I Drew This

Firstly, mind the look of the place. This blog is like most people’s spare room at the moment. Nobody comes in here much, it’s a bit of a mess but there’s definitely a plan to fix the place up a bit. That said, Christmas is coming and with all the weekends pretty much booked out between now and then, I’m not sure when I’ll find the time. But I digress.

Here is something what happened to me the other day.

I was picking Little Miss L up from after-school care. I was walking towards the building when I heard her yell to me from across the yard and come running towards me. She gave me an update as to what she’d been up to and one of her friends showed me a butterfly she’d caught. It was very exciting. The carer looking after them was a young man, I think he was one of the year 12s.

I noticed there was some sporting equipment strewn about the place and as my daughter and friends were talking to me, I picked up a stray volleyball a few feet away.  I told Miss L to go inside and get her gear and as she took off, I threw the ball above my head and set it in the direction of the big green wheely bin the balls go in. I think it hit the edge and bounced away but it was close.

The carer said “So, you used to play a bit of volleyball…?”

!?

“Used to…?”

I’m not in a fucking walking frame just yet, thankyouverymuch.

I’m still in my 30s and when I did play volleyball I played with and against people in their late 40s, possibly 50s. And while I may be retired hurt, you can’t tell just from looking at me: I walk upright and I’m still rather thin.

So while he was technically correct on the fact that I used to play (technically incorrect on the “a bit” part; I used to play a shitload of volleyball), I just didn’t like his assumption.

I guess though, that if I have a shoulder chip, then it’s my inability to play any kind of meaningful sport. My ankle is never going to recover, so that pretty much rules out any sport that involves standing up.

Which is most of them.

So I hate it when I hear people saying “oh, I can’t be arsed going for a jog”, when I’d gladly do it for them.

And no, I’m not about to launch into some kind of self-indulgent teenage song lyrics (is there any other kind of teenage song lyrics?). My heart isn’t broken, and thank you, I’m over all the nasty stuff that happened in high school. None of it was actually nasty, I was just there with a bunch of teenagers and you know what they’re like.

What I got goin’ on is the traditional, hurty pain that you get when some of your bits are broken or damaged or angry at you for daring to go out and have a bit of a run around after four years of not. “Take that!” my injured bits are saying to me. And I am. Taking it. For four weeks now.

It’s been interesting as the pain has changed from something deep within the joint: something dull and nebulous that I couldn’t quite point to but that made me feel almost nauseous, to something sharp and articulate like wearing an anklet of thorns.

There are a few tried and trusted ways of coping with pain like this.

• Painkillers. Anything codeine based seems to do the trick for me, though they never completely mask the pain. I mean, it’s an ankle: the pills go into my stomach but the ankle is all the way down there, so far away. I’d prefer having the edge taken off than no relief at all. And I may joke about it but I never mix them with alcohol.
• Not minding that it hurts. Not as silly as it sounds. The very reason the painkillers don’t work–that the ankle is so remote and distant–also enables me to somehow distance myself from the pain, and observe it as an impartial observer. Like looking at the sun and saying “gosh, that’s bright”, I’m able to look all the way down there at my foot and say “fuck, that’s painful” and just treat it as an arbitrary sensation. It’s very zen and detached, I know. But that’s just how cool I am, I guess.
• Other distractions. Work is actually good, when you can get into the swing of things and keep the painful bits relatively still. Lying in bed doing nothing on the other hand… not so easy to ignore it. I might try reading a book later and see if that helps it go away.
• Sex. Hoping to report on this as a method of pain relief sometime in the hopefully-not-too-distant future.

But it’s all fun and games really. I’ve been seeing some lovely doctors, such as my podiatrist. Now, I’m not covered for podiatry; I usually only go twice a year so it’s not really worth the extra in health insurance just to have her re-cover my orthotics. But now I’ve been going a bit more regularly I had to rethink it. And of course, if I were to get a whole new set of orthotics it would actually be cheaper to pay for it outright than it would to pay the extra premium —and I wouldn’t be able to claim the new ones for a year. Gotta love insurance.

Next week I’m booked into a foot/ankle specialist. Someone new. I get to tell another person the whole story and don’t we all love talking about ourselves?

But I’m going to be pleading with him to inject some cortisone into my joint. Now, I know that’s not a very long-term solution but while I’m working out what that might be, I just need some relief in the short term. Because it hurts.

And, for better comfort, I had to wear sneakers to work today and consequently I look like a bit of a dick.

