Dad turns 29 for the umpteenth time

Stepping off the train today on my way home, my mother and I got stuck behind a woman that looked kind of like Betty Boop and had a tattoo of the same on her calf. That's the problem with summer. Everyone takes the time to show off their skin and then all of a sudden there are plenty of ugly as hell tattoos in your face everywhere.

My story remains more or less the same. I told my mother once that I would only get a tattoo if I happened to kill a sea monster. I would have a picture of it permanently inked across my abs so that I could be like those old seafaring pirate types. I could hang around in bars and drink too much rum and tell stories and show it off.

Somehow or other, when I first told this to my mother she heard ass instead of abs so the story's been that way ever since.

It was my father's birthday today so we went out for dinner and somehow or other that entailed me reciting VD haikus off the top of my head, some of which were really bad and involved itching. It's alright though, because they made my mother laugh.

I have a paper due on Friday so I really have little to say. Tomorrow's my blogiversary.

Communique numero uno

Good morning, good morning. The sun is shining and somewhere in the 'burbs birds are singing.

No, I don't want a Metro, thank you, and I don't want 24 either. I prefer to live under a rock.

I want to write a paper about the effects of the free daily newspapers and the hundreds of minimum wage jobs they have created for people who smile and push them into your hands at skytrain stations on the economies and societies of metropolitan cities in Canada.

The free sample granola bar people are out in full force today. If you time your walk to work just right you might be able to get three or more but I never do. For some reason or other I'm incapable of greed, even when it involves things freely offered by transnational corporations. I will never understand that.

The man with the sign that says "picking up trash for your cash" is laying out on the corner again, with a blanket over his head. In front of him a small pile of sample granola bars are laid out as offerings, turning him into a makeshift shrine. I don't know what everyone is praying to.

I am at the moment typing on a French keyboard and that irritates mebecause it has a whole bunch of extra keys and the backspace button is a third of the size that it should be. Every time I try to press it I get \ instead. \\ \\\\\\\ It irritates me. Stupid things do.

The person sitting at the desk beside me is wearing some sort of perfume that quite literally takes my breath away. That is not a good thing. I need oxygen.

Full of holes of indignation

And everything's alright here. We got the Raygun EP on much too loud, but that doesn't matter because there aren't any neighbours to complain.

Worked on my spotting across the livingroom floor, spinning in circles one way, with my eyes trained upon the MC Escher, and the other way with them on the Picasso. Reprints, of course, because it's not like I can afford the real ones. But I'm still no better at it than I was when I was six years old because I tripped and fell over the chair.

I suppose I could move the chair, but then I would just fall over the table behind it.

And on the menu for tomorrow is a wrap that I made out of random things I found in my fridge: chickpeas, shredded carrot, cucanumbers, green onions and chives and cilantro fresh from my balcony. I ate some oregano right off the plant and it was pretty potent. It burns.

Tomorrow maybe I'll have asparagus and cream cheese.

I don't have any capers here and that makes me sad.

Then I'll have to get some of those really heavy ziploc freezer bags and make eggs in a bag again. You crack eggs into a bag, squish them around with some cheese and onions and maybe some peppers and pepper then boil the bag, like we used to do at Guide camp. If boiling water and salad tongs aren't your thing you could use the dishwasher, I guess, but that's cheating. It's absolutely delicious.

I can't tell you how much satisfaction I get out of the simple knowledge that when the blinds are down on all of my windows I could be dancing around naked in my apartment and you wouldn't know it. Clothes are overrated.

But Raygun, I love that song.

Tondere

At Cori's we used to just turn on the music and dance and explore and it was always good. We never did that enough. Today I danced and it just didn't feel good. The blackness behind the lights sucked the energy out of me and there was nothing there, no music, no rythm, no shuffle in the left waltz clog, just my right hand all tensed up into a claw.

Everyone has their off days. I won bronze.

The medal goes in the closet with the other ones and a plaque, some school service pins and two three-inch binders full of assorted certificates. The only one that is missing is my dogwood, my high school graduation certificate, but that was because it got shredded in the mail. Not that I cared. None of that really means anything to me. That's why it's in the closet somewhere.

I get bored of things sometimes.

Sometimes I even get bored of breathing but you can't very well just stop doing that. Sure, you can hold your breath but once you pass out and turn blue you'll automatically start breathing again when you hit the floor. Try it. I promise it works. That is, unless you do it while you're knee-deep in water or something. I don't intend to.

Sometimes when I'm bored at work I'll start doing something really menial and mindless so that I can free up my brain for other things. Then I'll ask myself some sort of question, like were the Yanomamo really as fierce and violent as Chagnon portrayed them? He seems to be pretty fixated on how they liked to beat each other on the head with clubs and axes and practice infanticide. Though I wouldn't know the answer because I've never been to Brazil.

I guess the other question would be why I remember stuff I learned in school from three or four years ago when it's not even part of my major. I just do. I'm good at that.

The next logical question would be to ask how these people liked to cut their hair and there is a word for that called tonsure. From Latin.

