This is it

My difficulty with social situations might be my undoing in my job. My last job wasn't a lot of fun at times, especially when my boss changed last August, but obligatory social events were mercifully rare. With the move and Christmas on the horizon, I'm likely to find myself in many more uncomfortable spots before 2014 is out.

As I get older, being socially "abnormal" becomes more of a problem. I'm always having to bluff my way through situations, and it's exhausting. I'm actually better at bluffing than I realised - I suppose I've had a bit of practice by now, and because I'm shy and retiring, people don't expect me to be bluffing. But bluffing my way through an 80-minute interview is a completely different matter from several months or years of work.

I'm already looking forward to 2015 (but see below). My flatmate should be gone by Christmas. I got another letter in the mail today from the neighbours, complaining about the noise. I'm starting to getting used to Kevin's noisy habits. Less so his smelly habits; the whole downstairs reeked when I got home today. I won't miss the assault on three of my five senses. Next year might also be the year I get to go on holiday.

I was disappointed with 3 News tonight. They whipped up the Labour leadership battle into a political soap opera. Shock! Horror! The knives are out and it's carnage! Report the news guys, don't be the bloody news. Don't just make up a story. That's not what the news is for. In all fairness, things aren't great for Labour right now, and it's hard to see who can unite the party and challenge the immensely popular John Key. One supposed truism that I hear over and over is: "He/she's just been an academic and a politician and has no experience of the real world." I think that's overblown; the corporate world (which is many politicians' taste of "real life") can be just as far removed from reality.

When I came to New Zealand in 2003 I felt a real sense of optimism. I wasn't that optimistic about me, but the country seemed to be vibrant and exciting and forward-looking and progressive. And caring. Eleven years on, I don't feel optimistic about my future or that of the country. NZ's "care factor" has taken a dive. If you're struggling, there's no-one to blame but yourself and your stupid decisions. The truth is we're all a product of both the hand we're dealt and how we play it. The choices you make in live have a huge bearing on where you end up, but having those four aces in your hand to begin with gives you one hell of a head-start. And it's very hard to make good decisions when everyone around you is making bad ones. People don't seem to see that anymore.

After 68 months of this blog, and on that pessimistic note, I've had enough. I've run out of things to say and ways to say them. If something earth-shattering happens (perhaps literally), I'll be sure to write about it, but otherwise it's game over. Here are some pictures from the tunnel at the weekend:

Line in the sand

On Sunday I took advantage of the sunshine by going for a longish walk - up Mount Vic, down to Haitatai, on to Evans Bay and along the waterfront to town. I then met Isabel from the autism group. We had an ice cream from Kaffee Eis and a good chat. We then walked along Oriental Bay, from where I'd just come, and at about half-five I said I'd probably need to turn back because Kevin would be expecting me to make tea. At this point we had a long discussion about Kevin. Isabel said my level of tolerance for him rated a "fifty out of ten" and I'd need to officially get shot of him. I handed him the letter tonight with a 21st December termination date. Legally I have to give him 90 days (I thought it was less, so it's just as well I had the conversation with Isabel) - this gives him 101.

At the autism group on Monday we talked politics. It's a subject that, along with religion, is normally taboo, but they made a special dispensation this time. Hopefully the discussion might encourage people to vote. Democracy is a wonderful thing to see in action, and we should all participate in it. I was in the same group as the guy with the braces who I've mentioned before, and it was largely because of him that religion and politics were put on the no-go list. In fact we also discussed the rules. There was a general consensus that Cards Against Humanity, an extremely Aspie-unfriendly game, should be off the menu at games sessions. It's hard to disagree with that, although as those games sessions sit outside the group, it would be somewhat controversial.

On Tuesday we went to Petone for a look around our new premises. There will be 170 people there altogether. We'll move again - just 100 metres or so - in the new year. The buildings and their surroundings look good actually, although the brilliant weather meant I saw them at their best.

The election isn't far away now, and many people have already voted. The sharp increase in advance voting makes a bit of a mockery of the law prohibiting election day campaigning. We don't have an election "day" anymore. I expect advance votes to be more heavily in favour of National than on-the-day votes (let alone special votes).

Scotland hold their referendum on independence two days before our election. The polls are saying it's too close to call. There is a lot of emotion in the "yes" camp. I can perfectly understand why many Scots wish to escape the grasp of a southern England-centric Westminster government, but I don't think the ramifications have been well thought out. For instance, what currency will they use? I think the Scots will be better off if they vote "no". And who's to say they can't revisit this at a later date when they're better prepared. (I learnt a new word today - "neverendum" - describing exactly this.)

Another grand slam has slipped by where I've taken only a passing interest. This US Open produced two surprise men's finalists and a very unsurprising women's winner. I don't think I would have enjoyed either of the finals, particularly Cilic's big serving that helped him beat a better all-round player in Nishikori (if I'm to believe Mum's assessment of the match). Every set of both finals finished 6-3 - I wonder if that sort of thing has happened before. While I didn't really follow the tournament, it has given me a goal, to see next year's US Open in person.

Air New Zealand's last 747 flight took off from San Francisco this afternoon. It arrives in Auckland in the morning. "Iconic" is a badly overused word, but it's entirely appropriate for a plane that changed the world. Not only that but it's an instantly recognisable aircraft. Apart from the A380, I don't think I could instantly identify any other current passenger plane.

Tomorrow I'll be doing some field work with the Czech woman. She called our trip a "date".

It's the economy, stupid

Yesterday the southerly continued to rip through Wellington, and it kept me inside for most of the day. Inside isn't a place I like to be on a Saturday. I did however catch up with the ex-facilitator of the Wellington autism group (who I saw in Auckland last month) and her husband. They were down for Beervana. We met at Joe's Garage on Tory Street, and covered a few conversation topics in a fairly short space of time. One of them was my flatmate. He is effectively a boarder. As they say these days, I'm over it all. I count down the weekends, because they're the most exhausting part of the week, and also because 17 is a manageable number. On Wednesday Kevin had what I hope is his last operation on his bum. He doesn't seem to be in pain. He was given a lot of medication after the op, and when I got home from work on Thursday there was all manner of lotions and creams and sprays and pills, in just about every corner of the kitchen and lounge. He'd had medicines lying around for months, but I'd tolerated that, probably because I'm quite a tolerant person. But the increased volume of them was more than I could handle. "I see you've got your drugs lying all over the place, like there, there, there, and [pointing to the couch] there." "Uh-huh, yeah." Have you got Asperger's? It's OK, you can tell me. "Um, do you mind not having your drugs everywhere?" He took all the medication downstairs, including the stuff that was there before.

