Erin just got off the phone from speaking with someone who sounded very scary. Mostly Erin is just a wuss, but she's hoping that scary person will give her a job.
If not, it won't be the end of the world, at least not for that reason. I'm out of couscous. That could be serious, as for the most part, couscous is the majority of my summer diet.
Start with a bowl that is larger than you think you need. Take halfish a bullion cube, disolve in 1.4 cups of boiling water from a kettle, add 1 cup couscous immediately and cover for 5 mins. Add some olive oil and a good mixture of any of the following: garlic, green onions, purple onions, tomatoes, chopped bell peppers. Spices are good too, especially when they're fresh. Basil, oregano and mint are always safe bets. Don't follow my measurements though. I don't measure things.
I have more things to do, now that I think of it. I should put together a portfolio with some of the writing and graphic design I've done, so it looks nice and pretty. Not my web design though. I suck at that. But I've made some other, reasonably nice looking stuff and it would be nice at some point or other to get paid to make more reasonably nice looking stuff. This is my thought exactly.
I should be thinking more about school right now. I have to write a paper on journalism for Tuesday, topic to be determined. I have to do a big corporate profile thingie about Bell Canada for Wednesday. Joy.
Loyal non-reader Jim asks: have you moved in yet? as I meet him crossing the street, on his way home from work with a cone of fish and chips. "Only sort of," I reply. And that would be closest to the truth, really.
It is Raymi's birthday today and I can't think of anything good to say that hasn't been said before. I first found her blog through the likes of Matt Good and Tony Pierce because they were always always saying nothing but nice things about her, and you know what? They're right. A lot of the blogosphere is boring but she isn't. I just thought I'd mention that.
It's one of my favourite pasttimes, writing up long lists of things to do that I will never accomplish. When I first began doing it, I was naïve and thought that writing things down would somehow compel me to get them done. Now I'm older and I know better. I still write out the stupid lists.
It's something about feeling organized, I guess. There are a lot of people that assume that I am because I've always done alright in school and at times I seem to be a very rational person, but they're sorely mistaken. All you have to do is take a look at my desk or my room, or my locker or pretty much any other space I inhabit to see that.
I live in a constant state of clutter, living space, work space, mind, body and soul.
I think it would be nice to charge someone with the responsibility of keeping my head on straight. This person would have to live with me and I could cook for them as long as they don't mind cleaning up a bit too because I forget and I don't really like doing that anyways. I'm not sure if such a person really exists.
So I write lists. I wrote one up today with all the things I want to accomplish over the summer and I doubt I will get many of them done. Regardless, I thought it was fun at the time so I figure it can't be all bad. I figure I'll probably do 20% of what I wrote down. The other 80, for the time being, can screw themselves. Either that or they get an honourable mention, a kind of runner-up prize to be determined at a later date.
I really don't know what I'm talking about right now. This is the worst blog post ever.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the majority of the things I said I wanted to do need money. That means I need a job. There's not much I can really do on that front right now, or for the next couple of weeks, for that matter. This is precisely why I hate spring.
I confess to feeling only half as much dread this year as I did this time last year, or the year before or the year before. I suppose that's a good thing. In fact, for the past couple of months I've felt better than I have in years. I can't say that I mind that much. There are a few people to blame for this but I don't feel like singling them out right now. They either know already or if they don't, they probably don't need to anyways.
George and I disected a bilingual newspaper today. Being a non-native speaker himself, he derived much joy from being able to pick apart all the grammatical errors in the English section of it, especially the ones in the letter from the editor.
Seems to me that among other things, editors are supposed to proofread and edit things to make them sound right. Apparently the editor of this one wasn't quite doing his job. As he said, some of the pages in the paper were "defected", as in they ran away to join other papers. Perhaps they ran away from other papers to join this one. Neither of us were sure.
At the grocery store I was ridiculed for my strange use of hand gestures while I explained that, given the choice, rats and mice will choose healthier and more organic foods over crappier equivalent varieties, because they are smarter than us.
My mother, you see, has an irrational prejudice against organic cereals, because the last time we bought some, mice got into them and mouse terds look suspiciously like some varieties of cereal out there, especially the ones with flax or wheat germ. She will not eat the stuff.
But instead of actually countering my argument with a well thought out rebuttal, she chose instead to resort to an ad hominem attack on the stupid way I was flailing my hands around in the air. Yes, it was stupid, but that's beside the point.
This meant, of course that I had to spin around in a circle a couple of times for no apparent reason because that's exactly what you do in a supermarket. I'm cool.
My sister put her hands within a metre of my neck, which made me squeal because yes, I'm that ticklish.
Then I took the shopping cart on the scenic route around the parking lot because I forgot where the car was.
Fin.
It seems my phone got into a fight with someone over the weekend and the result is that I had an unusually high number of messages on my voicemail, 17 of which were not for me. That's in addition to the 7 text messages that were also not for me.
Unfortunately for me they weren't even remotely entertaining. It doesn't matter what the messages are, I still have to pay for them, so the least that any wrong number can do is say something funny to amuse me, especially when I'm not able to skip to the end of any of my messages. Every second counts when that's how you're billed.
