Organisation is not my buzz

So I got the word that I can go on this work trip and hte first thing I do is regret, and the second? Panic. I hate organising things, and always end up procrastinating (see below) and then panicking and then paying more for stuff....

Today was a bif of a roller coaster ride through all that and trying to finsih f some last minute stuff which was really getting to me. I feel like I bend over backwards to encourage them and they interpret that as weakness and think they can get away with anything... Still got a free pen at morning tea...oooh errrr. Life is worth living. I guess once I get to Vila things will look different

Star sign: Leo the Lion? Sagittarius the archer? No Slacko the procrastinator...

Yet again the them of my post will be procrastination. I wonder if research has been done that shows bloggers... Or at least the habitual blogger type are classic procrastinators.
Today at work I read blogs, answered my emails, did some marking, checked my emails, read some blogs, found an interesting piece of research checked my email x 5 = my work day. Interesting yes, productive, well.... Sadly no.
So I was going to go away for the weekend, but then since I didn't get anything done today, I thought quite virtuously, you'd better not go. Stay in, get things done, as Bowie says in Let's Dance ahh David's shiny middle years, when he was less interesting... I wonder if that is what is happening to me. So I immediately starting thinking how can I entertain myself. What videos would I like to watch? Should I go out drinking, Perhaps I'll do both. Get a grip Gids! For Chrissakes, do some work.

But you know, my house needs cleaning, and my oven probably needs a once over. How we kid ourselves with this virtuous time-wasting.

Oh well, I can relive my teenage shoe gazing years... I have my mod anorak on, and have brought home the new VU greatest hits... Used to own them all on vinyl, and then in one ill-advised embracing of the future/oh-god-I'm-moving-house-again-can-be-arsed-lugging-lps-around fit of laziness, I left all my records behind in a house we were kicked out of for earthquake safety reasons. Two days later some builders turn up at a friend's 2nd hand record shop and walk away with quite a bit of money... The building remained empty for eight years before any earthquake proofing/slash upmarket inner city living for people who really want to live in the city with all the comforts of a suburb type apartments. I loved living there and would have saved heaps of money if they had let us stay up until that point ... The houses I have loved and lost, eh.
Anyway so the Velvet underground will be the soundtrack of the evening, and I can shoegaze and do some shuffly type dance in the comfort of my own living room and relive those halcyon (is that a tranquilizer) days....

Why I bother

I guess I should take back all that moaning. The bossguy just came through with the goods (so far)he may change his mind. I am off to the islands for work mind you. Hoorah for Dickens.
I was actually secretly hoping he would say no, becuae now I have to organise stuff, adn the complexity of such organising just paralyses me. It looks also like they want me to go and will pay for me to go but they will only pay me back for going. So I have to scrape up the money from somewehre so they can trickle it back to me. Hmmm. Still looking forward to some time away from here.... Though, dusty Pacific towns aren't really all that exciting. At leat I might get to eat fruitbat again. It is delicious though you might want to hold your nose a bit. The bats only eat fruit so they are bascially a little sack of sweet fruit pulp... Actually, that's kinda put me off. This means I now have to break it to the rest of the team that I will be doing my field work at the end of the year, just before the first deadline. Oh well, gotta dig out my organisational hat and get on with it.

Why do I bother? No, really, why?

I have taken my twin abilities to procrastinate and be incredibly indecisive to whole new levels I think. Today at work, between bouts of micro-adjustments to stuff, I did a whole lot of meaningless stuff, like google my birthparents' names. It seems they must be dead, though no obits, or have become ferals in the Melbourne and Sydney hinterlands. Oh well. I guess I will never test the theory of genetic attraction then... Thst's lucky, as that sounds quite ick. Specially as my parents will be in their early sixties.

I aslo tried on a million different pairs of glasses. For the second time. They gave me foru pairs to go home and try, or at least register my friends' votes.

I really have to do something about this lack of productivity I have deadlines and shit, and I kid myself that I always work better under pressure, and then end up having to prove this theory to myself. In fact not proving it by never doing the 'control' part of the experiment.

Still haven't heard from my sister since she visited I guess things will be quiet on that front for a while.

Well yet another dull post. ZZZZzzzz.

Am hanging out to go down to Wgtn for some time wiht friends. Have spend the last 4 weekends in this intoxicating (yeah, right) town.

Oh god, I am sorry that I have nothing to say...

dull post from a dull outpost

Updating on the creepy boss front. I rang me up to check whether I could finish a project for which I have external funding on early. He seems to think that writing up a grammar of a language should take about a week. Is it too much to ask that he takes our work seriously, especially when the institution reaps the benefits, pecunary and otherwise.

What else? Been spending a lot of time with my friends who live on the box, and sleeping with the television on. Have pleaded/begged whined for some friends to come up from Wel. to visit me. But nothing doing.

billeted in hell

Here's something you've probably never read anywhere else. I hate my boss. I wish I could say that in a way which was unique and edifying to you, dear reader, but I guess it is what is, i.e. a whine. My boss is not an expert in the filed over which he lords it. So he he makes these sweeping judgements, and these far reach decisions about my career without really knowing what I do. When I put this out to him, he acts liek I am bullying him or being disloyal. I just want you know a fair deal.