We also talked about property ownership. So far for me, it hasn't been what it was cracked up to be. In fact I associate buying this place with "bad", because I had quite bad depression around the time I bought it, and had to leave my well-paying role almost the moment I got my hands on the keys. That bad stuff had little to do with the property purchase, but it's hard for the mind to break the connection. It's a bit like my brother's attitude towards New Zealand: bad things happened while he was here, none of which were related to NZ, but he still doesn't want to set foot in the country ever again. Of course in my case more bad stuff has happened since early 2012 - the earthquake assessment, more depression, and a difficult-to-handle flatmate - none of which has helped. Perhaps the hardest thing for me about owning a property has been the added pressure of earning an income. Certain types of people can expect to earn an income that heads steadily northwards, or at the very least, northeast. I'm not one of those people. In 2009 I earned a good salary, then the following year my biggest source of income was online poker. In 2011 I was back to earning good money, almost half of which disappeared for the next two years. If I couldn't eat it, I wasn't buying it. This year has seen an uptick again, thanks also to Kevin, but I'm still earning far less than I was in '09 and '11, and it's anyone's guess what will happen next. That unpredictability doesn't lend itself to paying off a mortgage. Why can't I be like "normal" people and climb the career ladder? That's pretty simple, and I've said it before. Relationships, teamwork, all that stuff is far from innate to me. It wasn't obvious to me in that beanbag relay race when I was five - I had to learn what you were supposed to do - and it still isn't obvious now. And it's absolutely crucial to one's success in the workplace (and even wanting to succeed in the workplace). Joining a new organisation is always the same for me. I can wing it for a while, then it just gets too hard. That's what makes a temp job so good. You're hired to perform a specific task - there's no guesswork - and you're not expected to do any of that networking crap because you won't be there long enough.

We also talked about the economic shift that took place in the early eighties. In New Zealand the word for this was Rogernomics, after Roger Douglas, but similar policy changes took place all over the developed world. It's funny that the subject of phones came up. In the UK until the eighties, everyone had the same rotary BT phone. If you were lucky, you got to choose the colour. We had a brown one. Actually nobody really had a phone, because it remained the property of BT, which was privatised under Thatcher in 1984. I read a really good book which touched on the economic reforms of the 1980s, as well as homelessness, love and depression. Written by Elliott Perlman and based in Melbourne, it's simply called Three Dollars. At some point in the eighties, stock markets became mainstream and the ups and downs were reported on news bulletins. (The woman in the story thought this was funny - why should I care? - and came up with her own All Ordinaries index for recording the ups and downs in her mood.) In the eighties, money changed from being simply a means of exchange to a thing to have in itself, even a way of measuring self-worth. Jeez, if my salary isn't going up in real terms year after year, I must be a failure. How and why did that happen? It's an interesting question, because I don't think it's good that it happened, even if there were clear benefits to the new economic environment like being able to choose your phone, and getting your line installed much faster in a competitive market.

We did talk about the stock market a bit. It was good to talk to someone who understood concepts like over-diversification. When my gran died, she had a managed portfolio of shares. From memory she had shares in exactly fifty companies. As I tried to explain to Dad, that made no sense at all. You might as well invest in a tracker fund.

Perhaps because of the difficulties I face in keeping a well-paid career job (which are mitigated to some extent by my ability to not piss people off), I've sometimes found it hard to warm to people who do manage to climb the rungs of the corporate ladder. People who do something a bit different often seem easier for me to get along with. Maybe that's how I ended up with Kevin.

RPG - not my cup of tea

Yesterday I had that RPG session, which I only took part in because of my flatmate. Any excuse to get out of here for a few hours. I enjoyed it about as much as I expected to. There were some really uncomfortable bits which involved me having to talk and try to disguise the fact that I had no frigging clue what was going on. I do get the appeal of RPGs, they just don't appeal to me. Different strokes for different folks. Tracy, the "game master", had spent many an hour preparing for the afternoon, and had a kind of closed-off booth set up at the end of the table with a laptop and rule sheets and books; it all seemed completely nuts. When we slew the minotaur, it was all over. We didn't go far beyond the allotted five hours, which was a relief.

By the end of the RPG I'd had more than enough, but Tom and one of the others had arranged more games, with pizza, at someone's flat near the railway station. I was persuaded to drive there, this "someone" turned out to be a nice bloke, the we played two games that were far more enjoyable to me: Tsuro and Phase 10. For Tsuro, the rules stated that the oldest player starts. Oh great. I might as well have been eighty. I hadn't played Phase 10 before, and some of its rules could do with a tweak if you ask me (I think all runs should have to be of the same colour), but at least I understood it, and I've always liked rummy-type games. There were a few aspies there, so some of the conversation was, um, interesting, but all in all it wasn't a bad evening.

My flatmate really is a lazy bugger. To give you some idea of how lazy he his, he doesn't bother eating the bottom 5% (at least) of the insides of any food container. That probably shouldn't annoy me as much as it does, but if you can't even be arsed to scrape out a jam jar, it can't be a good sign. What's more, recycling is a foreign concept to him. That would involve actually rinsing out the jar and putting it in the recycling bag for me to put in one of the bins downstairs. Way too much effort.

I sent my boss an email, basically asking for more direction. He's now pencilled in two hour-long sessions a week with me. He's done something similar with my team-mates. I'm glad that my email has resulted in (I hope) positive change.

