Vanity

This just in: a guy fell off a boat and nearly drowned on a fishing trip because he was sleepwalking. Sounds like something I would do. I mean, I've woken up outdoors before, or with a completely different set of sheets on my bed. There have been times when I've woken up to find that I'd done a couple loads of laundry in the night.

You should try having a conversation with me while I'm asleep. I'm told that I don't always make sense. It scares me to think of what I might actually say in the middle of the night to whoever happens to be close enough to listen. I don't often say what's actually on my mind when I'm awake.

But what's more likely is that I'll be doing something absolutely pointless like taking poorly lit and framed pictures of myself with frizzy hair in front of the bathroom mirror. A malfunction in my camera will cause the flash to go off ten times as brightly as it usually does, startling me, causing me to trip over my own feet, falling backwards and smashing my head against the bathtub. While I'm lying unconscious on my back, I will aspirate on my own vomit and die.

Until then I'm just killing time.

My last assignment for school is due not this wednesday but the one after it. Then I can relax and regain my optimism.

Heritage

Today at lunch I noticed that my mother had left a back issue of The Beaver on the table, opened to a map of the area surrounding Kiev and Odessa. "It's our people," I said, pointing to the map, somewhere south of Chernobyl. Being thoroughbred Germans, it makes perfect sense that they lived in the breadbasket of Mother Russia, and not, say, in a place where people actually spoke German.

"Our people?" my father asked, "not my people."

"No, our people," mom said. "Vi vil have a German Christmas and explore our German roots."

"Ja," I always agree when she gets that way.

"And vi vil eat pickled beets!" she continues.

"Vi vil eat pickled everything!"

"Everything vi pickle!"

"And I vil bake a Stollen!" I shreik.

"Ja, because it's Christmas. Vi vil eat Stollen and YOU VIL LIKE IT!"

And that's about the time when my father backs out the door and starts mowing the lawn. This happens far more often than you might think.

Blank verse

Aurora carries with her morning sun
awakens birds from within the trees, calls
the alarm clock to sound its shrill complaint.

But Erin, go you to work this morning
to revel in the joys of Microsoft
Excel?

Tis so. It calls to me again.
For as long as I strut this pendant earth
these days of toil shall ne'er cease to pass.

Tomorrow we shall go to English Bay
where even now the sands swell, spectators
dig themselves trenches, birms against the tide
and lie in wait as armies against foes.
Come nightfall after Helios has gone
the length of Heaven to descend
behind the sea incendiary bombs
shall set the sky alight, now pregnant with
the glow of many thousand short lived stars
while thunder cracks swift reports o'erhead.

I've never been much good at this sort of stuff.

And now that I've put you to sleep

I have a paper due tomorrow, but I lack the motivation to finish it tonight. This weekend I will sequester myself and on Monday I'll fax it in, relatively unscathed with a 2% penalty. Yes, 2%. Apparently we're still in elementary school. Stickers for participation and a letter home to your mom saying how you're doing.

Maybe I'll get a button. I like buttons.

Speaking of buttons, Kathy's going to show me how to use the button machine at school so that I can make my own with Marshall McLuhan's face on them, because everyone wants a McLuhan button of course.

The button machine was created so that the buttons could have more buttons, of course. Or I was created, or whatever.

I've never been quite sure what to think of McLuhan, really. On one hand, he was visionary, I guess, but on the other, he came up with a lot of crazy shit. Nonetheless, he has a much more recognizeable face than, say Ong or Berners-Lee, which helps.

Insert something actually interesting here.

Hubert

And furthermore, it should be noted that yesterday I fell asleep on the bus on my way home early from work and didn't wake up until I was far beyond my stop and in Poco, no less. We all know what Matt Good says about Poco girls. They wear jackets with detatchable hoods, of course.

