The planning for Japan is coming along nicely. Today I received confirmation that we were able to book in on our preferred date for the Ghibli museum. I’m so psyched – lifesize catbus!!!! Also, I saw a picture on the Ghibli museum website of Hayao Miyazaki sitting in front of one of the robots from ‘Laputa Castle in the Sky’. Here he is:

The resolution isn’t high enough for me to tell what his expression actually is, but I’d like to think he’s delighted.

And why wouldn’t he be? Living in a country where things like what’s pictured below are just an everyday occurrence…

Some friends of mine

I just finished watching Sakuran. It was visually sumptuous – the colours, the designs, the clothes… And tomorrow, Tim and I are going to see Trina to sort the details of our Japan trip. I am so excited. It might be because this has been something I’ve dreamed of for around 15 years now.

Watching the Amazing Race the other night, and seeing the teams in Japan, in Tokyo, rushing through Shibuya… all these things that Tim and I will be doing in just over a month’s time…

Well. I can’t get ahead of myself. There’s still a few weeks to go yet, and Tim and I also have to concentrate on selling the house.

Still, it’s exciting!!!!

Before I go any further, let me just offer this:

Don’t get me wrong. I, personally, do not hate sandcastles. I quite like them. I also like this kid. The thing I find funny about it is that, after I laughed at his expression, I then noticed that it looks like he’s been eating sand. I don’t think he really hates sandcastles, I think he loves them, but in a culinary sense. Perhaps his hatred is a front, an excuse for the destruction, then afterwards he’s like, “well, it’s ruined, you won’t mind if I take a piece. Nomnomnom.”

So anyway, on with what I actually meant to say… Tim is on his way home as I type this! YAY! I think he won’t be in the best of moods when he gets in, because his plane from LA to Sydney was delayed by about two hours, so he’s going to miss his connecting flight from Sydney to Brisbane. He had caught an earlier flight from New York to LA, because he was worried about making his LA to Sydney flight. LAX can be a real bitch for connections, because they’re so pedantic and annoying. Plus it’s just a stupid airport (so I’ve heard, from several different people). So I know he’ll be tired and fed up, but I’m just going to be so happy to have him home.

A slight deviation – If you are doing an image search, check out this site: Flickr Related Tag Browser

So, this has been Tim’s journey:

Brisbane -> Tokyo -> Singapore ->London -> Frankfurt -> Paris -> London -> Boston -> New Hampshire -> Boston -> New York -> Philadelphia -> New York -> LA -> Sydney -> Brisbane

All that in three weeks. I think that list is right… It’s just the side trips I’m not 100% sure of.

Chris came over this afternoon and hung out for a while. We watched Little People, Big World (there was a weekend marathon of LPBW on) and talked about things. Then, Noelle arrived and we had to stop talking about her and talk about something else. Just kidding. We still talked about her. Not. Ok. I’m going to stop that doubletalk now. It was a lot of fun hanging out with Chris and Noelle, and Po. We watched the Pilot episode of “Dead Like Me”, and then Chris went home to his Doon but Noelle and I kept watching episode after episode of Dead Like Me. I really like it. The girl looks like she’s about 15, but she has weird, grown-up hands. They’re creepy, but it really fits in with the whole grim reaper theme. It reminds me of one of the radio shows of Ricky, Karl and Steve when they were talking about how they had watched that interview with Michael Jackson, where that guy followed him around and you got to see what his life consisted of. When they asked Karl’s opinion on Michael Jackson, he said, “‘e’s got big ‘ands, ain’t ‘e?” (substitute the extra apostrophes for ‘h’ in case you’re not familiar with his accent). Ricky and Steve laughed at Karl, just one more in a long line of extreme non-sequiturs. I can’t listen to the podcasts without laughing out loud. Sometimes I have to stop what I’m doing so that I can concentrate on not laughing too loud, because when I’m listening to the shows I am at work. It’s my escape from the daily grind (like Gloria Jeans wants to be, but we have a coffee machine in the lunch room at work so why would I go all the way to Gloria Jeans to escape the daily grind, there’s not even one near my work.)

