Month: March 2004

!!

But aside from that, life is quite boring. I have a new lounge suite (purchased on the weekend), a new TV, and a PVR/STB.

They aren’t making me incredibly happy, but they’re good for wank factor – and if I ever do end up getting that thing, (what’s it called, umm…. a social life!) then these things will be quite handy 🙂

Amazingly, I think I’m starting to feel a bit happier though – slowly finding some purpose and gaining some confidence. Sadly though, I’ve started drinking and eating junk food. Not good! Thought I’d kicked that habit. Oh well, diet here I come. 🙁

Yes, I’m still playing the cricket game in my last post. Completely, utterly, hopelessly addicted.

I haven’t posted here in a while, I’ve been travelling a little bit with work, and I’ve had other stuff happening too. Tonight I decided to pose a philosophical question to my huge adoring fanbase.(!)

Why is it that so many things in life that are good, fun, and enjoyable, so many indulgences that make us feel happy and content as humans, are ultimately bad for us?

Of course in my case, right now, I applied that to pizza and bourbon. But it can be applied to so many things throughout our lives.

Of course there will be purists that say “but everything is good for you in moderation” or “everything is bad for you in excess.”

I used to say that as well.

But if I want to drink bourbon and eat pizza every night, and it’s what gives me a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment, then why should my life be shortened by 20 years as a result?

Here is just another example of why “life is not fair.” All of you that have children, teach them that from an early age.

I have a strong suspicion that many of my social imbalances and inadequacies are a result of some of the brainwashing I was subjected to as a child, that what I gave out to others would come back in return. Alas, that has proven to be a complete falsehood – if you are nice to everyone, then people will walk all over you and take advantage of your nature. The only way to be truly at peace with the world is to assert your authority, tell the world what you want, and don’t take no for an answer!

That’s my take on this whole “society” caper.

Having said that, I’d like to tell people how much I love them without fear of being thought of as a sentimental, eccentric old softie. So there’s a paradox for you: How does one truly be honest with their feelings, build other people up and give them a sense of self worth, without turning themselves into an object of ridicule and a doormat for others to wipe their feet on?

I think there’s something in that for all of us, don’t you? (Deliberately phrased to sound like that pastor guy from Full Frontal.)

Those who read the above post might think I’m a little sad or upset tonight, but that’s not true at all. On the contrary, I’m feeling quite content and happy. Strange.

I may recieve a substantial pay cut soon. There are zero reasons to be happy about that – and I’m not – but I’m not exactly sad about it either, I’m just indifferent.

Where am I headed?

PS.

This game rocks.

I suck at it, but it still rocks.

I’m a bit pissed at the moment 🙂

My new TV (and stand) arrived today – after much pissfarting about, it was installed (for some reason my VCR decided to stop doing audio out while I was setting it up – but it decided that complying with my requests was more prudent than being relegated to ebay to be sold off to some other poor sap) and now everything’s working very nicely.

It also looks very pretty 🙂

The VCR is the only thing that doesn’ t match the colour scheme – not that I use it much – so it had better keep doing what it’s supposed to!

A friend of mine has put me onto a fantastic online radio station. My ISP streams it as free traffic, so I’ve been listening to it a lot this week – it’s excellent. Nothing but 80s music – if you’re interested, click my link and have a listen.

There’s also been lots of alcohol flowing through my house this week (I blame all the 80s music) – sadly, I’ve slipped back into some old habits. There’s been things happening at work that are really dampening my spirits – things that are quite unique to us because of our location – but that’s no excuse. I’ve just felt like getting pissed.

And this next week is going to be a bit sucky – I’ve got a couple of interstate day trips, and I’ll be in Hobart for the rest of the time, trying to help my counterpart on the other side of the state. It should be fun, but the travelling gets very tiring.

Anyhoo – I’d better stop drinking and sign off. I still intend to post my life story here, but there’s plenty of time for that. More to come on that note later….

Well, 1 week since I got back home, started work again, and even though I said in my last post I’d find it hard to slip back into a routine, that’s not the case at all. It’s been incredibly easy – and now I’m even lazier than what I was before. I haven’t left the house for the past 2 days.

