WWII

Day 9394

I've been poisoned. I'm unsure if it's the cockroaches, mosquitoes, bed bugs or maggots but either way they found a way to hit me where it hurts; my body. I got food poisoning last Wednesday from a restaurant in the city. Whatever I ate took 4 hours to settle in my stomach before it evolved into the gut punching ninja it is now. There's been an eerie silence on the Western front for weeks and I know now that it's because the insects have been communicating with international forces. It won't be long until the house is infested with insects. May God have mercy on us all.

Seriously though, I did actually get food poisoning. It wasn't cool. Imagine pinching your ear lobe as hard as you can, that's what it felt like - except replace the ear with your stomach and replace the pinching with searing pain!

In other news I managed to find two people to move into Jasper and lachies room. One of them is an Italian named Alberto and the other is a German called Jonas. I guess now our house has become symbolic of WW2 because Hibbert is English, Susan is American, Tom is Austrlian, and I'm 1/3 French, 1/3 Polish and 1/3 Russian.

I'm really disappointed that my Italian roommate doesn't know how to cook. I asked him to teach me to make a special type of pasta, but he said he didn't know and recommended I just look online :(. On the upside, the Nazi German taught me to make Pork Schnitzle and Spaetzle with a white wine sauce. It was amazing! It was like having 20 boxes of cereal in one bowl. I managed to teach him a few Australian meals in return - Vegemite on toast, Domino's Pizza, Chicken Schnitzel and Sushi.

Still in Australia :D

I recently faced the hard cold fact that my blog isn’t really about expressing myself, entertaining others, or exaggerating my drinking tolerance. The main reason I write here is so that future matt can relive young Matt’s experiences. It’s because of this that I’ve decide to dedicate this post to communicate where I am in my life, where I think I’m going, and what I think is influencing me. Now I know you must be thinking “Gee, Matt. If you really care about future Matt that much, why don’t you contribute more to your superannuation, or take out a loan and by property, or just eat at least one healthy meal a week”? And to that I say; “umm, uhh… maybe next week?”

Let’s start with some context.

1)      Russia has found Stalin’s Dairy and mindlessly obeyed a direct order to invade part of Ukraine. The take-over was non-violent and completely successful (note, this is all I know after seeing simplified cartoons of this situation on the internet). I’m not really concerned though because my childhood experiences of playing ‘Risk’ has convinced me that no one can hold Ukraine – there’s just too many entrance points from Asia and Europe!

2)      The world cup is being played in Brazil and my roommates are currently watching most games live. Even though they were passionately optimistic of Australia’s chances, I knew there was a 99 out of 99 chance they’d lose.

3)      I’m currently lying on Coogee Beach (which is mostly deserted because it’s winter) watching the waves gently roll up to my fingertips and then disappear into the sand below as I write this blog on a notepad. I guess if you randomly find 3 sentences missing or crudely written, then that’s because I got water on that section of the paper.

And now a little bit about me currently

1)      I’ve found YouTube videos consume 90% of my time. And because I know I’ll never be able to stop the addiction I’ve decided to make the most of the situation by changing the types of YouTube videos I watch. Recently I’ve been watching inspiring clips which are from successful people/ movies giving advice. One of them said “The sum of all your previous experiences, all your conscious choices and all your efforts combine to make you the person you are today and have put you in the place you are right now”. Whilst I could tell that this was meant to be an inspiring statement, I couldn’t help but feel demotivated listening to it from my phone in my right hand while searching unsuccessfully for a full roll of toilet paper in the public bathroom with my left hand.

2)      The other 10% of my time is spent working, chilling with my roommates or playing computer games locked up in my room. The work I do at the moment is quite uninspiring and the house has become very quiet since Jasper and Lachie have left. Overall I feel like I’m in a very stagnate period of my life – I’m not challenging myself academically, not meeting different people, not involving myself in sport, nothing. My parents don’t understand why I don’t just get more involved in the community and I don’t understand either – my best guess is a mix of 2 things: a massive change in culture bought upon by the internet and also crippling laziness. That being said, I have been working on my own company recently. I’ve been making content (albeit slowly) which I plan to upload to my site. I’m paying a computer scientist $450 to make the site. Hopefully this will give me the challenge I need to pull myself out of this slump.

