The other day I took a mug to work. My mum has a little collection of mugs, which all have different designs of sea creatures on them, including starfish, fish, whales, turtles, and so on. I wanted to choose one of these to take to work and keep on my desk. The other day, after I had already taken the mug to work and left it on my desk, I said to my mum, “By the way, I took one of the mugs so I could keep it at work.”

“What? You took one of the mugs and you didn’t ask!”

“I’m sorry, I was in a rush and I really just wanted to take a nice mug, not a crap one.”

“But I counted those. There were an even number of each pattern and design… you could have asked me first.”

My mum was just joking but I thought that for fun, she should try and guess which one I took. After doing a bit of counting she couldn’t remember exactly how many we had of each. She counted three with a blue handle and three with a yellow handle and concluded that I must have taken one of those.

“Come on,” I laughed. “What’s my favourite colour?”

“Purple?”

Of course, that was the case many years ago. I know people’s favourite colours are inclined to change, but I’ve only had about three different favourite colours. For the longest time my favourite colour was blue, blue, blue. I always told everyone when I was younger that my favourite colour was blue. One of my friends got me a blue shirt for my birthday. It was unusual that at the age of nine someone would give you a shirt for your birthday, especially since this friend was a male friend. I did like the shirt though, and I don’t know if he just happened to remember my favourite colour was blue, or if it was just a coincidence.

I loved the colour black throughout high school, and still do – but I don’t really like to think of black as a colour – rather, the absence of colour. So taking black out of the story, there was purple. Since 2005, that was certainly my favourite. I got dresses in purple and jewellery in purple. The guitar pick necklace I’ve worn all the time since 2006 (and still do) is purple. But I guess, at some point, purple and red became one… and red, ever so majestic, became my favourite colour.

I guess it’s something that’ll stay. I feel like it’s been a part of me someplace, that red was meant to be my favourite colour. I guess I don’t see myself getting over it any time soon.

I spent the last few hours on eBay bidding on items. I have an 8GB iPod nano (the third generation, the fat square kind of ones), which is a hand-me-down from my brother. That’s cool. I did give him my iPod touch before he lost it. Anyway, I would like a new iPod. I could listen to music on my phone, but I guess I’m too lazy to get around to buying a new memory card.

I wanted at least 16GB, so that’s what I looked for online. It then occurred to me that I really, really wanted a red iPod. Red is just special edition so they’re really rare now. But I can’t seem to find many on eBay for an affordable price (or maybe I’m just a cheapskate), and some of them don’t even ship to Australia either.

It also occurred to me that I could just get a small iPod, with just 8GB of space… and then I could lug two iPods around (that doesn’t bother me at all, promise!). It certainly sucks having some 40GB of music.

Today I bought these armwarmers for only $2! Well, James paid for me, but yeah.

Yesterday James and I celebrated our four-year anniversary with dinner at a lovely restaurant called 168 degrees. It was a mix of Asian and European, or “Asian Fusion”. James found the Eatability.com.au entry and suggested we try it. I had looked endlessly for nice Japanese restaurants and ridiculously fancy places to eat out, but you know what they say about looking too far into something, so much so that you completely miss what’s staring you in the face. I suppose that happened with me on a seemingly endless search for a good place to eat.

James made a perfect choice. He made a booking on the website even though he was in a bit of doubt about whether it was really a booking service. He got a confirmation email and after looking at it I thought it was pretty legitimate. He picked me up at 5:00 yesterday evening just as my dad came back from picking my mum up from work.

I was pretty confident with directions so I practically insisted James turn off the GPS. I had been around the area as I have family friends who live in the suburbs surrounding the restaurant. We got stuck at a little detour because the road had changed since I’d last been there. Oops. We managed to get out alright, though.

We had a table reserved for us at the restaurant and James was pretty surprised that the booking worked. I wasn’t that surprised! The staff were very friendly and welcoming and they made us feel at home. They weren’t snobby or overly formal, which I really liked. (One of the staff reminded me of James’s mum, but I haven’t told him that. Hahahaha.)

