Applicant Perception Assessment NCI-2001/01 (Part 2 - The Report)

"Applicant Perception Assessment NCI-2001/01 (Part 2 - The Report)"

From: Teigan
To: Neurocam Operations
Subject: APPLICANT PERCEPTION ASSESSMENT NCI-2001/01
Date: 7 January 2005 3:42:09 PM

So I'm standing at the (lower) tram stop on Fitzroy St. waiting for the No 16 into town, my phone alarm starts bleeping and I realise it's four o'clock. For the purposes of "Applicant Perception Assessment NCI-2001/01" for Neurocam, I'm required to "write a detailed account of everything that happens" between now and 9pm.

(Bemused by the sweeping vaguery of this, I wrote a somewhat smart-arsey email to Neurocam Operations seeking clarification of the directive - for example, what about things occurring between 9pm & 4pm in other timezones? To my surprise I received an ostensibly serious response from one Charles Hastings, Head of Operations, which put me back in my box. "The interpretation of the instructions contained within Neurocam Perception Assessment NCI-2001/02 is entirely at the discretion of the applicant." Okay then. "Everything that happens" means whatever I want it to mean. Easy. For practical purposes, I choose to interpret "things that happen" as being limited to "things I perceive to be happening". But I digress.)

I look around, and of course an infinite number of things are happening out there. It's Monday, but being January 3rd there's a weekendy vibe abroad; loads of people out, the outdoor tables of the cafes and bars and restaurants along Fitzroy St are filled with them, all creating infinite happenings within their own little orbits. Between a mild sense of information overload, abstractly wondering what constitutes "something happening" and pondering the enigmatic nature of Neurocam, I find myself slipping into magical thinking mode. My eyes rest on a half-full waxed paper cup of Pepsi abandoned at my feet, with two straws, and I catch myself wondering what it could be trying to tell me. Or what my brain is trying to tell me by focussing my attention on it. Or something.

The tram pulls up and it's pretty packed - being unable to sit down and read my book, this arbitrary-significance-divining perceptual mode continues. I try to observe the people (a large swarm of asian tourists, spanning the age spectrum; a portly, bent old man in a black baseball cap; a spotty, unconvincingly dressed young man with bad hair standing awkwardly by the doors; a skinny, beaky, angular twentysomething guy with a shaved head in a blue singlet and orange-tinted wraparound sunnies observing him, with what might be pity or contempt. Some teenage girls, all giggles and charm bracelets and SMS-bleeping colourful phones. Mmm teenage girls. No, stop staring) but they don't seem remarkable enough to constitute anything happening.

I look out the window, and it's the numberplates of passing cars which start catching my eye, for whatever reason. We're at some lights on St. Kilda Rd and it's a blue Subaru with a plate that says "SEE 382". Two cars behind it, spookily enough (or not) a red Toyota with "CEE 843". See what, exactly?

Weirdly futuristically-decorated silver van advertising itself as the property of "All Terrier Motives" Pet Care and Grooming service. All Terrier Motives? Oh, okay. Ulterior Motives. Ingenious. Maybe they're a front for Neurocam. Maybe the van is a mobile covert surveillance unit. And the plate? "CFL 643" - yes, good message, be careful. You are thinking like a psychotic person, however idly or casually. Stop it at once. Point taken. Nissan ute behind it: SFE 764. I'm safe now, having pulled myself up short. Phew. And we've reached Flinders St. Station.

A bunch of people get off and I sit down, take out the book I'm reading - "Down & Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film" by Peter Biskind - but quickly become irritated at Biskind's incessant personal sniping at Robert Redford under the guise of critiquing his management of the Sundance Institute and end up texting my friend Evan: "Sometimes I question your commitment to Sparkle Motion"; a "Donnie Darko"-derived injoke pertaining to his failure to send me, as promised, the manuscript-in-progress of his new novel. Think about the director Tom DeCillo - quoted, bagging Redford, in the text - for a while. His "Living In Oblivion" with Steve Buscemi as a harried film director struggling against insurmountable obstacles - including a premadonnaish Brad Pitt analogue called 'Chad Palamino' - was a classic.

I am trying to recultivate my interest in film.
I am doing Cinema Studies at Melbourne Uni next year.
That's what this tram ride is about.
I'm going to their Information Centre in Parkville to get myself a copy of the Undergraduate Handbook.

That's what's happening.

I'd called the Info Centre prior to departing, and gotten an 'all our operators are taking other calls' message, suggesting they were open. But they aren't, I discover upon arrival. They're reopening after the Xmas-new year break tomorrow, according to a sign on their door.

