OMG, cricket.

Look, everyone is entitled to their own views about music, sports and people they hang out with. Some choices make people look like idiots, others show people are downright fucked in the head, but that's what being a human is about. Don't try and understand them; it'll never work. Just smile, nod and back away slowly, trying not to make eye contact. Humans are fucked.

And this is proved while watching a game of cricket. My house looks over a sports ground (or two), lawn bowls club and tennis club complete with 8 tennis courts. It's sports-central down there. Just last Sunday, my good little buddy Maximus (100ft tall poodle) asked ever so kindly if we could go for a walk. So we did. And past the monkeys we walked playing cricket. Usually I don't take notice, or care, but just as we walked past them one of the fielders caught a ball and all the other guys screamed like they'd won first division and all took the 100 metre run over to the catcher to pat him on the back and hug him and congratulate him on his so-called achievement.

Now this is sometimes normal behaviour for a sports team. A more obvious example is soccer, where a goal is celebrated by a few flips in the air from the striker and a couple of nearby fellows humping his leg in glee. There are subtle differences though. First of all, I'm biased because I play soccer. But those hugs and humps only occur in professional level football and because goals are so rare (more often than not, only 1 goal between both teams per game) and every goal that is scored could very well mean the difference between continuing forward in a league or being knocked out of the championship. A goal is a serious deal; hence the "male bonding". If we get a goal in soccer, we mutter “yes” under our breath, acknowledging the fact that the shot was in fact a pass to another player in a completely different direction and it just happened to come off our boot wrong and slide past the incompetent keeper. Our fellow players grumble something like “nice work” or something like that, and get back to playing the game. A goal is fun, but no reason to start groping fellow players. It makes after-game drinks kinda awkward. Only in pro football does it happen. Only in pro.

In cricket, however, just to finish a game you have to get at least 9 players out. Every game. Guaranteed. Big fucking deal if you get one of those 9. You don't so much deserve a big sloppy kiss from your homo boyfriend players so much as a smack upside the head for taking so long to get the batter out. And you caught a ball. Big fucking deal. My 3-year old niece can catch a ball too. Maximus can catch a ball. It's no achievement. You're a loser.

I asked my mate at soccer how he was.
"I'm sore man", he said. "I spent 4 hours yesterday [wicket] keeping which equates to squatting up and down 100 times."
"I'm sorry to hear that", I said. "But you're lucky it's cricket. It's so fucking slow you can sleep for an hour and wake up when something interesting happens."
"Oh. I take it you're not a fan."
"Funnily enough, no."

Don't get me wrong, though. Variations of the game of cricket are shitloads of fun. At the beach we play a game of "bat down" which is similar to cricket except when you hit the ball, you put your bat down on the ground in front of you and whatever fielder gets the ball first has to throw it from where it picked it up and if he can hit the bat, he goes into the batting position. It's a brilliant game, and one you can finish whenever you want to. Unlike cricket which can take anything from 4 hours to an entire season.

"Hey Jeff, you want to go fishing next weekend?"
"Sorry mate, playing a game of cricket tomorrow. Who knows when we'll be done?"

Update central

I'm trying to get back into writing. Honestly. I just wish my other posters would write stuff. Lazy pricks.

Anyway, I went to Fiji a week ago and during every evening got pretty drunk drinking Fiji Gold beer which turned out to be pretty good (steer clear of Fiji Bitter if you know what's good for ya). After going back to the apartment after each evening at the hotel bar watching ESPN and meeting people from Chicago, NZ, Australia, Nuie and other places worldwide, I'd order a snack through room service and get to writing some shit. That stuff is all on my laptop, and one day I'll move it onto this website, if you're lucky.

In the meantime, an update on what's going on. Just about a year ago I woke up one morning, turned to my girlfriend at the time and told her I was going. Looking back, I wasn't quite sure why, but we both knew we weren't going to be together long-term. She thinks I was honourable, doing the hard thing by leaving. I thought I was a prick: leaving one morning and never coming back. Anyway, I wondered for a year how she was and what she was like and if we'd changed. You see, we didn't break up over anything big or serious, just general separation of each other's lives which happens more often to couples than not. I guess I always wondered if our paths had continued getting further apart or maybe at some point had changed direction and come back together. Looking back, I guess the answer was obvious, but it was important to find out. I knew she'd never want me back, and in some ways I didn't want her back, but she is still a big part of me and she gave me the best years of my life. She has a heart of gold, I tell her.