3)      I met a woman the other day who said she liked Shakespeare because of how he communicates human emotion so beautifully. She went on to say that HSC English prepared her with useful skills which she will continue to use in the future. This really made me reflect on how my high school English classes had left me completely unprepared all the English literary technique analysis that I come across in my daily life. Pfffttt, no! Please! I think Shakespeare is an overanalysed con artist who made up a few words and got way to much credit for it.
Consider this sentence:

“I woke up at 9:00 and took the biggest dump ever! About 40 minutes later I started drinking with my friend Timmy. We made a few fart jokes that were super clever”

This is how a mathematician would read that passage:
9:00 he took a poo
9:40 he started drinking with Timmy

This is how an English teacher would read that passage:
The passage is a metaphor for the eternal human struggle. The story of Christianity is told through the use of powerful symbolism. 9:00 denotes genesis where Adam commits the original sin. Once leaving the house (symbolic for heaven), he meets Timmy who consoles him about his mortal suffering. Clearly Timmy is a metaphor for Jesus. The final rhyme between the words “ever” and “clever” binds the story together and reinforces the idea that humanity can find eternal wisdom through the use of Jesus Christ.

4)      Anywho, I’m pretty tired now so I’m going to end this blog early and just mention that Google Glass looks really cool! Even though I’d never find any real practical benefit of using them, I want them anyway. I can’t wait till Apple comes up with their own knockoff idea – the iEye (or I’mshit) 

Graduation

I have my graduation ceremony on the 12th. After 5 long years of study I’ve accumulated all the skills I need to get a job in an Engineering company. I can use these skills to meet interesting people, go interesting places, and slowly begin my ascent up the corporate mountain. Along my journey I’ll get married, start a family and get a dog named ‘Sniffles’. Once my bank account is inflated enough to comfortably support myself and my family I’ll invest more of my time playing golf, drinking fine wine and making small of the cuff remarks to colleagues about the intellectual inefficiencies of the lower class. By the time I’ve reached retirement, technology would have reached such a level that my brain can be preserved in a vat of green bubbling liquid while my body lives on through the mechanical movements of a gold plated robot.

I can go on, but I think the sarcasm is transparent enough. Whoever ends up reading this crappy blog must really have a lot of patience with me. I mean, I hardly say anything worth any value. Let me test that patience with this post. Watch this YouTube video all the way through:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk

Did you watch it? I know you didn't… here let me write it again. Watch it this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk

That's better. Now write an essay about how the swimming pool in the background is a metaphor for the destructive effects of capitalism. Did you do it? No? That’s OK. I wasn’t going to read it anyway. I hate essays.

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Oh here we go again. Matt’s going to rage against the machine and be all pessimistic and shit.” Yeah, Ok, I am going to do that. But I’ll do that towards the end. That way I’ll give you guys a bit of a break.

Ok ok ok ok. I need to think of something non related to my future. Something non… related… to… my… GOT IT! OK OK! So Africa and Pablo (two Spanish peeps that studied in Australia a while back) invited me to go to London in 3 weeks. How awesome would that be! I would really love to go! I feel like a kid again asking my mum if I can play xbox with my neighbours. Except, you know, in this case my neighbours live like 17 million meters away. It would be so awesome to just throw my desk papers up in the air on a Monday morning and shout out “fuck it, I’m going to England!” But sadly reality is a harsh mistress. I’ll have to inform Pablo and Africa about my new found sanity and let them know I won’t make it. Besides, the next place I want to travel to is not England, it’s Kentucky. I simply have to know what they call “KFC” over there. Do they just call it “FC”? And how do they pronounce it? It seems a little inappropriate to me.

In other news I’m contemplating moving out a whole lot more. A pretty strange thing to do considering I just signed a year lease about a week ago. Jasper and Lachie are behaving themselves a lot more, but I still feel quite disconnected from the rest of the house and I guess I just want an abrupt change. I’m honestly entertaining the idea even though the distance I’d have to travel to work would be significantly more. I can imagine myself stepping outside of the house; encumbered by carrying all my clothes under my arms. The weight of the baggage and our beer bottle polluted front yard would make me look like an astronaut taking his first steps on the surface of the moon. “One Small step for Matt. Three thousand steps for Matt to walk to work”. I don’t know, maybe this is just a phase I’m going through. Who am I kidding, I’ve get a priceless Pac-man bottle cap artwork in my room which I can’t abandon.

I worked till 9:00pm last night trying to fix up a particular bug in my coding. I couldn't find out what the problem was so I just gave up and trotted home. In cases like that it’s nice to have a house so close. To my surprise work is actually getting much easier. I'm finding that time kinda balloons itself into one giant bubble and then bursts by the time 5:00pm pops up on the bottom right of my computer monitor. I'm unsure if I'm gaining productivity this way or losing the sporadic bursts of inspiration that I used to get. Either way, I can't help but be reminded of this scene from the music video 'Do the evolution' by Pearl Jam.

