Hi

I read somewhere once that you should write up a couple of extra blog posts to keep in reserve for when you have nothing to say, but every time I've done that, whatever I've saved seems totally inappropriate for standing in on any day other than the one it was written on.

That being said, even though my computer's been gimpy, I've still been blogging during my lunch break at work. I emailed the posts to myself and now I'm not sure what to do with them. We'll see.

In short, Monday and Tuesday were so hard to get through it was painful, but then the week improved substantially. Coffee and exercise always seem to do it.

This week I didn't buy tickets for Wilco, Gogol Bordello or the Brian Jonestown Massacre because I don't want to go alone. I saw a poster for Band of Horses the other day but I'm not going to that either because I can't expect anyone to dish out the money to see a band that they've never heard of from a genre they aren't interested in. As wonderful as my friends are, they all like emo bands, the Dixie Chicks and Jan Arden to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.

And it's all well and good for my sister to say that she's there to go to all of these things with me, but if she was truly born to be my substitute for a normal social life, she would at least be legal drinking age. I want to call up customer service to complain.

And the whole idea that I'd wait two and a half years before I'd do anything fun is just stupid, especially since I don't particularly relish the thought of living past 25.

But I'm complaining and I shouldn't. That isn't what I set out to do. It's just that I get so angry and frustrated and sad and then I blog about it, even though people would rather read happy happy happy and tits. So sorry.

It's like the nature channel, only different

This seems to be the summer of ogling, because I was at the gym at lunch with some of the people from my office and we let this guy join in with us and all of a sudden the game got really, really competitive, like he was trying to impress me or something. There is also a marked increase in the amount of random guys staring at me on the bus this year and I want to tell them all to shove off.

I don't know about this whole mating thing anyways. As humans we have the audacity to call ourselves more civilized than animals and yet it seems the best that we can manage for attracting the opposite sex is the puffing of feathers and strutting in circles and awkward conversation. We're no different than pigeons and I'm not impressed.

During these encounters I always hear a little narrator and an uninspired flute trill. "The male approaches the female, dressed in athletic wear. He will use this guise to catch the female off guard in the hopes of having time alone with her. The female is busy interacting with others of the same species so the male must smile in order to indicate that he wishes to join in...

...

"Having completely tired out the female's companions, the male extends his hand in supplication. The female shakes it, then promptly leaves the building, evading the advances of the male..."

Tomorrow they'll be locking antlers or making bizarre calls or lying on the ground, presenting their bellies to me or something. Oh joy.

MIA

I know I'm not supposed to apologise for being MIA from blogging, but I feel I have to. My computer decided that it would die Tuesday morning and though I've been able to check my email from work, I haven't been able to do much else.

It wasn't a crash, just that there were too many programs all wanting to start up at the same time when I turned the computer on, which meant that it never once froze, but it got damn close to it. At the moment, I have it running and I've cleaned up my harddrive a bit and removed or changed the options of a couple of the offending programs, but I don't know yet that the computer will actually run if I restart it.

I've got a little more maintenance to do before I will feel comfortable about turning it off. Needless to say it's going to be a bit of time before I get caught up on what everyone's been up to, especially since I have a million different places to be tomorrow.

But I will be back with a vengeance very soon, I promise.

With pictures.

Beirut

I had this song stuck in my head all day. I think I'm officially obsessed with Beirut. I've listened to Gulag Orkestar almost non-stop since I got it a month ago. It's the accordions and the trumpets and Zack Condon's voice.



I got new speakers for my computer and now all of a sudden I'm hearing all sorts of parts to music that I've never really heard before. I find myself wondering where the piano accompaniment came from, or the bass line, or a second harmony. It's like I'm listening to completely different music.

And speaking of music, today at work I got bored of listening to "artists similar to Broken Social Scene", on last.fm, which is usually what I listen to at work and instead typed in Beirut and so much awesomeness that I had never previously heard. It's going to take me at least a week to track it all down, which is good, because the music on my computer was getting kind of stale.

