The Future May Be Bright And Shiny But It Needs To Be Serviced Every Month

I spent a good part of the afternoon having the equivalent remote control sex with my DVD player.
This isn't as exciting or depraved as it might sound.
I popped open the DVD player, put the DVD into it and hit the close button.
I sat down.
The DVD player opened again.
I hit the close button on the remote control.
The DVD player opened again.
I closed it.
It opened.
I closed it
It opened.
I closed it.
It opened.
I closed it.

This 'yes, no, yes, no' game went on for a solid five minutes of digital foreplay before the DVD player just accepted it and started playing the damn DVD.
We've gotten so used to everything crapping out on a regular basis we hardly even notice it any more.

My parents only replaced the washer and dryer they bought for their first house when I was of an age that everyone I knew was having pregnancy scares on a regular basis. The new set almost immediately proceeded to break down on a bi-annual schedule.

This is why all the appliances in my place are second-hand vintage-y numbers.
The microwave is too big to fit on my bench, being probably the first even microwave sold in Australia with flat face touchpad buttons and therefore expanded fourfold to contain the reams of electronics. But I could probably cook a fair sized chook in it... if I was the kind of person who did roasts in the microwave...
My washing machine is older than I am but doesn't throw a fit every time its load destabilises, it just washes my clothes.
True I almost couldn't get my fridge up the stairs or through the door of my flat, yes it could conceivably hold a decent sized human body if you took the shelves out - and that may one day prove useful - but it works dammit!
They all work.
My friends may insist that I only have all these antique white goods because I am a poorsy poor poor person who still decorates like a university student.
That is a damn lie.
I have at least four more chairs than any university student and absolutely none of them are made of milk crates...

How To Get A Good Night's Sleep

Step One: DON'T chain drink coffee all day whilst reading Lovecraft!




Step Two: DON'T absent mindedly polish off a bottle of red wine whilst still reading Lovecraft!




Step Three: DON'T decide that you've had too much wine and try to balance this out by drinking more coffee... whilst continuing to read Lovecraft!




Step Four: DON'T suddenly realise that it is the middle of the night and that you are alone in a dark and suddenly sinister house and yet continue to read Lovecraft!




Just follow these four easy steps and with good luck and forward planning you will not find yourself jazzed on caffeine, tipsy on wine and twitching at shadows and half imagined sounds as you wait for dawn... still unable to stop reading Lovecraft!

I Just Thought You Should Know...

Your shirt went out without you the other day.
I saw it in the city on another man.
They seemed quite close.
I don't tell you this to hurt you, you understand, I just thought you should know.

They were walking together down the street and every now and then the man would glance at the reflection of the shirt in the shop windows they were passing and he would duck his head and smile.

They looked quite sweet as they strolled along, their arms swinging, his fingers curled around the ends of your shirt's cuffs.
If someone walked too closely by, the man would pull his arms in to his body, holding the shirt safely to him until the danger had passed.

They ate together in a cafe, the man tenderly brushing crumbs from the shirt's collar for it, and smiling with rueful sympathy when the shirt got a touch of coffee on its sleeve.

You might wonder why I'm going into such detail when I claim I'm not trying to hurt you.
Well the thing is... they saw me looking at them and together they smiled, the young man invited me to join their table and as we drank our coffees he reached over and the shirt brushed my hand with its sleeve.
I'm seeing the two of them again this weekend, hopefully one day you'll forgive me...

I just thought you should know...

The Dog Ate My Blog Post

Bah!
As this is the first full weekend off after NaNoWriMo I thought I would be hella full of energy and ideas and my writing muscles in my brain would be so bulgy that I would churn out a teetering stack of blog posts that I could release at whim over the course of many weeks.
Unfortunately given several factors this did not happen.

First of all my weekend was hijacked by malevolent elves. Well OK, they weren't actual elves.
One of them does look like an evil version of Jesus though and Jesus hung out with a bunch of guys kinda like Santa and... look one of the factors is that I didn't get a lot of sleep.
Let me start again.

Weekend. Hijacked.

