"Hopeful". Plus, point of interest, it also means "bloody".

It's time to talk about my day. My day involved commerce, rulebreaking, books, conversation, music, jingly noises and money.

Thanks. See you all next entry!

I imagine you're probably looking to read this in a shade more detail than that. So, with no implied chronology...

I had an interview today. After all, employment means money. I got to talk about my lack of previous experience, how I want to try to get myself a degree in professional writing*, and how early I could arrive. All in all, I feel things went reasonably well.

This is the kind of thing that's interesting and important, and it gets a shorter paragraph than the vast majority of trivial details. Yay me.

On an almost-related matter, I hate interviews. Hate them. Hate hate hate. Hatehatehatehatehate. I barely even think of them for days beforehand, feel calm on the day, and feel confident up until about ten minutes before the interview. And then?

I realise I'll be ten minutes early, and my train of thought looks like this.

Interrupting interviews probably makes a bad impression. Being late definitely does. How can you kill ten minutes and not be late. How can I kill it? *pace, pace* Oooh! Nine minutes. Is five minutes early ok? What if their clock is different? Oh god, oh god, they'll hate me and I'll make an idiot of myself and I need to stop pacing about and there's still eight minutes and forty-three seconds and why can't time go faster? But not so fast it makes me late! Could I read a book? Would I stop in time? Must not be late, must not be late... seven minutes fifty-seven... um... maybe if I sit down. Where? Nearby, but not too close and I must be looking very silly now and I don't care what the random people think of me but what if the interviewer thinks I'm silly and seven-mintes-thirteen. There's a library right there I could go in there but never be seen again for hours so no library for me and now my mental punctuation's gone. Oh! There's some! Six minutes twenty and I could just go there but I'd be too early just need to kill another minute or two and it should be safe a few minutes early can't look too bad and mental punctuation where are you? *pace, pace* I thought I stopped pacing! *pace, pace* Fine. *pace, pace* And now I'm all tense and I'll screw up the interview. Yay me. Five minutes fifteen and can I go yet?

And so it continues. I manage to think faster and faster on less and less as an interview draws closer and closer until, just before I go in, I'm thinking impossibly fast about nothing.

I shall call it 'nerve-ana'.

Also, I bought things today. Let's start with the puppies, who got a new toy. It's a ball with a jinglybellthingy in the middle. This jinglybellthingy gets Murphy all interested, but Montie doesn't seem terribly fussed over it. The net result is that it's now possible to hear Murphy running about outside.

Jinglejinglejinglejinglejinglejingle, you hear, as he runs away.
jinglejinglejinglejinglejinglejingle, you hear, as he runs closer.

He likes it. He likes making jinglynoises. I just hope he doesn't eat the ball and swallow the jinglybellthingy. Montie doesn't like it. I hope he doesn't make Murphy swallow the jinglyballthingy so that he doesn't have to hear it anymore.

I bought a CD! It's a 2-disc edition of Comalies, by Lacuna Coil. The bonus disc has shiny, in the form of pretty-sounding acoustic versions of some of the tracks. They've since been ripped and added to Winamp, and there's a chance I'll stretch the MP3s by playing them too much.

And, I bought books. This is where the rulebreaking comes in.

I used to have a rule - no more than $100 spent on books on any given day. Today, I spent just over $140 on books.

Um, ooops.

This happened at two different bookshops, though, as follows:

Dymocks
(I get 5% of purchase price as store credit)
J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - $15.95, +80c store credit
J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - $15.95, +80c store credit
J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - $15.95, +80c store credit
J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - $18.95, +95c store credit
Neil Gaiman - Anansi Boys - $32.95, +$1.65 store credit
Total: $99.75, +$5 store credit

Angus and Robertson
(Currently offering 25% off all full-priced kids' and YA books)
Jonathan Stroud - The Amulet of Samarkand - $18.95, discounted to $14.21
Jonathan Stroud - The Golem's Eye - $19.95, discounted to $14.96
Neil Gaiman - Coraline - $14.95, discounted to $11.21
Total: $53.85, discounted to $40.39

So why, you might ask, did I buy the HP books for their full price? Simple. I like the covers with the black spines more. I have two more of them to buy, but I probably won't need them until near the end of March. Which reminds me: People need to join apathy_books, because it'll be fun. And because they'll be the first to know just what I think of HP.

Mr Stroud was a recommendation from fireyfox, many months ago. I've bought two of them, because I finish what I start (No, really. Which is why I plan to finish my 300-second Firefly series sometime this year). I didn't buy the third because it was a different size to the other two, and I care about the aesthetics of my shelf.

Lastly, Neil. Anansi Boys is the next to be read, and I read Coraline start to finish on the bus. It's a lovely book, full of all the reasons why we love Neil - especially his elegant, neat style, with beautifully composed sentence after beautifully composed sentence in a way that lets the story speak for itself. If you haven't read Coraline, do so. In the words of Pterry, "you will never think about buttons in quite the same way again."

And that's it for today. If the title makes no sense, remember to glance at the mood.

---

* "But you never write anything!" shouted the huddled masses. They were, of course, huddled over books. Her huddled masses would never abide the thought of just being curled up in an alleyway with a bottle of cheap wine.

Especially not a Half Mile Creek cabernet sauvignon. There's a reason why it's only $5 a bottle. That's $5 Australian, mind you. The money in Monopoly is nearly worth more.

If ever the masses dared to ask, there'd be a short and frankly puzzling explanation. She'd tell them all about it - how she would've written things, once upon a time, for no other reason than there was an hour to kill and an idea in dire need of expression. How she'd have scribbled away, and scribbled some more, then given up on reading it and typed something completely different. Ultimately, how she'd needed a third script book on the creative writing question of her 3-unit English paper and just why hadn't the markers liked the dark fantasy murder plot? Incidents and details, fuzzy and half-remembered, but for a tragically unifying theme.

She didn't write so much in recent days, because they'd never said anything about it. They'd never told her what was wrong with it - they'd just bounce away happily, and she'd be horridly confused as to just why they wouldn't say anything. Could it be that terrible? Didn't they want her writing to be better? would it have felt impolite and crushing to point out any more than a semicolon used where a comma was the appropriate mark?

And even though the 'they' had changed, she still didn't do it. She felt hesitant with critiques for others - after all, her experience said to her that pointing things out just wasn't Done. It wasn't the right thing. It was frowned upon. It had found itself banished to the coldest corners of faraway places to which few go and from which fewer return. And then, on the few occasions she'd done it, things that felt nitpicky were welcomed. Even the rewording of a whole chapter was met with happysquees... or was it thoughtful murmuring?

It was the kind of thing that made her wonder if it might just be worthwhile to repost an earlier meme. Or, maybe she should just make up that convoluted modern-fantasy noir cybercrime technothriller with delicious pulpy filling. Or both.