23 May 2006

Yesterday a person rear-ended my fucking car. Aaarghh! Fuck! Can you fucking believe it? I can’t. It’s insane. That fucking car must be cursed. I’m not even joking.

I finally finished Bleak House, & have subsequently also finished The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett.

[NOTE: This is the last entry in this diary, although the physical book has about 30 blank pages at the end. I obviously just gave up. There are subsequent diaries, but since the date of these is much closer to the present, I will not be uploading these for some time, if at all. In parting, here is a photograph of the page containing the last entry. This blog is now officially on long-term, possibly permanent, hiatus.]

16 May 2006

Nearly a full two month hiatus. I started a blog where I mainly post the movie notes I wrote last year, plus some newer material on movies, books & music. So that has, to some extent, replaced this. Although obviously not entirely.*

Studying is forging ahead. It’s been tough the last few weeks when I ran into the business end of my graphics course. Man, that stuff can me mean! Still not finished the second assignment. Also CORBA programming has been laborious, but I finally finished the 2nd assignment last night.

Reading has gone ahead as well, quite voluminously in comparison with other years. I’m always reading something now, which hasn’t always been the case. At the moment it’s Bleak House. Fucking long. Probably too long, but that’s Dickens. There’s enough emotional truth in it to keep me reading, although some of the sentiment is overwrought. That, too, is Dickens, I suppose.

On the work front things are crap. However, there may be an opportunity to leave NMT quite soon (this year, anyway) to start my own little development concern. That would be so extremely cool that I don’t even want to jinx it by writing about it.

[NOTE: The blog is now also moribund. It can still be viewed at http://evanmorris.iblog.co.za/]

17 March 2006

Boredom has set in again. It’s early on Friday afternoon, I’m sitting in my office waiting for a meeting with Tracey & Stephen Sands, & I’m bored out of my fucking skull. I mean, bored to a state of physical discomfort. And all the usual shit is true, too, in the sense I cannot provide alternatives.

I think confronting reality is dangerous. I’m not even being facetious. Actually, acknowledging reality and trying to stop deluding yourself is an incredibly hazardous activity. It could, conceivably, kill you.

5 March 2006

Sunday night, sitting in the bedroom listening to music. Currently it’s Nena, “99 Red Baloons”.

Last little while I’ve read “A Room with a View” at last. Quite funny, a little different from the movie (interestingly so) & very entertaining. After that I read “Three Men in a Boat”, which is absolutely hilarious in places. I haven’t had that experience of being rendered incapable by laughter since I read “High Fidelity”. There is a particular passage in “Thee Men” where Jerome is hanging about near a churchyard feeling benevolent & holy, & a man comes out offering to show him the tombs. The description of his outrage  is paralysingly funny. I thought I was going to hurt my stomach. Seriously.

Next on the list is “Barnaby Rudge”. The main problem I have with it is that the print size is tiny. Really, really, stupidly small. Also, it’s not really funny. But Dickens has a good enough eye for character to keep me reading. Simultaneously I’m re-reading Les Miserables. I’m enjoying its leisurely build-up a lot more this time than I did the first time.

When I either finish or abandon Dickens I’m going to read Gogol. I haven’t read anything by him, I don’t think, since about 1990. Christ, time is incomprehensible.

In amongst all of this I am actually working (hard) & studying. Okay, I’m not working hard. I’m doing the bare minimum if truth be told. I have to start paying more attention.

And the last couple of days I’ve been constructing (in the background) a vast, comic novel. It’s this fact, combined with the music, that’s got me to sit down & write. You see, this satirical novel is fantastic & flamboyant (in my mind :-)) & very flippant. Yet I put on some music & it’s Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia”, & I’m the yearning artist again, wishing to do earnest work & create significance. So there’s this inane internal struggle. And I don’t really know what to do about it. So I’m just going to record its existence.

28 February 2006

Last day of Feb already. Fucking insane.

It’s probably worth recording that my current mental state is predicated on the idea that I’m going to die. That the concept of “meaning” in life is a siren concept, void of value. A pied-piper idea. Silly. Life is utterly, incontrovertibly meaningless & value-free. Nothing anyone does has any broad significance & everything is basically accidental. There are no external referents for anything & morality is a waste of time. Complete devotion to personal predilection is the only sensible way to behave. Everything else is just utterly stupid. Of course, holding these ideas in mind, I find that personal taste tends to lean towards doing nothing. In other words, because nothing is significant, the things you thought you wanted to have & do, you actually don’t. You only want to have them or do them if they’re significant. But they’re not. So there’s no point. I feel very taoist.

21 February 2006

The amazing flattened affect strikes again. Yesterday I was reasonably positive. Tonight I’m just completely flat. I could swing either way. Most likely into sadness & misery, though. It’s just fucking habit.

Work is burning. That doesn’t make much sense, not even as a metaphor. But anyway. Work is crap. I can’t fucking stand it. I’m so badly deployed, I’m so fucking bored. I want to tear my goddamned eyes out.