Apparently some guy who mumbles and doesn't sound all that smart wants someone to pick up his or her clothes. He said in another message that he doesn't care when and in another, that his dad will help. After a while, he decided that he wasn't going to waste his time. When he said that, I was thankful. But in spite of that, he left five more messages.
Buried underneath the pile were four messages for me and by that time, it was too late for me to answer any of them. There's always tomorrow.
The interview that I was supposed to go to today has been rescheduled, and I have another one after that to go to too. Kind of makes me feel popular, though in my experience, an interview means absolutely nothing when it comes to actually getting a job.
I must say that the whole working year-round thing seems very appealing right now. It would be nice to not feel like I'm haemorrhaging money by this time of year. Not that I am. It just feels that way. I'm actually pretty good at saving and budgeting. It would just be nicer if I had a little more in my budget for my coffee and alcohol fund, that's all.
As for my phone, I'm getting kind of tired of these people fighting, the people calling for Bosco and miscelaneous guys calling me at weird hours. My phone number is really cool and easy to remember, and consequently I think it gets given out in bars a lot. I may have to change it.
Just finished off a bowl of squash soup. I didn't have any ginger to add to it so I put in extra pepper, all of which sunk to the bottom of the bowl only to be found suddenly by my unsuspecting tounge. Ouch, that's good pepper.
Tonight already I've drilled myself on my lecture notes and stared at the stars until I was dizzy, the stars of Ursa Major Alkaid, Alcor, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda and Merak and Dubhe. I used to know all this stuff but now I forget. It's not that important anymore anyways. They don't control me.
I could write horoscopes though, just as well as anyone else. I could write fortune cookies too, but I already have. Some of them came true y'know. Apparently there's a special flickr group that deals only in chickens and I seem to remember them asking for the one in that pose specifically. I don't want to know why. I gave it to them anyways.
I drew a picture for you but it was covered in blots. Maybe I should have used a different pen. Maybe the blots were the whole point of the thing. There must be something lying latent in there somewhere.
Ponder it, grasshopper and tell me tomorrow.
At this stage in the game my concentration's shot. Here I am making lists of things I want to do over the summer when summer's not for another two weeks at least. That being said, should I take anthropology or women's studies over the summer? Both worthy, in my opinion, but I can't take both.
The majority of my plans for the summer hinge upon getting a second job. It's simple.
job + stinginess - tuition payments = Erin goes to Norway.
Though a much more logical solution to this equation is
Norway arrives on Erin's doorstep = Erin says hi. That's how it works in my brain.
Did I mention that my brain is fried? It's always like this this time of year. I need some time off.
I'm not in the habit of doing memes, but this one amused me.
According to google
Erin looks like 21 years old.
Erin looks like number 3.
Erin looks like she's a Barbie doll, college girl/Hooters waitress...
Erin looks like she's under water...no?
Erin looks like she's playing basketball?
Erin looks like she's ready to cry.
Hey Erin, looks like you are doing real well.
And Erin looks like a great big sister!
Stolen from other people.
Auswin: If I could write you a song it would start out all majestic-like, with lots of cellos and then it would get big and belicose with screaming horns and everything assaulting your ears.
Erin: Victory through sheer volume, eh?
Auswin: Exactly. And the in the end it would fade to a whimper.
Erin: The story of my life.
Auswin: Yep
Erin: And if I could write you a song it would sound like the sun breaking through the clouds after a storm while it's still raining, the sky glowing topaz as the sun sets, traffic lights reflecting across the slick street, people still walking with umbrellas, unaware that the rain is letting up. A head-on collision on the road, the screech of tires, metal on metal, percussion and concussions.
Auswin: How typical.
Erin: Not that it matters. I can't write music anyways.
Auswin: Story of my life.
Erin: I know.
Among other things today, I saw Sara Davis Buechner featured in a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. I. If there was ever someone who were to destroy a piano out of sheer enthusiasm, she would be the one to do it. She attacked that poor Steinway so hard that it shuddered under every impact, and she forced some of the most amazing, chaotic and spirited music out of it that I've heard in quite some time. I was very impressed.
Shostakovich was a pretty interesting guy too. You'd have to be to be both so in and out of the favour of the Soviets at the same time.
Hugh Fraser made an appearance as well, not only as a trombone soloist, but because it was the premiere of his Primary Colours. He's pretty talented too. I always wanted to play the trombone but I've never really had the chance to try.
As always, Sundays out are finished with dinner at the Red Onion: hot tuna salad, moose pie, extra ice cream. I'm so predictable.
The cat always tries to wake me up on Saturday mornings.
Some mornings she washes my face. She'll start with my forehead and work down my nose until she gets as close to my lips as I can stand and I get up.
Other mornings she's all claws. Damn, she has long claws.
Still other mornings she sits on my bed and begins to knock things off of my bedside table, one by one. That one's probably the most irritating, because you lay there, awake, figuring that the longer you pretend to be asleep, the more discouraged she'll get and the more likely she will go away and bug someone else. But, the longer you lay there, the more likely she will knock down something that is fragile, special or something that otherwise should not reach the floor in that manner, so eventually I get up.
This morning though, she found something that really works. I was fast asleep when the little bugger stuck her nose directly into my right nostril. Shit. It wasn't irritation that woke me up but pure survival instinct.