We decided to order an entree and a main meal each. We got these spring roll/crepe hybrids (as James called them on his blog with Angus beef. It was delicious. James got a slightly different one which I think had zucchini and more vegetables. It wasn’t as tasty as mine but it was good.

James was again a bit skeptical about the “whole crispy chicken” he ordered. He doubted it was whole, but when it arrived, it was indeed a whole chicken. It was enormous. I chose grilled salmon. Usually when I have a choice, I go for the salmon. It’s just so hard to resist. I am so used to eating raw salmon in sushi, so when the waitress asked how I wanted my salmon I just said “well done”. I know, I should have been a man and grunted, “medium rare”, but I guess I need a change from the raw fish.

After filling ourselves up with our delicious mains, we shared green tea ice cream. It was a really lovely date. Since that was also a new restaurant I went to, I successfully crossed something off my 101 in 1001 list, that being to go to ten new restaurants.

We picked up my brother from taekwondo later on. While we were waiting for him, we walked around the nearly-empty shopping centre feeling rather full and content. Since I’ve only ever done it once in my life before, we held hands and walked up the wrong escalator together. It was kind of fun just walking step by step up even though we were slowed down by the escalator moving back down. Hahaha. I heard someone applaud us but after we turned around, confused, there was a man from a distance (possibly a security guard) gesturing at us to stop. He must have felt like a god or something… I don’t know what he got out of telling off a boy and a girl walking up the wrong escalator in the middle of the night when there was practically no one else around. Loser.

Last week at work there was a server error, and later we discovered that the backups had failed, and not only that, but the server had its problems and everything was lost. The last backup was from September, meaning that pretty much everything I had been familiar with since I started this job was gone. We didn’t really have to start from scratch to restore everything though, since we had stylesheets and a lot of images – but the databases and most of the content was gone. My boss has thankfully come up with backup plans for backing up! I learned my own lesson many years ago when my freeserver deleted everyone without notice… backups are so important.

I have one more day of my education centre job, as I decided to end this week instead of next week – I kind of wonder if the kids are gonna miss me, but hey.

I’m pretty guilty of the latter. I’m not a goody-two shoes, but I’m not very rebellious either. Like typical rebellious daughters, I don’t do drugs or drink until I get trashed, I don’t drive a car when I don’t even have a licence, I don’t go out late and ignore my parents’ phone calls. Like most daughters, when I’m in a bad mood I yell at my parents, I also hate doing housework sometimes, and my room is a mess.

I began web design about ten years ago but didn’t have a personal website until 2003. I had just been learning to work my head around HTML and CSS. When I decided to make a personal website and include a detailed profile of myself, the only digital photograph I had of myself was a photo of me in a ballet costume performing the Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker Suite. Back then, digital cameras were expensive and I had obtained a digital copy of this photograph thanks to my ballet teacher. I didn’t think twice and I put it straight on my website, along with a substantial amount of information about myself.

I was level-headed, I was well-informed, I was careful, but I was also naive, and perhaps gave out too much information. The internet is full of predators, though over the past few years – dare I say – it has become a more interactive platform and people are interacting via Twitter and even advertising themselves to employers via websites like LinkedIn. I wouldn’t go as far to say that it’s safer, but it’s become more of an outlet for people to connect than it was before.

In 2003, I was 12. Ooh, come on. No parent likes their twelve-year-old chatting to other people online. Though I was regularly chatting with Rhiannon (whom some of you might remember from PetShopGirlsReviews.com before she disappeared, or if you remember her before then, she owned petshopgirl.tk) and other people who owned blogs and websites, my mum wasn’t pleased when I told her I was chatting to some random chick on Messenger from Perth, and she doozed up and ranted about how this girl could be some freaky old man who lived just around the corner. I was just thinking, come on, fat chance.

