Everything is good.

At the beginning of the summer I was working somewhere where I wasn't particularly happy. I have nothing against the people, really, and I wasn't being screwed over in any way. There doesn't always have to be a reason why you come home tired and feeling crappy and mildly dissatisfied every night. Sometimes it just happens and you can't put your finger on why.

Long story short, I switched jobs and everything about it was awesome and I'm actually kind of sad that I'm leaving because every morning I've worked there I've woken up, hopped in the shower and thought yay, I'm going to work. No complaints about anyone or anything. I have not had a single bad day there and if I wasn't going back to school I'd just stay. I'll go back next summer, if I can swing it.

But still, I know that I really couldn't stay there forever. As much as everything's awesome, I'll get a degree and then I'll be on the lookout for something that actually relates to it and better pay. And to avoid being disowned, I'll be doing a master's degree. And once I have my master's degree I'll be way too overqualified to go back to doing peoples' filing.

You know the scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge is looking back at the parties they used to have at Fezziwig's and he's saying that they had so much fun, but they had no money? For some reason it comes to mind.

I'm not sad to be going back to school. I'm taking a bunch of really cool sounding courses, one of which is with the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, who as far as I can tell, has not taught an undergrad course for eight years. I've already read the recommended texts and 25% of the assigned readings and they're dense so needless to say I'm soooo psyched.

This semester is going to be soooo good.

My mom used to be obsessed with taking pictures of us on the first day of school. For some reason or other, I felt compelled to grab my camera as I was running out the door in the morning yesterday and I took this. Probably for the same reason as the school photos. I'm just documenting the moment, I guess. It's my penultimate day of work shot.

Two things I don't get:

The first is something that seems to be happening more and more often these days - I have a drink or two and then cut myself off for the night and then some dumbass has to come over and either tell me I should be drinking more, or asks why I'm not with the same intent. My reply is that I have to work the next morning, to which they always counter that they also have to work the next morning, that they wake up earlier in the morning than me and that they work longer hours doing something harder than me.

I have yet to understand exactly what they intend to accomplish. Am I supposed to think they're cool or something because they've established that they're idiots with crappy jobs?

The next thing is why people insist upon having sex in cars right outside my door, which happens to also be just underneath my bedroom window. I'm quite certain there are tons of parking lots out there that are far more private, or at least there are ones that aren't right up against where I live so that when I step outside for a run I see a whole lot more than I needed to see.

I have a two million candlepower flashlight that I guess I could have used on them last night but I'm too polite.

Monet to Dali

A coworker and I took a couple of hours off during the day to see the Monet to Dali exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She'd already been but she really badly wanted to see it again, and I can see why. Lots of good stuff there both by big names like Matisse, Picasso, van Gogh and Monet, as well as quite a few I hadn't heard of.

It was nice to see some Rodin sculptures up close, including the Thinker, because it's even easier to see in person than in pictures what a truly talented sculptor he was. The same goes for van Goghs. Goregeous colours, movement, intensity. All good stuff.

As always, I see things I like, attempt to commit their names to memory and then forget them the minute I leave the exhibit, so unfortunately I can't really say exactly what it was I liked. I'd know them if I saw them.

Now that I've thought of it, my favourite of the exhibit was one by a German painter. It was painted as if you are the artist looking through the mirror at yourself and the room behind you. The artist's image appears to be approaching the mirror, with a look of disgust, holding a cloth with which he might possibly be using in the near future to blot himself out. Real concert tickets and letters are wedged in the edges of the mirror, so it was sort of a collage.

The others that stick out in my mind were a flat, kind of cubist painting of a river in blues, greens and oranges, a large canvas of a mother and child and one by a Czech painter - abstract in really bright colours and geometric shapes of a girl playing with a ball.

It's strange how peoples tastes can vary so widely, though. One woman near me was exclaiming over a painting of a villa in a Mediterranean setting which was done in a palette of pale pinks, yellows, sage greens and washed out blue. The colours were exactly the same colours that American artists use when they're painting pictures of adobe huts and cacti in the deserts of the American southwest, which are also coincidentally the exact same colours used to paint hospital interiors. They make me want to vomit every time I see them painted together anywhere.