I saw a French film - Folies Bergère - at the Embassy today. I enjoyed it from start to finish, but the scene that stood out for me was the father watching his son give his acrobatic performance - that was a beautiful moment.

Man and beast

The temperature in the Brecon Beacons is forecast to be 26 degrees on Thursday. I hope my brother is OK. In contrast, in Wellington, it's been the first day of what I'd call proper winter.

One of the facilitators from the autism group – I’ll call her Isabel – volunteers at the Wellington SPCA. On Sunday she gave us a tour of the premises. This was quite popular – many people on the spectrum have a strong connection with animals. The SPCA recently moved to the old Fever Hospital, which opened just after World War I as (mostly) a final destination for TB sufferers. Unsurprisingly the building is supposed to be haunted, but it now works very well for the SPCA. It was upsetting to see animals that had been neglected. At one point I had a dog on my lap who was shaking like crazy; apparently she was just very shy, and had actually improved in that regard since arriving there. I hope she goes to a good home. The cat section was the best – I could have taken any of a number of them home with me, but alas the body corp rules prohibit pets. Tom was fascinated by the microchip reader. He thought that humans should have chips implanted too, so we wouldn’t have the hassle of carrying around bunches of keys everywhere. I’m happy with things as they are, although come to think of it there have been occasions when a microchip might have saved me some embarrassment. Some of the group went to lunch at the Hong Kong BBQ on Kent Terrace – I’ve eaten there before – but I already had food and drink on me and I just walked to my car and drove aimlessly for a couple of hours. I needed some time and space to myself – the car was the only real answer.

On Friday night I’m flying up to Auckland. I’ll be staying four nights at that motel in Epsom I was hoping to avoid this time, but it was the place that made the most financial sense. My room will have a TV with a few Sky channels, one of which will be showing a sport I neither care about nor properly understand. I might even notice a slightly unpleasant smell when I walk into my room for the first time, but the niff won’t be attributable to anyone in particular, and anyway I’ll soon get used to it. I’m looking forward to it all. I hope to see Richard, Bazza and the woman who used to facilitate the autism group in Wellington. Seeing people is the main reason I’m going. The other reason is not seeing people.

Kevin is pleasant to talk to. We do have a lot of conversation, even when, or especially when, I’m not in the mood for it (and he does like to talk about god quite a lot). It’s his complete domination of everything inside my home that’s the problem, rather than him per se. It’s a shame because with the change of job, life could actually be quite good for me right now, instead of just about tolerable. Granted, things could have been even better if that app had taken off and I’d made lots of money and I could have travelled and not had to answer to anybody, but that app was doomed from the start. It was like buying a lotto ticket with only three numbers on it. Dealing with maps of drainage networks is nowhere near what being my own boss would have meant, but it’s miles better than insurance.

So the World Cup is over. Germany were deserving winners of a very good tournament that will live long in the memory. The final could have gone either way and I'm glad it wasn't settled by penalties but instead by Götze's excellent goal. I only managed to watch the first half before going to work. I noticed that several of the German players had umlauts in their name; surely (Schürrle?) one of them would score. Germany's consistency in major tournaments has finally been rewarded. They've reached the semi-finals of every World Cup this century. England haven't got that far since I was ten. Making Messi the player of the tournament was a little odd, but what do I know? On the evidence of the few games I saw, it would have been a toss-up between Rodriguez and Robben.

Oh, and I've just noticed this is my 500th post.

My brother's ordeal, and one eternity to go

Today I sold Julie's Nissan Micra that she bought new in early 2009. It's a classic grannymobile. I don't know what colour you'd call it. Peach? Shocking pink? I felt ever so slightly silly as I drove it to the car yard. At first they would only offer $6000 - it needs some work on two panels and the colour could be a turn-off - but when they came up a thousand Julie eventually accepted on the phone. It'll be interesting to see what price they put on it at the yard. I wouldn't be surprised if it's ten or eleven grand. Julie's just found out that she might be moving from her Newtown rest home to a retirement village up in Napier next weekend. She doesn't think she can drive anymore, with her arthritis and neuropathy, so she was desperate to offload the car. This whole Napier thing has come out of the blue after a conversation Julie had with her niece. If it does happen, I won't be too disappointed that she's moved away, but I probably will go and see her. Any excuse to get in the car and well away from here.

I phoned my parents last night. They'd just got back from three days in London. They saw two shows and visited the Maritime Museum (which has changed a lot since I went there when I was 16) and a lot else besides. Today they depart from Newcastle on a two-week Nordic cruise. Where all this appetite for cruising has come from I have no idea. Maybe appetite is the word: you can stuff yourself silly if you want to.

This weekend my brother - a reservist in the British army - is embarking on a two-week SAS selection exercise in the Brecon Beacons. I have a hard time even thinking about what he'll be going through in the coming fortnight. Three people died from dehydration in last year's exercise - it was all over the news in the UK. With just a map and compass, you really are on your own there. I guess that's the whole point. But some of the soldiers involved, like my brother, have survived combat in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. That they should put their lives at serious jeopardy in a training exercise just seems so wrong. I'll be keeping a close eye on the weather forecast.

Kevin knows the date I want him out by (well actually he doesn't, because that date has long gone). But he knows the date I told him, and assuming he's gone by then, I'm now half-way to having this place to myself again. It already feels like an eternity, so I've just got one eternity to go. At work yesterday I was doing a fairly menial task, but it was strangely therapeutic too, and the last thing I wanted was to come home to 24/7 Kevin and nonstop TV.

On FiveThirtyEight they were trying to get a measure of the off-the-mapness of Germany's 7-1 win over Brazil, largely by comparing it with famous blowouts in American football. But they missed one crucial fact: gridiron isn't on the global sporting map to begin with. No result in that sport, however shocking, can reasonably compare. You can say the same about rugby, although the All Blacks are a global icon, and if they were beaten 70-10 by Australia in a World Cup semi-final (heaven forbid), that would send out some pretty big shock waves. Only two sporting events in my memory come anywhere near Germany–Brazil. The first was Michael Johnson's 19.32 in Atlanta, when he obliterated his own world record and the rest of the field. That second 100 metres was stupidly fast. The other one that sticks out is Isner–Mahut. Not the same sort of achievement of course, but tennis is a global sport, and that match even overshadowed the last football World Cup, as well as the Queen's visit to Wimbledon, while it was happening.