Ages ago, my uncle used to send a crapload of chain mail to my mum. My mum used to refer to this particular one, in which there was some ridiculous story about this girl who started talking to a boy online. One day there was a man following her as she walked home from basketball practice, and as soon as she reached home, she rushed inside and shut the door. Her parents obviously asked her what was wrong, and it turns out the man following her was a douchebag hired by her parents to teach her a lesson about chatting to people online. I hate that story, FTR.

Anyway, my mum found my website. She told me to remove the information about myself. She was not very pleased. Much later, I put my information back up there (oo, rebel). My mum never asked about my websites again. Over the years, I can say I’ve revealed much about myself through my blog and have interacted with many other bloggers, and I know when something could pose a risk or not. However, over time I have come to learn that the blogging community is also a lovely one, and anyone I interact with is most likely another blogger with the same mindset as me.

Given that, I was still always cautious about what I wrote on my blog in case anyone from my family came across it. I still am – and there are some things I don’t mention at all on my blog. No one in my family is really aware of my blog address or really visits it. Recently, I also changed my name on some websites so I would be a little less discoverable – it has been quite some time that Googling my full name gives a vast array of results. (This actually doesn’t bother me all that much.)

My mum recently got a smartphone and likes that it gives her the ability to check her email. She can also save time while she is sitting on the couch, not quite in the mood to use the computer, but she can research the internet. Unfortunately that leaves her resorting to her phone as a cure for boredom, and one day as I was brushing my teeth, I heard her saying loudly:

“Hello, I’m Georgina. My favourite colour is red.
In case you hadn’t guessed that already.”

I stopped mid-brush, nearly swallowing some toothpaste.

I guess you could say that one of my worst nightmares was having my parents find me on Google. I imagined I’d have bricks falling out of my backside.

I said, “That’s my portfolio. How did you find it?”

As soon as I said that, I regretted asking her. She calmly told me that she had been looking for the origin of some foreign names and looking at foreign names in general when the idea occurred to her to Google my name. Me! Of all people. She said this, briefly pausing at times, and said she thought I had written beautifully on my portfolio and that it was really quite impressive.

The bricks stopped threatening to fall out of my backside. I stood there just nodding slowly as my mum surfed my portfolio (which contains quite a substantial amount of information about myself) on her phone. She asked me how employers reacted when I had interviews and how I used my portfolio to show them my work. I mean, come on, you still gotta explain this kind of thing to parents.

“I Googled your brother and I couldn’t find everything… you have so much. Look! Twitter, LinkedIn… what is LinkedIn, by the way? And a blog, owned by you…”
“I know, I’ve Googled myself before…”

I guess my mum finding me on Google wasn’t so bad.

I guess my cold is just stuffing things up but I hope to be better soon. Smelling some Vaporub seems to do the trick, too. I think the wind also gets to me easily. Yesterday I let myself into work (I have my own keys now) and I opened the windows because I was rather out of breath from walking from the station and up the flights of stairs, but soon enough the wind was making me feel cold so I shut them. The good thing about working in a converted loft is that it rarely gets muggy in there.

I caught up with Johnny and Fern the other day – I hadn’t seen them in months! I didn’t have a jacket with me and as I was waiting for them outside our meeting place, I was hoping it wasn’t going to make my cold worse.

I was wearing my shirt that said, “The art of conversation is, like, kinda dead and stuff”. A boy about my age was nearby with another two girls, and he asked, “Hey, excuse me, what does your shirt say?”

I walked towards them and let them read it out aloud. “Hey, that’s cool! Thanks,” he nodded.

Thankfully, that’s probably the only geeky shirt I own that has words on it; the others have prints of LEGO, rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock or a TARDIS, which doesn’t really encourage people to ask what my shirt reads, or say. A popular online store from which I bought some of these shirts is ThinkGeek.com. I used to shop there quite often before I found their shipping costs to Australia were too high for my taste, not to mention they seemed to be out of any good merchandise.

More often than not, I find geeky shirts that quote certain memes or have Pedobear on them, or Double Rainbow, or reference some game like Skyrim or Minecraft or Pacman, or have some programming or HTML or blogger joke on it. I find the majority of these shirts, particularly the ones with jokes on them, to be very unfunny and very lame. Yes, I think a shirt with <body> on it is a pretty cool shirt, but I wouldn’t buy one and wear it.

