girl’s flatmate’s brother had his birthday, so she had to go to the pub.
Wednesday: The next door neighbour turned 23, so she had to go to the pub.
Thursday: The Rugby State of Origin was on, and being a backpacker from the UK she was ‘really curious’ to see the game. She said she’d go and watch the game at the pub.
Friday: Jen (who happened to be away in training) rang me up on her lunch break, and told me to call the Mail Girl a lush. The Mail Girl wasn’t sure what this word meant, so she looked it up in a dictionary. When she realised it meant ‘drunkard’, she rang Jen back and told her she was so offended by this comment, she was going to have a drink to drown her sorrows.
*****
CityRail (the mob that runs Sydney’s train system) has been advertising ‘Public Transport Week’, which is in a few weeks time. We’re promised that we will be able to experience what ‘public transport will be like in the future’. I assume this means that CityRail will be hiring a rent-a-crowd of a few thousand people, and plonking them in the existing train system.
*****
Adam’s got a new saying he likes to use: ‘I’ll rip the world in half’. He mainly says this when he’s very frustrated or pissed off. He took it to new extents the other day:
Adam: Who the hell do Vodafone think they are?
Me: Are they going to cut off your phone or something?
Adam: I’ll bloody rip the world in half.
Me: Here we go again.
Adam: I’ll rip the world in half. I’ll rip it in such a fashion that causes Vodafone’s headquarters fall down the gap in the middle of the world.
*****
Adam and I were arguing about the Australian Football League again this week (surprise, surprise!)
Adam: That game is just so crap. They all wear short shorts – it’s a gay game.
Me: There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s better than this rugby shit that seems to be so popular here in New South Wales.
Adam: Well, you should just keep it in Victoria then. Don’t come up here to NSW and infect our fine state with your ridiculous game.
Me: Hmm.
Adam: In fact, if I was prime minister, I’d change the name of the game from Australian Rules Football. I’d take out the ‘Australian’ in it.
Me: So it’d just be called Rules Football?
Adam: Yes. It shouldn’t be associated with Australia because it’s an embarassment to the country.
So the Smashing Pumpkins are going to split up soon. Hopefully Billy Corgan can go and get his sinuses checked, now that he has some spare time on his hands.
Things which sound worse than Billy Corgan singing (there’s not many)
* Fingernails on a blackboard
* Someone cracking their knuckles right next to your ear
* And again
* A burp
* Bullfrogs calling for a mate
* A dog farting
* Cats walking on tiles
* The sound of your wallet spontaneously combusting
* Hungry crows
* The worst karaoke performance you have ever endured
* You in the bathtub
*****
Last night, as a sort of celebration for Adam’s birthday last Thursday, we spent the night in a hotel. We’ve stayed at this hotel before earlier this year – it was when we were just getting to know each other, so we have fond memories of the place.
On Saturday night we were innocently lying on the double bed watching TV when a maid burst in the door and started talking to us, until she looked around the corner and realised she had the wrong room. Too bad if we had’ve been into the nookie or something.
You know, I’ve always wondered what would happen if I walked around a hotel taking all the ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs off the doorknobs.
On Saturday night we went to North Sydney and had some bourbons at a few pubs. While we were waiting at the train station to get to North Sydney, someone crept up behind Adam and tapped him on the shoulder.
Of all people who should find us on an intimate weekend, it was the most Unhetereosexual Man In The World, San Fran. The last (and only other) time I’d encountered San Fran was a few weekends ago, at a party for Adam’s old work. San Fran used to work with Adam, and reckons he’s straight, but five minutes with San Fran and you’re not so sure.
San Fran, beige skivvy and all, was all over Adam as usual (at least he didn’t keep touching Adam’s inside thigh this time). When I last encountered San Fran he demanded to know why ‘such a cute face as Adam was single’. I wanted to tell him the truth but instead chose to get away from him. He scared me, and he still does. We managed to escape San Fran’s totally-not-heterosexual wrath on this occasion, but I fear that I’ll keep coming across him in Sydney, just as I used to keep coming across Community Radio Steve in Geelong.
Why is it that you don’t notice how strong/weak your bourbon is until you start to get pissed? I must just get really fussy when I’m drunk, I suppose. I remember thinking last night that one of my drinks had far too much ice in it.
Actually, you’d be surprised what goes into bags of ice. When I was living with my druggo flatmate in 1998, we went down to a local 7-11 store to buy a bag of ice.
Me: Can I have a bag of ice please?
7-11 attendant: Sorry, we don’t have any ice today. We ran out of ammonia.
Druggo flatmate: (in stoned disbelief) You put AMMONIA in your ice?!
Apparently it’s quite a common practice.
On our way home from the hotel today, Adam and I were looking at a poster ad at the train station. There’s been a lot of poster ads going up around Sydney promoting Green Power – in one of these ads there’s a picture of a ‘wind farm’ – lots of big propeller things in a field, that spin around in the wind to create energy.
As we got off the train, Adam declared:
Adam: I want a wind farm.
Me: Where would you put it?
Adam: I don’t know. I just want a wind farm.
Me: What would you do all day on a wind farm?
Adam: (thinks for a while) I could farm the wind.
Me: Then what? Just bag up the wind and stuff?
Adam: Yeah. I could farm the wind, then bag it.
*****
Listen to the Foo Fighers give Ringing Type 24 a new thrash angle!
Hear Fiona Apple warble along to Ringing Type 5!
Powderfinger give us their accapella interpretation of Ringing Type 8!
Marvel at the Chemical Brothers’ remix of the up/down tone of Ringing Type 10!
Eminem cuts the nasty rhymes to Ringing Type 27!
Rockia, The Album: Available now!
*****
Adam’s brother Ray (who lives in the same block of units as myself and Adam) has broken his arm and now has it in plaster. He’s been housebound for the past few days, but he visited us today.
Ray: Could I borrow your Nintendo? I get so bored, there’s nothing to do.
Adam: Sure, that’s okay.
Ray: (leaves the unit with the Nintendo)
Me: He’ll be back in about five minutes.
Adam: Why?
Me: It won’t take long for him to realise how hard it is to use a Nintendo controller with only one hand.