Had Holland won that shoot-out against Argentina, their passage to the final would have been unsatisfactory (a dodgy late penalty to beat Mexico, followed by two consecutive wins on penalties). With Argentina getting through, I know the result I want on Monday morning: a convincing win for Germany, or failing that, any win for Germany. Before the final we've got the third-place game, which has a bit more meaning (and intrigue) this time than it normally does.

Rolf Harris and cracking stats

Rolf Harris. He was on telly all the time when I was a kid. I remember him most from Cartoon Time when he did all those drawings in between clips. In 1993 he did his cover of Stairway to Heaven, complete with wobble board, which was rather good (and at the time I didn't even realise it was a cover!). All in all, I thought he was a jolly good Aussie bloke. Now, at age 84, he's been convicted of indecent assault on girls as young as seven, and he's likely to die in prison. You do that sort of crime, you do the time, even if you're 84. But it's worth remembering that it was a different world in the sixties and seventies. Since the scandal surrounding Jimmy Savile (he was also on TV all the time when I was small, and he seemed like a very dodgy bugger to me even then), several of these celebrity sex abuse cases have come to light, and we need to be a bit careful before imposing today's standards on events that happened decades ago.

Kevin likes to talk about his past. He recently talked about a time his girlfriend was stoned and almost burnt the house down by leaving a pan on the stove in the middle of the night, with two kids under two asleep. They didn't have smoke alarms. Apparently he wasn't stoned on that particular occasion, and he rescued his girlfriend and kids from the smoke and flames. He thinks he's a hero - "no-one gives me credit for saving those kids' lives" - and I tried to play down his hero status. At 22, and mentally a lot less, he was nowhere near ready to bring up a family, and neither was she. Sadly, he hardly sees his son and daughter from one year to the next.

I've started reading Quicksilver, the Neal Stephenson book that I borrowed from Tracy. She might be waiting a while for it. I have a feeling it'll be too clever for me. I finished Angela's Ashes which had the effect of making me realise I'm alive, and living with Kevin isn't all that bad. It really was miserable stuff. It also made me think what an amazing thing (from a food point of view) an egg is. You hear about super foods quite a lot; an egg is pretty much the ultimate super food. So many ways to cook them, and they're good for you (if you happen to ignore the dirty C-word). I ate two eggs a day during my one-month paleo experiment last October, and it hasn't done me any harm yet.

We're down to the last eight in the World Cup, and the classic matches keep coming. All eight group winners made it to the quarter-finals - I guess not many of the fancied teams finished second in their groups: they either went through as group winners or, in the case of Spain, Portugal and Italy, went home altogether. Five of the quarter-finalists required extra time, and two also needed penalties. The last three matches all went to an extra half-hour; those games were all goalless in normal time, but featured a whopping seven goals between them in extra time. All eight teams who played in Manaus, and therefore clocked up the air miles, have been knocked out. One of those was the USA, who were glorious in their extra-time loss to Belgium. Or at least I hope that the concept of a glorious defeat exists in American society.

What I hope the semi-final line-up will be: Colombia v Germany, Holland v Belgium.

Diving - probably my biggest hate in World Cup football - was the hot topic this week as Robben "won" that last-minute penalty against Mexico. A part of me thinks, wow, hats off to him for getting away with it, especially when it's someone that fun to watch, a bit like my admiration for an loose-aggressive poker player pulling off a crazy bluff. But there's one key difference - bluffing is a perfectly legitimate play in poker (indeed it's part of the essence of the game); diving to win a free kick or penalty is cheating.

I've been reading a few articles on FiveThirtyEight.com. It's an American site, most famous for Nate Silver's very accurate US election predictions. But it also covers sport, economics, social policy, whether we'll soon be paying to use the loo on flights... Most impressive is their analysis of footballer Lionel Messi - with all those charts and graphs, you get to see how, um, off-the-charts, this little man is. It's good to see some proper football stats for a change. People have this idea that stats don't "work" in football. Bollocks to that, basically, even if it's harder to quantitatively analyse football than cricket or tennis. Which brings me to Wimbledon. A lot has happened. Nick Kyrgios saved all those match points against Gasquet, then caused a huge shock in beating Nadal. Then Andy Murray got beaten today. Serena Williams hasn't been far from the headlines in the women's. But I haven't watched any of it and have only taken a passing interest really. With the World Cup and having a flatmate, something has to give.

Today was a crisp, sunny, South Island kind of day.

In my face

It's the weekend, but so what? I don't really want to see anyone this weekend, not even Kevin. Especially not Kevin. It wasn't long ago that some of my weekends were people-free, if you don't count the market, and I was fairly happy with that. Now there's someone around, and in my face, all the bloody time.

Yesterday I had a performance review at work. I didn't think I'd have one so soon. I did a lot better than I expected; I haven't produced or achieved anything there for weeks, but my boss didn't seem to care that much.

We're getting the wobbles here in Wellington again. Two earthquakes yesterday (although I didn't feel the first one) and two others that I've felt in recent weeks.

Tomorrow I'll be collecting for Autism NZ for three hours at the new(ish) Countdown at the end of my street.

The group stage of the World Cup has been completed; I don't think anyone can complain about a lack of excitement. The States surprised many by making it out of a tough group. Australia didn't win any games but won plenty of friends with the way they played (and scored one of the best goals). It's funny how American and Australian sporting teams (and fans) can be almost intolerable in the events they excel at, but very endearing in sports like football. Some of the images from the match between the USA and Ghana were of pure joy.
Uruguay also made it, as one of three teams to qualify despite losing their opening game. They'll have to play the rest of the tournament without Luis Suarez, who got a well-deserved ban that could easily have been longer. I couldn't believe Uruguay's population was only 3.4 million - that's less than New Zealand.
The football has been excellent with none of the ball-related problems that dogged the last World Cup in South Africa. The refereeing could have been better, but offsides are quite hard to get right and until they use technology to make those decisions, game-changing mistakes will be made.
I hope the knockout stage is as good as the group stage, and please not too many penalty shoot-outs (more about them in my next post).