The same goes for Dali. Some people like him and I don't. I like surrealism, but I just don't like Dali. There's nothing subtle about his paintings. They're well excecuted but they feel crude and blunt to me, like American humour. It's like they're slapping you upside the head and screaming out I'M SURREAL! I BET YOU DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE HOW FUCKING SURREAL I AM! And since every painting is a conversation, I say no shit, you're surreal, and then walk away in search of something less pretentious.

A year ago today I had a lot of dumb ideas, none of which I have realized.
Two years ago today I was working 7 days a week and went a little insane.

No better than when I started

I have less than a week left at work and how do I feel? Well, oddly enough I feel like I could work for another four months if I wasn't going back to school. Normally by this time in the summer I've been dying to leave for at least three weeks.

So what's different this year? Not a lot. The people are different, but they're just as nice as last year's people so that doesn't count. The job I've been doing is just as tedious, the building the same, the workday and breaks the same, everything else the same. The only thing I can think of is that this year I've been making almost seven dollars per hour more than I was last year. It's amazing what a decent wage can do to your sense of job satisfaction.

And yet, when I look at what the contents of my bank account will be after my last paycheque this summer and subtract the aggregate amount I have received to date in scholarships, really I've barely broken even, and it feels like it's only going to get worse, seeing as my rent is set to increase early next year and my tuition for this semester alone jumped 25% over what I paid in spring for the same number of courses. Ouch.

Luckily at school there is this nice hare krisna guy who cooks special hare krisna vegan food and will give you a whole plate of it for whatever change you have in your pocket at the time. That, plus a generous helping of all the spiders you can catch might actually provide enough protein for healthy skin, hair and fingernail growth.

Still, I think I really should get off my ass and apply for some more scholarships. I could say something like hi, my name is Erin. I used to live in a foster home. I am the president of a really large student union. They give me a budget and I spend it responsibly. I want to get a PHD so that I can wear one of those cool puffy hats. I can't think of a better reason to go through the pain of doctoral studies than that. My friends and family say I'm retarded, but in spite of being differently abled, I get decent grades. I will likely use my education to publish several books of theories and study that will be read by 10-15 like-minded souls and ignored by all of society, and this is how I intend to make the world better.

And yet in the end I always look at the sappy bullshit I write for these things and just decide to go to work instead. It's easier.

In which I actually put my degree to some use

So it looks like my entire day today is putting together a bunch of stuff with InDesign for my dad's job because he had a graphic designer that was willing to work for him but he didn't understand what exactly she was asking for and also, because he only got this job recently and isn't completely organized yet, he missed her deadline. Lucky me.

I'm probably making a mistake doing it in InDesign, because it's a program that my father neither has nor is familiar with, but I find it a lot easier to do layout stuff with that than Word, which is what he was using with little success.

The upside of doing a bunch of unpaid freelance work for your dad is that you have something else to stick in your portfolio, with which to show people that might potentially pay you to do things that you are eighteen times awesome. The downside is that it is unnecessarily difficult because I'm asking him for the content of this brochure and he's saying he doesn't really have it yet and talking to me over my shoulder while I'm trying to work.

Ideally, I just like people to give me stuff to lay out with an idea as to style and colour scheme and then I want them to leave me alone. Then I'll print out a copy, let them write all over it and make the suggested changes.

That being said, I had no real plans for today so I may as well be doing something useful. Not only that, he might consider getting or heavily subsidizing an upgrade to InDesign CS3 for me. These things tend to work out eventually.

Trying the limits of my patience

So here I am talking to someone I knew in high school and she asks me if I know of some sort of site or service that is kind of like Pandora, which is no longer available outside of the US. I suggest Last.fm because I am somewhat obsessed with that site and also it makes for better at work listening than the radio, most of the time.

This would be the time that a particular person decides to butt into the conversation. "You talking about facebook?" he asks. We filled him in on what we were talking about. "I just use facebook," he says. We continue our conversation about music and internet radio. "I just use facebook," he repeats. We keep talking. "I just use facebook," he says a third time. "Why don't you just use facebook?"

"This is boring," he says as we continue to talk about music. "This is boring, seriously. I want to go. Nothing's happening. This is boring. I could be playing poker right now." We were doing our best to ignore him by this point. When you dignify them with a response you only encourage them.

The problem with these sorts of people is that they really feel like their contributions are essential to your conversation, so when you walk away, they'll follow you around. The other problem is that other than being irritating, they're pretty much harmless, and never do anything particularly bad so it's not like you can really tell them to piss off.