It's also important to realise I didn't want to see her to see if we could get back together. If it happened, then I'm not sure how I'd react, but I was more interested in how she was getting on and if the strong friendship we had was still there. Bah, I talk at great lengths about this, but know that I've thought about it for great lengths for a year now. It's been a weight on my mind. I did and always will miss her.

So I called her. Man was I nervous; shaking like an idiot. I'd not talked to her since that morning (save for one time when I stopped by the apt. for 30 seconds to pick up some stuff) and I had no idea what she thought of me. Did she hate me? Did she care? I had no concept of how she felt and it wasn't comfortable. But a chat ensued and drinks and dinner was organised for the next week. Bah, this is getting boring. Long story short, talked for 5 hours and had in general a nice time catching up. We had changed, and whatever we had chemistry-wise had all but disappeared, but I guess that's to be expected. I have no idea if we'll see each other again but I'm no longer wondering if she's a prospect. She's still (and always will be) an amazing girl, but for some other guy who can treat her right.

Love. She's a harsh mistress.

Quote of the week

During a discussion about a friendly game of cricket:
"It's not about winning for me. It's about losing for the other team."

I make blog, you make posts and comments

Alright, here we go. A couple of years ago I started on, what seemed to be the craze at the time, an internet blog. I complained, insulted and just plain annoyed people for about a year (110 posts!) and then promptly gave up when more important things came along. Many bloggers just talk crap to fill their blogs when they run out of content, but me, I’m too lazy to do that and gave up. Things have changed, however, given that in about 4 months I’m off overseas to follow my friends (working in the travel industry always ensures friends in exotic places) over to Europe with stopovers in Chicago for a wedding, Vancouver for a beer and anywhere I hear there are women. I know I’m gonna get lost and lose track of colleagues, so I made this site to manage the process.

I think I’ll get back into the general postings too. I’ve changed a lot since I wrote my old posts (which I’ve filtered but left the OK ones here), so I should be a bit more kind, but I can’t guarantee quality.

On this new site you can check out where everyone is located (assuming they update their details), and leave comments for them. Do it. Its main purpose is communication, so communicate, dammit!

As you were.

Go rant go!

You know what pisses me off? Getting up in the morning. Not the whole “getting up” part, I don’t mind that (unless it’s cold and then that pisses me off too), but the whole getting ready for the day ahead. I hate that. I’m getting really sick of getting up and having a shower. What a waste of time! I can think of a thousand better ways to spend 10 minutes in the morning instead of creating work for myself. If you have a shower, you have to get in, wash up, and then get out again in 5 minutes and expend a bunch of energy drying yourself off. What’s worse than that is because you’re clean, you have to put on some clean clothes that, in turn, generates MORE work in the way of washing! And this happens every morning! When will the madness end?

Can we say “bunch of energy”? Does that even make sense? There are two things that I will do because of that stupid comment. Well, I may not do them, but at least I’ll think about doing them. One is to investigate the correct collective noun of energy, if there is such a thing, but that’d mean I’d have to spend even more energy looking for it. I don’t care that much. The other thing I could do is complain about the stupidity of collective nouns. What the hell is the point? Just use “group” instead, or something mundane and boring like that. If we wanted some fancy language with different words for shit, we should just adopt French or something.

French is an awesome language. I don’t know it, but I know people who speak it and I think it’s sweet. One day I’d like to learn it but I’m not smart enough. I hate not being smart. If I were smart I’d be able to recall what the collective nouns for shit were (and maybe even remember what the point of them are). Also, if I were smart and started a business that I could retire from (or if I were French and therefore lazy) I’d be able to sleep in during the morning and not have to be pissed off.

Back to work.

Sorry Mike

"How many light bulbs does it take to change a dyslexic?"

Graduation

As I said in my previous post, I graduated yesterday. Wicked. After a bunch of long tedious years, I finally got my ass into gear and finished the 21 papers I had to do to pick it up. I know it’s only a piece of paper, but I guess it means I can put the 20 or so years I’ve spent at school listening to teachers preach personal beliefs and pointless discussions about Jesus behind me now, and finally break out into the workplace.

