Going after our dreams can be an expensive pursuit. The Buddha Siddhartha Gautama said that to pursue our wants and desires was to stray from the path of spiritual enlightenment (although to add a little perspective, he grew up up with everything his heart desired available at his whim).

Like the Buddha (and to a lesser extent Paris Hilton), I would like to be a party girl first and then a great spiritual leader.

dave

I used to work late shifts at one of the lowest rent clubs in Canberra (I don’t think I’d be giving too much away by saying it was in Dickson and was frequented at the time mostly by tradesmen). Anyways, my job was sitting in a cage of sorts, paying gamblers who had managed to recoup some of their fool-gotten gains. Not exactly every young boy’s fantasy…although the cage was pretty accurate.

To kill time I used to read a lot; there were a lot of student types on the payroll that would study at work and so, in an effort to reclaim my book smarts and look like a big shot, I set about reading one massive tome in particular. The book was called “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”  by Julian Jaynes and it really was massive.

I must have read that book at least five times…well attempted that book five times. I really aced the contents page but never got much of the way past page 50 although that’s not to say that the book wasn’t fascinating because it was. It’s just that I’d jumped in at the deep end and was floundering in the subject matter. I kept at it as I did because I used to like lugging it around as it helped me feel a little more like a ‘diamond in the rough but the fact that it was a little over my head only made me feel like a ’slightly polished pebble in the rough’.

There’s a lesson in that I’m sure.

dave

These days it’s pretty easy to daydream at work. I defy any computer based employee (or as I prefer to call them Windows Explorers) to go a whole day without doing it. Spare a thought for those poor office workers of yesteryear who could only explore actual windows to escape the humdrummity of the working week. Now you could think that I just made up that word or…you could spend the next 5 minutes googling it.

No one’s going to judge you here.

dave

To believe in love at first sight means that in potential you believe that you could yet by knocked to the ground with surprise when you actually experience it. For example, I’m heterosexual but then again maybe I just haven’t met the right guy yet. Of course by that rationale, it’s also possible I haven’t met the right horse yet or the right inflatable love doll yet.

Surely there must be people all over the globe that have experienced surprisingly shocking love at first sight over all kinds of inanimate objects; and who knows, maybe whatever they experienced when they first laid eyes on that lampshade or washing machine is more than you and I might ever dream to experience. Of course it’s also possible they’re all crazy-bananas too.

dave

When I am at a friends house, I get very nervous if I have to go ‘powder my nose’ lest I should unleash some long dead lingering spirits. This is perhaps folly but if it’s ever going to happen, it’s going to be somewhere that I can be judged and sentenced for the crime.

Wherever possible, I compose myself until such time as I can get to the warmth of my own non-judgmental toilet. This is the same reason why I tend not to fire off air-biscuits in confined spaces such as elevators, cars or scuba gear. I know it’s just a natural part of our digestive system and nothing to be ashamed of, but it has the potential to produce odours that are anything but natural.

dave

I’ve raised this a few times previously in comics and blogs and I’ll no doubt raise it again in the future as a reminder to myself to stop putting my foot in it.I’m pretty good at interacting in a conversation (and I can produce referees who will vouch for it). The trouble is when I try to interact with people that I haven’t yet established appropriate boundaries with, I tend to cross said boundaries in a whirlwind of cultural taboo’s and social faux pas’.

Now I could tell you that it’s because I moved around a lot as a kid and had trouble making friends, or I could tell you that I’ve been double crossed by too many people to let anyone get close, but as I’ve pretty clearly demonstrated (with diagrams I might add) it all comes back to evolution. That’s not to say that I won’t be fighting it every step of the way, it’s just to say that if I do put my foot in it, please understand that I mean no disrespect, it’s merely science.

and I’m working on it…

dave

I am not one for budgeting although I will defend to the death the right of people to do it. The principle is sound but the practice is painfully tedious.I got switched to monthly pays at work which is a real knee in the genitals after two weeks into the pay cycle I can tell you. I find rather than budgeting, I’ve become more creative about how I make the money I need to stay ahead. I’ve been rummaging  through all of my possessions for the Ebay fairy to turn into cold hard E-cash and I may yet have to take up busking whilst cleaning windscreens at the traffic lights.

dave

Sometimes when I walk home from a night on the town, I see the ominous silhouette of a chap walking towards me. Instantly I’m like a cat in ‘arched back’ battle mode and I walk along working out attack, defend and evade strategies (this goes double for groups of chaps – I’ll go so far as to switch to the other side of the road for groups of chaps).

There is a tense moment as two potentially lethal strangers pass each other by (when any of those strategies may need to be deployed in an instant) and then like two xenophobic ships in the night, we continue on our respective journeys. I breathe a sigh of relief and scoff at myself for over-reacting over everyday scenarios. It makes me smile to think that the chap also walks off thinking the exact same thing.

and then I ninja him upside his face.

dave

I used to work in hospitality and let me tell you it was far from hospitable. My job was to spend my evenings wandering around a club picking up dirty glasses.  As you can imagine, I spent a heck of a lot of that time imagining my way out of there. Since perception is reality, I tried changing the workload into a more Nintendo based process.

I thought that the time might progress a little faster if it wasn’t for the fact the glasses became gold coins for me to collect and my supervisor became a koopa trooper (the object being to avoid him at all times). The nintendo technique got me through some particularly rough shifts until one double shift (whilst going for the high score) I mistook a group of old bingo ladies for a boss battle.

dave

I like to think that every adult I know is only ever trying their best to be adults (and it’s not that I actually have some sort of peculiar learning disability). It’s just that grownups are so serious at work and especially during meetings. To have to be grown up all the time for the rest of your life…well it’s just not worth thinking about.

dave