Monthly Archives: January 2004

Running from the wedding

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The wedding reception/cocktail party was cool. After briefly having a social anxiety moment and deciding that I would stay at home and clean my bathroom rather than going, I ended up teaming up with another friend who was going through exactly the same crap. Yay for social anxiety!

So we showed up. It was held at a bar down by the waterfront that overlooked the harbour and a bunch of apartments. There was free brooze. Chur. The bride may have been very drunk, or she may just be like that all the time. I’ve only met her once before, so it was hard to tell. There were speeches. An ex-girlfriend yelled out something. It was briefly moving and touching and all that, but my friend and I ended up speculating on how long it would last.

Not that we specifically thought their marriage was doomed, it’s just that I only know a couple of people my age who are married, but a know a whole lot more who are divorced. A few get engaged then break up, but most couples just seem to stay together until they get sick of each other. How very modern.

The wedding cake was chocolate, which is very pleasing because I’m not much of a fan of the old fruit cake. (Dammit, I should have taken a slice home and squished it under my pillow so I could dream of my future husband.)

There was a bit of talk about how the wedding wasn’t traditional, but it was actually very traditional. The little details within the wedding may have been updated, but the basic traditional wedding template was exactly what it is for most weddings. Just because you get married on a beach instead of a church, or have a DJ instead of an old lady at an organ, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking new wedding ground. Not that there’s anything wrong with ye olde wedding

After the reception we went to Burger King and continued bitching about weddings.

I bought some running shoes a couple of days ago. It’s the first pair of proper running shoes I’ve ever had (having previously gone for cross-trainers). They fit superbly well and support all the mutant parts of my feet. I’m going to do Round The Bays, and I want to run as much of it as I can. So today at the gym I did a solid ten minutes of running on a treadmill. This is good because running has always been really hard for me. Now I have one less excuse.

Two films

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Honey

There’s this girl called Honey and, like, she’s a really good dancer and some video producer spots her and gets her to be a booty girl in one of this videos, but, like, she’s such a good dancer that she starts choreographing stuff, then she won’t put out so the producer is all “bitch” and then the youth centre is condemned so she’s like “I don’t need no fancy choreography job. I’m gonna open my own youth centre” then Missy Elliott is like “I only want Honey to do my video, duh.” and the video producer is like “Honey, come back and do these videos and I’ll give you the money for the youth centre” and she’s like “I don’t need you” and then she has a fund raiser and raises money and the cute little boy dances and his drug selling brother stays off the streets.

But what really upset me about the film is that it teaches young girls that it’s better to go it alone and do things the hard way, rather than to salvage business relationships previously soured by bad sexual relations. Sometimes Missy Elliott will come along and save the day, but other times you just have to take the music video producer’s dirty cash.

Lost In Translation

At the end of the film, Bill Murray whispers something to Scarlet Johansson. We can hear the murmur of his voice, but the ambient noise make the exact words unintelligible. It’s like the climax of Radiohead’s “Just” video. We’re not supposed to know what he says, because it’s a private moment between the two characters. But it drove crazy the people sitting on either side of me. Almost simultaneously two women leant over to their boyfriends and whispered, “what did he say?” and the boyfriends whispered back “I didn’t hear”.

I’ve heard “Lost In Translation” described as a romantic comedy, but it’s not really a comedy. It’s more a romance, and a somewhat unconventional one. Scarlet plays a young woman who’s in Japan with her photographer husband. I like how her husband is around, and he’s sweet and kind, and he talks about interesting stuff, and when he’s away he sends her a fax saying he misses her, but yet it’s the sort of textbook modern romantic stuff that doesn’t mean anything when he’s also being drawn in by the spunky blonde actress who’s also in town.

There’s been criticism about the way that Japanese are portrayed in the film. There are no major Japanese characters in the film, and most come across like funny like people who are very polite or do really wacky zany things. But to me it seemed liked like the way Japan and the Japanese might come across if you were to only spend a week there. It’s all the differences that stick out, the stuff that reminds you that you’re not home anymore. It’s a slightly surreal tint, but sometimes that’s the best way to show emotions in film.

And then there’s the romance between Scarlet and Bill’s characters. Her husband’s out of town, his wife is in another country and the most tender, loving, romantic and sexy moment in the whole film is when a hand touches a foot.

Girly Clothes Stuff

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I was trying to buy a new bra but I couldn’t find one that fit. I realised that I didn’t actually know what bra size I was, and that there was only one solution. I had to go to Smith and Caughey’s and get fitted properly by an old lady with a tape measure.

