Further Wanderings

Well then, it’s been rather a while since I last wrote, hasn’t it.
But for good reasons, I assure you. What have I been busy with? I shall explain:

1. Cultivating hidden (talent?)
I’ve always thought it would be nice to be able to play a musical instrument, but have never had the talent and/or patience required to learn one (except my bit of mucking about on the digeridoo.) This has changed of late. Regular, thorough readers may recall me mentioning that I heard Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” played in the foyer of a movie theatre and got to chatting with the woman behind the counter who had put it on. During our chat she mentioned that she’d started playing the saw recently. Before I’d left home I’d actually given consideration to doing exactly that myself, and I took this as a sign that it was meant to be. The next day I did a bit of reading on the internet and pulled an old saw out of the flat’s tool cupboard.
[read on]

So you ask, what’s new and exciting in Wellywood? (That’s what some locals have taken to calling Wellington recently. The name comes from the fact that, between Peter Jackson and significant incentives from the New Zealand government, quite a bit of filmmaking gets done here.)

Well, we can begin with my flat’s pot-luck tea party. Tea, of course being dinner. I’ve always been kind of irritated by the confusion that this causes. Fine, I’ve been able to train my mind to instantly translate “tea” to mean “dinner,” but now what am I supposed to do if I want to invite people over for ACTUAL tea? Think of the confusion it would cause if Canadians called lunch, say, “gin and tonic” and took to regularly inviting people over for “gin and tonic” with no way to specify whether they meant a meal or a drink. It would be chaos I tell you. CHAOS!
[read on]