Saturday, April 21, 2007

Drifting

I'm 28 years old and i'm half drunk on Jim Beam and Coke and i know by the time i finish this update i will have had a few more beers as wel because at this exact moment of my life this is all i have to offer to the world. Since my last update here my life has become segmented into "get up, work, come home" and as black and white as that sounds, it's the grown up world we live in. My outlook on life has turned from the brilliant blast of colour that it once was to what can only be described as different shades of grey. For the few that read this blog you may have wondered where have i been and why havent i updated my page for over two weeks..well quite honestly its because there is nothing to update. Quite honestly i came to despise sitting at a computer all day at work then doing nothing afterwards but come home and get online and try and relive past glories with the people i shared so many wonderful experiences with. As i sit here now i feel that the past two weeks have been the most non productive in my life.

It seems right now the only people who know what i'm truely feeling at this point in my life are Sabrina and Bruce Springsteen.

I get up in the morning and go to work each day and when i'm not at work i don't feel i have a purpose here in Melbourne. My two closest friends in the world are at different end of the Australian continent and the freinds who came into my life in the past few years are all pretty much doing their own thing. They have direction and i don't. Its weekends between days here at the moment Mark side and whilst im not going to bitch and complain i just have to get how i'm feeling off my chest. There's a feeling deep inside my soul that i have something to give, i don't know what it is or where it will take me but i just know it's there. Life isn't meant to be easy and i accept that but its a real bastard when you know something inside you is wanting to burst out but you don't know how to go about it.

So with that late last week i decieded to chane things. Tomorrow i'm off to the Melbourne Museum that has been open for about 5 years but i've never been too. I actually joined an online dating service (because i'm the most confident man in the romance world...not) and there has been one girl who i have spoken to during the week who seems to be really really nice and hopefully i'll meet her soon. Since i came to the conclusion that life is meant to be lived and not analysed i'm trying to make my home town mean something more than me than being just a transit lounge between adventures . I have my family and i have job that isn't life altering but the people there make the 5 days week i'm there the most entertaining of my week. I haven't been to the gym since the fun run because i lost the drive but that has come back in the past couple of days and i'm doing a 8km fun run on Mothers Day with my aunty for breast cancer which i'm looking forward to being part of.

Right now you are thinking "whose the girl who he has been speaking to?" Well her name is Lorraine and for the past few days i've been speaking to her most nights and enjoyed talking to her and i'm sure soon ill catch up with this person but the point of it is that i have to break out of the monotony that i have imposed on myself since i've been back home. It's all about perspective and throughout the past few years i have learned that the glass will not always been half full but that shouldn't deter my fundemental belief that my life is half full and that i have to work towards making it overflowing with positive energy, love and excitement. So here i am on a saturday night getting shitfaced with Syd as my only company and my thoughts as my only escape from a life that has no meaning attached to it. Here i am at 28 years old feeling at the moment i write this diatribe that my life should mean so much more than the meaningless existence that it feels right now. It should mean more than the rambling you have been reading since the start of this update.

All i know is since i started writing this i've had three beers and nearly half a bottle of Jack Daniels and for me thats not a good thing. Life at 11.57p.m on the 21st of April 2007 can only compared to a shitstorm of emotional confliction that no-one can have any idea of how i'm feeling with the exception of one person in Western Australia. At this point in time the world could shut down around me and i wouldn't give a shit.

I would write more but quite honestly the Mark most of you know right now is in a period of adjustment and just not comfortable with the world right now. It's not the me you know and right now i'm the me that i don't like to be but i'm getting better though.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

The Greatest of All Time

First of all a Happy Easter Sunday to you all wherever you are on this fragile blue planet. My good self is spending the day at my desk at work whilst the rest of my family is out having a beautiful picnic at a local park on a day where it would be a travesty to see a cloud in the sky.

So while the day goes by slower than a Myanmar puppet show, I have managed to kill some of the time between calls by reading a copy of Empire Magazine. Now Empire claims to be the 'World's Best Movie Magazine' and considering I have never really heard of it before i would personally beg to differ and just as i type this i have just received two emails on top of each other. The first one asked if anyone wanted to go home early and the second one says if you didn't receive an email to say you can go home early then you have to stay. My computer decided to send them together even though the emails were 10 mins apart!! Arrghhhh!!!!

Ah well such as life.

Anyways back to Empire. The reason i am writing about this is because during my last minute easter egg shopping, i was standing at the checkout waiting to pay (so did about 3.5 million people who decided to do their shopping at the last minute) i saw the magazine cover which stated in bold silver writing "100 Greatest Movies of All Time." Naturally being a cinephile i wanted to read what Empire thought were the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. So i picked up a copy knowing that working the next day "Company X" wouldn't be swamped with calls so i was give my opinion on this very ambitious list.

