Gbazz

Ah the sweet sound of an update. I know, I know, its a joyous occasion, but I can hear you asking, “Why do you look so weird Brian?” Is it because I still have eye snot stuck to my eyelids? My messy hair?

It is neither of the above. The reason I look so weird is because I am tired and phlegmy, (not a real word, but let’s roll with it). I seem to have gotten sick over the weekend, and just in time for study week too!

I think another thing that’s making me tired are the dreams I’ve been having. For example, last night I dreamt that my sister and I were packing our bags frantically to catch a flight to Papua New Guinea. It was 12:30pm Dreamtime, and the flight was at 1pm, so why we even bothered trying to pack and get to the airport in time, I don’t know. Then Dream-Brian received a phone call from my mother, telling him that the flight wasn’t until next week. Meh.

An here’s the weird part, I dreamt that I woke up, decided to go for a walk and found a pair of rollerblades in the hospital parking lot. It’s been years since I’ve rollerbladed, but it’s one of the only sporty things I can do, so I decided to put them on and blade around the hospital parking lots.While rollerblading I met several people and the most notable was a guy who was a combination of Tony from West Side Story and Desiprince786 (who I don’t really like). I also met one of my classmates whose Dreamtime alternate appears to have a prosthetic leg. And not an aesthetic prosthetic leg, I’m afraid that the leg was more along the lines of Tee Hee’s claw (Live and Let Die, James Bond, 1973). Poor girl. I also ran into three of my friends who were members of a marching band, four other friends who had gone grocery shopping at 6:30 in the morning and a strange man who was following everyone else.

Imagine coming home after a good hour of exercise, only to wake up and find out it was only a dream? All that effort for nothing, and you end up aching because of a stupid dream.

Anyway, I’ve got to go make sure Abel hasn’t been paralysed by a brain infection while he was sleeping overnight.

Really, he might have.

Makes me feel: Hilarious, Thoughtful and OMGBBQWTF, I need to update!

Funnily enough, I started writing a post last night, but never got around to finishing it. The title? “Procrastination, let’s begin!…later” A fitting end for a post about putting things off till later.

First there was Gunbound, then there was Myspace, and then World of Warcraft came along. While all of those were fun, they eventually wore off, proving that I do have an addictive personality, but it seems that my addictive personality has an attention span slightly better than that of a goldfish’s.

The latest in this long string of addictions comes in the form of Stickam, one of the newest networking sites that have appeared out of nowhere. The words under its logo read “The Live Community” which are a pretty much accurate description of what it does. Stickam lets its users communicate with each other using their webcams, either by having one user host a room which other people can join, or by someone forming a chatroom which anyone can join.

Now I personally like the idea of a web based video conferencing tool, but during the four hours I used it, I felt just a little bit like a creepy old man sitting across from a high school, watching all the kids do stuff as they left school. I mean, sure, it’s fun to sit there and talk to your friends, or make more friends over the net, but wouldn’t you be paranoid that someone was pretending to be something they weren’t while they’re talking to you?

Another thing that I noticed was the amount of people who leave their cams online 24/7. The whole thing feels like a few dozen mini-Big Brothers all squished together for the convenience of all the voyeurs out there who enjoy watching the drama in other people’s lives.

Anyway the whole thing got me to thinking about how the media has been talking about how the latest generation despise the chatroom and email as things of the past. Stickam seems to have given the whole chatroom thing a facelift, since they now have chatrooms open that can hold heaps of people, and stream video at the same time. So maybe the media was a bit hasty in giving chatrooms the “dead” label.

But I have spent way too much time on the computer. (Stickam is my life now) And I should be getting to bed. How weird would it be if I had a Stickam themed dream?

I was walking to the bathroom this morning when I saw this copy of the resident’s newsletter Blu-tacked to the wall. Sorry for the crappy quality, I took it with my mobile phone. The newsletter is called Res.Com, and is a monthly production.

I work as the resident’s assistant in the dorm that I live in, and I like to think that I’m pretty easy going with some of the rules. Things like keeping the noise down late at night have to be enforced pretty much, but ridiculous things like no girls in the boys dorm? Everyone turns a blind eye to that rule.

But the story I’m telling happened last night, after a big resident’s meeting, a couple of friends, their girlfriends and myself were sitting in the TV room watching Thank God You’re Here. We had just psyched ourselves up to go out and buy pizzas and ingredients for milkshakes before The Chaser’s War on Everything started on ABC, when who should walk in but the new Residence Manager!

Needless to say it was a very awkward moment, and everyone just sat there looking at each other, expecting her to suddenly go off at all of us. Surprisingly she just asked the girls to go when she left, which wasn’t what we were expecting, and she stayed till the end of Thank God You’re Here, which was considerate of her, but still made the while room feel really awkward.

