Break Away

It's not so much that I'm not liking the Internet at the moment, rather that I just don't feel compelled to be on it all the time as would usually be the case. There seems to have been a drop-off in activity in much of what I know as my blogosphere. I don't feel the need to check the Pink Floyd, Genesis and Sigur Ros news so often anymore, given that it has all consisted of announcements of European tour dates and obscure, crappy ex-vocalists' album releases anyway. Using MSN has seldom been a rewarding experience at any stage in my life, and the recent stint was no exception. Simply, there's better things to do offline. Now I'm still spending similar portions of the Internet hours, but that time isn't being spent at the computer -- I've begun to use P2P again and I'm using it to collect Pink Floyd b-sides and various other bits and bobs. I just start the downloads and walk away, to the sofa which is actually about a metre away but there you go.

I've also been having great difficulty putting images into my blog entries for the past month at least. Blogger's been pretty uncooperative. I find it interesting that I'm having this trouble whilst Hannah is simultaneously turning her clog into a photo album of sorts, a lot of which is quality. In my case, the Syd Barrett photo was only appended to the relevant entry after over an hour of struggle -- I wouldn't want to spend that time on any other picture; here it was simply that it would have been disgusting not to include a photo of Syd. I'm still dissatisfied with my recently imageless entries, though.

Working at the air conditioning factory is semi-officially my part-time job now. I say semi-officially because I'm not necessarily secure in the position -- if the current inundation of work the company's receiving dies down, then I'll be laid off as an unskilled worker; the other young guys there at the very least did well in metalwork at school, whereas I sucked. But I've settled into a routine of working fourteen hours a week now, pleasantly padded out -- four and a half hours before uni on Monday and Wednesday mornings, and five hours on Saturday morning -- and earning a good amount of money with which I can progressively pay my parents back for the various things I owe them.

I was going to do an entry about the scrapping of the Overlander passenger train service between Auckland and Wellington -- for a brief time I was even set on creating a blog to provide a commentary on the state of New Zealand's railways -- and I may yet, but I soon realised that I felt too strongly about the issues to evoke them in writing in such a way that I would find satisfactory afterwards. I've found this has been the case with a lot of things recently. I don't know what's happened, but I have a feeling it's got something to do with my thoughts being organised much more spasmodically than they ever have been before, now that I'm moving into a new phase of my life. It's not a bad thing at all -- I feel far freer. Not allowing myself to be controlled by the constraints of what other people may think of me if I do something has made me a markedly happier person. These are the virtues of selling out, of being a hypocrit, of being incoherent or of being extremely angry or ecstatic about anything -- this is authentic human expression not about dumbing yourself down so that other people may understand you better. If you understand yourself then that's all that matters.

Lastly, about the train: the Labour Party has failed this country and proved its short-sightedness in letting money take prevalence over the interests of New Zealand developing an efficient transport infrastructure in the build-up to Peak Oil and by not recognising the Overlander's social value. John Broadwell put the argument for the retention of the train forward best, in a succint form.