I don’t think I spend enough time with people – but then the time that I do spend with them I quite often find uncomfortable, and sometimes tedious and boring. At least, with some people. I don’t want anyone who reads this in years to come thinking that I’m some kind of heartless robot, incapable of compassion – I’m not.

But it just dawned on me in one of those strange moments of clarity (interestingly enough, while I was running water to do the dishes) that there are some things I want to do, and that I can make them happen if I set them very clearly in my mind.

To start from the beginning – on Friday night I was feeling a little happy and I decided to have a few drinks – which is a lot rarer for me these days than it has been in the past (at least, drinking at home alone is rarer, I sure don’t mind going to the pub when the offer of company arises.)

Anyway, so I’m sitting at my computer, as is the normal thing for me to do, and I get the thought into my head that I want/need a bigger TV, and have done for a while. So I end up on ebay.

Well to cut a long story short, on Saturday morning I was the proud buyer of one of these (the top one.) I got it for far less than RRP (only just over half, actually), direct from Grundig Australia – when I placed the bid I really didn’t expect to win the auction but I thought hey, no harm in trying 🙂

I’m also highly likely to have a Topfield 5000 settop box/PVR on the way as well. I’m excited 😀

The point of explaining this was that I’d previously decided to start looking at property this year. Now I’m kicking myselffor not allowing for that – what I’ve spent on the TV and the STB (and what I’m also looking at buying another PC, for various reasons) is a pretty fair investment, when I’m supposed to be saving for a deposit on a house.

And it just occured to me that I’ve been talking about getting into business for myself for way too long now. Sure, I could do a bit of this and that on the side of my day job – but in practice, there are probably better ways of doing that – preferably a tried and true way, by opening a franchise of some description (again, I have some ideas in that vein.)

And it occurs to me that If I buy a house this year, and pay it off like mad for a little while, I might have enough equity to take out a fat business loan and get myself started 🙂

So, there’s some definite goals there. Perhaps I’ll find some clarity soon, and some more motivation to make it all happen.

The point aboutthe not spending enough time with people?

I figure if I actually invested some more timein the people I knew, and actually got to the point where I could call some of them friends, then they would have helped me figure this all out much sooner.

OK, well I’ll need to keep this post for future reference I think – nothing like putting something in writing to make it a reality, is there (although I guess it didn’t work for the jogging :-o)

In other news, I’ve spent the last 3 days going through all the episodes of Firefly – as a rabid Buffy fan I can see Joss’ handiwork all over it – I really enjoyed watching it and I just wish it hadn’t been axed so prematurely.

They’re making a movie though, so there’s bound to be a lot of people around waiting for that one with bated breath 🙂

Why haven’t I blogged? Well for a start, work’s been fairly busy this week. Secondly, I’m ashamed toadmit that that resolution I made earlier about jogging every morning?

Didn’t happen.

I set the alarm for 6:15am and everything, but I’m just sooooooo not a morning person. Add to that the fact that the Tassie cold is starting to kick in (it’s really starting to feel like summer is over, the nights have been starting to get nippy) and you’ve got a recipe for sleeping in 🙂

Work has been interesting since I’ve been back – been trying really hard to stay positive, and so far so good – I think. The team is kinda talking to me again, which is nice. I’m thinking that the person who was in charge while I was away is also a bit tougher at times than what I am – maybe they’re realising how easy they’ve really got it 🙂

My area manager visited yesterday and gave me some interesting ideas – that helps too. Oh, and his coming back from Malaysia with presents was also nice 🙂

Now I’m playing about with FlipPublisher since they saw some exhibitors at the furniture show they went to using FlipBooks as a presentation tool. At least from what he’s described to me, that’s what it was. Someone’s had the idea for us to utilise it as an in-store catalogue, so I’m having a play with it just to see what I can do. I need to find my creative side again – although I’m actually having some more ideas as I type this, so that can’t be a bad thing 🙂

Anyway, 3 days off for me now – maybe I’ll blog again soon. I’d better make the most of them though – in the next fortnight I’ve got 3 interstate trips for training and meetings, and at least one of them falls on my day off, and there’s lots of other stuff happening at work which will make it interesting, to say the least – but it should be OK. Have fun! 😀

Well, here I am, home at last. Actually I’ve been home for ooh, close to 12 hours now – been spending the evening watching Futurama episodes on DVD, drinking Jack Daniels and laughing a lot.