It’s not hip and it’s not funny or cool or totally rad or fully sick [bro]. Let’s just say, if I saw an English teacher wearing a shirt like the one I mentioned earlier, I’d think he was being rather pretentious or trying to be cool. It makes sense for me to wear it because I’m part of the younger generation and even though I prefer writing formally and with verbose words at times, I do kinda, like, talk like that.

There’s a shirt that reads “Just shut up and reboot already”. If I saw an IT support guy, or just someone working in a computer shop or anyone interested in computers wearing that, I’d honestly think he was a snob.

It’s as if whoever chooses to wear these shirts will think that whoever is interested in the same thing as them or has the same kind of knowledge as them will understand their shirt and likewise, think it’s cool. Perhaps it does seem cool to that person, but you’re just showing off, really. I don’t see my boss wearing a shirt with <body> on it. I would understand it, but if someone else sees someone with a shirt like that and has no idea what HTML is or is unfamiliar with the internet, they wouldn’t think twice about it.

James agreed with me and stated that it was the reason why he wouldn’t buy something like a ROS shirt. (I’m sure that 98% of you would have no clue what that means.)

“It’s sad. It’s like you’re saying ‘I want you to ask me what my shirt is about so I can boast of my knowledge. NOT to converse, but for me to tell you about my specialised expertise on a topic. FOR I WAS HEAVILY NEGLECTED AS AN EARLY TEENAGER’.” And after a pause – he laughed.

If it makes someone feel good wearing a shirt that shows off some of your knowledge, well, fine, be my guest, I’d say to them. Hats off to you, mate. But don’t expect me to ask you what it means if I haven’t a clue, then mope and have a booboo at home because no one asked. Finally, if you do see someone with a shirt with something you like on them, are you seriously going to approach them and say it’s zarking awesome? I still think that giving strangers compliments makes my shoulder feel like spiders have crawled over it. I also think that receiving compliments from strangers gives me the same feeling (but on my other shoulder).

Maybe it brings this sense of community or something. “O HEY YOU LIKE VLOGBROTHERS TOO WELL SO DO I OMG…”
“Then why the fuck don’t you have a DFTBA shirt?”

“I would also take an arrow to the knee omg you play Skyrim? Man I love your boobs.”
“Ugh, go away.”

So even if girls do play Skyrim, or any other game for that matter, it doesn’t mean you get to make out with them. I know couples end up together because they have the same geeky obsession with something – they might have met online through playing a game, or found out in school that they had common interests, but I bet you my left foot that it wasn’t from wearing some godforsaken t-shirt with some geek joke on it.

(If you’re still wondering, ROS = Robot Operating System.)

You can see how cute they are! I have to say they are my favourite shoes in terms of versatility. I find versatility in clothing and accessories to be pretty important. I don’t like changing things every day to suit my mood, so it’s nice to have some staple pieces that aren’t just staple pieces, but ones that you can wear comfortably almost any time.

I was disappointed when it rained last week and my shoes got soaked all the way through. I wasn’t wearing tights or stockings because it had been very hot, so I was bare-legged. Despite having an umbrella (which was lent to me by my boss because I didn’t bring one as I didn’t see the rain coming at all – it only started raining around 5:00pm), the rain hit my knees and my legs and just aimed for my shoes.

I got The Squelch. It’s just about the worst feeling you can get when you walk in the rain. You can feel the water wetting your toes or your socks, slowly, as you’re walking through the rain. Be it slow or fast… that feeling is just terrible.

Anyway, I was walking, with this Squelch, and I saw all these other people wearing high heels and other people wearing boots with their shoelaces just dragging behind on the wet pavement. It was raining so heavily that you could hardly see in front of you and there were puddles everywhere. You were probably pretty lucky if a car didn’t half-drench you by driving in a puddle. I saw some people with umbrellas who still looked relatively dry, and I was guessing they either got lucky or only just stepped outside. Hmm.