It's got to end some time, Kevin

I got an email from Dad basically saying, jeez, I hope you didn't upset your flatmate when you said you wanted him out by Christmas. It's funny that both my parents seem more concerned with his well-being than mine. I took him on for the extra money, not out of the goodness of my heart, although I think I have been pretty good to him - I've given him a lot of leeway (probably too much, partly because his past made me a bit wary). He has it pretty good here, with all those cooked meals (OK I'm not that good a cook) and all that housework that magically gets done, often when he's still in bed. He has the whole place to himself when I'm out, and has almost free rein on the TV and whatever the hell else he likes. His classes are a ten-minute walk from here. It's all very convenient for him and I can perfectly understand him wanting to stay. But...

The World Cup continues to excite and surprise, not that I can watch much of it. I did catch some of this morning's game between Brazil and Mexico; the Mexican keeper was in inspired form. I still have my booklet from the 2010 tournament, with all the results filled in. The group games from four years ago look a bit dull now; some teams (um, England?) operated entirely in binary, with every game finishing 0-0, 1-0 or 1-1. I'd written in some notes from my hotel in Bali - "Channel 13 (reception awful) or 8 (not much better)" and names of countries in Indonesian that I'd picked up. Ivory Coast was "Pantai Gading", Greece was "Yunani", New Zealand was "Selandia Baru". Watching the action in a foreign country, and not having complications like work or flatmates to contend with, made the whole thing more interesting.

Warning: if you don't like maths or logic or tennis, or probably all three, please ignore the next paragraph.
Last year I promised to do a hypothetical calculation based on the Wimbledon qualifiers, and post the result here, so twelve months later... Qualifying for the men's singles at Wimbledon (which is going on now) involves winning three matches: two best-of-three-setters and a best-of-five. There's no tie-break in the deciding set of any match. The question was, how dominant do the servers have to be to make a best-of-three, on average, last longer than a best-of-five? The reason why that is even possible, in any situation, is because you're more likely to reach a long third set than a long fifth set. If you make that final set long enough (and you do that by making both players demons on serve), the greater likelihood of reaching the final set in a best-of-three starts to outweigh the fact that you've played two fewer sets to get there. If you assume that both players are equally dominant on serve, and their dominance is constant throughout the match, it turns out that we need the final set to last, on average, 14 times longer than each of the normal (tie-break) sets. That might sound ridiculous, but to achieve this the server "only" needs to win 86% (or more) of points. That's a very high percentage obviously, but you might expect it to be higher. The average length of a no-tie-break set rises steeply once you get above 80% of points won on serve. By the way, if both players are winning less than 14% of service points (and I've certainly played matches where it's felt that way!) that would do the trick too.

A guy at work is due to become a father next month. So at work today they had a baby shower (if that's what they call it when it's the father). I ended up spending over thirty bucks on this event, which is quite a lot when you don't really know the bloke. And it meant you had to talk and mingle and all that tricky stuff. And I realised that there's at least an 86% chance that I'll never have kids.

World Cup memories etc. II

I spoke to Kevin and made it fairly clear that his tenancy will end this year, not next year or the year after. That means it'll probably be six months before I get my own space back, and that's a helluva long time.
Mum and Dad are in the UK and fly to Bordeaux early next week. Dad is really enjoying the sights and sounds of St Ives and Cambridgeshire. There's a lot more life there - human and non-human - than in Geraldine. I'll give them a ring on Saturday, on which day Mum becomes eligible for a gold card. That's hard to believe. She still seems fortyish to me.

The World Cup is now just hours away. I wanted to arrange a tipping competition for work, something simple where you just put in $10, pick eight teams in advance, and get points based on how well your selected teams perform. I'm normally hopeless at organising anything, but something like that I could comfortably manage and would actually enjoy doing. Then I thought better of it, realising there is virtually zero interest in the World Cup around the office. It could have been an embarrassment if, say, only three people entered including me. And what if I'd won? In Auckland these sorts of competitions ran all the time. I did reasonably well, even in the rugby ones, despite (or maybe because of) my lack of rugby knowledge.

In my last post I said 1990 was my favourite World Cup. That's got a lot to do with England's performance and being a kid, but perhaps it was the last competition where football (in the UK at least) was a working-class game, instead of the money-making machine it's become since. The 1994 World Cup in the States wasn't bad at all, and it got plenty of coverage back home. England weren't involved, but Ireland were, and they caused an upset by beating Italy in their opening game. There was one big black mark on the '94 competition however: the Colombian player who scored an own goal was shockingly murdered on his return home.

I've read some online comments about past World Cups, and most agree that 1998 (France) was better than 2002 (Japan and South Korea). For me it was the other way round. In '98 I'd had way too much of all the England hype and I wasn't too disappointed when they were knocked out. Plus I was in the middle of my A-levels which I knew I wouldn't do very well in. The motivation wasn't there. One of the highlights for me was Jamaica making it. By contrast, in 2002 I finished my university final exams on the eve of the tournament, and after months of intense study and high-pressure exams I could watch the games entirely guilt-free. Senegal's win over France in the very first game set the tone nicely (Senegal were like the new Cameroon); there were upsets galore. England negotiated their group of death, then beat Denmark comfortably, then faced eventual champions Brazil, and with a bit of luck... The only real downer was some dodgy refereeing which helped South Korea reach the last four at the expense of Italy and Spain.

The 2006 tournament in Germany promised a lot (the hosts beat Costa Rica 4-2 in the opening game) but didn't seem to deliver much, even if Togo and Angola added a bit of colour. I quite enjoyed 2010, mainly because of what I was doing (travelling for some of it) and New Zealand's performance - it's a cliché but they really did punch well above their weight by drawing all their games. This one will be interesting for sure, with so much non-football stuff going on behind the scenes. England play Italy on Sunday in, as far as I see it, a brand new stadium in Manaus, in the middle of a rainforest, where there's next to no interest in football. England's second match, against Uruguay, is in Sao Paulo, which according to Google is 1670 miles from Manaus. It sounds like unnecessary burning of fossil fuel, and an equally unnecessary logistical headache.

