Good News

I haven't posted a journal entry for a while now, I think my main problem is I keep going to bed before I write them. So I decided to sit down today and write one at 6pm. I call it...

The Bradism Six O'Clock News.

Our top story tonight, upon walking out of his office at lunch time today Brad found himself swamped by slow moving herds of many children. Upon closer inspection - as his stroll was slowed by their thick numbers - he noticed they were all wearing "Ben 10" t-shirts. At the nearby convention centre a Ben 10 Live show had just finished. Brad considering making a Facebook status update saying "I don't know who Ben 10 is, but his minions have taken to the streets." Then another part of Brad brought up that Lego have had a Ben 10 line for a while now, and there's no way he could sell that quip without risking being called on fake ignorance.

In other news, while at Coles, Brad was making several purchases from the deli, specifying product and a weights. After requesting 150 grams of Reduced Fat Ricotta Cheese, the young man behind the counter sliced a wedge from the cheese wheel, alighted it to the scales which showed an exact 150 grams. The two men made eye contact as they realised they were sharing a special moment, although Brad was more in to it. The deli worker still bore a grudge from when Brad requested 200gms of champagne ham and been told to put some back when the scales read 245.

Research shows that the addition of a small window to each of the security doors in Brad's office may be causing more issues than it solves. Previously the risk of having a door opened in your face had been low because the sound of it being digitally unlocked served as warning. Now there is a window, conservative office workers tend to both stutter to a halt when they realise someone is on the otherside of the door, and delays are encountered as they wait for each other to make the first move.

Now to Vanessa, who has the latest on a blue shopping bag which did not make it home from the shops today. "I bought cheap chicken. And those 6 pack thingies of yoghurt were only four dollars. Then, as soon as I left the checkout the bag broke. I had to carry it home like this." And then she mocked carrying a bag with a hand wrapped around either side.

To sport, and the countdown is on to the new NBA season, which starts in three weeks. This would partly explain why Brad visited Yahoo's NBA Sports page while he was eating his lunch.

In finance, Brad didn't spend any money today. The Australian dollar is worth one Australian Dollar.

Now to the weather. Today's photo of "A Lego hobo-mime" is brought to us by Brad.

image 817 from bradism.com

It was slightly cool earlier today, but by the time he'd walked to the office it was much warmer. This proved to be a microcosm of the journey to the gym that would occur later.
After getting home from work Brad took off his shirt and is yet to put one back on.
The outlook tomorrow is further sunniness, with possible cloud and a late shower when Brad tries to walk home.


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The woman with the fake tan stepped into my office, sat across from my desk and lit a cigarette.
At least, she would, sometime in the next 20 minutes. Smelling the future has advantages, but precision isn’t one of them.


Stretching Checklist

Before Game:
Wrist
Illiotibial Band
Shoulder

Before Bed:
Glutes
Hip Flexor
Hamstring
Groin
Shoulder
Bicep Head

Reinforcements

The kitchen war has been going on longer than anyone can remember. For the appliances, it hasn't been a good week. Sandwich Press was caught in cross fire during a mission on Wednesday evening, KIA. On Saturday the body of Rice Maker - missing for months - was recovered and sent home for burial. And then this morning Blender - a veteran of tours to three different war zones - killed himself, possibly due to depression brought on by PTSD.

Until today a Corporal overseeing Breakfast Operations, Blender survived numerous injuries including a cracked jug, a leaky seal and wiring problems. He served over four years total; we had some good times.

This afternoon we went to Rundle Mall to find replacements for Sandwich Press and Blender. We got a new press for $48 but when it came to the blender - and I'm not sure why: perhaps it was the grief, perhaps it was because I blend almost daily, perhaps because I thought I better understood the effect of the high Australian dollar - I bought a $330 blender. The Breville Professional 800 Collection® Die Cast Blender.

Two Thousand Watts of blending power. This is the Little Boy of kitchen appliances. This Blender will change the food war.


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Small Talk

Actual Conversation from Today.

Brad: How was your weekend?
Co-Worker: Good, how was yours?
Brad: Every meal I ate, I ate between bread.
Co-Worker: So, good?
Brad: Summer.

A White Winter


I've enjoyed hip hop music for a very long time. I'm not sure exactly what attracts me to it. It could be the clever wordplay, the ego, or the beats. They're all good. I love the verbal theatrics by the likes of Aesop Rock, Busdriver and Blackalicious just as much as I like hearing Rick Ross owning three dozen cars and Lil' Jon yell about skeeting in everything that rhymes with "skeet skeet".

I like working out to rap, although I try and keep that on the down-low at the gym that I'm trying to motivate my next leg press by listening to Dr. Dre rhyme about growing weed and being a real O.G. I also like writing perl scripts to rap, the other day I automated the generation of several control scripts listening to the new Wacka Flocka Flame.... It was very white... Oh God. I really don't know how to listen to hip-hop. But despite its regularly questionable lyrical content I still keep listening to it.