This week marked my auspicious return to the volleyball court. I had forgotten which year it was that I last slipped on the knee pads but due to the magic of putting a lot of work into writing a blog since 2003, I can simply go back in time and see that my operation was in December 2005.

Footballers have whole knee reconstructions and are on the field again after six weeks. You’d think that after nearly four years, I might be able to have a bit of a runaround, whack a few balls about the place and generally enjoy myself doing what I love.

And, as things went, I did have a pretty good time. I was very rusty and very out of shape but the rest of the team I was on was just as rusty or maybe less experienced, so I found myself compensating for some of them; encroaching on their space a bit when the other team’s best server came on (well, someone had to get a dig up).

I was really unfit though, and my legs’ transformation to jelly began somewhere around the end of the first set.

But wow. It was really good. The game wasn’t of the best standard but I got a few good hits in, set up a few good points, saved a few points and even blocked on or two.

After the game though, I knew I wasn’t going to be jumping about the place the next day. I even stopped at the supermarket on the way home for a bag of frozen peas: they make great ice packs.

I had taped the ankle, wrapped it in a bandage and put the whole lot in a lace-up brace. I didn’t land on it funny, twist it, roll it or even give it a dirty look all game.

It wasn’t swollen or damaged. But it was angry.

Next day, I couldn’t walk on it. I worked from home but had to go into town for a meeting and had to grab my trusty old walking stick.

There I was with my stubble, untucked shirt and pack of painkillers. If I’d suddenly amassed an incredible knowledge of diagnostic medicine I could have passed for Doctor House. I had the odd urge to send random strangers for a liver biopsy. I even thought of taking all my painkillers out of the blister pack and putting them in one of those little yellowy-orange plastic bottles.

Anyway, long story short, it’s Saturday morning and I still can’t walk properly. The ankle is just too weak. I’ve told the guy who got me on the team that it’s not looking too good. He’s hoping it’ll come good; so am I, of course.

But the writing’s on the wall and the writing says ‘Whatever you do, don’t even think about setting foot on a volleyball court ever again unless you want a life of pain and resemblance to a certain fictional crippled TV doctor’.

In other news

We’re going away today, back Tuesday. Off to the Yorke Peninsula. We usually get out for a drive or other such fun but the weather’s looking like crap for at least the rest of the weekend. I’ll be voting for sticking the kids in front of a DVD, sitting on the verandah with a glass of wine and a good book.

Payday is Monday, so in the preceding weekend, things sometimes get a bit tight. We banked a cheque on Wednesday which was supposed to have cleared by this morning.

It hasn’t.

I called the bank, who have admitted a “processing fault”. So I just emailed them this:

Dear Co******alth Bank,

I have just been speaking to one of your customer service representatives regarding uncleared funds in my account.

Your representative has admitted that a cheque of the amount of $**.**, deposited on 09/09/09 has not cleared and that the fault lies entirely with the bank.

Because of this failure, a fee of $200 has been imposed, payable by you into my account immediately.

If the funds have not cleared by midday today, another $200 fee will be imposed.

Please pay the original amount as soon as possible to avoid any further fees.

Regards,

Andrew B***
The Customer

I mean, what goes around….

I used to work in the city.

And yeah, I already mentioned this in a post. It’s just that it weighs so heavily on my mind, I’m hoping that writing about it will be a little cathartic.

Mornings are all go in our house. There are kids to get up and dressed, lunches to pack, kids to ask again to get dressed, cups of tea and breakfasts to make, and “Kids, why can’t you bloody well get dressed when you’re told” to be said, repeated and yelled day after day. Getting out of the door on time means being in the car at 7.45, or 7.50 at the latest. 8 am is doable but it’s a rush.

My wife and kids get off together at school in the city. To get a park for drop off, we need to be there by 8.15, otherwise we’re doing laps of the block for 10 or 20 minutes. On a good (early) day, I can even get out and take the kids into class and say goodbye. I realise that in a couple of years they won’t want me anywhere near them and all kids probably wish they could take out restraining orders to keep their parents a safe distance from school, so if I get the chance to do classroom activities, I’m fine with that.

If I’m catching the bus, I need to be in the centre of the city by 8.20. I rarely make this and usually end up having to wait till nearly 8.35 for a bus that gets me setting foot in the office around 9.07.

If I’m driving to work I have to be on the road again by about 8.35. Taking the car, I can usually get in the office before or right on 9. See, I like to get to work early. Because if you get to work early, you can leave early. And who doesn’t like leaving early?

