George C. Scott in 'Man Getting Hit By Football'

OW. My groin knees.

Well, Monday is here and it's day two of the after party recovery process. Actually, the enormous hangover I had anticipated on Sunday was headed off at the pass somewhat through a combination of long periods without actually drinking on the night, and then Berocca, exercise and pasta the next day, so my afternoon / evening was a lot better than I had expected it would be. My knees are goddamned sore however (more on that later), and I decided that taking a mental health day today was a sound plan.

The party itself was the usual after show drunken barn dance. My own tendency to go completely insane at these events was curbed somewhat by the fact that the various speeches, thanks yous, back-pattings and mintie awards didn't get finished until half past three, there were homicidal boguns next door preventing certain plans from coming to fruition, and I spent quite some time looking after one of the people in the cast who got too drunk. Nonetheless, there was time to have frank discussions about whether or not my youngest brother is a 'womanising bastard', climb to the top of the frame on the porch, bitch about / celebrate the show, taunt the boguns, and drunkenly injure myself.

The boguns had been having their own party directly over the fence, but it got broken up pretty quickly when someone pulled a giant knife on someone else out on the lawn and I hear threatened (in a highly cliched manner) to 'cut you up, man'. It was at this point that the police got called and duly arrived with the paddy wagon and a large squad of the 'ready to fight people' style police that you sometimes see around the place on Friday and Saturday nights - not exactly the riot police, but the 'we will break your out-of-control up party up good' police. After that it was mostly quiet from the boguns, although one of them took the opportunity to yell 'fags' over the fence at us every so often and lob beer bottles onto the driveway. When I stuck my head over the fence to inquire what the problem was, partly out of dunken bravado and partly out of genuine curiosity, I got into a 'conversation' with the lead one (who looked like a 17 year old version of Fred Durst) and he actually ended up saying (and I quote) "you know how we roll!" to me. I don't think my spontaneous burst of laughter in response was the gang-star effect he was going for, because he ended up throwing a bottle at me, or in my direction anyway. It smashed into the fence well away from me, but I may or may not have a very small piece of it currently in my hand, I'm not entirely sure. So that was an interesting part of the evening.

After the sun started coming up, somebody decided it would be a good idea to go and get breakfast, so a convoy of drunk people set out down Riccarton Road to McDonalds. At some point I decided it would be a good idea to run into someone's front yard, up a level somehow (was there some steps, or a barbecue table or something? I can't remember) and vault arse-first into their hedge. This probably would have worked well, except the hedge was made of sterner stuff than I expected, and rather than cushioning me in its branches, it simply bounced me off. I rolled right over the top of it, flipping over, fell off, and landed face down on the footpath, first point of contact knees, second point of contact face. Ow. Could be my days of doing this sort of thing are coming to an end, because A) drunk as I was, it bloody hurt, and B) as people were assisting me to my feet, I thought to myself: "Wow. That was prodigiously stupid. You could have smashed your teeth in, you lucky bastard." As it is, I just ended up with some pretty severely bruised knees, but as Danny Glover has observed in a number of films, perhaps I'm getting too old for this shit.

After McDonalds I jumped on the first bus going down Riccarton Rd with the idea of going home, I think this was about 8:30am. The next thing I was aware of was having one of those conversations you have with someone when you aren't actually really awake, the kind where you are talking absolute bollocks that is only vaguely related to what people have been saying to you. I often have these with Karen in the middle of the night when she sits bolt upright in bed and begins searching for 'the little frog creatures', fearing that ' the cat will eat them!', as a recent example. Anyway, somewhere in my brain some alarms must have gone off somewhere, because I woke up and realised I had been having this sense-challenged conversation with the bus driver. I looked around and discovered I was the only person on the bus. I looked out the window and discovered we appeared to be on Linwood Avenue. Being somewhat asleep I had evidently failed to get off at the bus exchange. I explained to the bus driver that only moments before I was fairly sure I had been talking absolute bollocks to him. Luckily he was a very understanding and patient individual who was clearly used to drunken yobbos falling asleep on the bus on a Sunday morning, and told me were actually heading back to the exchange. Eventually I got home around 11, having it seems taken about 2 and a half hours to bus home. At best I was asleep for much of that time. At worst I was kidnapped by aliens. Be sure to be on the look out for any strange behaviour that devices they may have planted in my brain may cause over the next few days / weeks / years.

