I like you. I’ll kill you last!

Apparently, I’m a glutton for punishment. I’ve accepted a contract job with a top-5 Australian site to help out with their Doubleclick migration, which will be my third in the last year! I am actually pretty excited; traffic pays a hell of a lot better than temp work, and the offices are located in the middle of the Vietnamese section of town. Looking forward to some delicious, delicious lunches!

It’s so funny to be on the other side of this sort of thing. Instead of working my ass off & putting together training docs & harassing Doubleclick with unanswerable questions, I just get to be the low-level contractor who has to be trained from scratch on the site structure and the old ad server and such. I’m going in tomorrow for a few hours of site training to get an idea for how they sell the property and how things are divided up.  Work officially starts Monday, which is exactly two months after my last day of work in Seattle.  I’m actually ready, I think, to be a 9-5er again; it will be nice to use my brain a bit more, for sure!

Now that I have money coming in, I’ve gone and spent my paycheck of the future on basketball shoes.  Shit’s expensive here – I dropped AUD$140 on an okay pair of And1s!  But the good news is I think I’ve found a basketball team in the upper division of, according to the cool guy who sold me the shoes, the best league in Melbourne.  Once the film fest is over I’m going to play a trial game with them and see how it goes, so hopefully that will work out.  They even play on Tuesday nights, just like at home!

Speaking of the film festival, it’s now in full swing and I’ve liked everything I’ve seen thus far: No One Knows About Persian Cats, Moon, and Humpday.  I think I’m going to see a total of 10, which when you count in my volunteer shifts makes for a busy couple of weeks!  Starting off my time in Melbourne with a fest was a great idea – definitely a nice introduction to the arts scene here.  My volunteer shifts are cool, too, since merch sales really only pick up when folks are shuffling into the cinemas.  So I have a lot of free social time; I made friends with the venue manager, who says that she has some connections into basketball leagues here.  She’s made some calls on my behalf so if my prospective team doesn’t work out, I have a backup strategy.  One of my housemates was making fun of me for putting so much effort into finding a team that *doesn’t* practice; she has a point!

I’ve also been trying to do more touristy things, since I am nearly out of funemployment time.  On Tuesday, I decided to walk over to a waterfall I’d seen on the gigantic Melbourne map in the bathroom.  The waterfall itself ended up being really lame (like 2 feet high! why is that even on a map?) but it was in the middle of an awesome, huge park.  It’s built around a bunch of switchbacks in the Yarra River, which makes for some excellent walking and bird-spotting and stuff.  I ended up covering about 14km in total, and explored a big chunk of the park as well as the neighborhoods in between here and there (it’s three to the east).  It’s fairly close to my job as well, so I expect I’ll be spending more time out there as the weather gets nicer.  On Wednesday, I signed up for a group tour to the Yarra Valley wineries, which was tons of fun.  There were only 6 people on the tour, and there was a lot of wine, so we all had a great time.  It doesn’t sound very good, but a lot of Australian wineries make a sparkling Shiraz/Pinot Noir, and it is absolutely delicious.  Definitely one of those drinks to file under danger…

The house & housemates continue to be awesome.  The other day we got a letter from a TV production company asking us if they could use our house as a location for some CSI-type show.  We are all really excited and hoping they want it to be a crack den or something so we can get background roles as junkies or dead bodies.  If it works out, it’d be a hell of a souvenir of my time in Melbourne!!

Oh, and apparently I’ve arrived in Melbourne – I’ve run into folks I know twice now on the street this week.  I can count the number of people I know here on two hands so I’m not sure what to make of that…

Hope you all had a great Christmas in July, heathens

I feel like I should have more exciting stories for all of you at home, but moving overseas is incredibly un-glamorous for about the first month or so.  Especially since I’m planning to be abroad for so long – it’d be stupid if I spent through lots of my savings in my very first city.  So, I’m in cash conservation mode, which doesn’t really make for good blogging.  But here I am anyway…

Speaking of savings, I discovered a couple of exciting bargains this week, in celebration of our lord and savior and when he got all born again in July or whatever.  (Yes, I am talking about Hulk Hogan, aka Santa with Muscles)  Movies here are usually really expensive – like over $15 expensive – but on Mondays everybody goes infomercial sale crazy and things get cheap.  The cinema across the road goes down to $6 before 4pm and $8 after.  So Mondays are now officially cinema days – I’ll see any old trash for $6.  It’s my hip excuse for seeing Harry Potter this week.  (The verdict?  Better than a lot of them, except the third of course, which was a real movie.  It was overlong and the usual bla bla blas about Harry Potter movies but not bad for the price!)  The other bargain was pretty good, too.  Melbourne’s having an arts festival this fall and Fischerspooner are coming thru for a night as part of it.  Unlike most cities, where arts festivals generally mean inflated ticket prices and stupidity, here it means I get to see them for $17.  When you consider it’s at their Paramount or Moore-sized theatre and one US dollar is worth $1.25 Australian, it basically means I win at life.  So ha.

