(I've had to hide the promo image because it was creeping me out! not sure if I made things better.. or worse)
El Orfanato is a scary movie with enough spooks to give a grown Scotsman a big fright. [ mish would give this movie 2-thumbs-up if her hands weren't covering her eyes ].
Today is good soup-weather - so I'm making some after buying a new, bigger saucepan for the job. The apartment smells of clean, warm laundry and vegetable soup. I absolutely love weekends when I can spend a lot of time inside reading and pottering about. I'm having a really lovely weekend, actually - soup today, movies last night, lunch with the lovely Kincaids and Woods-Williams on Saturday, out with same on Friday night for Fox's birthday and my leaving drinks. A very nice weekend indeed.
Willo, Teh Fox and I went to the 10:45pm session of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull last night. It was cold and clear, with the smell of Winter in the air. Rugged up with coats and scarves, we made our way into Hoyts in the city.
I've had Indy's theme music in my head for two weeks, having been working on some promotional stuff for it at work. I was like some cinematic Pavlov dog, humming the tune everytime I dealt with a piece of film collateral or Indiana Jones trivia.
The movie is predictable, uncomplicated, a bit naff at times, but lots of fun. I had a good time, and I was genuinely pleased to see Henry Jones Jr one more time. I honestly hope I don't see him again though; this was a nice curtain-call, but that's enough George - don't drag any more of your horses into the streets, just let them enjoy their pastures.
I left my job as Interface Developer at Citrus on Friday.
I am not good at leaving - I find it difficult to know when to leave and how to go about the process of leaving, and then on top of that, I'm an awkward hugger - so I avoid any action on the leaving front until I absolutely *have* to. I stay too late at parties, I stay too long in jobs, and I over-stay my welcome in relationships.
In one of my previous jobs, many years ago, I left resigning from the company late - I stayed and stayed, hope making me think things would change, my heart kept telling me that the person at the core of our pain might change even though my mind assured me people hardly ever do. This time, and for a change, I listened to my head and took the opportunity the University of Melbourne offered me and I start there on Monday.
Leaving is never easy for me - I hate resigning, I dislike saying goodbye, I feel uncomfortable being the focus of attention on the last day and I say dorky things because I'm nervous. Maybe leaving isn't supposed to be easy. I have learned, though, that if I'm unhappy with a large incompetent part of my working process that continues to impact on my daily levels of satisfaction, then staying and trying to ride it out isn't always the best course of action for me either.
I was asked several times in my final week if I was excited to be leaving - which I kept finding was a strange question to answer given a) how much work I had to get through in my last week and b) how much I love working with the talented Studio team at Citrus. Yes, I was and continue to be excited about the new challenges ahead of me, happy to have Flash in my life again with the added challenge of learning Actionscript 3, looking forward to learning all about Flex, thinking about all the things I've learned since the last time someone had me design a learning module etc, but I am genuinely sad to be leaving such a great team of online designers, developers and friends.
(i'm doing stuff with stuff and breaking stuff and whatnot.. so if you find that stuff doesn't act the way stuff ought, it's cos I'm stuffing it up)
They're not pretty - and I know how annoying it is to make a comment and have to wait for the admin to publish it - but for right now, the comment are on, but not the best solution.
One good thing (for me, anyway) is that in the last 24 hours since making the modifications and turning the comments back on, I have had no SPAM _at_ all_ - compare this to 1500/24hours when I closed the comments last week.
So, yay (for me) but user-experience-apologies in the mean time.
The thing I really need to do is upgrade Movable Type - I'm a few versions behind. What stops me from upgrading is the fact MT upgrades are a time confusing pain in the arse, not to mention heavy handed in the file-size department. So I remain on 3.whatever instead of being all 4.0+ with all the loopholes and problems that causes my poor old blog.
I love your comments. I will approve them as often and as soon as I can - thank you for your patience - or if you don't have any patience, thank you for putting up with this clunky process.