And what are the principle parts of the verb?
tondeo, tondere, totondi, tonsus
I always get stuck on totondi. Sometimes I say tondivi instead because in my mind that would make sense too. It's perfect tense, as in have or has cut, sheared or clipped, though in English usually the have gets left out. We're pretty sloppy with our verbs. Latin is not, though whether Romans actually cared or not is debateable. It's the pickiest damn language, so I'm sure that they would cut each other some slack if they screwed something up once in a while.

There's only one person in the world that would be able to answer that though. His name is Reg Foster, he wears overalls like they do in mechanics shops and he lives in the Vatican. He used to be Pope John Paul II's Latin secretary and he might still be working there. A friend of mine had lunch with him once.

I'm sure that the word tonsil is related to tondere, but I'm not sure how. Maybe because if your tonsils get too infected they cut them out, or at least they used to. I had tonsilitis six times in one year but they still wouldn't take them out.

Tonsure's what those monks have. Bald on the top and hair all around. Some men get that without even trying. Funny, that.

10

Arriving home tonight, the boy upstairs just had to announce that he just got back from the community centre dance and that he had danced with five separate girls. He danced with one of them for almost ten minutes and his friend tried to make him touch her butt but he didn't because that's mean (and, as his mother interjected "If someone touched my butt I would punch them in the nose!").

And how old is he? Ten, of course. What a player.

I find it a tad hard to believe that a boy his age would be so interested in girls, but I guess stranger things have happened.

So, being curious, I asked my father, who proceded to tell me about how the only time he was ever remotely interested in a girl was in grade 7, when he always had to sit at the front of the class for being such a rotten little bastard. The girl that sat beside him was named Jane, she got her first pair of garters that year and he was apparently curious as to the mechanics of such a garment.

A likely story.

The younger brother took my cat Frick upstairs for a playdate while no one was at home, as I'm sure happens more often than we hear about. The cat's getting very irritable in her old age and I guess she just wasn't up to being dressed up and buried under blankets today because she left a rather large turd on their couch.

That's my cat.

I figure her nasty personality is either a result of being herself a Poco girl, or of being a tad bit gender confused. She's so ugly and mean that everyone seems to think that she's male or something.

I have other thoughts on my mind, but I'll unload them tomorrow.

The green buttons are all placebos anyways

I figured that I'd beat the traffic on the roads by getting on the train a few stops early but no, there just had to be a derailment in Poco.

No sooner had I dozed off when Abby's favourite conductor, John perpetual hangover woke me up to announce that there was a derailment on the tracks ahead and they were going to take an alternate route. Well, more like "umm, hrmm, mnah mmmrrm derailment in Poco annnmmm-anyone wanting to get off of the... train has to go to car 3."

One man apparently from car 7 walked through mine, dragging his bike up and down the stairs, and through multiple doors to get there.

"Alriiiightummm I got to ah open the doors manually... so don't press the green buttons."

I'm pretty sure that the green buttons on the doors are all placebos anyways. They only put them in last week.

The lineup at Poco station stretched the whole length of the platform, but it moved surprisingly fast, even though people had to walk across a separate set of train tracks to get in, and within seconds the mass exodus of commuters travelling the length of the train had arrived.

And in spite of that the train was only two minutes late and I arrived at work on time, where I promptly ran out of things to do, made up a bunch of new work for myself and then had people look at me with puzzled looks because apparently no one's ever run out of work before. Then I did my homework for school during my lunch break and then made up more work to do. Yeah, your tax dollars at work. Not mine because I don't pay taxes.

Right now I have bad tinnitus in my left ear.

Sometimes I just want to slap some of the women on Queer Eye. Sure their boyfriends are clueless slobs that screw everything up but at least they tried. They tried, damn it. Not that I care because it's another rerun anyways.

&there4 I am an idiot

I think that due to sleep deprivation I left my mind in entirely the wrong place today and so it figures that during my lunch break I would decide to check my blog, see if anyone had commented on anything and maybe post something completely random. What else is there to do when I have an hour off, it's pouring in rain outside and I brought a lunch from home?

To my immediate surprise I found out that mine own blog was a blocked site, as far as the government was concerned, and I got one of those huge bilingual warning pages instead. Now, in retrospect this isn't all that surprising, considering:

I work in a government office.
I needed a secret security clearance from Ottawa to work there, secret being somewhat higher than confidential.
I see all sorts of private information concerning individual citizens daily of the kind that I know I wouldn't want shared about me.
Access to all outside email and chat programs are blocked.

Now, you'd think that I'd have put two and two together and figured out that they'd block anything to do with blogging earlier. Hence, I am an idiot.

Hence this blog will not be updated during my government mandated breaks at work like the world famous Busblog, but that's alright.

Just like last year, you will not hear much about work at all on this blog, even if it means I have to tell you every day for four months about the guy who falls asleep in the seat across from me on the train. He always wears dark pink shirts, which happen to be the exact same colour as his face and it looks terrible and drives me nuts.

