Yet another backdated roundup... (Part 1)

Thursday night (21/06) was work drinks. This one was an actual company sanctioned drinks night - not just the usual Friday afternoon piss up we have. It was at 3 Degrees at QV. Well, I intended to NOT get appallingly trashed and make a total fool of myself. Yeah, well that didn't happen... But the good thing was, everyone else was equally blotto, so nobody actually noticed :o)

So at the end of the evening, we wandered off to find another place to drink... along the way I looked around me and realised... I didn't know these people. I had connected myself to the wrong group and didn't even realise!

So I sheepishly crept off in another direction to try and find my friends. Wandering along Swanston St, my phone rings - it was LR from my team:

Me - "Hello?"
LR - "Hello?"
Me - "Where are you?"
LR - "Where are you?"
Me - "I'm on Swanston St, where are you!"
LR - "I'm on Swanston St, where are you!"
Me - "Where on Swanston St!!!"
LR - "Um...hee hee hee..."
*Click*

OK, so that was all I could get out of her. Obviously in worse condition than I was. Only thing to do, drunk to the point of almost not being able to walk, freezing cold (it was probably 5 degrees), I jumped on the Number 6 tram home. After about 15 minutes, I realised that the tram didn't turn into High Street like it's supposed to do. Shit Shit Shit Shit. Got off at the next stop along St Kilda Rd. I got on the number 5 tram instead of the number 6. Honestly the bloody numbers look the same when your eyes are crossed. So walked back down St Kilda Rd and waited for the number 6 tram - again. On the tram, it was a quick 5 minutes til I get off at my place - easy. Well, it should have been. Next thing I know, I lifted my head up to see where I was... didn't recognise anything. I asked the chick sitting near me "Where are we?". "You're at Glen Iris, hun"...

Shit shit shit shit shit. My 1 second head lulling was actually a 20 minute sleep. Jumped off at the next stop, crossed over and caught a cab back home. It cost more to get a cab from there than it would have if I had just got the damn cab from the city in the first place. Dick head.

Friday morning... oooooooooooh.....
Certainly not the best condition to herald in the most religiously significant date on my calendar, Cyndi's Birthday. The veritably ageless goddess of music turned 54.



Caught up with my mate Johnny who was down from Sydney for the weekend. Always nice to see him - one of only a few people that I have seen from Sydney since my move... Monday was brunch at Palate on Greville St with Johnny and a couple of his friends. Good company and conversation, great wine, a terribly long wait for our food, which wasn't that great when it did finally arrive (after I shoveled to the side of my plate the masses of shaved parmesan, there was very little actual pasta on the plate) - which is a shame, cos Palate has always been a great place, one of my favourites, which was why I took them there. If I stop going to every place that disappoints me, I would end up having no where to go... :o(

Brrrr......

Click your heels...

Do you ever hear people talking... can't quite hear or work out what they are saying, but think that maybe they might be talking about you?

What if you wish they were talking about you...

Finally...

I finally joined a gym. After weeks of putting it off, I walked into Genesis on Chapel Street and joined. No more stuffing around. I am determined to get back that bod I was so happy with last year...

Trash no more...

Friday night, I had a catch up with Jane (You might remember her from previous catch ups including "the skinny dipping / wrestling episode with her hot straight guy friend" and others...)

Anyway, it turned out terribly trashy, for which I have decided to take heed and avoid this one going forward...

Met up at my place, so she could check out my shit-hot pad - for which she was in total awe, but not really surprising since for a 20-something working girl she still lives like a uni student.... You know how that goes... milk crate furniture and crap lying around EVERYWHERE... Anyway, so after loving the new queer quarters, we headed out to Candy Bar on Greville Street (still my favourite street in Melbourne) for a bottle of nasty $8 red - at bar prices, made it a princely $36. Kinda looked like it had changed owners, cos the only people in there apart from us were new staff, and people that knew them... So left there and decided next stop was Dan Murphy's for a couple of bottles to enjoy in the warmth and comfort of home.

Liquourland had a special on $17 Jamiesons Run wines - 2 for $20! Woah! So grabbed 6 bottles before they realised that should have been 2 for 30, took off home feeling very good about my bargain basement booze.

