Well, another of my job applications was rejected today. I try and I try and no-one will reciprocate in the slightest. I can't earn money, I can't meet anyone, I can't change anything.

In a lot of respects, I am lucky. I wasn't battered or molested as a child. My arms and legs work. I have all my own teeth and eyes. I was born white and middle class in a first-world country in the late twentieth century, which is practically the definition of dumb luck. It is important to bear this in mind.

I still don't feel very gruntled. I am going through another of my depressions, this time pretty determined not to go back on antidepressants, since they made me vague and created an unpleasant physical dependency. The thing with this bout is, I'm feeling dumb. I have less imagination and less feeling of inspiration than I can remember for years. So having all this downtime in which I could be doing creative stuff and webwork is proving rather frustrating. Anything I try to set down promptly goes 'small and boring,' as Quentin movingly says of his own experience of writer's block in Archer's Goon. I certainly can't believe anyone else would want to see it when I find it so dull and unappealing.

I have no idea how to make anything better. There are such narrow limits on what I can do, and I meet with such indifference from the outside world.

So I'm seeing two major trends here: pity of self, and resentment of everyone else. Not liking anyone very much here. As in so much of life, I have the perpetual nagging sense that there is something I'm supposed to do to make things right, but I don't know what it is. It is just not in my vocabulary. Or my ken, if you wish. One only ever finds out what this thing was supposed to be when it turns up in a list of prerequisites you haven't fulfilled and can't go back for now, time's up. There is a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin attempts paddleball, gets into a hideous tangle and says ruefully/bitterly, 'I can't help feeling I would have performed better if I'd known what was expected of me.' I feel very like Calvin there.

Well, you know how it is when you really need a candy bar.

Chivalry is NOT dead where you're concerned.
You're from the Medieval Tribe--good at
swordplay, horseback riding, archery, playing
the harp, and weaving. You're always ready to
slay whatever needs slaying or rescue whoever
needs rescuing. Just don't let anybody tell
you that thou talketh strangely.

Which Lemmings Tribe Do You Belong To?
brought to you by Quizilla

I am a mediaeval lemming. I'm as puzzled as you are. Another quiz by the person responsible for the Dungeons and Dragons thing below. The style in which the lemming quiz questions are written betrays that whoever Betelgeuse is, he or she is fond of the Discworld books. Isn't it odd to get just a whiff of a person like that, but still know nearly nothing about them.

You are Sheila, the Thief. You are always willing
to lend a hand and you have a really cool Cloak
of Invisibility.

Which Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

So now you know. I'll admit that, as a very small kid watching Dungeons & Dragons, Sheila was my favourite because she had red hair and wore purple. I seem to always think people with red hair wearing purple are pretty cool. (And I already thought Uni was stupid and unnecessary.) To be honest, I think I'd also have a fair bit in common with Eric, at least as far as making sarcastic comments about everything seen, heard or encountered goes. But every small party of adventurers thrown into a fantasy otherworld needs someone who's got an Attitude about the whole thing; if it's not Eustace Clarence Scrubb, it'll be Ryuuzaki Umi. 'Narnian efficiency again.'

I was interested to find an article online by the guy who worked as 'developer' on the animated series, in which he initially appears to be kind of harsh on ol' Eric.

"The kids were all heroic -- all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric.  Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn't like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do.  Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in.  He was the one thing I really didn't like about the show."

But it turns out as you read on that what he objected to was not the presence of a character who wouldn't stop bitching, but the fact that the writers were restricted to adhere to a 'pro-social' message which meant they could never have Eric's misgivings or objections turn out to be justified. Dissent or difference of opinion could not be shown as valid. Never was Hank, the burly blond quarterbackish Ranger and leader, to turn to slight, dark, peevish Eric and say 'Wow, I'm glad you called me on that. I was about to get us into a lot of trouble.' If you don't want the same thing everyone else wants, there must be something wrong with you - or of course, you really want the same thing and are just kidding yourself you don't out of contrariness.

Whew. Weird. Well, it was 1983.

Feeling much better today, thank you! Self-medicated with the Beatles and Bad Girls.

On which note: sweet merciful crap, Fenner and Di? Isn't that somewhere in the Book of Revelations as a sign of impending apocalypse? On the bright side, perhaps she will finally be the one to kill him. Jim Fenner really needs killing.