Sometimes I forget how public my life has become lately. I was watering the plants on my patio when all of a sudden someone yelled out at me "where did you get your watering can? It's cool!" I had to wait a moment for the synapses to fire and process the situation. ie:

I am standing outside on my balcony
&there4
people can see me
&there4
someone is talking to me
&there4
I'm expected to respond

It's going to take a while for me to get used to this stuff.

In rushes public relations aspirations Erin who kindly states that I got my absolutely awesome watering can from a store in Steveston called Prickly Pear, but that I know that you can get the same ones in white and pink from the gardening shop between the cement factory and Granville Island Market on Granville Island.

Then a very polite, grandfatherly looking man asked me if I lived here alone. "Of course not," I lied, which put him instantly at ease. Young girls shouldn't live alone, you know. They need nice men to protect them. I guess it wasn't completely a lie, though. Gradually I'm beginning to fashion a sasquatch of a boyfriend out of the hair I pull out of the drain in my shower. I'll zap him to life once I find some batteries for my TV remote.

With the rate that I shed, I figure it will be another three months before he weighs as much as a regular boyfriend. We're going to have to work on conversation skills though.

His name is Hubert.

You know, most of the time when I'm writing or talking I stop far short of what I'm actually thinking. Far short. I just got an absolutely disgusting mental image of me screwing a matted clump of my own hair and it wasn't pretty. I'm absolutely disgusted. Tonight, at least, I sleep alone. Be joyful.

Sick

I don't have a garburator so stuff that eventually goes moldy in my fridge eventually goes down the toilet. My mother made the poorly timed suggestion that I should clean the rotten things out of my fridge today. I had to tell her that no, I'd already seen enough of the inside of the toilet for one day.

I wish ice cream tasted as good coming up as going down.

And someone tried to hack into my ebay account. They're clever, those hackers.

Beach!

Posting will be light and erratic until Friday. I've got a couple too many things on the go right now, and they happen to be essential things, like work, school and registering for more school, as well as some less essential but importaint things, like sleep and tracking down a certain Belgian who seems to have disappeared from my fair city, or at least that's what the automated lady tells me in French when I call his phone, . I promised Peter that I'd write a guestpost and I haven't forgotten about him. I'll get to it once I stop pulling out my hair. Honest.

In the meantime, let's go to the beach.

Today's a good day for sailing

Won first prize at the fair today. I get to take my ribbon home sometime next week.

Saw Measure for Measure at the Bard. It's a play that defies categorization. Not tragic enough to be a tragedy, but far too dark to be a comedy. I'd be more inclined to call it a tragedy though, because though no one dies in the end, truth and innocence falls victim to lust and corruption, and none of that is really made right by the end of the play. Shakespeare must have been feeling pretty cynical about the world when he wrote that one.

Ate a pleasant salad nicoise at Bridges where the tuna was delicious, though a tad overdone for my liking. I like it rare, really rare. Like flopping around on your plate rare. Once I find some decent grade fish nearby I'm going to cook stuff like that here too.

We met vikings on the high seas, but the water was so rough that they had to be towed back in to the dock. Crazy Norwegians. No trans-Atlantic trips today.

The water was so rough that it kept stealing the sticks away from the dogs on the beach. Poor guys.

I didn't mind though. The wind made the heat almost bearable.

To China with love

Devon was in poor form last night. Most days he's a constant stream of innuendo and wordplay But we had to look elsewhere for entertainment. It was like he was barely at his own party, like he's finally realized exactly how long he's going to be away and what he's been dragged into.

It was far too hot at his house and we got bored watching the 10th generation inbred mutant guppies so we ran down to the waterpark, where we all got thoroughly soaked in our clothes. It was so hot out that by the time we walked the one block back to the house I was almost completely dry.

I think Devon's in for a culture shock. There's a good chance that he might be one of the tallest people in China by this time tomorrow. Someone really should have tied a brick to his head when he was younger.

Right now I'm eating tortellini with raspberries on top. I have nothing interesting to say.

Solitary life

Cooking for one is such a bitch. You're continually asking yourself the question, do I really eat that little? and adding a little more, a little more to the pot, until you have enough food for a week.