Viva la Vega

Thanks to the wonders of modern postal service and a clever Norwegian who thought to use one of those little par avion stickers I found a package just inside my apartment door today.

Not chewed, not smashed, not lost. Hallelujah.

Inside is a copy of Kaizers Orchestra's Viva la Vega, which I'm going to watch right now instead of writing something relevant for you to read. Sorry about that.

It seems to be the only DVD that will actually play properly on my computer and at the moment, it's the closest I can actually get to going to Europe and seeing them live.

Now if only he'd get out of bed so I could thank him in person. :p

You can't fool the children of the revolution. Can you?

Matt Good's finally reposted his manifestos on his website, though they've been available elsewhere for years. They bring back a lot of memories.

Cleaned out and rearranged my parents' kitchen today, not the least because of the fact that my wardrobe has been sitting in the middle of it for six or eight months now and that's not where it's supposed to be. Where it is supposed to be is out on our lawn in a garage sale next week. It's ugly anyways.

There is some stuff that I can't wait to try and get rid of. Problem is that I have no idea where most of it is because most of my things are still in boxes, like they have been for a year and a half. All I know is that the boxes will not go to my apartment. Sure it looks a little minimalist right now but I'll fill it up with junk in good time. Either that or books.

One thing that I'd like to take there though is Nancy the hard-hearted woman. She's a headless mannequin from the old Woodwards store downtown from back in the days when mannequins used to be the size of real women. At one point in time she and I used to be able to wear the same clothing so I used to use her as a dress form but I've lost a little bit of weight since then and now I don't know why I want her. Probably because she's got a name and she'd look kind of cool in a corner somewhere.

Most of my things have names, the notable exceptions being my palm pilot and my Canon 350d.

The lady upstairs gave us a huge ham completely out of the blue and up until this point we had no idea what to do with it. Do people eat stuff like that? The concept is foreign to me. I think it's going to be eight years' worth of sandwiches or something.

I think I'm going to make pea soup. Kind of like the pea soup that comes from a can but not from a can.

They're talking about hurricaines now on the news and it looks like it's going to be worse than last year, because of course there is no such thing as global warming so full speed ahead. Drive your Hummers.

I spent my time in the shower today contemplating the similarities between cigarettes and ziggurats and couldn't find any. I finally settled upon the word plectrum. Plectrum.

Plectrum.

It's just a cool word.

Kind of like ten minutes with Tony only different

I am going to make up a comic strip for the school paper about a hexoplegic wasp named Alfonso who teaches aerobics. I don't think it will be all that funny but that means it will fit in nicely with the rest of the humour section in the paper. Burn.

Well, not really a burn, just true. And it's also true that the whole paper happens to be one big inside joke between all the editors that no one else who reads it is able to get. ∴ there is no reason to read it in the first place. But whenever someone tries to start another paper that has some sort of relevance to the school population the administration crushes it because that's what they do. Time to shut the school down again.

And once again they'll be talking about the crazy pinkos on the hill but that's alright because somebody has to do it.

On Thursday maybe I'll go down to the paper office and demand my $2.50 back and then keep reading the paper anyways. That way I get it for free, you know?

I was trying to explain the Biblical allusions in U2 lyrics to my father the other day but he didn't get it and I don't know why I do because I've never really read the Bible other than for anthropological reasons to learn about a dead and gone civilization and about how they weren't too crazy about women because they are whores but they do like wells and springs and rivers.

They've got a thing about water in the Bible. I figure those guys must have lived in a desert, but I don't. That's why I honestly don't understand why there's a church down the street but don't try to explain because I'm dense.

But being Irish and good Catholics of course there's all that stuff in U2 lyrics, though my family was Irish too. The orange kind, which came over here and immediately got jobs from the Conservatives beating up Liberal voters and Catholics around election time, which was a common occurance at the time, and you'd know that if you payed any attention at all in History 10. I didn't.

And every time I just say things without thinking they tend to come out inflammatory like I think they just did but some days I just don't care.

There were two Bibles in our house growing up. The first was the official Scrabble Dictionary, second edition, which was used to death, replaced by the third edition and committed to the recycle bin. The second was a book by a guy named E.E. Evans Pritchard called The Nuer, about a group of happy loveable people that lived beside the Nile in southern Sudan. They had cattle and dung huts and they liked drinking cow's blood because they couldn't bring themselves to slaughter their animals and a guy named Qath or Quath or Cuath or something used to live in the sky and shoot people with thunderbolts. Rainbows were very scary things.

There aren't very many Nuer out there anymore though. The British gave the enemy tribe guns, which they used to slaughter all but a couple of them who fled Sudan and came here as refugees where they have to bundle up because it's cold in Canada and there are no cows in the city.

My parents are actually members of the Church of Sun Myung Moon. They got recruited quite accidentally when a nice Japanese woman took their picture and asked them if they believed in the sanctity of marriage or something like that and now sometimes they get invitations to huge mass marriages in the mail and we think it's a scream.

My parents are the only cult members I know.