Yesterday I’m not sure what the weather was thinking but it was so hot. It is supposed to be summer where I live, but lately we’ve just been receiving a lot of rain, so I guess you could say that it was what we had been expecting since December. Today, it seemed to cool down as it was exceptionally windy in the morning, but as soon as I stepped outside after noon, to go to work, it was so hot I perspired straight away.

At work I had to train a new guy working there. He’s in the same grade as my brother, used to do the education program when he was younger so was pretty familiar with how things worked. He made a few mistakes which I had to point out. He was also a bit slow. However, being slow is usually experienced with most new workers, as it does take some time to get used to the marking system. That said though, he did a great job for his first day, and he picked up the workings of the centre pretty quickly and didn’t hesitate or get distracted. I have to say I’m actually pretty proud of him! I remember training a girl before who kept chatting to me and kept asking questions, and she also kept watching around her and not really paying attention.

The boy is coming on Thursday as well where I hope he continues to work at a steady pace. He was a very fast learner, I must say. I will be stopping work there soon… so I really hope he is a good replacement. Fingers crossed.

I bought some ball stud earrings on eBay a couple of weeks ago and I was excited to get them but when I received them in the mail today, I was less than pleased. They were just wrapped once in paper and put in a standard envelope; no padding or box or anything. I noticed that while the seller had 98% positive feedback, they did have at least 20 different buyers give negative feedback. My earrings were a bit bent at the posts, which I could fix by bending them back… but the balls were meant to be a shade of silver and they were already rather discoloured. Giving them a rub sort of helped even out the colour. I still sent a message asking for a refund.

The weather forecast says it’ll rain tomorrow. Surprise, surprise. I might bring a change of shoes. Just in case.

Edit: I’m still sick. -___- I have a terrible cold now.

I’ve had laryngitis and pharyngitis before and they have both inherently sucked. My mum takes to giving me this ridiculous Asian stuff called watermelon frost. I instantly think of an land where the ground is made of watermelon crust and I can make pink snowballs and untouched ice is the pale lime green that the edges of watermelon slices are like.

In fact, watermelon frost is the complete opposite. It’s this… powder that looks like someone probably coloured heroin a green colour. Not the pretty green colour of the exterior of watermelons, but the green that the colour of your stool is if you ate too much spinach the night before.

That’s often hard for me to imagine, so sometimes I imagine I’m a cavewoman with a crummy mortar and pestle made from two really sketchily shaped rocks. And I just crushed some leaves into a powder until it was… powder.

Nonetheless, this crap is horrible to put in your throat. I dislike unnatural remedies a lot of the time, especially when it comes to things like headaches, sore throats, and colds. Whenever I’m sick, I opt for honey tea, vitamin C, warm soups, and my personal favourite – water. And maybe some grapes. I don’t like taking painkillers because I’ve had experiences where they don’t really help.

I developed a headache throughout the day, which was really unpleasant. For the most part, watching Futurama cured it. I took apple cider vinegar for my throat, and I can tell you it burned like hell. Probably just as bad as chugging down plain vinegar. I can tell you though, if you think salt water is bad, this burns about a hundred times more than salt water could ever.

I’m listening to gypsy music now, since James told me about Armik, a flamenco guitarist with over twenty albums under his belt. I have listened to some gypsy music and it’s the kind of music that puts you to sleep. I dearly love instrumental music, and I really love listening to orchestral versions of classic songs or sonatas. Songs are very lovely when they can put you to sleep, and they can be very relaxing. I find that a lot of music from Japanese animation can be very lovely as well (think Laputa and Naruto – I don’t even watch Naruto but the music is beautiful). And then you get to artists like Explosions in the Sky, whom I saw last year with James. When you get to things like shoegazing and post-rock, it’s where it starts getting interesting.

I begin to see the structural and melodic similarities between instrumental post-rock and Mozart. Not all music does that, I guess.

I don’t feel like I hit many dead ends. I can sleep to heavy metal. I’ve tried dancing the Macarena to a rap song. Surprisingly, it works. I plan to develop a theory out of that.

