rather terror than tyrany

That's my new anti-anti-terrorism slogan. I think it'd go well on a t-shirt.

I wanted to speak a little bit this evening about an old cassette (I know, pre-CD) that was playing in my parents car earlier. It contained a whole bunch of old jazz and I really liked it. I can't remember what the point of this was, unfortunately.

The other thing was about a hitch-hiker I once picked up. A man and his wife, it seemed to me. I drove them a relatively short distance before he asked if I could drop them off and wait just three minutes. Well... she had nothing of it. I didn't mind at all - I wasn't actually urgently needed anywhere - but she had that matronly, old-womanly pride. The pride of the poor when they are accepting a favour from someone unimaginably richer than they. Acceptance, but no demands, no requirements. Just... I'm not sure. It was interesting, is all. What was perhaps more interesting was that he was quite happy to do the socially unacceptable. Which I didn't mind, but anyway. Curious.

Make it go away without a word / but promise me you'll stay and fix these things I've heard

That's not actually relevant, it just happens to be what I'm currently listening to. Also, I think the italicised lyric thing is pretty cool.

how things change

Before we begin I'd like to mention a very high pitched noise I'm hearing as a result of having plugged in my phone. I'd also like to say briefly that I bruised my toe.

When I was younger I had no sense of humour. I appreciated wit but I didn't find it funny. I would read Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams books and not laugh. Seriously. I loved and understood them, I just... I just didn't see them as funny. They were just good stories. And so it was that I didn't laugh when reading the Adrian Mole stories. I didn't see them as funny, I just saw them as a description of life. I quite liked them. They were educative. I'm still quite a fan of the Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4. A great book. But never one that I've seen as funny. Only some years after reading them (between when I was aged twelve and when I was aged fifteen I read them) did I read the blurb which elucidated the humour. And I see why people would find them funny. But they're not funny at all, really. They're just... real life. Or a life, at least.

Thanks to someone's blog entry I was reminded of this recently. I was specifically reminded of a time Adrian and his girlfriend break up because she won't show him one of her breasts. So he dumps her. He was fifteen by this stage, I think. (One of the reasons I found it so real is because when you're that age everything that's so humorous really is just as important as the book makes it out to be). Everybody in his class is talking about their sexual escapades and how one particular girl will have sex with anyone for four shillings and a pound of grapes (or something like that; some money and a pound of grapes). So he gets one of his friends to arrange a date with him and this girl. They go to a roller-skating rink and he wears his PE shorts because they're all he has that matches his friend's description of what people wear on dates. He takes her the pound of grapes and is unceremoniously rejected, then ridiculed for bringing grapes, since she has no idea why she'd want them.

Interestingly, I was once Adrian. Not necessarily Adrian Mole but I was called Adrian as part of an internet pseudo-relationship stalking thing that happened a few years back. Well, last year. Beginning of 2006. Crazy, crazy times. And my name was Adrian because that's what happened. And the more I think about it the more Adrianish I am. But then again other friends have said there's no Adrian to me at all. Quite possibly true too.

I'd like to move on now to a completely different topic. Conversations. I don't start them, because I don't like to be rejected. Especially on MSN. I also fear the rejection of text message or email communications where I send the last message and get no reply. It has to happen eventually but there's inevitably no "goodbye" message. So it's one of those "you hang up first" things. I'm disheartened by how often I send the last message. It could be because I always reply even when totally unnecessary but ... I don't know. It's just disappointing that I want to talk to them more than they want to talk to me. It makes me feel reliant. Like I'm being their friend and they really don't want me around. I know it's stupid - I know that, but I still feel it sometimes, to some small degree.

Sigh.

good days and bad.

I had a small nervous breakdown earlier this evening. I fucked up my moot, totally failed at it. But it's not the failure that bothers me. I can handle failure.

Take for example another small failing today: this morning I had my administrative law tutorial and it was terrible. The submission I made had almost no meaning at all. It certainly wasn't an accurate reflection of the law or a valid argument to make. I had be buoyed by the return of my second briefing paper (86% or a high distinction, plus a request to put it up as an example for next year's class) but this wasn't why I was ok with doing such a shitty job. I was ok with it because my preparation involved reading the question as I was getting dressed.

The moot was different. I spent five hours in the library today. Admittedly not all of it was preparing for my moot - some of it was sleeping and I also talked to Nikki (Rogers, old school friend) for a while... but I spent quite some time preparing. Reading cases, taking notes, underlining important sections. I spent $2 on printing. I wrote and rewrote. I worked at this. I didn't work exhaustively but I was prepared. I knew what I was doing. I was ready. I was going to kick arse: smash it, as they say.

