Bend over and take it

"You're on night shift."
Translation: drop your pants, you're about to get screwed.

"Change of plans - there's a breakdown at another site and you're running the crew."
Lube? What's lube? Nothing like a painful rough job is there?

"Come see us in the office when you get back."
This one's an interesting one - basically they want the story of how you got fucked. Not only that, though. This is the time of after-fuck tickling that has the potential to make you really exhausted because you only have three hours left to sleep.

Do I fight this? No. Like a good little worker whore I bend over and say bring it on.

Then you get feedback saying that in one night your crew got through the same amount of work it would have taken the opposition an entire week to complete. It's like being told you give good head. You might not like doing it that much but a compliment, knowing that at least you do a good job, makes you more likely to want to do it all over again.

Quote of the Day

Out on a mine site where everybody brings a cooler bag for lunch, Mister SexyAwesome pulls out a handful of candy canes instead.

I wasn't allowed to have them as a kid, he explains. 'Cause I used to suck them into a point and stab people with them.

Three apparent impossibilities in food production

1. Post-mix orange juice concentrate that does not produce a drink reminiscent of gastro medicine.

2. Appealing airline food.

3. Picture-board menus that actually represent the finished, oversauced sloppy mess that is served up as a burger, rather than the stylised neatly stacked fluffy-lettuced vision of the unattainable.

Time for online quizzes

I decided to waste a miserable cloudy boring morning playing with online quizzes. According to one, I am 40% interesting. That implies that I am about 60% boring, which is probably pretty near true. Then I happened across this beauty. The Personality Defect Test. Have a go, I dare you.

Your result for The Personality Defect Test...

Spiteful Loner

You are the Spiteful Loner, the personality type that is most likely to go on a shooting rampage. In high school, you were probably that kid who wore all black and who sat alone in a corner of the lunch room, drawing pictures of dead babies. You are a rational person and tend to hold emotions in very low-esteem; not only that, but you are also rather introverted, meaning you probably bury any emotions you feel deep inside yourself, like all of the bodies in your backyard. Combine these traits with your dislike of others and your brutality, and it seems that you would be quite likely to shoot innocent people in a rampage. Most likely, you also have low self-esteem. Hell, I get low self-esteem just looking at you. This is only yet one more incentive to go on a shooting rampage, because you wouldn't care if you died as a result. Granted, you probably haven't gone on a shooting rampage and probably never will, but all the motivations are there. All you need is for someone to push you over the edge, calling you names and belittling you. Like me. But don't shoot me. I have a 101 mile-long knife, you know. In conclusion, your personality is defective because you are too introverted, brutal, insecure, and rather unemotional. No wonder no one hangs around you, you morbid, cold-hearted freak!

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more BRUTAL than gentle.

4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Televangelist.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Capitalist Pig, the Smartass, and the Sociopath.

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits.

Take The Personality Defect Test at HelloQuizzy

Communication

Meet the self-proclaimed Mister SexyAwesome. According to him he can even take my ten dollar headlamp - covered in a watermark pattern of grease and grey dust - and make it look sexy. This picture depicts him exhibiting his form of greeting. It does not portray anger or frustration. This is a happy greeting. You are priveledged if you recieve one of these because it means he likes you. Otherwise you'd get ignored completely. I have another picture from a hundred metres above SexyAwesome and he still manages to greet me in this way from a distance. You can only just make his finger out in that shot, so I think it would be perfect to send to the boss as a potential aerial shot for advertising purposes. Or at least as a suggested desktop background for the company computers.

He leaves messages for me, too. We can spend all morning carving solid grease off a surface and yet he still finds a space to think of me.



I love these guys. Maybe that's because they truly don't give a shit.

I don't need to hear about your day because I read it all online.

I'm twenty-eight and I have wrinkles. I have only just realised this. It disappoints me more than scares me. Yet another failure in life. I haven't looked after my skin by lathering it in girly products that I have avoided due to lack of knowledge and pure fright at how much you have to do to "stay pretty". I'm not pretty, never have been. So no hope there.

I work in a bloke's world, but I still have to get driven to a toilet if I am in a remote location, because no matter how blokey I may come across at work, I still have to squat to piss.

I won't have children. I don't really like the idea of me raising a child in a gay relationship. Round of applause for those who do, but it isn't for me. So knock out being a mother. Besides, I'm happily in a situation where that will never be an option.

I make friends with a woman and the assumption is that I'm after that woman. I make friends with a man and the assumption is that he must want to turn me. It seems that my desire to spend the rest of my life with a partner of the same gender has intruded upon my ability to make friends. When did life become all about sex? I don't want a fuck. I want tenderness. Seperate from work, seperate from a social life, but privately intertwined into my being and everything I do.

The woman I love has just told me that I will never be able to make her feel safe. Only a man can do that.

So I'm stuck in limbo. I'm not a man. I'm not feminine. I'm neither and I'm nobody. Because I don't grandstand my past or present actions it looks like I've got nothing to offer except a few photographs and experiences that yes, you can read about online. I'm pixels arranged on a screen. A genome sequence of zeros and ones. The Binary Being.