The phone rings. It's my mum, calling from Rosedale, on the NSW coast. She informs me that it's a public holiday today, doofus (she herself does not call me 'doofus') and that a pelican has just shat all over the car, but that she & dad are having a lovely time. I wish them my best.

Wander around the campus a bit. It's so pretty. I am going to like studying here, I think.

Sitting on a bench having a cigarette, and a man walks by listening to an iPod - or some other portable audio device with the distinctive white earbuds from an iPod plugged into it. They're very ugly and noticeable a mile away, those white earbuds, hence a poor design from the consumer's standpoint - but a stroke of marketing genius in the sense that they subtly advertise the ubiquity of the iPod to all and sundry. You see them everywhere at the moment. Or at least I do. Maybe that's just coz I want one so badly. Mmm, high capacity portable hard-disk-based digital music players.

Cross back over Swanston St just in time to hop on a tram back to Kilda.

First half of the tramride passes in a haze. The song "Mistaken Identity" by Delta Goodrem, which was playing on Channel V at the gym this morning, has taken up residence in my forebrain and won't dislodge.

Notice a swarm of maybe thirty or forty distinguished looking men in business suits, swaggering like they've just emerged from a long working lunch, up Dorcas (or possibly Coventry) Street and onto St. Kilda Road. But - and here's the thing which makes it out-of-the-ordinary enough to qualify as a 'happening' - their suits are all exactly the same shade of muted peach. They are all wearing the exact same satiny peach-coloured tie. The effect is completely surreal. I look around for cameras. Surely it's a setup of some kind. But there are no cameras. Weird.

*beep! beep!* Ev, quite the surrealist himself, texts me back, epically: "Have u considered a career in sockpuppetry. Analysts predict the market 4 skilled sockpuppeteers will increase exponentially ovr the nxt decade. It's estimated tht by 2025 every home in the industrialised wrld will b fitted w/ a full-featured sockpuppet theatre. Affluent dwellings will hve 2. xxEv"

An unkempt, depressingly young woman gets on at St Kilda Junction and starts chatting happily away to herself about how various major world leaders are actually robots, and the Port Philip City Council is secretly a paedophile ring, merely milking the whole 'local government' schtick to lend itself a veneer of respectability. Everyone else on the tram studiously creates this weird psychic deadzone around her, rendering the atmosphere much stranger than her strange behaviour alone would have done. Not wanting to conspire in this alienating treatment, I briefly make eye contact, which she seems to like. Then I realise I could easily wind up in the deeply undesirable position of becoming a replacement for the apparently imaginary person she's currently talking to. Quickly cut away, falling regretfully into line with the other not-overtly-insane passengers on the tram completely ignoring her. This situation reminds me of living in London in 1999.

Reflect on how differently people who live in teeming metropoli - as opposed to rural hamlets like Canberra - relate to each other as strangers in public spaces.

Dismount back on Fitzroy, cross the road, head up the street. Still lots of people out. Hit by a sudden pang of loneliness passing the Prince of Wales. Turn the corner onto the Esplanade. Stop for a cigga, looking wistfully out to sea. Feel glad that - whatever else may be lacking in my life - I do at least live in a beautiful place.

Synchronistically, just as I'm feeling all self-piteous and angstridden, who should call but Canberra's answer to Marla "I've just swallowed a bottle of Xanax" Singer, JF. She's in conniptions about whether or not she should move back into her parents place, since the rigours of living on her own are just too much for her. "I just lack the basic living skills necessary to sustain myself independently!" she whines. Gently suggest that perhaps she could maybe, like, try and learn them. "Oh, I hate learning things. *audible pout*"

Find myself becoming increasingly irritated at her flakiness and start lapsing into flippancy and sarcasm, which she is too self-absorbed to detect, irritating me even further. Her myriad 'problems' are all entirely self-generated and she has no real interest in resolving them, because that would deprive her of her only significant preoccupation in life, leaving her with nothing to talk about except her tedious accountancy job which she hates. I've known toasters with more self-awareness than this woman.

I start to make "well, gotta go" sorts of noises but these make no impact either since she is experiencing a Major Emotional Crisis and it's inconceivable that I could possibly have anything better to do than listen to her piss and moan interminably for the remainder of the afternoon.

After about forty minutes, the conversation finally ends like this:
Her: "Look, I'm *sorry* if my problems are difficult or unpleasant for you to hear about, but I --"
Me: "J, it's not that they're difficult and unpleasant to hear about, it's just boring. Okay? They're boring. Goodbye." (Click.)

