Whenever my friends have picnics and I’m there with a camera, it must be the relaxed environment that I’m not used to do that makes me think my friends are part of a General Pants campaign I’m shooting.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-03.jpg[/img]
[i]Kat and Jessie munch on a watermelon slice.[/i]
I mean… they’re not… but that’s not the point.
It still feels like I’m shooting one with them in it.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-08.jpg[/img]
[i]Kat and Leyla are talking… about something… buggered if I paid attention…[/i]
Last weekend, Nikki, Jessie, and Nikki’s sister and friends (and whatnot) had a little barbecue on Sunday afternoon to say goodbye to Nikki before she heads back to America. As of writing this, she’s already back and doing Nikki-stuff.
We’d had the dinner at Betty’s earlier on in the week (as I wrote about here) where a few more of us said hello to her and did the whole friend-thing and now we had this. I guess it was supposed to make up for lost time. Sadly, as friends fall apart, we’re unlikely to see Nikki again for an even longer amount of time.
I hope it doesn’t take that long for me to see Jessie or Kat again.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-02.jpg[/img]
[i]Kat is Jessie’s cousin (I think… I’m struggling to remember here… either cousin or sister…)[/i]
I’d written some stuff for my blog on the actual day so, here goes:
Mike gave me a lift so I got here (Centennial Park) at 3.40.
No one (from our group) was here. They’ll be here at 4.30.
Trust me to be early… me being the one who’s almost always late.
Fair enough. I go for a walk up the road to get some money out and a snacky lunch because earlier today I had a sort-of-reunion with family I’d met and had never met and we had to have Kosher food, and after sampling some of it before the guests had arrived, I decided that I didn’t really feel up to tempting fate with the foul Kosher food that was provided on the table. It was oily, flaky, smelly, and lacked anything any sane or insane person might call a flavour. I’m not saying all Kosher food is like this, but I seriously hope most of it isn’t.
So, I get some of what I [i]think[/i] are chickpea chips (they’re not… they’re like honey puffed puff things with savoury seasoning on them… just avoid like the plague!!!), some Starburst lollies (they weren’t very good either), and a Bundaberg Sarsaparilla from an IGA and feeling a little peckish, I decide to grab a muffin from a little cafe near the IGA in Paddington that was in close proximity for me to walk to.
And it has to got be the worst muffin I have ever had.
I’m something of a muffin expert — an aficionado if you will — and I have had a lot of bad muffins in the past, some that had even smelt and tasted like fish… but this was [i]bad[/i].
So bad, I went and spent an extra 3 bucks to buy a sausage roll up the road which was — quite frankly — delightful and caused my tongue to roll about in sheer ecstasy compared to the muffin which was barely fit for the trash.
The sign advertising
[quote]Muffin
$3.00[/quote]
should have been enough to alert me, to throw me off. It should’ve been enough to say “No Leigh… no,” but I went ahead and bought this detail-less muffin thinking it seriously couldn’t be [i]that[/i] bad.
I was wrong: dry, flavourless, and very thick but flaked like caked sugar chips off of a friand… my muffin had more in common with a friand.
People shouldn’t be allowed to sell bad muffins.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-05.jpg[/img]
[i]Kat, Leyla, and Nikki do social stuff… whatever the hell that is.[/i]
Now that I’ve been with the group for an hour and a half or so, I kind of feel the need to remind myself why I don’t actually go out with friends or otherwise:
I get bored easily and no one talks to me, and with evidence of this, I’ve had to be bored and amuse myself with my camera because pretty much no one is talking to me or will talk to me. As such, using my camera seems to make people think I’m not wanting to talk to them and then this whole vicious circle goes round and round and round.
I have to entertain myself with pointless shooting otherwise I’ll look like a stalker or an unknown stranger (which itself is probably a bit tautological).
Hell, as I write this I’m probably being treated as such.
It seems pointless too. I know this whole thing is about a bon voyage to Nikki but, like any other social event, I’m already more bored than fried rice would be at a health food convention.
[i]Fried Rice: “Come on man! Where’s the stuff that’ll clock your arteries?! — What’s that — Dried PawPaw?! That’s all you got?! What the fuck, bitch?!”[/i]
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-01.jpg[/img]
Sadly, people aren’t even attempting to break me out of it.
I mean seriously, what the hell are you supposed to do when you’re bored among “friends”?
I guess I probably will cut up and leave soon. I’m well past my attention limit for social events, I imagine.
It’s not that I don’t want to spend time with the people in whom I call and consider my friends. I do, but I think mostly that the feeling isn’t exactly mutual; or if it is, there’s an expectation in that I have to make the first move (speaking conversationally, of course) and quite frankly, I don’t know how or what the hell I’m supposed to do.
I’m sure I’ve said it in the past or I’ve previously inferred that I’m a clueless fuck in social situations, and like most people, you will probably put it down to some form of an excuse or not enough self-confidence.
Hell, I had one guy comment on a four-month old blog entry on my MySpace account a few days ago that I needed self-confidence or girls wouldn’t go for me. That’s a fairly easy answer or excuse to surmise the issue with.
Instead, I believe that there’s a whole species of humans — male and female — that like me were not born with a set of social skills.
As such, when confronted with a social situation where no one talks to them, they retreat to the nearest empty or secluded corner to postulate wildly about random junk (or work on their blogs in small notebooks while taking photos of anything that moves).
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-04.jpg[/img]
[i]Now that I think about it, Jessie is probably Kat’s sister… Christ, I can’t remember at all…[/i]
And that’s all I had. Trust me to go off-topic. This was supposed to be about Nikki leaving… but I guess like all picnics and parties and events, the issue gets lost somewhere after the first bite of a sandwich or the first drink or the first kiss or whatnot.
Event ideas, themes, or subjects aren’t really things to be chiseled into stone as no one will pay full attention to them anyway.
In the end, we all talked and conversed and did whatever it is that people are supposed to do when they’re with friends on a beautiful day in a beautiful park with wine and food and rugs and dogs and soccer balls and nice little dresses that people still wear on their good days.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-07.jpg[/img]
[i]Much like how Jessie is really hot, Kat is really hot too. Okay, they’re probably sisters. That sort of hotness must be a family-sibling sort of thing. Lucky genetics or something.[/i]
Sadly, we also learned that another member of our photography class from Uni would be leaving Sydney soon to move to Queensland.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-GeneralPants-06.jpg[/img]
Alex, as pictured above, would be leaving sometime in a few weeks. I imagine we’ll all probably want to venture out for a last meeting with her, but knowing what people are like, would it actually happen? Will it just lie dormant in the stages of “Let’s all do something before Alex goes!” or “Who wants to go to a pub?!” or will it actually happen?
I guess like all events, only time will tell.
[url=https://www.leighlo.com/spore/index.php?gallery=./Art-Experimentation/2007-02-18-GeneralPantsKindOfDays]The rest of the pics can be found here.[/url]