Before I begin my endless ranting for today, I just want to give a special thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday today. It means a lot that people care enough to take some time out to wish you well. A special shout out to my evil 'twin' Brad, sharing birthdays with Pompey, Nelson and MacGyver can't be all that bad. However the rest of you can go and get... yourself some ice cream, as you should use any excuse to have some. Smooth, eh?
Another year, another round of discovering new ways to waste an afternoon. Unfortunately this year I spent it catching up on assignments I should've been doing during the first week of midsems, but the way I see it there's no real point doing things early as the motivation just isn't there. Personally I blame card games for this... waiting until the last possible moment to play your hand doesn't always translate into real life.
The other day I was combing my fingers through my hair, (as I refuse to pay the bigwigs in the comb industry) when I noticed something kind of disturbing in the undergrowth. A speck of colour, something existing in stark contrast with the world around it. A rogue element that must be destroyed.
Yes, a white hair.
I guess it's still one hair in a million but it did really spook me out for a second or two. And for some reason it triggered a miniature quarter life crisis fuelled by some sort of question of my mortality. The first thing that came to mind was The Seven Signs of Aging by none other than the Ponds Institute. However, the actual seven signs are quite boring and are mostly related to skin quality. I have endevoured to create a replacement set of signs that cannot be masked by thirty-seven tonnes of makeup. Enjoy.
- Are you dead? (If 'yes', please proceed to Question 7)
As the legal definition of the term 'alive' comes under attack by the morbidly obese, freshly defrosted icemen (thanks, global warming!) and the undead Zombie Gardeners of Ivanhoe, this question will become more and more difficult to answer. - Have you still as active as you were five years ago?
Unfortunately that answer is a resounding 'no', damnit a couple of months ago I managed to strain my hamstring getting out of bed... in the region I prefer to refer to as the 'Shane Watsons'. Epic Fail. Too bad telling a doctor you pulled your Shane Watson sounds kinda weird and wrong. - Are you currently a client of the Shane Warne 'Yeah Yeah' Corporation?
Not just yet, but I have attempted to use a waffle iron to get rid of my singleton white hair. The problem still persists, but on the upside I now smell like maple syrup and rhubarb. Lovely. - Do you refer to phrases used by the generation below you to stay cool and 'with it'?
That mostly depends on whether netspeak is an invention of our generation or theirs. I have noticed that using the Mark Holden method of using old sporting phrases to create random punchlines seems to transcend generations, with Kyle Sandilands hijacking the catchcry for his own nefarious purposes. I hereby propose we use the 'free kick' signal used in the AFL to signify really bad moves on behalf of the greater populace. - Do you resent the spoiled youths of today and their rowdy rebellious ways which could easily be solved by a good caning?
Hmm not sure about this one. I remember being in high school and wondering out loud how the Year 7s could somehow manage to get progressively dumber and dumber with each passing year though. Must be something in the water, or else someone's been drinking that tainted Chinese baby milk powder for longer than they might think. - Are you a member of the Catholic Church clergy?
Last time I checked, the next in line to the Pope isn't exactly a spring chicken. Career advancement is a plotted in fairly linear single minded one really - Step One: Wait for current pope to depart, Step Two: Rig ballot and become Pope. The only other waiting line comparable in length is possibly membership to the Melbourne Cricket Club. - Are you Eddie Murphy's recording career?
Well that's hardly fair! If 'Party All The Time' can get airplay at my neighbour's daughter's 18th birthday, I would like to think that Murphy can party any time he wants. Just keep him away from anything remotely female.
Until next time, I'll leave you with the song that's been in my head for best part of the night. No, it's not 'Party All The Time', I'll save that for some other time. It's a track by End of Fashion, a band from Perth with 'Fussy'. The video itself is taken from the viewpoint of one person in a very sticky situation. The accompanying single 'Kamikaze' takes the same situation but from the perspective of the other person. Very weird stuff, but strangely watchable.
With an intro like that, I could host my very own radio show.
Having said that, those ads certainly beat the alternative radio promos you sometimes hear. That one with the rapping really doesn't cut it for me... "Get some pancakes in your mouth! (In your mouth! In your mouth!)" rapped in a half arsed Vanilla Ice manner - so to speak it really gets my goat. I wonder what that really means.
