Post 150 (filling the void as easily as I fill a box with maps)

Ah, 150 posts, didn't time fly? I'm quite a self reflective person, actually, pretty guilt ridden because of my lapsed catholic upbringing where everything was a sin, but I find the accquisition of tastes and goods and CDs and posters (don't ask) and DVDs bought in London over time to be endlessly fascinating. I'm also a bit of a nervous person, I do worry a lot. However, there is a lot of things lying about this room at the moment that sign post the person I used to me (the signed Jessica Mauboy Idol poster, however, is a person I don't recognise). I wish I could find my diary (the only one I kept ever) from 97, so I could remember more about who I was, but at least today I had a better idea of who I wanted to be, in the self reflective glimpse of a well worn face over obsessing about statistics and figures. While I can't care like her, I was at least trying, so I was happy about that, and no, it wasn't because Barack Obama won and made me realise good things about life. I was more into Steven Gerrards 95th minute penalty...when you are trapped, genuinely trapped, it's good to have days when it doesn't get you down. The person I've become is OK, but there's a terrifying coda in my head these days - my cousin, who died two years ago, that scares me. He was only 39, and now his insurance money has been used to set up the business of his fiancees new boyfriend. She keeps going round to my aunties house and saying it like it's a good thing, but more significantly, he drove himself into the ground with hard work and I guess the short and fickle nature of life continues to scare me, as is the thought of someone inheriting my possessions, particularly my Weekend At Bernies Box set. I did learn a lot though, and have changed as a person, I really have, I get far less hung on on minor worries, but the motivation to live each day as full throttle is still questionable...

When I failed uni, I can't say I was sad or upset or anything that I should have been. I guess it was sort of like being on death row in a way, even down to the fact I had a last meal before facing parents who were a lot angrier than me. I wish I had been more bothered, but I just wasn't, although my Dad was pretty annoyed that my plans for the next year involved third year studies of Thelma and Louise (or as he puts it, do they come back up for a sequel?). My upthrusting and somewhat overambitious girlfriend was even more annoyed than they were, although she expressed that anger by not cooking the nights pie properly. Suggesting even gently though that the crust needed work would have been call for a slap however, so I kept quiet. As it happened, I thought I had a burgeoning career as a music journalist to fall back on anyway. I didn't really fancy explaining to my mother that I was working on a music newsletter on that fandangled new contraption called the Internet, or that I was going on be on popular alternatastic radio sation Triple J talking about my love of music, but in any event, when I was on Triple J, I think I was pretty genuinely rubbish and sounded about twelve (my girlfriend thought I sounded like Linus from Peanuts, and that was being kind). To be honest with you, that's a pretty big blur in my life that moment, except for the fact that because I was living with my parents, who were pretty unhappy with me, I had to sneak out of bed about eleven o'clock to take a phone call from Richard Kingsmill and was really expecting Mum to storm out and demand to know who I was on the phone too in the middle of a live cross. It probably says a lot about my state of mind though that what really upset me about failing uni was that I had a lot less Internet access to pen my thoughts on the popular music scene rather than what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I woke up each day for the first time in my life with literally nothing to do, and it was quite strange. I distinctly remember one day just deciding to go for a walk out of nothing else to do, ending up on a distant point on Kingston Beach, and just watching people doing things for hours. As this day unfolded in a sea of indifference, sea spray and fat joggers collapsing in the sand, a man on the beach had a heart attack, or he choked on a peanut, one of the too, and there was some incredible screaming from a woman in a black dress who sort of screamed to everyone that someone should help him, without seeming to offer much help herself. The man eventually got off the sand just to tell her to shut up. And although this delicious black and sand comedy was unfolding in front of me, I was so disengaged from all reality, I can clearly remember thinking, well, that killed ten minutes, and then went and had a lime spider that I paid for with a five dollar note I found on the beach. Not god I hope that guys OK or god I could help, but that killed ten minutes. Accutely guilty, I went back to the beach and watched as he was loaded onto the stretcher, and calling the ambulance man the c word (not cardiac) and thinking, well, I was right the first time...