Then that's all you eat, breakfast, lunch and dinner, except for breakfast you eat it with a kiwi.

It's economies of scale. When you have to go through the same time and effort to make a little, then why not make a lot instead? Then you don't waste any time the next day, or the next when you are stuck eating the same thing and the same thing.

Every day is exactly the same. No amount of beating my head against these four walls can change that.

Every day I get this strange feeling almost like the receptionist is trying to buy me off with imported chocolate bars and coffee and lunch and such. I think I'm just paranoid, but still. I've always had a hard time accepting gifts and anything that looks remotely like a handout, especially things for no reason so it puts me on edge all the time.

Anyways, today she decided that I needed a daytimer and some other cool, useful but completely unnecessary things, like a nifty government insignia clipboard that she picked out of a catalogue and charged to the government. Your tax dollars at work. Anyone else notice that their income tax went up recently? Mine did. Good job, Harper.

Oh well, these things will keep me organized and allow me to work on the train so they're good expenses, I guess. If I used government credit cards to, say, book a flight to Norway tomorrow, there'd be cause for concern.

But if you must know, I ordered a new stapler. Shoot me.

Something to add to my daytimer, when I get it:
I can't remember. That's why I have to write these things down.

Fish scales between my teeth

Sometime around noon today we managed to call forward all our phones in unison, bar the doors and sneak outside, only to somehow all appear at the exact same restaurant. It was like we planned it or something.

Lunch was all-you-can-eat sushi, which happens to be one of the most brilliant inventions that I can think of, and being an anthropologist at heart, my attentions turned to the other people in the room. It's always interesting to see the way different people attack these things. There are those who dig in fearlessly, like me, the wimps who only eat california rolls and then the people who can't bring themselves to eat anything other than teriyaki chicken.

Then there's the one person in your party who calls gyoza perogies and then insists upon eating them with a fork. She's from Toronto. Yet another reason why Ontario sucks.

I seized the opportunity to order far too many BC rolls, which were delicious, but I got fish scales stuck between my teeth.

One of my coworkers told me about another job that he used to have at the Vancouver International Airport, called "infiltration". Infiltration being a fancy word for strapping bombs to oneself and trying to get past security. He said that he was surprised to see how often he actually got caught and how professional the people were, especially when he had guns shoved down his pants.

Security officers who fail to detect infiltrations are immediately docked two day's pay and then have to go do all the safety security training again. I feel safer already.

I think that that would make a good co-op job.

And as I sit here, firefighters, paramedics, a boy approximately four years old with a suspected C spine injury. Stretcher, neckbrace, oxygen. Giving oxygen is always the funnest part. I'm going to put this mask on you. It's going to make you feel a little better. I want you to take some deep breaths. Check radial pulse. Load onto stretcher, into truck. Gone. Right under my window.

Fancy that.

Don't worry, he'll be alright.

Cheap entertainment

Nearly every day around 12:45ish a small, skinny middle-aged woman stops in front of the art gallery. The people sitting on the steps between the lions run the gambit between occasional business execs in power suits and kids with strange hairdoos rolling joints, but when she arrives, they all take note. She is not someone to be missed.

She hangs her jacket on a handrail, then ties her long, thin hair back with a scrunchee with a gaudy floral pattern that matches her knee-length skirt. From out of nowhere, she produces an oversized set of headphones, places them over her ears and then she begins to dance.

She shuffles, she twirls. She flails her arms. She shakes her butt for everyone to see, making her skirt swish from side to side.

She sings too. She is quite tone deaf.

She is strangely entertaining. I love how incredibly un-self conscious she is.

Price of admission? $4 for a roll of sushi and an orange Nalgene waterbottle brought from home, though I suppose a green one would do in a pinch.

When I went back to the office, my only amusement was a radio station that I sort of made up on Last.fm that needs some tweaking, becaue it plays too much Daft Punk and not enough Kaizers Orchestra. Regardless, I fell asleep in front of my computer and it was about an hour before anyone noticed because one of my eyes was open.