Ok so I've absent mindedly gone back to pessimistic Matt. I guess it was inevitable. Time to rage.

I guess the first thing I want to confess is that the holy book I've been reading ever since early high school has shown me the way to truth. I'm talking ofcourse about the Dilbert Comics. The great book of Dilbert was right. The prophesy has come true! Working in an office in a square cubical is dehumanizing and boring. Superiors aren't always capable of making good decisions. And most importantly, Engineers are furious at the vacuous crap that oozes out of the mouths of art students.

I'm also hating Facebook more and more too. Don't worry I'm not hopping on the bandwagon here (I'm still a hipster, guys). I don't hate Facebook because of it's surveillance on the public - I actually support that - I hate Facebook because of how everyone is turning their wall into a plaque filled with awards. That's for Linked-In guys! Not for Facebook.

Also, I'm genuinely frustrated at how society has a tendency to group people by age bracket like sheep and assort them into different pens. It seems like if your under 20 you must get a good grade in high school and either learn a skill or go to Uni. If you're between 25 and 30 you must have started on a career and be looking upward. But if you're 30 or higher you need to have a family or be working on one. I kinda wish people learned for the sake of learning. There's so much delicious information out there and it's belittled by simply learning it for the sake of practical application.

Lastly, I found out recently that a French exchange student reads every one of my blogs. I'm impressed you can put yourself through this much torture just to see whats going on in my life. I feel like I need to reward you somehow with some advice. Ok, how about this? Go to the nearest French Google office and tell them that they should start spelling 'Google' as 'Googel'. It'll sound extra French and the rest of the world will love you for it. You're welcome :)

Bieber

The last few weeks have been a bizarre mesh of events for me. I have to deal with mind numbing boredom for the most part of my day while simultaneously having quick and rapid bursts of creative thought. Almost every day after work I find myself scribbling away in a corner of my room hatching a new idea that could be part of a company I hope to create in the future. I guess the proper term to diagnose me would be 'business bi polar'.

During my lunch break I met up with Ed (a brother of a friend of mine from way back). I heard he did graphic design and had some website creation skills. The meet up was short and sweet - he told me what he could do, what he couldn't and what pay he would like. Something non related to business stuck with me after we had split ways though. He mentioned casually that I looked "weathered". I'd usually shrug something like that off without a second thought and put it down to having one too few cappuccinos in the morning. But strangely I've been having a lot of people tell me that recently. It's also strange how everyone manages to find a new synonym to keep me on my toes. I guess eventually they'll run out of words and the problem will solve itself.

I wonder if it's a result of my new haircut. I've decided not to cut my hair as of February for a few reasons. 1) To save money in preparation for Tony Abbott’s budget cuts and 2) To try something new - I figure this will be the only time in my life where I can get away with long filthy hair. The only downside is, I've gone through the itchy faze, the greasy faze and the semi mullet faze, but now I'm going through the awkward moment where my hair is long enough to just wrap around and scratch my eyes faze. I feel like a teenage pop star due to the amount of times I have to swipe my hair left or right.

Birthday blues

It was my birthday a few weeks back. I'm now 24. I didn't have a party and instead had a nice dinner with my parents, my brother and 2 friends from up North. It was nice, but I was kinda hoping for a party to compliment it. In early March I made a Facebook event for a party which would be held on a Saturday sometime in April. Sadly however, the invites never got sent out to anyone since apparently April was a too demanding month for my roomies...

The big two four isn't concerning me as much as I thought it would. Maybe it's because I know for a fact that Tom feels insecure about his age - he's 27 and hence the oldest in the house. I managed to settle his fears earlier today by claiming Andy (the couch bum aged 31) is officially the oldest resident in the house.

I vaguely remember getting drunk with Hibbert and Susan a few days ago and telling them that 'I wanted to get punched in the face'. At the time, I was trying to communicate that I wanted to feel some youthful exuberance before I got older. But for all the right reasons, they thought I was seeking some masochistic pleasure. After a painful 20 minutes of discussion I finally managed to get them see what I meant. For the record, I don't actually want to be punched in the face, I just want to ward off the seductive call of the corporate world for as long as I can.

My anxiety about getting older isn't what has been worrying me too much as of late. What's been occupying my mind most of all is this feeling of inadequacy which I can't seem to shake. Apparently I've been carrying my insecurities about my intelligence for at least the last 17 years. I've been reading 3 independent psychological reviews that were conducted on me at varying ages in my past. The common trends in all of them are: 1) Poor comprehension 2) Poor memory 3) Poor concentration and 4) A low self esteem. I can only wonder how being put well outside the glamorous Da Vinci program in English and many other subjects affected these 4 things. On the bright side though, I managed to tell the psychologist "I bet you compliment everyone's drawings, not just mine" right after he complimented my drawing of a stick figure. Pretty badass for a 7 year old, right?

