...that I have nowhere else to get this out. Not that I blog much on other websites anyway, but I think I just need to put this somewhere so I can reinforce the idea in my own mind.

I have just realised that can't afford to be lonely. Even when I am lonely, I can't let myself become so lonely it hurts. I can attempt to ease the pain of it sometimes with a splash-and-dash, but when the pang of loneliness hits, it hits hard. The best thing I can do is to not let it get the better of me.

Why? Quite simply, because it makes me vulnerable. And when I'm vulnerable, I do dumb shit. I'll be the first to admit that going to a strip club or a "massage parlour" has its appeals in such situations, but I'm usually able to stay aware of the fact that the financial ramifications of wandering into such a place when driven on by a need for temporary (and almost always unsatisfactory) fulfilment would be crippling to my food budget. The other thing I can end up doing is randomly going into nightclubs in the hope that I will magically strike it lucky, but since I'm not the dancing type unless I have other people with me, I usually just sit at the bar and drink. And naturally, drinking has its own consequences.

But more than this, being in a relationship that could produce offspring is what terrifies me the most. Although I am probably as fertile as any other 26-year-old, I will not allow myself to be put in a position where I may conceive a child. This is for medical reasons which I do not care to elaborate on. Now, finding a lovely woman to share my life with would be all good and well, but if I was to get into any kind of relationship at my present age I would be constantly terrified of the moment when my partner's "biological clock" started audibly ticking. In addition, should a conception occur, I am convinced that I would be a terrible father, also for medical reasons. I know this is irrational, even chauvinistic. I also know there are many women in the world who have made the lifestyle choice to not have children of their own. I can't justify why my brain puts all these conditions on finding love, or at least a momentary flash of happiness in this weird life of mine, but there it is.

There is also the practical viewpoint to consider. I am presently in what one would normally consider to be the prime of one's life, and I have a full-time job, which I am about to give away for a chance at a new life in another country. My present income is barely sufficient to support my own life, let alone the life of someone I would want to commit to. I am hoping that my change in circumstances will bring more opportunity for me to work in music, which has always been my true calling, and perhaps for a quasi-reasonable salary. The long and the short of all this is that, in addition to my fears around children and biological clocks and all that rubbish, my mind seems to continue reminding me of the fact that: a) I am too young; b) I could not afford to support a partner in the way I should like; and c) it would be utterly irresponsible of me to look for a partner if I knew full well I would have to leave her behind to pursue my career. So essentially what I am left with is a heart that is begging for succour and affection and a brain that won't let that happen.

I think I might be losing my mind. I hope I can hold out till I'm safe and sound in my new home in Australia, but every day it just seems to get harder, lonelier, and more stressful without someone to come home to and just be with, so I could forget about the world for even half a second. At this very moment, sleep is a priority. But until the time I can escape, all I'm really capable of doing is "hanging in there". But the longer this goes on, the more my hope for a shared future with a loved one fades away.

Tomorrow is a new day. I would rather not see what it brings, because it mostly involves work, but I guess I have no choice.

Good night.
Alex
-x

Uh... I don't remember being that popular. Ever. Nice stat though, maybe someone is looking out for me? Psssh, dreams are free, I suppose.

Anyway, I'm moving. Leaving the country. Permanently. And planning to set up camp in Sydney, Australia, where I have a great bunch of friends that have already made heaps of offers to help me settle in and find employment and adapt to the 30C temperatures they have there regularly. Hopefully this will be an important first step in my plan to take over the world.

It's not that I dislike where I am, with the exception of my work, which I do desperately want to escape. To begin with, my World Tour of North America (see below) reinvigorated my love of travel and adventure, and I wish I could still be freelancing around Canada and the US with a truckload of money to spend. It was one of the greatest and most memorable experiences of my life so far, and what gave me the most satisfaction when all was said and done is that I afforded it all through my own hard work.

But more importantly, with my degree in music unusable in my adopted home (there's simply no work here in little ol' New Zealand for people like me), I feel the time is right for me to uproot and forge my own path to my dream lifestyle. Something, anything that involves the music biz has got to be a step in the right direction, and with music industry jobs listed daily online and no additional visa requirements for me to migrate, Australia is very much the land of milk and honey as it appears from this side of the Tasman. It's time to go on a new adventure, and hey, if all else fails, I'll always have my friends and family back here.

I wonder: if you're reading this and you have the vaguest memory of me from when I used to be more involved with the site, perhaps you could comment and say hello? It's been so long since I've been on that I don't know who's still here and who isn't. Oh, but don't let that stop you commenting if I look like the type of person you might like to chat with. I'm still interested in meeting new NNers, even if I'm distracted by reality most of the time. *sigh*

Hope you are all keeping well. Love to all my friends on here!

