Plumbings and goings

The plumbing in the kitchen has been playing up for some time. I did tell my landlords but they never did anything, so I've just muddled along. Until this morning that is, when all hell broke loose. I couldn't turn the tap off (neither could I really turn the water main off with three other flats being affected) and water gushed out, accompanied by a deafening high-pitched screech. I had no luck with any of the plumbers in the Yellow Pages so in desperation I rang 0800 PLUMBER and that did the trick. He replaced the tap and some of the dodgy piping under the sink, and handed me a $330 bill which I'll pass on to my landlords.

It's now been a month since I left work. I don't miss it. I did my best to fit in there, but even though I started out in the actuarial department where I at least had something in common with my colleagues, it would always be a struggle for me. I realised this three weeks into my job, when I happened to have a birthday. Apparently it was tradition to bring in a cake on your birthday, but as nobody in the team had had a birthday in the short time I'd been there, I was unaware of official cake protocol. Anyway, I dashed down to Foodtown and bought a cake for something like $3.85, to be shared among the ten of us. I was told I needed to send an email, which I did, but things started getting serious when I was informed I'd sent the wrong kind of email. "You need to send a meeting request." "A what?" "A meeting request in Outlook, so that everyone knows what time cake is, then they can accept or decline the meeting or say they're not sure." "But I don't really mind what time. People can help themselves if they want." "I'm sorry, you'll have to pick a time." By that stage I'd had enough. "Man, are you serious? There are only ten of us here. I could just shout 'cake' and it would be a hell of a lot easier. Look everybody, cake! CAKE!" In the end I did send a meeting request, when someone had shown me how, as did all my colleagues, unquestioningly, when their birthdays came around.

My actual work was tedious and as far as I could see, meaningless. I'd been very determined to get that job, and the two-week wait to find out whether I'd got it was agonising. Now I wondered why I'd bothered. I quickly became depressed and went back on the citalopram I'd only just come off. I'd shifted my life from East Anglia to South Canterbury four months earlier and I'd just moved again to Auckland where I knew nobody. My living arrangements were far from ideal; I was boarding in Bayswater with a couple in their thirties and forties. I found the bloke - all eighteen stone of him - easy to get on with but I could never relax around his wife. At night they would argue; I could hear everything through the paper-thin wall between my room and theirs. They did however have Sky; I'd become a virtual insomniac so I used to stay up and watch Roland-Garros or Euro 2004, or sometimes Super 12 rugby even though I couldn't have given a rat's razoo about the score between the Stormers and the Waratahs. It was hardly surprising I was depressed given that I was in a soul-destroying job in what seemed virtually a foreign country.

Eventually I figured out how to complete my various tasks at work, but I never figured out why I was doing them. Unfortunately my superiors in my team were beyond why, and I soon gave up asking the question. I learnt little about how the business operated; my job was simply to follow the process, to press the right buttons in vaguely the right order. I felt a real loss of identity. When I'd finished checking our 400-odd-page report, I would file it away and consciously label the file in my handwriting instead of in block capitals, as a way of getting a shred of that identity back.

Most of the time I didn't have enough work. But my first pair of actuarial exams were looming, so my strategy was to concentrate on those, even though my depression made concentration of any sort difficult. Still, it had been two years since I finished university and I quite enjoyed the study. As the exams got closer I was allowed one day a week to study at home. Some people use their study days to lie in, or play golf, but I got considerably more work done on that day that on any other day of the week. To my surprise I passed both my exams and received a welcome boost to my pay.

In August 2004 I joined the tennis club at Belmont; this was hugely beneficial for me - I got to meet new people playing the game I loved. In November I moved from my Bayswater flat to one in Milford, this time sharing with people my own age. Again this was a good move for me. I was no longer depressed, and in 2005 I passed another three exams. Work still hadn't improved but I was past caring; I left the office on the dot of five and by 5:05 I'd completely switched off. It was perhaps fortunate that the chap I sat next to at work was even less engaged than me. At least I showed up on time. He would roll in hours late and fall asleep at his desk; sometimes he didn't even wake up when his phone rang. His record in the exams was shocking and he left halfway through 2005.