The positive mood from the other day hasn’t entirely faded – although I’m starting to regret my choice of albums in the car. I’ve had Ben Folds – Rockin’ The Suburbs in there for a couple of days now, and while I’m a huge fan of Ben Folds, it’s perhaps not the right music to be maintaining a positive frame of mind to.

It’s actually quite happy music, it just has such a sickly-sweet, happy yet sad quality to it. Actually the last track on the album (The Luckiest) is probably the worst – it makes me cry – but it’s not a depressing song! It’s a love song, about how lucky he is to be with his partner, and one of the ways he expresses it is about a man in his 90s who dies in his sleep, and his wife dies a few days later.

That’s something that actually happens in real life – when a couple is so completely devoted to each other and one partner dies, the other loses all reason to keep going and ends up passing away soon after. Or so I’ve read.

But it’s not the story itself that’s depressing – it’s actually quite a beautiful thing, when you think about it, that two people could be so hopelessly devoted to each other that they can’t see a reason to go on without the other.

One day I’d like to be in a relationship like that.

Well, all the things I planned to do yesterday are done, I think – I went out and did some sightseeing, spent some time fishing, and just generally lazed around the Nelson Bay area. As of this morning I jumped in the ute and headed back to Sydney, where I’ll be getting on the boat tomorrow to head home to Tasmania.

It’s been an interesting few weeks – I think if anything I’ve had too much time to think, and looking back over some of my previous postings here, I do sound like a depressed old sadsack. I never meant to sound that way. It’s just that when all the excitement ends and all the dust settles, that’s what seems to be left.

Which reminds me – the MD of the company I work for is running an invite-only course for future leaders within our company – I’ve been lucky enough to be invited in one of the first groups that’s doing the course. (I may have mentioned this earlier – that first instalment of the course is the reason I was in Sydney last week, but anyway, I digress.)

While we were sitting there last week he said something that’s really true, but that a lot of us probably don’t think about all that much. Everyone has their own definition of success.

Everyone has different goals that they want to achieve. It’s up to us to work out what we want for ourselves to achieve the level of satisfaction we want for our lives.

One thing I’ve realised, while I’ve been spending all this time thinking over the course of this trip, is that what’s making me sad is that I’m quite aimless. I’ve got no sense of where I want to go with my life, and it’s been that way probably ever since Cas and I split up – yes, I’m going to say her name now.

So that’s really my goal – the problem is that most of the people I come into contact with in my life already see me as successful. I’ve certainly been blessed with success in my professional career, and for a while that gave me a great sense of satisfaction, but now that I’m where I am, living in a really pleasant place, driving a nice car, not working insanely hard and earning a good income, it really all pales in significance when I think about how hopelessly lonely I am.

Somehow I need to remove the social inhibitions that have been plaguing my life for years and get out there and meet some people! I’ve spent so long withdrawing from the world that I’m not sure I remember how – but that’s OK. It’s really only just dawned on me (although I’ve known it all along) that I have so many blessings I should be counting. I also think that there’s a couple of people back home who have even tried to get me out of my shell a little bit, and I haven’t really been paying any attention.

Oh, and one more thing. I’m going to start jogging. At least three mornings a week. Can I do it? We’ll see. But I’d really like to lose about 20 kilos, and while changing my diet has been helping, it’s not working fast enough. So while I’m sitting here in the motel, and I’m feeling really positive about it, I’ve promised myself that I’ll start doing it as soon as I get home.

But only on work days. I’ll be damned if I’ll get out of bed at 6am for a jog on my days off 🙂

Then I’ve got to work on deciding what I want out of my life. Otherwise this issue is just going to crop up again and again.

