That was how bad last year was. It managed to completely knock my ability to write one of these out of my head. I won’t lie, I haven’t thought much about writing anything for a while. I think the last post I wrote was simply out of necessity, as I was in the same predicament as I am now. I needed to write something to pass the time, I’m doing the exact same thing now. That, and I felt like I needed to update my site. I wonder what I’d be doing if I didn’t really blog. I mean seriously, over the past few years, I blog because I’m bored. I’m not the type of person to look through random Youtube videos, I hate using myfacepagespacebook simply because it feels like I’m doing small talk over the internet, and I only ever do anything nerdy if I need to. Take for instance people who ‘browse’ Youtube. I don’t get it. Fair enough if I watch one video that’s slightly interesting and click through maybe twice on a couple of other ‘related’ videos, but that’s only ever because I’m looking for something. It’s never out of boredom that I go through the Random pages of Youtube and expect to find some kind of gem. Hell, I barely use the subscription part of Youtube to keep up with videos I kind of like watching. I dunno, I was never one for keeping that completely update to date with things like that. Hell, my facebook page is pretty much full of those event invitations. I dunno, maybe I’m becoming that guy that can’t keep up with technology. Or maybe I’m just incredibly unsociable. It’s only been recently that I jumped on the Twitter and honestly, I still don’t get what’s going on with it, why there is so much hype about it. I will admit that it was incredibly exciting when I first signed up, it felt like an incredibly slow IRC channel. I can see where it would be helpful from like a laptop or while you’re out with your phone, but doing that twittering thing while I’m sitting at my desk just felt weird. Even now, using thing Twitterific thingy from my laptop is way more fun than sitting at my desk.

Speaking of desk, I’ve since relocated rooms since my last post. Before I was upstairs in a relatively small room (only exacerbated by my incredibly large desk), I’m now in the room downstairs. Like a tiny little granny-flat thing, only minus the granny. Originally it was meant to be a room for when relatives come over and spent a few nights with us, seeing as it’s not connected to the house, so they won’t annoy us when they get home. Now it’s the jarryd-pad. I’ve only been down here for a little over a week, but it’s kind of neat being down here, completely cut off from my family. I can now see how much fun moving out will be, other than the whole moving part. Seriously, I can’t believe I kept so much shit in my room. When you walked into my old room, it was Jesuschristdesk, and then bed. That was the only thing you ever saw in my room. I usually kept my masses of shit hidden in my cupboards, which made moving just that much harder. I started getting my shit ready to move Monday morning, and I didn’t end up finishing the move until Friday lunch time. I could have slept in the room on Thursday night, but I hadn’t moved my computers yet. It took me all of Friday to get all of my computers downstairs (minus the 3 old ones I took downstairs the day before) and it took mum and I nearly an hour to take apart my desk, bring it down the stairs and assemble it again. Now, if you don’t know this already, but my computers are connected via a wireless router, it’s my only way of getting the internet short of bashing holes in the wall and running cat6e cable through them. In my old room, I was almost on the other side of the house getting fairly decent wireless speeds. Nothing to be proud of, but it wasn’t the worse either. Moving downstairs I thought I was going to cure my wireless woes as I was going to be within 10m of my modem. Right? No. Wrong. Completely wrong. Fuck you wireless.

That Friday night was bullshit, I spent hours trying to work out why I was suddenly going from full speed wireless, to barely anything by moving closer to my source. It made zero sense. I went from going through like 6 walls, to going through 2 and suddenly I’m worse off than I was before. After an hour of fiddling and moving shit around, I eventually worked out that if I sat outside my room, quite literally standing outside my door, I’d get full speed again. Move down to where my desk is and I’m suddenly downloading as if I was poor. Ok I thought, I’ll buy two 10dB antennas, surely that’ll fix the problem considering the stock antennas are only 2dB (I know, that made no sense to me before I bought them, but just think bigger is better.) I went for a drive over to Jaycar (it’s like the Radioshack for Australia) and figured they’d have something I needed, I brought the old antenna just incase. The conversation I had with the guy that worked there felt like I was talking to a wall, or a retard. Better yet, I could have had a smarter conversation with a retarded wall.