Go into Coles on Acland St., wondering vaguely if I have been unconscionably horrible. Ultimately decide I haven't. Brutally honest, certainly - but, I rationalise, when someone's lost perspective to the extent that she unquestionably has, to be brutally honest is doing them a favour. Cruel, kind, etcetera. Buy cheese, bananas, tuna, pasta sauce (complete with a tag around its neck: "Try new Dolmio pizza topping's" - tsk), toilet cistern disinfectant pellets, corn, bread, ciggas.

Go home. Pass the quiet middleaged bald man (Darren? Daryl?) who lives down the corridor with his six year old daughter (Sophie?) on my way in. She is eating a strawberry paddlepop. I say hi. He says hi. She says hi.

Unpack my shopping. Install one of my new toilet cistern pellets and take a shit. Make a sandwich. Switch on the 'puter and start writing up this account. Switch on the news, so that I can at least make some reference to things which have happened outside of my own personal sensory sphere.

The first ten minutes are tsunami-fallout coverage. Since the disaster itself occurred days ago I decide this material doesn't qualify as pertaining to anything that's happened this afternoon.

In other news, four people have drowned at Warnabool bay. One family lost loved ones from three generations. Grabs of a visibly distressed woman in sunglasses talking about this. The Bakhtiyaris have arrived in Pakistan. Vanstone intends to bill them for at least a third of the $3 million in legal fees, detainment and deportation costs they've 'incurred' during their Australian jaunt, the stingy bitch. In finance, the relative values of various international currencies have fluctuated yet again. Sport. Cricket. Tennis. More tennis. Blah. Weather: it was a mostly sunny day around the state today. Allegedly. But not here in Melbourne, I can attest - it's been pleasantly warm but equally pleasantly cloudy.

Does the weather constitute something which is happening? It's notoriously the thing you talk about when you haven't got anything more happening to talk about, so perhaps not.

An eye for semantics is a trait highly valued by the management of Neurocam International, apparently. So perhaps my best bet is to emphasise my eye for semantics in this account, rather than my eye for what's actually going on around me - which is rolled back into my head most of the time, lending me a disconcerting, zombielike appearance that frequently causes sensitively disposed types to run away screaming in terror when they see me coming up the street. No, really.

7:30 Report. More ghastly tsunami tragededom, inevitably. The news media's apparent difficulty in covering a story so large-scale - both geographically and in terms of its practical and human impacts - is interesting, and - at a stretch - comparable to the challenge facing those attempting Perception Assessment NCI-2001/02. At least, those poor souls who weren't privy to the 'interpret at your discretion' caveat I was lucky-slash-intrepid enough to discover.

Everything that happens. Everything that happens. It's deliberately vague, of course. It doesn't say "everything that happens to YOU" for a reason. It's inviting broad interpretation. This pontification counts as valid content because it's happening right now, in my brain and on my keyboard, and it's 8pm.

Good evening, thanks for joining us.

My attention has just been caught by the trailer on the teev for the first ep of a documentary series called "Altered Statesmen" (tonight: the inside story of Ronald Reagan's cognitive decline subsequent to being shot by John Hinckley in 1981) which appeals. But it's on at 8:30 and X is semi-expecting me at his place in ** at 9:30ish, which I'm not a hundred percent sure I know how to get to, so I should probably be en route by then.

I wonder whether I should eat something, or get some food on the way, or whether we'll end up going out for KFC or some such later in the evening. This latter seems a likely scenario.

Hmm.

Fuck it, I had a sandwich.

Don't even know if I want to go really. Maybe I'll just stay in and continue reading my copy of VicRoads Publication Number 00568/6 "Road To Solo Driving" ("Learning to Drive - Driving to Learn" - odd choice of subtitle for a manual aimed at pre-"L"-platers).

Postscript: I ended up staying in and watching the doco, which was quite interesting. Nothing else happened.

ATTACHED:


worst.jpg - Still from David Fincher's "Fight Club" (1999) depicting Helena Bonham-Carter as Marla Singer and Edward Norton as "Jack", juxtaposed with a promotional shot of a Nokia 6610 mobile telephone, representing my horrible conversation with JF the psychic vampire, the worst thing that happened today.


best.jpg - Notably nondescript found photo purportedly of St. Kilda beach, representing a brief and somewhat empty moment of vague contentment I experienced whilst looking out over said beach, the best thing that happened today.