At least this time the World Cup will be played in a (mostly) hospitable climate in a country that actually cares about the game. If it really takes place in Qatar in eight years' time, heaven help us.

Bummer

Yesterday Kevin had an operation for an abscess on his bum. I picked him up from Kenepuru Hospital. It seemed to be a success. He was given seven items of medication and told not to spend too much time sitting on his arse - that isn't an easy task for him. It's a problem he's had before - hopefully it'll now be sorted once and for all.

The highlight of last weekend was probably going to the zoo (it was Wellington Open Day so you could get in for a gold coin donation) and seeing the chimpanzees being fed.

You know, they eat sweetcorn pretty much how I eat it. A cheetah sadly died on the way to Wellington Zoo yesterday.

On Saturday, a wet and horrible day, I met up with this woman in her late twenties who I'd never met before. She's fairly new to Wellington and does a similar job to mine - she used to live in Geraldine and Mum put me in contact with her. We had a coffee on Cuba Street, then she took me out to Lyall Bay and we had another coffee. I quickly ran out of things to say and must have seemed very boring. I even felt very boring.

I'm looking forward to Wimbledon and the World Cup - two sporting events I actually care about happening at the same time. But right now the French Open is taking place. So many shocks already. Both the Australian Open champions, Li Na and Stanislas Wawrinka, were knocked out in the first round. I was thinking, heck, to have both champions lose in the first round of the very next grand slam must be extremely rare. I bet that hasn't happened for twenty years or something. Turns out it's never happened before.

I've just started reading Angela's Ashes. It's been sitting on my shelf for years but my dad told me it was very grim so I haven't dared read it until now. The word "arse" features quite prominently.

Discomfort zone

Tom persuaded me to attend a games night on Wednesday. It was a Reddit meetup, not that I "do" Reddit or anything. It took place at Victoria Uni, really close to where Tom designs and builds his robots. There must have been close on thirty people there, including that "Death Star" busker, who I last saw in February, still wearing that crazy jumper. I felt out of place pretty quickly. There were Game of Thrones references in conversation, which I didn't get because I don't watch it, not that I'd be able to concentrate on it if I did. There were also Monty Python references. Now I do get that, but heck, I don't know all the words to all their songs off by heart. In the first game (I've no idea what it was called) a succession of dice rolls led me to be a "traitor" whose goal was to kill the other five players in the game. Things got complicated for me quickly. I was presented with a rule book and told to study it so I could secretly plot my course of action. Jeez man, give me a pack of cards or something I understand. If it wasn't for Tom (who I'd seen too much of over the previous few days) I might well have just slipped out of the exit door and gone home, taking my traitor role almost literally. I was relieved to roll a triple blank which led to instant death for me, and more importantly the end of the game. The second game, almost inevitably given this is 2014, was zombie-dominated. Like in the first game, my final dice roll was the decisive action, although this time we won, not that I cared. Everybody seemed extremely pleasant and interesting, but wherever my comfort zone is, I was a million miles out of it.

When the games were over, Tom showed me his lab, if that's the right word, where he does all his extremely fancy stuff with robots. I felt a sense of envy: he's very good at what he does and clearly enjoys it immensely. They even had a mini-museum of old computers, calculators and slide rules. Completely unexpectedly, he then showed me where some of his ancestors on his father's side were buried, very close to the university campus. Then I walked home in the teeming rain.

I'm getting on OK with my flatmate, but the fact that he's there (and he is pretty much always there) adds a certain tinge to everything I do, to the point where I often feel unable to do anything. I know it's just me (oh, and all the noise from the TV), but the long Queen's Birthday weekend looms darkly. I wish I could get away. Somewhere, anywhere.

Puffed enough

If I walk a mile, like I do to and from work each day, I feel like I've had a decent amount of exercise. Yesterday the challenge was to walk almost a vertical mile, up to the 1529-metre summit of Mt Hector, the highest point of the Tararua ranges. Even getting up in time to be at the train station by 7am wasn't an easy task. Our starting point, Otaki Forks, was over an hour's drive away. We'd only been going ten minutes and I was already puffed. I was in no mood for energy-sapping conversation. The six others, with the exception of Tom, were all experienced trampers for whom this kind of exertion was no big deal, so I felt out of my league. I took very few photos: most of the scenery, beautiful as it was, passed me by. The saving grace was the weather which was almost perfect. It turned a near-impossible undertaking into just a very difficult one. After 4¼ hours we reached Kime Hut, 70 metres from the peak. Our leader decided that we wouldn't go any further and that we'd only have a short stop for lunch because he had an organised murder mystery evening scheduled. Bugger you, I was thinking. We were a little quicker going down, and reached the bottom at 5pm, shortly before sunset. I didn't get home till seven; it had been a long day.

It was an exhausting walk, and if I said I enjoyed it I'd be lying. It wasn't just the physical exertion, it was the people too. How dare you talk merrily about corporate restructures or the tramping club photo competition when I'm struggling to put one foot in front of the other? The memorable Akatarawa "bush-bash" I did two years ago, while also being very hard work, was very different in that respect - most of the others were having a tough time too - and the whole experience was that much more satisfying.

It's now 3½ months since I had this place to myself. I still haven't got used to the change. Unless something out of the ordinary happens, I think I'm in for the long haul (I know, I know, it's my place, I can do what I like...) but I don't think it would be fair on Kevin to get rid of him till December, in which case I'm only a third of the way through this stint. I know it's just me, but I'm unable to concentrate on things anymore; it always feels like there's someone looking over my shoulder, and $25 a day isn't really enough to compensate for that.

Going down...

