tooth soup

The usual condolences apply — this journal was long thought by many as dead, but I’m here to rectify that with a post of largish proportions. Read on and be bored amazed.

Okay, important-ish news first before the rambling. First up is my brand spankin’ new job. That’s right, it’s curtains for ye olde video shop, a workplace that has served me well for the four years of my university bachelor degree. For all my bitching to some of my friends about crap pay and working weekend nights, I don’t have anything bad to say about looking back. I have made some awesome friends and learned how to communicate with people so much better through working there, and the workmates that I have had there (Jen, Kate and the old crew as well as Daniel and the newbies) have always made me feel that it was less a job and more a family. I’m a bit sad to be leaving, really. The new job involves pretty much the exact same responsibilities, just more intense and pertaining to books. I’m now going to be serving, reading and making aloof elitist comments on your choices over at Dymocks in Carousel, so feel free to drop on by and say hello if you’re ever in the area. If you buy anything by Dan Brown or the accompanying book to ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’ I will smite you.

I got a phone call this afternoon by Bill Richmond, my unit coordinator for my final two years just one at Curtin. Seems I managed to get myself a PhD position. Yeap, that’s right, sometime in the future I’ll be known as Dr. Phillip English. I’d love to add Esq. to the end of that, oh yes. So yeah, lots of excitement over that. I’ll have to let Dymocks know that I’ll need to tone down my hours to allow for it. But they’ve always said that they allow a lot of movement when it comes to education issues, so it’s reassuring to know that I’ll be able to trust them with not burning me out with too many hours.

I’ve been seeing a lot of my girlfriend lately. Events have conspired* to throw us together pretty much every day for the last two weeks. It’s been interesting, or not interesting rather, since the transition from seeing each other two days a week before uni finished to the current every day thing has been almost unnoticeable. I haven’t had the time/space/absence-of-Louise to plan/execute any of my small romantic gestures, which I’ve missed doing, but it’s been interesting seeing how we manage to see each other constantly over that long a period of time. I don’t think we could have done it six months ago, which makes me wonder what has happened since then. What subtle shift in the dynamics of the relationship has enabled us to bear with each other on an everyday basis? One answer, and I’m musing out loud here, is the development of a fond (loving?) distance from reality produced by understanding the other person more. As if by knowing all the faults of someone you can ignore them, become blind to them in the face of the image you have built of them, brick by neuronic brick. Or perhaps not. Anyway, it’s been good. Comfortable.

If you are without a book to read and enjoy metaphorical (and not so metaphorical) exploration of the human psyche, go out and grab yourself Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson. It’s quite an interesting read about a man exploring the different sections (humours) of his psychological state as he moves through a near future U.K. that has been ‘rearranged’ into countries according to psychological behaviour (Serena, this would be right up your alley). Also, for those of similar taste to mine, I am midway reading The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliot. It’s a tale of an otherwordly circus and a guy that gets dragged into it to be a clown. It’s very darkly comic and quite graphic.

I have written two very nerdy articles. Check ’8 Things Guaranteed to Make a Nerd Cry’ and ‘I Met My gf on teh Intarwebs’. I think they are amusing. Tell me what you think.

Christmas has driven me crazy. I’ve managed to find a few unique gifts for my family, but for the most part I’ve just spotted books as I run around the book store. The advantage of this is that I have a whole lot of very easy to wrap presents to put under the tree *grins*. I have asked for a Wii from my Mum, which I have managed to wheedle info out of from the guy at EB and hopefully I will be purchasing it tomorrow in the afternoon sometime.

On my ‘holidays’ I haven’t really had the time to put anything down on the page with regards to stories, apart from the aforementioned articles (which were basically a bit of fun and didn’t involve much thinking at all really). I’m trying to rectify that with a story of the Aussie outback with a subtle twist. I’m 2.5k words down and moving into the conflict stage at the moment. I really want to get it done before I lose the feel of the story. So I’ll be trying to get that done in the next few days. I’ll edit it and update when it gets done so that people can have a quick squiz.
Andy is moving out of the house today. I think we’re all on good terms, sometimes the dynamics of a house is just not right. Moving in will be Shani, but not until next year at the end of January. So for a little while it’ll only be myself and Amy living here, which will give us a bit of space to move around.

I have been dabbling with Linux. I installed Linux after a frustrating period of Windows XP hanging continuously. It was really fun and educational in terms of problem solving and the things that computers can actually do. But in the end it comes down to what I actually want to use the computer for and what is easier for me on a daily basis with regards to the environment I am using it in. For me that means going back to XP so that I can network more easily and use applications such as photoshop and games. I won’t tell everyone to go out and get one or the other OS, but now I have definitely got a broadened appreciation for what computers can actually do when people put their minds to it in a community.

Okay, I’m updated. Time to go and play some more Diablo 2 before the annual decoration of our Christmas tree.
Phill

* I know that ‘conjured’ is a word that gives an air of bad feeling towards the fact, but I couldn’t think of anything better

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