This Winter now gone I discovered two great sources of entertainment. One was The Wire, one of the greatest television shows ever made. The other was The Rub's History of Hip Hop free mixtapes. One mix for each year of hip hop the past few decades. And all of a sudden, as I consumed the two, some hip hop tracks started making a lot more sense. Like, that's what a re-up is. And what the Five-Oh are. It was quite enlightening. I really felt started feeling as immersed into the culture as a white Australian guy who experienced the culture almost solely through television could feel. I started referring to hats as "crowns", and said "you feel me" a bit more than usual.

If you have any like of hip hop, I highly recommend The Rub mixtapes. If you like television I suggest you watch The Wire. Binge on it for a week, if you have a chance. And see if you come out speaking Ebonics.

It Blends

As I made my second smoothie today with the all conquering Breville Professional 800 Series Blender I jokingly mentioned to Vanessa that I loved the Blender so much that if it had a Facebook Fan Page I would like it.

She didn't reply, too busy enjoying her awesome new haircut that I won for her at a silent auction during last week's quiz night.

Nevertheless, I filed my offhand remark for later and next time I went online I discovered that the Breville Professional 800 Series Blender did not have a Facebook fan page. So, I created one. Then Facebook was like "yo, do you have official representation for this product?" I was, like, "No." So I created the "Unoffical " . thing I said before.

In hindsight I should have said "My " . thing I said before, because we are the official representative of most of the stuff in our kitchen, I believe.

So, if you also have a Breville Professional 800 Blender, or just appreciate it's quality and stainless steel finish, why not also like it on Facebook?

Because, I decided that if the Blender gets 5 'likes' on Facebook then I will remove the ads from my own site. And that has nothing to do with me only earning $7.50 in almost three years.

Rooted

Lately I've been in a cycle of injuring something, trying to exercise around it, injuring something else, repeat. Apart from giving me a lot of material for my maybe one day dream of a website that lets you strike out body parts and then get shown a list of exercises that are still possible, this has been good for nothing. So I decided I'm not going to exercise any more, until my injury count goes down.

Thus, this weekend has been a rather low energy one. The furthest I went was for a walk down the road to see this unusual tree that Emma tipped me off to.

image 819 from bradism.com

When I first arrived this magpie was sitting there like it was on a bad trip.

When I first arrived this magpie was sitting there like it was on a bad trip.


Vanessa for scale.

Vanessa for scale.

And the road I walked down:

Finniss Street. North Adelaide, SA.

Finniss Street. North Adelaide, SA.

Men's Brad

Sometimes when I'm day-dreaming I think about my unpublished, undrafted men's magazine. It's called "Brad's Health" and it's like Men's Health but basically only for INTJ types. I think it corrects most of the flaws inherit in all of today's existing men's lifestyle magazines. It's more focussed on having everything in your life balanced, rather than trying to knock each aspect of it out the park. It would have a cover-story headline like:

Ascend the Corporate Ladder! Build your own House from Scratch! White-Water Raft the World! Perfect Family! Bench Press your Face Off!... Pick One. Or learn to compromise.

I think it would sell OK, or at least be read by many people who never pay for a subscription. Not only because of its life changing essays like the one above, but obviously for all the handy tips and pseudo-scientific facts it would come loaded with. And seeing as my journal is as close as I'll probably come to owning my own lifestyle magazine, I think I might share some handy Brad's Health tips on it. Like one I came up with today:

It's almost Summer, this is the time you should be cleaning your fans! I spent a quarter of an hour wiping the ceiling fan in my bedroom tonight, rubbing a damp towel over the wood and the brass supports until it was spotless. Why am I so excited? This is going to be the first summer in my entire adult life where I'm going to think to myself "It's warm tonight", flick the switch on a fan that hasn't revolved once all Winter and be sprayed with a barrage of dust. And, unless you are the type who dusts your fans regularly all Summer you're now going to have to go clean your fan because, if you forget, then one night in a week or so you're going to be sneezing and screaming "BRADISM DOT COM!!!!" and shaking your fist at the moon. (And if you are the type who dusts your fan regularly all the way through winter then what are you doing reading INTJ Literature?)

While I'm on the subject of genius, I'm surely not the first person to discover this but no one has ever shared the secret with me. If you work in an office that gives you the choice of paper towel and a hand dryer in your bathroom, next time try using both simultaneously! Its combination of effectiveness and decadence that might be just the pick-me-up you need, now that it looks too sunny outside to escape with a cup-a-soup at three o'clock.

Head Injury

I busted my thumb during basketball on Thursday night. It was the start of the second half and I tried to intercept a pass being hurled through the key. The ball crashed into the top of my thumb, making a "thwock" noise. It was the same injury that Shaq suffered earlier this year when Big Baby Davis hit him when he was shooting.

This, I thought, was ironic (the injury, not the Shaq coincidence). I'd come into the game expecting pain in my shoulder that was at the time engulfed with a yellowing bruise that spread from my bicep to my chest. The shoulder I hurt in September... I watched the rest of the game from the sidelines where the Dee Brown's Pumps went on to win quite comfortably without me. And now I've had to endure yet another weekend of limited functionality, more being anchored to an ice-pack. I keep adding to the count of days where I feel like I'm just waiting to heal. It's demoralising! If I was a major road with a sign saying "X days without an accident" it wouldn't ever go into double figures.