Idle scheming

I went on a paddlewheeler down the Fraser River today. The neighbourhood's not like it used to be, though it was probably a lot more run down when I lived there than I actually remember. Hard to say.

I haven't felt all that creative lately, and I'm not completely sure if it is work or school or being all responsible-like. I think I'm going to have to shake some things up. No more sketchbooks, notebooks and fancy pencils. No more expensive paints. I'm going to go out and buy a pad of manila paper and get myself some HB pencils, the yellow ones with the pink eraser at the end that doesn't actually erase anything. That and some Bic pens.

That's what I'll do.

I have six library cards: Vancouver, Coquitlam, Port Moody, Fraser Valley, UBC and SFU. Last year I spent over $150 on fines because I can't keep them straight. Starting today I'm going to go a year without library fines. Wish me luck.

Matter

Yesterday I had one of those days when I'll be walking out in the rain during my lunchbreak without an umbrella and I get some sort of idea to get me out of the rain like going back to work, because in spite of labour standards, I don't really need a lunch break. But my father's paranoia that I will become fat and ugly like his sister, his mother and all his brothers compells me to unchain myself from my desk for at least fourty minutes per day.

So I think harder and come up with something like going in and getting a tattoo over lunch. It would have to be someplace weird though, like that little part at the base of the back of my ear where it joins up with my head.

And what would I get? A dot, of course. It would represent all matter in the universe squished into one place before the big bang. Face it, the matter has to go somewhere. Why not behind my left ear where you'd only be able to see it if I shaved my head? Makes perfect sense to me.

I'd never get a tattoo though. I can't make up my mind at restaurants so I'm positive that whatever I'd get I would regret or dislike within two weeks, at the most.

I have been delinquent these past few weeks. I must confess to going entire days without checking out how the people on my blogroll are doing, but I do keep up. You see, Peter's photo site got hacked, KevBo's coming to Vancouver, and so is Kunstemaecker, who is on hiatus until after he finishes planning his latin music festival.

Matt Good wants a ceasefire and peaceful resolution to escalating violence in the Middle East, especially since the real casualties of war are always innocent civilians.

The Busblog isn't quite the same, now that Tony's writing for LAist, but he's still the blogfather, as far as I'm concerned. Jamie Boud got a new motorcycle. Fil has gone back to writing in the third person. Raymi is Raymi.

Joey de Villa is sending me my very own squishy cow from Toronto. He also posted a picture of some Japanese Doritos that amuses me. I wonder what they taste like.

Gusgreeper is getting married and going off her meds, or "tits" as she prefers to call them. She's been busy molesting spirit bear statues all month. Ryan is still chasing after Edinenya.

Christine was impressed by the waiters in Brussels for all the wrong reasons.

Devon's having a little get together tonight because he's leaving to spend a year in China. I think I'll miss having him around.

Every good boy deserves fudge

You know when I'm trying to find an address like, say, 1166 West Georgia I don't remember numbers. I look at it and think 100 years after the Battle of Hastings West Georgia. That William. What a twat.

But then again music is all numbers. There are no notes, except for C in the middle. The rest are numbers above and below. I used to have the hardest time in music because they would say something like "improvise using an F# blues scale, when what they really meant was "improvise using the sharp three notes above C". That would have made a lot more sense.

Does 1166 West Georgia even exist? I could go outside and check, you know, but I won't.





I'm just not in the mood.

Crackberries

Some day I will die after being hit by a car crossing the street while dialling a number into my cell phone. Some day my mother will suffer a similar fate emailing someone on her blackberry. Like mother like daughter.

Thanks to an executive director that has magpie eyes and likes collecting trinkets, all the managers where my mom works now have blackberries, which they learned how to use today. Now they can zap each other's handsets with inane messages like "what is the meaning of life?" and "I know where u live." They're almost as fun as lazers, and as they said on Saturday Night Live, everyone in the world likes lazers and cats.