The problem with me is that sometimes I am far too diplomatic for my own good. I have a hard time telling people that irritate me that I can't stand them. I'll go out of my way to avoid contact with these people, to the point of not answering my phone when they call, not replying to their emails and being on the exact opposite end of the room. But when I'm cornered, I'm polite, so I guess I come across as being really nice, which only attracts more of these people to me. This would be the case with this person, who makes a b-line in my direction every time he sees me at a party.

So while he follows both of us up to the bus stop, we're talking about music from Eastern Europe and Israel, he says "Eastern Europe? So they sing in French or something?" We continue talking and then he says "That was a joke. You were supposed to laugh." And that's about the time when I decided that I didn't feel like catching the bus and walked an hour to get to the other party I was planning on going to. Nothing like a good long walk in the dark when you're set to explode.

825

I never really wrote this thing for an audience. I mean, it's cool that people read, and it's cool that some even bother to link me, but the fact is that I just write stuff down so I won't forget. I am my biggest reader, as my sister found out one night when she was sleeping over. I'll post something, read it over, then edit it five or six times before I can leave it alone, and then I'll pick a month at random and read to see where my head was at. Maybe it's pure narcissism but I find my own writing really entertaining.

It's so easy to forget the details. There are some things that I remember very well. I could tell you random useless stuff, like how Kiichiro Toyoda consulted a fortune teller who told him that the key to his company's success was starting the names of all his car models with the letter C, and that's why up until a few years ago, all Toyota models had C names: Corolla, Camry, etc. I know which texts are included in the canon for the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Tewahedo Church.

Can I remember what I had for lunch two days ago? Nope, not a chance. So how will I know in a year if I don't write it down?

This blog has become a repository for all the crap that gets stuck in my head, some good, most of it not. I find that the more I throw out there, the more I have. I guess it works like love, only less warm and fuzzy.

That being said, I have a love/hate relationship with this blog. I have never once been happy with the content, the template, the name, the domain, pretty much everything about it and it drives me up the fucking wall.

Tonight I have places to go and people to see. I'll be back in approximately 12-18 hours with photos.

Paint it black.

I've been looking at the canvasses again and how a couple of them have things sketched out on them already. Grandma painted sailing ships and roses, mostly. And I was thinking that I'd feel kind of bad painting right over them, even though I really don't feel like finishing them for her. I've always taken issue with the lack of variety and imagination in her paintings, just as she's always taken issue with the fact that my style has never been hers.

I painted her a picture once of a hummingbird in dots of really intense coloured watercolours and her reaction was that she had to teach me how to paint and to shade things. When I replied that I already knew how to shade things, her reply was that I didn't do it right. I really haven't painted much since, not so much because of the criticism, but more because I've just never gotten the hang of it.

The painting was eventually framed and placed on the wall in her kitchen above Kalmalka Lake, just below a framed copy of a poem grandad wrote for her. As I grew a little more discerning, I was able to pick out more and more flaws in my work until I came to really dislike it. Still, I would kind of like it back, even though it's most likely that my uncle threw it in the trash several years ago.

It always seemed that everything I did she had done better so that instead of taking an interest in things, she was always finding ways that she'd outdone mom and I. I never figured out why she was always competing with me. What could she possibly gain from it? What could anyone from that side of the family possibly gain from such petty rivalries?

But you know those huge wigs that women used to wear with fancy decorations in them? I was thinking of painting one with a ship in it. That or waves of spaghetti, a ship and meatball whales. Or squid. Everyone loves squid. Tesellated squid. Squid knocking down buildings. Squid in phone booths. One day you'll break the glass only to discover someone's replaced the fire alarm with a squid.

See how hard this is for me?

Scalpel, please

It's strange. I wake up at the exact same time every morning and have a reasonably short shower. I usually get out of the shower more or less at the same time. So why is it that the rest of my morning is always so random? Some mornings I have a nice leisurely time getting ready for work and others I can barely finish half a cup of coffee before I run out the door. How does that happen?

I guess I just have off days. At one point in time on Monday I noticed that the skin around the big ugly wart on my finger was beginning to blister so I tore it off, and then because the wart was now sticking out of my finger like a column, I began to hack at it with my scissors until I'd sliced off about three milimetres off the top of it. It didn't hurt because there are no nerves inside warts but it did occur to me that I'd look really weird if someone came to my desk and I was cutting chunks out of my finger.

