Pintado - That Guy

It seems like the time is right to move on - in four weeks, I finish uni for ever, and in eight weeks I lose my job. The allure of Blogspot is strong - greater options to make my blog feel like home. So, I've spent the better part of two days moving original entries from PintadoGuy here at LiveJournal to my new home, PintadoGuy at Blogspot. Nothing needs to change, guys - nothing. Everything is just the same over there, so you can still get your four-times-daily updates on what I'm doing, wearing, thinking, eating and writing.

Thanks for all the good times, LiveJournal. You can still visit me (and you'd better) at http://pintadoguy.blogspot.com/

It's been one of those glorious, surreal days where sunlight streams through the leaves onto the busy city footpaths, and the sky is bright and blue, and there's this beautiful autumn smell in the air - one that smells like red leaves and sweet flowers. Babies reach out at walls in delight as their prams dart through the crowds, dogs wait patiently for their charges outside shop doors, and kids play football on the lawn of the State Library.

The boys accidentally kicked their footy straight at me, and I smiled indulgently, bending down to pick up the ball and return it - only for the fucking football to bounce wildly off my knee into the path of an oncoming tram. Flustered, I grimaced in apology, and hurried off, leaving the kids to rescue their toy and snort behind my back.

It didn't ruin my day though - oh no, I'm feeling good today. This glorious weather is such a rare delight in Melbourne that my bones are soaking up every last mite of it. Bring on the sunshine, and the smell of the air - I'm ready baby.

I thought I had spent my Writing Journalism tutorial with a carefully organised look of interesting and attractive disinterest on my face. However, after I'd gotten up to visit the bathroom I caught sight of my face in the mirrior, and I was frightened -- I had a grim, cranky look etched into my eyes, as if my old bones were pained and weary. I looked angry, and mean, and morose, which was NOT the kind of look I had organised. I had wanted to appear collected and above the proceedings.

I've mentioned this before - how I should have a minder or something to watch me get ready in the morning so that I don't do/wear anything stupid. But now I'm disappointed, and worried, that my carefully crafted look of disinterest/interest in this tutorial was so utterly wrong and open to misinterpretation. What's really at stake here is my personality. My looked of interesting disinterest was supposed to make me look all of the following things: wise, charming, handsome, Batman, intelligent, slightly bored (so that people would feel compelled to interest me) and so on. Obviously, nobody in my tut got that, because I sat there hunched over looking cranky.

I'm led to believe that my ideas about my own appearance are wrong, then - in my mind's eye I am a sweet, lovely person whom everybody loves, who always wears a skirt because she is a lady, and who buys the big issue when she has $5 in her wallet. More importantly - and this is just between you and I - I am, under cover of darkness, Batman - a dangerous ninja who protects the weak and fights the bad guys, and plays soccer twice a week at Albert Park. But maybe people just see some rotund guy who always looks tired, and seems to drink a lot of coffee, and frequently disappears outside to smoke, and is constantly biting her nails? I don't want to be that guy, but I also don't want to stop being/doing any of those things (except for being tired all the time, that just means I need more sleep).

That guy isn't as attractive as the guy in my head!

Oh man... today just got a whole lot better. Work is boring, so I've been playing in the Nickelodeon forums. I stumbled across this fantastic forum in some place called Gargarama where the topic of discussion is "Have you kissed someone?". I mean, how cute can you get? I could just cry with the innocence of it all. I've included some of my favourite lines from the forum - which are all way too cute, mind you - and they're all real.

"yes i have it was my x and he was so cute and his name is shawn miller." (It's true Shawn, I didn't make that up).
"Ive kissed all 24 of my boyfriends." (this little twerp has had more boyfriends than I've had, obviously)
"I have kissed mostly all da yr 5 and yr 6 boys that r hot and popular and cool. Mostly taken me on a date." (What dates are they going on at the age of 11?!)
"I HAVE KISSED ONE AT MY FREIND BARTHDAY PARTY! I'M PLANING TO KISS HER AGAIN SOON." (awwww.... "planning to kiss her again soon"...)

Bless!

I want to go back to those times, when kissing was all there was to look forward to. Or maybe I'm having one of those days where I don't really like being an adult, and therefore would like to go back to being a mere 13-year-old where people cook me dinner and give me pocket money and cuddle me.

