So I turned thirty today.
I rather hoped I’d have something solemn and substantial to say about it all, but just as on many other mornings in the past (and probably many more to come), I woke up tired, vaguely hungover and with as little wisdom as I had yesterday.
I’ve always had a bit of a problem coming up with just the right words to mark an occasion. Ironic really, considering how many words I throw around, both verbally and… writtenly? See, again my limited lexicon fails me. I remember being at the Gathering in Nelson on the cusp of the minnellium, (the one in 1999/000, not the one only pedants celebrated in 2000/2001). Time was tight and I was determined to make my last words of the twentieth century something appropriately momentous. Something like Oscar Wilde’s alleged last words “Either those curtains go or I do.”
Twelve years of school, five years of tertiary education, what’s the best I come up with?
“Shit, who am I gonna pash?”
Excuse me, my phone’s ringing… That’ll be The Oxford Book of Quotations wanting a word.
So I got up this morning, that’s right, tired, vaguely hungover and still lacking wisdom. Nor, I noted as I had a shave, do I look like a man. Why is that? Why do some guys look like men when they hit twenty, and others of us still get ID’d at Pak ‘n’ Save? Why does the odd ginger woman that gets on the bus each morning have a moustache I could never aspire to? Seriously, she scares me. It’s not so much the beard that worries me, or the odd smell, or the erratic eyes. It’s the stuffed toys she has hanging off her oversized backpack. If Furbies aren’t a sure sign of a sociopath, I don’t know what is.
A friend points out I got a nebulous mention in last week’s NBR. To be honest I’m unclear quite how to take it. In case you missed it (which I dare say is most of you), and care (surely a minority) it was in the context of a comedy piece about a divorce ceremony for Helen and Don. There was a mention of a poem, “Damian Christie’s Ode to Deborah’s Shawl”. Talk about obscure references, but there ya go.
For those of you who’ve been following it, I found out a few weeks back who was behind the radionzbias website, and the source of all the scurrilous allegations about me, and my apparently dodgy history. I’ve recorded a phone call in which I confront him with the facts, and it makes for amusing listening. A wee court case nothwithstanding, I’ll tell you soon who’s behind it, and possibly upload the phone call too for everyone’s mirth and amusement. Call me vindictive, but I prefer to think that in an open marketplace of ideas, it’s important to know your accusers. And to laugh at them, wherever possible.
Interestingly, radionzbias has been strangely silent since I first hinted I knew the masked man’s identity. Well, if there’s something positive to come out of all this, that’d be it.
Enough introspection. I apologise, it’s very twenty-something of me. It won't happen again. Sniff.