So, Sando Says! Remember how excited I was at how Joanne Black managed to find a way to write short snippets of infotainment via using communist boxes? Well, this week I want to test if it could work with non-communist boxes. My theme for this week? Smiley faces—how else would your mildly autistic friends know if you were joking online? It’s a visual clue that written language was quite happy to do without until computer scientists just had to start talking upon the internet in the early eighties. God damn you, father of modern emoticon usage Scott Fahlman, I’m going to go over to Pittsburgh and shank you one day. Shanking is of course when you provide someone lamb shanks at a dinner party. As New Zealand lamb is of such a high quality, he’d be asinine to turn down the offer.
Whanganui vs. Wanganui. Who cares? This guy. I’ll tell you this: if you don’t want to see an H in that city’s name you’re a racist. There’s no difference between you not accepting the correct Te Reo spelling of the word and killing Maori culture. And, anyway, by trying to stop this cultural rebranding you’re cutting into the already decimated financial pull that Whanganui has. Do you know how many jobs hanging the new signage up is going to create? Seven! That’s going to raise employment levels in Whanga-Vegas by nearly 9000 percent. Please Whanganuites, absorb what I’m saying and let the “H” back into your heart. You did it for “P”, it’s time to let the rest of the alphabet in too.
I’m addicted to not being in pain. Oh yeah, I have chronic pain, from when I had a football-shaped ‘inside zit’ removed from my tailbone a couple of years ago. The pain hasn’t really gone away, but does lessen during certain times of the year. Not as in that ‘time of moon when it neither waxes or wanes’ or ‘times when I’m not at school’, but as in, when it’s summer it is warmer and I’ve noticed less painful. So to further elaborate: I can tell the temperature by how much my butt pain makes me want to top myself. Sorry, I mean “better myself”, I wouldn’t want to mention suicide in an offhanded way, considering how serious the topic is. The point I am trying to make is that I take pain killers to numb my pain. I used to just take codeine, which, amazingly, did the trick right away. This week has been one of the worst weeks that I’ve had in dealing with my ass pain in quite a while. Even now while sitting on a very padded seat, with polypropoline leggings, pants and an Antarctic rated sleeping bag on, I still feel a dull ache and sharp pain down there, just sitting at the bottom of my consciousness while I try to type out my column. It is smirking at me right now. I take painkillers to combat this smug bastard, and some of them help. The best thing I was allowed access to was codeine. It was just so useful, 30-60mgs of the stuff at a time in the middle of winter and bang! I didn’t feel the pain any more, but I didn’t become a spaced out zombie who just slept the entire day. Less than this amount and I feel fragile, and start trying not to move too much, I don’t want to cause myself further pain by doing normal person stuff, like beating myself half to death with fruit. For a while there of course, I thought that it was a little bit romantic living with an ailment—I felt like Horatio Nelson, after losing an arm. Sadly the realities of living in this situation are as depressing as watching an armless rat going through the motions of cleaning its fur. Now, like many, I can’t get access to just codeine (because that would be silly, it’d have to be something like a codeine phosphate), and have to take it mixed with other substances like paracetamol, which is fine and all, except that over 2000mgs of paracetamol a day can cause kidney problems, and I’m taking at least that daily during times of high pain like… say June through August, or ‘Winter’ as it’s now known. Let’s not even mention the fact that I saw a close acquaintance try to ‘better themselves’ through taking a whopping great amount of it at once. Thank god they were ignorant enough to think that taking a huge amount would kill them faster rather than make their body want to hyper purge. I get why we demonise opiates, really I do, I wish I was less panic-riddled and could just discuss this with my doctor, but every time I do, I can see the cleverly placed Narcotics Anonymous poster on the wall, and my hopes dip just a little while my invisible arms try to free myself from the psychological dirt that peppers my pelt.
I am having one of those existential crises that I keep reading about in stupid magazines that litter the Student Health waiting room. You see, two of my friends have just had a baby, it’s not like they are the first in my peer group to birth a womb goblin, not by a long shot; I have emerged from as small town after all, and what happens in small towns? You do drugs, or become incredibly religious. Either way, chances are you’re going to have a baby, the options just determine whether it’s born addicted to PCP or Jesus at birth. I guess my biggest problem is that they were the sanest of my peer group. They probably still are as well. If they are still as sane as all out, and I am still part of that crew, it is now an indicator that I am either nearing a time where I should consider using some vagina-wielding person to birth a baby for me, or it is an indicator that I fucked up something chronic a while back. When is it sane age to start going all Spogworts Wizarding Academy for Semi Gifted Children, I ask rhetorically? It’s all so fucking frightening how normal the people back in Paraparaumu are finding this progression of getting married, moving into a small highly mortgaged house, and having babies is. Did I miss some sort of family memo that this is how life is meant to go? Well, yes, it turns out I did. Many thanks New Zealand Postal Service, your incompetency has cost me my future and the lives of New Zealanders in potential. Why don’t you go protest that, government-mandated abortion-picketing Christians?
My partner came in gabbling and babbling about some sort of psychotic homeless people making music out of objects. It turned out, after I had forced half a box of antipsychotic medication down the gabbling throat, that it wasn’t Blanket Man or the “shkews me” fellow who had been making noise, but the professional musical dance show Stomp. I promptly forced more hypnovel, or ‘midazolam’ if you will, down the offending throat, and went out to tub thump, what ever that is.
So, which 1st years frittered away all of their hard-earned $1000 course related costs without leaving themselves enough to get a coat for winter? Good luck guys, the op shops have been out of the non-smelling like rat pee ones since before the century started. Try not to die or have unprotected sex for warmth. Get money for it at the least.
Night yo.