Darling I’m down and lonely with the fortunate only. So sentimental, not sentimental, no, romantic not disgusting yet

Today is the last day of lectures and lessons of semester one, 2010. Today, I had my last improvisation playing assessment. I had got virtually no sleep, and no, it didn’t go well. I am just hoping that I will pass. Today is also the start of the long weekend for Queens Birthday. Although I didn’t even know that, because classes have ended so I will not get Monday off anyway. Plus, I have soooo much work to do over the weekend in order to prepare for my repertoire jury assessment next Wednesday.

Thanks to the combination of beautiful (however freezing) weather and the start of the long weekend, the ferries I had taken in and out of town to university were both relatively empty compared to usual. There were a lot of school aged kids milling around the city in the afternoon for a spot of shopping as they had finished classes early. I rather miss being excited for the hour early, 2pm finishes that we used to get at college last year and prior. It feels so weird not being young anymore.

Speaking of leaving college though, my sister just had her last official day of school – at the age of 16, she’s now “graduated early” (on paper, at least) or “dropped out”, in order to attend Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, on a full Women’s Golf Scholarship. She had a shared lunch at school today, and her friend made her the cutest cupcakes ever. You can’t really tell due to the flash in this photo, but the white bits are actually indented to look like golf balls – how adorable!

On the topic of cakes, this is what my (rather hastily made) birthday cake from my sister looked like. It tasted great, but I swear, they don’t look as amazing as they used to… shhh.

I am sooooo looking forward to freedom and late nights out starting Wednesday next week after my assessment! So far I have plans for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday already. And very likely Saturday. Inebriated shenanigans with loud music and much better clothing than my daily 5-minute scramble, I’m sure!

I’m not the way that you found me, I’m neither here nor there. One day I’m happy and healthy, Next I ain’t doing so well

I’ve been listening to The Dead Weather’s Sea of Cowards whenever I need a kick of energy lately (which is all the time), especially first thing in the morning; thus I felt this entry’s title, derived from “The Difference Between Us” was appropriate, as it seems to describe precisely how I’ve been feeling.

Gloom aside though, my mum and sister are busy baking in the kitchen – yes, yes, whilst I am relaxing on the couch making this post, basking in delicious smells – and the first batch out of the oven consisted of scrumptious oatmeal chocolate chip cookies! I was disappointed after 2 cookies that I had already eaten my allocated allowance, as apparently these are to be taken to some golf event tomorrow. Grrr!

Last night I finally got around to renting out a couple of movies I’d been meaning to watch for a long time. I know both Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Eyes Wide Shut are both pretty old movies, but there’s a reason they’re both so famous, and I’m glad to finally have watched them. For starters, I know Jason Statham’s not exactly Oscar-winning material, but he’s never failed to entertain me in a film. I still can’t get over how he was a national diver. Heh. On the other hand, I had never taken much interest in the idea of Eyes Wide Shut. I remember my parents and the press had made a big deal out of it, back all those years when it first came out, but what had piqued my interest was the fact that we had been assigned to watch it for a Scholarship English tutorial last year. I’d ended up watching A Clockwork Orange and Fight Club instead, but never got around to anything else – let alone the idea of Tom Cruise being jealous of his wife’s sexual fantasies. It’s such a bizarre movie… I’m still not even sure what to think of it.

This is a pretty slack post, and I didn’t even take this next photo, but why bother when Mum’s already taken it, and it’s cold and wet outside? I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the onset of autumn (winter soon, please!), and this is a corner of our deck and backyard. You can hardly see the back deck that the chair and table are on, as it’s virtually completely covered by fallen trees. Sweeping those are a nightmare.

Friday afternoon adventures:
1/ Remembering the wrong time for the ferry home, thus leaving the guitar boys to walk to the ferry… then discovering I had a 1.5 hour wait to spend alone, bored!
2/ Talking the guys down at Boardertown to help me get my broken Wesc headphones replaced, even though I lost the warranty and receipt.
3/ Seeing Takuma, who had been doing tennis training in Texas for the past few months.
4/ Walking the length of the beach catching up on things, being silly, reminiscing.
5/ Spying on the guy doing that thing that I can’t remember the name of… the sport where they stand on a board that looks like a surfboard, and are just, uhh, paddling along?!! Takuma says it’s all the hype and are all over sports magazine.
6/ Discussing how far away the rain is, as Rangitoto Island quickly disappeared behind the clouds…
7/ Being ambushed by the rain, and discovering just how far we’d walked down the beach – as running on increasingly wet sand in damp, tight jeans and dr martens wasn’t the easiest thing to do! Especially because I’m so unfit now…
8/ Spending the rest of the early evening chatting over twinkies and then going shopping for a new beanie to get me through winter.