I'm hungry.

The funny thing is that I had tons of things to say before I sat down to write this. It's strange, that.

The other funny thing is that I decided a long time ago that this would be my repository for everything in my head and yet there are so many things in there that I don't bother saying. Things that maybe I should. Things that maybe I shouldn't. Mostly stuff I don't.

Perhaps it's just that I've told too many people I know about this blog.

Perhaps I just wouldn't say these things even if they didn't know about it. I don't know. I'm not going to ever tell anyone to go away.

Maybe I should say more.

Last September my mother sent me over for an appointment with her hairdresser who drilled me with friendly, innocent questions about school and things as she styled my hair. She told me I was a very pretty girl and I was flattered at the time because it's something that I rarely ever hear.

Little did I know that she had taken the liberty of getting my phone number and setting me up with her son, 26, medical student, job in a hospital, plays soccer, tennis, owns a boat, casual drinker, non-smoker. By all accounts a nice guy and through no fault of his own, I wasn't the least bit interested.

At the time I felt more than a little used by the fact that absolutely none of it had any prior knowledge or consent from me and I was literally groomed for the part, based solely upon my appearance and a couple of polite pleasantries. I guess I must exude respect, docility, servility, dependability, traditional conservative wholesomeness out of my every pore.

I know a lot of big words.

I cook really well and I can knit too, if that means anything.

I guess that's not such a bad thing.

Growing up, I could never figure out why my friends' parents liked me more than my friends did. I'm quite convinced that I was the kid that your parents suggested that you call when your first three or four choices weren't available to come play. It's alright that I didn't like Barbies much because I could help you with your spelling homework and I wouldn't even tell you you were stupid for not knowing the difference between there, their and they're, even though you were.

I could have even taught you how to knit.

Some days I just feel sad.

Irritants

Bra shopping always brings back irritating memories.

Memories like one time when you were younger and your father decided that he would tag along as you traipsed through the lingerie sections of department stores at the mall.

In many respects bra shopping is much like shoe shopping, and I'm pretty sure that as far as my father is concerned, it's just as uninteresting. Actually, I'm 100% sure of that. To tell the truth, I hate shoe shopping just as much as he does.

This did not bode well for either of us.

Inevitably while I was looking through whatever happened to be in stock, my father would find the ugliest neon green foam padded bra he could get his hands on and then put it on his face and pretend that they were alien eyes.

Or he would find the biggest pair of old lady panties in the store and declare that he was going to rig them to a boat and go sailing, or he'd wear a pair of them on his head and run around like a Mexican wrestler.

When he was finally bored of that he would eventually pick up the smallest thong he could find and ask if it was a bracelet or something.

But in spite of the memories, that's exactly what I'm going to go do tomorrow, as the majority of my bras have now reached the stage where they're not saggy enough to be noticeable to other people but just enough to be uncomfortable and irritate the hell out of me.

Other things that irritate me today:

small dogs

women who call their husbands "hubby"

people who stand on escalators

the fact that Monty Python was supposed to be on at 10:00 and wasn't

co-op jobs that pay honorariums of between $500-1000 per semester when you have to pay $600 per semester to do co-op in the first place

fabric softener

Lucky number 6

The sound of bagpipes carried far above the campus always seems to waken the latent Scot in me and never ceases to make me smile. Sadly, I was never able to accomplish more with my bagpipes than the sounds of tortured livestock.

The ones at school, however, are the best in the world.

I had forgotten how pretty the school can be during the summer when it's half empty and the trees have leaves. It kind of makes me want to take summer classes sometimes, though I know that there's no way I could ever swing it.

I wasn't there for classes anyways. I had a meeting.

I arrived to find that our furnature had arrived at our room finally. Not quite the stuff that we had ordered but adequate, I guess. I had had a funny feeling that the school would never go for the stuff that Ryan had picked out. What honestly do students need a bed for in their common room?

I sat in there and talked to Chels as gradually people began to arrive, far more than we had originally expected, which was good, because if we had had less than the magic number 6, it would have been a big waste of time.

Because there were only the two of us execs there, and a bunch of new people, the meeting went really fast. We planned a social event in the space of about three minutes and then devoted most of the rest of the time to telling the new people what we had done in the past, what we could do and asking what they wanted to do. None of them really suggested anything but they all looked pretty interested.

Chels drove me home and we bounced with glee all the way.

I still want one of those shirts with your choice of random attributed to Marshall McLuhan quotes:

"We are the genitals of technology."

"I don't know who discovered water but it certainly wasn't a fish."

"This message is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself."

or my personal favourite:

"The chicken was the egg's idea for getting more eggs."

Though for the record, I've always liked Harold Adams Innis better. Much better.

I am a geek.

Riki would have something to say about all this

The garden below Makiko's desk was designed by an architect. It was supposed to look like an aerial map of Canada but the laymen screwed up, ignored the plans and just put all the ornamental grasses wherever. Now it's just a wild mess. Not that it matters much. It's on the roof of a building downtown and no one ever visits it.