It also occurred to me that what I had just done was kind of gross, so I took my scissors to the washroom to wash them off with some soap and then I found a bandaid for my finger. Shortly afterward it started to itch like crazy. That's a good thing, right?

I'd much rather go see a doctor who can burn the damn thing off but apparently it's not big and ugly enough for me to get a referral. No matter. That was Monday and this is Thursday and the wart is now half its original size and shrinking because my scissor skills are so damn awesome. Black market surgery, anyone? I'll cure what ails you.

Garlic breath

This is a purple tomato. It doesn't really look overly purple in the picture so you'll just have to take my word for it. I just harvested it from my balcony and I really want to eat it but I kind of feel like someone else should be with me so I can share it with them because it's going to be a pretty momentous occasion. I mean, I've eaten purple potatoes and purple carrots, but never a purple tomato.

Yesterday I ended up wandering up and down Commercial Drive with Lindsay and others looking for a place to eat. We ignored our gut, which was craving Caribbean and went for pasta instead at a restaurant that was packed with people in the 45+ category where drinks were expensive and three out of the four of us were not particularly happy with our meals. Oh well. These things happen.

I think my pasta was supposed to have a tomato sauce, but the sauce seemed more like a half cup of oil with a couple pieces of tomato in it and I think it was probably the oil that gave me heartburn all night. That and garlic breath. I still have garlic breath from that meal. It won't go away.

I hate to say it but...

Alright, debrief.

I arrived at the wedding in relatively high spirits, thinking that I would stay for a few hours, be really gracious and friendly and then make a speedy getaway. As soon as I got there I found Kathy fuming and muttering that she wanted a cigarette and figured from that that something was up.

The backstory here is that Kathy is, for lack of a better term, the nicest sucker there is. If you're stuck, she will spend more of her time and money than is necessary to help you out, so when a certain someone went all bridezilla last week, Kathy volunteered to help a little. She was given one task over the phone, only to arrive and find that what she was expected to do had ballooned into a full-page list. Not only that, she ended up being the one taking the flak for anything that went wrong - the fact that there wasn't enough cutlery, that someone had been left out of the seating arrangement, that no one knew where the cake was supposed to go.

We went outside so she could vent and then I said to her "This is not your wedding. You did not plan it. You are not getting paid to help. You are not responsible for fuckups. You are a guest and will demand to be treated like one." And when during dinner the mother-in-law came over in a flap demanding that Kathy drop everything and make adjustments to the seating plan, I barked orders to do exactly the opposite. The wholething was beginning to piss me off too.

The wedding itself? The ceremony was nice and short. After that everything dragged, so before we were halfway into the planned activities, we were almost three hours behind schedule. Every time I tried to take a picture, the photographer got right in my way so I have quite a few pictures of her pink, denim-clad butt (who the hell wears jeans and a sweatshirt to a wedding?). I was at the best dressed and least well behaved table, but can you blame us when we're hungry and thirsty and there's nothing to do? (And also, if you want conversations to stay polite and G-rated you shouldn't invite Brown at all because he'll always drag us all down to the gutter with him.)

The entertainment consisted of trivia games which the guests weren't allowed to participate in and home movies, one of which was kind of funny, but the rest of which were boring and too long. Two tables left before cake was served and we were playing poker at ours. After cake our table excused itself and ran off to a party.

I hate to say it but that wedding badly needed alcohol. Not that it ever solves anything...

I've been busy.

I've been busy these past couple of days and most likely will be tomorrow too. Tonight Peter was kind enough to invite me to see Wilco at the Malkin Bowl with his entourage and I'm glad he did because it was awesome. Frankly I suck at reviewing concerts, movies, books and suck within three months of seeing them, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Or maybe he'll blog about how awesome it was. Or someone else. There were more than a few bloggers there.

One of my coworkers has an answering machine attachment thing that talks to him. He turns off the ringer on his phone and lets everything go straight to voicemail, and whenever there's a new message, the answering machine will tell him. As far as I knew and could hear, it only had two phrases:

"All my parts are in order and I am functioning perfectly."
"There is a message for you."

While he was away from his desk today I was thinking about how I was getting to the Malkin Bowl and other such logistics when all of a sudden the talking answering machine cut right into my thoughts:

"Are you sure you are making the correct decision? I think we should stop."

Freaked me right out. Good job, technology. Way to make me paranoid.

