Sorry for being all self-referential, but I have to point out that the hit counter informs me that someone has come here searching for christina aguilera in army clothes or in dress ups.

Good lord.

I've come over all funny...

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse 'The Body' Ventura in a no holds barred, hardcore rules street fight.

Winner gets to be President.

Q. What’s better than having sex with a twelve year old Asian boy?

A. NOTHING!

Humour the second:

Q. What’s better than being on your first proper date with a girl you’ve had a huge crush on for years?

A. Getting as far as “NOTH…” before you remember that her kid brother is a twelve year old Asian boy.

How the hell has it been a year already?

Happy anniversary honey.

Decorating my classroom I came across a bunch of movie posters donated to me by a departed workmate. I decided to hang the 1984 poster just above head height behind my desk.

Big Brother is watching my students.

Of course, none of them will get it. And neither, for that matter, will the philistines I call co-workers, but knowing that it's there makes me that bit more content during the day...

Right, these holidays, I’m starting up my new company – Adopt A Horrible Mutant Pig-Boy.

Say it with me now: “I’m also a customer…”

Of course, I more than anyone (being surrounded socially by the most despicable pack of perverts ever to befoul the earth with the taint of their filthy sin) can see the potential for abuse of the system, so to speak…

“Squeal like a pig! I know you can!"

So, prefacing the Roman Religion topic with a good old fashioned discussion on horrible religious persecution. Specifically, at one point, lingering on the Crusades.

Student 1 "So why are the Cantabury Crusaders called the Cantabury Crusaders?"

Student 2 "Duh! 'Cause they're from Cantabury!"

I guess it is a bit weird – I am my job, and fuck Tyler Durden up his stupid ass – so the funeral happening during a particularly hectic set-up period in the first week of school meant that while the rest of the family were saying goodbye, I was several hundred kilometers away, organising juniors, wrestling with inflated class sizes, sorting out enrollments and doing whatever it is I do when I’m at work. Truth be told, on the day of the actual funeral, I didn’t even remember it was going on until the evening, on the way home.

My brother came back and caught me up.

What was most interesting about the whole thing, he said, was talking to one of our uncles about our Grandfather. Gordon (never a close enough relative to earn “Granddad”, or anything similar) has always been, in our estimation, very little more than a bit of a cunt. Because, well, the only person who ever talked about him in any detail was my Grandmother, who divorced him thirty years ago (which, as a middle-aged Catholic in the seventies, was a big deal…). While never particularly scathing of him, my Grandmother was more vocal than the other members of my famously taciturn family, so hers were the only memories that got shared.

I only met Gordon a few times, almost exclusively after his mind had completely gone. The one encounter I had with him when he was (arguably) compus mentus was when I was about three, and he made a disastrous attempt to teach me how to swim. (Over two decades later, the majority of that time spent within reasonable distance of the ocean, and a few years worth of swimming lessons to boot, and I still can’t swim. An old flatmate told me once that she thought there was a correlation between this fact and my unpleasant childhood memory. I myself try not to use words like ‘correlation’ unless absolutely necessary.)

My uncle said that it was a pity that we never got to know Gordon – that actually, he wasn’t a bad bloke. This uncle said, in fact, that Gordon resembled no-one so much as my own father. The only reason that we had never seen it this way is that my mother is capable of living with someone like my father. Grandma wasn’t.

Don (my uncle) told the story of going to Auckland as a small child. The entire family packed into a small car, Gordon started driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Grandma and all of the children pointed this out to him, to which he matter-of-factly replied that city people needed signs telling them which way to drive because they weren’t very clever, but that he knew where he was going, so didn’t need to look at the signs for help.

The sentiment, if not those exact words, is exactly what I spent my childhood being embarrassed by when it came out of my father.

I remember one incident that my brother and I were particularly mortified by in our youth;

My father’s truck had been towed away, so he went down to the impound lot. “I think you might have towed away my truck,” he said to the man on the gate, and asked if he could have a look round for it. Presently he found his truck, got into it, and drove it out of the impound lot without looking back.

That is the way my father’s mind works; “I parked my truck, and when I came back, you had towed it away. There’s no hard feelings or anything, I bear you no ill will, but now I need to get my truck back.” Now, yes, the authorities certainly did want my father to pay a $200 fine for the return of his vehicle, but his processing was “Why? You’re the ones who took it away. I’m just getting it back”

Another Gordon story from my uncle Don:

The family was driving in the country, when Gordon saw a large imposing fence surrounding a coal mine. He found the gate with the big ‘No Entry’ sign on it. He opened the gate, and drove through it. Grandma and the kids pointed out that they weren’t meant to be there. They pointed this out again when they passed the sign saying ‘No Trespassing’. And again when they passed the next such notice, as Gordon drove the car straight into the mine.

