never could get the hang of thursdays
I’m sitting and wondering this morning what on earth I did during Internet 1.0 (i.e. before it was fashionable to call it Web, and give it a version number). I can recall fansites dedicated to Buffy, my very own Geocities account, random flash games and ad-overkill Yahoo!Mail, but that all seems a little… well, lacking.
Do tell, what was the net for you before blogs & bit torrent, before gmail, googlepages and flickr?
I want to be rich enough that an overnight 10% jump in petrol prices doesn’t faze me in the least. I wouldn’t even have to skimp on the caviar.
Until then… bloody hell >.< $50 for half a tank of fuel?! Are you crazy?
*most reluctantly hands over cash*
I’m looking for a digital camera, and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions based on their experiences. My criteria are:
Can you guys help me out here?
Annie encounters Centrelink: Ah, bureaucracy. Can anyone help Annie out here?
Oh crap, I’m late I’m late I hate CityRail I’m late, I thought as I ran from Circular Quay to the Conservatorium of Music. The time was 4:01, the concert scheduled to start a minute ago. I’d never even seen the Conservatorium before, let alone knew where the entry was. Going on a map, a wing and a bit of a prayer, I managed to find it, and apparently… I wasn’t late. Or at the very least, everyone was late. No actual performance started until 4:15, by which time I was seated and reasonably aware of the fact that if you took hair colour as a reasonable measure of origin, 90% of the audience was Asian. Not altogether surprising, but a fact that did make me amused. Continue reading “Piano Stories”
The club is packed, and the crowd is slowly transforming. The Friday night 9-to-5ers are leaving, finishing their week, and the dedicated party nuts are heading out to start their weekend; two different worlds crossing in the common space of the music and drink. I’m not sure what I’m doing here, and soon I will be out of place, the business shirt and formal pants an odditity instead of the standard. But she’s here. It’s always about a girl.
She is dancing, lost alone in the music. You can see her across the floor because she wears a white halter and skirt, bright white that draws in the dim light of the club and amplifies it. She throws all her energy into the dance, dark hair flying as she performs for herself, or perhaps for those around her. It’s all the same, because she has her eyes closed, and the small smile on her lips shows she is immersed. The drink disappears down my throat and I untuck the shirt, instantly dropping the formality. Perhaps I can pass for an overdressed student.
Her eyes open and she spots me. The smile turns into a grin, and she keeps eye contact, dancing out the song. I’m fixed to the spot. I turn around and order for us, her timing perfect as I turn back to hand it to her.
“You’re late,” she says, leaning in close to be heard over the music.
“I know,” I return, feeling the softness of her cheek, her hair. In the club, under the loud music, such intimacy is standard, even necessary.
“How long?” she says, sipping.
“One drink,” I reply, clipped sentences enforced by the music, its beat rising to a creschendo.
“No fair!” she shouts, barely audible, pouting. She finishes the drink in one long swallow, and races back to the dancefloor. It’ll have to be one set.
If there was ever evidence of the Devil’s hand in the affairs of men, it would be the little white beast which has perverted society to the point where people carry it around with them willingly, its tender white tendrils enwrapping the masses drawn in by the oh-so-innocent promise of joy, even as those around acknowledge how short lived that joy would be. Anything else that makes this many people this anti-social would have been legislated to the nth degree, as concerned parents and civil libertarians alike argued about the harm to society in the long term.
But no, they’re all in it. All tempted by the sweetness, the deceptively simplistic and straightforward appearance, as though it was something that made your life better. Oh no, dear friends, it is an addiction. The very definition of hedonism. Once it has you in its grip, it’ll never let go. Ever. And when you’re deprived, the sweet white drug there but just not quite, you’ll curse and wail and will wow “Never Again!”, even annunciating the capitals. Because that’s how frustrating it is.
But at the end of the day, when you finally make the breakthrough, when everything is on the road to recovery and the metaphorical horizon stretches out in front of you, promising a return to those cherished memories, you’ll take back those words, you’ll laugh at why you were frustrated, and you’ll just cross another one of those nine lives off, wondering if this one will last a month or six; you can never quite be sure, can you? C’est la vie, they say.
Greenpeace Founder Goes Nuclear: “Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce [CO2] emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.” This is somewhat along the lines of what I wrote about this last year when the debate was on here.
Forever young, forever young…
I wanna be forever young
Do you really wanna live forever?
Forever… forever…
Gah! I’ve had this song in my head for nearly 3 days straight now.
Youth is like diamonds in the summer sun
diamonds are forever
so many adventures couldn’t happen today
so many songs we forgot to play
so many dreams swinging out of the blue
left to come true
Not that it’s such a bad song, but it’s just stuck.
note: Song is Forever Young by Youth Group, an Australian band. Make sure you get the latest version, not the one that sounds like it was made in the 70s or 80s. It’s available on The OC Mix 5.
It’s funny how, with some people, you can start again right in the middle of a conversation. Once you get the pleasantaries over, it’s back to being right there, where you were in when you left. The intervening time adds nothing but new experiences to discuss, or new perspectives on old prejudices. You nearly forget that there’s been time in between.
And yet with others, it takes an effort. An effort to connect again on the level you’d strived to reach before. You know these are friends, and there’s a reason why you’re making that effort to connect again, but none the less an effort you have to make.
You invariably want more friends of the first type, but you know they’re a rare breed, people you’ll only find a few times in a life time, people you need to cherish, your soul-mates in the sense of friends. But the other type, you need them too. They fill the gaps between the soul-friends, they provide that safety net, in a sense. Even if you have to make the effort, the payoff is there.
The terrible analogy you’ve just come up with is that the first type are like DVDs – you can get right to where you were fairly quickly – while the second type are like old VHS tapes – lots of scanning and effort to find the right place.
You think you’ll end it on this note, and grab some sleep. Tomorrow’s right back to that grindstone.