The last time I was properly fitted for a bra was when I was about 11 and I underwent the highly traumatic process of being dragged along to the D.I.C. department store in Hamilton and being declared a 10AA and given a hideous flesh-tone slingshot/bra.

It was slightly better this time, though still not one of those really rad things that happens in life. It turned out I’d had the chest size wrong. I’d been going bigger, but I should have been going smaller, to a 14. (And, yeah, a lady does not reveal her cup size, etc).

Now that I know my proper bra size I can now go and buy bras that fit. No more ill fitting cups, or bits digging in or bagging out where they shouldn’t. How incredibly novel it is to actually have a bra that totally fits properly. Highly recommended.

I was also out looking for a nice top to wear to this wedding reception/cocktail party thing I’m going to on Sunday. It was utterly traumatic because etiquette rules that ones does not wear black to a wedding, but that black is entirely appropriate for a cocktail party.

I tried on a bunch of tops and realised that now matter how discounted they were, the pregnant westie chick look was never in and will never be in.

It’s also alarming to see all the red, black and red and black clothes. It’s like that Girls Aloud video has been blown up and scattered amongst the chain stores of Aotearoa. This is one of those trends that’s come in and gone right out again in the UK. Therefore I can not bring myself to partake in it in this country. Besides, black and red are (along with turquoise) those colours that look really bad on me.

(Oh, it’s so hard being a girl.)

In the end I decided that I need a new pair of running shoes more than I need some crappy top.

Nyu-Jirando Idoru Odishon

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I went to the NZ Idol auditions today. I strolled in, bought a latte, sat down in a corner and just watched. After a while various people waiting had noticed me writing down stuff and were looking at me, like maybe I was someone affiliated with NZ Idol. I tried to look mysterious. I think I may have pulled it off.

I’ve written up my observations in the NZ Idol community.

Big Day Out Observations

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At the Big Day Out I was sitting up in the stands being disappointed by some band. So instead of trying to enjoy their mediocre set, I looked around at all the people and noticed what was going on.

Among the items of Metallica merchandise was a bandanna. Various bogan guys could be seen around the stadium with the bandannas tied around their heads. However, it was a more difficult look to pull of for girls. I saw one petite girl walking along with her boyfriend. He had the bandanna around his head, and it looked ok on him. She had also tied hers around her head and it looked terrible. Her small head meant that the bandanna was all out of proportion, and coupled with her hair sticking out the top of it, it looked more like a head bandage than a cool bandanna. Shortly after another chick walked past me. She had the bandanna tied around her hips, and it looked so cool that I heard some guys behind me commenting on its hotness.

Dehydration is a legitimate concern, but compulsive sucking of a bottle of water is freaky. There’s the baby bottle aspect of it, the gross sucking noise it makes, and the undeniable fact that seeing someone sucking on a water bottle just isn’t attractive. To use the sipper-top requires screwing your mouth into a nasty sneering position. But people have started to pick up on this and I noticed more than a few people unscrewing the sipper-top and drinking out of the bottle. It’s, like, the cool thing for 2004.

In the Black Eyed Peas “Shut Up” video, Fergie wears an boobtube with a bra underneath. This look was all over the Big Day Out. It’s cool because it means that girls who need the support of a bra can now wear a boobtube, and girls with a small bosom can wear a boobtube without it looking like they’re wearing a support bandage. But there’s one sort of girl who shouldn’t do this look: the extremely obese girl. There’s a difference between celebrating your body, not hating your wobbly bits and putting on a freak show. Boobtubes do not normally come in size 20 so the few girls like this I saw had squeezed themselves into probably a size 16. People looked, but it wasn’t a “wow, there’s someone who isn’t afraid to dress how she pleases”, but more like “Oh my God… look at that!”.

Thanks to mentions over the last year on “Space” and C4, jester hats have now moved into the category of fashionably uncool. Normally there’s a stall selling them, but I didn’t see one this year. I did actually see two jester hats, but one had beer logos on it (which probably makes it worse). Quietly on the way out is dyed hair. Back in ’94 at the first Auckland Big Day Out I remember all these incredibly cool guys who’d dyed their hair blue or green especially for the occasion (and had the stained hands to prove it). This year I didn’t see anyone who had done BDO dye job. There was a stall run by some hairdressers who were doing spray-in colours, but hardly anyone seemed to have gone there. The few people I did see with the spray-in colours looked like they were living in the past.