I sometimes get all narky if I’m running late: when traffic’s heavy, when there are too many 25 zones, when people don’t know that when the light is green and the red arrow disappears, they’re allowed to turn right. Or if the bus is late, I get annoyed having to sit in Victoria square… waiting in disbelief that the buses can be so early/late/irregular (really, they publish timetables for buses. I can’t think of anything more useless).

I should say I used to get narky. I don’t really now. Not anymore.

I don’t enjoy working out of the city. At least not on the other side of the city from where I live. It’s not that I dislike the north in particular but I am in a rather unattractive corner of the metro area. The first day I caught the bus out here, I knew to get off at stop 18. I dutifully pressed the Next Stop button after stop 17 and stepped off a minute or so later. Turns out it wasn’t stop 18 but stop 17A. Of course. Obviously.

Stop 17A puts you right outside what looks like some disused packing plant. There’s a derelict factory with those really high rail things that you could move stuff on (don’t ask me what). There’s an expanse of overgrown grass and a brick building close to the road. It’s been tagged to the point there’s hardly any brown brick exposed. All the windows have been smashed. Some have been boarded up and subsequently had the boards smashed.

I was stopped in traffic the other day at Light Square. About a billion people wanted to turn right into Currie St and the right hand slip lane had filled up so nobody could get past the right-turners to go straight; they were all in the straight-ahead lane waiting to turn right. I thought “this is gonna make me late. I have to get to…” Then the image of stop 17A popped into my head. And I realised that this—being in the city amid the chaos of morning rush hour—was where I really wanted to be.

The place I work—the suburb, the strip mall, the broken footpaths—is so disconnected from the city in my mind, it’s like I work in another country. When I’m in the city, I can’t believe that it’s possible to get to a place so far away, not in distance but in mood. Of course, I know the way, and whether I’m on the bus or driving, I get here eventually.

And I still want to get here early because the work itself is fine and I want to impress the right people well enough so that I can get another job back in the city. And I still like to leave early.

But the crazy driving, dropoff, driving again. I don’t really get narky anymore. Driving through the city, or waiting in it for a bus… that’s the highlight of my day.

Two net-related things that annoy me recently:

1.Twitter.

Or, more specifically, twitterspam. I wrote something about looking through stock images the other day and within a few hours, I was being followed by a company that was all about providing stock images.

This is an interesting example, because although I hate the concept of trawling twitter for keywords as a way to market your wares, I actually found this kind of interesting and am currently following back (big internal dilemma, that one). I think because I actually found the targeting kind of useful, I found myself following. I’ll give them a week.

But I hate 99% of the other twitspam.

I kind of think of the twitter “conversation” as being like a crowded pub, or party. I’m talking to a friend. I mention stock photos, or whatever. There’s a guy standing near me who hears me mention this and says “That’s interesting you mentioned stock photography because I actually manage a photo library”.

This isn’t too bad. Though the analogy is more like he was at the party eavesdropping on multiple conversations, hoping someone would mention it. If you did that at a party, people would think you were weird and avoid you, you lurking freak. But it’s niche enough that some people might, if they’re already talking about it, be interested. Fair enough.

What shits me though, is the number of new followers I get who have pictures of pretty teenage girls attached, who say nothing in their feeds, only posting a bunch of links (and while url-shortening services are cool, they do mask the real url, so you have no idea if it will land you somewhere extrememly nsfw, which I bet most of them do).

The pub or party equivalent of this is some filthy fat bugger in unwashed jeans, holding up a facemask of a pretty young model, walking up to his target demographic (probably just males) and whispering “wanna see some pictures of chicks doing it?”

Block.

2. Domain name gluttons

I’m looking at doing a new website (long overdue). Having my own url will mean I can finally get some business cards printed so I can at least give off the illusion of being a professional freelancer (in a completely on-the-side way, you understand).

But, be buggered if I can think of a good name for a domain. Or, more precisely, be buggered if I can think of a good name that isn’t already being used. Or, more precisely, be buggered if i can think of a good name that isn’t already not being used but is owned by someone who has no intention of using it and only owns it on the off chance you’ll want to use it and wants to charge you $3,500US for something that should only cost $20. Fuck you, mate, dot com.

For the record, I want something fairly arbitrary as a domain name. The only thing I don’t like about my friend Bruce’s domain, tenpm (where he kindly lets me park this rubbish), is that it actually stands for something.  I liked it better when I though it was just a short, memorable but completely nondescript entity. It doesn’t have to mean anything. That’s what I want. (And the one I really wanted, arbitraryurl.com, is already taken by someone who, while not using it, at least isn’t whoring it out to the highest bidder. Actually, they may be using it. It’s either laziness or art. I can’t work it out.)