Last night I fell asleep only when the birds were starting to sing. So I’ve had about two, maybe three hours’ sleep. Max. And tonight I intend to watch Liverpool play Benfica. Maybe. Christ, I feel so deflated!

Weird.

Last night while I was suffering insomnia I convinced myself to stop telling stories. To just stop it. To withdraw my energies from “creative” things. But the habit persists.

Why would I withdraw, you ask? Because I’m frankly disinterested. I don’t get it any more. It’s all just habit. It’s OCD. Seriously. All human activity. Even our cherished beliefs, opinions, even so-called reasoned conclusions. All just fucking arbitrary habit. Could have been anything. Blind accident. Could have been a civilization of shames pederasts. Same thing. No difference. Just accident.

It was all a lie. I think I cried about that for a long time, harshly, recently. Bitter, burning tears. Uncontrollable. Not that sweet misery that you allow to leak out while to wallow in it. This was crushing. Hurting. Sobbing, cursing, moaning. It was all a lie! The whole thing was a lie. And I’ve nourished the lie with such care that the lie now owns me. The lie owns me so much that I’m even choosing these words carefully because of the delusion that someday they will be referenced in someone’s essay about me. That’s how fucking sick I am.

13 February 2006

It was my birthday yesterday. Largely uneventful because I was horribly hung over. Really. I could barely sit upright. Saturday was Julia’s birthday & we went there for a night of severe drunkenness & dancing. The weekend had already got underway on a high note because Friday was out wedding anniversary (11 years) & I made Heidi a 3-course meal & we drank a lot of wine & watched the Bulls (not really deservedly) beat the Cheetahs 30-18 in the Super 14.

Saturday morning we went to a costume place in Centurion to get wigs & then we didn’t have breakfast at Kaene. We ordered breakfast & we waited a long time for breakfast, but before breakfast could be served I told the manager I was tired of waiting, I didn’t intend to eat breakfast any more, & I wasn’t going to pay for the coffee & hot chocolate either. Not a good start to my day, actually.

In the afternoon I did a tiny amount of studying. I also watched bits of the Waratahs (surprisingly narrowly) beating the Reds 16-12.

After that Heidi took me to buy my birthday present. A digital camcorder. Very extravagant. I protested. She bought it anyway.

Afterwards I watched Liverpool beat Wigan 1-0, off a great striker’s goal by Samy Hyypia 🙂 Amazingly, no Liverpool striker has scored a Premiership goal yet in 2006.

This was followed by the first half of the Cats losing to the Stormers at Ellis Park (23-12 was the final score). I didn’t see the whole game because we were getting ready for Julia.

Their new house is in Lynnwood, beautiful old Cape Dutch house. Party went okay until I started getting horribly drunk & everyone ended up in the kitchen reminiscing about high school. Fuck. That really sucks! Then Heidi basically tore my character to pieces in the car on the way home (at around 2 or 3 in the morning).

Next day, yesterday, was the aftermath. Indeed today I still feel ill.

Anyway, spent the day reading, watching Mr & Mrs Smith, which is a complete turd, really. Really fucking awful, brainless, insulting junk. Shit script, dire editing, vapid direction & phoned-in performances. A genuinely cynical exploitation flick.

Last night Heidi & I were both asleep by 20h30. I had horrible dreams filled with architectural disasters & wild animals, & I woke up at 02h00 & stayed that way till 3. Heidi woke me again at 04h15 because she had to go to the airport, then again at 5 after she’d left, because she wasn’t sure if she’d closed the garage door. And now it’s about 20 to 7.

Oh, one other amazing sports result: Chelsea went down 3-0 to Boro in the league. 3-0! To Boro!

1 February 2006

Hey, it’s February.

Some sort of intense respiratory infection has been creeping up on me for a few days now, & it’s finally settled in. I feel like total shit.

It may also have a lot to do with stress levels. Work is falling apart, studies, life. It’s challenging to say the least. But hey, it occurs to me that this is probably desirable! Isn’t it supposed to be easier to shine in crisis than in times of quiet?

30 January 2006

Everything was actually going quite well today until I posted what I thought was an innocent remark on Empire & got flamed. Then I responded with flame & now I feel fucking sick. Seriously.

I never fucking learn.

Also, I have to study this fucking SQL crap & it’s brainless. Genuinely fucking brainless. I think what I must do is set it all up in Access & ussue the SQL queries, or try to have fun, set it up in mySQL & do it that way.

26 January 2006

Not doing well. Weird. The last two days or do I’ve been immersed in work, which has been annoying, but I haven’t felt really sad or anything. Now suddenly I’m tanking. And my sinuses are all swollen & filled up with gunk.

Might be something as trivial as the weather, though. It’s raining again, whereas the last couple of days have been quite sunny. Who knows? I might be that simplistic.

Went to see “The Constant Gardener” last night. Very well made, or rather well shot, but quite slow & in the end it didn’t across as fully cohesive. Needed editing. I think there might have been a director-producer creative struggle about the film’s core intent, because it ended up being diffuse, torn between social commentary & thriller-romance. In the end it wasn’t much of either. Some beautiful photography though.