Monday, January 31, 2011

It just occurred to me

that for thousands of years, people wouldn't have known what their face looked like. I mean, of course, they might've checked themselves out in rivers and ponds, but still.

Isn't that a frightening thought?

New Year's Resolutions

Like most people, I like the idea of bettering myself throughout 2011, just not the effort required. It's become something of a sport in the modern day, making new year's resolutions that deep down we realise will remain otherwise unfulfilled. It's been a while since I've done this kind of thing, so I'm unsure as to how it will pan out. And seeing as though I don't recognise any gaping personality flaws I may posses, or pressing issues in my life, I've had to get more creative. In compiling and detailing these ideas, though, I'll be sure not to be too vague. Reading things like "be more adventurous" just pisses me off. Now for the mighty list:

1. Get to the gym, get more muscular.

Last time I got a membership, I mainly did cardio, but this did little for my scrawn, and since I've long since quit most sport, there's no real need for me to be especially "fit". Some inklings of biceps would be nice, I mist admit, despite my not being obsessed with muscle as being indicative of my heterosexuality like a lot of people.

2. Complain less about air travel.

Because, let's face it, I'm pretty lucky to be jetting off to bonny Asia as it is. 12 hour flights really aren't that bad; rather, the real horror comes when, only 3 hours in and 9 to go, I imagine all the things I could be achieving if only I weren't stuck in a thin metal tube, the acrid smell of body odor in my nostrils and a fat man snoring in my ear. I could be achieving anything. My solution- pop a few valiums.

3. Read one book every month, post reviews on blogspot.

This comes more from a need for new material on my blog than anything else. Still, I feel inherently cleverer and cultured upon finishing a book, and I could always do with playing less Xbox. As it is, I'm caught between re-reading Treasure Island and old issues of Xbox 360 World, the reviews of which I can now quote right down to the witty captions.

4. Reclaim (at least partially) my former tennis form.

Playing against my father the other day, it suddenly dawned on me how shit my game is these days, and how my twelve year old self would unequivocally whip me in a proper match. Sure, I won 6-1, but my shotmaking, especially where my serve was concerned (by the end of the match I was flinging serves at him, the double fault count approaching 20!) truly worried me. One day I will be able to fondly appreciate that I am past my best, but damnit, not yet.

5. Learn to write in cursive.

Looking over my exam papers, I am frequently appalled by the shockingly poor quality of my handwriting, as well as baffled that markers could actually understand what I wrote. Indeed, when e's become a's you know you're in trouble. My friend has even gone so far as to kindly refer to it as an "illegible scrawl". Cursive would simultaneously solve this problem, as well as giving a marker/teacher the impression that I am in fact a hard working guy, rather than some lurking psychopath, and am discussing the properties of ionic substances, rather than compiling my "people spying on me" list.

6. Be more positive.

You'll have to excuse the vagueness here. I tend to complain a lot, in want of something insightful and clever to say. Often these complaints are warranted, like if I pass a mock-tudor house, but I imagine it can get too much. Obviously changing your personality is difficult, but by approaching experiences with a better attitude, perhaps I'll enjoy them more?

There are, of course, more things to add, but a year is a short space of time. Being more adventurous can undoubtedly wait until 2012. Oh wait, the world will end then. Oh well.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

The Beautiful Game (sort of)

The Australian Open is upon us once again, and for the most part, I couldn't be happier: I love tennis. I feel I've done a pretty decent job of watching most of the good matches, and having just witnessed the downright clinical thrashings of Federer, Nadal and Ferrer, I have some musings I would like to share.

1. Tennis, by nature, is a frantic, intimate, emotional game. As such, it evokes a range of feelings from viewers like me, ranging from job to downright disdain and despair. Here's what I mean:

- I love seeing Ferrer's terrier-like ball tracking finally rewarded by Murray's inevitable blotched overhead. Classic.
- I love Federer's uncanny ability to suddenly raise his serve to the exact appropriate speed and angle to ace whoever he may be playing on the big points.
-I love smooth-talking, cool chair umpires who don't take shit from the likes of Roddick, and who make overrules without a second glance.
- I love how a bigger deal isn't made out of Andy Roddick's name. I mean, come on- Rod Dick? He might as well be christened Colloquial term for penis/Colloquial term for penis. Hehe.
- I love how the crowd blatantly and unequivocally is cheering harder for Federer, despite his playing against a home favourite (and yes, total wanker) like Hewitt. 