Alex
-x

A few of you might remember my forum post from *ages* ago that bore the same title as this blog post, but what was once a flight of fancy that I had no hope in hell of ever affording has now come to pass.

I have escaped my dreary work surrounds and run away to the US of A. I am now in Chicago and will be until the 12th; from the 12th to the 16th I will be in Atlanta; from the 16th to the 20th, Austin; from the 21st to the 23rd, Seattle; and finally Vancouver, until the evening of the 25th. I have posted a few pics in celebration of this fact direct from the bathtub of my hotel room in Chicago.

Now, if any of you should happen to be nearby while I'm around and know of a good place to get a drink -- or some quality action, who's to say? -- then feel free to drop me a PM or a comment. I'd love to hear from you, especially my NN friends from when I used to frequent the site about two or three years ago.

Oh, and if people in Chicago want to set up a group outing, I've scored myself a ticket to the Cubs-Reds game at Wrigley Field on the 11th. I *might* have money to get to the Falcons-Dolphins game in Atlanta, but I'd be pushing my luck.

Hope to hear from some of you folks, but even if I don't, this holiday is certainly going to be an experiment in flying by the seat of my pants...

...but I think I'm going to fucking cry.

Never ever watch "Requiem for a Dream" if you don't really know what you're in for. Someone said to me that it could be the most depressing film ever made; I don't think I really got what they meant until I saw it for myself.

In the meantime, life is dull and boring and going nowhere. Maybe that's a reason to cry too.

Well folks, all the work has paid off. My thesis is all bound up and sent off to the examiners, and I have a little more money in my bank account thanks to a Christmas casual job selling cellphones in a retail store. It was boring and my legs were really sore for most of it from all the standing around, but they paid me well, so I'm not complaining. Much.

So now I'm resting and recuperating after blowing a considerable chunk of money on Christmas. The Christmas spirit kind of passed me by this year while I was working, so I mean to do some solid catching up on being festive at tomorrow's New Year's Eve celebrations.

The trouble with my group of friends is that there are some alarmingly hot young ladies among them, but because they are good friends of mine they are off limits. While some of my friends haven't subscribed to the whole "don't screw the crew" adage, it's important to me to not mess up any friendships with a careless (read: drunk) advance on anyone. And yes, there is a particular girl I'm thinking of, but not only is she a great friend who gives equally great cuddles, she is also *completely* out of my league as anything other than a friend. She will be there tomorrow, armed with a camera to catch out the silly idiots who try and sneak off for a quickie.

But yes, I ramble. Time for sleep, and preparations for the big night ahead.

I've finally completed the biggest chapter of the thesis. My supervisor's been looking at it over the last week or so, and says it's starting to look like a really good piece of work. So tonight, it's sleep-in time. Even though I'm having to stay up to all hours of the night, I'm managing to get this done. I think it's going to look really good when it's all finished. It might be slowly sending me insane, but that's all right.

I miss you guys. I promise to be a little less slack about keeping up with you all, and to give you the attention you deserve once I'm all done here.

What I do wif her?

LOLcat-isms aside, I met this lovely lady at this year's Erotica Expo in Auckland. She's all smiles and great to chat to, and after seeing some of the scenes she was in... Wow. That was almost two months ago now, and I've only just gotten around to scanning the photo into my computer and putting it on here. Go see.

Life is dull and boring and filled with time-consuming work. Hopefully things will change soon.

Okay, so, I have a thesis due in a couple of months. It's not going well, but my supervisor and I have more of a dialogue now than we did earlier in the year. So I'm confident that I'll be able to get it done. Anyway, I was desperately trying to wrestle one of the chapters of it into shape so I could show it to my supervisor. It wouldn't co-operate, so I printed out the half-done version of it to show her. Then she didn't even show up because she had other marking to get to. Would have been kind of nice to *know* this, but it's that time of year, I guess... So I buried myself in some books for a couple of hours.

Then I went to the meeting for the group I run on campus. We were supposed to have an awesome teacher in... She's here all the way from Albuquerque, and she's someone who really knows her stuff and gets along with everyone so well. But when I showed up at the meeting room, everyone was standing outside because the room was booked by someone else. We only have the room booked on alternate weeks; so in accordance with Murphy's Law I'd made a mistake by confusing which week we had it, and called in the teacher and so on. One of the other girls there started getting really snarky at me and making rude comments, basically trying to put the blame on me without saying it out loud... Okay, so it was my fault, but I'm kind of also trying to hold down a thesis, and manage a band, and deal with other people's requests that they me to see to, so I don't need you to wipe me through your ass for it, you miserable freshman. (Disclaimer: I'm sure other freshmen are nice people, just not this one.) I was so tempted to snap back at her, but I figured it would just make everything worse, so I just left in a pretty nasty mood.