I feel like I'm the shrew today

Alright, at Du's request, here are more pictures of the dramatic rescue. I must confess that after planning and plotting and looking forward to that for so long, I now have no idea what to do with myself. My life has become empty. All I can look forward to now is coming home after work and eating dinner and going to bed. Quath help me if I ever retire or achieve my wildest dreams.

I've been really irritable these past couple of days. I had this crazy idea in the car today that maybe if I got a hysterectomy or something it would fix it, but seems to me that that is a sort of really outdated bit of medical wisdom that never actually worked in the first place. Besides, it's not PMS. It's just that I'm finally coming down from a few weeks of feeling pretty good and I can either feel sad or bitchy, and bitchy's better than sad.

I guess I have to feel some guilt though at thinking again that perhaps it would be nice to euthanize my father to put him out of his misery at being stressed at work and having poor health and not being able to understand computers and having two absolutely rotten talentless disappointing children and getting old and being frustrated with absolutely everything and credit card debt and losing his memory and being right when people are wrong and losing his mother last month and talking about himself as if he's orphaned and fighting with relatives over what is to be done with what she left behind which is nothing.

He has this crazy idea that instead of using money from the estate, he will personally pay for some sort of memorial thing for her, to which mom replied that no way in hell is she dishing out the money to see her mother-in-law immortalized when they need a new roof and a new furnace and haven't paid off replacing the hot water tank last month yet. I fully expect the conflict to come to blows, but in the mean time it's throwing dad's blood sugar and blood pressure way out of whack.

Funny thing I've noticed, though, is that when mom drives to things we have a habit of getting there on time, because she deliberately avoids roads where there is construction and street festivals instead of driving right into them and then swearing lots, like dad. So imagine our surprise when we arrived at Bard on the Beach half an hour early without ever having gone more than 10k over the speed limit.

We saw Taming of the Shrew today in the midst of all the weird weather. Rain, sun, rumours of thunder showers, all cycling through every few minutes, but that's Vancouver weather for you. At one point the heavens opened up and it got really noisy under the tent, just as the actor on stage paused in the middle of his monologue about it being a cold and rainy day to say "what with the weather!" at which point the entire audience cheered.

In spite of the rain, we stayed nice and dry under the tent for which I hold Mikhael personally responsible.

This year's production was set as a spaghetti western with lots of gunslinging and desperado types, and the token Mexican for comic relief. Good, as always, though I think I liked the post-Cromwell restoration version better. The silliness just seemed to fit that period.

Your mission: rescue Batman

A couple of weeks ago Batman landed on the roof just below my window. I tried to reach him, but only succeeded in pushing him further down.

I decided that I would wait to get it until later. But why should I climb out on the roof when I can get my sister to do it instead?

I, database

It's weird how it happens. I'll be sitting there and then all of a sudden I'll be hit with the futility of everything. Today it's my del.icio.us. I have so many things saved in there, so many tags: shopping, government, coffee, media, music, podcast, norsk, activism, art, design, web2.0, photography, photos, photoshop, knitting, nostalgia, iran, iraq, oil, fansite, news, communication, consumerism, human.rights, stick.people, food, social etc. etc. etc.

One of the inherent functions of communication technology is that in using it it changes how you think. With the invention of writing all of a sudden people didn't have to remember everything anymore. You could just write it down and look it up later instead.

So how do databases change how I think?

It's a pasttime you find on the internet - collecting things. Doesn't matter what things. List them, index them, store them for retrieval later, possibly, if need be to recall them. Take something and collect all that there is to see and hear and know about it. The size of such projects are overwhelming. There is very little quality control, very little heirarchy, nothing to assure you that one particular thing is more relevant than any other thing, except, perhaps, the frequency with which it is linked to, and even that is misleading.

And instead of stopping for a moment to think about what we are saving and why, we continue to feed it because yes, in this day and age, it is possible to see 18,000 pictures of cats with their tongues sticking out and to know the exact date, time and contents of Kurt Cobain's penultimate bowel movement.