-Yet I hate seeing Judy Murray, doubtless a pushy cow like I imagine her to be, stand up to applaud her son's shots, teeth bared and fists clenched.
- I hate how the likes of the 199 ranked Tomic appears to actually harbour belief that he may triumph over a top ten player, solely because of "home advantage".
- I hate the over use of the trite phrase "good hustle" from commentators- this isn't American Football for christ's sake.
- I hate it when players emerge on to the court, so heavily bandaged that if they showed up looking like that anywhere else, a friend might reasonably comment, "were you hit by a bus or something?"
- And I hate staying up till 1:30am, only to have my heroic efforts rendered pointless by that fucking Scot.

2.  When you watch as much tennis as I do (and granted, plenty of others see much more- Sky does a generally dismal job of putting tennis even vaguely high on their priorities), you come to know the players well, and if you're like me, to speculate about their lives. An example of this come up when the camera inevitably pans to the players' boxes- specifically, to their parents, who are often present. 

Take Federer and Murray, for example. Federer, of course, is the infinitely cooler one of the two. I see his parents, his father surely being the guy the Monopoly man was based on, and I imagine that they leave Federer alone most of the time. That even when he was Murray's age, they had better things to do than perpetually run around after Rogie. That he called them up and said, "hey, guys... fancy free tickets to the Open this year?"

Murray, on the other hand, lies at the opposite end of the cool spectrum. He is, and will always be, a mumma's boy (is that how you spell it? Looks a but ghetto to me). I look at Judy looking rough as usual in the stands and see her subconsciously re-wording the constructive criticism she will doubtless deliver to her son following the match, win or lose.

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Like the new layout?

I went for the black because I care about conserving power by allowing my monitor (and yours!) to display darker colours.

And for the same reason, I go to blackle.com, rather than google.

*I actually don't. Nor do I care about energy. Like most people, I'm a bastard.*

Quand je serai plus vieux, je vais...

I'm constantly trying to organise and consolidate my life- considering what I'm doing at the moment, what I've done so far, and must crucially, what I will do in the future: let's talk jobs.

First, I planned on a life of solving crime, this after watching Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century on Saturday mornings. He and Watson flew around on circular hover crafts (because let's face it, how else does one actually know it's the future?), wearing trench coats, and smoking pipes. It seemed a grand lifestyle, the laser guns and all that, but even at the age of 7 or whatever, I could still see the single fault in that it wasn't yet the 22nd Century. So, I moved on...

...to Marine Biologist. Not sure the motivation for this one, however. I used to be quite the animal guy, next to Simon, of course. He was the animal guy. I had decided the oceans were cool, and being a scientist was even cooler. When my Year 5 teacher announced one day that her daughter was had the very same job to which I was aspiring, I demanded to know more. The very job. Marine Biology just sort of faded away, and for a while (like I should have been) I remained uncertain on the career front.

Yet this didn't fly with my OCD need to catergorise everything. At the time our house was being renovated, and I liked to pore over the plans, examining in awe the way our architect had included every detail from sinks to the garden hedge, and the wispy way she penned her name and address in the bottom right corner. Architects even had a way of making doors look sweet. This was my motivation for taking graphics in Year 9, which I found to be dismally boring. Onwards.

I fly quite a bit, and I had always harboured a vague interest in planes, and pilots. This, of all my various planned careers, must have been the most closely and seriously examined. I read up on being a pilot, talked to a bunch of people from the industry, and even took a test flight. I was very gung ho for a month or so. I was told I had the perfect, exacting personality for the job, and that the perks would be outrageous. It was my medical examiner, a great old man, who finally spoke seriously to me. "I found it dull," he said, "because essentially, you're just monitoring equipment." This last piece of advice resonated with me, and has since put me off the idea of flying for a living. That, and I realised that I deeply hate flying, and what with my bad eyesight and asthma, getting the medical renewed every year would have been a pain in the ass.

Last night, having seen half of The Social Network, I settled on come IT job. Good pay, according to TradeMe jobs, plenty of travel opportunities (because I'm that angled around pay- my father's son), and typing code is just so cool. I don't know anything about it, of course, and I'll have likely changed my mind in the coming weeks. It's good to dream, though.

I just hope that by the time enrollment for Uni actually comes around, I won't be fixated on something awful like teaching.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Choice shots from Vietnam!

