summer holiday .

i am pleasantly surprised (nor maybe not so much pleasantly as just surprised) that my wireless internet connection is much better here, on the gold coast, than at my home in sydney.

yes folks, you heard right. i am blogging from the gold coast with pristene internet connection. and right now i’m staring at a wine rack full of sealed mount franklin bottles; a scene which obviously belongs in someone’s garage.

i figured that it was about time i took myself on a holiday. although i miss my yearly trip to shanghai, (and all the shopping involved), it feels good to have tried something new. my asserted independence is strikingly bold, and this has been increasingly emphasised by my bus ride to the airport.

the forked road .

upon observing a rather attractive female cleaner in the toilets of world square shopping centre today, a very curious question became embedded in my mind.

i would think that even without fantastic english skills, a nice face, long curly hair and a decent rack can probably get a poor girl around five hundred per night, no toilet cleaning or sex involved.

which leads me to my question; would you rather be a stripper or a toilet cleaner?

now consider this hypothetical situation; you have no wealthy background, immigrated rather recently, probably need to pay bills or even school fees to gain an education, and have no real skills or ways of getting hired.

weeds .

everybody is growing up.

i never thought i’d come to a point in my life where everyone was so free. it’s so weird. i forget what it was like to not be allowed to do something. to not be allowed to stay out. to not be given extra money for lunch. but i always had plenty of money for lunch.

i don’t remember the feeling of anger and frustration directed towards my parents when they said no.

i can’t seem to relive those feelings and the thoughts that crossed my mind. those issues all seem so trivial now. does that even happen anymore?

armageddon .

in sydney today, between 4 and 5 am, the sky was red. not the soft, pale orangy-red of dawn, and not the crimson red of blood. just the kind of red that made the sky look like a five year old child had shaded it with coloured pencil.

as you can imagine, people freaked.

although the redness eventually faded to an ugly orangy-yellow as the sun rose, there were ongoing whispers about how the world was about to end. i imagine if we lived in a world without technology, the christians would have stood up on their soap boxes and told us it was our fault because we have sinned, and even jesus could’t help us now.

the chase .

i have come to realise that i have an alarming amount of disrespect for girls that chase after guys. it’s rather appauling; i’m practically borderline disgusted, and that really shouldn’t happen for anyone except for men who are already disgusting.

this realisation came to me as i was halfway through another taiwanese drama series in which the girl tries extremely hard to, and i quote/translate, “step into the guy’s heart.”

cue cringe from liz. sometimes i actually wince. maybe one day if it were bad enough i’d gag.

tipsy .

when you say and do stupid things while you’re drunk, it’s just an excuse. i don’t believe that you can wake up the next morning and think “oh shit, i totally didn’t mean to do that,” unless it was stumbling a little and tripping over into some dog shit.

all the things you say, all the people you hit on, all the people you “accidentally” kiss are still a product of a decision making process; a slightly clouded one, but a decision all the same.

but maybe i’ll be whistling a different tune when i fuck up while i’m drunk.

is that the difference?

the hospitable .

i don’t like hospitals. i remember having been a couple of times in my life, very briefly. apparently i was in there for months when i was about two, but that blissfully escapes me.

to be honest, i’ve never visited someone i really cared about. when i was seven, i went to visit my dying grandfather whom i had known as an abusive alcoholic for my entire life. even now i remember him, my only deceased grandparent, as a smelly drunk who gave me sultanas on his deathbed.

apart from that, i’ve visited a distant relative and a distant friend. i’ve rocked up with a fourty degree fever only to be told by a stupid nurse that i should take my clothes off because my body was at such a high temperature.

hair .

last year, during an english class, my extremely wise teacher, mr morris, told us that there comes a certain time in a woman’s life where she cuts her hair. now because my teacher is a funny guy and likes to over analyse things, i let it go and thought about other things instead.

but i thought about it again the other day.

first, i thought about my own mother. i can’t pinpoint the exact year that she chose to cut off her long and rather pretty hair, but it must have been sometime in her early thirties. there’s a video of us when she was about thirty three, and she had really long curly hair and bright red lipstick, and i must admit she was quite a picture.