In this day and age there are far more indexes pointing to information than there is information itself. It was a phenomenon first noted about pornography, but which has since spread to practically everything else. When you link to something, you aren't creating new content, just indexing something old. It seems that the only things we really know are where to find information it if we needed to know it, even though we probably won't.

At least that's the case with my del.icio.us. I have hundreds of links, all tagged and sorted. A large portion of them are things that I came across and linked for later, because I didn't read them at the time. But will I ever read them? Probably not. I don't have the time or the patience. And if I look at things that I saved a year or two ago, will they still be relevant for the same reasons why I tagged them in the first place? Likely not.

And how many links listed in my del.icio.us are now stale or dead? How many of them would I actually be able to retrieve should need or desire warrant it?

Why do I have tags called "estonia" or "packaging" or "ngo"? I have never once used them to look anything up. I don't even know what I'd find if I did. I can't remember why I saved anything under them. Why are "bibliotek" and "library" different tags? Why didn't I combine them in the first place?

There is no narrative, no logic, no heirarchy to any of it, and I can't blame a computer or a database. It was all of my own doing as I, like the rest of the internet, unconsciously work to immitate the machines and structures we use every day. Today I hate it. Tomorrow I'll go back to the same old same old, linking and tagging and storing shit that you or I will never use.

Keep the lolcats away from me. Seriously.

I try really hard but most nights I can't sleep. Last night as I lay in bed I rolled over on my side, with one arm resting on my mattress and the other kind of parallel to it, up in the air.

All of a sudden the words flew unbidden from my mouth: "Invisible Tom!"

And it was that precise moment that I realized that my geekiness has ascended to all new, previously unimaginable heights. I began to laugh hysterically and then I couldn't get to sleep.

Holy sheisse I must ban myself from the internet.

I drew a fish.

What can I say? I'm speechless, to be honest.

I drew a fish.

I'm contemplating adding a person on facebook when really I should just do it, but I'm thinking that it might send the wrong message to this person or some other stupid rationale that I'm bouncing around inside my head.

Lately I've noticed that I have developed kind of an intolerance to raw spinach. It doesn't matter where I've eaten it, home or a restaurant. As long as it's raw, I get a nasty stomach ache and diarhhea for a good 4-6 hours immediately following my meal. I can't think of any reason for it. Before about four months ago, I'd never had a problem with the stuff.

I guess you didn't need to know that.

Some people set up a drumming circle outside about four hours ago, which was cool four hours ago, but now I'm tired of it. The rythm doesn't change, and neither does their location. It's starting to get irritating.

I'm listening to Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia by the Dandy Warhols right now, which in my humble opinion, is pretty much as close to perfect as an album can get. The first three songs, especially. I love how they blend into one another. I wonder what it feels like to create something like that, knowing all along that it's good? I wish I could feel that.

Inkwells

Have you been acquainted with my inkwells?

Back in the day Vancouver used to be mostly tidal salt-water marshes, entirely unsuitable for building. Then they brought in some Dutch people, who, in a manner that I'm told is typically Dutch, created the waterfront as we know it today through several years worth of diking, draining and filling.

What did they use as fill? Garbage, of course. And that means that sometimes when they do excavation and start to prepare sites for building, especially old industrial sites, sometimes the machines unearth garbage that is 60-80 years old. The inkwells came from a hole that was dug behind the Vancouver Flea Market, shortly before it was backfilled to discourage antique hunters from digging in it.

I love old garbage dumps because there are always treasures to be found. One time when we were on a rockhounding trip, we left an unsuccessful dig for fossils and started to drive around some of the backroads, looking for where someone had told us UBC geology gets their fossil samples.

Climbing up through the forest, I found some rocks left behind by someone who had highgraded their findings, but not the dig site itself. What we did find, however, was a smallish garbage dump. After digging among the rusted tin cans, we emerged with some hip flasks, gin bottles and a couple of other miscellaneous things. The crowning jewel of our find, though, was a large glass oil lamp, which, upon being placed in the window at home, developed a purple tint.

Sometimes old glass turns purple because before WWI they used to put manganese in glass to make it clear. The manganese reacts with UV rays and eventually gives glass a purple tint. During the war they needed manganese for making weapons, so they found something else to add to glass instead. That means that if an antique piece of glass turns purple when you leave it in the window, it was made before 1914.