And since I posted to twitter about this the other day, I’m surprised the domain whores aren’t following me, hoping I’ll grace them with a clickthrough.

I started a new job a little over a month ago. The actual job, where I sit down and do the actual work, isn’t too bad.

But I’m now working north of the city.

I live south of the city.

So getting here, taking so long to get here, having to catch the bus rather than the train, being here, sharing an office big enough for three with five other people, getting sore eyes from staring at two monitors all day, being subjected to another staff member’s musical tast all day, NOT being in the city, having to go to other non-city, outlying suburbs regularly, having to sit on the bus for more than an hour to get home… that sucks.

Not happy. And I’m so unfit I feel disgusting.

And I need a haircut.

I used to get that done in the city.

I have two daughters. They were born 2.5 years apart and the birth of my second roughly coincided with when gmail was starting up by invitation only and giving email addresses to blogger users.

I thought, being the forward thinking type, it would be a good idea to sign my girls up right then. Sure, neither of them could read or write but this was probably their only shot of getting their firstname.lastname@ combination. Generations of kids below us will be consigned to a world of email addresses that will need to have their year of birth or arbitrary characters appended to their first.last base.

Signing them up at birth (theirs, gmail’s) was the least I could do to give them a sense of ownership over their own names.

With little miss L, I was able to secure her first.last combination. With little miss M though, her first.last was taken, so I signed her up twice. So when she’s a bit older she’ll have the choice of first.middle or first.m.last. Thing is, her middle name is way cooler than her first name, so I’m glad I’ve given her the option. I missed out on her first.last combination because, I’m sure, of my wife’s insistence on giving her the most popular first name going at the time. But let’s not go there.

I was mentioning this to a colleague this morning and he suggested that couples having kids now might actually want to consider going so far as finding out which gmail combinations are still available before committing to a name for their kids.

Wish I’d thought of that four years ago.

Where to begin. Or, where to pick up.

Time is precious and this has always been the project I’ve dabbled at using the time that’s fallen between the cracks of Important Things. I kind of disappeared for a while though. I changed jobs and the way I had structured my time previous to that completely changed and the snippets of spare time spent here just disappeared, and so did I.

But things have changed again. There’s probably a blog post in there somewhere about where I’ve been but that’s for another day. It’s Sunday night and there’s work to be done.

I’ve often thought I should try liveblogging. If only for my own entertainment. But y’know…

Firstly, at the time most liveblogworthy things are on, I’m usually getting kids to bed, loading the dishwasher and generally cleaning up the mess I’ve made earlier in the afternoon.

Secondly, and probably more pertinently, I live in South Australia so unless I want to liveblog the McGarey Medal count (a medal ceremony for local nugget-headed footballers (a tautology in itself), where they all sit at tables and gasp in amazement as a presenter on stage continually impresses them by counting to three), there’s very little point. See, we’re half an hour behind the east coast of Australia, so nothing is live here. I’d be reporting on who’s been eliminated from SYTYCD and commenting on Natalie’s frock, while in reality she would be back in the green room in her tracksuit pants downing her second Bacardi and Coke (because she’s a classy girl).

It’s also difficult with something like Eurovision, because we’re 8.5 hours ahead of western Europe and while it may seem a good idea to blog it that far in advance, there are obvious flaws in the plan. It’s a Saturday night deal in Europe but we have to content ourselves with watching a delayed telecast on Sunday evening.

I’ve been big into Eurovision since SBS started broadcasting it in the late 90s. It appeals to me because it’s the zenith of ironic consumption. Everyone in it is so into it and has such a great time, and seem to genuinely participate in the rivalry, even though everyone knows it really is a little bit shit.

It’s still fun to watch and it’s getting a bit more of a following over here now but I’m not sure a lot of people here get that it’s kind of supposed to be sort of crap. Australians love to take the piss but, I dunno, I kind of get the idea that it’s more derisive and genuine than being in on the joke. I kind of miss how we used to get the British feed with Terry Wogan with his reserved and veiled sarcasm, which again, you kind of had to get it to get it.

I nearly didn’t watch it tonight though, after the local Channel Nine news, in an act of sheer televisual bastardry, blurted out that Norway had won the competition as they threw to a commercial break. No ‘we’ll give you the winners after the break’ or ‘stay tuned for the winner of Eurovision’ just a completely unexpected announcement in what must have been a deliberate attempt to fuck it up for anyone that wanted to watch it later. It would be competing with 60 Minutes after all, so they took it upon themselves to ruin it for everyone.

Nul points, chaine neuf. NUL POINTS!!