Until then, I need to make sure my nose stops running and my throat stops feeling like it’s being poked with a flamethrower.

It was easy. I could be exaggerating, but it was so easy to have so many things to do. It was so easy juggling four or more dance classes a week, along with piano and swimming. I got enough sleep and I got to finish all my homework and I never struggled and I never stressed out.

I took a long time to shower. I took my time. I was also a terrible eater. I was picky, but I ate very slowly. I struggled to eat. For a while I’ve dealt with a small stomach problem, and as a child I would often take over an hour to eat my dinner and down my spinach and corn.

I remember my brother stressing out at that age. I remember him being temperamental and disorganised before he even began seventh grade. I know I wasn’t like that at all. It was when I was sixteen that things took a toll and I gradually dropped my extracurricular activities. I had an order. What I liked the least was what I dropped first. Swimming. Then funk. Then tap dance. Then singing. Then jazz. Then…

I believe that over the years, I accumulated a deep sense of worry for more than just my extracurricular activities. As many of them demanded my attention and my practice, often pushing me forward with exams of their own – or in the cases of dance; shows, competitions, performances, – I had to weave such events into my schedule. Dance school was like another school altogether, and the pressure to attend regular school for six hours a day along with all those commitments began to quash my ability to keep atop the homework tasks set daily.

Time and time again I worried that I’d run out of time to keep on top of everything. I can’t pick out the exact point where it got worse. My secondary school days are now – in my head – a blur of hastened friendships, relationships, and struggles with depression.

No, it wasn’t simple. But I remember once being unworried, then being worried.

Now I’m unworried.

It was Australia Day today, and I didn’t have to go to work because this date, the 26th January, is recognised as a public holiday. I sat at home for most of the day listening to the Triple J Hottest 100, and played guitar and painted my nails a jellybean blue. Not too far into the future, I’ll be working, I’ll be studying, and life will be just as hectic as it was last year. But briefly, I think about how having so much to do can be a burden on even the most organised, energetic person. I think that shooing the worries that will soon come my way will not work unless I put in some effort.

So much to worry about as an adult. Money. People. Education. Work. Responsibility. Yet I believe I have changed. I am no longer scared of growing up. I am no longer scared of time passing. But those are things that will doubtlessly arrive at one point or another, or that overcome me at some point. If I can keep pushing away the worries that haven’t arrived, then surely they will keep their distance.

I miss being a kid, being unworried.

But when I think about it, I too am a kid at heart.

I don’t remember exactly when I started this job at the education centre, but I remember that in early 2008, shortly after James and I began dating, I was happy to receive this job at all. James told me it was going to suck and the pay was going to suck, and he seemed to know what to expect. I went ahead with it, really unsure of what to expect for my first job. I didn’t like it in the beginning and I had to get used to their rules of marking papers, and I had to deal with little children, which, to that date, I hated.

So it’s been about four years since I’ve had this job. I can’t say I love it, but I’ve grown to like it over the years. I was close to quitting at one point because I wasn’t really enjoying it. I guess what held me back from making this decision to quit was the fact that they needed me. For a small centre, I was the only English marker, compared to many of the other girls and other staff who worked with maths or with the younger children. There wasn’t much change over the years but I found myself tolerating the children with less effort. I grew to like some of them. I felt so attached to the job, as my first job ever. But it was time for me to quit, having another job with more demanding work and one that I thoroughly enjoy, not to mention the fact that my classes will clash with my shifts over at the education centre.

I loved having a job near home, I loved that it was rather easy work and not so intensive, and that it was close to public transport so if I needed to travel there and I couldn’t get dropped off by my dad for whatever reason, or if I needed to go to university in the morning, I could still get there somehow.

That said, I have received my timetable for the duration of the year. I don’t know why people post their timetables on their blogs when they get them – I usually don’t like sharing that kind of thing, but I’ll have you know that I am in class four days a week.