I'm sure we evolved that way to prevent bugs and creepy crawlies from burrowing up there and eating our brains. In this climate at least, it isn't exactly necessary, but nonetheless that seems to be how I'm programmed.
If you ever want to wake me up in a hurry, that would be the way to do it. Shove something up my nose.
The little bugger.
I hear Mr. Dressup singing upstairs right now. I seem to remember that when he died in 2001, some of us in highschool felt substantially more affected by it than by the attacks on the World Trade Centre seven days earlier.
Not that we're callous and unfeeling people. No, it has to do with proximity. Ever heard of the Afghanistan complex? Here, one death in Vancouver is as big as 4 in Toronto and 10, maybe in New York, 50 in France and 500 in Afghanistan. Something like that. But Mr. Dressup was like family to so many of us so that made him even more important to some, I guess.
Or maybe it was just that the sudden loss of a fixture of all our childhoods was somehow more important than the undoubtedly important things that we were seeing on tv at the time. I don't know.
Got an email from a friend saying Hey Erin, you spelled my name wrong on the website happyface, to which I replied Sorry about that, I'll fix it right away happyface, to which he replied thanks happyface. And all's well.
He looks kind of like a goldfish.
Sometimes I wonder about some of my other email though. Got a message from God the other day and he said that he was playing a club in Auckland. I replied with much regret that I couldn't make it.
I got a different one that simply said:
Liked your blog so much, I decided to eat the person next to you. Good luck, hope you survive. (incidently, bad neighborhood)I can only imagine that he was talking about Urban Dead, which I must say is one of the most addicting games I've found on the internet to date. Maybe I'm just easily amused.
Work on the publication committee took me downtown today to use the computer labs at Harbour Centre. The we concluded that we need a lot of pictures and cut our meeting really short.
I wandered down to my mom's office and talked to her for a while, as always, suffering through the stupid jokes that her coworkers tell about me being slave labour or something.
At one point in time, one of the other managers walked in and leaned against the wall. "Did you get my email?" he asked. "Don't look at the attachment, just open it. Open it!"
So she did. We listened as the cool voice of Gino Vannelli began to flow from her speakers, and the other manager began to dance in my mother's office. As he got his groove on, my mother and I expressed a telepathic feeling of being deeply disturbed from opposite sides of her desk.
Other staff members began to walk by her door and then all of a sudden people began to shout throughout the office "They're playing makeout music!" A couple of other people stopped near the door and started dancing too. "Oh look, he's growing long curly hair as we speak," my mother snorted.
Eventually the people evaporated and all was well.
Leaving the building, however, was another ordeal. The same guy stepped out of his office to ask everyone within earshot if they wanted to go with him to see Gino Vannelli at the River Rock Casino. "The whole office should go!" he said, and the idea was immediately shot down by the executive director, who asked why anyone would ever want to see such a spectacle.
She then followed us around the corner where she told us that Gino Vannelli has been living in Oregon for quite some time and making classical music because apparently she follows his career closely.
I had an uneventful train ride home.
My friend Lauren left a message for me during class today and I called her back a little over an hour ago. There was nothing really in the voice but I could tell right away what it was. She wants to move in with me. How did I see that one coming?
And if it was up to me, I would probably say yes, even though I'm not completely sure if my apartment needs a sudden influx of perky ueber Catholicness. She's someone I get along fairly well with and she's got a good job. Seeing as the rent is for all intents and purposes negligable and I get free electricity and phone, it wouldn't be much of a problem for both of us, and I might actually be able to start to put away a reasonable amount towards my escape to Norway fund.
But then again, there's only one bedroom. True, the place is obviously big enough for two, but it kind of looks like that means two people who sleep with each other. There are ways to work around that though.
The bigger thing is that yes, I have my cool penthouse apartment thing and I live in it, but it's not like I moved out or anything. It only looks like that. No, my apartment is actually an additional room in my parents' house. You didn't know that, did you?
I have my very own apartment so that my father can come over and work on that fucking puzzle until at least 8:30 at night, and later when it's not a school night.
I have my very own apartment so that people can come over, cook things, dirty all the dishes so that when I get home, I find that they haven't made anything for me except extra work.
I have my very own apartment so that people can come home and turn on the tv just to distract the hell out of me and then say that it must be a good place to study. It sure is at 4am.
No, I haven't moved out at all.
But what gets me is how I'm supposed to be more independent and pay my own way and such. I mean, I moved to a separate city. Is there something else that I'm supposed to do that I wasn't aware of? I mean, other than being rude, though somehow talking civilly doesn't work.
I told her I'd run it by them though I'm completely certain they'll say no.
First the worst. Let's get things straight, there was never zero the hero because zero is nothing. It's an abstract idea. There is nothing heroic about it except that all your heroism is an abstract idea too.
Second is the best, or at least that's how they always said it, though Seinfeld used to say that second place was the worst because it's the absolute best of the losers. But I always thought that silver was pretty respectable myself.
We sat around once and tried to think up something better to rhyme with second and the best we could come up with was leper. The strange thing being that I asked my sister many years later and that was the best she could come up with too. Second the leper... I don't think it's got the right ring to it.