It's just occured to me that perhaps the reason why today is turning out to be SUCH a shit day is because the woman who sits next to me in cubicle has a throat infection. It's pretty gross, and it's distracting me. She talks a lot, which normally is annoying, but today it has become creepy because now she sounds like the lovechild of Darth Vader and Hannibal. Really scary. Her voice is hoarse, and croaky, and gravelly, and mucousy, and every time she speaks to me, I'm like, "Here! Have what you want! Just don't speak to me anymore!"

Okay, I'm having a panic attack.

My boss has been out of the office, and I've taken advantage of this to spend all morning looking at jobs on the internet in publishing and editing. Only there are none. Or, there are, but there are none that I can apply for. Happily, I did find a "guide to getting into the publishing industry" webpage, only for it to say the following: it's pretty hard to get into publishing, and so you shouldn't bother trying if you're not brilliant.

I'm so close to tearing out all my hair. I am literally almost in tears, because I'm frightened I'll end up old, alone and unemployed/unemployable. And poor.

I'm not a good enough writer (I can write bullshit well enough, but I mean real writing) to become a journalist. Because I haven't had anything published, I cannot become a sub-editor. Because I'm no sub-editor, I'll never become an editor, and therefore I am destined to always be a loser.

Loser Pintado.

Obviously, the first thing I need to do is get published somewhere. I emailed the editors of Farrago saying this: "I'm going to wind up alone and stupid unless you kindly point me in the right direction. I will do anything, I swear. And, bonus for you, I already write in my blog a lot."

I need to smoke many, many cigarettes, one after the other. And, I also need for someone to give me a hug, and then slap me around a bit and tell me everything will be okay, so that I can believe it.

I thought I would see what kind of other communities there are on LJ, so that I could "share my interests" with other bloggers - something I've never been that good at. Sharing interests, I mean. I'm not one of those people who's obsessed with football, or my hair, or computers, or having scary cleavage - apart from reading, I'm fairly boring. But I thought I would make an effort, this time.

Beer. I selected this because I do like beer - doesn't everyone? Some days, I just fill up my water bottle with beer and I feel complete.
Cigarettes. I'm actually very ashamed of this, but I thought, "hey, I'm pretty interested in smoking - I do it a lot." But it turns out the other people who are interested in smoking are far more hardcore than I. I'm softcore.
Coffee. Fairly basic. Everyone knows I can make it as far as from my bed to the city before I start to break down, and need a caffeine fix.
Cuddling. Also fairly obvious. I need lots of hugs (oh, for fuck's sake, that makes me sound like a wanker), but the only reason for that is because J is constantly withholding love as PUNISHMENT - last night, he spent the whole time sleep-talking, and keeping me awake. Finally, desperate, I figured I could take hold of the situation so I said, "Cuddle me immediately," and J rolled over and muttered, "Can't, I'm busy." In his sleep! Therefore, maximising my own cuddles is one of my interests.
Harry Potter. Reading. Well duh, on both counts.
Politics. Yes. I'm a left-leaning cosmopolitanist. I think. Sometimes it changes, depending on how early it is and how cranky I am.
Porn. Sarcasm. Sushi. I put these in to flesh out my interests a little - I was starting to feel constrained by my image as the good-girl-who-goes-bad-in-her-own-time. I do love sushi though, and Nori Furigame - the seaweed flakes with sesame seeds that you put on rice. Oh, man.
The Homosexual Agenda. Very, very important to me. They need breeders on their side too.

Check out this moron who attached himself to various LJ friends' lists - those of people whom he thought needed some special attention. My favourite part is at the very end, where, after ranting and raving about how them gays are all drug abusers, sinners and sodomists, he describes his current mood as "loved". Now, that's comedy.

I'm a little worse for wear after battling the bush over Easter, but still quite proud of myself for having come out alive. Over the past four days, I have battled the following:

1. The rain and the lack of a plastic jacket. ("You didn't bring a plastic jacket?" "You didn't tell me to!")
2. A hard dirt floor and the lack of a sleeping bag (..."You didn't tell me to!"), and a very, very sore side from cuddling up to Ja to sap his body warmth - which wasn't reciprocated.
3. Icy-cold water, from falling into the river whilst fishing.
4. Blackberry bushes.
5. Dahl.
6. An elevator (when I got back to work, I fell over from the stress and cut up my ankle, and almost lost a finger!).