In other arts news, the film festival started this weekend, which means I’m now spending a couple days a week hawking merchandise and attempting to use a credit card machine.  I also have an excellent slate of movies lined up; just came back from the first one, No One Knows About Persian Cats, which I quite liked.  The audience were rather IMDb-like and stayed until the end of the credits…  Volunteering is actually pretty nice – in a 4 hour shift I do about 30 minutes worth of work and spend the rest of the time socializing or reading a cornucopia of free books on my Kindle.  If the iPhone gets to be the jesusphone, does that mean the Kindle gets to compete with the bible and be called the jesusbook?  Because I am plowing through the public domain – just finished the entire Sherlock Holmes library and am now halfway through Gulliver’s Travels.

Other than books and movies and obsessing about money I spent my week twice getting drunk with the housemates, once by sheer chance, and swearing off beer.  Did you know that for the price of one pint of beer at a bar, I can buy a whole bottle of Jacob’s Creek Shiraz?  Did you know that a six-pack of beer costs $17 here??  I never imagined beer would be so expensive in Australia, but it is, and I am coping sullenly.  Good thing I like wine!

Oh, and I have a job interview in the morning, and I think I really want the job, so here’s hoping I don’t fuck this one up!

American for tangerine is ‘shut the fuck up’

Don’t ask me why I’ve swapped a Seattle summer for a wintery Melbourne, which is exactly like a rainy Seattle fall.  We even had a thunderstorm today!  But I’m here, and in the last 4 days I’ve managed to find a place to live, secured all the essentials (bank account, mobile phone &c) and, more importantly, secured a couple volunteer jobs at the Melbourne film festival.  I’m helping out with the marketing/sponsorship stuff while I look for actual paying work here, and then when the fest starts I’ll be doing merchandising or something.  I actually started volunteering today, just for a couple hours, and already have some free tickets!  So suffice to say, things are going very well here.

By this point some of you may be wondering how the laziest person you know managed to get this far.  Let me let you in on a little motivational secret: living in a hostel.  Nothing like waking up at 4am to a screeching English girl in the room next door going on about how she can teach her roommates English even though she knows nothing about grammar because, in her words, “you can just talk and I can correct you when you make mistakes!” to give you the energy you need to get the hell out.  It was when she started lecturing them on the definitions of tangerine and tambourine that I put my bitch hat on, knocked on her door, and informed her that American for tangerine is ‘shut the fuck up.’

Actually most people in the hostel are pretty cool, and I’ve made friends with a few German girls.  We’ve gone exploring in St. Kilda, cooked a big group dinner, done the obligatory drinking, and apparently tonight there is going to be karaoke?  Don’t worry though, I won’t destory any foreign eardrums by singing myself…

My aunt is a zombie, from hell!

My favorite animated – or claymated, which sounds too much like a creepy American Idol fan website – short from back in the day is now free on the interwebs!  Check out Not Without My Handbag for some serious awesomeness…

The world’s most relaxing piano solos, volume 7

SIFF this year has been almost uniformly excellent.  Last year it felt like we saw 4 bad movies for every good one – but this time around, even the bad films have had redeeming qualities.  Even the secret festival – always a crapshoot – has been pretty amazing.  I can’t talk about the two films I saw there, but here are the other 8 I’ve seen thus far:

Departures (2008, Japan) – The best way I can think to describe this one is that at it was a very, very good film being slowly strangled by a really stupid melodrama.  Apparently it won the Oscar this year for best foreign film – no idea how or why.  But it was a worthwhile film to see, for those occasional moments of brilliance.

The Yes Men Fix The World (2009, USA) – Two things made this hilarious documentary work: its willingness to stick around when things got awkward, and its use of comedy outside the corporate pranks it was perpetrating.  What would have otherwise been a political documentary starring funny people became instead a hybrid docu-comedy.  And I learned a new text messaging technique!

The Beaches of Agnès (2008, France) – I’d never seen a film by Agnès Varda.  Watching this autobiographical doc made me want to.

Favela on Blast (2008, Brazil) – As a documentary, this one wasn’t that great.  It attempted to tell the story of baile funk and Rio’s favelas through the lyrics of and occasional interviews with its MCs, but didn’t really succeed.  However, the music was awesome, and it was pretty cool to have its hilariously filthy lyrics spelled out in the subtitles.

Rembrandt’s J’accuse (2008, Netherlands) – A film as much about our lack of visual fluency as it was about Rembrandt’s Nightwatch.  Very, very dense (it’s Greenaway!), and something I’ll definitely be catching again once it’s on DVD.  Easily one of the best of the fest so far.

Bluebeard (2009, France) – Pretty terrible adaptation of the Bluebeard fairytale.  After the film, Michael and I came up with two genius ideas – Bluebeard’s Castle would make a great Halloween costume (think dead, blue barbies) and Advent calendar (one of the prizes could be Visine!).  So thanks for that, Bluebeard!

The Maid (2009, Chile) – I have always been kinda weirded out by the idea of live-in maids.  This film did nothing to help that!  An amazing performance by Catalina Saavedra made this intimate portrait of a maid just about perfect.

Sounds Like Teen Spirit (2008, UK) – I was introduced to Eurovision when I was living in London and despite its effects on my liver, I find the whole thing hilariously compelling.  This doc covered the 2007 Eurovision Juniors competition, but not strictly from the “holy shit this is creepy” angle I was expecting.  Probably because it’s harder to make fun of kids… but I was really curious to discover the “why” behind Ukraine’s winning “librarian stripper” entry and instead got a look into the experiences of a few of the less ostentatious acts.