I’m really tired. Here is another funny picture (I find it funny. Actually, I find it hilarious. I’m not sure why. Don’t get mad at me if you don’t find it as amusing as I did):

I think I really like that the thing behind it is so ugly, and the text is small and plain, and you could sort of imagine that kitten saying that. If you’re great at anthropomorphising like I am. Not as great as Karl Pilkington, who apparently saw a bee have a heart attack (because London is so stressful and all). Karl also said that ginger cats are always fat (you never see a skinny ginger cat, according to Karl) because life’s more stressful for them than other cats, because they would get picked on for being ginger. He also said they always look ‘fed up’.

Lauren and Nathan are coming over tomorrow morning to hang out before we go get Tim from the airport. Yay!

I am posting people that I have celebrity crushes on. I’m allowed.

I’ve been watching Lost most of the afternoon. Right now, an episode with Desmond as the focus character has started. This is awesome because Desmond is probably my favourite at the moment. I love his accent, and he has the power to see into the future randomly. But then there is this side-story running throughout that is like the “Final Destination” movies so far (it might develop into something more impressive, but for now it’s not all that amazing) whereby Desmond sees Charlie dying in various ways and accordingly prevents his death. Plus i just realised why Desmond calls everyone “brother”. I was wondering about that.

The people next door are having arguments again. They yell really loudly, and because I went down to put the garbage out (good timing!) I could hear quite a lot of what they said, but I still couldn’t understand what they were arguing about. Mum thinks it is the 15 year old boy who lives there that was yelling. He apparently plays “that stupid game” in his backyard (which is how mum described it) which Rosie elaborated upon by saying, “yeah, I know what you’re talking about, he has a stick and waves it around like Star Wars, and runs up and down the yard and does noises and stuff.” Lol!

Noelle and I had our picnic at Roma Street Parklands today. As you can see, the grass really is greener… over there. There’s one big expanse of grass which has dried up and died, but the rest is still alive and well. Noelle and I had wheat-free bread (super dense but yum) with cream cheese, tomato, lettuce, jarlsberg and also some chicken from a chicken salad that we got from McDonalds at Roma St station, seeing as there were no real shops open today (Noelle said, “Those labour day sales adds were misleading! They’re the reason I thought shops would be open today.”) We also had some watermelon and some rice crackers, and pineapple juice. It was a lovely picnic. Dumb ibis.

One bad experience of the day was public transport. Brisbane Public Transport SUCKS! Allow me to explain: Noelle’s bus came fifteen minutes late, so when it arrived, another one arrived at the same time. Once Noelle had arrived in the City, we walked down to Central Station. After viewing the timetable tvs, we found a Roma Street Train would be leaving Platform 5 in approx. four minutes – plenty of time to get down to the platform and get on the train, right? Well, in any other universe but this one apparently. None of the escalators providing access to platforms 5 & 6 were going down – they were all set to go up. So, not a big problem, we hurried down the stairs. We struggled through a throng of people exiting the train we wanted to board, and just as we got to the yellow line, the doors closed – right in the face of some foreign guy who shrieked and jumped backwards. With over two minutes until the departure time scheduled on the screen, the train pulled away from the platform at the signal whistle from a QR employee. We spoke to this person, who became defensive and indignant. It wasn’t her fault she blew the whistle, apparently. She can’t control the train timetables. She doesn’t have to take this. I said to her, “You are a representative of Queensland Rail – in fact, the only one that I can see this minute. You are the person we’re speaking to about it.” Noelle said “You blew the whistle for the train to go!” But apparently this logic was too obvious for her, and she walked away from the discussion muttering under her breath.

Queensland Rail could benefit from some customer service training for their staff.

Whenever mum calls out to me, no matter what she’s saying, it makes me feel like I’m in trouble for something. This is especially true if she’s calling up from downstairs. She says “Hey Cass…” but the tone is like a warning sound, and I respond warily with “yeah….?” slowly. It’s either going to be a random question about something-or-other which I won’t know the answer to straight away anyway, or I’m going to be berrated for not wiping the bench down properly or something.

Well, I’m tired and have a headache. I’m going to go to sleep so that I’m at my best for work tomorrow, and so that I don’t seem “not myself”. Who am I if I’m not me? Someone less likeable perhaps… Sorry everyone! Here are some pictures to make up for it:

I had a dream about work night before last. Then last night, I had a dream about people from work, but not in a work situation. I dreamt that there was a bomb out in the ocean. It looked sort of like a box, with a computer keyboard attached. In order to stop the bomb, the “2″ key on the numerical keypad of the keyboard had to be pressed, only the devious person who set the bomb also removed the “2″ key.