A note, though, to people wanting to try this: the purple can't be reversed. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The inkwells won't change though. They're not old enough, but I like them anyways. So many pleasing shapes and so many variations on the same mundane theme and purpose, kind of like the variation you'd find in clothespegs.

My favourite, though, has to be Skip: the successor to ink.

A boring post about work

Today I had a weird day, I guess. I was offered my old job back, so I had made arrangements for today to be my last day of work where I'm working now. Yes, a Tuesday. That's weird. I start the other job this Thursday, which is also kind of weird, but it works out.

I ended up taking lunch early, so I more or less missed all the people that I usually talked to in the lunch room. Around the end of the day I got really, really busy, for once. About half an hour before I had to leave, I tried to call someone so that I could tell them where I'd left some important stuff and the status of some things that I hadn't finished yet. Alas, I couldn't find anyone, so I sat down and wrote an email instead, and didn't feel quite as good about that.

It was almost twenty after by the time I left. But when I reached the door, I suddenly realized that I hadn't surrendered my security pass yet, so back into the building where I had to fire up my computer to write an email explaining where I'd hidden it.

During that, my phone started ringing, and being the idiot I am, I answered it. A rather terse sounding woman was looking for someone that I was almost certain was out of the building by then, because the office was closed, but I transferred her call anyways, and after not getting him, she phoned me back.

Apparently she was trying to update her address book and it had to be done RIGHT NOW so I helped her and then finally made it out the door.

Yay! I got my old job back! And as per usual, that's pretty much all you're going to hear about it on this blog.

Fruit preservation orthodoxy

Made strawberry jam yesterday. Only because it's usually mostly dad that eats it and because he's diabetic mom decided that we would use splenda instead of real sugar. You know the stuff that "tastes like sugar because it's made from sugar?" It doesn't taste like sugar, really. I think it has a weird aftertaste. You're supposed to be able to substitute it in recipes cup for cup, but every time I've done that things come out disgustingly sickly sweet, and so if that's what I'm using, I usually cut the amount of splenda by 2/3.

Still, it doesn't really taste like sugar, which means that the jam, being merely sugar, berries and pectin doesn't really taste the same. We've always made freezer jam. The recipe has always been

4 cups mashed fruit + 6 cups sugar + 1 package pectin
mix fruit and sugar, add pectin, let sit in bowl a few minutes, pour into jars, leave jars out overnight, store in freezer indefinitely

That's the way it has to be. That's the way it's always been. It's like religion. Other people cook their jam before it goes into the jar, but that changes the flavour of the berries and makes them less sweet. Other people use the snap lids instead of the plastic screw lids, and that involves cooking the jam in the jars. All commercial jam is made like that. That's why without exception all storebought jam sucks.

But seriously, they couldn't fit the 11th commandment on the tablets but if it was there it would read:

Thou shalt not cook the berries in your jam.

followed by:

Thou shalt only play Bob Marley while making jam.

So imagine our horror when the splenda wasn't really dissolving into the berry puree, and to solve the problem, mom stuck it all in a pot on the stove. "You're not cooking it, are you?" dad asked. Mom gave him a guilty look and said that that's what it said to do in the official splenda cookbook.

Sounds like heresy to me.

8 things

*gasp* I've been tagged by Jason.

It's the old tell eight things about yourself meme. Here goes:

1) I was in the 11th car to ever cross the Alex Fraser bridge. I think. I was definitely there when it opened.

2) I lived in a public park for 14 years, in a little yellow house right beside the ocean. My neighbours were homeless people and geese. The house isn't there anymore. It was demolished 3 years ago, but it still shows up clearly on Google Earth. Google really needs to do something about that.

3) When I eat cherries, I never spit out the pits individually. I keep them all in my mouth until I get all chipmunk cheeked and then I spit them out. Depending on who I'm with, it's either funny or gross.