Well, more like four evenings a week. With the exception of Fridays in Autumn semester (February until July) – I have a 9am-12pm class. I’m planning to go to work afterwards. All my other classes start at 6:00pm and end at 8:00pm or 9:00pm, so during the day, I’ll be working. I have this strong feeling that I can do it, that I won’t be dead by the time I get home, that I’ll have every ounce of energy I’ll need. I don’t start classes until the end of February.

In my last post I mentioned my new computer Kepler, and he has consequently been added to The Cavalry. James and I managed to sort out the operating system (Windows 7 64-bit!) and install absolutely everything I needed. Well I haven’t installed WampServer, but I’ll do that eventually. James pretty much spent the weekend at my house.

We had wraps for lunch (on both days!) and between him, my brother and myself, we probably ate four bags of chicken strips over the weekend. Although we had problems installing some things, a few restarts did the trick. I had prepared myself pretty well by downloading the installer files for most of the programs I needed prior to buying the computer.

iTunes, as usual, was a pain in the backside to deal with but thankfully this time around I did not lose all my play counts and playlists and library history. Ah well, I have Last.fm to found for most of the plays. On the topic of music, James encouraged me to look in my record collection and find something to play. My favourite records are by the record player and my others in my bookshelf, and usually I just play my favourites… but I put on some Stevie Wonder and I realised how great that was.

I think you can see some of the physical photos of Kepler in the enlarged screenshot. I’ll post them on my photoblog shortly. Yep, I went and hid the taskbar so I can use the icons in RocketDock as shortcuts.

Also, I just washed my hair with new conditioner and not only does it smell nice but it’s left my hair so very soft. It’s specially for damaged hair and since I’ve had some split hairs (not ends, but hairs ) lately, it’s leaving me with the impression that it’ll do well.

Today, James picked me up at my house early in the morning and we went to a mall about fifteen minutes from my house. After we got lost and found ourselves in a homeware mega mall full of furniture stores (no, we’re not ready to buy furniture yet, at least not until we get a house) and drove past a shop called “OMG Lighting” (they really couldn’t have picked a better name), we lined up for about ten minutes watching this idiot in overalls ask the guy over the counter for assistance. It wasn’t the kind of place you could look into and browse around. You had to know what you were getting.

James remembered everything, bless him. I didn’t really quite understand all the specifications, but we walked out with a motherboard, four gigabytes of ram and a processor. Only Intel i3, because this computer’s just for doing work, study, designing, watching some movies – nothing big and heavy like gaming.

Of course, there was a phase during which I was so excited about the game Duke Nukem Forever, but half a year down the track I’m not as thrilled. I actually took the time to read reviews about the game and I wasn’t too pleased; many hardcore fans were also disappointed. James knows me well and he says it isn’t the kind of game I’d like, and he wouldn’t like it very much either. (He’s more of a gamer than I am.) I suppose I’d better go back to the 80s and 90s when video games were not full of sexist remarks and were all about explosions and female assets. Right.

We went across the road and I spied a black and red case. Oh cheeseballs, it was the sexiest thing I’d seen that day, before James said that it would gather dust so easily even if I did put it on a table and vacuum my desk once a week. It had red. I think I just totally fell in love. At $200 though, I felt it was much better to buy the $70 one and get something that wasn’t aesthetically pleasing but something that was just a better idea.

When we finally went back to my place after getting a spill-resistant keyboard, webcam and a 24 inch monitor, we had fun looking at all the bits and pieces and fitting them together. I was excited to open up the monitor, but we looked at it last. It took us some time to fit things together and get things together, but after about two hours we had it going. When I finally saw the monitor I couldn’t help but exclaim, “It’s gorgeous!”

I wasn’t too fond of the size before getting it. 24 inches seemed rather large. It seemed a little too large, but I think it’s just the right size. I use a 27 inch Mac at work and I can’t believe it’s that big. James’s monitor seemed bigger and I got the one that is the same size as his.

Unfortunately the software wasn’t all cool; we had a lot of trouble trying to install Windows 7. While James tried to figure out the cause of the problem I grilled some chicken and washed some lettuce so we could have some chicken wraps for lunch.