In true bureaucratic fashion I wasted a lot of time today.

I went to photocopy some things I needed in booklets but put the stack of originals in the photocopier wrong so all the booklets came out completely blank, colated and stapled. But just so happens that I had other things to photocopy as well, so while I was doing that, I painstakingly pulled out all the staples out of all the booklets with my fingernails and fed them back into the paper tray.

But then again, I always work through my lunchbreak and I put together four mailing lists in half as much time as they thought it would take me. It wasn't that much work, really.

It all works itself out.

I think I may have demagnatized my debt card with my office key card after accidentally putting them in the same pocket together. I'm tempted to try it out but I really don't want to run the risk of having it not work while I'm in a store. It's happened before and it's a tad bit embarassing.

There is a woman who keeps offering me a coaching job that I'm kind of tempted to take because it would mean being outdoors with people and I would have to ride my bike to work, which would force me to get back in shape.

On the other hand, there is no possible way that I could get there in the morning from my apartment, and someone has to live there over the summer. I don't really want to give it up either, because when no one else is there, it's a great place to study. Calm and quiet and clean. And somehow I sleep better there too.

Three papercuts

It was one of those days when you have to get to Howe so you walk east down West Georgia, thinking that since it goes east-west and Howe goes north-south and you're walking in the right direction you'll eventually run into it.

It also happened to be one of those days when you forget that though most of the downtown core happens to be laid out in a grid, some of it isn't and you suddenly lose sight of Dunsmuir, which was the other street you were looking for because it just arbitrarily turns into Melville.

All this makes you not notice that you just crossed Howe and are now passing Thurlowe and now Bute.

Shit.

At least you now know where Alberni is in relation to practically every other street in the city.

It's census week

Today I sifted through the photos that I took of apple blossoms on old, tired fruit trees and sawmill ruins as I tried in vain to contact the census people.

Somehow or other they had managed to miss me when they handed out the forms two weeks ago and all I really wanted was for someone to give me one of the online codes so that I could once again make the governments aware that I do indeed exist.

That way they can continue to underfund the hospitals, inform the local elementary school that I will not be attending this September and once again change the name and borders of the electoral riding I live in.

But I'm being facetious. They do lots of useful things with the information, I hope, other than selling my name and adress to mailing lists so I can get junk mail.

I spent about two hours phoning repeatedly, pressing 1 for service in english and 2 for inquiries about the 2006 population census only to be told repeatedly that all the lines were currently busy, please call back during non peak hours, ie. 2:00-4:00 and 7:00-9:00. Of course, the first time I called was at 2:05.

Finally I got through to Edna. She did a search for my place of residence, which because the server was busy, took about 15 minutes, during which she made a few feeble attempts at light conversation, a la

I guess the network is really busy right now.
It doesn't always do this, just sometimes.
It's really slow right now.

Which I answered with polite yet disinterested phrases. The search, however, was in vain because my place of residence does not exist. No problem. I gave driving directions so that in 2011 someone will arrive at my door and drop off one of those forms. Then I finally got my online access code.

Today I made a trip to the fish hatchery just for the hell of it and the old guys running it were so excited that there was a female under the age of 60 somewhat interested in what they did that they invited me in and talked my ear off for nearly half an hour.

Apparently this year they've seen a higher than normal number of birth defects in fish. Missing fins, swimming on their side, two heads, that sort of stuff. Never a good sign.

Yarns

Grandma Eileen is quite the storyteller. She had a new one for us when mom and I went out to see her yesterday with the annual Mother's Day offering of chocolates.

Her favourite one is about how at our old house at 707 my parents had invited people from both sides of the family to dinner one night. My father's sister brought her daughter Andrea and she and I were playing in the livingroom while the adults hung around in the kitchen.

Suddenly Grandma heard me making an unusual ammount of noise and my mother told me to shut up and go play. When I didn't do that she went to investigate.

Grandma to the rescue! Andrea was pulling my hair and twisting my ear and wouldn't stop when she was asked to so Grandma took hold of her and bit her.

On the odd occasion she says that she bit off Andrea's ear, but usually she doesn't specify the location of the offending bite.

The general consensus among everyone else in the world is that the event happened a little differently.

I used to have an ugly yellow box with yellow wheels of the same kind that you could get at Ikea during the mid '80s that I used to keep my toys in (or was supposed to keep my toys in). I was sitting in it and Andrea was pushing me around. Because it wasn't designed to carry so much weight, it began to scratch the hardwood floors much to my mother's chagrin. Someone had to yell at Andrea to make her stop.

I've never told Grandma's story to Andrea so I have no idea what she thinks of it. Not that it matters much. Like all of my cousins on my father's side, she's too old and cool and mature to have anything to do with me. Her loss.

However, the equally implausible story du jour happened to be about making salad for her mother and my mother throwing a temper tantrum over ice cream.

Grandma lives in a hospital where they serve her roasted porcupine and ice cream scoops of "crap they call potatoes", as well as 1/3 of a carrot at every meal. They cut the carrots into thirds because that way they can make three people suffer for the price of one.