I never understood the kids out there that swore that it was third the golden bird because in my universe third is always nerd. But then again, those were always the kids that played foursquare instead of tetherball in spite of the fact that tetherball was an inherently superior game. Not that I was ever good at it. I'm too short.
Julie asked me the other day why we don't play heads up seven up in university and honestly I don't know. Makes about as much sense as the running around, paying the rights to your firstborn for tuition and jumping bureaucratic hoops to get a little piece of paper that won't actually guarantee that you'll get a job.
But then again, I don't remember how to play the game. All I remember is grinding my nose into my desk and wrapping my arms around my head so tight that I squished my eyeballs half way down my throat and couldn't see anything. And whenever you looked up, there'd be a circle of condensation on your desk where you had been breathing.
Fourth the king of the north, but not the Great White North, eh, because we've got a queen. She doesn't visit much though.
The rest of the numbers are really irrelevant, mostly because I have to go to class and there is question as to whether or not they exist. It is a question that I will not waste my time upon.
Until next time,
Erin
"I brought my umbrella here. I don't know if I need it yet."
"You never know around here," I replied. This guy is always at the busstop but I've never actually talked to him before.
"No, you never know around here. That's why it's good to be prepared. I don't need it yet, but I have it when I do. You know the immigrants these days, they're all over into everything. They just let them in. You don't know their backgrounds or nothing. Too many of them. They should tighten the borders up. I seen how they live. I've been to every single country in the world." He sneered at this then continued. "Miserable bastards, Russia, Czechoslovakia, India, Pakistan, Kenya. I seen'em all. East Germany, Poland..."
"Somalia?" I supplied. For those who aren't familiar with what I mean by Somalia, this link helps. Think Abu Gharaib Canadian style.
"Yeah, I been to Somalia, and Sweden and Norway. Miserable bastards. No pensions and so much poverty. I seen how they live. Then they come over here and they never had it so good. And the Middle East, it's terrible there too.
"I told my nephew that he should join the army. I said that it'll make a man out of you and he says that I was right. That's what I did. And when you get out you get a pension. $3000 a month and you join the Legion and get free bubbly. You just show em your card and they give it to you. But my nephew's a master boilermaker now and he's gonna do that wen he retires from the army but he's got cancer now..."
And that's about the time when my brain switched off. I can only take so much in one day.
Late last night I was sitting up talking on Skype in the kitchen with the door closed so that I wouldn't wake anyone up with all my chattering. I was quite absorbed in conversation when I heard a squeak from across the room.
My mother had crept down the hall nude as she is accustomed to do in the evenings and opened what the person on the other end of the line termed "the screaming door" a crack.
I looked up to see her hang her head out past the doorframe, squinting, no doubt wondering what I was doing in the kitchen with my computer late at night after the world was asleep behind closed doors.
"I'm on the phone," I whispered, and she stared at me for a bit before she crept back down the hall to bed. I'm sure she wonders about these sorts of things but she gave up asking a long time ago.
"Why are you whispering?" the voice at the other end asked.
"Nothing," I replied, "it's just my mother."
We run a small magazine at school that we recently inherited from some other students. Upon looking through all the back issues, we decided that we hated the old version of the thing. The writing was too formal, it didn't have enough pictures and the layout was ugly as hell.
We set about giving it a makeover, with a new logo, a better layout etc. etc.
But as much as we tried asking other people to contribute articles to the thing, no one other than the four of us really did. That has left us short of the amount of content that we really wanted to have.
We brought this up at a meeting with some other people and Meena suggested that we have a contest along the following lines:
Some days I'm amazed at the bizarre ways people get to this site. Someone found me through google today with the searchwords "mistint paint vancouver", which linked to this post. Other people come in search of "pistachio pudding", lured in by the numerous times in the past where I've confessed my obsession with the food. Alas, they were probably looking for this video.
But some I just have to wonder about. One time a couple of weeks ago, someone in India somehow landed here with a search for "consequense of separation without divorce in India". I was a little disturbed, so I searched all around my archives to try and figure out how and why a search term like that would point to my blog and came up empty.
I searched google and yahoo for the same thing and came up empty too. There is absolutely nothing relevant that I could see on that subject to be found by searching in that way.
I know that if I was looking for something on that topic, I'd search for it through the article indexes and databases that I have a subscription to through school. Probably ones about Sociology or Women's Studies would be my best bet. A quick search on the Women's Studies International database brings a little over 250 articles on the subject, and it is one of many places I could try. No doubt I'd be able to find books and news too, if I bothered to look, but a general google search would be the last place I'd try.
Today I'm glad that I have both the access to so much information and enough education to be able to find and use it when I need it. It is sad that there are so many people out in the world that don't have that privelege.
I sincerely hope that whoever found me through that search is well and found the information that they need.
If you leave your window open a crack in the fall, the ladybugs come and invade your house. They used to come in through the bathroom window and stay the winter in the attic. Then when it got warm enough, I'd gather up as many as I could find and put them back outside.
They smell funny when you piss them off.
They like eating liver flavoured cat treats, so I've been told.
My neighbour keeps bees in his fridge all winter and then he rents them out to farmers in the spring and I always thought that was kind of cool. I'm thinking that maybe I'll get some bees this summer too.