But I didn't. I failed dismally. My presentation was poor, I gave bad arguments, I didn't have the cases to back up what I was saying. It was terrible. This is the problem. I don't mind failing. What sent me into shock and made me cry (well, I didn't cry about it until I was home and watching sad DVDs, so we can blame them) was that I'm not as good as I think I am. That's the great travesty here. If I work really hard and still can't do it - well, that's incapacity. I know there are things I can't do. But none of them involved using my mind. Anything that required thought I could do. Anything. Give me enough time and I could learn about Puritanism in Elizabethan England or electrical engineering or organic chemistry or gender studies or finance. This was my strength. This is what made me feel good about myself. I was capable of learning anything I put my mind to. But if there are things I can't do... that bothers me greatly. Especially if it's advocacy, precisely what I'm training to do, what I want to do. It makes life difficult.

This then triggered a massive round of self-hate and Nikky-angst and such. And the die alone business. Great fun all around.

diaries

I'm watching Bridget Jones 2. Because sometimes you just have to. Regardless of the administrative law essays, administrative law journals, assignments and other such things due but not yet done. Well, I've had enough of working. I know I shouldn't but... I totally, totally have...

I just want to live a life that involves reading xkcd followed by eating chocolate cake and bagels. I don't mind occasionally doing something productive with my life, like treasury work or something, but... well, I just don't want to write essays on things I don't know anything about. This is why I prefer criminal law. I actually go to those lectures.

Lots of generic angst too. Meh.

relationships

I was thinking about asking The Lovely Clara to do a guest blog for me. I really need to blog and I'm pretty lazy, so surely that works well. I decided, however, that I should reserve the "privilege" for a girlfriend. We can be all coupley and have sloppy makouts and share a blog and stuff. How disgusting would that be? That's totally the sort of thing I'd do too...

Which brings me nicely to the next point. We'll call this a segue because that's a cool word.

I don't have a girlfriend. I want a girlfriend but there's not a lot of hope for me. I see the reason behind this to be the way things work nowadays. It seems that in adult relationships, or relationships involving people my age, tend to start with going on the prowl for sex. If you find someone else looking for sex, you sleep together and then later start to like each other. Ok, so perhaps extreme, but you see my point: you're seeking a relationship before knowing the person. Unfortunately, the alternative also doesn't sound good: find someone you like, befriend them and later proposition them. So here I am in a quandary. I don't know how to go about finding a relationship. I'm reminded of the bash.org quote comparing being rejected by a girl to being rejected for a job. I'm also thinking for some reason about the difficulty I have in remembering who people think I like - it differs between social groups. And who do I actually like? God knows. When I find out I might put it here.

Sigh.

far too late to be writing

I spent a good four hours today convinced that this blog was terrible. More than that, I spent that time worrying that I had to get rid of it lest pain, humiliation and the like ensued. I even started the process of taking it down before I realised that was silly, and it'll all be fine - so it remains. Hopefully I won't hurt too many people with it...

I think that happened because I saw law girl and imagined what she'd think of me if she knew.

Speaking of what people would think of me if they knew, last night I ate five pieces of garlic bread (Dominos garlic bread, specifically) in a manner that earned me $10: all in the mouth at once, swallowed in under 35 chews. Thirty four, to be precise. Quite the useless feat.

Two things about tonight though. Firstly, David Hicks will serve seven years. Poor bastard has already done five. Now we just have to do something about the other two hundred and fifty people there.

The other thing: there was the first youth parliament taskforce meeting tonight. I got treasurer, unsurprisingly. I was thinking about going for convenor but... well, Pat wanted to do it and that's appropriate, and otherwise there wouldn't have been the right number of positions for people and this means there were no contested positions in a world first. So go us. I just want something that looks better than treasurer - or something that's not related to financial management. I can write press releases too, you know!

Also also, I think a first person shot, looking past my shirt and penis into a toilet bowl full of urine would be a great drugged-out shot for a movie. No really. I just felt so drugged and it was epitomising my just standing there, not doing anything. Which is what one does when one can't think of anything to do. I think it'd work anyway.

i traditionally spend more time looking for a blog title than writing the entry

I'd like to talk about a few things. Firstly, while listening, and I mean really listening to Landed (Ben Folds) this morning in the car I decided that I will not have any more girlfriend angst. Things will happen or they won't and there's plenty of time and it's all fine. So no more of that angst. I reserve the right to have other angst and bouts of relapsing.