In mid-2006 I took on a new role in the marketing department, which was a great improvement. However in August I suffered another bout of depression which forced me to pull out of an exam. The following month I made a trip to the UK, which perked me up a bit. I'd hoped to catch up with my brother but he was sent to Afghanistan two days after I arrived (he's a Commando in the British Army). In early 2007 I fell out with my Japanese flatmate - I wasn't tidy enough for her - and in May I moved from Milford to my own flat in the delightfully named Pluto Place in Birkdale. The flat itself was far from delightful: it was in the bush, in a cold, damp, dark hole. Despite my best efforts with an eight-litre dehumidifier, everything got mouldy. In spite of the conditions I wasn't depressed - well not until March 2008, just before I moved out. I passed some more exams and managed to set up my own website. In May 2008, before winter set in again, I shifted to my current flat in Devonport, thinking for some bizarre reason that the great location might set me free from depression for ever. Hmmm. Shortly after, my role at work changed once more, and suddenly I had no idea what I was doing again.

Last week I bought some font creation software for US$79, and I've spent some time designing some letterforms. To my surprise I've found myself using sin, cos and tan, beasts I haven't encountered for a decade.

Realising I have no real edge in hold 'em, not above the lowest couple of levels at any rate, I've switched my attention to badugi. I haven't got the bankroll to play cash badugi so I've had a go at the $2.20 tournaments. In my three attempts at the limit version I've finished 33rd twice and a card-dead 22nd, all from eighty entrants. The structure of the limit tournaments is poor; brick out on your three-card 32A and have your pat nine cracked by someone drawing two all the way and you're pretty much toast. The pot-limit structure is much better; it can be because people eliminate themselves by playing all-in kamikaze badugi or just by getting unlucky when they hit a monster and run into a slightly bigger monster. Early in my first crack at the pot-limit version this morning I was lucky enough to be on the right side of that equation with a 6432 against a 6543. A few hands later I made the stone-cold nuts and I led the tournament. It was a disappointment, therefore, when my pat 10-4 ran into a pat 9-8 and I finished 11th out of 66, only just inside the money.

This evening I'll be having dinner with a woman I met at last Saturday's autism group, and presumably her family. It should be good.

Flights and frights

There never seems to be any news at this time of year. I'd almost given up watching the so-called news on TV (of which very little was news at all) but on Wednesday I tuned in just in case. Oh boy. It was hell on earth. The reported death toll from the Haiti Earthquake varies widely, but it looks like being somewhere between the population of Cambridge (the one I was born in, not the one in the Waikato) and the population of Wellington. An enormous number. And most of those who survived have a very bleak future ahead of them.

The better news from my end is that I've booked a holiday. I'll be flying to the UK in early May and will spend twelve days in Thailand when I come back. I get back into Auckland towards the end of June. I was very pleased with my fare which came to $2400. I've got definite plans to go to Italy (I'm going on an intensive Italian course next week) and I'll maybe even spend some time in France if I can fit it in. I'll also want to see my grandmother, who isn't getting any younger, and my brother who I've only seen once, briefly, in the last six years.

With those six or seven weeks blacked out in my calendar, I can now set about finding some temporary or contract work. I phoned four recruitment agencies this morning. No luck yet but I'll keep trying. My best bet might still be Andy's place of work; the last time we spoke he seemed reasonably optimistic about a temporary assignment there.

We had the the first men's group of the year on Tuesday. As is often the case, Brendan dominated the first part of the session with his obsessive anger over a job he had more than ten years ago. He has a problem here and somebody really needs to talk to him (maybe me); it disrupts the meeting and doesn't do him any good either. We then watched the first two-thirds of Shirley Valentine which has so far (in my opinion) been a bloody good movie.

Talking of movies, I went with Julie on Wednesday to see an Italian film called Mid-August Lunch, a translation from its italian title Pranzo di Ferragosto. It was a bit like some of those French films I've seen, where not a lot happens but not a lot needs to. It did make me want to go to Italy, and I was able to pick out a surprising amount of Italian without looking at the subtitles.
On Saturday we had the monthly Autism NZ meeting which was fascinating as always. I had a long chat to a woman of around forty whose daughter had Asperger's and we'll be meeting up for dinner next weekend. I'm still toying with the idea of getting a diagnosis myself. When I was small my parents didn't want me officially diagnosed, even though the doctor said I was perhaps mildly autistic, mainly due to the stigma and lack of knowledge of the condition back then.