Making a very basic dinner tonight, chicken nibbles and potato wedges. Gosh darn it, I can't be a wonderful, imaginative cook all the time.

I realise that a lot of the more angst-ridden stuff I've written here lately is cryptic and roman à cleffy. But it's not something I feel like going back through in order to explain it. This would rake up feelings that I am determined to get over and leave behind. Don't worry, it's just delayed-onset teenage angst, nothing to be taken too seriously.

From John Birmingham's The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco:
You have to understand. I did not think of Stacey and myself as having this tortured, unrequited will-they-won't-they thing going. Not in any reciprocal sense. I know by now you probably think I had it real bad for her. Well pat yourself on the back Professor, but unfortunately last I heart, they don't hand out Nobel prizes for the tragically fucking obvious. It didn't matter for shit anyway. You see, if you pressed in on her, Stacey could be just like Juliana Hatfield's sister; she had a wall around her nobody could climb. Sometimes, like the night before at Jordan's flat, that distance she kept between her soul and the world might collapse down to three microns of warm space, but the gap was still there and even her best friend wouldn't be game to reach across it.

Stace was aware of it too. She'd use it against you if you crossed her or anyone she cared about. I'm sure if those vengeance dykes had actually raised a finger against the Decoy she'd have been all over them like a cheap suit with her fucking jujitsu and secret ninja stuff. Wouldn't have held back at all. That distance, that basic lack of a connection would have led her to do it. I don't know why she was that way, whether it was something in her history, her family perhaps. I knew she had a fairly disastrous relationship record, as bad as any of us, even Missy. But whether that was a cause or a symptom of this deep emotional autonomy I don't know.

Sarah again now, not JB. The consolation of literature, in classical terms, is the fact that no matter how you feel, someone has felt that way too and written about it. There has been someone in the universe who would understand. They can't be here for you right now; they live somewhere else or they're very, very dead, but they left this book for you. You're not really alone.

It isn't a big consolation, but it's what you can get when you're in a Holden Caulfield kind of place.

I've been playing with Photoshop parodies this past week, inspired by the Photoshop War at the Bebop Board. The results are not big with the sense-making, but they're fun if, like me, you are a fan of Cowboy Bebop and a lot of 60s music. Wanna see?

Someone told Spike 'you can get anything you want.' He turned up expecting Julia on the menu...

Quitcherbitchin, I could have made it even more disturbing by changing the title to 'Alisa's Restaurant' and sticking Jet's head in there. The only reason I didn't is that it'd be too much of a pain in the ass editing his prosthetic arm onto poor little Arlo Guthrie. And then there's...
this, which owes a lot to my fondness for the Sunrise Art Works book packed full of Bebop character, prop and set design sheets.

However, the Beboard people are not keen to have another PSW right now (apparently they had a second one four months ago, although this information isn't on the PSW archive page) so I've initiated an Escaflowne one on Nekomusume.net. The quality of contributions so far is encouragingly high. The goal is not just to create something that looks visually slick (I'd be in trouble if it was) but, of course, to derive humour from the concatenation of Escaflowne and... whatever else.

Shamingly for the person who started the war, I didn't actually contribute until just this evening, when I came up with this rather forced effort. Actually, I've had that image floating loosely around in my head for a few years now. Getting a decent image file of the poster to work with from the Web proved impossible; in the end I had to scan a souvenir shopping bag in two sections and paste them together, hence the funny crinkles and light reflections and the line across the middle. So the results are not perfect, but they still make me smile.

A curious pattern frequently repeats in my life. I identify a problem. I complain about it loudly, conclude that I can't fix it and either bleat for help or give up. Within five minutes the solution will have presented itself. I can't make this happen deliberately by saying theatrically 'I give up!', sitting down and waiting. My surrender must be genuine. But right after I made the last entry here, I thought of one last place where a copy of the registration number might be preserved, and there it was, and now I can do all my work on the G4 and everything will be lovely. Won't it! *^.^*

Apart from the broken-link blitz, I want to redesign Merchant Prince because it doesn't have a comprehensive look at present and somehow the index page has gone flooey with the text-bearing table cells pushing the picture-bearing ones out of alignment. Of course, that's what everyone recommends CSS for.