I suspect this anxiety has made me quite hypersensitive towards my roommates. Jasper and Lachie are both kind and interesting people when talking to me individually. However, they mutate into very different people when around other company. In a group of people Lachie will tend to take advantage of my passive behavior and be more sarcastic and rude towards me. It's nothing too cruel - after all, most of his calls are memorized one liners my brother gave to him when he was living here. Japser, however, talks about me behind my back and will typically resort to more physical forms of embarrassment. He mocks my clumsy and aloof nature with his village friends and sometimes pinches me discreetly as I walk past him because he knows I won't make a scene in front of other people. At first I dismissed this as simple immaturity and attention seeking, but as of a month ago, I started cracking the whip. Well, I guess it would be more of an elastic band than a whip. I've spoken to Lachie and Jasper both individually and together about this in the hope that they would be more rational than irrational. I was wrong. Although I've convinced Jasper to stop physically hurting me, they're persistent that I'm overacting and that it's all in good fun. They keep telling me that I should 'fight back'. Even if I did want to fight fire with fire, I don't have the wit, social skills or communication skills to do so. More over, I really don't want to! I shouldn't have to be an asshole to stop being treated like an asshole. Even if it is in good fun, they should respect a roommates desire not to get mocked. Right? My patience is running thin, and off the cuff jokes about my intelligence is starting to make my blood boil. I'm afraid that if I can't convince these two to stop treating me this way, I might explode in rage at a seemingly innocent joke about my intelligence.

In other news, Jasper was surprisingly well behaved when we went down to Jervis Bay to go camping with one other guy. It was a bit of a sausage fest (both literally and metaphorically - we had sausages every meal), but it was still really great to spend close to 8 hours a day on a beach soaking up the sun. I found the sound of waves crashing on the sand a relaxing break from the high frequency hum of the air conditioner in my office.

Where was I? Oh that's right, I was having a massive winge. Sorry, I'll talk about more interesting stuff like places I've been and different alcohols I've drunk in a later blog. For now, it's all about feelings n' shit.

These latest events have really made me seriously consider moving out. A few things are chaining me back to the Animal House though.
1) If I move out and move in with people with real ambition, then I can say goodbye to Uni parties forever.
2) I have pretty much no other 'friends'
3) I'll be one step closer to walking into the jaws of 'The Machine'. (Obviously 'The Machine' is run by 'The Man').
4) My dad thinks I should move out

Either way a short term solution is needed. I need a good middle ground between my socially stunted Engineering PhD colleagues and my roommates. I need to get more involved with the community. I'll also try and dig up some embarrassing stories about Jasper and Lachie. Because this time, it's personal.

Pizza! (I know that doesn't really describe this post very well, but I figured it's attention grabbing and it sounds nice)

I went to the beach a week ago. It was a bright Saturday morning. The sunlight was so bright that if you listened carefully you could hear the flies and small bugs sizzling in the distance. I'm perfectly aware of how white I am, so I decided to pack a bucket of sunscreen with me. Wait wait wait, there's a joke here somewhere - ok ok, I'm so white that the sunscreen I put on was a darker shade than my skin! Ok, shut up at least I'm trying some impromptu comedy. I'm sorry if I don't spend every waking hour thinking of ways to be funny on my blog. Where was I? Oh yeah, I was being barbecued on the sand. When I went to work the following Monday, one of my work colleagues had the observation skills to not just notice that I was wearing sunglasses while I got sunburned, but also realize the exact type of brand of sunglasses I was wearing too! The aviator signature had burned a small tattoo into my face.

Umm what else? Oh yeah! I'm expanding my horizons and improving n' shit. I've decided that I'm going to learn how to cook a few different foods. I made homemade pizza the other day (with a pre made base of course). I added sooooo many ingredients and it actually turned out really well! Olives, eggplant, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, cheese, prawns, mushrooms, tomato paste, and fetta cheese sprinkled on top - it had it all! My parallel universe slob clone would be proud and my parallel universe high achiever clone would be reluctantly sympathetic.

Speaking of improving n' shit, I've been growing my hair out for ages now. At least 6 weeks I think. I want to claim that it's a post modern fashion statement, but secretly I just like the idea of achieving really long hair. I guess it'll be good to look back in a couple of years and be able to physically identify my lowest point in my life.

