EDIT: I went back and finished the draft I had started before I posted this. See former entry for the updates I was referring to in here. Well...as many of them as I could be bothered doing. *lol*
Var
sent a postcard on 9/23/2008
HOKAY.
On the agenda tonight: (1) fractured foot (2) career opportunity? (3) wushu cross-training! (4) bad? haircut
(1) Let me explain something to you about my sleeping habits. I get very little sleep and often at really strange hours, including like...2-hour naps whenever I can get them. So waking up is quite a feat for me most of the time. As such, I use both my clock alarm and my phone alarm to wake me up. I set my clock alarm for the actual time I want to wake up and put it right next to my bed. The quieter phone alarm I set for about 15-30 mins before the time I want to wake up (depending how much sleep deprivation I have suffered beforehand) and put it across the other side of the room. Rationale behind all this: - First alarm goes off. I have to actually get up and walk across the room to switch it off, waking me up partially. - Will inevitably crawl back into bed. - The second alarm goes off a little while later. I'm already half-awake from the first alarm so this time can actually fully get up.
Usually this system works fine, although sometimes if I'm taking a nap, I wake up three hours after I set my alarm, find my clock alarm switched off and my mobile phone under my pillow with no recollection of ever having moved from the bed. *lol*
On this one occasion, I was taking one of these naps but surprisingly I did wake up - kinda. The first alarm went off, startling me with its loud DMX - "Party Up" ringtone. Dazed, confused and desperate to stop the loud noise, I leapt out of bed and stumble-dashed across the room. Half-asleep, I failed to notice that my foot was dead (pins and needles, y'know?) and when I put it down, instead of obeying my order to lift the toes and put down the heel, it just hung limp and I put my full weight down on the bridge of my foot. THAT woke me up.
So my LOVELY, WONDERFUL, AWESOME housemate drove me to the nearest emergency ward and then kept me company in the waiting room, even though it was about 3.5 hours until I was called up. Had an x-ray, was diagnosed with a very, very small fracture, given crutches and sent on my way.
Crutches are HORRIBLE. I mean, great for avoiding pain, but when you want to pick stuff up? No chance. Carry things around? Uh uh. Attract weird stares from strangers? Congratulations, you've hit the jackpot! ~_~;;
Anyway, should be walking normally in a week but have to wait another 5 weeks after that before I can get back to true normalcy. No wushu and no treadmill. I'm gonna be faaaaaat... T_T
(2) My university (as I imagine most do) has a careers and employment database which lists jobs for the students. I happened to be surfing this one night (god knows why when I already work like...30 hour weeks on top of full-time uni X_X) and found an ad for a new company needing a writer for a company profile. My current job requires me to write up lots of resident letters for the student accommodation, marketing propoganda for the hotel and reports for the bigwigs in head office so I figured, "Hey, there's some easy, once-off cash." They even provided the content - I just had to rewrite it in a non-retarded way. Easy.
So I shot off a four-sentence long email to the address supplied saying that I was a uni student interested in a writing career and would be happy to do some proofreading/editing. The guy got back to me quite quickly but unfortunately he had been running on a really tight deadline and had ended up needing to hire a company to do the profile instead. However, he mentioned that he might need someone to write articles in the future, full-time. I explained I would love to write, but there was no way I could do it full-time being that I was at uni and also had another job. "Okay," he said, "I'll get back to you." Seemed like a classic shut down line and I was a little disappointed but knew that I had made the only decision I could have reasonably made without driving myself into the ground.
About four months later, I'm at home and I get a call from a new number. Pick up. "Hi, is this Varya? This is J. I was wondering if you're still interested in writing articles?" We got into a lengthy discussion and at first I thought he just wanted me to write a couple of articles for the company's free quarterly interest magazine. I was fine with this, and was fine to do this for free as well, just for the experience and also cos they're involved with charity work. However, by the end of our discussion after I had pretty much agreed to do it, I realised that what he actually meant was that he wanted me to do ALL the articles and was offering me full editorial rights!! I couldn't believe it - this guy didn't even have an example of my writing style and didn't know anything more about me other than what was disclosed in those fateful four sentences and he was offering me my own magazine! It was way too good to turn down so I expressed enthusiasm, but honestly and bluntly explained to him that doing all the articles was probably beyond my capabilities considering my existing commitments. We kind of wrapped the conversation up there but it was pretty much agreed that I was going to be involved in some way or another.
He got back to me about a week later with a second writer, more articles and the decision that I would be getting paid for them whether I liked it or not. We sat down and had a proper face-to-face meeting and after getting more background on the company I was getting even more excited. Really nice guy with a lot of passion for his business; he's not in it for the money but for the company growth. Very laid-back and approachable...a bit of a tendency to go on tangents, but hey, so do the best of us, right? ^_^
So anyway, I am going to be doing half the articles and get co-editorial rights for the magazine. If it gets a good response, they might start releasing it monthly and I will have a full-time professional writing job waiting for me after graduation! =D
I know it's not really what I like doing...in fact, I've always hated journalism. But it's a foot in the career door and is how I have always worked: you gotta start in the shit if you're ever going to work up to being the shit. I used to work in some pissy cafe earning peanuts while customers abused me. Then I worked in a pub/restaurant where the money wasn't in the wage but in the tipping, which incidentally was a direct function of how hard you could get the patron (yeah, 99% were male - who's gonna bring their wife when there's a pretty bartender for visual-raping?). Now I'm acting as stand-in for the manager at my workplace, don't have to do ANY cleaning or standing for 14-hour shifts, and have received a pay raise even though I'm in a casual position. Start modest, work hard and you will reap the rewards.