Yesterday I felt down and don't exactly know why. I put on my relaxation CD and did 750 pulls on Bazza's exercise machine, and that helped a bit. Maybe I was worried about finding work, or perhaps it was because of my poker bankroll which has been heading due south since that royal flush. I've also had two panic attacks in the past week. I still find them frightening, though now that I know what they are, they seem to subside after a couple of minutes.

Somebody commented on my last blog post. This was exciting for me because I average something like 0.0274 of a comment per post. There was one snag however - it was written in Chinese. Luckily you can go into Babel Fish and get a deadly accurate translation, even for languages that don't use the Roman alphabet. The message, in English, is "The semblance with the fact itself symbol, the common people actually easily is often not deceived by the incrustation." It's always been a major concern of mine that ordinary people aren't fooled by incrustations, so on reading that message I breathed one heck of a sigh of relief.

Jumping in

Yesterday I had an enjoyable day at the Heineken Open tennis. The big names weren't there - the top four seeds, who all hail from Spain, get a bye through to round two and don't play until Wednesday. But that didn't matter. I decided not to watch the first match on Centre Court, instead seeing my fellow Pom Daniel Evans play his final qualifying round match against someone called Wang from Taipei. I made the right decision too; it was a very good match which Evans won in three tight sets. I felt sorry for the players who had to contend with Centre Court's ridiculously loud PA system, the announcer mispronouncing the players' names and getting all the countries wrong at full volume. "Turn it up a bit," Evans said as he faced a big point in the third set. It would have driven me potty too. I then moved to the main court see the two wild-card Kiwis who happened to draw each other in round one. Rubin Statham ran out a well-deserved winner against his higher-ranked opponent Dan King-Turner, playing like a man possessed to reel off the last four games. The rest of the day's play didn't quite live up to the earlier action but I stayed till the end regardless.

After six years of living close to the sea I've finally figured out how to get in it. In the past I'd gradually ease my way in on tiptoes with my arms outstretched above me. This works fine until the water reaches my nuts and I start to wince. Once I'm over that hurdle I'm OK again until it reaches my chest. Finally, after all that agony, I'm in. At the weekend I changed my strategy completely, deciding to run in making as big a splash as possible. It turns out that's a far less painful method.

On Saturday I popped round to see Brendan. He's reorganised his living area again; he now has two TV rooms, labelled Cinema One and Cinema Two, complete with viewing schedules neatly set out using the 24-hour clock. Talking of clocks, he has dozens of them. And that's not all. He has precisely nine telephones, a calendar for every month of the year (all with pictures of naked men - he is gay after all) and every kind of calculator known to man including a novelty foot-high one and a retro one that prints out receipts. Hanging on his wall is a seemingly innocuous photo of a rugby team, but it turns out it's a Where's Wally-type picture, except the object isn't to find Wally but willy. I could go on, but I won't. I'm sure you'd only need to spend five minutes in my flat to have a jolly good laugh.

I've finished all my Joe Bennett. He has a remarkable knack with words; he even managed to get the words "rootling" and "fossicking" in the same short story. I'll have to get hold more of his fine work soon.

After 7000 hands of limit hold 'em at the lowest stakes, over two months, I plucked up the courage on Sunday to move up to the nosebleed nickel-and-dime level. Though I was well ahead, in big bet terms at least, I bemoaned my lack of monster hands. My best hand had been four fives, until Sunday evening when this happened:



Of course thousands of players catch royal flushes every day, and they make little difference to your overall win rate, but it's still nice to have hit the poker equivalent of a hole-in-one. After being stuck in a holding pattern around the $30 mark, my bankroll has now nudged over $40.

Tonight I'll be seeing my counsellor/psychologist and going to the men's group shortly after.