Andy is back too! He was on our couch for about a month not paying rent then traveled to Melbourne in search for a job. I guess it didn't go so well because he's back in Sydney and has already started moving the food from some of the shelves to make room for his clothes and tooth brush. I personally like the guy a lot even though my roommates are losing patience. I know he's probably just being nice to me so he can feel more welcome in our house, but it's still nice to have someone to chat with during and after work.

Oh yeah! Most importantly I've got a job with SpoonFeedMe! It's not a full time job, I just work 5 hours/ week on top of my current job. I'm happy with the arrangement because it'll be a good way to test out the company. My first task has been to investigate equipment to buy for the company to make good quality videos. I definitely invested a few more than 5 hours of my time into this, but I don't really mind since I'm being payed $30/hour. Plus I really want to do a good job because it's a $7000 decision! Dan is a very organized and intelligent bloke - he's pretty much a Jewish version of Josh Kelson.

Speaking of Josh, I still haven't met up with him since he moved about 15 minutes drive away. It's a shame because I really liked the idea of working with him on weekends to build his website.

The NSA will never get me!

An interesting controversial subject that has grabbed my attention recently is internet privacy. I usually pride myself on being indifferent about such matters until I know enough information, but now I feel I know enough to warrant an opinion. I definitely don't align myself with the radical views of Julian Assange, but I do have a few views in common. In particular, I'm scared that the legal punishment for committing misdemeanors will remain fixed despite a growing transparency in private lives. Let me explain. Laws should ideally be made to prevent immoral activities. So consider, for example, hopping on a bus without a ticket and getting caught by the cops. A fine of $150 seems reasonable (from the states point of view) since it will do very well at preventing you (and others) from hopping on buses without a ticket. However, the number 150 is actually pretty arbitrary and i'd suspect a likely overestimate trying to compensate for all the times you've probably ridden the bus without a ticket but haven't been caught. This is a necessary thing to do since Sydney Transport doesn't have eyes all over the place which can tell them when people are abusing their system.

However, lets say that a sudden recent development in technology allows Sydney Transport to observe every passenger and instantly fine them for not having a ticket. What would this mean? Well, I'd suspect you'd get a lot of fines and a lot fewer people riding without tickets! All good right? NO! This is where the arbitrary origin of the $150 fine really comes into play. Imagine the subset of passengers that forgot to buy a ticket or had no money to pay for a ticket - these people are still victims of the unalterable $150 fine. I'm not trying to say that these people shouldn't be fined at all, I'm trying to say that the law needs to consider what fee is necessary to prevent illegal activity in different situations. Clearly the $150 fine isn't applicable in this hypothetical since a fine just a little bit higher than the price of the ticket itself would be enough of a deterrent. Basically, laws need to evolve with evolving technology.

Don't worry, this isn't a complete side track, this is actually all related to internet freedoms. In fact, I think this analogy is actually pretty accurate at representing the issues with the internet. Except, in this case, the bus fine is $2000 dollars and the cops can choose whether to target your or not.

My life is entirely transparent to anyone who has an internet connection. I check Facebook regularly, the videos I like on YouTube are put on display on my Google+ account, I write a blog, and I don't even delete my browser history. If the Australian government wanted to, they could sift through all the crap I've done and pick me up on a few misdemeanors - like downloading mp3 files off YouTube. Radicals like Julian Assange promote Government openness and individual privacy as a solution to this problem. I don't think we need to have complete anonymity, I think we need legal tolerance. Oh by the way, this doesn't just apply to just downloading movies and textbooks, this extends into all areas of online private life. I've been warned by countless members of my family not to mention any negative experiences about my work on my blog because it would make me look unattractive to other potential employers. In their eyes they see it as so little gain for so much potential loss. I kinda get that, but it's the principal that annoys me. A potential employer shouldn't resort to a highly exaggerated and (lets face it) somewhat fictional blog to find out the work ethic of an applicant. And more importantly, even if my blog was the source of relevant information about my work ethic, it really wouldn't give the employer the information necessary to compare me to other applicants since the other applicants could have cherry picked their online history and built a completely fake version of themselves.

Overall, it annoys me that a growing number of my friends are informing me that they find themselves culling pictures of themselves on Facebook to appear more attractive to a potential employer. Ultimately it probably doesn't bother them too much, but what they're doing is fueling an illogical thought process that's running rampant throughout society. Stahp it!

In other news, I didn't get drunk on Sunday! I know, i know! I got soooooooooo sober! A bloke called Andy who has been crashing on our couch for the last 2 weeks recently won $200 from a sporting bet and spent half of it on booze for the whole house on Saturday. It was fun. I passed out in a bathtub.