She was in a surprisingly good mood, except for the fact that the box of chocolates we brought for her had no coconut flavoured ones.

&hearts &uarr &darr &larr &rarr ♦ ♠ ࢮ &there4 ∞

I'd better post something, lest people start to think that I've gone the way of half the blogs in my blogroll that are sadly no longer.

There is an explanation for this. It's quite simple.

Aliens.

They came around 6:50 am and forced me to go through a security clearance check and work for the feds editing manuals to be distributed to unsuspecting public.

Then, when they decided I had had enough work, they decided that I should party. Party was as follows:

large political button collection
lady in pink dress and bolero tattoo
Svend Robinson
Jack Layton leads a conga line
I offered Joy McPhail some cheese but she politely refused.
friendly socialists
friendly activists
friendly union organizers
chicken dinners
Croats, lots of Croats

Then they took me out to another party the following night, this one because Gina is moving back and she bothered to invite me. This one my parents decided to come to because it was at a pub and they figured they could have a drink with me before my friends arrived because they've been dying to take me out for a drink for ages but no such luck because they were already there. I took a lot of flak for that one, though to tell the truth, my parents are actually a lot cooler than some of my friends.

Didn't drink much. Mostly I was just tired. Borrowed other peoples' cameras to take excellent pictures. Eventually a couple of us left after a dispute over who was going to pay for the food that we ordered which we ended up paying too much for, compared to certain other cheap bastards. Not that it matters anymore.

In the lineup for the bus, Kathy poked Riki and she would have fallen over had I not caught her. I thought it was cold out but apparently Riki didn't because she had had a lot of tequila and felt like she was in Mexico. And as she walked off into the night towards her apartment I didn't have the heart to tell her that her skirt had ridden up much too far. She was almost there anyways.

You know you want it

Me? I just can't resist the seductive charm of a plywood woman who offers me chow mein.

Brought to you by the letter F

Alright, I'm not in the habit of doing memes at all, but this one looked fun. Kimanda gave me the letter F, so now I have to list 10 words starting with that letter with a description of what they mean to me.

Frick - is the name of one of my cats. She has been known to pose with Japanese tourists, bite the hand that feeds her and attack dogs as large as German shepherds. A recovering buolemic, she once rode all the way from Port Moody to Vancouver and halfway back (about 35 km) on the freeway in the car roof rack before someone pulled us over and told us she was there.

Florence - I was the only student to go with all my teachers to the Uffizi Gallery to see all that famous art up close. Then afterward, when I met up with my friends, we found a carousel in the middle of a plaza with a little old woman who charged us half an euro each to ride. I'm sure we'd never pay that much at home to do that.

Ford F150 - John had an old truck that was given to him and it was grey with a wide pink stripe all around it which I thought was ugly as shit. One night it was stolen and totaled and he was never quite the same after that. He loved that ugly truck. He eventually replaced it with a minivan and complained often that he was reduced to being a soccer mom.

Famous - There used to be a little greasy spoon on the main street of our town called the Famous Cafe, owned by an eccentric little Chinese man and his wife, who used to do all the cooking. I don't know if it was actually famous or not, but it was pretty popular among police and paramedics because it was the only restaurant open at 4am every morning and breakfast was really cheap. Many people were sad when they retired.

Football - (the soccer kind) When I was little, my parents thought that they should put me in sports as well as dance and Brownies but they didn't know what my attitude towards that was. One day they told me that they had signed me up for soccer and I started to cry and told them that if they wanted me to do it I would. Needless to say they never made me play. I think I appreciate it more today though.

Faroese - is a language I know almost nothing about, except that it's used on some islands in the middle of nowhere that are owned by Denmark and there are some other islands in the middle of nowhere that are owned by Canada that Denmark says it owns too but it doesn't.

I'm running out of F words, aren't I?

Fish and chips - is what I had for lunch with some friends today. I guess Americans would call them fish and fries. They're the best with canned mushy peas and lots of pepper to dip the fries in but they didn't have any where we went. They did however have cream puffs with real cream.

Flak and the Enforcers - In my first year of university they drilled us repeatedly with Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model, which was about how all the media we see has had to pass through five sets of filters first. The fourth one they mentioned was Flak and the Enforcers, or negative feedback given to media networks from lobby groups, advertising, complaints etc. I always thought that it would make a good name for a band, or at least I did at the time.

But how can I forget

Fridays - The best day of the week. Can you believe that in high school I used to wake up at 5:00, row for an hour and a half, go to school, then row another hour and a half and swim for three hours and go to bed at 11:30 without dinner to be up again at 5:00 the next morning?

Frappuccinos - Rain, sun or snow, it makes no difference. I am a Starbucks whore. They're good to have when I'm not studying and I don't feel like having an Americano or worse. I just wish they had less sugar in them.

Ack, terrible. Comment to play, if you wish.

I have no new photos so you get more car crashes. Joy.