Walking down the street to my apartment, it was sunny where I was, but there was a foggy mist over the ocean, the kind you get when it's sunny here but rainy there and everything is bright.
The cherry trees by the side of the road are all in bloom. The most beautiful cherry tree of all used to be right beside my house before the bulldozers ate it. That was a year ago. Water under the bridge.
I stopped for a moment to watch a little songbird flit from branch to branch in a willow maybe a metre away. It was a species that I'd never seen before. I'll have to get my field guide out at some point.
Little birds are very high strung. I've always thought that the reason why they don't live very long is because they are never still. Like we all have the same amount of life in us and they just choose to use it up faster. Box turtles can live to be over a hundred. It makes sense.
I think someone might have come up with that thougth before me. That makes sense as well.
Standing out on my balcony I noticed that the ladybugs are back today.
We kept seeing those ads for the new vanilla Oreos and decided that at some point or other we would have to investigate. Who says I can't be swayed by advertising?
We both had a sneaking suspicion that the vanilla Oreos would taste suspiciously like the old vanilla Girl Guide cookies when Mr. Christie used to make them because Mr. Christie doesn't make Girl Guide cookies anymore.
So imagine my non-surprise when my father arrived this evening at my apartment bearing vegetables, gourmet mustard, a new loofah for me and vanilla Oreos. Yes, my dad is awesome.
Being the Oreo connoisseurs we are, we turned the radio on to the first classy sounding station we could find, 90.9 on the fm dial to what seemed to be CBC Radio Canada where they were playing violin arias and reading the news in French.
Then we tried them out. Our initial reaction was that they were extremely crunchy, like dog biscuits. The tartar control kind that help your dog have healthy teeth.
We soon found that soaking them in milk did not help with the crunchiness. This met with instant condemnation on our part.
You know those Oreo commercials where the older kid says to the young kid "you know, when I was your age, Oreos used to be chocolate..." and sounds like the cliche old man? Well we parodied them until we were bored.
"When I was your age, we could chew through Oreos without breaking our teeth."
"Nowadays cookies are so goddamned hard that you can skip them on ponds like rocks!"
"You could stick some together and use em as hockey pucks!"
"These things are so hard, you could stone someone to death with them!"
Anyways, now I'm sitting across the room from him and I've changed my mind about the classiness of CBC RadioCanada. After the violins and the news ended, there was a full hour of tone-deaf girls with acoustic guitars shreiking "you got me wet" and other such stuff followed by some guys who only know three chords and sound severely constipated. More specifically, they sound like the French language equivalent to Korn.
"So, what should I do?" he asked, "I'm standing on a bubble right now. I could go either way." He shifted from foot to foot a few times to illustrate his point.
"Do it," I said, tilting my head in her general direction.
"Do what?" his eyes grew wide as he tilted his head the same way.
"Just go do it," I repeated.
He had been bugging me about her all lecture, she being one of the bleach blondes sitting a few rows down from us. He sat on one side of me, asking like he does every week, if I've noticed how many hot girls are in the class and how I thought he should ask her out.
I am absolutely the worst person to ask for relationship advice. Maybe my advice is good, but if it is, it's never exactly worked for me so I wouldn't know. Though I told him that you can't exactly expect a girl that doesn't know you to just go out with you and I figure that that was pretty good advice. Julie even said the same thing. We both said he should just go talk to her.
Though I stopped very, very short of saying that a girl that fake and baked who has already rejected him not once but twice is probably not worth his time since there are other girls out there that mistakenly think they're fat and would be flattered that he was even bothering to talk to them. Oh well.
Julie sat to my left. Through the course of the lecture, she drew a cow, a car, her boyfriend and miscelaneous squiggles all over her notes. In the margin of her paper, she wrote:
Forwards I am heavy, backwards I am not"Figure that one out," she whispered. I stared at it for a while and then settled into a comfortable daydream. A rather nice one, in fact. Julie poked me about half an hour later. "Have you got it yet?" she asked, drawing a circle around the riddle with her pen.
It seems like all roads lately have led somehow or other to Ikea, as sad as that sounds, and as always, trips to Ikea tend to be unique experiences. I'm sure the Swedes plan it that way. Them and their clever marketing.
Today it was like Cirque du Soleil in there. Cabinets, endtables, kitchenwares and children in leotards on unicycles. They were apparently recruiting but I think I'll pass. I'm a little too old to start being an acrobat and too female and weak to be the world's strongest man. I know, excuses, excuses.
I saw the coolest looking family in the cafeteria though. A really huge black man and a really short Chinese woman with children who looked Chinese, but had huge afros. Not a very common combination, to say the least. I would have taken a picture but I thought it would be rude. I live in a pretty neat day and age that stuff like that can happen without it causing problems.
After it all, I emerged relatively unscathed and surprisingly enough, with only the things that I had gone there to get. I am now the proud owner of one of those rack thingies that goes under the kitchen cupboards that I'm going to hang my mugs off of. The cupboards are a little too high for near-midgets like me and there's not enough space on the counters for the mugs so it makes sense. Chock that one up to the Swedes being clever again.
I suppose I could have made something similar out of wood or metal. After all, I got a new torch yesterday and I'm pretty eager to play with it but fact is, I don't really have the time right now. I have three papers to write between now and Thursday morning, so I really should work on that right now.