What with cancelled trains, late nights, too much booze, demanding friends who have unrealistic expectations of the amount of hours in a day and my ability to travel from one place to another faster than the speed of light I seem to have spent most of this weekend turning up to things just in time or just in time to be asked why I didn't turn up earlier.

Without the power of sleep I have been unable to come up with any rejoinders wittier than 'so's your face'.
Without the power of wit all the conversations I've had have been ridiculously boring.
I tried to remedy these two problems with the power of alcohol which unfortunately just made me sleepier and my rejoinders slipped down the class scale to involve such zingers as 'your mum was [insert other person's previous statement here]'.

I've only been home long enough to have a couple of showers and get enough sleep that I didn't actually pass out at any point.
I've got nothing done, had no real meals and am getting major guilt trips from the cats and the dog who are going to great lengths to point out to me how abandoned and starved for affection they are. This has been conveyed via the mediums of poop, shedding and piteous noises of an almost Geneva Convention breaching magnitude.

No part of the weekend was actually bad per se but they were all jammed together so closely that I have had no time to myself and am going to roll into work tomorrow feeling tired, cranky and wondering if I somehow hallucinated the weekend altogether.

I know that this rambling bitching about nonspecific events doesn't constitute much of a blog post.
I also know that this is basically me making excuses to myself about not getting anything written during the week let alone over the weekend which is pretty weak.
But despite all the things that kept me from doing anything this weekend, none of them were actually significant enough to stick in my memory which is a little depressing.
The most memorable part of my whole weekend was this dream I had about a time travelling bumble bee man who changed the universe so that everyone I know was working at a giant hairdressing salon... but it doesn't get any more lucid as it progresses and I know that there are few things as uninteresting as other people's dreams.

Except the one I had where Batman was rappelling down the inside the chimney of a mansion wearing a santa hat as a disguise so that the gremlins who were living there would think he was Santa and... *coff coff*

Anyhoo by next weekend my energy levels should be back up, I should have actually produced some actual material, and I will be politely but firmly telling anyone who wants me to go anywhere or do anything to go do something of a fairly unpleasant and probably anatomically uncomfortable nature. Because if you can't occasionally tell your friends to go swivel then are they really your friends?
In the meantime I'd better go grab some sleep so I don't start trying to tell that bumble bee story at a meeting at work...

Eat It Everyone Who Has Never Won A Nobel Prize! That Includes You Amy!

Take that cynical voices in my head! Take that and swivel on it!

I may have had to basically give up TV for a month - I did not miss much, apparently the new summer programming line up is to include crap and shash.

I may have developed a reflexive twitch that sees me hit Ctrl+S every few seconds even when I am not in a word document - did you know you can save your Spider Solitaire games?

I may now have to make a concentrated effort to use contractions once more as I purged them from my repertoire to make sure that I was making maximum progress with my word count - has anyone noticed how wanky the sentence fragment 'aren't you' looks when expanded to 'are you not' or 'are not you'?

I may now be the proud owner of some of the longest continuous sentences ever written outside of James Joyce's Ulysses - I is can use full stop now!?

I may have ended up eating the laziest meals - can you say microwave cuisine!? - since my Honours year at University! How do you cook again? I remember that fire is hot...

I may now be freaking out because I can not remember what the rest of November entailed apart from squinting and muttering in the light of my computer screen - I assume I went to work because I am still being paid...

But I made it!

I joined the ranks of thousands of people around the world who have managed to churn out at least 50 000 words in one month and I am so high on the feeling that I may in fact be seeing colours that do not exist!

My goal for next year's NaNoWriMo is to learn how to plot because let me tell you, sitting down on the 1st of November and going 'durh what should I write about' and just letting your characters - who are mysteriously close-mouthed about what is going on - drag you from one event to the next makes for an interesting ride but not much in the way of pacing!

I am going to just take a moment to bask in the warm glow of having finished, continue retraining myself how to blink and contact all my friends and family to let them know that the kidnap note and the ransom demand that followed it were actually just a ploy to silence the constant demands for contact and/or attention that they kept making of me.

This fun genre-specific logo is one of many provided to the NaNoWriMo community of Melbourne by the lovely Lauren E Mitchell who knows that we are excitable little pixies who like bright colours