My father the luddite was both intrigued and repulsed by the new gadget at the same time. "What does it do?" he asked, and I tried unsuccessfully to explain that it is a phone, internet, email, instant messaging and palm pilot in one device.

Take the "bl" off of blackberry and substitute "cr" for a more appropriate word for them. The signs of blackberry addiction are all too apparent in the office where I work, where managers walk poor posture and their heads down, prone to bumping into walls and thumb cramps. Rick Mercer did a sketch about just this.

The only real advantage to all this is that when Colin goes down to Vegas next week, he can send us the play-by-play. After all, isn't that what communication technology is for?

Give me a break

Late last night I had one of the worst cravings ever for a Kit Kat bar. The chunky kind, because though the bars that you break into fingers taste exactly the same, I just don't like them as much.

Luckily I can usually convince myself that I lack the motivation to go out and get whatever food I'm craving, otherwise I'm sure I'd probably weigh twice as much as I do. I survived the night.

Today was a completely different story, though. At about 10 am I suddenly wanted that Kit Kat bar again. At lunch I angrily chewed through my homemade salad, my own personal version of the blue brie and walnut salad that you can get at Finch's Tea House on Pender Street. I made a pointed effort to walk past all drugstores and corner stores that I knew would have chocolate bars in stock during my lunchtime walk.

But I can only take so much. Sitting at my desk, I could hear Joanne taunting Yvonne in the cubicle next to me with a Kit Kat bar just like she does every afternoon. Only this afternoon it suddenly hit me: the lunch room on the 19th floor has a vending machine and there are chocolate bars in it.

I rode the elevator all the way up to find the lunch room empty. I pressed A1, popped in a toonie and squealed loudly when the chocolate bar dropped. Suddenly paranoid, I looked around quickly to see if anyone was watching then shoved the Kit Kat bar into my pocket and ran all nine floors down the stairs. Back at my desk, I inhaled it and then destroyed the evidence.

I'm weak.

Bilingual message from probably the only France supporter in Rome last night

Ciao tutti!

FORZA ITALIA!!! what an amazing game...too bad for the French but I'm in Italy so hey, I'm happy Italy's won! plus I think its wise not to wave the french flag in Rome today or any other day for the next two weeks!! the atmosphere in Rome last night was un-be-lie-va-ble, I've never seen anything like it!Pure joy, thousands of people, green, white and red everywhere, young Romans stripped down to their Dolce and Gabbana underwear, and a steady flow of alcohol!!! And tonight, repeat performance because the italian players are going to be parading around Rome (Circo Massimo). Now have to go get some sleep (did ANYONE in Rome sleep last night?) but I just had to send you guys some pictures before!

un bacio,

Alison


Maintenant en francais:

Ciao Tutti!

FORZA ITALIA! quel match incroyable...c'est dommage que la France ait perdu (et que Zidane ait perdu sa reputation!) mais comme je suis en Italie, je suis contente que l'Italie ait gagne! de plus, je crois que ce n'est pas tres prudent d'afficher les couleurs francaises a Rome aujourd'hui! ou tout autre jour pendant les 2 prochaines semaines!!! quelle ambience a Rome hier soir: je n'ai jamais vu quelque chose de pareil! De la joie, des milliers de personnes, de vert, blanc, rouge partout, des jeunes romains en slip D&G ds les fontaines de la ville, et pas mal d'alcohol!!! et c'est reparti pour ce soir, comme les joueurs italiens viennent faire la parade a Rome (au Circo Massimo, tout pres de chez moi). Maintenant, je vais me coucher un peu (je crois que pas une seule personne a Rome a dormi hier soir!) mais avant il fallait absolument que je vous fasse part de cette soiree incroyable, avec quelques photos biensur!!!

Just a question

Why is it that whenever I post something mildly controversial the post suddenly disappears?

This is the third time it has happened. It's starting to piss me off.