I need:
- mustard, but not the kind people put on hotdogs. that stuff's awful
- an extension cord or two, but the three prong ones, not the two prong ones because I can't plug my computer into them
- a new loofah because somehow or other I forgot to get one today and my old one is, well, old
- laundry detergent. I don't need to begin to explain to myself why I need that.
Don't let me forget.
A while ago some suction cup rubber ducks appeared on my shower wall. This may have been my mother's doing. Hovever, I think the ducks might actually be for sticking on the bathtub so you don't slip and die while you're having a shower, because one by one, the little ducks have fallen off the wall. Hence, my ducks are no longer in a row. I'll have to fix that...
Half an hour ago I was sitting in my apartment, minding my own business when all of a sudden I heard what sounded like a gunshot or an explosion of sorts. When I looked outside, camera in hand, this is what I saw:
I nearly made the mistake of dialing an area code for the fire department because by now Telus has made sure that the (604) and (778) is firmly ingrained in my mind.
"There seems to be a rather large fire in my yard. Could you send me a fire truck please?" I asked the operator, and told her the city, but forgot where exactly I lived. Remember, I've only sort of moved in but I don't really live there much.
Remember also that when asked, I often have difficulty remembering my birthday, age, which class I'm supposed to be in at a particular time and people's names. This makes me the worst possible person to be calling 911 in an emergency. I'm far better at first aid. You just have to hope that whenever I'm doing serious first aid that there's someone around to call an ambulance because I'll most likely forget.
Lucky for the world, I have the sense to only call 911 from landlines, so by the time I finally figured out my adress, the operator had long since tracked it and dispatched someone. "Thank-you very much," I said to her when she told me that. I'm always unnecessarily polite on the phone. Not that that's a bad thing. The lady was pretty polite herself.
Very shortly after I hung up, a fire truck arrived. Thus ends the unscheduled entertainment for the evening. Back to my homework.
Was at a pot luck dinner thing with my dad last night. It was at a meeting for a fraternal organization that usually gives him some money to do drug, alcohol and safe driving programs at his school. We brought the bean salad and yes, it was delicious.
Usually he would take my mother to these sorts of things but we shipped her off to Mexico so I get to fill in for her. My primary function at one of these things is to walk around with him and introduce myself to people so they will say their names because like me, my father is completely incapable of remembering people's names.
The organization itself was apparently started up by a group of travelling salesmen and did a lot of insurance stuff to help each other out. Now it appears to be made of a lot of pleasant old people who raise lots of money and then give it away to charities, play bingo and go to the horse races together.
From what I've heard, the same organization offers affordable health insurance and subsidizes the cost of perscription drugs for its members in the United States because like Rwanda and the Sudan, the US doesn't have socialized medicine. Sounds strangely communist for something coming out of the States, but benevolence is a good thing regardless of the name or the reason.
After dinner, they awarded cheques to some people there. One for the Surrey Special Olympics, the Salvation Army, the local hospice, hockey and soccer teams they sponsor and other worthy causes.
Then they had their elections. Some sort of supreme chancellor person was visiting from Alabama? Arkinsas? Oklahoma? I can't rememember. He read out the names of all the people nominated to all the positions and they all sounded weird, not like say, president, treasurer and secretary. "Y'all line up against the wall there," he said, "These are the people you've chosen for the positions. Any objections?" He repeated that three times and then they were all elected to their strange sounding positions.
It was a unique cultural experience, to say the least.
They're nice people, so I feel like linking em.
That is all.
On the way home from my bus stop a man rushed out from behind our local doughnut shop and brushed past me, his cell phone pressed to his ear. Walking past him, I thought I noticed out of the corner of my eye two younger guys forcing small packets of white into their pockets. No excitement there. My high school supposedly had a heroin problem and that was never exactly a secret. Then again, I could just have been seeing things.
The house next door looked like it was no longer completely vacant. Another grow-op? Possibly. You can never quite tell from the street. You're not supposed to.
None of this bothers me as much as it probably should. The neighbourhood's really not that bad, in spite of its faults. It looks a little more run down, a little sadder and grubbier than when I left it, but as always, the dirt you know is always better than the dirt you don't.
At an intersection I ran into the circles man, so named because he often stops mid-step to turn a tight circle in the middle of the sidewalk or the street, wherever he happens to be. He makes two trips up and down the south side of the street every day, and has done so for longer than I can remember.
"I haven't seen you in a long time," he said, "Where have you been?" His accent wanders all over Europe. I have never been able to place it, though I've tried for years.
"I moved away for a while," I answered.
The circles man began to smile knowingly. "With a boy?" He winked.
"No."
"Well, I'm glad you're back then," he replied. His smile faded slowly as I crossed the street.
Back in the summer of '76 the Canadian dollar climbed to $1.08 US.
We packed up next to nothing in the trunk of the Dodge Colt because the Datsun pickup was not a vehicle to be trusted on road trips and then we headed south.
In Bellingham we stopped to buy some camping equipment, where an energetic young salesman worked extremely hard on us for his commission. We had never seen a plastic cooler before and you could only get the metal ones in Canada at the time but he assured us that it kept your food just as cold but it was lighter and easier to carry than the old-fashioned kind, and he added that it was very durable plastic too. He jumped up and down on the floor model to prove it. We were sold.