Eight days in the job. Getting to know quite a bit about pipes. Compared to people, pipes aren't too bad. They had drinks after work today. I didn't want to be there but I didn't want to be at home either. After work I had that sinking feeling. The end of the week, but weekends are hard work. I was wishing I was still back in Auckland doing some kind of temporary work where I could relax and not face the impossible task of building a rapport with my workmates. Did I mention that my job isn't permanent? It's a two-year contract. Two years feels like an eternity. The money is better - that's something - and the work is interesting, but there's all that other stuff. And I'm staring at a blank calendar with nothing to look forward to.

On Monday I got a letter from the apartment next door about excessive noise, both in Kevin's room and in the lounge. For me, that's actually a good thing - it gives me more ammo when asking Kevin to turn down (or off) the bloody TV. It's the second note I've had from the people next door.

That evening I played board games with Tom and Tracy. We played two games of Qwirkle which involves placing rows of tiles with matching shapes or colours in a similar fashion to playing words in Scrabble. It was a nice simple game, and I felt I had a reasonable handle on it. (I won the first game and came second in the other.) Then Tracy's mum joined us for a co-operative card game called Hanabi. Unlike any card game you've ever played (except Indian poker if you've ever tried that), you see everybody's cards except your own. Interesting concept certainly.

My new employers have come up with a new "logo". It's terrible. For a start it isn't a logo at all. It's text on a yellow background. Wellington is full of creative people; I don't see any creativity in this block of text.

Much debate on the Guardian website after the execution of Clayton Lockett. He was injected with a previously untried cocktail of lethal drugs, and only died 43 minutes later from a heart attack. I'm against the death penalty. Yes, some people commit such heinous acts that you wish they could be wiped off the face of the earth, but by killing a convicted killer, it starts to make you as bad as them - two wrongs don't make a right. There's little evidence to suggest that capital punishment reduces murder rates. Plus there's always the chance that you'll execute someone who was wrongly convicted. And nobody, no matter what they did, deserves to die slowly in agonising pain.

Also from the Guardian, here's a rather alarming article about prenatal screening for autism. Having met many warm, kind, intelligent people who happen to be on the spectrum, the idea that their very existence could be denied as a result of a positive blood test is repugnant.

I've written several times on the demise of sport as we know it. Most popular sport these days is like fast food, and it's amazing how people just mop it up. They announced this morning that rugby will soon feature a super eighteen. Yes! An upsized competition. Bigger is better. Then there's English football where the top players are paid obscene amounts and fans happily part with a large chunk of their own wages to see them play. As more and more money flows to the top of the game, some of the smaller clubs are struggling to stay afloat. One of these (and they aren't even that small) is "my team" Birmingham City, who are dicing with relegation to the third division (which is now called League One - go figure) for the first time since 1995. They've lost their last five games, and have only won two of 23 home games all season! Tomorrow night they travel to Bolton in their final game. They could draw and stay up on goal difference, or if they're really unlucky, they could win and still go down. It's hard to predict results on the last day (some teams have nothing to play for so you don't know what sort of side they'll put out or how they'll approach the game) but I reckon Blues are marginally odds-on to be relegated.

Southern excursion

I got back from the South Island on Saturday. Only eight passengers were on the flight from Timaru to Wellington - I hope under-half-full planes don't become a trend; we know what will happen to the Timaru service then.

I arrived on Wednesday. Dad had lost a fair bit of weight. He bit his tongue in the night and couldn't eat properly for the next week. Not much happened on Wednesday although I did get my hair cut in Temuka for just $14. On Thursday we visited my aunt and uncle (who has survived with cancer longer than anybody expected, and isn't getting any worse) in Hampden. On the way we stopped off at Riverstone Kitchen near Oamaru, a really weird place with a castle and moat. Attached to the restaurant, there were a few barns piled high with more gifty junky stuff for sale than you could imagine. They also grew their own fruit and vegetables - that was pretty cool. We then drove down the coast and stopped off for lunch to see a school of dolphins and several seals. We went as far as Moeraki and had a drink there before having fish and chips (which came from the "world famous" shop in Hampden) with my aunt and uncle.

Mum took me out for golf on Friday. I don't know why she bothered - I'm completely hopeless. On some holes I lost count, and I'm normally OK with counting. On the ninth hole - the last we did - I got a par three that came out of nowhere. In fact I wasn't far off a two. Some family came over for dinner.

On Saturday morning we saw my cousin's eight-year-old son play rugby - it was his first time playing with proper tackling. He played for a team called Celtics, against teams from Geraldine and Temuka. There were four mini-games going on at once, and they must have been doing that up and down the country. Both my dad and I felt a bit out of place there, but really everything happened with the right level of seriousness given the age of the kids. It's not good when you see parents get too emotionally involved, living vicariously through their kids. Grass-roots sport, both for adults and children, still seems to thrive in South Canterbury. The sport section of the Timaru Herald is full of things like Maureen McClutchie winning some golf trophy with a score of 92-23-69 (I just made that name up, but it's usually McSomething or O'Something), and presumably all those scores are important to somebody.

With the mystery of MH370 (my dad thinks the pilot committed suicide), an early candidate for word of the year is "ping". When I got back home, it was more of a case of "pong" emanating from downstairs. That aside, things are working out OK with Kevin. I do nearly all the cooking, but at least that way I control what I eat (I'm not sure I'd trust him). I met up with Tom yesterday; I still find him hard work at times, and I'm glad I didn't take him on as a flatmate.

Guess what - my parents are coming to Wellington for three days on Wednesday (they'd forgotten about my trip when they booked their flights; they could easily have booked to come up here at the same time as I was going down there). After that I doubt I'll see them for a while - they're going on a big overseas trip in early June.

Eight more days at work.