As suspected today hasn't been a busy day at work. I have some faxes to key but i'll get to them a little later. As i read the article i found out that the list was complied by the readers of Emipre (a list was also complied in 2002 and this is a 5 year update) which made me think that this list could be skewed a certain way. By that i mean the core of the readers would be men who harbour dreams of being in the film industry, men who are trying to break into the film industry or movie tragics who can tell you why Samuel L. Jackson has a purple light sabre when no-one other Jedi does.So here are the top 10 greatest movies of all time according to Empire Magazine readers.

10) Goodfellas
9) Amelie
8) Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back
7) Lord of the Rings - Return of the King
6) Donnie Darko
5) A Clockwork Orange
4) Aliens
3) The Shawshank Redemption
2) Pulp Fiction
1) Star Wars - A New Hope

Now its 8.30pm as i got swamped with faxes at work and now after having some dinner i can finish this off. My point was going to be how does shit like Donnie Darko get rated above classics such as "Goodfellas"? How does "A Clockwork Orange" get a mention when the copy that Sab had froze at the 20 minute mark and therefore we couldn't watch the film? I do agree with Star Wars being number one cause that is just a bloody fantastic film and it still sucks you in after the 20th time. Still with this list it makes me think the readers of Empire don't know what they are talking about when it comes ranking the best movies ever because everyones tastes vary.

It's a good mag but this time around i wasn't impressed.

Friday, April 06, 2007

A really Good Friday

No i'm not sitting in Ferdinands knee.

I'm Catholic so at this time of year we are all celebrating our very own 'Superbowl." There's a bit more of a spring in out Catholic steps as we amble our way down to church to celebrate the death of Jesus and his Lazurus like resurrection three days later. Growing up in a house where we aren't allowed to eat meat on Good Friday has meant this holiday hasn't been as much about remembering the death of Jesus as it has been about not having a really nice ham and cheese roll for lunch. That sounds selfish i know but thats the honest truth.

So with that in mind Mum, Dan and myself were invited to the home of the owners of our local Chinese Restaurant. Now when i first heard of this i must admit my mind was boggled. Why on earth would you want to celebrate Good Friday, a day where you can't eat meat at the house of the owners of your favourite Chinese restaurant whose lemon chicken is to die for? Still Wendy and Ferdinand are part of our family (it's a rule in our house that once you are part of our lives you are part of our family) and we have been loyal customers for years. The good thing about yesterday was that their house was on ly two suburbs across and i didn't have to drive...woohoo!!

As we made our way into the backyard i was confronted with a BBQ scene straight out of China. Grandma on the BBQ watching over the chicken wings which is being heated by charcoals. As soon as i saw that i thought "Crap, we are going to be here for 3 days waiting for this stuff to cook." I know that different parts of the world do BBQ differently but my god, it took me 30 mins to cook a chicken wing one day with the teachers from Topkids at a dinky little BBQ place out the back of Tin Shui Wai. Thankfully rather than just having two or three charcoals to heat the meat there was a bloddy bag full. On the other gas BBQ was some of the nicest fish i had ever seen and that in all honesty was going to be destroyed by persons typing this update.

Grandma doing her thing.

I was also happy to see that Bev and Mick (who are basically my second parents) were also at the do plus a few more of Wendy and Ferdinand's family. A couple of the fam were over from Hong Kong and i naturally had a pretty good chat about the place and the more i talk about Hong Kong the more i realise i truely loved my time there and how much i miss that place. I know in myself that i will be off to Europe next but i will be flying though Honkers to catch up with friends and just soak up the atmosphere of that amazing city again. After all the food was cooked and ready to be eaten i sat down with a couple beers and managed to make my way though that much food that when i got home last night i was stuffed and had to actually take a nap.

As the day wore on i hung out with Wendy and Ferdinands two kids. Now i know we all have to get older but when you have seen their two boys grow up you realise how fast time goes by. You see, this family works bloody hard at their restaurant and when the boys were only little primary school kids, everytime you went out the back to go to the toilet you would pass one or the two of them fast asleep under a blanket on top of the freezer. Later in the day their Aunty went back inside to get the Mahjong table up and running and judging by the sound of it the game was getting pretty heated.

It was a really Good Friday.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Don't believe everything you read

According to Melbourne's largest selling newspaper, the Herald-Sun, i'm a big girl.

Now the reason for this claim is that in Tuesday's paper i was able to finally find out the time i ran for the fun run i completed last sunday. Actually now that i think of it, dad called me "Markina" in the morning before work and i had no idea why until i was given the phone only to find out that one of friends of the family (Irena...from the footy) had already found the results of the run in the paper and decided to call up and give me the good news.

So getting into work i was confronted with a few laughs by some of the staff as they had already found my name in the paper and it was all in good jest. I just can't figure out how my results got in the womens side of the paper rather than the guys.

Anyway the time i ran in my first 3.4 km fun run was 17 mins 30 seconds, not bad at all.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

The first steps

It may be the official shirt but this green is not our colour!