4) I hate wearing shoes. I can never find a pair that fits well and besides, you can never get foot odour and the like from not wearing shoes. I used to walk barefoot pretty much everywhere where I was allowed in the summer when I was little, and I used to walk up and down our gravel driveway just to toughen my feet up. Consequently, I've stepped on 14 pieces of glass in my lifetime. Most I picked out myself, one was removed in the hospital the night before a dance recital and two are still in there. They really don't bother me much most of the time.

5) The first cat that we ever got for me I named Spotty Spot. She was a calico and had no spots.

6) I do a pretty good raven call, actually a couple of different raven-sounding croaks, even though I don't know what they all mean. It's fun to go into the forest sometimes and stir up some shit. Just croak out something like "dude, this is my tree and I slept with your girlfriend last week" and then listen to all the ravens croak themselves hoarse.

7) My baby blanket is still on my bed at my parents' house, not because I really need it to sleep but because it's a blanket in serviceable condition and I'm stingy and don't see the point in buying a new blanket when the old one still works. That being said, it needed some minor repairs last year, but now it's as good as 20 years old. Quality Ikea stuff, I tell you.

8) Every single time I vacuum I have to clean it out with tweezers and a pair of scissors first, otherwise it will be too wrapped up with my hair for it to suck anything up.

Who am I tagging now? 9) I'm a very indecisive person. Who wants to be tagged?

More secrets

But I guess my biggest, bestest secret is this guy here. His name is Tom. I don't think he'd take kindly to me posting real pictures of him without asking but I did this drawing that's almost finished and it looks a lot like him.

When I have spleen to vent, he gets to hear about it. When I'm really happy about something, he hears about it. When I'm really depressed, he hears about it and same goes for when I get really paranoid and high-strung. If I have an irritating pimple or a blister or something, chances are he'll hear about that too. If I want to express my frustration at something mundane like how one strap on my bra always comes loose and then half of me sags, chances are I'll tell him first.

Now, would I tell other people these things? Probably, if they took the time to talk to me just as much as he does, but no one does.

The best thing though, is that he doesn't know any of my friends at all and they don't know him. That's what makes him a secret. A good secret, though, because I credit him for keeping me sane for the past year and a half.

Erin's sad social life

Peter wants secrets. Big secrets.

Big secrets eh? Well, I've never been asked out. Well, except for the guy who irritated the hell out of me so much that I never would have said yes. But I've never been on an actual date because no one will have me, really.

I've been called fat and ugly and a lesbian and "smart" which is another word for no one's interested. But you know? I've never been interested in them either, so it never really bothered me much. It's actually pretty easy to make peace with being completely undesirable, and far less emotionally traumatic than thinking that you actually are worth it. And it helps when you think of everyone who puts you down as your inferior and entirely not worth your time. No one should have to justify it in that way, but I digress.

During high school I lost 30 pounds, and since I left, I've lost a few more. And then came little changes. I started plucking my eyebrows, a skill that I've never really mastered and I don't think I really do all that well, but they do kind of look nicer. Then I whitened my teeth a little, finally stopped tearing my fingernails to shreds and chewing the skin off my lips. I started to tackle the nasty, out-of-control blackheads on my nose with some success, and during the past three months, I have almost completely corrected my posture.

So, surprise surprise, all of a sudden I get oggled on the bus a lot. I get poked by random guys on facebook and friended by friends of friends that I have, to the best of my knowledge, never met. Occasionally guys give up their seats to me on the bus and in general I get treated with a little more respect and interest.

And to tell the truth, I'm well beyond flattery and now it just makes me really angry. The fact is that none of this used to happen to me, and my personality hasn't changed, so it can only be due to the fact that I look different. These people wouldn't have given me the time of day then, so why should I now?

But, back to my original paragraph. Every few weeks my father seems to want to point out that I could, you know, invite people over. Like male people, because I wasn't aware that I live alone in my very own apartment and could pretty much do whatever I want (and do, usually). During the wind storms last winter, I asked him if he could get me some candles in case the power went out, just regular candles. Somehow I ended up with scented tea candles when I specifically asked for regular, boring old candles. It's pretty sad when it's your own father that's trying to get you laid, when seems to me it's usually more fatherly to do the opposite.