Well onto the main event now, the reason for this post to exist. Currently I have extended family visiting from the family base in Hong Kong - five people in all. This has unfortunately had the effect of forcing me out of my room to accommodate them merely due to the fact I happen to have a one and a half sized bed (the bed frame we brought with us from HK didn't have a standard size over here, in fact we had to get one custom made). As a result I have been repatriated downstairs to the study where this 'fine' publication is put together, with some messy results as seen here:
Yeah sleeping in the middle of the study really does cramp things up somewhat. Things are still messy as per usual, but instead now I sleep in the midst of all of my own mess. Since they have hijacked my bedroom, I have had to move most of my regular clothes downstairs which results in several small piles of clothes forming on spare chairs. So this is what it's like to live like a hermit in a room full of crap. I'm not that far from being like that guy who hoarded everything he came across until that fateful day where he died in a collapsed tunnel of his own junk somewhere in his apartment.
On the upside, we got them to buy us a new DSLR camera over there. Things are generally cheaper over there and vary in legality from 'off the back of a truck' to Nintendo Vii style knockoffs. Either way you can't really complain unless it completely falls apart upon exposure to something like say, Oreos. A fairly obscure curse to be sure, but I am feeling a bit hungry right now.
Anywho, here's a shot taken by me while in the car. The thing with having nine people under the same roof is that feeding them becomes a bit of a problem. Jesus isn't here to provide us with pancakes or bacon (The Gospel according to Bacon - coming to a store near you!) so we often end up going out for dinner. And each time we end up going to a Chinese restaurant. Personally I don't really see the point... you jump on a plane and fly eight hours just to head to Chinatown. It reminds me of the Americatown thing on The Simpsons, though you could counter that argument by claiming there's not really that much local cuisine to try out besides fish & chips and shrimp on the barbie... curse you, Paul Hogan!
Once I figure out how all the settings work I'm sure I won't need to hide my incompetence behind fancy lighting effects and motion blurs. Join me next time when I fight the seven signs of aging with the help of my own homebrew face cream.
Some families have special days out to places like the beach or the fairground, you know, something to do as a family unit that we will treasure forever and perhaps someday tell our kids, or someone else's, I'm not too fussed. But not my family. Our idea of a family outing (Not that kind of outing, though that would be interesting depending on what you accuse them of. My personal favourite is witchcraft - you can use the pyre for a good barbecue afterwards.) comes in the forms of trips to the dentist. I suppose it makes life a bit easier if we all just got our annual checkups over and done with in one shot, but it is really overkill to make it a family event of discomfort and potential pain. Coincidentally this is not unlike the experience of watching an episode of Gunther's ER on SBS or being forced to sit through four consecutive screenings of Two and a Half Men reruns that have accumulated on your hard disk recorder because your dad insists on watching it at a later date. Delete them already!
Okay, now to stop my whinging for now, for I have no real reason to. For my teeth are the best in the land as far as I'm concerned. Despite the obvious beatings I will endure after she reads this, the dentist did comment that I have much 'better teeth than my sister'. So I did the only thing a sensible person in my position could do - walk out of the room with the biggest grin on my face. I continued this pattern of stupidity for the rest of the day, winning arguments simply by flashing a grin. Must remind myself to buy a mouthguard for future encounters, lest I wake up in the middle of the night with a cricket bat in my mouth.
I firmly believe the secret to good dental health lies not just in regular brushing and rinsing habits, but being scared into the entire routine at an early age. I have vague memories of the mobile dentistry showcase coming to my primary school in Year Two like some sort of mobile torture roadshow here to make your afternoon miserable. Apart from that, you would have to factor in the competency, patience and sobriety of the dentist. Going through a hundred prep aged kids probably isn't the best way to relax, and at that age you really wonder if that drill could take out a good chunk of your cheek. Fortunately I have no such problems now as I breeze through checkup time and come out smiling as if it were a competition. As they say, winners are grinners. Or is it the other way round?
But of course karma, the great equaliser struck back when I was promptly crushed by a falling piano outside the dental clinic.
Well I sort of lied about that one. But having your football team lose to your sister's football team falls within the same area of concern. Is this the point where I lose all faith in humanity? Is there a black hole waiting for me the moment I get up off the couch? Oh that's right, it's just a game. But what a hurtful one it is.