Heyyo. I'm going through a period of frustration. I really want to revamp some of my sites but whenever I start to work on this I run out of steam. I'm not sure what it is. I can't get inspired to turn out graphic designs that please me. Part of the problem is that my workflow is interrupted, since my HTML editor is on the G3 and almost all my work is now on the G4. I have to switch computers and squint through the G3's muddy, half-dead monitor in order to do anything to my pages. I can't simply install the same software onto the G4 because at some stage, my father lost all the documentation that went with it and so I can't enter the registration number that would activate it. And apparently it doesn't want to run over the network between the computers either.

I suppose the real problem is that there are too many things half-done and undone, bothering me and fragmenting my attention. Most of my fanfics are still offline and it would take days and days to get them into HTML form again. They sit there glaring at me accusingly. And all the shrines need to be checked through for broken links - not within themselves but to the outside world and from one to another, since at one time they were hosted on different free space providers and today I found a link within Merchant Prince that still referred to one of those accounts. It all means going hippity hop through the computers again. My feeling of creativity and confidence is at an all-time low. I feel I ought to learn to use CSS but every time I start to read about it it bewilders me. My father is at home with a cold. I still don't have a job. (Dymocks turned me down too.) I have a feeling that once I have a job and my time to work on these projects is limited, there will be all sorts of things I get fired up to do to them. Very, very perverse but very typical of my life.

I'd better at least go and do a broken link blitz. I feel so ashamed of those little buggers. Frankly, I'm not too thrilled with any of my webwork just now.

Maybe once this stuff is settled I can finally complete the Hitomi and Millerna shrines, 'Not Without My Gymbag' and 'Impossible Princess.' Here's hoping.

I had another job interview today, at Dymocks in Newmarket. I have no idea how it went. I mean, it seemed fine to me but I am obviously no judge. Hhhhh. Don't know what to say. Might be going out with friends this Friday and Saturday. That will be a nice change.

Happy to say that my cat's tail is functional again. And the day before yesterday I had another interview, at the University Bookshop. I would rather work at Dymocks than there; Dymocks seems like a more easygoing shop and I would be being groomed to run the children's section, which is a favourite area of mine. I have still not heard from the third place I applied to, the Auckland Law Society Library, so poo to them.

I'm supposed to be making dinner tonight but have no idea what to cook. I guess I'll go and have a rummage through the deep freeze. I think we have some chops. Mmmm, chops.

Well, it is almost unbelievable, but my cat has got something wrong with her again. It is not an original ailment this time but a repeat of 2002's stumper, the Inert Tail. (See here for the turbulent truth.) Absolutely the same story. Her tail has turned to utter flop except for about two inches at the base, which still perks up at her command. She is presently able to jump (I saw her just now) but goodness knows what will be the long term effects. Veterinary investigation never solved the mystery of the original Inert Tail phenomenon so it is hard to see what we ought to do this time around, except wait for it to enigmatically get better by itself.

Today I had to go to a 'seminar' about the unemployment benefit at my nearest office of Work and Income New Zealand, a.k.a. the welfare. A cheery touch, I and my fellow ne'erdowells were instructed to attend at 8:30 am, when the glass doors were still securely locked so that we could look in at people with jobs indoors with light and heating. It was a very cold, rainy morning (I had earlier treated my mother to a rendition of the Mario Lanza un-hit 'The Nastiest Day of the Year'). We stood pitifully like damp pigeons in a loading bay for a while until they wanted to let us in. Then we went in and gave our names at a desk and were sent to sit and wait and were marked off a list by a girl with big boots and then herded in to hear a seminar from a man with no gift for public speaking and that particular Indian accent that transposes the sounds of 'v' and 'w.' I quite enjoy listening to people talk in this accent, and thinking about things like how they would sound asking at a petrol station for some Valvoline, so the excursion was not quite wasted.

The gist of the seminar, as I understood it, was that 70% of jobs are never advertised and WINZ has information about 3-5% of jobs. Hmm. They're clearly the right people to see. They also emphasised several times that the first 'suitable' job they came up with for you, you had to take, even if it was only seasonal work, even if it represented a substantial cut in pay from your previous position, even if, in fact, you knew you'd hate it and have to leave soon out of sheer oh-I-hate-this-job-so-much-I-feel-physically-sick-every-morning. (I've had that job.) Seriously, I don't think they are really set up to find 'suitable' employment for a person with a postgraduate degree who wants opportunities to use her intelligence. I have three job applications in at the moment (sent them off yesterday) and just hope to high heaven one of them comes through so I don't have to go back to that wretched place. Don't they have a crushingly ugly website? And what is that little logo figure doing, playing Glowing Rugby?