This post has ended up being way longer than I intended so many I'll leave (3) and (4) for another time. *hehe*
Var
sent a postcard on 9/19/2008
To those who don't actually know me, this will probably make me sound like a slut, but I thought it was too funny not to quote.
Jackie says: I only remember your guys by their nicknames and like, the occasional numeric suffix to differentiate between the Boys with Names that shall not me named. Var says: I think that is probably the most creative labelling of my exes I have ever seen.
Var
sent a postcard on 9/17/2008
What is it with old people?? Omg...I swear. I thought I loved old people but really, they're starting to freak me out. So remember the whole episode with the old man giving me candy the other time? Something kinda similar happened today.
Well okay...it was not really similar at all except that it started off with a random old person staring at me, hard. I was on the tram last night coming home from work. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with Melbourne tram seating structure but basically I was in a one-seater facing another one-seater. Now these seats are seated quite close but when people are sitting in them, they usually politely but deliberately position their gaze out the window or even sit sideways so that their knees are in the aisle instead of almost brushing yours.
So anyway, I was sitting in one of these, coughing for all I was worth (cos I'm quite sick at the moment but apparently that doesn't justify a day off work) and then a woman sat down. Fair enough; the tram was pretty full, there was an empty seat across from me. No big deal. Actually she probably wasn't that old...maybe very late 50s to early 60s and she was a black woman whose clothing (not to be racist) reminded me of one of those African American slave women. Like, she was dressed in this broad-brimmed hat and a kind of patchwork pinafore which somehow managed to look out of place and perfectly normal at the same time.
My coughing subsided and I followed tram etiquette and firmly stared out the window. However out of the corner of my eye I could see that the woman was NOT looking out the window but straight ahead. Once again I was going for this "staring out into a middle space which just happened to be located near my face" hypothesis like last time. I turned my attention to our reflection in the window to confirm this, but she was not gazing or spacing out...she was looking at something. Intently.
To my horror, I saw in the reflection that she was starting to lean forward too. It was like one of those ghost movies where in the reflection you see a person leaning right up close to you but then you look away from the reflection to the reality and the person is just sitting there, minding their own business, not doing anything. Unfortunately for me, the reality matched the reflection.
I thought perhaps she was trying to read the tram route map on the wall behind me or something, but was too freaked out not to be sure. So I turned to look directly at her and you wouldn't believe - she was staring right at me, at my chest! Not only that, but she was still leaning forward. By now there was probably only about a foot between my actual body and her face which was closing fast.
In my most scathing, fuck-off voice, I said, "Can I help you?" from between gritted, bared teeth.
Finally she looked up at my face, seeming to ignore my fierce expression, and smiled. Then she touched her own throat and muttered, "Your necklace...it's beautiful."
Oh.
Well, shit.
I could feel my cheeks burning with embarassment at my hasty hostility. "It-it was a gift from a friend," I stammered.
"Real diamonds?"
I let out a short bark of nervous and derisive laughter. "No. I doubt it."
The woman sat back, still smiling and I burst into another fit of coughing partly because I could still feel the tickling at the back of my throat from the sickness but mostly because I wanted to end the conversation.
The rest of the tram ride I continued to look out the window but could see in my peripheral vision that every now and then, the woman would turn to stare at my throat again. I was more than happy when my stop came around and I hastily got off, not sparing the strange woman another glance. But as I was waiting to cross the road and the tram moved past, I could see her staring out the window, her eyes following me.
Var
sent a postcard on 9/14/2008
Haha...yeah I know that it's not really a proper blog post but nothing of particular interest has been happening recently, unless you want me to write what I have done each day which is boring (saw Harold & Kumar 2 with dude, went clubbing with friend and got absolutely shitfaced, spent my 7am-start work shift later that morning trying not to barf on the hotel guests, went to the parentals' for Father's Day/Mother's b'day).
I thought this was really sweet and it's another notch on my belt for proving that long-distance relationships can succeed. A lot of my friends are currently in serious LDRs and often fret about how they "never work". That might have been true years ago but these days with webcams and internet and phone technology, it's really not that bad. People just need to forget about the "long-distance" part, just realise and acknowledge that they are in a valid relationship and make the most (best) of it.
Also, I'm a big fan of the production team who made this short. Many a time have they caused me strange looks from my roommates while I'm laughing out loud at the laptop. Check out more of their films on YouTube here.
Var
sent a postcard on 9/09/2008
So rather than being kicked around,
I'm going to kick you to the curb
So rather than being pushed around,
I'm going to push you away first
So rather than trying to protect you,
I'm going to cover my bases first
So rather than trying to open my heart,
I'm going to lock it with a key
So that only the special ones Can ever get through to me