I've never been an athlete and considering i'm amongst friends here i can say with a pretty good degree of certainty that the Olympic medal dias won't be seeing my feet anytime in this lifetime. Yet earlier in the year when i came across the CityLink "Run for the Kids" it was something that struck out as something that i wanted to compete in to prove to myself that i can do something out of my comfort zone. I've never ever thought i would want to take part in a fun run and considering that i do enjoy a good bite to eat and a drink to boot why would me...me of all people want to do a freaking fun run?

The simple answer is that my fitness levels have never been a constant in my life. My weight has gone up and done without any focus and this was something that i wanted to strive towards. My initial thoughts were to compete in the 15km leg but that was rightly shot down by one of the staff in my local gym who said to me in early feb "mate if this is your first one, take the shorter course, see if you like it and then if you do, slowly move to longer distances." That was the best advice as i really thought i could run 15km with 2 1/2 months preperation but instead mum, dad and myself signed on for the shorter 3.4 km run.

Late last week i was getting excited about my first fun run and trying to figure out why runs like these are actually fun..then the flu struck. The guy who sits next to mea t work got a really bad case of the flue early last week and this hit me on Friday night and all day yesterday. I was feeling so bad that standing in the checkout of the Big W at Highpoint, i was looking around and felt that i wanted to faint. I woke up this morning with a headache and really not wanting to run. Unfortunately mum wasn't feeling to well so it was just dad and myself. It was a cool morning and there were 30,000 people participating and the atmposhere was amazing. Everyone from mums pushing their kids in prams to elite athletes whose shoes and hi-tech garments cost more than my yearly salary.


Thousands of runners, hundreds of volunteers. One amazing atmosphere.

Still that didn't deter me from giving the Tan Track a red hot go and as Dad and I slowly made our way to the start line i said to him "I'll see you later" and just jogged off. It was hard throughout the race as i was continually weaving between walkers and joggers but as soon as i hit the bottom of the hill i just ran my guts (which there is a bit) plus add to the fact that with the flu my head felt trapped in a vice but as soon as i got over the top of it and downhill again i just went for it. I stopped twice for 5 seconds as i really had to spit but as soon as i saw that finish line i just went for it and when i crossed that line i was stuffed and relieved that i actually did it...me..Mark Pepper just did a fun run!

Afterwards i finally caught up with Dad and we got our showbags and made our way down to Port Melbourne for a big hearty breakfast. Whilst there we caught up with Stav whose place i'm at tomorrow night to watch Wrestlemania after work. As dad and i were walking back to the car we saw some of the field for the 15km run coming up to the finish and the encouragement from the crowd watching to the runners was just amazing, i've never been a part of an event like this and i know i'll be back for another fun run and i know which one i want to do.

It's a 10km run in the beautiful bayside suburb of Williamstown on the last Sunday in May. It's just on two months away and with enough training and committment i know i can beat that distance. For those thinking "what time did he run?" well i didn't wear a watch but the results were all electronically timed and the times come out in the paper on Tuesday.

It was a great morning and it was for the kids as well.

The things you miss, the things you don't

Part One : The things you miss.

Last Friday the 30th of March saw me in two minds. Actually it was a day of contradictions I had two events on my mind and the problem was i really wanted to be at the one i couldn't be at. That event was Sab's 28th Birthday and as much as i could try to be there through phone calls, presents or birthday cards I felt a bit of sadness because i couldn't actually be there to celebrate with her. Even typing this now i just feel disheartened in some ways. Sab is such an amazing friend to me and i love her dearly and being away from her tears me up more when events such as birthdays come up.

I know she had a wonderful time and i'm super happy for her that she had a fantastic night with her roomates and friends. The photos on her website (whatsabdid.multiply.com) projected to me someone who is starting to gather momentum after an adjusting period of being in a new city. I'm so happy for her and as tough as it is for the both of us being apart from each other i know we'll be back in the groove and piss farting around together again in the future. I never really realised or appreciated how important Sab is to me. That's not to say i didn't before but probably because we spent so much time together you sometimes forget why you are friends with someone in the first place. She understands and somehow tolerates me and that's a pretty rare thing for me. I just cannot wait to see her again.


Part Two : The things you don't

As Friday night drew closer i was getting excited as it was the first Aussie Rules football game i have been to in 4 years. After finishing work i had a few pre match bevvies just to wet the vocal cords that i knew would get a pretty good working over later in the night. After staying at work and having a few laughs, it was time to make my way to the home of sport, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Forget Wembley, forget San Siro the home of sport on the entire planet is the mighty G'.

So as i made my way into this rebuilt mecca the atmosphere was rising slowly and the night was cool yet still. I felt like i was having a case of deja vu' as i know i've been to this place before and i know what i'm supposed to do here but i wasn't sure exactly what that was. Still after having a pie and a beer the feeling of the footy being back was just amazing. Needless to say that feeling didn't last long as my team played shit house and lost their opening game. In fact i was so pissed off with my team that i actaully went back to the pub near work were a few of the workmates were still there after the game as i had to drown my sorrows. Next thing i knew it was 2am and i was in a bar at Richmond with three of my workmates. My team really played that bad and it was just like the old days before i left.

I didn't miss that at all.