A Real Update

I have a confession to make to you, my faithful readers. It is with a heavy heart that I must admit to an act of simple deception. Remember the carnival and fireworks from the last post? They weren't in celebration of Obama's victory. They were for Guy Fawkes Day, an incredibly insane holiday where people shoot fireworks off and party. It's kinda' like the Fourth of July, except we know why we celebrate the Fourth of July--it's the day our forefathers declared independence from England and set off down the path to becoming a great nation.

Guy Fawkes Day, on the other hand, is the day a man by the name of Guy Fawkes tried (and failed) to blow up parliament in London. It's also celebrated in the UK, and I think they have it in Australia and Canada as well. But why do they celebrate the day some dude tried to symbolically destroy the English government? No one's been able to give me a solid answer, but I suspect it's just an excuse to get drunk and blow shit up.

That works for me, I guess.

Anyway, even though the celebration wasn't in Obama's honor, the Kiwis are quite happy about his election. Literally every person I talk to who recognizes my American accent asks me if I'm happy about Obama winning, and then proceeds to tell me how happy about it they are too.

And that works for me as well.

Life has been fairly quiet since my last real update. Last Sunday, Alexa and I did see a street performer who combined silly tricks with fire juggling, sword swallowing, and escape artistry with strange and crude jokes to create a pretty amazing show. We had seen part of his act on Labour Monday, but had to leave early on because we were meeting people for lunch.

Also, as I mentioned last time, I worked a few FIFA games at the stadium, and I discovered that FIFA stands for the "Federation of International Football ANAL RETENTIVES!"

Seriously, they were nuts. Coke is one of their sponsors, so they had all these crazy rules about how nothing could be advertised if it wasn't owned by Coke. Changes ranged from the small, such as having to pour beers into cups since we couldn't give the fans labeled bottles, to the large, such as blanketing the gigantic WestPac (bank that sponsors the stadium) sign on the outside of the stadium, to the utterly ridiculous, such as covering up the manufacturer names on our cash registers, the walk-in freezer door, and the various machines that keep food hot. Because, you know, McAllister's Refrigeration INC is a direct competitor to Coca-Cola, and if our fans were to see the teeny label in the back of our kitchen, they would immediately think, "Shit! I was thirsty for some Coke, but now I'm going to leave the game and go buy a giant walk-in fridge for my home instead!"

Thank god for business people.

Also, I've been doing some writing, using the word "writing" very loosely. November is National Novel Writing Month. It's just an online thing where participants try their hardest to write 50,000 words (roughly 200 pages double spaced) in a month. You "win" if you make it to 50,000 by November 30th, but there really aren't any prizes involved in winning. I'm not sure if there's a real point to it, other than to encourage people to produce 50,000-word-long heaps of doo doo. What else can you expect when you're writing so quickly and not editing? It's the method the big bad Woolfe used when writing Mrs. Dalloway, after all, and look how that turned out (oooh, sick burn). At any rate, my heap of doo doo is currently 11,130 words long. Last time I tried, in 2006, I only made it to about 7,000 before I quit. So my doo doo making skills have improved!

When not busy making doo doo, I've been working a lot more. For the past four weeks, I've had over thirty hours every week, which means I've been saving more money for fun things, like...

Whoops! Speaking of work, I had really better be getting ready to go to Domino's. There are hungry Wellingtonians who want pizza to go with their Friday night raging, and I'm the only one who can help them!