Perhaps you can take those dots, that arrangement of zeros and ones, and arrange them so that they represent somebody who lives, breathes, sometimes laughs with happiness flowing through her entire body, and today.... hurts like all hell.

Why women make good cleaners.

I was supervising today. There is stuff all to do in this a lot of the time. Delegate the work, check it's done, do the mountain of required paperwork and cop the blame if anything fucks up. I took advantage of having little to do and squirreled away to read the newspaper for an extra fifteen minutes at morning tea. I was cosy. There was free crappy coffee (but still free). There was a space away from the sounds of welding, grinding, generators and reversing alarms on the mobile equipment. Relative peace.

It had to end prematurely. One of the workers hunted me down.

I asked him how it was all going in the machine.

Well. He says. It was all going great until the backpack vacuum stopped working. I've checked with the electricians and they say there's power definately getting to it. But it still won't work.

I looked at him, an older man who has the air of being looked after by a wife for many years. The kind of man who wouldn't have a clue how to drive a washing machine let alone an oven. The job he's been doing for the past hour is chipping about a centimetre of dust/mud off the machine flooring in one of the back areas. He's got to cover about five square metres worth of tight edges and dodgey bits with hoses running through it all. I'd figured it would take him the rest of the day to properly, because all our company sent with us was a dodgey little backpack vacuum. Normally our vacuum units take up a whole trailer.

Have you emptied it yet?

Silence.
And a look that said you have to do What?

Seriously.

Mailbox Monday

Big machines: Drill part II

In theory it takes five hours for two workers to pressure clean a drill. The reality is that the time spent depends entirely upon what it has been digging into, and how long since it had it's last bath. If the thing has been drilling clay, and hasn't had a bath for a month, it'll take more like ten hours of blasting to get all the shit off it. If it's a coal drill it will all blast away really easily, even though it looks filthy. You're guaranteed to wear it from head to toe. Ears, nostrils, cleavage. Even my arse crack copped a bit last time I did a coal drill.



The ones I clean usually get parked on a washpad for us at night so they can have a bath before getting serviced at 7am the next day. This means all the chunky crap that could potentially fall on somebody, or impede them from reaching something has to blasted to smithereens. Any grease that could be a hazard to the work has to be removed, also by blasting and coating in degreaser. When we've finished climbing all over the mast - that big bit hanging off the end with the number on it - we get the thing raised up so that we can get into all the crap in underneath it. By that time it's usually somewhere near dawn. Then it looks like this:



Then we climb all over the motors and blast the crap off them. We try not to hit the little red wires snaking around the motor that will, if hit with a pressure blast, set off ten grand worth of fire system. We hose out all the crap from the radiators with low pressure hoses. We make the operator's cab (the bit with the windows) look pretty and if I have time I'll even blast out the crap from the boot brush so the operator can keep his boots clean. It's the creature comforts that count, after all.

Making Music

Dear Dive,

I first started reading you back around the time when I had a solo date with my laptop and anything alcoholic I could lay my hands on for National Drunk Blogging Day. That's coming close to two years ago now.

What really sold me was almost wetting myself while reading a post you wrote on playing New Year's Eve gigs. In the ranty viciously humourous fashion I love to see from you, that piece hit all the right points. While trying to avoid urinal disaster and gasping for air, I just had to keeping saying Bugger it, you're so right! I was sold.

You're amazingly supportive. You comment all the time even if I seem to never answer. It was you who gave me the name Groover. From such a distance you would not believe how much of a positive impact that contact with you has made in my life.

It's important to step back occasionally and think of the positive. You have people who have never met you who love you to pieces - how cool is that?!

I've been meaning to join in your Let's Make a Racket Thursday series since you started it. Yes, it's been an embarrassingly long time, but I'm here now. Just like a drummer I've turned up for the gig eventually.

This is one of my pieces - not a racket as such, but it's here. It's a classical guitar trio written in my first year of Uni (there'll be a few of the Uni days posts coming up - brace yourself). Citrus Twist, performed by myself, Stephen Tafra and Stephen Thorneycroft [aka EphenStephen] in a loungeroom. For performance identification we were usually known as Totally Plucked.

Glad to see you couldn't keep away from Blogville for too long!

Cheers,
Vic

p.s. Eat plenty of curry. If life ever tries to bite you on the arse again at least you can fart back.

Slow and Steady

Believe it or not, this little guy* was moving too fast for me to get the shots that I wanted. I had to pick him up, move him back into the sunlight, and hope the hell he went the right direction when he took off again. At least the little sucker behaved enough for this one.

[* Actually, most species of snails are hermaphrodites and when they shag, each snail with fertilise the other and they both will reproduce, so both pay the price for shagging. I think that's brilliant. Also they can mate themselves, so one snail alone in a pond can still reproduce.]



What I like about wildlife photography is that it's bloody difficult to get your subjects to pose up. There's so much chance involved, you're always going to get a different shot. I don't have a nice big fuck-off lens for my camera, so getting close is an issue. Wildlife, unless it's a variety of wildlife that's incredibly dopey or incredibly slow, tends to elude me quite often.