Joe Bennett - one clever bloke

Yesterday I started reading Barking, a collection of Joe Bennett's columns. I've already finished it and am about to start on a more recent selection, entitled Eyes Right (and They's Wrong). Boy do I wish I could write like Joe Bennett. Sometimes I even wish I could be him; I certainly envy his lifestyle. As it happens we share the same birthday. Joe Bennett, Adolf Hitler and myself: an unlikely trio.

My favourite column in Barking (there were plenty to choose from) was on the subject of apples: pick up any apple from a supermarket and it'll be a beautifully polished but utterly tasteless eight-ounce water bomb. As a kid we had four apple trees in our back garden: a Bramley (for making yummy apple crumbles), a Worcester and best of all, two of the delicious (and wonderfully named) Bohemian Blenheims. We sometimes had more than we could eat so when I was ten I started selling them, or trying to at least, outside the front gate.

His column on Singapore was interesting. I visited recently; my experience was very similar to his. We even stayed in the same hotel, the Excelsior. He was on the 21st floor while my room was on the 13th, a floor that most hotels superstitiously skip over. I tried to fit as much as possible into my four days: Sentosa Island, the zoo, the amphibious boat, the Singapore Flyer (their version of the London Eye), the river cruise, Chinatown, Little India, you name it. Like Bennett I got very sweaty in the process. He said Singapore was a very ordered place - mainly I agree, though a couple of exceptions that spring to mind are the seven-storey shopping malls with names like Lucky Dragon Plaza, and a rabbit warren of eateries in Little India called Lau Pa Sat Market, which serves appetising food so long as you can get past the signs:



I watched one of the women's tennis semi-finals today. At the change of ends before what turned out to be the last game of the match, Shahar Peer called on her coach. She said she was struggling to pick up Wickmayer's second serve. While this was interesting, which muppet decided to allow on-court coaching? I realise tennis players now have coaches, agents, physios, psychologists, the whole nine yards, but while you're on the court it has always been one-on-one, mano a mano, and should remain so. In Agassi's book he likened tennis to boxing, and there are definite parallels. While they're at it, could the WTA also eliminate those tactical momentum-upsetting loo breaks? And that supposedly high-octane doubles scoring system, which is in fact anything but, is also a farce.

I've been back in Auckland for four days and until this afternoon I had yet to make human contact. Lack of human contact is the biggest danger I face in being out of work - hell, it was bad enough in work - so I gave Brendan a ring. We chatted, or mostly he did, and we agreed to meet up tomorrow.

The first week of the rest of my life

I’m back in Auckland now and it’s a lovely day up here – too nice to be stuck in an office, which of course I no longer am. In fact I plan to have lunch soon and finish my latest book at the beach. I’m most of the way through Vroom with a View, the Vespa book. It doesn’t lack humour, and gives a flavour of Italy useful for anyone planning to go there, but I feel it could have been much better written. Over Christmas I finished Jen Birch’s account of life with Asperger’s, Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open (an excellent read, thoroughly recommended to anyone with a passing interest in tennis) and Joe, a fascinating book about one boy’s severe autism which raises some interesting questions about what makes us human. I’ve often wondered whether my humanity is compromised by my limited social life.

New Year’s Eve was as uneventful as I’d hoped. The concert didn’t reach the heights of the one earlier in the week; at 11pm I tried my hand once more at the darts game, this time breaking even (which was better than I managed on the chocolate wheel). At midnight we watched the fireworks display which was impressive even if it lacked a rousing finale (or rather there seemed to be so many false finales that by the time the real end came I was still expecting more).

On Saturday Dad and I saw the new half-billion-dollar blockbuster Avatar. Only nine cinemas in New Zealand are showing it in 3D and of course Timaru isn’t one of them. But even without the fancy glasses (which by all accounts can give you a headache after watching a 2¾-hour epic) I didn’t need any more visual stimulation. I enjoyed it from beginning to end. It seemed there was no special effect that they couldn’t pull off. Dad and I agreed that the film carried a political message, but while Dad thought it was “save the planet”, I thought it was more of an anti-war message, i.e. don’t go into Iraq just because they’ve got all that oil, or in this case, “unobtainium”. Whatever, it was refreshing to see America painted in a not-so-flattering light.