These Cookie Dough Bites are amazing. Dammit, I need more of that stuff.

And last, but not least, I took a detour on my way home at about 3am to pick up a belated birthday present. 3x Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds albums. Just because Matt thinks I need to be enlightened. I can tell you now, it’s going to take me quite a while to get into them. But alas, I am very impressed by the wrapping job. It’s too bad I couldn’t get a photo of it whilst it was still wrapped.

The View From the Afternoon

I woke up extremely happy this morning. That is, asides from the fact that I’d only finally gotten to sleep after 3am due to the drunken imbeciles who decided to keep ringing me up and pay the tree in my front yard a very loud visit, because I refused to come out and say hi. You know who you are. GROW UP.

Anyway, rants aside yesterday was one of the best days that I’ve ever had – my 19th birthday is actually tomorrow (23rd), but Lottie decided to treat me to an early present of an afternoon to secret locations that’s kept me guessing for about a month – and we even ended up with our own stalking fan club of sparrows! (scroll below). The only hurdle that I had to conquer was a Jazz theory test at 10am; but at midday on the dot, I was greeted by a car of balloons and bangin’ tunes* right outside the KMC where my classes are. It was lucky that the only thing I’d had to eat all morning was a mere banana, because our first stop was the Sale Street bar for an amazing lunch and beer. By amazing I meant it not only quenched my thirst for Monteiths and imminent hunger, but made me extreeeemely bloated to the point of shameful shirt adjusting, and is probably the best beef burger that I’ve ever had. If only Burger Fuel were as generous with their aioli as this! Not only the beef, but also the pot of aioli had a melted layer of baked cheese over the top… I’m craving another one now, just thinking about it.

The waggu beef burger sounded so good on the menu that we both ordered the same thing. And buddy Monteiths beers – Original Ale and Radler. It’s a shame that it was so dark inside and I couldn’t get a picture of the interior – the decor’s amazing. That light in the distance behind Lottie’s head below is actually caged in a frame of cutlery!

Next stop was at the newly opened Topshop at the top floor of The Department Store that’s located on Auckland’s North Shore. I made sure to take physical proof to document Lottie’s first day driving across the Harbour Bridge and back! We were quite disappointed in how ridiculously small Topshop turned out to be; and the sales assistants kept slowly putting out new garments every 10 minutes or so, which made it really frustrating because it caused all the customers to turn into tactical operators, due to the limited amount of stock, especially in the most common sizes. I ended up buying a very versatile black skirt and black dress, which I’m sure I’ll wear soon (I’ve got plans for that dress…) and post.

Technically the weather was “shit”, in the sense that up until 4pm it was pouring with rain with no apparent end. The only problem with calling it “shit weather” is the fact that that is precisely my favourite weather. Ever. The only way it could’ve gotten better for me was if it developed into a thunder storm, complete with lightning displays, haha. The picture on the right below is actually out of chronological order, and was taken on the Harbour Bridge between 4-5pm… see the drastic change in Auckland weather?!

We paid the mall a visit, before heading over to a cafe that I don’t actually know the name of… but that’s probably a good thing otherwise I may shred their reputation based on the poor treatment that the waitress offered us: they had two sliding door entrances, and upon entry, we asked for a table, only to be greeted by a “wtf are you doing in here” glare, followed by “we’re actually closed and only doing takeaways, so you’ll have to enter from the other door”. What an mf-bitch. I would’ve been shot if I ever did that to a customer. (Off topic, but speaking of which, this is my FIRST weekend being cafe-job-less, YAY!)

Luckily, they had amazing ice cream – I’d chosen double chocolate (of course), and Lottie had tried peanut flavoured scoops… which I still think is a really bizarre flavour for ice cream. Creamiest, thickest chocolate flavour, ever.

