Monday, December 03, 2007

Lowdown

I think an unnamed cartoon monkey put it best when he wrote; "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times".


Friday afternoon saw me in a foul mood. It started when I was reading some local blogs during my coffee break, culled from blogspot's list of blogs tagged "Perth". I think I was experiencing what Katra calls "freudenschade" - misery at the joy of others. After I finished reading a random selection I was more depressed than I've been in months. Here's an abbreviated reenactment:


It's our third anniversary today, and honey, I just want you to know that not a day goes by without me thanking God for such a beautiful, funny, sexy...

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I am the luckiest person in the world...

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As soon as we get back from trekking in Nepal we're going to get to work expanding the business. It's going to be amazing to see the...

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I can't believe the way you really "get" me...

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Here are some photos from Kate's wild party (that's HalfDog with me at the turntables)...

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The new album's nearly finished...

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...the best fun ever...

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...so much in love...

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...really couldn't be happier...

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...thrilled to have experienced...

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK *Sound of mouse being hurled against wall*


I'd also been struggling with a Word document that had been cobbled together from the corpses of half a dozen other Word documents, and it was resisting all my efforts to get it to format correctly. I was gritting my teeth and hissing damnation at the screen as the computer decided that, when I ordered it to paste a few lines of text into a paragraph, what I really wanted was for the following paragraph to be reformatted into 4 point Helvetica Bold with margins extending somewhere out into the carpark.


Battling peak hour traffic on the way home did nothing to alleviate my mood, even with the roof down and the wind in my hair. In fact it got worse, as the pleasant summer sky suddenly turned black and sent a heavy squall of rain across my exact position. The rain lasted precisely the amount of time it took for me to pull off the freeway and raise the roof... and then it turned back into a a pleasant summery day, leaving me to stew in a hot humid car with saturated upholstery. The half hour after a got home was accompanied by a soundtrack of slammed doors, random swearing, and whatever inaudible sound blood pressure makes as it rises into the danger zone.


Something needed to be done. So on Saturday I devoted myself to the three most effective forms of therapy:


1) Cafe Therapy

I started my Saturday with a couple of flat whites and some fruit toast at Food For Me, which I stretched out over an hour and a half while I read the newspaper and some design magazines. As a bonus I arrived just in time to snag the last free table; freudenschade was replaced with schadenfreude as one annoyingly beautiful yuppie power couple after another came in, only to be turned away disappointed. Ha!


2) Retail Therapy

I did a Grand Tour of Shopping, looping around from my home through the western suburbs, down to North Fremantle, up through Applecross and back to home. Technically I was supposed to be buying a birthday present for a friend, but instead I bought myself a glazed ceramic tray, a 1920s Art Deco covered dish, some plastic toys and a copy of Life magazine from 1968 with Barbarella on the cover. Hubba hubba.

My friend eventually got some very expensive soap from her favourite very expensive store.


3) Party Therapy

I went to a cocktail party in the evening, hosted by a couple who have the two greatest attributes of successful partygivers. One, they understand that a good party requires money, time and effort in large doses. Two, they're not the kind of people to suffer fools gladly - heaven knows how I've managed to sneak under their radar all these years - so the party was exclusively crowded with interesting people. I drank nought but champagne, ate nothing but exotically prepared seafood, and talked to no one but the charming and the accomplished.


So by Sunday my mood had returned to a state of equilibrium. The trick now is to keep it that way.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The purchases sound good. How about a picture, including Barbs. You must turn straight to Worst of Perth if the happy blogs get you down.

8:39 AM  
Blogger Blandwagon said...

Don't worry, TWoP, pictures of Barb will be posted soon. They need to be shared with the world.

10:38 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Vist more good photos for Annapurna Regions

http://www.heiantreks.com

Francis...

4:03 PM  

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