I still use that thing from time to time and to this day I've never come across a better plastic cooler. I just wish it wasn't such a hideous shade of green.
Down the Oregon coast, with its breathtaking views and beaches, camping all the way. You used to be able to do that right by the side of the road. Stayed at Disneyland for a while, got a terrible case of heatstroke, then eventually it was time to go home.
Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, just over the Washington border, we stopped to help a woman whose car had broken down by the side of the highway. Looked like a radiator problem. Inside the car was a bevy of children of various ages. I don't remember exactly how many. We asked if there was anything we could do to help her out since it was so hot out and she had the children with her.
At first she refused, but then changed her mind to say that yes, indeed, we could do something for her. She asked us to take her oldest son with us on our way home to Vancouver and make sure that he got to Seattle safely. An odd request, but nevertheless we were soon waving goodbye to the woman and the majority of her children and en route to Seattle.
We spent about four hours on the road with him. He was a nice enough kid but for the life of me I can't remember his name. Turns out that it was his birthday and he'd just turned 19. His mother had scratched together the money for a ticket to go see Earl Smith play a concert and they'd been on their way there from the farm where they lived when their car had broken down.
We had never heard of this Earl Smith guy before but we just assumed that he was one of those obscure American country singers that you never hear about in Canada. Not really our thing.
Finally we made it to Seattle and we dropped him off somewhere near downtown, never to hear from him again. However, a while later, an American band that no one had ever heard of came to Vancouver. They were called Aerosmith. Coincidence?
It was the summer of 1976.
Sometimes my memory goes back further than it should.
My mother and sister are in Mexico for a week. School fieldtrip. That leaves my father and I here to drink with reckless abandon. Or not, as the case will most likely be.
My father arrived at my apartment in a huff. It seems that he was upset at how superfluous he felt at the airport. My sister does this thing where she can be very short and rude to people when she either has no interest in what they are saying or they say or ask something that she thinks is obvious. I can only imagine that that is what took place. I don't know if she even realizes that she does it. I'm hoping that she'll grow out of it one day.
Anyways, this isn't supposed to be a bitch session about her because she'll be away and not reading my blog for a week.
I left school four hours early today because it was snowing so hard and the busses were getting stuck in the streets. Snow always makes me paranoid. Coming down off the hill, the blizzard turned to pouring rain that was so hard that it quite literally rained right through my umbrella onto my head and turned the streets between the bus stop and my apartment into rivers.
By the time I made it there I was thoroughly soaked and chilled and I've only recovered just now. There's something about chronic sleep deprivation that seems to make my body completely incapable of keeping itself warm.
I did something really stupid today. There is this person named Sam that I had been talking to through email for a while and I thought Sam was male. Then I met this person and decided that he was female, but apparently he wasn't and no one told me before I called him a she today. I feel like a big idiot now.
I have had a little cat bugging me for the past couple of hours now. She gets a bellyrub from my mom every night at eight ten, sharp and will fuss until she gets it. It is now eleven thirty-four and she's still here, which means I should go now. Good night all.
Sunshine and bunnies, I promise.
Right now I'm at my apartment, attempting to coax a statistical research methods paper out of my brain before my battery dies because I wasn't brilliant enough to bring the power cord with me. It's not exactly happening as quickly as I want it to. These things seldom do.
I am listening to the radio, which is strange, because except for when I'm in the car, I don't do it. Even then, I really haven't listened to any stations with contemporary music at all for the better part of the past two years and I really have no concept of what is popular these days. It's not that new music sucks, it's just that a lot of older stuff is just better, and so much more doesn't make it on the radio. Not that I should necessarily be the judge. My musical taste is a little random and perhaps odd at the best of times.
Anyways, I made myself a pot of tea. Orange pekoe today instead of green just for a change but I forgot that I've been out of milk for a while now so because I can't possibly bring myself to add sugar to anything I'm drinking it black. The first cup was alright. The second was a little strong, but now I'm into my third cup of tea and I'm having a little trouble drinking it. If I wake up tomorrow with a chest like Chewbacca you'll know the reason why.
I have just been informed that one of the parents at my dance school has had not one but two brain aneurisms and is more or less a vegetable right now. While I would probably be the first to admit that he wasn't a very nice person to begin with, I can't say I'm happy to hear it either. Though, if you believe the least bit in karma, that would be the obvious one to blame, not that I wan to say that he deserved it or anything. Most people don't.
And with that, fair people of the internet, I leave you. My battery tells me that it has 7% remaining and I have a sneaking suspicion that that will not be enough.
I really should rearrange my priorities...
If I could explain how boring I am right now, this is how I would do it.
Take this puzzle, for example. It has been sitting on my desk in my apartment for weeks, for other people to try and piece together when they come over. Why? To have something to do. To be able to waste their time doing something, rather than wasting time doing nothing.
Is there a point? I don't know. Will there be a reward once they're finished? Nothing more than the breif satisfaction that they wasted enough time to complete something completely useless before they have to break all the pieces back up and put it back in the box.
What is boring? Take something and multiply it ad infinitum until you have a legion of things that are essentially the same. Puzzle pieces. They're boring.