Does this all bother me? Well, all I know is that I spend a lot of time at home missing concerts and things that I would have gone to had I had someone to drag along. I'm not the sort of person to pine away at home though, and gush over secret crushes or anything so I'm not too too concerned. On the upside, I'm going to die rich.

I've got more, but alas, this post is already pretty long.

Your questions answered, not quite 24/7

Since Carrie (and actually not Kimananda) asked, I would recommend Jonathan Safran Foer. I think Jonathan would agree. He's only written two books but now I'm a fan. Aside from that, I read Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan and I thought it was a pretty good book about cultural (mis)understanding. I've read some other books lately that reminded me a lot of Margaret Atwood, who Im not overly fond of but if that's what you're into then I can recommend some of that too.

As for movies, I haven't seen one lately that has floored me, so I'll think on it some more. I really want to see The Last King of Scotland though.

And food? I like cambozola cheese. It's very creamy and mild for a blue cheese and it's delicious on top of lettuce, with some sliced tomatoes, toasted walnuts, pepper and a vinegarette. I've probably said this before on this blog.

Is television evil? (the extremely abridged version)

A man was hit by a car in an intersection a few years ago now. He had to drag himself across several lanes of traffic to get off the road while cars swerved to miss him because no one would stop. A similar thing has happened more than once at a skytrain station, where someone was attacked and then lay there for several hours while people stepped over them before anyone took the time to stop and check if they were alright.

In Canada (I can't speak for anywhere else) the incidence of violent crime is down, and has been dropping for the past few years. During the same period of time, the number of violent crimes reported on the news has increased significantly. The media thrives on telling us about all that is ugly and violent in the world. Is it any wonder then that there are a lot of people who choose not to participate in their communities and that there are people who don't want to help strangers out?

I saw a woman trip and fall on the skytrain platform a couple of weeks ago and an old lady tugged on my arm and asked if I knew what had happened. "It wasn't a man, was it?" she said "I think it was a man that pushed her down!" Now, why would she think that? Could it not be in part due to the fact that the news portrays the world as a place where old women should fear for their lives when they step outside?

More often than not, the mainstream news reduces important issues to personal conflicts between important people and tends to treat ordinary people like spectators, rather than participants. Instead of giving you the option to become involved in public life in some way, you are meant to think that politics is something only done by politicians, law enforcement is only done by the police, social projects are only done by the government etc.

I think evil only happens when people choose not to resist it, and people are far more likely to help each other out if they all feel connected to their communities, able and empowered to do things. The messages we hear on television are too often that we should be passive and fearful, and I think that is a very dangerous thing. Every moment you spend vegetating in front of the television takes a moment away from something more important you could be doing.

That being said, I like House, and *gasp* all the interns are gone! On the one hand, they irritated me, but on the other, I can't imagine the show without them.

I'm not completely immune.

Abducted not once but twice!

Please accept these flowers as an apology. I have been abducted on two consecutive nights and my mornings are pretty rough if I'm not in bed on time.

I firmly resolve to not be abducted tomorrow. Regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly.

In the meantime, I bowled my very first strike ever. It only took me 20 years to do. Pretty amazing accomplishment, eh?

The twilight zone, or my banking situation.

Alright, Kracker asked about the twilight zone...

For reasons which I can not fathom, I'm not paid this year through direct deposit, but by cheque instead, which means it's up to me to go through the extra step of cashing them myself.

That would be fine except that I get home from work at around 6ish every night and at that point in time I'm tired and hungry and I really don't want to go anywhere. Getting to the bank involves taking the bus and a round trip would take me about an hour and a half.

Not to mention, the bank closes at 4:00 and due to renovations and vandalism, they've not only moved the night deposit box somewhere that I don't know about, but they've also put a lock on it. I don't have a key for it because I can't get to the bank before it closes. That means that I can stick them in the ATM machine, I guess, but then it will be at least five days before the cheques get cashed.