The camping itself was great fun: I spent many quiet hours curled up next to the fire with Starship Troopers (another lovely Heinlein) in one hand and a cigarette/beer/glass of rosé in the other. On Sunday afternoon, I bravely donned plastic pants (they call them "waders") and then spent a good ten minutes wafting through the campsite and posing for photos so everyone could see how "fisherman" I was, and how fabulous. There ensued a two-hour walk down the river, scouring for fishies and pointlessly casting a rod in waters I'd already splashed and clomped my way though noisily. At one point I tripped over my own feet and landed up to my boobs in the water, which not only gave me the "in" look of being in a wet t-shirt competition, but introduced the ice-cold water to my butt-cheeks. That was unpleasant.

I suppose I should also reveal what everybody wants to know - whether I crapped in the bush or not. Short answer, yes. Long answer, yay-verily. I first braved the outdoor toilet on Saturday, disturbed only by my first glimpse of a native animal (a small brown frog, species unidentified). On Monday, however, I woke up with some serious downstairs action after a bowl (bowel?) of dahl the afternoon before. There's no real way to put this delicately, so I'll just say it: I ran as far away from the campsite as possible, only just making it to the side of the road before any sense of human decency I had was crushed by instinct. It was horrendous, the type of experience that could kill a man if he had access to a porcelain bowl, let alone a hole in the ground (and even then, not). It was a humbling experience, to say the least. To say more, J and I spent several hours on our way home battling unsealed roads which further upset my tummy and I was a fairly unhappy lass when we arrived home later that evening. I hate you, dahl.

And then, when I made it back to civilisation this morning, I fell over on an elevator at Melbourne Central and cut up my ankle pretty badly. So, I'm a walking wound, a walking open wound.

But don't think I had a bad time out in the bush - I did have a wonderful time, more than I thought possible, given that I am by nature a porcelain-bowl type of girl. Yay camping! Boo dahl.

I've been having parenting dramas this week. Dad's away with my stepmum in Tassie, which means that (even though my 18-year old step sister lives with them) my presence is required in the house, to "watch over everything". Which is great, because what it really means is that I spend a week frantic out of my brain trying to prevent my youngest brother from being killed. He's everything a 16-year-old should be - manipulative, dishonest, vague, annoyingly cool - and all week he's been trying to get me onside so that he go "fully sick" at some party tonight. Meanwhile, I have resisted this because last time I babysat the little brat I ended up driving halfway across melbourne at 2am to pick him up, as he'd gone a-wandering.

Anyway, so first of all he wants to have some people over. "About 20 people, maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more," he says nonchalantly.
"Ah, NO WAY JOSÉ!" I say with all the power that comes of being a babysitter.
"Okay, well maybe I'll just go to a few bars and shit in the city."
"Ah, no," I singsong, "You're only 16, no bars for you-oo."
"Okay, well I'll got to this party in Sandringham."
"Fine. I'll need the phone number of the parents who are going to be there, so that I can call and make sure it's all okay. You'll also need to be home by 11pm, as that's your curfew, and if you're home a minute later I'm calling Dad."
"WHAT? that's so unfair! I wanted to catch the last train home, otherwise you have to pick me up."

I backtracked quickly, agreeing that he could catch the last train home but that a) I wouldn't accept missing the last train home as an excuse, and if he was late I would call Dad, and b) no-one was allowed to stay the night. Satisfied that I was being the ideal parent, I got up to go to bed, and he adds, "Oh by the way, A-- is coming over tomorrow after school."
"Why?" I snarled. Although I've never met her, I don't like A--, his girlfriend. She seems like a pain in the ass, and the kinds of girls Simon goes for are not the kind you bring home to your mother.
"Have to give her an easter present."

I think about this for a while, and the only way I can think of to prevent a visit from A-- is to call her house while she's at school and pull that prank from Mean Girls, you know where the Queen Plastic is all like, "Hello, is (young girl) there? This is Planned Parenthood, can you please tell (young girl) that her test results are waiting? Thank you!" But I figured that was way too mean to do to a young girl (who may or may not be a bit of a skank), so instead I'm planning on removing the door handle to Simon's room so that they can't close the door.