Since you're all probably growing tired of the same old material- opinions and the likes- I thought I'd try something different and post some photos from my July 2009 trip to Vietnam- the birth of the "Viet" prefix you know and love. Here we go:



























This is from the chocolate buffet at the Sofitel Hotel in Hanoi- one of the few places I actually heard french being spoken in this francophone nation. Georgia and I spent about an hour here, but could have done with another two or three to simply make our way through the myriad of cakes, slices, sauces, creme brulés, fondus etc etc. This plate was soon demolished by myself.

On to Hué. Specifically, Georgia and my hotel room at the Saigon Morin. The colonial style, a throwback to the bygone days of the French colonisation, could be seen throughout the entire hotel. The far window afforded a great view of the river we later trudged over, and the mandatory basket of fruit before it.



























Still in Hué, at the Forbidden City, an old temple-type attraction. We threw some food into the pond, and were met by these swarms of gold fish. I count 223 of them.


Read this sign- honestly, read it! The spelling/grammatical errors are everywhere you look, and for me represent all that I love about the language barrier. We found this at a beach resort somewhere between Hué and Hoi An, and rolling on the sand- almost like drunkards. Oh, the ragulations!



























At the beach in Hoi An, minutes before the downpour began. The beach was quite crowded in the opposite direction. The beach was one of Hoi An's few highlights, I have to say.



























Taken during our final night in Hoi An, as we ate tea in a restaurant overlooking one of the town's pretty canals. Georgia took this photo, and we agreed that it had the sort of artistic composition that professionals searched for.



























I struggle to shrink into one of the tunnels used by the Viet Cong during the war. Around me, crowds of Americans gasp at my incredible feat, though I am soon outclassed by the petite Georgia, and an ever littler Vietnamese guide.




























The single flattering photo of me from me all 387! We are dining at a backstreet Indian restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City towards the end of the trip, enjoying the delights of a Bollywood film and some good Yellow Dahl (is that how you spell it?).

Friday, January 7, 2011

I have a dream...

Foreword: It's 2011. New year's resolution: fewer shithouse articles. After this one.

After seeing Inception a bunch of times, I got more interested in dreaming, as I'm sure everyone else did. Figuring that inducing lucid dreaming wasn't particularly likely, though it would be inceptionally (see what I did there?) cool, I have taken it upon myself to actively try and recall my dreams following my waking, and failing that, to write down the few incoherent fragments that are there.

Here is an example, fresh from my cahier. It begins in a doctor's office. He is, for some reason, cheerily telling me that my bum is now made of molten rock. No wait, I just remembered that he found out by accident, and I was doing a medical examination in the first place. Yes! All my friends were there. How strange.

This can't be what you had in mind, Martin Luther.

Yes, back to the main event. An ass made of liquid rock, as it were. As I sit hunched in a decidedly shitting position over some sort of x-ray machine, I gasp as my bum is highlighted with pulsing yellow goo. What a tragedy- I could weep, and possibly do.

My parents try to console me. My sister tells me, "harden up Will, it's not that bad." She of course, doesn't know the severe implications of this burden yet- and neither do I.

It's bees. Bees are attracted to my bum. Just to remind you, the premise of this dream is that my bum is made of molten rock, and now serves as bee-nip. In my desperation in the doctor's office, I suggest cutting the rock out. But no, he tells me, "that would risk thousands of swarming bees!" Great. At home, the bees are a constant presence. They come in twos, threes, but don't appear to want to sting. Thank god I'm not Sami/Nick/Luke. But I cower all the same, and refuse to sleep in my bedroom, with its freshly formed hive above my pikachu.

The dream gets hazier after this. I only know that I somehow become desensitised to the bees, which seems to me as implausible as the bum thing. The dream progresses...

Now me and a few friends are at my school, Burnside, skating. This while the annual Year 9 Dance is taking place. Also, I am a boarder at the school, despite them not offering this as an option. The bouncer has confiscated my deck, and I am forced to improvise. Finding a stick of fair length, and deeming it worthy, it set about creating my new longboard.

I don't profess to being especially handy, but somehow, this board materialises, even though I only recall playing with those plastic bands that can only tighten and never loosen. We called them Chinese finger traps.

This is where I woke up, at 10:38am. The dream took place between 7am and then- i.e. my second bout of sleeping that night. My friend Simon once noticed this phenomenon, and he was dead right. In trying to decode the dream's meaning, I like to think back to my time playing a forest folk in my Intermediate school's rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the lines we sing:

In dreams, things are never what they seem.
No one knows just what it means.
In dreams...

I think there's a tear in my eye. How poetic..