Sat around listening to music, quaffing our cut price tipple... 1am, Jane decides to invite a friend around to join us... lovely. He arrives - no money. I had to go down stairs to pay for the cab. A further 30 minutes of chatting, and by 2am, we were sufficiently spastic to disturb the neighbours with our babble and so relocated to my bedroom which is blessed with shared walls.

Big mistake.

Within seconds, Jane flings her glass across the room, across my brand new white doona cover and pillows, across the silver grey carpet, and (which I discovered with total horror the next day) across 3 of my hot AG shirts...

The terror must have been too much for me. I then passed out.

Saturday morning, I cleaned up, threw out the trash, then disposed of the empty bottles etc... Never again. No class, no room... mean, ruthless, but definitely necessary.

I had just 2 hours to clean myself up, as I was heading to my FIRST live footy game! Sydney Swans against Hawthorn Hawkes. It seemed fitting that my first live game be not only my home team, but against my mothers team... needless to say, Swans kicked the Hawkes collective butts.

I have never seen my mother in the way I saw her that day. I saw sheer unadulterated hatred in her eyes. Her pure abhorrence terrified me. I could see that woman was capable of ripping a chair out of its concrete foundations... such was her passion for the 'almighty hawkes'... Personally, it made no sense... her passion didn't help them. Losers... :o)

Roses (not) Only...

So much happened yesterday, that this is gonna seem like a roller coaster ride...

So hang on, hold tight...

Early morning, I get this call from the concierge in the lobby of my work. "Sir, we have a parcel down here for you." I was expecting some software from JD, so thinking that's what it was, I went down to collect it. Nope, no software... it was a bloody big box from Roses Only.

So I take it back upstairs to my desk, with my whole department watching... "Ooh! Aah! Ooh!" "I never get roses!" "What did you do to deserve these? Put out?" Jealous bitches. So opened it up...

A dozen huge long stemmed red roses, a teddy bear, chocolates... and a card - not signed.

I knew who it was from, but I alluded to a secret admirer, just to keep everyone excited...

Roses, teddy bear, chocolates (which I can't eat!). JD is making it harder and harder to keep saying no.

I haven't talked about JD before - but I will leave it for another time.

So flowers aside, the rest of Wednesday was one of the most emotionally traumatic work days you could possibly ever have. Only one work day more traumatic, and that's getting fired...

It was training day. And not just any old training - that's generally not very traumatic - that's right folks, I am talking about... Role Play.

It was the second session of 4 hours of "how to be a better relationship manager" training... our hosts, Darren & Bruce. Bruce you might remember as the tall dark haired cop from Home & Away a few years ago... well, he now works for a company which provides "behavioural change programs empowering individuals, teams and organisations to achieve their full potential..."

Yeah... and you know what? You're right... We all thought the same thing...

So anyway, 4 hours of role play. Standing up in front of people, and improvising as only a true actor can... but we, as non actor folk, had to also do. We had to learn about how to communicate effectively, and stop using barrier words, and how to get results from open questions as opposed to closed questions.

Ultimately it was all about stepping outside your comfort zone... well, I didn't step out of it... I was thrown head first.

In my last role play episode, or should I say fuck-up, I just couldn't do it anymore. I was nervous, I was sweating, I thought I was going to throw up. So I am called up for my turn and the thing is I am generally a fairly quiet speaking person (unless I am drunk...) and knowing I am quiet, Bruce uses that as an opportunity to discuss how we should change our tone and volume to ALIGN ourselves with the person to whom we are speaking. And he chooses to do it in a soft, almost feminine voice... Like he was talking to a scared little 5 year old child. So I snapped at him... "I can see how changing your voice to suit could work, but to me I am finding you just a little condescending".... mhmm...

So moving on, I was so fucked up they basically had to coax me through the whole thing... and when I had finished, they applauded and congratulated me for "stepping totally out of my zone"... Yeah... what I wanted to do right then was step totally on his zone... the one surrounding his head.

I was an absolute mess. I sat down and all I could do was watch the clock.
Tick...
Tick...
Tick...
5pm came and I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

I swear if NCS sends me to another one of those sessions I will sue for mental anguish...