As I was leaving town, I got a text message from one of the group members who'd been conspicuously absent from the folks standing outside the meeting room. She said she'd been keen to come along to the meeting that night, but she'd been hit by a car while she was out running, and she now needs surgery to have her arm put back together. I was completely taken aback, but I know she's a tough cookie, and she'll be one to view it more as an inconvenience than a near-death experience. So I sent her my commiserations and my best wishes for a quick recovery, and headed home.

And finally, and worst of all, when I got home, my mum and dad sat me down in a chair. It seems that my mum also needs to have surgery before Christmas, as her thyroid gland is potentially cancerous. After she has it out, she'll need to take medication for the rest of her life. Nobody thinks it's at a life threatening stage just yet, but as with everything involving vital organs, it's going to be a long and slightly dangerous process in the operating room for my mum, who's now well into her sixties.

So the question I have to ask to no one in particular is, was I some kind of serial killer or something similar in a former life? Because I have some shitty karma issues. Trust it all to come down on me at once, just when I least need to be bothered by drama.

Bleh, dealing with life makes me sleepy. Night, people.

The songs:
1. Somewhere Else (5:07)
[url]http://files.boxstr.com/10301/The%20Rawdevns%20-%2001%20-%20Somewhere%20Else.mp3[/url]
2. Girls of Carmel High (4:06)
[url]http://files.boxstr.com/10301/The%20Rawdevns%20-%2002%20-%20Girls%20of%20Carmel%20High.mp3[/url]
3. Supre Bitch (4:04)
[url]http://files.boxstr.com/10301/The%20Rawdevns%20-%2003%20-%20Supre%20Bitch.mp3[/url]
4. Don't Know (4:41)
[url]http://files.boxstr.com/10301/The%20Rawdevns%20-%2004%20-%20Don%27t%20Know.mp3[/url]

The guilty:
Sam - guitar
Fonz - guitar
Alex - bass
Kelly - drums

We call ourselves The Rawdevns, which was the name our founding singer gave the band. His name is Vandrew, and the letters in his name swap around nicely to make "Rawdevn". I think it's cool, but the others will probably want to change it at some point, since Vandrew has long since parted ways with us. We've been playing since mid-2005, but constant dramas and personnel changes have made songwriting especially difficult. These songs are meant to be guidelines for each of us to take away in the breaks between rehearsals, so they're only really "demos" in the truly indie sense of the world rather than in the commercial sense. Blah.

We recorded them using just my vocal mic in our rehearsal room through to a digital recorder, but they've come out really quite listenable. Kelly's drums dominate the sound of these recordings a bit much for my liking, but he really is the missing link in our band sound that we've been searching for. I love how my bass sounds on here, but Fonz and Sam will need to turn themselves up a bit next time. There are no vocals (we are on a continual search for the perfect vocalist), so we did what we could with just us.

Somewhere Else was the very first song we ever worked on as a full band at our first rehearsal. It still rocks out every time we play it, but it's starting to show its age a little. Kelly was still getting used to it, but he's done a pretty good job on it. Unfortunately the onboard compressor on the digital recorder decided to get pissy at us on the clips this time, but it still came out all right. Fonz wrote this song about a girl who punched him in the head.

We wrote Girls of Carmel High in an hour at last week's practice. It's a fast, straight-up pop-punk song that we think will be a big audience favourite. Carmel College is a school based near where we rehearse that has the highest rate of pregnancy amongst its students in the country. I wanted to write a song about self-respect, being true to yourself and refusing to give in to peer pressure. The interlude is wickedly spacey. We've pseudo-storyboarded most of the music video already.

Supre Bitch was written late last year about Sam's ex-girlfriend (don't worry, both she and Sam love the song), who at the time was one of the most vain hairdresser/fashionista girls I have ever met. The song is about not following the trends that everyone else is buying into and not being afraid to strike out on your own. Think The Darkness meets stadium rock from the eighties, with a punk spin added for good measure.

Sam had had ideas for a new song for ages, but had never been able to put them together as something complete. Today we figured out how we could string it all together, which took us all of 45 minutes, and he cautiously named the song "Don't Know", since he has no idea what it's about. It's one of the darker tracks we've done, and when Kelly broke out his jazz chops and his double bass for the outro, we knew we'd nailed it. Listen carefully for my two screw-ups on the bass.

Anywho, see what you think. We'll re-record these with a vocalist when we can, hopefully with better facilities than the ones we used today. If you can't download the files, my bandwidth limit is probably expired for the day, so try again tomorrow.

We'll try to get three more songs on the way next weekend when we have the time to do more recording. Polish Head, Riot Pigs and the Turnpike Breakdown Jam are likely candidates at this point. I'll see what the other guys want to do.

Kthxbye.

Must... Sleep.

No. Must... Work.

Need... to sleep... am fading... Fast. Seeing... television... static.

NO. Must not... fail... thesis. Must... Write... Words.

GRAAAAAARGH.