Aside from the show taking up a lot of time lately, I am now just about working full time due to taking on some extra hours with the A/V department at uni - yes, (although this is more of an American thing and I'm not too concerned about it) I have become an A/V geek. Essentially I am filming lectures for placement on Web CT, about 12 hours a week. I randomly got offered this job after I had been filming for disability services, operating a handicam that plugs directly into a flat screen so one of their students can watch the lecture she is currently at on television (she is extremely near-sighted - I zoom in on OHPs, writing on the blackboard, and so on), and they needed someone to film more hours, and I happened to be standing there. I was told 'we'll offer you between 12 and 16 dollars an hour depending on experience'. I duly said 'I have no experience' and they said 'we'll give you 15 dollars an hour'. How this quite works I'm not sure, but maybe it's out of some kind of inherent institutional respect for my Masters degree. If so, it's about the only way that having one is really currently relevant to my life at all. I almost keep forgetting I have one. Actually, I'm not sure I could even lay my hands on the certificate itself...I think I know what drawer it's in, but I'm not positive. Anyway, hopefully the extra 2 dollars I recieve on A/V hours will help to keep me in Coke, and to shame the disability services office who pay me 2 dollars an hour less for jobs that require considerably more skills and or talents...but sadly they have no more money, so they couldn't pay me more if they wanted to. Never mind, you can at least be sure 'professional filmmaker' will be showing up on my CV.

Anyway now between filming lectures and transcribing textbooks I feel almost like a fulltime student again. Over the last two weeks I've learnt bits and pieces from Anthropology, Psychology, Biology, Sociology, Economics, Management Science, Accountancy, Finance and Information Systems, and more than I ever wanted to know about female genital mutilation from Gender Studies. I also went to some Statistics lectures, but I don't count them, as I set my eyes to glazed and let them pass safely over my head. I think the single best piece of new information I have learned to date is this:

Seratonin = 5HT = 5 hydroxytryptamine. (and is responsible as I understand it for keeping your brain in a sort of state of supression, which is apparently the way it normally operates. Those bits of 3rd year neurobiology I can pick up are pretty interesting.) The only shame about the name 5 hydroxytryptamine, which really rolls of the tongue, is that it is not 2 hydroxytryptamine or 3 hydroxytryptamine - which would presumably be bihydroxytryptamine and trihydroxytryptamine, respectively. Trihydroxytryptamine especially sounds like great stuff. I think someone should get onto it, even if they have to break the laws of physics at the covalent bond level, or something. How hard can that be?

There are other bits of information I have learned too, or in some cases relearned - like first year courses are freaking huge. Damn, C1 holds a lot of people. A lot of people. All of whom are 12 years old. And that courses like MGMT and AFIS, which really do seem to exist so that people who take them can get the university to specifically prepare them for the sole purpose of earning heaps of money when they leave, are strange things, and very much removed from my own concept of uni and uni experience (as I suppose should be obvious I'm proving now, with my 13 dollars an hour). To be honest though, aside from the 'junior wannabe capitalists without souls, embrace the system, suck up to The Man' aspects of such a path of learning, which do indeed offend my own probably just-slightly-right-of communist-sensibilities in some fashion, I must conceed that anyone who can actually sit through 3 years of this stuff without blowing their brains out probably deserves some kind of reasonable financial reward. After all, it's only fair for the world to compensate these unfortunate graduates for complete removal of anything resembling a personality, due of course to their long exposure to acute boredom.

Was going to rant more here, but I shan't. Bed instead. But here's news: I just finished downloading Season 2 of Harvey Birdman (Season 3 is apparently on telly on the US at the mo, working on finding the first episodes), so if you wish to have / see it (the episode with The Jetsons is particularly funny) you can give me blank CDs (2) and I'll see what I can do. Like throw the CDs out of a car window. It wouldn't help of course, but it would show that I could do it.

Ben away!