Of course, as these thoughts colonised my mind I took hold of my mental arm, led myself outside and sat myself down for a stern talking to. Of course I was overreacting. I'm not the only person in the world to get injuries. Many people suffer worse than me. And many aren't able to go to SportsMed and work on their x-ray collection and have their parts wrapped in sports tape either. I need to stop complaining, rest, ice, compress, elevate, medicate, stretch, ice some more, stretch some more. I needed to stop being melodramatic, be patient and things will be better.

Then I thought, you know what? Maybe I'm going the wrong way with this. My pattern of injuries has to be something more than bad luck. A conspiracy!? It's not the first time I've decided that my misfortune is the result of some seedy collusion. I sat down and tried to be as paranoid as possible as I reflected over the past two years of injuries. Start with my wrist, the result of an unavoidable collision with the floor during a game of basketball. Or was it...? I wore the cast for so long that the theory became the accepted summary of events. However, I never noticed pain until the next day: September 11. Crap! What happened to me that night?

Next was the knee injury, the ITBS that refused to be exorcised. This is where things become interesting. My knee pain was its worst a year ago, the exact same time my wrist reconstruction was starting to come good. Both my legs have an iliotibial band, but only one developed any symptoms. And it was the exact one that would then need to be stretched multiple times a day by my bad wrist. So at a time when I might otherwise have been pushing myself too early to play sport with my delicate wrist I was instead stuck with a bad knee that I had to pull and hold with my left hand many times per day. My last wrist check-up revealed my grip strength in my bad wrist was just as strong as my writing hand. Maybe the universe was, in a way, looking out for me. Helping by hurting, that sort of thing.

Still, months passed and despite my wrist graduating to new levels of activity, I was still suffering from knee pain. Then, one night playing basketball I rolled my ankle. No big deal, I'm an uncoordinated tall guy; I'd roll them all the time. It would just be a few days of icing and elevation and then it'd be like it never happened. Except, this ankle took three weeks to heal. Which ankle did I sprain? The one just below my bad knee. I barely used that leg for three weeks and afterwards - you guessed it - my knee was feeling better. Was this a second serendipitous injury, or just a coincidence?

Then, a month or so later the shoulder pain started. As usual a physiotherapist said it would only last a few days, and that was six weeks ago. The first time my shoulder was treated the physio grabbed my wrist and pulled it in all directions to test the shoulder's structural integrity. There wasn't any consideration given to my wrist's fragility and I was unbelievably clenched during the whole process. At first I wasn't sure where this one fit in. Then, on my most recent visit to SportsMed to confirm that my thumb wasn't fractured the doctor decided to check my shoulder again and I was relaxed, now actually owning some confidence in my wrist's strength. I think that's what my thumb sprain has been about, the universe's way of forcing me to do everything with my weaker hand for a week. Also, I have been opening a lot of doors and turning on taps right handed using my middle and index finger. It's only been three days, but I've already noticed an increase in strength for these two digits. Actually, wait, I just worked it out! The point of all these injuries was to set up a chain of events which would lead to me giving myself the strongest two-fingered salute possible.*

Derp.

* This is not the actual conclusion, which is that I obviously should just stop playing basketball.

Rose Tinted Entries

I find many brain things amusing. One of them is the rose tinted glasses thing, where for some reason even though a point in your life where something like your job was shitty, once enough time elapses you will only remember the good bits. I often tell myself when I'm down - somewhat mockingly actually - that a year from now I'll miss this moment.

Today I was feeling a little nostalgic about my time in the suburban call centre office. I hated it at the time. But now, little things bring a smile to my face. Like, making myself "Fuck You" coffees where I'd put in a double serving of cheap Nescafe instant coffee, and enough low-calorie sweetener to make it palatable. And then drink the tarry mess. And playing Sudoku on my phone whenever I did a poo. And climbing into my nice, toasty car on cool Spring evenings before driving through peak hour traffic past my old work site to get to my house.

These memories made me happy. Particularly when I realised that if those were the best parts of my job then, I am even more thankful for the best parts of my job now.

Take Me to the River

I went for a walk along the Torrens from North Adelaide towards St Peters. I listened to Talking Heads and took some photos. It was dusk.

Wet footprints. A mystery! I didn't investigate...

Wet footprints. A mystery! I didn't investigate...

Colours

Colours

Ducks. Did they leave the footprints?! I don't know, like I said I did not investigate.

Ducks. Did they leave the footprints?! I don't know, like I said I did not investigate.

image 826 from bradism.com

image 827 from bradism.com

At one point the path along the river ended and I got a bit lost in a suburb. I pulled out my phone to try and search Google maps. And before I could even open the browser my phone was like "You are at these co-ordinates. The river is around that corner and down a slope. There is a bridge that will get you back home."

I was impressed, "Thanks! Android phone." I said.

"No problems, Brad, any time. I'm going to get back to randomly pausing while playing your music now."

image 828 from bradism.com

The O-Bahn was pretty today.

The O-Bahn was pretty today.