A mine worker came up to the car and said “What are you doing here? Members of the public aren’t allowed in here.” As Grandma and the kids shrunk into their seats, Gordon replied “Well, this place looked interesting, so I thought I’d bring the family in for a look.”

So the mine worker showed them around.

Now, certainly, “city people” would have just turned around at the sight of one of the three signs, but at the end if the day, Gordon knew that no-one would really mind if he just had a bit of a look round.

All my life I’ve grown up with the idea that Gordon was a bit of a bastard. And hell, he clearly didn’t make my Grandmother happy, so there’s that against him. But as Don pointed out; The tendency is to make things black and white, good and bad. The truth is, so much of what had embarrassed him and his siblings as children - and mortified my Grandmother as an adult – was just a vaguely eccentric guy doing things that no-one else particularly minded him doing.

He pointed out that my father is exactly the same way. A person who, to an outsider, looks maybe just slightly weird, and possibly even slightly nuts, doing his own thing. Certainly, his world view does not correspond with every single accepted societal norm. However, other people who think differently are just wrong. And if they only took the time to think about it, and see it from his point of view, they’d see just how wrong they were.

Certainly, my brother and I spent the majority of our childhood in a state of perpetual embarrassment over our father’s behavior in public, but, as with Gordon, in hindsight, it is certain that no-one else noticed, or minded, what Dad was doing.

As my brother said; It’s probably the regret of every child – that they didn’t think as highly of their parents as they later found out they should have.

The other thing my brother said was that he felt guilty spending the entirety of my Grandmother’s wake talking about Gordon. Similarly, I feel bad that I’ve been trying to think of a fitting eulogy for two weeks, and am now just talking about the ex-husband that she had gladly lived half of her life without. But, as my brother said – he didn’t know Gordon, only the faintly damning picture given by the only family member who ever talked about him in any specific detail, sparing even as that was.

But here’s the thing – I remember my grandmother, and don’t need to dwell on those memories here. I wanted to say some form of goodbye to her, but I didn’t need to wax verbose about it. The cancer first came almost a year ago – we all (including my Grandmother herself) were ready for this, and had made our peace.

I guess the one story that I will tell is one of the last told to me by Grandma.

She was talking to my little cousin Brooke, who she has had a large part in raising. She had explained to Brooke that she was going to die sometime in the near future. The subject of a talking alarm clock that Brooke quite liked came up.

Brooke: Grandma, when you die, can I have your alarm clock?

Grandma: Of course you can, Brookey. When I die, it’s all yours.

Brooke: (Thinks for a moment) Grandma…

Grandma: Yes Brookey?

Brooke: Will you want it back after…?

Alright, so I was ever so slightly ashamed of myself for buying the Katy Rose album. Hailed as the ‘cred’ version of Avril Lavigne that it’s okay to like, she’s still a sixteen year old pop-tart with an army of producers to sell her mutton-dressed-as-punk teen wangst, and anyone who claims different is worse than Avril fans (who may not be able to claim musical elitism, but aren’t hypocrites either…).

But still, Rose has managed to earn my money and my love with this line, which I feel justifies me:

I’m six feet under the Bhodi tree
With my crap new age philosophy

She said see you later Boi indeed…

Sean walked into the living room to see James sitting in a chair stark-bollock naked, languidly drawing a picture of Sean’s face on his chest with a black felt-tip pen.

Sean thought about it for a moment, and decided that it was easily the third most disturbing thing he had seen that day.

(Thing about the current wave of nostalgia based entertainment - you know, GI Joe, Charlies Angels, all that. As you'll be able to tell from the way it's well written, I didn't do this one...)

The only youth I feel nostalgic for is the zany last days of high school and that final, endless summer with my friends before we went on our own journeys down different roads in college.

Then I remember that it never actually happened, it was a bunch of crappy American movies.

Which makes me miss it all the more, I suppose. Time dulls all things. When I was a kid watching Transformers etc I was always frustrated by the, well, imaginariness of it all. I didn't want to watch movies about superheroes, I wanted to be a fucking superhero. Being a kid was shit. You couldn't do anything. It was always "I'm gonna... one day". Hope as a general thing is a nice thing to be nostalgic about, but specific hopes?