Me: “I’m looking for an RP-TNC connector”
Jaycar Retard: “Uihh.. I don’t know what that is”
Me: “It looks like this” (Showing him the antenna in my hand)
JR: “Oh. Um. I’ll look in the computer”
Me:

After the abortion that was my visit to Jaycar, I gave up and eventually ordered some online thinking it’d take a week to get here. Pretty much a day later I was installing them with hope they would fix my problems. My router went from a small little-eared thing to a box with antennas that look like they deserve to be on car or roof. Surely these giant antennas are going to fix the problem. No, once again I was disappointed with my hardware, it was a complete waste of time. I was no better off than I was before, but I now have a serious looking wireless router. All this work though, might have lead my Dad to finally installing some cat6e cable around the house. Why he couldn’t have done that when I first moved into my old room, I’ll never know.

I’m not sure whether it was the last post, or the post before it where I was saying something along the lines of Kmart wanting to fire me. Well, they did inadvertently. I come into work Monday and find I’m suddenly not on the roster. Wow, after my shifts not changing for nearly a year and a half, I’m suddenly removed completely from the roster. Clerical error? I think not. I ended up confronting Liam about what was going on. Originally I wanted to be a little reserved about the way I spoke to him, but for some reason he really got under my skin. I think it was the combination of finding out that they wanted me fired (mind you not the first time, remember when Jason Neely wanted to fire me?) and that he wasn’t really defending his staff. It got to me, I’ll admit that. I felt pretty nauseated by the way I was being treated and I think that showed. It went from me spilling my guts to Jono and Timmy helping. I think at one stage had they not stepped in and continued the conversation, I probably would have punched the cunts face in. I’m honestly not that aggressive about things, but by god my blood had boiled. It eventually got to the point where I could not stand to be in his presence and that I had said all that needed to be said and walked out. It felt weird, I knew the conversation wasn’t going to be taken seriously for some reason (they just aren’t like that.) What made things worse was as I had just finished the conversation, Tim Rule walked around the corner as I was walking off. I think had I not cared what I wanted to do the next 12 months, I would have punched him aswell. The way it went, was after a week of having to deal with Tim Rule and his shit, Jono and I were ’spoken to’ about something retarded (pretty much they were trying to find an excuse to speak to us.) That was on a Thursday, so I had a whole weekend of washing away my sorrows as a result of being spoken sternly to by Tim Rule! ( ) Now, imagine my disgust when I get a call, 7pm Sunday night telling me not to come into work.

Liam: “I heard about what happened Thursday. How about you take a week off”
Me:
L: “Take a week off and we’ll speak before next week about your shifts”
Me: “I won’t be back if that’s the case”
L: “Just take a week off, come back refreshed!”
Me: “Yeah, sure.”

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to leap through my phone and kill someone before, but at that moment I could have stabbed him. I didn’t care that he was telling me to take a week off work, I knew I wasn’t going to go back anyway, it was merely the fact that he rung at 7pm on a fucking Sunday night. Why not have the balls to ring me Friday morning, or Saturday afternoon. What was even worse was that I was being fed bullshit about why I should ‘take a week off’. Since that conversation, I haven’t been back into Kmart since. Apart from Timmy and Jono, I haven’t spoken to anyone, or set foot back in that store since I got the phone call from Liam.

Honestly, it’s a pain in the ass not having a steady income (it wasn’t much, but it kept me afloat), but I could not work in that joint even if I tried. Retail, it seriously chews away at your soul until you’re left with nothing but an empty hole. I haven’t worked since that day either, although I am making money taking photos, it’s just a little weird. I’m still unsure on what I really want to do, I want to head down to Sydney with the locals DJs from Discovery and see what it’s like down there. The DJ who is flying them down (DJ Lenno) spoke to me the other night and said that his staff down south love my photos and that I should come down for a night and take photos for them. Could I see myself living in Sydney though? Fucking oath I could. I know for a fact there are a hell of a lot more gigs down there (both nightclubs and festivals) I could go to, but my problem would be, that I know no one down there. I’ve got an uncle and aunt that lives down there, but neither of them are close to the city. Plus, I couldn’t leech off relatives like that, I’d feel bad. If I ever went down there, it would have to be for good, and I would have to have some kind of permanent job where I could support myself. I honestly don’t want to leave and then have to come back 6 months later. I don’t want to be that person that couldn’t live somewhere else and have to move back. There’s nothing in Darwin for me. I rarely speak to my friends, and I have nothing that resembles a relationship up here, so what’s there to lose really. I’d like to be able to leave Darwin, so that in 5 years when I come back for Christmas one year, people will want to see me and know what I’ve been doing.