Second to last on my mind

I have many, many things to say today but they'll have to wait until tomorrow. Today I sleep.

Did I mention that I lost my drivers licence on Wednesday? Not lost as in location but lost as in I can't use it and can't drive. I laughed all afternoon because of it.

That is absoluely the last thing on my mind. Second to last on my mind are the following:

1) The person I work under is beginning to really scare me. One moment she is manically happy and the next she's talking about throwing herself off a bridge. She has nosebleeds all over herself and crashes her car because she is so stressed. I don't think it would take much to push her over the edge, to be honest.

2) She talks to herself a lot, but then again, so do I...

3) While I only pretend to hate the typical Vancouver style steel and glass architecture as much as my mother, I have to admit that the buildings I can see from my office window are some of the ugliest I've
seen. So much for a room with a view.

4) I have completely changed my habits around the office to avoid our new receptionist at all costs. She is anal as hell and she doesn't recycle a single thing. I can't stand people who don't at least attempt to recycle. It's not like it's difficult.

5) There's a spider making a web on the outside of my office window, in spite of the wind. I wonder if it knows how far up it is.

6) Working for the federal government is kind of like the Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave. They're already talking about extending me to December. I don't know what they're talking about. I'm going back to school.

Don't look now...

...but it's the Matrix and other Hollywood films, Russian folk art style.

Squid

When we moved two years ago, each member of my family had his/her own cell phone, so we discontinued our landline phone service. That meant none of us were listed in the phone book.

The immediate advantage to having an unlisted number is that telemarketers and representatives of political parties no longer phone you during dinner. A less obvious advantage is that estranged relatives that you don't want to talk to will not look you up and call.

One of the conditions stated in the contract when I moved into my apartment was that I would have a phone line. My landlord pays for it, and uses it to leave occasional messages on my voicemail that I am then unable to retrieve because I can't remember what my phone number is. I do not use the phone and I have never given the number out.

Imagine my surprise when the phone began to ring. Imagine my greater surprise when the person on the other end of the line turned out to be none other than my uncle Squid.

Squid, you may or may not remember, has always shown a blatant disregard for other people. He is the type of person who borrows things without giving them back, or just takes them without letting you know. Because he has the same initials as my father, every time he is caught speeding he gives the police officer my father's name and address and we get the speeding ticket and a fine for driving without a licence in the mail.

The last time I saw him he was sitting in a McDonalds eating a Big Mac complaining about his multiple heart surgeries and high blood pressure, and talking about how no doctor was going to fucking tell him what to do.

He was reasonably polite to me on the phone, though, so I lied and told him that I'm stupid and I know nothing about anything, and he should talk to my dad if he wanted to know where my grandmother had moved. I think that was the right thing to say...

Speaking of estranged relatives, my mom mentioned the possibility of picking up Harold the Hun's ashes from the funeral home over the weekend because they've been sitting there since September. There has been some dispute as to how we should dispose of them. A garbage can would suffice, but my aunt has suddenly become overly-sentimental about it and wants us to pay the 5000 or so dollars to have the ashes buried in a cemetery plot and then however many thousand it takes to have a stone made for him. Nota bene that she was the same person who moved and had her phone number delisted when she was 21 so that he wouldn't call, and hasn't spoken to him since.

I just can't understand why anyone would want to pay over twice what he left behind to honour him when he was such an abusive person. It makes no sense, but many things in the world don't.

Aqualung

It is T minus less than a month until the so called camping trip of less than epic proportions. Kathy just got a new cd player stereo somethingorother as well as an ipod that she is quickly pumping full of mp3s to take with us.

This has gotten me thinking about roadtrip music. For family trips, usually we listen to whatever my parents feel is most palatable out of whatever my sister decides to bring. This usually boils down to a mere handful of overplayed albums: Great Big Sea's Up, U2's The Joshua Tree, The Dandy Warhols' 13 Tales of Urban Bohemia, Santana's Shaman and Nickelback's The Long Road.