These remarkable (my new favourite word) "creatures" by kinetic sculptor, Theo Jansen, reminds me of one of the classic SuperNets (or the Internet as it was known back then) websites, Soda Play (which isn't quite same animal as yester-years).
The Client was a bit shit.
My client liaison was a bit shit.
I was a bit shit.
Blame was proportionate. Which makes us all even.
I Twittered - it wasn't a great twitter, but it got a response - one response. A call from my roommate's boyfriend. He is a smart dude and knows disheartenment when he sees it. So he says those three magic words "Need a drink?"
By far, the most beautiful thing I've seen in days, was Willo: standing on the steps of Chocolate Buddha in Federation Square (I'd link to it but the site is shit) - a beer for himself in one hand and a beer for me in the other: him suited up to the gunnels in between. Blissfully beautiful, and much needed a) company and b) drink.
It was cold though - Winter is making itself known in Melbourne and after two beers we decided Kent Street was a better idea.
Trams being trams, a 10 minute wait for the 86 meant a re-evaluation and a decision to go to Bar Lourinha.
If you've never been.. don't go. It's already popular enough. I believe you can live your life without knowing how great their king fish is, or how the wagyu beef melts across your tongue, or how sea fresh the oysters are. You can probably live a most satisfying life never introducing such mouthwatering octopus into your mouth, or being treated to the weirdly textured but intimately flavoured chicken livers. And the service, so saucy, so articulate, so particularly educated. Lord, no, never go there. ever! Hear me? You can live without it - it won't be a great life; it won't be a life full of rich flavours and colours of Spain; but it will be a life, of sorts, none the less.
After the Stereophonics concert on Friday night, we concert-goers went back to Craig and Suzanne's house to play Wii MarioCKart. It was good - beanbags and Wii controllers, vodka, an addictive game, Scots, Irish, a Kiwi - such fun. The other thing we did was talk. And talk. Talked about lots of stuff that seemed to revolve around personalities, people, nature, nurture and eventually: happiness.
Through this discussion (that lasted until dawn) Keiron mentioned a movie he'd just seen, describing it as "possibly the best movie I've ever seen" he said, and cited from it the simple message that if we were simply nicer to each other, we would solve a hellova lot of the problems in the world, and specifically impact our levels of happiness.
Well, it's not like you're one thing or the other, okay? There's still a kid inside but you grow up when you decide to do right, okay, and not what's right for you, what's right for everybody, even when it hurts... Like, you know, like, you don't jerk people around, you know, and you don't cheat on your woman, and you take care of your family, you know, and you admit when you're wrong, or you try to, anyways. That's all I can think of, you know - it sound like it's easy and for some reason it's not.
Gus answering Lars' question "When do you know you're a man?"
While we talked around the mulberry bushes until the early hours, experiencing in microcosmic irony the very obstacles we were talking about (religious, political and philosophical differences - living the dream in miniature) we always came back to Keiron's (asleep on the beanbag by this stage) original idea recognised in the film "be kind to each other"*.
After getting home early Saturday morning and sleeping/LOLcat'ing the edge off my exhaustion I shared this story with Willo and Fox and we decided to see the film.
I'm not going to talk much about it, mostly because I'm pretty crap at articulating these things. What I loved was that the film explored what could happen if we did just care about each other. What living in a place where we were kind, and our neighbours were too. Lars and the Real Girl is really a fairy tale and a love story. It's a story about the importance of affection, the tenacity of love,. How a broken heart can affect other people too. The "long tail" of friendships, connections and family.
It's also about seeing people's problems and helping, and while it might be easier to ignore mental illness when it's out in the back shed, it's better, if more difficult and painful, to make it visible and work at dealing with it together.
It's as funny as life is, but it's no comedy. It's a gently told story of being open to the needs of others, of caring, of helping, and of working together.
* not to forget this message is in many films, not the least of which is Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure "Be excellent to each other! Party on Dudes."
PS: We did actually hit upon a pretty interesting answer to our happiness discussion. Simply put: the secret to happiness = blow jobs: ½ the world would be happy and ½ would be busy / not talking.