I was actually not too fussed about graduating. I couldn’t be bothered to be honest. I mean, it’s great and all, but sitting around in an auditorium for a couple of hours listening to speeches about people “makin’ it big” just doesn’t do anything for me. One thing pushed me to do it, and that was so the Mum-Lady and Jim could come and watch, and observe yet another one of their kids getting a degree (the 4th now). All I can say is they obviously did something right if four of us have degrees and another has one in the pipeline.

I couldn’t have been much more wrong about the day, however. It started with a procession walking down a main road in one of our more popular shopping towns in the pouring rain. I didn’t much care, actually. It was still quite nice. But what struck me the most is while walking down the street, strangers would come out of their places of employment and clap and whistle and cheer to celebrate all these people (800 or so of us) who had taken the time to earn something. And I have to admit, it was a really nice and (if I don’t sound too gay), a touching thing to do. Even though degrees are a dime a dozen and anyone can get one, I still felt proud and was reminded once again of my closed-mindedness and negative attitude towards the general human race. Thanks to everyone who came out and saw us.

I hear down in Dunedin, which is a huge student city in the South Island, when they do their processions every store owner without fail will come outside and cheer the students on. That’s cool. I’m slowly learning not ALL humans are ass-holes.

On top of that, I met a nice young lady who was the splitting image of Reece Witherspoon and kept myself busy during the boring bits of the ceremony being an idiot with her. All up, it was a good day and I’m happy I took part. It’s all over now. Time to make my business work.

Go get a degree.

2 things

Firstly, my 100th boring, uninformative post. I've been thinking for weeks about what I can put in as a suitable item, but nothing has come to mind. It goes in with my other "thing": graduation today. Oh wow, I can't think of anything better to do than stand around for hours in the rain with a bunch of camera-hugging asians who can't actually speak english, and just bought their degrees. At least now I can say I'm a "scientist".

Now I've dropped my 100th post, I'll start updating more often again. Wish me luck.

No, seriously, we went to the sun!

As I browsed through my bookmarks today, I came across one that I had added months ago for a website that covered all the new shit going on in spaceflight. I dig engineering and big machines and anything significant humans have made out of stuff found on and in the ground. It’s interesting. It’s creative. It gets the brain ticking. It’s cool. As I browsed the site, I found links and references to the most recent space trip of the Discovery, made by the Americans. They were talking about how they pulled out of doing a 4th spacewalk outside the ship, and the dangers and the such. Sound normal? It is. But they make a hell of a lot of fuss about it.

The fact that people get excited about a man walking around successfully isn’t very alarming, but it made me think: if they jump up and down when some dude crawls out of his ship in low orbit, do they seriously think I’ll believe them when they say they went to the moon?

Before you jump on the “you’re such a conspiracy theorist, D” bus, let me put it this way: it’s better to be on that bus than the “I’ll believe anything I see in magazines and on the news, no matter how stupid it is” train. Honestly, I read somewhere else that the Americans have recently put in place their intentions to spend $17 odd billion of dollars and the next 15 years trying to get back to the moon. Forget the “wind in the flag” or “crosshairs in the picture” theories of previous moon trips, just think logically about it. If it was so easy that they could do it when they had only just invented TV and the Beatles were around, why can’t they do it now? What do they have to do for 15 years to make it possible when they’ve had 35 years to plan it?

And what’s worse, is that people can’t get planes to fly from one city to another without issues, but in the 1960’s humans managed to get a spaceship into orbit, all the way over to the moon, LAND on the moon, run around jumping and planting flags, get back in, get off the moon, get back home, through the atmosphere and land safely without fucking up? Seriously. Even now, humans don’t dare leave from the comfort of Earth’s orbit. It’s not as though they fly into the space between Earth and the Moon, they just stick around in orbit and jump out of their window. I don’t try and create conspiracies; I just don’t believe everything I read.

Don’t believe anything I just said.

You too?

You too hate U2? I’m sorry but I can’t stand them. They were good back in the 80’s, back when Bono had short hair and didn’t care about staving kids, but now, I just don’t know. All their old stuff have been played so much it’s ruined it, and their new stuff is the same as any new stuff from a 20 year old band: boring, repetitive and depressing. Don’t come anywhere near me with it.

That’s all.