The next thing we knew we had a couple of sparrows land on the windscreen wipers watching us eat. Joined by a couple more. And a couple more. We even had to wind our windows up because they began to hover at eye level, having a peek inside the car – as if to see whether it was safe to enter and nab some waffle cone! Craziest scene ever. 30 minutes and a lot of bird poop later, we called it a day and tried to beat the traffic back East.

Spent the rest of the night curled up in Lottie’s bed with girly indulgences such as magazines, Skins on dvd, web-scouring, chocolate slice and and and CC & DRY, yay!

This is going to make it hard for me to come up with something for Lottie’s birthday in 5 months…

And now it’s time for me to sulk about the amount of jazz I need to work on for my assessments this week, next week, and the week after… and the fact that it’s my last day being 18. I am soooo not ready to be in my last year of being a teenager.

One last thing: I found this online the other night. It is SO TRUE.

Make that two last things: I was ecstatic to get home at around midnight to discover that Euan and bought me a No Wow album with a limited edition documentary and live footage of The Kills. AND compiled me a usb full of live footage, because he initially thought he couldn’t get hold of the dvd. Haha. Double score.

These arms are mine, don’t matter who they hold

I’m making myself promise that I will tidy my room after I make this post: it’s been transformed into an inefficient workspace lately, and I should really put away all the things that I need to step and skip over! I would post a picture, but it’s a little too shamefully messy. To begin with, my forearms are resting on a pile things covered by a tent of paper just to reach the keyboard to type. My mouse only has about 5cm’s worth of space to move in each direction; the bed is completely covered by a pile of clothes, and I’m no longer sure which are clean and which have been worn once or twice. The only space I’ve really paid much attention to has been the square metre in the corner where I’ve moved the chair to, and propped up a music stand, just in arm’s reach of the amplifier… along with my WESC headphones. Those things come in handy for when practise drags into the early hours of the morning – the only problem is I’m unable to plug my headphones into my amp and my metronome simultaneously. I’m sure had mum been less sleepy, the constant ticking heard through the wall would’ve driven her to insanity like it has to me. See – I don’t even make sense today!

My left wrist is now bound by two loops of tape, it feels like it would fall apart otherwise. I know, I know, I need to be careful with my technique and pressure placement so that I don’t strain it, but all this last minute practise has really put me to the limit. That’s the thing I’m really hating about a practical degree – you can’t cram practise, like you could cram for an exam. If you don’t know something well enough to recall it from memory instantly, when it is requested of you to play it, there is no way in hell you could dawdle your fingers for a bit, look around the room, and eventually get a “lightbulb moment”. You can’t erase your first answer, change it, then re-change your mind and decide you were correct to begin with. No, no, no. Once your hands are committed to playing something, the sound is out there, for the judging panel to mark down a number in accordance to its precision.

I’ve always been really terrible and leave things to the last minute… you’d think I would’ve learnt by now, but it still keeps happening. It’s not that I neglect things entirely until it’s too late, it’s just the fact I ignore all the details that I’m unsure of – which is the biggest trap of all! Anyway, I just had my technical jury assessment for electric bass today, and it went ooookay. By that I mean that I know I will pass, very averagely, if even “passing safely” at all. But how I did today is a million times better than how I sounded a week, two, or three weeks ago, so the pain is kind of worth it. Maybe.

Also, I decided that I’d post a playlist today – it’s just 9 random tracks that I like, that I happened to listen to today – so it’s certainly not one of those overtly well thought-out, deep and meaningful mix-tape type things, haha. Enjoy.

Perhaps fuck off might be too kind

I quit my job.

After a year and a half of weekendly hard work being enslaved to the picky customers of a busy cafe for 8 hours at a time, today was my second to last shift. Complying with the whole 2 weeks’ notice thing, I still have to somehow survive one last shift next Saturday – and I’m afraid it will probably be the longest, ever.

I’ve noticed over the past couple of years that I’ve sometimes got a problem with authority figures. No. Let me rephrase that. I’ve got a big problem with people who are in a ‘position of authority’, but are either unqualified, hypocritical, disrespectful, unprofessional, or all of the above, and much worse. And the people I work with are exactly that.

Earlier, I was tempted to go into a full, blow-by-blow account of all the reasons and awful situations I’ve been put in at work, but I’m just not in the mood right now.

In a vain attempt to cheer up and humour myself, I aimed my webcam and its effect at my cat. I don’t think he was particularly amused…

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