No more noughties

It’s been a tricky year and I’m glad it will soon be over. It’ll also be the end of a decade – the “noughties”. I wonder what they’ll call the next one. The teenies? The tweenies? And there’s still little consensus on whether next year will be “twenty-ten” or “two thousand and ten”. With the future still very much up in the air for me, it seems fitting that we’re about to enter a decade that nobody knows the name of and a year that nobody knows how to pronounce.

I can't believe it's been ten years since the millennium, and all that hype about why-two-kay and planes falling out of the sky. It's made me think about what I've achieved in that time, or rather what I haven't.

Mum took me out this morning for nine holes of golf. Some surprisingly good shots were interspersed with totally expected duffers. I had two par threes and a bogey five, but on other holes I struggled to stay in single figures.

Tonight I expect we’ll be seeing in the New Year at Caroline Bay. They put on a fireworks display at midnight. Historically New Year’s Eve has been one of the most painful days on the calendar for me so I’ll be hoping for an uneventful evening.

iPredict Annual Report

As 2009 comes to an end, I thought I'd give a quick rundown of my profits and losses so far on iPredict, arranged by stock in descending order of profitability. Everything is rounded to the nearest dollar, only stocks with a swing of $10 or more (up or down) are included, and all related stocks (usually these would form a bundle) are lumped together. Here goes (please excuse the iffy formatting):


October 2009 petrol prices ......................... +$315
Gordon Brown not to resign ........................ +$121
Special votes at 2008 NZ election .............. +$99
11 June 2009 OCR ....................................... +$82
June 2009 petrol prices ............................... +$72
Spelling of W(h)anganui ............................... +$52
Swine flu cases .............................................. +$28
30 Apr 2009 OCR ........................................ +$24
29 Jan 2009 OCR ......................................... +$23
Anti-smacking referendum turnout .......... +$16
July 2009 petrol prices ............................... +$15
4 Dec 2008 OCR ........................................... −$10
CPI for year to 31 Dec 2008 ....................... −$13
10 Sept 2009 OCR ....................................... −$24
30 July 2009 OCR ....................................... −$58

A few notes:

• The Gordon Brown resignation stock is still ongoing: it pays $1 if he resigns before the next UK election which he could still do (though personally I doubt it). However I haven't been exposed to that stock for some months.
• I might not bother with the OCR stocks in future - I figure there are many iPredictors who know a lot more about the economy, and the goings-on at the Reserve Bank, than I ever will.
• I'm sitting on a handful of temperature-related stocks. Specifically I'm long on the stocks that pay $1 if this year's average global temperature ends up being higher than in 2008. I should make a thirty-odd-dollar profit here, despite the recent snow storms in Europe.
• For all the stocks on the list above, my investment decisions were based on facts rather than gut instinct, with one exception: the W(h)anganui stock. I didn't know, or particularly care, what would happen there. I wasn't even sure what the definitions meant. I just figured that a 20% probability of some kind of compromise seemed a bit on the low side.

All in all 2009 was a successful year for me on iPredict. Who knows what will happen in 2010, or even whether I'll be in the country long enough to meaningfully participate.

Friends and family

Yesterday I didn’t feel like I was on holiday at all. I just wanted to get back to Auckland, away from Mum’s friends and family. Unfortunately I have little in common with many of the people I’ve met over the last week, particularly the blokes. I don’t engage in conversation, mainly because there is no conversation, just jokes, banter and anecdotes about the time Wayne O’Shea left a dead sheep in the back of his ute for six months. Then out of the blue someone asks me about my future plans, and suddenly I’m the centre of attention. I get fifty ideas chucked in my direction, some serious, some not so serious, and I’m overwhelmed.

For most of yesterday I was depressed and didn’t want to know. We went to the Caroline Bay carnival. For some reason halfway through one of their concerts I suddenly felt more relaxed. We had a go on the chocolate wheel but our luck was well and truly out. Then I tried my hand at a darts game where you have to hit paper stars attached to a board. I was lucky enough to come away with twenty bucks for an outlay of four. I found the darts game interesting: among the vast array of games it was the only one where a skilful player could earn a long-term profit. Indeed a professional darts player would surely clean up there. In my case, however, skill played a minor role, if that.