I have another bank account but I don't really use it. I got it with a scholarship and stuck $150 in it somewhere around 5 years ago and I haven't really touched it since. I don't even really seem to get regular statements for it because it's so inactive. I don't know what the account number is and I don't have a card for it so I can't really drop my cheques off there after hours either.

So I have a small but growing stack of cheques, money on paper but not in the bank. Pretty much all I can do is look at it.

That, my dears, is the twilight.

I have to go to bed so I'll answer more questions tomorrow.

Probably the only time I will ever do this

I wrote a post about how I really need to get to the bank to cash some cheques, but I haven't had time to spend two hours doing that so I'm kind of broke but not broke at the same time.

You don't want to read it.

What do you want to read, anyways?

Ask and I shall answer.

Thoughts on seeing my sister's dance recital last night

There seemed to be a lot less students at the dance school this year. The director of the school is retiring and perhaps that's a good thing. She took a lot of flak over kicking me out of the school, but mostly her choreography is getting kind of stale and repetitive and the year end shows are completely random and lacking in unity, in spite of having themes.

That being said, she brought on some new teachers this year, and it showed. Some of the dances were actually kind of refreshing to watch, because they were different from what I'm used to seeing at these things.

Abby did well, of course, but her choreography was boring. Not a lot she could do about that.

As always, though, you go to these things just to see the little kids, the ones that don't always know what they're doing but look cute doing it.

I felt a little sorry for one of the dancing moms though. They were wearing bright red stretch velvet tops and one poor woman's nipples just insisted upon poking up through the fabric. As much as I tried to pay attention to the other twelve or fourteen women on stage, my eyes were continually drawn towards her, and I know I'm not the only one.

Actually, I think the only one who missed it was probably mom, because the sight of fat women dancing in stretch velvet makes her put her head between her knees.

This post goes nowhere.

This week I've had to wake up half an hour earlier each morning than I usually do and it's amazing what half an hour will do. Due to some other commitments, I can't go to bed before 10:00 each night which means that the earlier I get up, the less sleep I get and there's no way around it.

It's amazing though, because you wouldn't expect a usually sleepless half hour to make a difference, but maybe just the act of laying in bed, trying to sleep actually counts for something. All I know is that I've been getting up just a little earlier and I've been really out of it as a result.

This morning I was on autopilot so much so that I got off the train and headed down to the skytrain station, on my way to a place where I previously worked but am not working at now. I got to the bottom of the escalator and then had to go all the way back up and run to catch my bus.

The lady sitting across from me was homely, barrel shaped. Her cleavage sat in a flattened shelf on top of her frame and reminded me of a puddle. You know how puddles sometimes ripple when the ground vibrates? The bus was vibrating.

She pointed up to where the top hatch in the bus was leaking rainwater onto a man's leg.

There is no exciting ending to this story. It's boring. My brain is fried. I need sleep.

Everything I needed to know I learned from commercials on TV

People who buy Mitsubishi vehicles are retarded because they don't bother to adequately test-drive them first.

I love cheese, therefore I must continue to leech off my parents.

People who shop at Home Hardware need overly-elaborate multitools to accomplish the simplest tasks.

Collecting Air Miles with a BMO debit card causes low-flying planes to demolish the stores you use the card in.

If you don't eat your vegetables people will slap you.

Spraying salad dressing in spritzer form on people will neither piss them off or stain their clothes.

Whiskas food makes cats very anthropomorphic while Whiskas treats turns cats into rockets.

Debbie Travis doesn't have much style but I love her anyways.

Not having your eyes checked once per year will trigger the apocolypse.

Need a social insurance number? Need to apply for Canada Pension Plan? Government employees could be stationed anywhere to serve you, even inside the back of trucks, closets and zamboni engines. Be on the lookout.

Tostitos make women sit around and talk to each other, because nothing else does.

Having good car insurance lulls elevator repairmen into a false sense of security and unsafe work environments.

Snapshot of my neighbourhood.

Alright, I'm satisfied. I've done my one scary thing of the day.

