if fortune cookies are to be believed

the correlations between mopping and blogging

blogging is something I do as I wait for the floor to dry.
So much of my posts seems to be about cleaning. Which is odd -I am such a slob. Obviously as I haven't posted for a while.

Have been up and down the island. I went to the big city in the north for a conference, which was ultimately dull and yet again I failed to network - though did ask questions at quite a few papers so I guess I was visible. I stayed with E & M (and my god-daughter) at their new house by the beach. The house looks like a cross between a boatshed and a tea rooms, with a wild adn ovegrown garden with lots of beautiful native birds - tui and kereru getting drunk on the rotting berries.

Their life looks great from the inside and out. Though they work hard to maintain it. M like S is somewhat saintly in the weight they carry in the day to day duties ... I wonder if I would be the same ... probably not.

Got kidnapped yesterday in a borrowed car and took Dr Nietzche to Wgtn. We visited every bookshop and cafes in between. I was secretly and childishly proud when I stopped to say hello to people and after Nietzche would say - you know everyone.

Been hanging with him and Dr Oscar and Pepper Bell, MA a fair bit, bit for some reason they depress me. Well maybe not actively, maybe I remember my depression when I am around them - is that a kinder blameless way of saying the same thing. I just feel quite often I have nothing to say to them. Dr N said that I remind him of one of his sisters - she's been alone so long she probably couldn't get used to having a partner ...

Well a person from porlock called ... there are so few of them ... and I shall leave you to go drink.
Cheers

3/4 fell asleep

Dysfunctional dinner parties...

Last night I was kinda forced into hosting a dinner party that went all wrong. Three of us were tired, two because we worked hard all day (saturday) and had been out the night before. The other because, his girlfriend lives elsewhere tires himself out by talking on the phone all night. Sadly the fourth was totally up for it as she had a night off from her kids. When she realised that we weren't so hi-nrg (go the eighties speak) she got quite stroppy and actually slapped phone guy and then tried to make out it was a game. The gas in the bbq ran out halfway through and then we played banal quiz games ... God my social life sucks.


Anyway she gets a taxi home in a huff and the guys decided it was too far to walk back to their flat so my house was full of snoring men.

They have now gone out to Herbertville on the coast for more tetchy attempts at good times and I am about to go back to work...

um I think I wrote a book report

I wonder if anyone has cited microsoft word as the cause of violence or self-harm in court. I got pretty close today. Between word and acrobat I was eyeing up the window in my office and my computer and declared that one of us had to go.

Part of the problem just might be that I am completely hung over. Monday night madness got totally out of control - arguing about Nietzsche until three in the morning. Nietzche is a little creepy. I know that hardly counts as an awesome critique of a philosopher but he seems to garner cult status in some circles.

Am reading this book Everything I know I learnt from television. It is written in a really annoying style and attempts to analyse popular tv in terms of philosophy. It is patchy at best. The section on friends is marred by an incredibly dull view of how gender intersects with sexuality ... Monica is masculine Chander is feminine ... everyone thinks Chandler is gay therefore he is feminine and vice versa ... hmm heard of Judith Butler Mr Pop philosophy guy? The most annoying section is on sex in the city. He does a pretty good analysis of this in terms of a Giddens' like theory of intimacy but because Mr G is not an actual philosopher (gasp) but a lowly social theorist, the author Rowlands does not see fit to name the originator of his analysis unlike the other chapters we he talks about his main men Schopenhauer and Sartre like their his homies (homeys?) ... literally ...

On a brighter note Pamuk's novel snow is fantastic.


In other news I have got a piano so really do I need this blogging shit?

if you go down to the woods today ...

I am thinking of changing my name to Marky Mark ... because that is all I do this time of year. And also because I am so buff.

Yesterday I intended to do more of the above, but Oscar Madison kidnapped me and took me on a small town odyssey. We hit every secondhand bookshop in the villages of small town Horowhenua. He bought up every tatty tome on our country's political history and I bought the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. There were also some cool old children's annuals from the 1950s but ... I'm broke. We hit the coast where Jethro, specialist of Viking and epidemics lived and asked the locals where they lived. The locals didn't know or pretended not to (it would have helped if we could remember her last name), so we drove up driveways or isolated cottages to see if we could recognise her car. The hinterland is mostly covered with pine forests growing on small but steep sand dunes and there was definitely somthing spooky about the whole area, and I did not feel comfortable about just rocking up people's driveways, but Oscar seemed to think it was not inappropriate country behaviour. Then we freaked ourselves out by recalling that in the denouement of the last two local murderers, the alledged perpetrators were harboured by people in this very village so we left.

Got home and beat myself up over not getting any work done. My tongue lashing of myself was so devestating that I didn't recover and hence did not catch up on the work ... next time I will try self-praise.