It's become a bit of a personal challenge to capture the wildlife at the local wetlands. Frankly I suck at it. Part of me says give up until you get better equipment. Then there's this other part, the inner teacher in me, that says for years I have urged students to get past these very sorts of obstacles. Don't give up. Be patient and persistent. Your improvements may be slow and steady, but consistent effort and thought about direction will always bring improvement. You wanna be a superstar overnight? Ain't gonna happen, buddy.

Patience, and you'll get there. Slow and steady.

Today is the day of "Hangover"

It was my birthday yesterday. I chose, in a lack of wisdom that appears to plague me annually, to end up plastered. That very special Oh shit I can't remember getting to bed kind of plastered.

Dammit. Another one down.

Mailbox Monday

This Is Not Art

There is a festival on in town - This Is Not Art. They had a Sunday afternoon fair that I decided to go along to, somewhat for inspiration for my brain and somewhat just to sit back and peoplewatch.

There was a uniform for all the contemporary artist types in attendance.

If you're female, you must:
1. Wear stripey socks pulled up to uneven heights on the legs.
2. Wear outrageously bright leggings, with a definite favour toward flouro pink.
3. Have access to your own sewing machine and manufacture some kind of sack to wear that you obviously flaunt as expressive and arty, but in reality - it's just a sack made from your old curtains.
4. Shave off the hair on one side of your head and not bother with brushing the other side. Bonus credo for cultivating dreadlocks.
5. Sport a satchel of hand-sewn nature consisting of a patchwork of bits of other hand-sewing failures.

If you're male, you must:
1. Cultivate facial fluff. Do not shave, do not trim, do not wash.
2. Wear some sort military jacket, but avoid camouflage print at all costs.
3. Have some sort of metal bits hanging off your face.
4. Blue denim is not your freind. Wear black, black, and more black when it comes to pants.

I wandered past rows and rows of zines, wondering at how these people can happily charge five bucks for ten poorly photocopied pages of bad poetry and stick figure drawings. I wandered past jewelery stores that all seemed to make use of shirt buttons. Fancy an earring with a shirt button on it? Why thanks, that might come in handy some day. I wandered past racks of sewing machine "retro" [=sack] atrocities and hand-made political buttons.

This Is Not Art. Damn right. What could be a really inspiring festival exploring the personally defined lines between art and atrocity left me feeling like I had seen to much atrocity. As for expressing individuality, how can you do that when you all look the same?

PhotoHunt: Sad

Juno - aka Misskin, Snothead, Furrous, Little One.
I miss my little girl so much.

Looking after "self"

This afternoon the light was good for taking some shots I've wanted to take a road trip and chase for a while. It was pretty hot, so I could also have been out swimming. There was plenty to do outside.

But I chose not to. I stuck my head under my wing and looked after myself a little. The room that had really begun to resemble that of a teenager got tidied and rearranged. I closed the blinds and cranked the music while I was doing this and danced and sang in only a pair of jeans. I organised my CDs into genre and cross-genre.

The new feeling of organisation and tidiness is calming. I unwind a lot knowing that things are easy to find and not lying all over the floor, or even hidden in cupboards and not sorted. I also unwind completely to music. Dancing and singing while listening to anything that mildly took my interest was far better than spending an afternoon outside.

Time to look after myself (in all aspects) for a while, methinks.

Not a Half-Nekkid Racket

It's Thursday. I should be joining Dive in posting my own tragic attempts at music-making. I should also be firing up the old thursday tradition of posting arty Half-Nekkid Thursday shots.

But dammit, I'm too stuffed.

Eleven hours of dragging an industrial vacuum hose around a big-arse machine in the heat of a coal pit and I'm absolutely knackered. I'm covered in grease, dust, and layers of filthy sweat. If it's this hot now, how the hell am I going to handle the summer?

Mine regulations say that we have to wear long sleeved shirts and pants of a specific design. We also have to wear steel capped lace-up work boots, a hard hat and safety glasses. Over the top of this is the usual cleaner's uniform is the disposable chemical suit. Sperm suits. Those things are like little zip-up sauna body bags. You could sell them to quite a few women as a weight loss program and probably make a mint out of it.

My clothes were wet from head to toe with sweat. It was dripping from my lip and forehead which is so unattractive I get the shits with myself for being a sweaty pig. The mandatory safety glasses fog up every ten minutes, and by the end of the day it was so hard to lift my feet with the weight of the steel caps on them that I felt like just shuffling them along instead.

Is this so hard simply because I'm unfit? Do I sweat more because I'm fatter than I should be, and unfit?

Do I have to spend hours at the gym and lose all this weight? Become a little fitness junkie in bike pants and a sports top? Do I drink less water? How do I stop from sweating so much?

Sleepytime

In order to prepare for bed one must:

1. Block out weird demolition noises from unidentified source in new suburb.

2. Endeavour to fall asleep immediately due to the nagging suspicion that there may be bitey things cohabiting the bed.

3. Block out the fact that one's surrounds are in such a state of messiness that they resemble the bedroom of an adolescent, except that the papers on the floor are bills rather than maths notes.

4. Focus on the bunch of flowers recieved as a surprise left on my bed today as a warming point of happiness and content.

Goodnight.