Some songs and albums are permanently tied in my mind to places and events. There's one section of the Malahat Highway on Vancouver Island that I can picture quite clearly, and every time I remember driving through that stretch Aqualung by Jethro Tull has been playing.

I used to think nothing of it until the time when I got a ride with Kathy and her dad to a regatta in Elk Lake and we took the long, scenic route to Victoria. Her dad had set the radio dial firmly on some soft rock station or other, the kind of station that plays sappy love songs and too much Phil Collins, when all of a sudden just as we entered that particular stretch of highway I heard the characteristic opening guitar riff from Aqualung. Soft rock stations never play Jethro Tull. To this day I can't explain it.

The whole Nickelback album, The Long Road, will always remind me of the barren wasteland that they call Alberta because somehow or other we managed to go on a roadtrip there in the middle of winter and only take one cd with us, or at least, that's how it felt.

I know that whatever I take with me will depend a lot on who else is coming. If Riki comes I'm definitely bringing Kaizers, no matter what Kathy says about my odd taste in foreign music. If Jess comes, we may just have to try and fit her into a box. I think I put far too much thought into things like this.

My head is full of philosophical questions today, questions like:

If you buy a prefab house from Ikea, does it come with a huge allen key so that you can put it together?

It shall be renewed

On Friday I foolishly thought that I could renew my drivers license at the ICBC at Coquitlam Centre mall, because it was the only ICBC office that I could think of that was open in the evenings when I could go. Of course, I couldn't. Being an extremely lazy person, I still have a class 7L loser license, and that means that instead of paying a fee and getting my picture taken, I have to sit the entire exam again.

This in itself would not necessarily be a problem, but for the fact that though the ICBC at Coquitlam Centre has convenient hours of operation, there is no testing at that location. Figures.

The website told me that there was an ICBC branch downtown, at 800 Hornby. Today I foolishly thought that I could find it and renew my drivers license during my lunch break. No such luck. However, closer inspection after work found it inside the courthouse building complex, beside a huge, red sculpture of one of those spring things that you find in the centre of clothespins.

Tomorrow it shall be renewed.

In spite of work tomorrow, my plans are nebulous. Apparently I'm only working a half day, which doesn't completely make sense to me but I have a lot of miscellaneous errands to run right now, so I welcome the time off.

I can't believe that summer's half over already. It feels like it hasn't even started.

Zombie Elvis wears Old Spice

Steve’s birthday was actually the first non-alcoholic party I’ve been to in a while. It was nice for a change.

The crowd was decidedly geeky, so inevitably the conversation turned toward Nintendo. "Welcome to my life. It’s like this 24/7," she muttered as she dragged everyone femalie outside to sit in the shade with her baby. From then on conversation was about babies, which is even more boring than video games.

Why is it that people automatically assume that since I’m female I’m automatically interested in babies? I don’t care how much he weighed when he was born, or how many ounces of formula he drinks daily or how many hours of labour you were in or how cute his little booties look. I might, however, make a half-assed attempt to make him smile, which will fail.

Eventually Ian joined us, partially because he thinks (and rightly so) that video games kill conversation and are bad at parties and partially to fire up the barbecue. That was the first burger I’ve eaten in about 6 years, I believe. It was quite good for a burger, but still, I don’t think I’ll be having another for a long, long time. That is, unless it’s a tuna burger from the Red Onion. I love those things.

Presents were interesting. The biological father, who I'd never met before and from what I understand, isn't particularly well liked, brought a stack of them, the last of which, oddly enough, wasn't a CD or a DVD. The play by play went as follows: "It's a box. It's a picture frame. It's a picture in a picture frame. It's a picture of an old guy in front of a brick wall?" At which point biological got really excited and explained that it was a TGI Fridays in Edinburgh. ... Yeah. He seemed to be the only one excited about that.

More importantly, it was wrapped in bubble wrap. Fucking bubble wrap. I hate it to the power of 3.