We were all standing in a big area with lots of covered stalls, like a market, but every table had different types of keyboards on it. I found a “2″ key, and took it from the keyboard, but then realised that because it was an ergonomic keyboard, and the keyboard of the bomb was just a normal old beige one, it wouldn’t fit. Everyone then started searching for a suitable keyboard to steal the key from. I finally found one that was similar, and stole the “2″ key, and some other keys as well (I have no idea why). Someone came up to me and told me to put the keys into a basket so that we could keep them afloat and swim out to the bomb, so I put all keys except the “2″ key in there. I said that it would be safer if I just held it myself.

We then ran down to the dock, and were searching for a place to dive in where there weren’t any rocks. As I was running up and down the dock, I saw a dead body lying on the ground. It had slashes all over it’s body where blood oozed out. I said “I can’t dive in here. I’m going further up.” I found a spot without rocks and jumped into the water, careful not to go too deep in case there were rocks i couldn’t see, or I had misjudged the depth. When I was in the water, I realised that there were lots of people who had been slashed just like the dead body on the dock, and they were all Sudanese refugees, all floating in the water around me. I saw a boat just beside the dock where the refugees were going and a man there would slash patterns onto their chests and abdomens as they tried to get on the boat.

Then I woke up.

I thought I’d write that down to remember it. I have a bad memory, but for some reason if I write something down, I will be more likely to remember it.

This week has been a tough week, especially with Tim being away. Work was busy with end-of-month, plus now learning Payroll and Super. It’s good that it’s a long weekend, because I really need the rest. I need to do a spring clean of my room, and do some laundry, and move the boxes out of the spare room that I put there with all these good intentions of going through them to figure out what I had and what I needed for when I eventually move out. It sounded like a relaxing Sunday afternoon task, something that I wouldn’t need to think a lot about, but then I got distracted by something and so it never got done.

I’m really good at procrastinating. I have all these grand plans of rearranging my room, putting away in boxes downstairs all the things I no longer use, the books I know I won’t read, and untangling all the cords under the computer desk and beside my bed. I hope that this does happen, but already this morning I’ve procrastinated by deciding that right now is the best time for me to write a blog (it’s been hard to get in the mood to write lately. I go with the flow, baby!), and also that I have to make a cool “spring clean” playlist in WMP that i can listen to while I clean. I really do need a playlist, it’s easier to keep going with cleaning if I am listening to awesome music.

I think I’ll also pause during the clean to read old notes kept in my “things to remember!” shoebox, and by looking through the photographs from our trip overseas, maybe finish off putting them in their photo album just because I think, “If i was really cleaning up, then EVERYTHING should be in order and finished”. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have the time. These are things that are good to do to keep me occupied, because looking through photos of our overseas trip makes me feel happy (but also nostalgic). I also need to write up the conglomerate of my diary from the trip. I’ve been meaning to do that for ages, but its such a big job :S.

I also need to update the graphic memes on istoletheinternets, and create a decent design for the site. I’m not a graphic designer, which makes it difficult, but Nathan did make me a banner to put up which I might try to use the design from for the header. Or something.

It’s good having Tim as part of my life, even though I miss him terribly. He’s in Scotland at the moment, and sent me this photo of a view from a hill a few days ago. He’s going to visit Loch Ness. Last week, Japanese scientists explaced… placed explosive detonators at the bottom of Lake Loch Ness to blow Nessie out of the water. Sir Cort Godfrey of the Nessie Alliance summoned the help of Scotland’s local wizards to cast a protective spell over the lake and its local residents and all those who seek for the peaceful existence of our underwater ally. Lol. But seriously, Tim is such a generous, thoughtful, funny (either deliberately or accidentally) person. I hope he’s having an awesome time, but I can’t wait until he gets back.

Nathan is one of the smartest people I know. For real, and I work with a lot of doctors (though not the medical kind).

Plus, I find these Cyanide and Happiness comics amusing. Check them out.

I consider myself lucky to have Nathan as my brother in law (unofficially, until next year, but he is already part of the family). I have the benefit of his empathy and understanding of situations from a male point of view, which is a very useful and precious thing. It’s easy to get caught up in the hurt of previous experiences, to say, “I can’t handle this”, and to hold yourself back from ever opening up to someone again (because with that one act, you are opening yourself up to be hurt in one of the worst ways possible, in an emotional sense). However, it is with Nathan’s encouragement that I am taking things as they come, and being content with feeling content, and not questioning everything all the time.