Secondly, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed today confessed to 29 separate illegal acts, including planning the September 11 bombings, the Bali bombings, the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings, bombing the Empire State Building, several US embassy bombings, the Richard Reid shoe bombing, assassination attempts on George W Bush, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, Jed Bartlett and Pope John Paul II. He also confessed to planning bombings of Big Ben, Heathrow Airport, killing Daniel Pearl, kidnapping the Lindburgh baby, hiding Lord Lukin and killing John F Kennedy, despite not being born at the time. The only things on that list I made up were the last three (and plotting to kill Jed Bartlett, clearly). This guy has confessed to everything under the sun, having been held at Guantanamo Bay for the past year, with the two years before that spent in secret CIA detention - in a "safe but secure location", one can only presume. People only confess to everything for one of two reasons: they are taking one for the team, or they have been tortured, threatened and mentally destroyed to the point where they will sign anything you put in front of them. I have my bets on which. What perhaps disgusts me most (though really it doesn't disgust me as much as the horror they've put this guy through - beyond what he deserves even if he did all that stuff) is that they are promoting this as a big victory. Clearly he masterminded everything and now they've got him for it. And they'll kill him for it.

Let's move on though. Let's talk about a question that occurred to me. Does it matter who you kiss if you kiss someone, in terms of cheating? This occurs because I've been watching too much West Wing (and also probably too much Clerks II). Like, if you kiss someone but have no intentions towards them, is that any less cheating than kissing someone with intent? I'm curious.

Next thing is that Angie has been talking about moving out. That makes me feel like I should move out. I can't afford it now but could if I tried. Perhaps I should? I almost certainly should. Hmmm. We'll see.

Finally, think about what you're doing right now. You're reading this blog on the internet. Now think about just how much work went into making this work. Start with agriculture and move on. That is truly astounding to me, the amount that was required directly - not counting water or public transport or any of that - just to make me complaining to the whole world so easy. Astounding.

wanting

I want a girlfriend. I don't want sex, or kissing, or anything like that. What I want is a girlfriend. Someone I can walk around with holding hands. And someone I can talk to all the time about everything. Maybe a little kiss one day or another, but really it's mostly about holding hands. Listening to songs like Kiss Me (Sixpence None The Richer) or One Crowded Hour (Augie March). Acting out Kiss Me maybe. This isn't what I had with Nikky. But it's all that I want. Something simple and innocent. That's all.

Clearly, I'm on my way down. I knew this.

argh

A R G H
R     G
G     R
H G R A

The unfortunate thing is that it doesn't read in a circle, rather in two parts, unlike this one:

A R G H
H     A
G     R
R     G
A     H
H G R A

Subtle but important difference.

Sally. Like Sally Heap, but not.

something to think about

Boston Legal, Season Three, Episode Nine, at twenty six minutes in (HDTV XviD XOR rip). All about the meaning of friendship.

spiders

There was a spider in the toilet. Not in the toilet, but in the toilet-room thingie. I didn't like that. I don't like spiders. I can remove them, because I overcome my fear, but I did not look away from it the whole time I was in there. I had this frightful fear it would jump off the wall and bite my face. It might have moved a total of three centimetres, maybe, in the whole time I was there. But still.

I don't know. I'm a strange person. I had a dream last night that involved me kissing somebody (I should give her a nickname, but I'm yet to decide on one) and also discussing with her the common law interpretation of "maim" compared to the natural definition and why, despite codification, reference to the common law was still required. I shouldn't read law text books while falling asleep. I'll have to keep that in mind especially when I turn purple.

offending people

I think I've done far more offending than I should have recently. So let's get a few things straight.

Firstly, I don't think I have no friends in Hobart my own age. The trouble is that I don't have uni-friends in Hobart. Nobody in maths, nobody who I sit with during law... that's the issue that I was bitching about.

The other point is that engineers aren't really that bad. They're just really cliquey and sometimes it bothers me that I'm so alone in my maths/engineering lecture because there are two hundred people and all the engineers have their engineering friends and don't even look at me, and I don't have my maths friends, and so that's what happens.

In much more exciting news, watch out for me in my new t-shirts purchased from xkcd. They're a ripper, as Pat would say. I also have West Wing Season Two and all sorts of things. I'm enjoying Criminal Law despite not even having had a lecture yet. Maths is pretty good but not fantastic. If you want to know my thoughts on admin, just go and take a look at my admin law blog.

opening up

This blog is now public.

Tonight I didn't drink. After all this telling everyone that I'm a drunk, I just didn't drink. Turns out I'm too damn tired. At 3:14am (pi time!) I need to snore.

I also need to do the Hockey Tasmania website, finish the Fairer World - Youth website (just the bits she told me to do today) and do a financials program. Once all that is done, it's just a matter of doing the other eight hundred things on my list...

Meh.