At the end of the day not all was well. But hopefully we get it figured out tomorrow. I plugged Fin (my laptop) into the monitor. I remembered that this was what I wanted in the first place; just a monitor to use with my laptop. My mum was the one who suggested a new computer for me and I can’t thank her enough for that. I hope that my laptop lasts longer since I’ll be using it less.

So, he hasn’t come out of his shell yet. But say hi. His name’s Kepler. After Johannes Kepler. Because Kepler’s Laws are as follows:

1. The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
2. A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
3. The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

And, you know, because I like space and all.

I see many people are involved. Many people blocked out their websites for the 18th day of January. People tweeted about it everywhere. People posted about it on their blogs. People posted about it on forums. People expressed their opinion virtually everywhere – on the internet. I guess I didn’t really want to put much thought into the issue, thinking that a lot of these internet-related laws or acts usually don’t garner much of a problem in the end. Of course, it crushes the right that people have to free speech, but when I look at it in light of other things, I feel like it’s not going to take a massive toll on my life.

I could be wrong, though.

My brother seemed to only have become interested in the issue today. I hardly talk to him since he’s occupied with studying and activities like taekwondo, and I have work myself, but when we do get to chat, it’s usually about the internet or music or something that is indirectly related to the internet. Today he brought up SOPA, as if it was completely new to him. He does use the internet a lot – just as much as I do – but he doesn’t do much other than play games and watch videos occasionally. That said, I’m not surprised he wasn’t as educated on SOPA as I was.

My parents find me to be very terrible when it comes to “general knowledge” and world news and “current affairs”. Truth be told, I hate current affairs and I find news incredibly dull.

It’s always “three thousand people were killed when a ship ran aground on the east coast of Whatchamacallit. About fifty of them are believed to be Australians”. The latter sentence always ticks me off, because for some reason, when a large number of people have died, the fact is always put forward that so-and-so Australians have died. I begin to wonder if it is like that in other countries. Perhaps not. My brother, on the other hand, gratuitously laughs and repeats lines from newsreaders that follow as such: “Good evening a man has died…” where there is no pause for breath between the greeting and the announcement of a tragic incident.

But when it comes to internet-related things, oh, I like to believe I’m on the ball. Which is why I wasn’t at all surprised when my mum said, “What are you guys talking about?” Neither she or my dad had any idea what SOPA was about, though my dad had a faint grasp of the situation. My dad uses the internet to download music, and my mum sends and receives emails. That’s about it. If the internet were to go down for whatever reason, they wouldn’t feel that affected.

I guess in the past few weeks, being busy with work, I haven’t felt so attached to the internet as I have before. I know, I work with the internet with web design and I have to be connected to the internet, but I still don’t feel that need to check my email every two minutes. My consolidation has done me really well; I have cut down on a lot of online projects and I’ve relaxed in terms of blogging and reading blogs. It’s something I enjoy, but after nine hours at work, sometimes I really do just want to read a book, or watch Futurama, or crash on the couch and just see whatever movie is on television. I have hated many things about the internet – the drama, the idiots, the YouTube commentators, the YouTube “community” (as my boss says, “what community? More like a flash mob”), the Tumblr bitches, Tumblr in general, the whiny bloggers, the paedophiles, the sex advertisements, the thieves, the…

Oh, I could go on. But you know, it’s times like these when I really appreciate a good walk out of the office and Vietnamese food with the gang (I’m just referring to workmates here), a walk to the bus stop with Jebediah ringing in my ears, or just curled up in bed on a Saturday morning finishing a really good book.

Whatever happens with SOPA, well, rest assured that it can go right back up the backsides of anyone who makes the internet an unpleasant place.

Maybe we all do. But a lot of us take photos that aren’t ours to use as avatars, rephrase things, quote Wikipedia, have downloaded an album without paying, have shared music with everyone else – maybe we do get a taste of our own medicine, but who’s going to stop us? It’s the freakin’ internet.