Not taking shots, but I know pretty smart people whose entire lives consist of watching DVDs these days. Weirder still when it's just series 6 of Buffy - nostalgia for two years ago? What the hell is this all about?

More scarily yet, many of these people regard Xander and Willow as closer and better friends than the real people they know. Amusingly, they are mostly correct.

Fuck it. I'm an imagination deficient cynic, destined to star in one of those Sovereign Life Assurance "I still have dreams... they're just different" ads while being filmed jerking off into a tincan watching late night Sky porn in a TV shop window. I get the nostalgia thing - I'm pretty damn nostalgic about my hair, and that's only recently gone the way of all things. It just depresses me. 25 year olds shouldn't spend their days sighing wistfully and regretting the past. Even if it is all we did when we were younger.

For eight odd years, I've has the name Gustave Flaubert written on a piece of paper, and wondered where it came from. Thanks to 'Bobos in Paradise' by David Brooks, I now know.

Brooks recounts Flaubert's predictions for his novel Salammbo:

"It will 1) annoy the bourgeois... ;2) unnerve and shock sensitive people; 3) anger the archeologists; 4) be unintelligible to the ladies; 5) earn me a reputation as a pederast and a cannibal. Let us hope so."

I think I would have liked the bohemian revolution of Flaubert's Paris. When Gerard de Nerval was asked why he walked a lobster through Tuileries gardens on a leash, he replied; "It does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep."

Of course, as a card carrying member of the Bobo class, I was interested in the later defense of the bourgeoisie .ie that they provided what Brooks called "an effective moral context for capitalism."

"[W]ith its reverence for institutions such as families, organised religion, manners, ceremonies, and community groups like the Rotary Club or the PTA, bourgeois culture fosters institutions that keep a free society from descending into amoralism."

This week: MASH

"I had a dream last night that I was asleep!

And I dreamt it while I was awake!"

Ended up on the bus home with a student this afternoon - happens sometines when I leave early. This is a student who has spent the last year overseas on an exchange progamme, and has returned a year older than his peers, with a new, more experienced outlook on life.

We got to chatting about the logistics of high school and such forth, when, out of the blue, this student told me that he was proud of me.

Assuming he was taking the piss, I somewhat warily asked him what he meant.

He pointed out that when I had first come to the school, it was obvious to him that, while I didn't have big problems, I was having difficulty adjusting to life there - I didn't really know how to fit.

However, after his year away, he has come back to see that I have grown into my role, I have become an important part of the school.

I liked that.

Sure, that's not anything that's going to "make the job worthwhile" or anything - that stuff usually involves the students doing something impressive, not simple ego stroking.

But still, it was nice to hear...

-Mighty Carl Jung

“I’m a swinging guy
Throw a belt
Over the shower curtain rod
And swing.”

-Faith No More

According to her timetable, she should have been in my class that period. Of course, despite the fact that she had turned up in uniform with all of her books and gear, she’s not officially a student. Still, she was at a loose end, and asked if she could spend the rest of the period in the class anyway. After a bit of wrangling, I let her – it is her class after all, and she’s missing out on valuable learning time. I let her in and gave her the material she’s missed out on so far for the assessment due in next week and spent a while catching her up. She spent the rest of the period working.

Two hours later, the police were at school. It turns out that I’m the first person to see this girl in six weeks, since she ran away from home.

In a horrible sort of way it’s nice that just when I think my job is settling into predictability, there are still things that can surprise me…

Now that the world isn't ending
It's love that I'm sending to you
It isn't the love of a hero
And that's why I fear it won't do

-Chad Kroeger

Evan Dorkin's comments on his livejournal;

Just because I have a modem, a few magazine subscriptions and a DVD collection doesn't mean I'm an expert on anything, and the same goes for all of you out there. Got it? Cool.

"I'm a 26 year old fellow who's in movies. Of course I'm going to find it easier than some other 26 year old fellows to get laid."

-Colin Farrell

-Mike Moore

I remember this one 21st I went to – that of a fundamentalist church goer I had known since my mid-teens. We had been growing more distant – after leaving school, she became more involved in the church, as I became less. She was church-going to the point of being insular, whereas I was spending my time with the sort of tax collectors and sinners that only a university education can expose you to.