They also kept repeating the phrase 'you have to go Out There in the Job Market' as if the Job Market were a physical location (perhaps with gaily canopied stalls and kiosks) rather than a mere notion. And they said you should ask your friends and family to give you a job. Oh, for crying out loud.

Today I did my first book-crossing. I released a biography of Aleister Crowley in a ladies' toilet, next to the nappy-changing table. I'm afraid this may not have been a really kind thing to do. Some days, no matter what you try to do you are just going to do it in a way that's weird.

Signs that some people have an amazing amount of time on their hands: if you check the 'goofs' listing for Dick (see sidebar under DVD/Video) on imdb.com, you'll find damning observations on the types of machine gun carried by the Nixons' guard of honour, the model of car driven by Betsy's parents, and a bitch that Quaaludes had already been invented, so Betsy's brother couldn't have helped invent them as the closing captions claim. But, happy day, Arlene's soft contact lenses are not anachronistic because the movie is set in 1972 and they became available in 1970. Now, I liked Dick a lot (nothing is cuter than Kirsten Dunst in ponytails and on roller skates, or for that matter Kirsten Dunst shouting into a sudden silence by the Washington monument, 'You can't let D/dick run your life!') but I cannot imagine watching it with the type of person who suddenly leans forward, frowns slightly or purses his lips and says 'You know, those guys are carrying the wrong type of gun.'

I just read that back to myself and realised that, however, I do know two people who might make that observation. One of them is a U.S. Marine and the other's just kinda quirky that way. The point is probably moot because the chances of me meeting up with either for a video evening (I 'know' them in the Internet sense, which sometimes overlaps with the Biblical sense but not in this case), and then the further chances of one of the videos chosen being Dick, are preeeeeeetty slim. But there it is, it could conceivably happen - except they won't have to say it, because I, armed with the knowledge from imdb.com, will be able to say casually as the scene begins, 'You might wanna take a look at the guard of honour's totally incorrect machine guns - am I right or am I right?' Then they'll be really impressed and will let me hold the remote control and have first pick of the doughnuts.

Right?

Except that scene is pretty late in the movie, and I expect we'll have eaten most of the doughnuts by then.

My sister has a headcold, caught from the baby she nannies, and she's mad about it. Not mad at the baby, but mad at some authority that is supposed to ensure pathogenic fairness in the universe: if you do 'all the right things,' in terms of diet and exercise and vitamins, apparently you are never supposed to get sick. Man, I thought only particularly badly brainwashed Americans thought that way. It's actually one of the stages of either grief or coming to terms with terminal illness: 'bargaining.' People go through this phase of thinking that if they can just DO THE RIGHT THING, they will get a reprieve or be protected. I never saw someone do that with a headcold before. I hope she never gets cancer.

Well, I would hope she wouldn't get cancer even if I didn't suspect she'd be really weird about it.

So this week I'm supposed to make contact with WINZ, the 'department of work and income,' the Unemployment People. I have really not wanted it to come to this. A person with an M.A. 1st Hons is supposed to be able to get a job. But hey, nobody cares about you. Employers are a lot like human rhinovirus that way. I have to find a job to earn some money until the next academic year starts. The difficulty is, I am SO NOT GOING BACK TO BURGER KING or anything like it. I cannot stand working in a place like that. I am too smart for it. And the pay is frankly piss.

Did I already say I'm leaning much more towards the MLIS programme at Victoria now? Cause I am. It will mean relocating to Wellington for a year, but it is closer to my real interests, such as they are. I'm still applying to the postgraduate diploma of teaching deal, but that would now be my second choice. The problem is, I have no idea how any of this is going to work out financially. My parents want me to 'contribute' but they haven't said in what proportion. I have no experience of living in Halls. I still have no job so I have no way of knowing whether I will be able to 'contribute,' and if I can't does that mean I can't do anything? I wish they would hurry and send the MLIS prospectus so I can find out the current details about the children's lit scholarship I want to apply for. Which I don't expect to get, but at least it is DOING something.

Oh, and rah rah, All Blacks won the Bledisloe Cup. Keep it up, lads.