I was walking past the Legion when I noticed that one of the cars in the parking lot had its lights on. I decided that I would try to find the owner of the vehicle because nobody likes to discover that they have a dead battery.

But talking to random people is a very scary thing to do. I had to walk to the end of the street and back before I could go and do it.

There are a whole bunch of businesses that use that parking lot and so I started to make the rounds. I didn't have much luck. I saw some people walking into the auditorium behind the Legion so I followed them in. "Are you here for the audition?" a lady asked. But I wasn't. I was just looking for the owner of the car, and she lost interest in me.

I slipped into the Legion for a bit, but I didn't stay long because there weren't many people in there and no one that I knew. It smelled funny and I don't think I'm really entitled to be in there anyways. Sometimes I wish I was though. You can get a burger and a beer there for $3.50. After 15 minutes of searching I gave up.

On my way home I passed two Filipino women in sweatpants trying to walk a huge grey cat. The sea cadets were marching up and down the street, drumming and playing trumpets. The ninja turtles were out sparring again in very, very slow motion.

Nasturtiums

I'm growing nasturtiums on my balcony this year. I love the almost circular shape of their leaves, and the contrast of the pale green against the black of the pot they're in. I'd take a picture but it's raining, and they haven't flowered yet anyways.

When we lived in the parkhouse we used to buy them every year and then it would fall to me to plant them in the front garden.

Then one year mom let slip that nasturtiums are edible flowers. I figured that I would have a snack one day, so I sat out in the front, under the pine tree and ate all the plants down to the ground: leaves, stalks and flowers.

We never bought them again. I wonder why.

Idle speculation

Dad bought me some new ceramic pots for the plants on my balcony, and right now they're sitting unfilled haphazardly across the livingroom. I know that in a little while I'm going to have to go to bed, and that will mean that I'll have to go turn off the light.

People find it a tad disconcerting that coming up to my apartment at night, I have to slip past them into the dark to the furthest corner to turn on the light. I leave them standing there, just inside the door.

There are switches inside the door, of course. One of them sort of illuminates the hall by the bathroom and laundry closet without actually lighting the inside of the laundry closet, which lives in perpetual darkness, no matter what the time of day. Another seems to have the ability to turn the phone on and off.

So, after I turn off the light, the livingroom will be transformed into a minefield. I could scoot in behind the table and through the kitchen, I guess, except for the fact that I have left the dishwasher door open so it can trip me too. I could close it, I guess.

In fact, I could move the pots too. Chances are, I probably will.

The question is why I wrote this post in the first place.

I got you all figured out.

After two years I'm willing to acknowledge that the only real reason why half the people are here is in the hopes that I will shut up about my commute and my feelings and stop taking pictures of flowers and just post more goddamned pictures of my sister already.

Well, I can live with that.

"You know what is a funny word?" she asks. "Silly. You're silly Erin. See! I made you laugh!"

If she was a musical artist, I'd bet my life that her entire image and career would be dependent on these photos, that's how inflated my ego is today. But she's not a musical artist, even though she's actually a decent singer.

Crow

I started drawing this today. Not sure if I'm going to finish it or how. We'll see.

He needs a name. Not the drawing, but the crow that's taken up living on my balcony.

It's my blogiversary and I can have nothing to post if I want to.

I have no exciting photos for you.

For my blogiversary I had considered doing something with my template or moving this blog to another domain or something, but I haven't, so perhaps I won't.

That being said, it's my blogiversary!

This isn't my first blog, or even really my longest lived, but it may turn out to be that way eventually. My first was 6 or 7 years ago, when I decided to start a blog because Christine had one and I thought she was really cool.

Anyways, no one ever read it, and that's probably a good thing.

Today at work a newspaper ended up on my desk, and one of the advertisements in it had a phone number, something like 1-800-WLD-HRSE.

I began to look at the last word and wonder what exactly it was supposed to stand for, and in order, this is what passed through my mind:

HeaRSE
HiRSutE
HoaRSE
HoRSE

The question is which one was correct? All I know is that 1-800-wild-hirsute sounds kind of like the kind of thing that would be advertised on the tv at 2am.