Take your kids to work week is like so six years ago

1. And in the beginning there was breakfast of oatmeal and kiwi and Erin put milk on the oatmeal but sugar she did not eat because it is white death. 2. And it was good. As good as bland crap like oatmeal can be.

3. And Erin was made to stand and wait for the bathroom. And Erin danced up and down and crossed her legs and got pissed off until someone let her in.

4. And Erin's father said "Daughter, thou art lazy. Come to work with me that I might have lunch with thee." 5. And Erin had other plans for today but she said yes anyways.

6. Erin's father's office is constantly full of people. 7. And Erin met Leila and said hello. 8. And Erin met a girl that looked like Pink and said hello. 9. And Erin met a girl that dresses like a clown and calls herself Muffin and said hello. 10. And mostly Erin just sat around doing nothing.

11. And Erin watched a presentation at the school. And it was good.

12. And then they went for Chinese for lunch and it was good. 13. And Erin was unable to finish her lunch so she got it packed up in one of those styrofoam thingies. 14. And she felt bad because the styrofoam thingie will eventually end up in a landfill.

15. And the unplanned activities of the day took precidence over the planned. 16. And Erin did not go erging like she had planned. 17. And Erin knows that she has to get down to coxswain weight by September or she's cut from the rowing team. 18. Again.

19. But lo, Erin's books were due at the library. 20. And Erin thought, I am very lazy and broke so I have no bus fare. 21. And Erin renewed them for another four months on the internet. 22. She has had them for eight already. 23. And it was good.

Just like Emeril, only different

Out in the more rural part of town there is a road where you can go to buy stuff straight off of farms. Most of it is honour box stuff: honey, free-range eggs, sometimes vegetables and the like.

This is exactly where we went in search of manure for the garden, and where we found a shed by the side of the road filled with just that. I seem to remember my sister saying something about how the task of throwing bags of manure into the back of our vehicle was a load of crap, which was exceptionally witty because that was exactly what it was.

We made other jokes about it as well, which I won't repeat because you can probably guess what they were.

Making potato salad for dinner, I realized that one of the eggs that I had boiled somehow had not been completely submerged and was still pretty liquidy on the inside. No problem. I just put it in the microwave.

There was a point in time in my life when I found it really fun to carefully remove and then replace a small section of the top of an egg, place it in an egg cup and then microwave it in order to watch the top erupt like a volcano. I am over it.

I made sure that the membrane inside the egg was broken so that it wouldn't do the same thing. However, nothing could prepare me for what would happen.

We have a nifty little egg slicer thing that my sister loves to use so she had the honour of chopping them up. I turned my back for just a moment as she began to slice the last egg, the one that had been in the microwave and then all of a sudden I heard a small explosion. When I turned, the yolk of that egg was all over the kitchen and my father, who had been sitting across the kitchen table at the time.

Bam!

I really need to have my own cooking show.

Good luck to a certain Norwegian who has a particularly scarying exam to write about an hour's time. ;)

Bridge, tunnel, rainbow

It was Cinco de Mayo yesterday, the international celebration of my mother's birthday. As you can clearly see in the picture, my apartment exudes coolness, coolness that is accentuated by the fact that there is obviously a party going on there. A party with rubber ducky wrapping paper because that was the only kind that we could find at the last minute that wasn't either baby, wedding or christ you're an old bugger themed.

There are many people out there on the internet. Lonely people. Teeniebopper people. Geeky people. Stalker people.

Parents of autistic children obsessed with Dora the Explorer people.

Because of something my sister wrote about babysitting my cousin and watching that repetitive show that drives you nuts, she was contacted by a parent of an autistic child who can't quite understand why the kid keeps chanting the same thing over and over, and wants to be able to see the episode.

We've been searching for it all morning to no avail, and finally we decided to email the network where it aired.

Maybe we'll find it.

Crash

I didn't have much to do today so I took pictures.

















More tomorrow when I feel like talking.

It's all relative

Re: Grandma Eileen

She was in an unusually good mood the other day. She only swore a little, she smiled and she didn't bother complaining about any of our twitty relatives. She did however tell the man next door to her to shut up and drop on his head. Up until that point I had wondered what was wrong with her but it turns out that nothing was. Good to know.

Re: my father

It is a stupid idea to tell your mother-in-law about how you visited your own mother and had a nice time on the day when you should have been visiting your mother-in-law because it was her birthday. Everyone knows that. We were "busy" on her birthday, remember?

Re: my sister

She won her rugby game today and now they're in the finals. I was just leaving to see the game when I sat down and fell asleep for nearly an hour. So we went to Dairy Queen and walked home together. She's awesome, I tells ye, except for the fact that she didn't tape House last night and I don't want anyone to tell me what happened to Foreman. DON'T TELL ME! I want to watch it myself.

Re: my uncle Lloyd

Courtesy of him there's a large chunk of chocolate cake sitting on the kitchen table and it's calling out to me. It's terrible cake and it has too much icing but it has that fake custard stuff inside. It beckons...