Holiday

Today is the first real day of my holiday. Officially it started on Tuesday night, but the last four days have been taken up with Christmas and family, which aren’t conducive to holiday at all.

My last day at work was a successful one. I was able to keep a fairly low profile, just like I have in the rest of my time with the company. My colleagues very kindly bought me two books – Andre Agassi’s autobiography (I’m just past the crystal meth, or gack, phase) and Vroom with a View, an account of a journey from Milan to Rome on an old Vespa. We had morning tea and lunchtime drinks (I was happy to pay for them), after which I cleaned my desk, packed a box of memorabilia, said my final goodbyes, then I was off.

I took the 7:30 flight to Christchurch and stayed the night at Uncle Dan’s – he and his wife Anne live on Memorial Avenue, just yards from the Airport. Dan has lost even more weight. Though his surgery was a success, the weight loss is a real concern, and his illness seems to have affected him mentally. Sadly he appears to have given up on life. He showed me some pills he’s recently been prescribed, supposedly to help him put on weight. Citalopram. I was on that for nearly eight years. During the first year I did indeed gain weight, though I doubt the medication had anything to do with that. Whatever, his illness has now become mental just as much as physical. On Wednesday morning we drove down to Mum and Dad’s place in Geraldine.

We spent Christmas Day up the Rangitata, at a place called Stew Point. There were seven of us – Mum, Dad, Dan, Anne, another of Mum’s brothers, his third wife, and myself. It’s nice to get out of Auckland; it would be hard to find a place less like Auckland than our Christmas picnic location. I sometimes think of Geraldine as being in the wops, but this was the real wops. It was blowing a gale up there. It wasn’t easy trying to eat ham and turkey without being savaged by a bull or my paper plate disappearing.

Yesterday I met up with Phil in Timaru. His mother lives in Waimate. The carnival had just started up so we tackled the crazy golf course. Phil beat me by six shots. The hole that replicates the Port Loop Road was my undoing. Phil flies back to Auckland today, and will soon be meeting his Danish girlfriend. Last night Mum and Dad had a barbecue; it seemed everybody was there. I wasn’t in the mood for all that food and drink, and having to explain my, er, career change. Now everybody has gone and I can breathe a sigh of relief. I no longer have to explain anything.

Stimulation

Just a short one today because, as is usually the case at this time of year, there really isn't much news. Yesterday I went along to the Autism NZ meeting. The turnout was back to the October level of 25 or so. The room is rather echoic, and unsurprisingly all that noise became too much for some people. I felt bad because I hadn't brought any Christmassy food - were we told to at the last meeting? - and again I wished I could have been more helpful. The main facilitator - the boss if you like - now knows that I'd like to play a more active role there in the new year. I'm in the middle of reading Congratulations! It's Asperger Syndrome, a book written by one of the more eminent people at Autism NZ. It's a fascinating read.
On a similar theme, I'll soon be helping out (I hope) a twelve-year-old boy who suffers from dyspraxia. We'll go to the beach, to the movies, for walks, that kind of thing. Basically giving him some much-needed stimulation when his parents are unable to (I'm hoping it might be stimulating for me too).

My shirts are ironed in preparation for both my remaining days at work. I'll try to enjoy them. On Tuesday night, after my leaving drinks, I'll be catching a plane down to Christchurch. I'll stay at Uncle Dan's for the night and travel down to Geraldine the next day. We'll be having a quiet Christmas, and if previous years are anything to go by, probably a hot one. In fact extreme weather is almost to be expected in that part of the country. Just last week they were bombarded by inch-wide hailstones.

PokerStars bankroll update: I'm now sitting a few cents shy of $30.

The final countdown

My new laptop arrived last Thursday so I’m back in the world of the living. I never thought a computer would become an indispensable tool for me, but I now realise I’m lost without one. Despite this, I still don’t like computers that much and generally feel more comfortable with a pen in my hand than a mouse. I see a computer purely as a tool – I’m pretty much oblivious to all the noughts and ones and nuts and bolts that make everything happen.