The evening was redeemed via improv games. One person goes out of the room, everyone else decides who they are and then everyone interviews them, using very pointed questions. The object of the game is for the interviewee to figure out who he or she is and start answering the questions correctly.

Some rounds were hilarious. The one that sticks in my mind is probably "Dr. Doolittle, canine sex therapist," because we got to torture poor Steve with questions like "do you use diagrams or are you a hands on kind of guy?" The other one that we had a lot of fun with was "zombie Elvis," because we all started screaming when he walked in and he couldn't figure out why.

Then we played a game called mafia, where people die and then the rest of the room has to figure out who killed them and who to execute. People keep dying until all the mafia is taken care of. Something like that.

Beware. I live underneath a park bench and I have a legion of spiders that I use to kill people. Kathy, however, has a special ring that turns her into a man with superhuman strength so that she can tear off people's limbs off and drink their blood. Don't piss us off.

Disengagement

Some days I take myself out of things just to see what the result would be.

I used to have dreams that I sat in at my own funeral, just to see who would bother to show up and what people would say there, but I was never satisfied with the results. I was never sure if I actually knew the person they would describe, or if I even liked her.

There are days when people phone me up and ask if I want to go out and do something and my answer is no, but I decide to do it anyways. They are the days when have to stop myself and wonder what the hell I'm doing, who I'm with and why I'm doing it because none of it makes sense and none of it I like.

Some days all I want to do is draw the curtains and lay out on the livingroom floor, letting something wash over me. I'm partial to yanqui u.x.o, laura and God is an Astronaut these days, at least for that purpose. Aural drugs, they are.

Steph's party

Once again, Canada's birthday and once again a party, of sorts at Steph's. I didn't spend much time there, actually. I ended up in the contingent that went out to the playground to play grounders, which is probably more fun than it was when we were in kindergarten, especially because some of my friends are able to jump over peoples' heads while their eyes are closed.

When we decided that we had enough mosquito bites, we ventured back to Steph's house, only to find people there drunk, stoned, listening to weird music and having a whipped cream fight around a fire in the back yard. Now, this would not necessarily be a bad thing, but seeing as how it would take a lot of work to get ourselves into the same state, we didn't bother.

We hopped into Kathy's car and headed up to Horizons for reasons which I can't remember, but were probably good at the time. At Horizons we found a) couples making out in cars and b) twice as many mosquitoes, both of which were to be expected, so we wandered around for a while but didn't stay long.

Back in the car, Devon introduced us to a new game. "It's called sex," he said.

"Devon, I don't think you really have to have to explain that one to us," I said, noticing that he was the only male in the car. But it was pretty benign. Whenever the driver runs a yellow light, someone has to yell "sex" and then everyone touches the roof of the car. The last person to get their hand up loses an article of clothing. All I will say is that I'm just as bad at that game as I am at poker.

We decided to go back to my apartment, but when we arrived there were a couple hundred young people milling about, police and ambulances. A fight and a stabbing, from what I've heard. We kept driving around until they were gone, and then I went to bed. Pretty much.

I'll talk tomorrow

Amateurs

I was on my way to work yesterday when a guy ran up from behind me and punched the guy in front of me in the back of the head. The guy crumpled into a pool of dropped slurpee, and the other guy proceeded to pound him into the ground while I stood there.

Apparently the one guy was the owner/manager of the nearest Blenz. The other guy had shoplifted a bag of coffee beans that was probably worth ten to fifteen dollars. I can't believe that the owner's profit margin would be so low as to be so concerned over one bag of coffee to be driven to aggravated assault. Though at the time, I wasn't thinking that. I was just standing there.

Wally, the other mailroom guy stepped in with some others to try and claw the two apart. I've never been overly fond of the manager of that particular Blenz. Yet another reason why I usually go elsewhere.

My sister tells me that she had a dream about how I stole her underwear. I'm not sure why I would do that.

My dad and I are fixing the kitchen sink. Plumbing isn't his forte, and neither is it mine.

It is Canada Day. There will be pictures.