Ze Goat Island

Outdoor pursuits. One of the things I love about summer in New Zealand is everyone gets outside and flees the suburbs to the beach for the day. Yesterday I pursued this humble tradition and jumped in a car laden with people, supplies and snorkel and headed for Goat Island. The only thing I was missing was a bottle of L&P. So after being cramped in a tiny roasting car for over an hour I finally arrived at the beach along with the other half of the city hot on my heels. The next part of the day was pursuing the quest of finding the ultiumate beach spot, which is never an easy task. Do you opt for the sunny spot, or some point with shelter from the wind or do you look for somewhere with shade (which will eventually move anyway)? In the end the only spot that was available was in the sun anyway, so it was time to let the sunburning begin. I have since one terrible episode in Thailand been very careful being out in the sun; I even have factor 50 sunscreen. After about three coats of sunscreen I was ready to hit the water. The best thing about Goat Island is the fact you can snorkel around and see heaps of fish (though my childhood memories have way more fish there than there are now), so it's like swimming plus.

I'm still getting my head around this blogger thing. I used to use Livejournal a little and some of the functionality over there was quite cool. For example the Music and Mood settings were quite cool. I could write about what I was listening to, and my mood, but there were cool little tabs instead over there. I guess that lead to the type of people who use that site. Perhaps people who want to 'outcool' you on their music choice were there, or perhaps even people wore their mood on their sleeve. I'll have to try adding some photos sometime and see how that goes.

My two lives

Day after day I wake up, go to work and return home to log into a second world. It's got to a point where they aren't different or parallel lives. They have become the same life. Online once seemed like a different sphere where I was something else... anything. These days, that isn't the case. I am who I am. I have many names these days online and offline, and you know what? I love it.

My creativity had dried up over the last 18 months. Something banal had set in, but I need to end that.

I'm seriously addicted to World of Warcraft. It's not something I do... It's now something I am. I have friends there, I have plans to make gold and a list of goals in game. It's weird. I enjoy it, but sometimes I do boring things in there, just like I would wash the dishes in real life. Sometimes I don't understand why I do it. After getting some new shiny piece of gear I want to run around the Undercity and gloat it up. I just got my epic mount (a very fast mode of transport) and have even developed a sense of elitism when seeing other players with 'lesser' mounts. This is weird since in physical reality this mount doesn't exist yet it's worth 720 gold which translates into a real world monetary value of around $NZ100.

Then there is the other part of me... the prior parallel 'real life' me. Working day by day as a journalist with nothing really to say. I just use a set formula in the way I write. It comes out the way my industry expects, but does not allow me to push any different creative areas. On the plus side it has improved my writing structure... I think.

Thus I work, I sleep, I cook, I spend time with my awesome girlfriend, I grind for gold/honour/whatever online and then I sleep some more. How exciting is that?!?