Chris is also a wonderful help in this way. Our friendship is very important to me. It’s amazing to have an understanding of where each other is coming from. I must remember to take real notice of his advice, though sometimes I’m not in a position to be able to do that. Also, I have to apologise to him (sorry Chris!) for never believing his outrageous stories which later turn out to be true. And Willy’s stories never turn out to be true! Or very rarely anyway. It’s not Chris’ fault that he has such an interesting life. But I know that this isn’t going to stop me from doubting him again… I think that’s just the way that I am, and the way he is.

And also, I miss Tim because he’s overseas!

Emo!

So anyway, I went to see a couple of movies this weekend. Two in a row, actually. On Saturday afternoon, at Rosie’s cinema, I saw “The Curse of the Golden Flower” with Rosie, and then following that, I saw “The Lives of Others” with Mum, Helen & Noelle. They were extremely different movies, so it wasn’t too bad sitting through two movies in a row (often at home, I can’t even sit through one movie in a row because I have to get up and walk around or do something. I think a cinema kind of forces me to sit down and watch, because I can’t just get up and go play tetris, or play with Napoleon or whatever.

Okay so firstly, if you plan on seeing this movie, be careful of reading this next bit because there are spoilers. But they might not really be spoilers… The movie doesn’t make much sense anyway, so I won’t really be ruining the story for you or anything. It’s a very incestuous movie. Starting off, the Emperor has three sons – one from his first wife (whom he maintains “died when her son was very young”), and the two other sons are to his second wife, who is the current Empress. The Empress is having an affair with the first son from the Emperor’s first wife, but he doesn’t really want to carry on with this affair anymore, he wants to run away with his new secret love. His new secret love is Chan, the daughter of the Imperial Doctor. The Imperial Doctor, meanwhile, has been following the Emperor’s orders to put poison into the Empress’ medicine that she takes every two hours, which will slowly leave her with no mental capacity whatsoever. So anyway, it turns out that the Emperor’s first wife is actually the Imperial Doctor’s current wife, and she’s not dead at all, which makes the Emperor’s first son and the Imperial Doctor’s daughter half-brother & sister. On a technicality, first son is screwing both his mother and his sister. So the Doctor’s daughter goes insane and runs off screaming, and the first son gets killed by the Emperor’s youngest son, who turns out to be a real freak (anyone surprised?) and has organised his own little army of about five or six soldiers who are efficiently butchered by the Emperor. The Emperor then goes on to bash his youngest son in the face with a huge metal belt that he’s been wearing, until the kid is mushed into the carpet. After this, they all go and sit up on a big round tower in the middle of the Imperial Palace, high above the courtyard which has been covered with chrysanthemums for the chrysanthemum festival. Then some other stuff happens, second son kills himself, and then it ends. No closure, I’ve no idea what happens. I think the Empress probably just goes crazy and the Emperor does whatever he wants to do. That’s the Tang dynasty for you. Brutal.

Second movie – Lives of others. This is about the surveillance of supposed “enemies of the state” or “suspicious persons” that was carried out by the government during the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the end, it’s a beautiful story. There’s a lot of horribleness going on throughout, but humanity redeems itself by a few important acts of benevolence during a very volatile time of history. It was very interesting to see. I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess that stuff like that still goes on even today, and probably even moreso with the technology that is available now. It’s a bit scary, to think that this all happened less than 20 years ago… it’s surreal. Like a bunch of surrealists changing a lightbulb. Or like chinchan.

Also, last week was my birthday. I had a small party on Saturday 21st April at my place. So many of my favourites were there. Here is proof of their awesomeness:

This evening marks the close to a relatively stressful week for me. Even though it was a short week, and even though it should have been a fun week because it was my birthday on Monday, the other side of Wednesday just seemed to go to shit. (eep!)

Tim left for his holiday today, three weeks in Ireland & Scotland. I got teary when I was speaking to him on the phone before he boarded, and then afterwards, felt embarrassed in retrospect by my own emotions. How very girly of me! I think that my emotions have been stuffed around somewhat by the horrible experience I had last week. I think that perhaps I’m feeling a bit unsafe, a bit co-dependent – not just on one person, but a whole lot of people, and a bit unsure of myself. I think it’s time for me to just start taking baby steps back towards what I perceive as normality in my own life. I miss my independence. I miss feeling safe. I want to take these things back from the person who made me feel afraid to just step outside on my own.

