Here is the stupidity of finding an apartment in Australia: it sucks. Typically these things are handled through real estate agents and they have open houses every Saturday. However, they are typically “open” for a grand total of fifteen minutes and most of these open houses are between 11 and 12 am, usually in mutually exclusive overlapping intervals. Also: all of the real estate agents get together and try and figure out how they can arrange their times such that someone looking in any one particular area has to drive from one side to the other the maximum number of times possible.

So I started this morning copying addresses and prices from the newspaper into a Micr$haft Word document, only the ever helpful paper clip (which apparently I haven’t disabled yet on this computer) kept reformatting my text for me. I think it though that I was typing up a complex ordered list instead of a lift of dates. So when I wasn’t carping about how stupid the system was this morning I was yelling at my poor computer.

I found a couple of nice places, but mostly they were not adequate. Needless to say this painful, yet fruitless activity put me in a bad mood. My mum was super nice to drive me around to all of these places (especially given that I was grumpy about the situation). It was the only way I could have possibly seen everything that I did! At least it was an educational experience.

After all that running around I had a meat pie sans tomato sauce for lunch followed by a wonderful custard tart. This is one thing that I love about Australia: the food. :)

I'm thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, which of course brings up the whole low carb thing. It's a serious inconvenience that pasta is now worse than slathering your blood red cow stake with the thickest bacon grease imaginable, because when cooking for people you have to think up something more complicated to make. So I send Tyler an IM asking: "are you on any of those funky low carb diets?" in hopes that if he comes out to visit me in New York I can make something simple like pasta. But he doesn't answer me right away.

I decided I really needed a paper clip. I riffled through my desk drawer, but come up with nothing. I decide to go buy some and tell Tyler: "i need to go get paper clips. i'll be back in a bit."

To which he responds: "no; they don't work. my dad actually wrote a book which describes why"

I was about to walk out of the room, but I stop with a feeling of dread in my heart. Suddenly I had been thrust into some strange universe where Mr. Spock has a goatee and for some reasons all paper clips have become non functional. I wonder what else is different about this parallel universe? And why did Tyler's father write an entire book on why paper clips don't work? I've been so wrapped up in the future and being an optimist and all that B.S. that I have made myself susceptible to believing it just may be true when somebody tells me something like "paper clips don't work."

"huh? what?" I type.

Then I remember the question before that. "oh. heh. cool. got confused there."

Tyler responds with: "the diets"

"i thought you were saying PAPER CLIPS didn't work."

Relieved that I wouldn't have to double check my Star Trek DVDs to insure that Spock didn't have any extra whiskers (except of course for that one episode that he did), I went off to get some paper clips.

On the way back I'm listening to a CD I burned with just music that I like to listen to and none of the extra chaff which is on those CDs that those musical corporations expect us to buy. It struck me recently that with the exception of the first ("reptile") and last song ("suicide notes") it is all "happy" music, and that I haven't been much interested in listening to the "unhappy" tracks. Guthrie used to imply that the fact that I used to listen to depressing music made me unhappy. I contend (as I did then) that I listened to depressing music because I was depressed, and now that I prefer to listen to "happy" music because I am optimistic.

For a second there it didn't even bother me that I still don't have plans for New Years Eve. It occurs to me that New Years Eve is really Old Years Night... and is so about the past, not The Future.