In other news the cleaning I slaved over to please my sister on her inaugural visit to this shithole town, was all in vain. She barely commented on the house at all, she was instead completely shocked by the kingdom of dullness she found herself in. We played a good game called 'crimes against humanity' which was basically trashing the local architecture, low mean spirited looking cottages with acres of what are locally known as granny flats out the back to make a quick buck out of students, migrants and whatever other unfortunates get washed up here in the Paris of the....

To tell the truth her visit did not go that well. I was on edge the whole time, and actually got quite angry with her. It was stupid. I know what she is like and I should just accept it. She is perfectly happy the way she is, so I shouldn't react to her overly direct manner. Lots of silences and feigned tiredness. It was fun though and unexpected to go to the pub with her and watch the footie. And we share a fondess for reality tv, something I never expected from her. I have the excuse of saying that is sanctioned lingusitic eavesdropping. Oh well, we are both so different and yet both Capricorns!

neat and tidy

I'd like to say not much to report, but that is not entirely new. What I mean is there is not much good to report. I am still a lazy slack-arse who watches too much television, while reading a book and listening to music. All these activities at once distract me from the chaos that is the front room, or parlour as it is known to you posh gits out there.
Alas, alack and lackaday, as Chet Baker happens to have just sung, I am really going to have to get onto the mess tonight. My sister visits tomorrow and that means that at some point over the weekend I will be receiving a covert tidy test, with white gloves tracing the molding and all no doubt.

She is so clean and neat that when we were kids she used to offer to tidy my room. Oh that's great I have now realized that I can now blame her for my penchant for piles and stacks of things rather than putting them away, i.e. actual tidying, rather than a nod, a tip of the hat in the general direction of tidiness. I failed to acquire it when young. Or perhaps it is a gene thing? Most things seem to be nowadays. Soon parents to be will be able to order a tidy child... 'we want male blond 140 IQ and who won't hide hlaf-eaten teaspoons of peanut butter behind the curtains in the lounge'.

Actually I am not as bad as I make out. I really like this house, so I keep it nicely. I am learning weeding. I planted bulbs and even caught myself contemplating cleaning the windows. Outside.

The trouble is I also have a lot of work to do before she arrives. I need to finish two applications for work. I am in formfiller's hell. I hate forms, the more educated I get, the less able to fill in a form. It is weird. I have a PhD but I miss a box here , a place to sign there, always forget to date them.

Well enough of this, I am going to sweep the kitchen, give mouth to mouth resuscitation to the bathroom cyclamen(note to self begin research on why Cyclamen and African Violets are the preferred cultivars of the bathroom?, stack the dishwasher, unstack the dishwasher, stack the dishwasher, you get the picture. Anything I can't clean, I shall throw away or hide.... Maybe it is a gene thing...

mutton dressed as mod

I got a new anorak the other day. A victim of advertising. You see when was about 18 me and all my friends, well most of my friends wore anoraks and thought we were mods. We use to hang in the gloomy cafe, smoking cigarette after cigarette in lieu of lectures and construct 'sculpture' (read 'mess') from polystyrene cups. A few of the guys had scooters, and we would shuffle around in packs, drink dollar-a-drink drinks at the Palace on Tuesday nights, and hang at Clare's on Friday and Saturday night.

Mod was just one way way to be alternative. How important that word was us to then back in the eighties. Oh to be alternative. Alternative music, alternative clothes. You know, she's really alternative. How we thought this was not a label, I don't know.

So I see this chainstore/clothing label/outfit that would not ever have passed as alternative back in the day advertising these anorakky looking jackets. I am entranced. I had been thinking that I really had to stop wearing hoodies to work as it is inauthentic, lecturers masquerading as students. And I had thought that I would by some sleek sort of fitted jacket thing, in a sombre colour, but then TV ruins everything. I see anoraks, I must have anoraks.

I sneak into the shop because my alternative snobbery even though historic now still weirds me out when I got into such 'mallshops' and look at them. At first I can't find the real anoraks or at lest the most simulacrum of an anorak, all I can see is 'the updated' version made out of ski-jacket material. I am desolate, I will not be seventeen again. Then the sales assistant comes up, looking like he might be approaching eighteen himself and asked if he could help. He pointed out the black shiny version, and said great aren't they, and I told him of my dream to be seventeen again. And he laughs and shows me where the anorak coloured anoraks are and gets kinda excited for me. I make a few jokes and feel like I'm his best customer for the day.

So I now I have my anorak and a spring in my step and thanks to this mall type shop I am alternative again. I could go home and listen to the Smiths or cob my hair like Paul Weller the God of Mod might do.

People comment on said anorak all the time, a female colleague asked to try it on. Perhaps they too feel the pull of a seventeen year old fashion reminiscence.

On the downside though, at the supermarket, I see this old guy, seventy odd wearing my anorak. Hmmm...