Recently (a month or so back) I was offered the chance to take on a management role (same as what I’m doing now) in other parts of Australia. At the time, I actually said yes, I’d move again, and then later I rescinded my acceptance and said I’d rather stay where I was. Right now, I’m feeling more and more comfortable with that decision by the day. If I’d moved, then the most likely outcome is that I’d feel a sense of purpose again for a short time, and then after 12 months or so I’d start to feel listless and depressed again, just like what’s happened at every other place I’ve moved to. And it’s happened with increasing severity each time.

At least by staying I can hopefully get to the root of the issue. My gut feeling is that I just need to discover some career aspirations, a small circle of friends and a woman to take care of/take care of me. The career side of things, well, I’m having some ideas about that – but I’ll save that for another time. The rest, remains to be seen.

I’m now in a motel in Nelson Bay, doing a bit of research before I hit the beach tomorrow for some fishing.

Why is it that I always get all emotional when leaving places where she is? I never get that with anyone else, but I was in tears when I left, as usual. It’s not that I’m fucked up over her, specifically, I think it’s just that I’m lonely and miserable in general. She told me to quit my job, heh. I wish it was that simple.

Was listening to some Evanescence in the car earlier today and on one of their EPs there’s this song called Solitude. It seemed to sum up pretty well how I was feeling (actually perhaps I shouldn’t be listening to Evanescence as their music always tends to depress me – although I really enjoy the music.)

Amy Lee’s voice continues to amaze me. I don’t know why, I mean there’s probably a fair few singers out there of her calibre, but it just has a haunting quality. In fact that’s what set me off this morning – the flat next to where I was saying is being renovated and the guys doing the work there had the radio on really loudly – then My Immortal came on and I just burst into tears. That song has that effect on me a lot, it always makes me think of times past – much like Ben Folds Five and Don’t Change Your Plans.

How does one move into the present without breaking ties with the past? It’s a case of not wanting to let go of those memories of things that were so wonderful, yet they’re holding back from an even better possible future. The main thing I’ve been hoping for is to get involved with someone else, but in typical catch-22 fashion, that’s highly unlikely to happen unless I get over the past and allow myself to care again. And that’s really difficult when you’ve got few friends, low confidence and low hopes. So, one tends to sink even further into a funk of depression which seems harder and harder to get out of the longer it goes on.

But still, I guess I’ve learnt a few things. I thought that having a good income and a nice car and nice clothes and lots of pretty posessions would make life somehow more bearable, but it hasn’t. (That’s not to say I’m a yuppie by any stretch of the imagination, heck my lounge is still a dodgy rickety old futon, but if I need to buy stuff I definitely don’t worry too much about budgeting these days.) Drinking a lot isn’t particularly helpful either, neither is eating whatever and whenever you feel like it, neither is smoking (cigarettes, pot, whatever. Been through all that, as will be evident when I eventually get around to typing out the aforementioned 16 page story written when I was a dope fiend. 🙂 ) So here I am still singing along to U2 and I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

Oh well, we soldier on, don’t we. That’s what life is all about, I guess – just need to find a more positive outlook on things. Maybe anti-depressants (I’m still being advised to see a shrink but sadly, I can’t bring myself to do that. I have an aversion to brain shrinkers, and I’m not particularly interested in living my life on medication, either.) and then again maybe not.

Will catch some fish tomorrow. Might post some pictures. Maybe that’ll be less boring in case this blog ever gets read by anyone other than me 🙂

Couldn’t resist getting back online once more before I left. I’ve told them I’m leaving and now they’re saying I don’t have to, that I’m welcome to stay, etc – but are they just being polite, and will I look silly if I do decide to stay?

I can’t stay. Part of me just feels like a third wheel hanging around here – but as the housemate said earlier, it’s nice to have the company. I guess that’s how I feel too.

😐

Some holiday, huh.