Re: my mother

She interviewed people all day and now she's talking about every single one of them. One guy managed to say "sort of" 90+ times in the space of twenty minutes. They kept a tally. My mother feels obligated to phone him to tell him exactly why he didn't get the job and suggest that he get some help to fix his speech impediment.

Juxtaposition

I have spent the past two days in an office with neither air conditioning nor windows that open. To say it has been unpleasant would be an understatement.

My uncle Lloyd turned 66 today, so we all had a party of sorts, sitting around my grandmother's bed at the hospital.

My aunt Gay was there and she's looking worse than ever. It seems like every time I see her she's gained another twenty or thirty pounds and tonight she looked like she had been inflated like a balloon. What I wouldn't do for a needle.

Auntie Marilyn was also there. I'm not sure exactly how she puts up with Lloyd's pompousness but she does it and seems to enjoy it for some reason. This is something that I'll never understand. She's such a dear.

The whole thing seemed kind of strange to me though.

On one side of the curtain, people were laughing as Lloyd told stories about home internet use: "So, I email Marilyn and say do you want to make love tonight? and she emails me back, no. Must be a default in the damn computer program or something."

On the other side of the curtain behind me another woman lay in her bed, tended by a volunteer because she didn't have any family near. She is not expected to make the night.

There will be pictures again when I'm not so damn tired.

Chop chop

Alright, please disregard the previous post.

It was written while I was in shock and obviously I was not able to think clearly because I now think that my wrist has just been sprained. The idea came to me while I was in the shower and found that gradually I was able to move it more and more. It still hurts and it's still swollen but I can move it a lot more than I could.

That and I don't want to sit for several hours in a hospital waiting room.
That and I've never ever broken a bone before in my life, though there are times when I probably should have.

If anyone was wondering, I was running to answer my phone and turned a corner, slipping on the floor and smashing my right hand directly into the bathroom door frame. I seem to have some large and painful bruises all down my left side as well, on my elbow, hip, butt, knee and ankle that make me walk and sit all gimpy.

That's why the hallway should be shaped like a velodrome. You don't ever see those bikes fly off the track, do you?

What bothers me right now is that these things always seem to happen in threes. Now that I've fallen out of the car and tripped in the hall, I'm not completely sure what to expect. Hopefully something pleasant.

Maybe someone will send me a letter stuffed with unmarked bills or something. Fifties and hundreds would be nice, though I will accept twenties too.

I just checked my mailbox and there was nothing there.

Come on people. Chop chop.

Shock

I always laugh when cat slides across laminate floor.

I don't laugh when I slide across laminate floor.

think I broke my thumb

hurts to type; can't use mouse

when I stop being shocky I'll get x rayed

treat for shock = oxygen + warm blanket + reassurance

I'll be fine

there's always amputation

using cranberries for ice

need breakfast

can't type; hurts

Who do they think they are, and where did they get that car?

Upass or up ass, that is the question.

When I paid my tuition for the summer, the $98 Upass fee was included in there somewhere, which for those who don't know what I'm talking about is the government issue bus pass that I get for being a student. $98 for four months, which is a hell of a lot better than the 120something I would have to pay each month if I didn't have the upass.

Problem is that my spring upass expires today and no one bothered to mail me my summer upass that I should be getting because I paid for it. So I checked the website and found out that someone suddenly decided that they would be so kind as to exempt me from the upass program because I'm only taking correspondence courses this summer and don't need to go to school.

But what if I need to go to work?
And what if the only reason that I took summer courses was so that I could get a upass?

These things evidently don't matter because a refund cheque for $98 is in the mail. Stupid fucking Translink bastards.

Now that my grandmother lives in White Rock and a lot closer to us we apparently have to visit her a lot more often.

That means we also have to visit the white rock more often. It is a rock and it is white. Once in a while some crazy kids hellbent on fucking with the system graffiti all over the white rock rendering it some other colour than white. Then someone has to get out there and paint it white again because the white rock has to be white. It's in White Rock after all.

Out on the western side of the White Rock strip we decided to have some dinner. After surveying the options available we were stuck with a tough decision: fish and chips or fish and chips? I mean, if we didn't want fish and chips we could always have fish and chips instead. These were the options open to us at the time. We finally decided upon fish and chips.

The place that we were at unfortunately lacked canned mushy peas, which saddened me greatly. It did however have homemade tartar sauce, Germans and really retro looking Superman cartoons playing, thereby earning brownie points.

Outside, people drove their convertables up and down the strip there. Apparently the Trooper song about the boys in the bright white sports car is about people who drive along that very road by the beach in the summer. Betcha didn't know that.

Boundary Bay is an important area for environmentalists and birdwatchers because there is a huge number of species of birds that live there or stop by while they're migrating. That explains why I only saw two different types.

My father suggested that I lay down on the train tracks and rest my ear on the rails so I could listen for trains approaching and my sister suggested that I just leave my head there.

I said something that bothered my sister at some point or other today and she kneed me in the crotch, which both anatomically and otherwise was a pointless waste of time.