Ten days ago I attended the mental health support centre’s Christmas party. It was a very well-run event with close on 200 in attendance, many of whom are isolated at this time of year and rarely get to go to something like that. It was great to meet up with some people I hadn’t seen for a while, and the food was a definite bonus.

On Friday I had another meeting with Mrs You’re Screwed, a.k.a. the careers advisor. Things didn’t seem so bleak this time, mainly because we didn’t get into the specifics of my future career options. Instead we concentrated on my CV – I showed her both versions. She took a real dislike to my choice of font in the old version. “It’s Times New Roman, that’s so old-fashioned.” I protested, saying it wasn’t Times New Roman (it was Garamond) but she insisted that fonts with those “little sticky-out bits” belong in a previous century. So serif fonts are dead then? Has she picked up a book lately? Or a newspaper? Once we’d done with the font debate (by the way, font design is something I’d like to get into) and focused on the content, she actually talked a lot of sense and was very helpful. We’ve got one final meeting, about interview tactics (hmmm) after Christmas.

I’m now in my last full week at work, and to be honest I’m relieved. I've worked with some good people (not least my current boss) but I’m ready to move on to the next chapter of my life. Four months shy of thirty, it’s time I jumped off this conveyor belt. For too long I’ve been drifting along, letting everything happen to me. School just happened to me. University for the most part just happened to me. And for the last 5¾ years, work has just happened to me. In fact working in the corporate world has been similar to school, all the more so since we moved to our expensive new offices in a soulless business park two years ago.

Competitive tennis is over for 2009. My record since the start of the season (seven wins, nine losses) is disappointing. I lost my last match, a mixed doubles, by the unusual score of 7-6 (7-0), 7-5. Unfortunately I’ve played very little singles which is my forte (if I have one). Yesterday we had great weather for tennis so I turned up to club day, which I enjoyed more than usual. Bazza was there, perhaps for the last time: he’s moving to Papakura at the weekend. Though house prices are considerably cheaper there, I seriously question his move because he won’t know anyone. If he joins a tennis club down there, people won’t accommodate him like they have done. He won’t get away with making dodgy line calls all afternoon, tell his partner she’s a bloody idiot whenever she misses, and swiping food from the fridge afterwards. I tried to convince him to stay in the area, but when he’s made his mind up there’s no stopping him.

It’s a while since I mentioned online poker but I haven’t given up, although I no longer play those time-consuming freerolls. I deposited US$10, as a challenge to see how far I could get on just ten bucks. My bankroll (if you can call it that) now stands at $22, mainly from playing hold ’em at penny stakes. I think I’ve got the right skills and temperament for poker. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t frustrate me when that fourth diamond hits the river to give that muppet who played A♦ 2♠ a higher flush, but crucially I don’t let it affect my play on subsequent hands. Obviously playing for inconsequential stakes helps in this regard, but when I was younger I’d have been far more susceptible to what they call “tilt”. I’ve played very little poker with real people and real hands, but at university I remember being dealt a king-high straight in a penny-ante draw game. The hand was dealt out of turn, we all had to muck our cards, and I went ape-shit.

I’ve just got home from my last Italian class of the year. Our teacher Matteo has done a good job of selling all things Italian. I’d love to go there some time next year so I’ve enrolled in a five-day intensive course at the end of January.

Death spiral

I won't be doing much blogging in the next ten days or so. I've been having problems with my computer for some months, but this week it finally gave up the ghost. It wouldn't even start up - instead it went into an infinite loop: a neverending death spiral. This morning I bought a new one - a Toshiba costing $1500 including all that anti-virus stuff, but I won't get it for another week or two. As I write from an internet café I realise how much I rely on the internet.

I haven't been at my best this week. On Wednesday I saw a careers advisor in the city; she said my prospects of finding work are bleak. According to her, I've got nothing that any recent graduate doesn't have, with the exception of almost an extra decade on the clock. She also gave me some handy hints on writing CVs. I agreed with her regarding the content of a CV but wasn't so sure when it came to the layout. "You must use Arial." Well I think Arial is a perfectly good screen font, but on print it screams "I don't give a toss" to me. All in all, that meeting put me in a foul mood.