Here are some more blasphemous images. I don’t know why people would care – God told everyone not to make false idols, so what do Catholics do? Plaster them up all over their places of worship! lol!1

Current song playing on repeat in my head is “Say Hello to the Angels” by Interpol. I can’t find a music video for it. Maybe there isn’t one?

Current song actually playing on WMP is “Change in the House of Flies” by Deftones. I don’t have the entire White Pony album, just this one song. I remember Lauren talking about an album of the Deftones where they just played all acoustic stuff. I’d like to hear it, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, the whole entomological theme reminds me of “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka. Reading that book made me feel vaguely uneasy. I could place myself in Gregor’s skin much too easily, so I guess that in that way the writing was effective. But still, (to use an entirely banal expression) it really creeped me out. I very much like the song though.

I’d love to learn German. I never used to think about the career prospects of study (it was always just knowledge for knowledges sake) but now, every time I think of something I’d like to study, the thought comes hand in hand with “and where would that take me? What would I gain from that?” The obvious answer is “Knowledge”, which used to be the most important thing to me. Maybe I’ve started to be more practical… or boring. I don’t know. I was also thinking about the things I want to study, if they’re not going to lead into an external career, then I could just keep studying and researching until I become an expert and then I could be a university lecturer or even just do research for the universities. If I was a washed-up action-hero movie star with a German accent, I might even receive an honorary degree or two. That’d be awesome.

I am so tired. I’m at that point where my eyes are closing by themselves, or they’re telling me they want to close. Last night, Nathan and Lauren came over and they had a bbq, which Chris and I missed most of because we went to the supermarket. Later on, Chris and I got dressed up and went out in the Valley. We got called emos. We drove around for a while, made a video (which is on Chris’ computer so I can’t post it yet), and then went home at about 11:30pm. I didn’t end up going to bed until about 1am though, because as soon as I get on the computer I hang about for ages just doing nothing. Maybe looking at ImageChan (it’s less annoying than sifting through all the crap at 4chan to see some vaguely amusing photoshopped image) or just clicking the StumbleUpon button a million times.

This is not Sparta, this is me dressed up for Friday 13th. Today Chris and I went into the Valley and had yum cha (which was really expoola because we just kept getting plates of crap and not eating them!!1) and then walked around the markets for a bit. I purchased some jewellery and other stuff, as did Christopher. This afternoon we went out to Stafford and saw “300″ at the cinemas there. It was a really cheesy movie. Phillip said that it was really gory, but I didn’t think it was. There was a bit of cartoon blood splatters, and a couple of corpse piles, but nothing that offensive.

Oh btw, it’s my birthday on the 23rd (that’s not this Monday coming, but next Monday). My birthday celebrations, however, will be on Saturday 21st April starting at around 7:00-7:30pm at my house. It’s a BBQ so byo meat, or whatever. Some alcohols and foods will be provided. Others you will have to hunt and gather yourselves. We have several houses surrounding ours, which may or may not be ideal places for scavenging. Not that I am suggesting nor condoning that sort of behaviour. No siree.

I thought I would write a birthday wish list, if anyone who is buying me a present is having trouble figuring out what to get me:

* jewellery
* make-up (only for those that are sure they know what I like!)
* tetris for DS
* tickets to something good
* subscription to Frankie magazine
* noo shoes
* something mybestest branded
* a monthly two-zone translink ticket
* something lovely and surprising and thoughtful

And I could probably name a few more things once I’ve been into the city. I’m going there tomorrow afternoon after work. I’ll keep you posted.

I told a lot of people that I had seen a fox jumping on a trampoline. In case there were any doubting thomases out there (why i oughta! do these look like flesh wounds to you?) here is the proof:

If I ever opened a trampoline store, I don’t think I’d call it Trampoland, because you might think it was a store for tramps, which is not the impression we are trying to convey with our store. On the other hand, we would not prohibit tramps from browsing or testing the trampolines, unless a tramp’s gyrations seem to be getting out of control.

Lol. A random quote from Nathan which I wrote down in my phone for some reason: “The worst thing about being a rollerblader is having to tell your mum & dad you’re gay.”