So being the fragile petal that I can sometimes be, I go back to work, bitch for 30 minutes with everyone else who had been dragged through the process earlier, picked up my gorgeous big box of roses, and headed home. Via Dan Murphy's. Me, my roses, some yummy soy cheese and crackers, and Cyn. Perfect way to wind down after a very emotional day.

Well, it got me thinking. It's been almost a year since I left Mark. And 6 months since Dean.

What was I so afraid of? I have spent 6 months saying NO. My determination to have a year without the stresses and dramas of a boyfriend? To what end? What really was the purpose. And it dawned on me... I'm scared. I'm scared of fucking things up again. I'm scared of getting it all wrong and hurting someone else. I have been making a point of not getting attached to anyone.

I have also spent the past 12 months regretting and hating what I did, and I needed some closure. I needed to be told that it was OK. We all make mistakes. I wanted to be told by one person in particular. And I wanted him to tell me that he is happy now. Most of all I needed to tell him how sorry I was. So I called Mark. He told me that it was OK, that yes people do make mistakes, and we learn from them. And most importantly, he told me that he was happy.

So where does that leave me? I feel relieved. I feel like I have been forgiven. I think I don't need to spend a year building this shield around me. And I don't need to keep pushing people away.

Maybe not quite time to let someone in, but we'll see what happens.

As if I never left....

So was thinking, since I have done bugger all blogging for the past month... it would be too hard to go back through and fill in the missing weeks... so I am going to pretend that I never stopped! :o) But first let me just recap...

Moved to Prahran. Love it here. Apartment is hot. Settled finally. Love it, love it, love it. :o)

Ok, so...

Good sleep again. Unusual considering we ate dinner at 8.30... Our first proper dinner we cooked since we moved in... And it being my favourite dinner, makes it doubly special :o)

A night of firsts actually. Finally getting the wall units finished, first cooked meal at home, and first unexpected phone call...

Sounds weird huh, but actually the whole time we have been there we have only had like 5 phone calls... and they were all us just messing with the new phones :o) not that we have no friends... just that we hadn't yet given out the number to anyone.. just parents...
So it was so funny, we were eating dinner, watching TV, and the phone rang, and we both thought it was on the TV, then we looked at each other like "what’s that noise?" and realised it was the phone... so funny...

Excited about the wall unit... I put together the final parts myself cos Dom was in the bedroom with his friend Mark working on his new wardrobe and drawers... it looks so cool. We decided what was going in it and everything. One part of it is perfectly laid out to use as a bar, complete with space for a 20 bottle wine rack and everything :o) so we are pretty pleased with the way it turned out.

Work sucked today.

In a team of 10, 4 were away. and the work I was looking after was really complicated, and I think the person whose work it was had 'planned' to be sick today, cos most of what I did came in on Friday and he had sent stupid questions back to the clients in an effort to delay response... cos he knew someone else would look at it for him on Monday... grrrr so anyway, I ended up walking out with the shits at 6.

My friend Darien came over for dinner and drinks on Saturday night. Sweet guy... when you get to know him... When he arrived, we wandered down to Dan Murphy's to grab a few bottles of wine, then stopped at a Nepalese restaurant to grab some food... at home, ate, drank, drank, drank, talked, listened to Cyndi (a fellow cyn-ophile! yay!) argued about what constitutes being a racist... the boy has serious issues I think... his whole opinion was weird, so weird that I really can’t explain it... so will leave it there... :o)

Anyway, Dom couldn't cope with the in your face discussion style and went to his room... After a while when Darien and I had finished off the bottles of wine, we shared a little choof. Oh - I have discovered that’s what they call it down here... well, at least the people who have heard me say "gonna choof now, see ya later!" in other words "head off / go / leave"... but after a few giggles, I now know what it means here...

Anyway, so after that, ridiculously smashed (doesn't take much for me anymore!), opened a bottle of sparkling, half a glass, bed, dead.

Definitely have to hang out more often - he's a lot of fun... once you get used to his humour, and his attitude... ha ha ha :o)

Good times...

Oh, one last thing... Andy, Craig, Baz, Pauly, Dove, Dionne, Hamish, Drew, Penny, Shane, Johnny, Mikey, Gav, Lu, Rob, Ken, Mario, Matt, Mark... and the rest :o)... Miss you... Talk to me soon!