I think the worst moment of this strange few months of nothingness was probably my experiences being paid (in experience as Hank Hill would say) to trim branches. I am definitely not cut out for gardening, and would sort of lop and hack leaves with mad abandon, hopefully not killing the plant. I didn't even have the muscles that would have got me noticed by the bored housewives of Kingston anyway, so it was pretty much just not killing plants, and drinking juice if I was lucky. My girlfriend got me a job interview with a company who wouldn't tell anyone there what job we were applying for until day 3 of the course. Our leader, a camp guy not unlike James Van Praagh, took his time for telling us that we would be going door to door selling knifes, at which point a little pantomime voice in my head said "Oh no we're not" (especially during the company song) and got out of there pretty quickly. Worse, I had a job interview with Vodaphone where, in a simulated call centre exercise where the caller (a character actor called Kevin no doubt) was trying to find Vodaphones number (ooh you tricky minxes) I couldn't find Vodaphone anywhere on the computer, until the voice on the other end of the phone broke all sembelance of character and told me how to find it - suffice to say, someone was lopping branches the next day. And then, the final indignity - no, not collecting the dole, although that was depressing enough, being swallowed up by endless forms and the cold wind of the courtyard - but selling CDs at Cash Converters. I found this a lot more fundamentally depressing than failing uni if I'm honest, being trapped in that tiny little room with the appraiser looking at my Martin/Molloy CDs as if he was appraising a gem. No one needs to go through the painful process of selling a CD to try and live, and having an awful man in a starchy white shirt stroking his beard intently and smirking as he offers you two dollars a disc...his attitude grated with me violently, and when Kingston Cash Converters closed down a few years later in a flurry of unpaid bills and left a big pile of letters under the door, well, I wasn't especially sad, let's put it that way, and if that guy lost his job, I can suggest he might give me a call, I wouldn't mind appraising your valuables...

My parents and my girlfriend (if she even remembers me) will no doubt believe that it was their love and support that got me through this difficult time, but don't listen to them. Who got me through was a Chinese lady called Xu, who worked at the Hydro. I worked at the Hydro for three days, on a strictly temp basis, and my taxing job was to put maps in a box. Why wasn't really explained, but they put me in a big room with a lot of boxes, lots of chairs, a Commodore 64, a fridge full of small orange bottles of pop, but strangely, very few maps. The whole thing was incredibly strange, and had it been a few years later, I would have suspected I was being set up for something high-larious on Scare Tactics. So I kind of threw the maps into the boxes and set off to get some water from the vending machine (my tolerance for orange pop untested). Xu, my boss, asked what I was doing, and I said, well, maps went in box, now water comes out of machine (I was quite literal in my descriptions at that point in my life), and I remember this amazingly clearly...she gasped. Now, I hadn't had anyone ever gasp before (except my girlfriend...am I right folks...ah never mind) like it says in novels, but she quite clearly gasped. It wouldn't be a stretch to say she swooned. "No-one," she said in a soft, amazed voice, "has ever, ever done that so FAST!" and she took my hand and told everyone in the office about the incredible boy who could put maps into boxes. Then, I swear, they let me play on the Internet for the rest of the day as a thankyou, and they bought me a muffin. After six months of being yelled at, told I was useless, told that I wasn't going to amount to anything, after six months of my girlfriend whipping me (mostly at that skiing game on the ATARI) I actually had someone being amazingly kind and nice to me. Sure, it was a little bit mental, and I felt a bit like I was being severely buttered up to do something really unpleasant, like fire someone or go and kill some anti Hydro protesters, but it was definitely something that I appreciated, that someone finally made me feel wanted, and probably woke me up and engaged me in what I was doing for the first time in a long time. The gesture was so appreciated, I positively bounded into work the second day, to see Xu wearing short workout shorts, a winter coat, and furry winter boots, and the entire office huddled around a computer talking about an online horse racing "be the jockey" computer game the entire office was playing...it was a nice world to visit, but not to live in....

And of course, the next day, I left, but that, as they say, is a story for another Mauboy...