New start

I haven't posted for absolutely ages, because I didn't think doing so would improve my mood and I had little to say anyway. But guess what, some news! I've got a new job, out of life insurance or anything remotely related to that, for ever (that's a promise). I'll be working at Wellington City Council, analysing data to do with water: waste water, stormwater, and drinking/bathing/washing water. Beyond that though, I'm pretty clueless as to what I'll be doing on a day-to-day basis, but it's got to be a helluva lot better than what I'm doing now. The first interview (with a panel of three) was long. Eighty minutes. How did you handle this or resolve that or implement the next thing? Jeez, I don't know. In ten years of life insurance I haven't implemented a goddamn thing. I made a good impression in the middle of the interview when they gave me a kind of test, asking me to comment on some print-outs of manhole data, and I suppose that was the crucial bit. No, I didn't get asked why manhole covers are round. They made positive noises at the interview and I felt like, you know, I could actually see myself working there. Then they invited me back for a second, shorter, more informal interview with two senior managers. If anything this was scarier than the first. They were big on concepts, big on ra-ra-rah. The big boss, seeing on CV that I'd lived in France, took me by surprise by speaking to me in French. Merde, I don't understand anything. Was that a date? 2020? 2200? Help me! When I chose to respond in my native tongue, that didn't deter him from continuing to prattle away in French. I did come out with something eventually but I felt a bit embarrassed. They then mentioned a salary band, with a massive range between the top and bottom figures. That didn't sit well with me. The second interview actually served to dampen my enthusiasm for the role. Anyway, at ten to three last Wednesday I got the phone call with the job offer, and I accepted it the next day. My mum had been speaking to someone from the golf club and apparently you have to negotiate salaries these days. Mum proceeded to tell me at least ten times (and I'm not kidding) the exact words I had to say in my salary negotiation. Sometimes she needs to butt out. I was glad when they simply gave me a figure, which I accepted. It's not a huge amount but it's a significant increase on what I'm getting now. It should get me further along this graph:

I'm more relieved than excited about the new job, which I'll be starting on 22nd April, straight after the long Easter weekend. It's what it gets me out of as much as anything. I'm a bit surprised (and lucky, I think) to have found something so soon. I'm a bit worried that I won't fit in (especially after that second interview), and that the work will be beyond me, but the gamble is worth taking.

On the same day as I got the phone call about the job, Richard texted me to say he's got his old wine-selling job back.

Kevin has been here since the beginning of the Month of the Cicada (aka February). He's taking some getting used to. The hardest thing to get used to is the sheer amount of time he's here - in an average week he's out of the flat less than twenty hours. For me, getting outside is vital to avoid going mad; not so Kevin (or maybe he's quite happy going mad). He has one or two traits, if you can call them that. The smell of his room, which permeates through the whole downstairs, reminds me of the interior of those old clapped-out buses - probably about an N-reg from the first time around - that we used on our school trips. There's his chewing gum - look, you can chew as much gum as you like, I don't care, especially if it'll stop you from smoking, but making it click is really, really vulgar. Then there's the TV. You know, sometimes I don't want the TV on at midday on a Sunday. What's on at that time anyway? And he watches so many movies, nearly all of them violent action movies. Seeing how much he enjoys watching violence is a little disturbing. Last night we watched Inglourious Basterds, and that got pretty gory at times but was actually rather good.
Although Kevin is basically OK, I don't look forward to weekends like I used to. I seem to have less freedom to do what I want, when I want, than I did even in other flatting situations, let alone in the seven years I lived by myself.

I've been following the story of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, mostly on the Guardian website, for the last two weeks. In this world where everything is tracked 24/7, it's hard to fathom that a plane of this size carrying hundreds of people can vanish off the face of the earth. I spent most of last week trying to work out why those two red arcs - which encompassed the possible "final" locations of the plane - weren't joined in the middle. The whole affair has been handled appallingly at times, but it's heartening that so many people and organisations from all over the world have banded together to try and solve one of the greatest mysteries of our time.
Strangely this has made me want to travel overseas again, on a plane - something I haven't done for four years. With the new job, who knows, that just might be possible again in the next year or two.

Kevin and keeping calm

The environment in my flat has changed. The most noticeable change, other than the massive TV I'm looking at now, is the smell. Suddenly this place smells human.

My flatmate - let's call him Kevin - has had an even messier past than I guessed. He's got three kids to two different women. The two eldest are already teenagers; the youngest is four. Those aren't problems that simply go away. He used to chain-smoke and drink like a fish; I'd be surprised if his drug use wasn't/isn't restricted to legal substances. He's talked about his depression; I noticed he had a shoe box with "Kevin's Meds" written on it. Last night he had an anxiety attack and was unnecessarily embarrassed.
Kevin is trying to make positive changes. He's just started a web design course, at what to me is exorbitant cost.

I saw my counsellor on Tuesday. She said I still haven't got over the slow-motion car crash of three years ago when I got the actuarial job here in Wellington. She also said that by coming off my antidepressants I'm regaining emotions that were suppressed, and I should stay off them for that reason. I saw my (newer) doctor yesterday. I asked her if I could stay off the antidepressants but go on beta-blockers instead to help with my anxiety, and she was fine with that. With the old doctor the outcome would have been totally different. 

It was Bob Marley Day so both Kevin and I had the day off. We were both trying to use the internet at the same time and an IP address conflict was giving us all kinds of problems. I think Kevin fixed it on his computer and we're OK now. I applied for another job, this time with the council, but I don't expect my application to get very far.

It hasn't been a bad week at work. My boss has taken the week off. It would be a neat arrangement, we each take alternate weeks off - if I could arrange that I wouldn't be looking for another job.

There was a lot of discussion about flags last week (and a little bit today as you'd expect). I'm up for changing it, but not to the silver fern on a black background. Yes it would be distinctive alright, and I like the silver fern as an emblem, but I think a national flag needs an injection of colour, and why does it need to be the same as what our sports teams wear? How much blue is in the Italian flag, or orange in the Dutch flag, or white in the German flag? Or, for that matter, green and yellow (I know they call it gold) in the Australian flag?

Here's a really good article about the guy who claims to have survived 13 months at sea. The author of the article says he wouldn't cope very well in that situation, and I know I wouldn't either. And I don't even feel like a particularly modern male. (The article reminds me that I should get Life of Pi out on DVD, now that I've got a near-cinematic screen to view it on.)