Of course after she left with the girls, the urge to go get pizza was dead, so we just watched The Chaser’s War on Everything and a bit of the comedy festival over in Canada. Nothing was really funny though, since her visit seemed to have killed the night.

The thing that sucks though, is that we knew that she had come into the men’s residence (thank God for network chat) and the girls had gone into one of the boy’s rooms to hide, but after waiting in there for 10 minutes had come back out again to watch TV.

Surprisingly she didn’t tell them off, but just told them that both she and security would be doing random checks in the future, to make sure that there aren’t any girls in the men’s residence, which blows.

The other guys shouldn’t be getting into too much trouble, but since I’m an RA, and I was in the room with them, I don’t know what kind of trouble I’m going to get into. Oh well, I can only wait and see.

The only way to win is cheat

And lay it down before I’m beat

And to another give a seat

For that’s the only painless feat

I can’t sleep. It’s currently 1:49 AM, and my eyes are wide open.I’ve tried everything, turning off the lights, drinking warm milk, playing “Sounds of a tropical rainforest” but none of it’s working.

And to make everything stranger, the images of a dog and a hot coffeepot keep popping up in my head. Am I going crazy through lack of sleep? Would it be nice to be crazy?

When I say crazy, I mean having a delusional disorder. Wikipedia says that the DSM IV defines delusions as

A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith).

Now I know that not everyone would like to be crazy, but just think about it. If you were delusional, would you be affected by your perception of how others saw you? As long as the delusions aren’t bad ones, the perk of having to constantly think of how others saw you would be a nice change.

That’s enough crazy posts for today, I’m going to go try to fall asleep while reading a book.

I’m sitting in my dorm room, looking out the window at one of the prettiest sunsets I’ve seen.

OK, I was going to go to the TV room to take a picture of the sunset through the window, but there are screens on the window, and it’s way too cold to go outside. So now you get to look at a picture of a sunset I found on Google:

I should probably be reading journal articles for my essay, but seriously, how can reading a 2-inch stack of journal articles and hospital procedure manuals motivate you to write a 3000 word essay on infection control?

Ernie’s birthday party last night was pretty cool, the usual food and drinks and since he’s Asian (different brand from me though) he had karaoke! Singstar, more specifically and it was awesome. We started around 11 PM and sang a bit of Delta with some Shannon Noll scattered in there, but towards 3 o’clock the whole room was practically screaming the lyrics to Bohemian Like You over and over again. For a party lacking in jello shots and ultrasupersonic, megalithic, back breaking dance music, it was pretty good.

Sorry for the short paragraphs, feeling tired and annoyed at classes tomorrow.

Sometimes you have this great speech worked out in your head, but your mind just comes up blank when the time comes to actually put it into words. Earlier today I had a solid idea of what was going into this first post, and it had a deep, profound message that would have left the reader thinking great thoughts, but unfortunately, I’ve forgotten what it was. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with facing your fears and preparing yourself to face the challenges in your life, however it doesn’t seem like we’ll ever find out, will we?

Forgetting something, no matter how important or insignificant is an embarrassing experience, especially if it happens frequently, in front of the same people. Some people forget little things, like feeding the fish or picking up an extra cheeseburger from Maccas, but sometimes it’s big things like forgetting to pick up your girlfriend at the airport after her 14 hour flight from Los Angeles. Everyone has one of those moments at one time or another, but it’s probably safe to assume that most people have better memory than I do.

The way my memory acts up is a little unusual, since I can always remember the events of the current week as well as things that happened more than a month ago, but the previous three weeks always seem to be a big blank piece of greyness. 

A friend of mine (Troy) recently went to Africa as part of a group that builds playgrounds for various orphanages over there, and before he left, he asked me to feed his fish. Now when someone asks me to do something like this, I usually ask them to call me everyday to remind me to actually do that while they’re gone, but since Troy was going to a whole other continent, it would be pretty expensive to call every day just to remind me to feed his fish. Now I haven’t done any of the math here, but I’m guessing that if he did that, he’d be able to buy ten more fish with the money he’d spend on calls.

So we came up with the brilliant idea of putting up signs to remind me to feed the damn fish. He ended up making three signs, putting one on my door, one on his door, and one on the bulletin board near the entrance to the dorm. Then he left for Africa, probably praying that at least one of his precious clownfish would survive while he was away. Happily. none of the fish died, but some of the credit goes to my cousin (who cares more about fish than I do) for remembering to feed the fish those mornings I slept in.

Earlier in my post I said that forgetting something could be an embarrassing experience, but now that I think about it, next time you forget something, there’s no need to be embarrassed, since you could always forget the whole incident.

I was going to put something else here but I forgot what I was going to write.