At her “party” – precisely the sort of bloodless affair you'd expect for someone who knows no-one outside the congregation – I ended up chatting to her alone. We got to discussing the significance of twenty first birthdays. For years, I explained to her, I had never seen the point behind an arbitrary celebration of a random number. However, in the last little while, my new acquaintances had taught me the reason; Not everyone makes it to twenty one. It’s not an arbitrary excuse to have some friends over – it’s a celebration that you’ve managed to claw onto survival for so long, where so many haven’t.

She looked at me for the longest time, and then slapped me incredibly hard. Then she grabbed me and held onto me tight, like she was never going to let go.

"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."

-Horace Walpole

The coda to this conversation from a few weeks back came today, at school’s official Shakespeare day; Most of the staff in some sort of Shakespearean garb, and me in my usual costume of what-I-was-going-to-wear-today-anyway-and-
you-can-stick-your-Shakespeare-up-your-arse.

The school Nurse accosted me and demanded to know where my costume was. I gave her the de rigeur answer from the last few Shakespeare evenings; that I was dressed as an English teacher.

She looked me up and down with a skeptical eye...

“No you’re not."

After minor pleasantries, this new person says: “So I hear you’re interested in tumors?”

Taken only slightly aback, I realise that there is a massive pile of papers related to subcutaneous panniculitis-like t-cell lymphoma on the coffee table – This eagle-eyed visitor must have spotted them.

“Yeah,” I mumbled “I guess I have got a bit of stuff about them here…”

New person looks with blank eyes to where I am gesturing, and doesn’t even register the papers I’m talking about.

“No, I’ve just heard.”

I always knew I had a reputation, but I didn’t know it was for this…

-Lena from tAtU

I've become so numb
I can't feel you there
I've become so tired
So much more aware
I'm becoming this
All I want to do
Is be more like me
And be less like you

(from Numb, by Linkin Park)

-Jesse The Devil Hughes

Anyhoo, in the name of experimentation, I today tried one of McDonalds’ Boss Burgers. I figured that there was nothing to fear for a person with my not inconsiderable fast-food experience.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

Even now I can feel my body going into Meat-Shock as my consciousness fades. On the one hand, I expect you all to avenge my death. On the other hand, it’s how I’ve always wanted to go…

Written by an aging science fiction writer, it clearly and with no hint of subtlety states that the whole concept of alienated and disaffected youth who believe that older people do not understand them is because young people are being controlled by a malevolent alien power.

In addition to being a classic piece of BBC sci-fi from that era, it is also a fascinating trip into the mind of a writer who just can’t comprehend the new generation, and cannot come to grips with what his world has become…

Pharrell from NERD sings the above with a “I’m fucking your girlfriend” look on his face.

Proves you can learn something from music videos – Until I saw this one, I didn’t even know there was a facial expression to convey “I’m fucking your girlfriend.”

Consider me educated.

-Jesse The Devil Hughes

Big Mike first appeared in the Occupation of ’96 – where a pack of disaffected University students occupied the registry building for a week or so to protest whatever was worth protesting back in the day.

One of the many characters attracted like moths to a neon sign flashing “freaks congregate here, we have candy” was a large man in his thirties, somewhat unconvincingly claiming to be an anarchist. His name was Michael.

So, the occupation came and went, leaving in its wake years of good stories, none of which will be dwelt on here.

Cut to a few weeks later, and a few of my acquaintances were in the goth bar du jour chatting to patriarchal Gothfather Ewan.

“Remember that guy Michael from the occupation? He’s started stalking me.”

My acquaintances chuckled and said that of course he was over dramatising things. Ewan’s response to this was simply to point;

At the next table, sitting by himself, silently staring at Ewan, was Michael.

Over the next little while, Mike became a terrible plague on the goth scene. On Mondays he was in fairly presentable condition, but by week’s end, the fact that he only owned one pair of black pants and one black shirt started to catch up with him.

One of the few times I’ve seen goths running is when there was a Running-Man-esque escape from Big Mike, where a group of heavily made-up and high-heeled figures fled from him like scared children, dodging and diving all around the student union building to escape.

There was the one story that people at a party saw him coming up the street, so the lights were turned out, the stereo switched off, and every partygoer silent as Big Mike knocked on the door for several minutes. The party resumed after he had left.

Of course, this guy didn’t exactly endear himself to people. My brother tells the story of another occupation, where after they had successfully stormed the building, Mike went back to his mother’s house for the night (yes, he was in his thirties and lived with his mother…) and had a good night’s sleep. The occupiers, after a night trying to snatch sleep on uncomfortable chairs, were awoken just after sunrise by big gothic books tramping up the stairs, the curtains being flung open to let in the glorious light of morning and the loud proclamation “I hate sunlight!”

