Sunday, November 02, 2008

Please Check Your Suspension of Disbelief At The Door

I very much enjoy playing video games, but as I was waiting at the bus stop the other day and mentally noting strategically important sniper positions. I couldn't help but wonder if the number of first person shooter games I play has any sort impact on me and my everyday life.
There must be others out there like me who recognise the following behaviours and don't think them unusual?
  • In movies when the character attempts to fire their gun but has an empty clip, you can't help but mutter 'dumbarse' under your breath at them, for not counting rounds.

  • Despite having never seen or even touched a real gun you can't help but correct friends and family on any inaccurate miming of weapon use.

  • In spy type movies it takes all your will power to not criticise characters if they do something you consider amateurish.

  • You no longer walk sideways - you strafe.

  • You no longer head someone off - you flank them.

  • You look left, right and up when entering a room.
  • You think in an emergency you could probably navigate your way in or out of the building you work in, via the air conditioning vents.

  • You can't help but see the resemblance between a whole uncooked chicken and a headcrab.
  • Little girls singing nursery rhymes is closer to bone chilling than cute on the nice/horror continuum.

  • When you sit at your keyboard your fingers naturally sit on WSAD and the Shift key, not JKL and FDS.

  • Entering a toilet where there is a flickering fluorescent light gives you the uber wiggins and you'll need to push the door of any empty stalls completely open before you can do anything.

  • Head shot or head home - you know it's the only way to be sure.

  • You can't shake the feeling that turning the likes of these will result in great and favourable things for you:

Sunday, April 20, 2008

If It Walks Like A Duck...

Part of the reason I've been out of the blogging sphere for such a long time is that I had been suffering pretty badly with migraines. The regular brain melting pain sorta killed off my motivation to write. Funny that.

So over the past 6 or so months I've been trying various things to try and conquer these ubergrains...

The Chiropractor
I went to a holistic chiropractor which means rather than launching straight into the adjustments, they first ask you a bunch of questions about your life (Likert scale questions so obviously deeply probing stuff). Then they take a heap of x-rays, poke your vertebrae with a magical wand thingy which prints off a colour coded picture of which sections of your spine are bung and make you watch a 10 minute video of the founder of the practice talking to you about the three types of stress (accompanied by panpipes and waterfalls).

The follow up session they tell you have a crooked back and neck, and proceed to crack them in the same way every week and in the same way as some else you know who goes there for lower back pain. It felt good to start with but I realised several hundred dollars later than I was getting a headache a couple of days after every adjustment. I figured there was no need for both my wallet and head to hurt, so stopped going.

The Acupuncturist
I next tried an acupuncturist. After an initial consult where he asked me a lot of very specific and personal questions (those Likerts were looking pretty good), taking my pulse and looking intently at my tongue, he began to describe the cause of my problems. I am apparently a crappy breather and I have a weak liver (I figure it does pretty well considering). When Mr Needles said that I also had weakness in my stomach and advised me “You hungry...you eat!” I thought it was the start of a beautiful friendship. I was soon to be proven wrong.

To be fair, when he described the feeling of the needles going in as ‘just a bit of pressure’, he was right. However, once the skin is broken he would push, twirl and flick the needles and it felt less like ‘pressure’ and more like pins being stuck into my nerve clusters.
The neck rubs and the weird pressurised leg bags somewhat overshadowed the pain so when he prescribed me a mixture of granulated herbs to mix with warm water and drink, I forked over the cash. To describe to you what this mixture tasted like would be to describe horror itself however, I took them religiously.

After a month of this highly expensive torture and continued migraines, I asked him if he thought I would be seeing some results soon. “Yes”, he said, “very soon”. At the end of following session as I was paying up/emptying the contents of my bank account, he tells me there was no need for me to come back. As he passed me the last of my herb mixture he adds “I give you more than usual because you bigger than usual.” Dude. Not cool.

So, after the pain the prick caused me (see what I did there?), he called me fat and charged me for the pleasure. I decided to try the GP again.

The Doctor
The reason I was resisting going to the GP was that I knew what he was going to say. The allopathic treatment for migraines is either anti-depressants (urgh*) or beta blockers. I’d taken beta blockers several years back and not only did they cause me to personality flatline, they also made me plump up and cough like an emphysemic sailor. However, given the alternative seemed to be more migraines, I went back on them short term over the Christmas break. Turns out last time the personality dysfunction wasn’t about the beta blockers, it was about being morbidly unhappy in my arse ex-relationship. I did get chunky and my cough made me quote Doc Holiday more than once however.

A Happy Ending
Turns out that if I avoid my food triggers of wine, cheese and chocolate** and exercise every day I only get one or two brain cramps a month. So I’m now chemical free. Heh. Sorta.

* I’m a dirty booze hag remember?
** I know, I know....yes, it totally sucks, but there are adequate substitutes and we’re not talking about Satan’s inner sole/carob.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Meredith?

So yeah. I'm back and stuff.

On Thursday I had to attend a launch party thingie for a website I've been project managing for many months. It's been a 'challenging' project so it was lemon juice on paper cuts when I found out it was at The Lanes bowling alley.

Ever since I was a kid I've disliked bowling...partly because of the shoes and associated grossness that goes along with greasy food, bad music and throwing heavy balls at 10 pieces of white plastic, but mostly because I suck horribly at it. So I was pretty dark on the fact that I had to attend this 'party'. Knowing I couldn't show up and associate with clients in the mood I was in, I tried to cheer myself up as I was walking down to The Lanes. For some odd reason the song "My Favourite Things" from The Sound of Music popped into my angry little brain. As I tied to recall the lyrics I realised that my favourite things are actually quite different from ole Maria's.

Here's my version:

Raindrops on roses and all the earth kittens,
bright coloured Muppets and possum fur mittens,
brown d.vice packages tied up with strings,
these are a few of my favorite things.

My Little Ponies and strong coke and bourbon,
door bells and door slams on Jehovah's suburban.
Plunging neck lines and the way Eddie Vedder sings.
these are a few of my favorite things.

Girls in a cheap dresses caught right up their asses,
makeup that stays on my nose and eyelashes,
loud belly laughs that show QI brings,
these are a few of my favorite things.

When the bills bites, when the head stings,
when I'm feeling mad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
and then I don't feel so bad.

Cheered me right up and I bowled a 91 and 93 including 5 strikes.