Take a day, wake up, brush teeth, eat, waste time, sleep. Multiply by 28000, give or take a couple thousand and you've got a lifetime of days that are all essentially the same. At the end? The breif satisfaction that you've done a good job doing nothing particularly important before you too are broken up, thrown in a box and shelved indefinitely.
That's boring.
Stats is really getting to me.
My mother and sister are leaving for Mexico next week. They run around packing things and discussing. At some point in time my mother suddenly realizes that she can't find the usb cord for her camera and begins to panic. She searches around for it and the search becomes a three-way yelling match between her, my sister and father, one that I try hard not to be included in, though that in itself is pretty difficult to do when I'm in the same room.
Turns into a much larger yelling match than it should have been, my father yelling that she should just go buy another one because they probably only cost five dollars or so and finally my mother giving up looking for it and yelling back that she will go to the store tomorrow and buy another one.
I wait until the storm dies down a little to explain to her that she should wait until after they get back before she goes out and gets a new usb cord because they're definitely more expensive than five dollars and they also have to order those sorts of things in because every camera and electronic thing has a completely different usb cord so they don't usually keep them all in stock.
I said that maybe when everyone's a little calmer, someone will find it because it's not the type of thing that any of us would throw out. Yelling at each other rarely helps solve the problem.
Besides, it is very distracting while I'm trying to work on my term papers.
She finally agrees that it is a good idea. After all, all the pictures that are on the camera are also on the computer, so she can just delete them and not worry about it until she fills up the card.
A few minutes later she moves some things around in her room and voila! There it is! "Sometimes you sound just like me," she mumbles, giving me a hug, "and you do it more and more the older you get. I'm not sure if that's always a good thing."
We were sitting around one evening, talking to each other on msn, when we decided that we should go and do something social, like, you know, interaction with other human beings in person, instead of being complete losers on the internet every waking hour of the day. Someone suggested that we do something that no one's done for a long time and a few things like lazer tag and bowling were suggested. Finally someone decided on skating, because no one can remember going skating since sometime during elementary school.
I have vivid memories of having to do all my homework and not have any overdue library books at elementary school to be able to go with the rest of my class to the ice rink for a couple of hours. At least fourty minutes of that would be spent trying on three or four different sizes of rental skates because naturally I didn't know which one to get in the first place. The rest of the time would be spent shuffling around in circles, holding onto the sideboards trying to keep myself up, while my friends tried unsuccessfully to teach me how to skate and my ankles got very, very sore.
Not much has changed.
I decided to go because yes, indeed, I have a death wish.
I arrived fashionably late at the rink to find that only Devon and Chani had bothered to show up. Everyone elses' loss. While lacing up our skates, we all agreed that we would all suck equally as much because none of us had gone skating for at least seven years.
So what happens? We all got onto the ice and Devon crashed into things, I looked knock-kneed and Chani was a pro. I mean, look at her:
Clearly a pro. Twit.
Then, after an hour and a half of good old-fashioned, non-alcoholic fun, we wandered over to the pub across the street for a little of the other kind. I then walked home and took enough pictures to keep this blog going for the next couple of weeks. Good thing too, I was running out.
On a more positive note, I helped with the hosting of a documentary workshop/lecture thing today, about the crisis in Canadian journalism. Crisis being that ownership concentrated into the hands of a very few companies, and that the news media tend to all show the same conservative, white, uppermiddleclass perspectives.
The speaker had a background in photojournalism in Turkey and is now making a documentary on journalism in Canada. She was quite inspirational and I must confess feeling slightly motivated to do something like that too. Then again, I think I've always wanted to do that, to travel to impoverished and wartorn places to see the people there and document it in some way. Something about that has always been more appealing to me than tourist traps. It's convincing people to pay you to do it that's the problem.
Watched Born into Brothels today too. It's a documentary about the children that live in brothels and red light districts in India. The neat thing about it is that the filmmaker gave cameras to the children and let them tell their own stories. Some of the things they say are quite different from what you would have expected.
They did that here on the Downtown East Side a while ago. They gave disposable cameras to prostitutes, drug addicts and homeless people and told them to go and take pictures of things that they thought were important. The pictures expose a side of the neighbourhood that isn't readily apparent from the street, a community with some people who really care and look out for each other. In spite of any prejudice you have towards those sorts of people, they come out looking human.
Very democratic, I think. In spite of our claims to democracy, neither our governments nor our media are really structured in in a way that allows us to do that. To the government we are numbers and to the media we are target markets, aggregate audiences to be bought and sold to advertisers. Is that how what we call democracy really is to function? Is there no place in the system for the individual?
There are so many people in this world that have stories to tell if we just let them. I guess that's part of the optimism behind blogs, the idea that if people speak, someone, somewhere will listen and things will change. I've never been much of an optimist though. It's hard to see things changing any time soon. Inertia's a pretty powerful thing.
Doesn't change the fact that I like reading people who are different from me though. I just wish that the interesting ones were easier to find.
Daniel Regelbrugge's written another post for Matt Good's blog and I forgot to mention it earlier. His posts are always well worth the read. Then again, the whole blog is worth the read, though I don't know why I bother to mention that. Most of the people that read this already know that.