It’s now Tuesday, and I had every intention of leaving today and heading back down south. I’ve got to be on the boat in Sydney on Friday morning, so I’ve still got a few days up my sleeve, but I don’t want to overstay my welcome.

It’s been an interesting few days here. I’ve done some fishing, (caught quite a few too) – photos are up on my webspace but they’re nothing exciting. Drunk plenty of grog. Ended up being able to get online for a couple of hours most days, although I miss my ADSL at home. On Friday (well officially, on Monday 🙂 ) my isp released some funky new plans – and I’ve asked them to upgrade me from my current 512/128k connection to 1500/256k – it’d be sooooo good if that was done by the time I get home (although chances are it’ll be early next week, I’m guessing.)

I’ve kinda felt bad that I haven’t spent a lot of time out and about doing stuff – been lazing around the house a lot. Listless – confused, tired. Really, if I wanted to laze around the house, I could have spent my three weeks holidays at home, and saved myself a couple of grand in travelling expenses, but hey – I’m still enjoying driving the ute, and occasionally visiting some of the facilities that are lacking back home.

My friend’s housemate has also been enjoying the ute, I’ve been letting him drive it (with me in the car) and how he’s set on buying one. It seems to have that effect on people (it had the same effect on a guy I know back in Tassie, too, and he didn’t even drive it.)

I say housemate because I have to give her the benefit of the doubt. I’m incredibly paranoid about these things, yaknow?

This girl is my ex, although I’m trying really hard not to think of her as that – I’d much rather think of her as a friend. It’d make it easier for me to get the hell over her (it’s been like, 2 years already.) The problem is that we never really actually broke up. Things were going along just fine and dandy until I took a promotion and moved out to Dubbo, and ever since then we just kinda drifted apart. We tried the long distance thing for a while, but it was pretty hard, and in the end I think we just mutually decided we were better off as friends.

That wasn’t so easy – when we had both told each other we still loved each other, and we still regularly visited, and still slept in the same bed together and cuddled lots – it still felt like a relationship and it’s not so easy to let go of something like that when it means so much to you. It’s perhaps one reason why I’ve found it really, really difficult to see myself getting involved with someone else (and add to that my normal complete shyness around strangers, especially of the attractive female variety, and it becomes downright near impossible.)

Anyway, even up until early last year when she visited me in Tas, things seemed pretty normal. A lot’s changed since then, obviously.

We work for the same company – she always said she never wanted to become a manager – since then she took a promotion and moved up here. She severely chastised me once about never smoking pot around her, yet she’s living with a guy who smokes every night. She always said she needed to live on her own, even – when we were together, I was at her place 4 or 5 nights a week but moving in was never an option, but now she’s living with this guy in a flat that’s half the size of the one she was in back then. And even though she swore blind to me that her and this guy aren’t together, I still can’t help but wonder if there’s more than that to it – sure, they have separate beds, but their lives are just so intertwined together between work (they work together – just like she and I did when we were together) and home that it seems pretty cozy to me. And her and I don’t even cuddle any more. I miss that.

I’m probably being totally paranoid, but I don’t have a choice – I can’t accuse her of lying to me, and really, it’s none of my business anyway. It’s her life, and although I care about her deeply I can’t get too involved. The only reason she’d be lying about it is to spare my feelings, but it makes no difference to me now, really. I’m mature enough to accept that she has been or will be involved with other people, and that won’t change the fact that we’re friends and that I care about her – what we had is over. There’s no necessity for her to be dishonest about anything.

But anyway, no need for me to keep ranting about it – I guess I’m a bit sad that I didn’t really have much of a chance to really talk to her about things. There were always other people around.

So now I’m going to disappear somewhere else and let these two get on with their lives – this flat is too small for three people and I’ve had a great time – I just wish I didn’t still feel so alone.

It’d be nice to be able to feel like I was heading back home feeling really positive and recharged, but it’s not really feeling that way right now. Maybe a couple of days of alone time will help that – I really hope so.

In the meantime I’d better get offline – they’re having problems with the computer at her work and she’s asked me to come and have a look at it – not that I’ll probably be able to do much, but anyway…. *gone*