Eventually, he even enrolled in University.

And was promptly expelled and trespassed for stealing books from the mature students library.

He was still around, though. I remember marching up the street (there were a lot of protests in the day, but that’s another story entirely…) and coming to the legal limits of the university – which also happened to be the front gates of the cemetery.

The image of Big Mike rising up the steps of the graveyard to join the march at the legal limits of where he was allowed is something of an iconic one, if you’re in that frame of mind…

He was a regular at the goth nights – there every week, sitting in a corner for hours and hours nursing a solitary drink and not talking to a soul. I sometimes wondered what he got out of it. Sure, some people prefer quietly soaking up the ambiance, not having to shout to socialise and such forth. Of course, they’re usually doing it by choice. Occasionally I would look at him and wonder if he thought it was worth it – Years spent in the (admittedly peripheral) company of an entire subculture that refuses to meet your eye…

Last I heard, he was flitting between here and Wellington – someone saw him on the news, in the background of a protest Victoria Uni was having.

Actually, that’s not the last I heard of him.

The last update that I had said he was dead.

A vein in his head exploded or some such – it was all told to me third hand…

That’s why I’m writing this. As eulogies go it’s a bit arse, but I was in the mood to reminisce.

I’m actually sort of sad he died. Will I miss him? No. In the eight odd years he was lurking around I said something like four words to him. Do I regret the poor way we regarded and treated him? Honestly, not really. There were reasons we thought of him the way we did, and it would be a bit hypocritical to act contrite after almost a decade of this behavior...

The sadness (small and niggling though it may be) comes from the fact that, well, Mike had a shit life (for lack of a more poetic way of putting it) and now it’s over. Sitting in a club where no one will talk to him and being the butt of a lot of jokes is as good as it will ever get for him.

The life that God gave him was, frankly, sub par. The best he could have hoped for is that it would get better one day.

Now it never will.

And that is a bit sad.

You think about killing yourself as you stare at the ceiling
Ignore it
It’s just a tiny disease that the city gave you

-Henry Rollins

“[I]f you’re sensitively inclined, half an hour in front of the box is enough to make you feel thoroughly inadequate, sheltered and privileged just to be alive, Western European, HIV negative, heterosexual, unraped, unbombed, unstabbed, unmutilated, unhandicapped, uncancerous, unaddicted, unburnt, unflooded, unmugged, unpersecuted, unshot, unmined, unmolested or unsacked.”

I've always hated capitalists who think of nothing but profit. However, I've finally found a moneyed bastard I can respect - Felix Dennis, publishing magnate (responsible, most famously of late, for Maxim), poet, and 56th wealthiest man in Britain;

"People who get trapped in the tunnel vision of making money think that is all there is to life. I found just as much pleasure for many years taking vast quantities of drugs and having scores of very beautiful young girls without any clothes on around the place."

(wrote this a while back, been thinking of it recently…)

I’m writing in the kitchen. I can’t write in my room because the wiring is shot to the extent that the lights don’t work.

Of course, the kitchen table is so sticky from gods know how long without attention that I’ve had to spread a plastic bag across it to rest my notebook on.

I look out at the night street; entirely brown and dark blue, the only thing bright enough to catch my attention is the flashing neon sign “Girls”.

All the years I was a student I lived in a nice, clean, fully furnished house in the suburbs, and now, with two degrees and a decent income, I live here.

Whodve thought?

“You’re perfect yes it’s true,
But without me, you’re only you.”

-Faith No More

As he was talking I thought back to today.

I called one kid a moron in front of his friends. I threatened to rip two students’ arms off (and reattach them to the wrong person). I talked in depth about an “aura of stupid” I was convinced hovered over one of the students. Also, I hit something like six or seven students on the head with rolled up bits of paper.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s me…

Then I realise that no; it’s them.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.

-Anne Frank

Alright, I quit. No, seriously, I quit.

A sex education course pioneered at Exeter University proposes that sex education for girls under sixteen should encourage oral sex as an alternative form of 'intimacy' in order to lower the rate of teen pregnancy.

Of course this by itself is enough to send me screaming into the depths of madness, but just as I was reaching up to blind myself, I read onto the next paragraph of the study.

Early trials have been successful.

This is actually working.

I need to take up drinking. Possibly bleach.

Fuck cynicism – I have a better job than you.

-Bone Crusher