How did the terrible picture above get taken? Perhaps I was drinking too much of this stuff on Sunday.



I've already forgotten the name of it. Seriously the nastiest shit I've ever drank and at well over 75% probably the most alcoholic as well. I'm surprised we didn't all go blind. It has an odour that makes you wonder whether or not it was actually manufactured for human consumption. But not bad if you chase it with iced tea. And only iced tea. Some people learned that the hard way.

I'll sniff you out, if my nose will have anything to do with me.

My brain's just not been into this lately. Maybe something to do with not having enough sleep lately. Maybe having to do with the fact that I started writing something else down on Friday that hasn't run its course yet. Perhaps something will come of it. Probably not. I have a habit of eating my projects alive, losing interest and leaving them to die of neglect. When I was five years old, someone gave me a ball of yarn and for the next five years that same ball occupied me, as I knit and tore it apart who knows how many times.

I've been reading All That is Solid Melts Into Air by Marshall Berman on the train in the morning. It discusses the works of several modernist thinkers, along with the art and culture of the time. Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire - these I get. But then he moved into a body of Russian thought that hits me and bounces off. I feel dense.

Still, the thought that one could meet his nose out on the street is kind of amusing, especially if one's nose outranks him and will now have nothing to do with him.

I guess I could have been a nose, except that I like spicy food and I'm kind of allergic to some perfumes. But there was this one time when my rowing team was at a regatta where we all slept on the floor of a room and inevitably everyone's uniforms got tossed about. I took it upon myself and my trusty sharpie to write peoples names inside them. But first I had to figure out who each belonged to, and how do you tell otherwise identical garments apart? Smell.

Each had their own blend of deodorant, shampoo, lotion, aftershave, fragrances and body odour that made my uniform labeling remarkably accurate. Which I suppose was good, since I was writing on peoples' things with permanent markers.

Not that I try really hard to sniff after people or anything. I just notice that sort of thing, and I tend not to forget.

Recycling makes me feel good.

What do you see here?

I'll tell you what I see. It's a stack of cardboard ice cream boxes on top of a bin marked recycling at Bard on the Beach.

You see, they used to have cardboard recycling bins there for the ice cream boxes but this year they don't. The only available recycling bins are for bottles and cans only, so people dutifully dump their cardboard in the trash cans instead.

But not while we're around. If you start piling cardboard boxes on top of the recycling bins, some people will actually start doing it too. And if they throw the boxes in the garbage, my sister will scold them and fish the boxes out.

And if you do it enough, people will actually start to make the decision themselves. We saw one guy look between the garbage and the recycling bin several times before making his choice. There was a visible moral conflict going on there and eventually recycling won out. I applauded him.

We're saving the world, one insignificant cardboard box at a time. Damn straight we're cool.

Damn you, facebook for making me think too much

At one point in time today, I remember that the whole sky took on a kind of sepia tint. It was kind of cloudy and blue-taupe and at the time I started writing an email to myself, like I sometimes do, so that I could post it to my blog later. But it was so loaded with bizarre metaphor and poeticky language that I dumped it before I sent it home.

I mean, who cares if the sky turns brown anyways? It was probably just the tinting on the windows.

At one point in time last night I was kept awake by the noise of somethingorother moving around in my intestines. It wasn't uncomfortable, just noisy. Usually when it does that I quickly find myself feeling really sick, but nothing came of it. It was just noisy as hell.

I've been having a lot of completely random people adding me on facebook lately and I have no idea where they're from. Do they read this blog? Are they stalking me on last.fm because I listen to a lot of cool music?

I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt with this stuff, but still, if we don't have any mutual friends and we haven't talked in, say, more than four or five years, or you're completely random and I don't know you at all, it might be nice to send me a message.

Hi, we did ___ together.
I was in ___ class with you.
I don't know you but I think you're hot.

I don't care. Chances are I'll add you anyways. But at least then I'll know. Most are invited to bask in my awesomeness.

But the thing is too, that I'm kind of wary of people who try and friend me when they have no friends listed on their profiles. As far as I see it, the nicest thing about facebook is that because most people tend to add the people they already know first, most of us are probably putting relatively accurate information on our profiles. Not to mention, you can tell some things about people by digging through their friends lists anyways, especially if you don't know them.

So, what to do about a mysterious person who arrives out of nowhere, apparently looking like a supermodel? Goregeous guys have lots of friends, no? And what are goregeous guys doing wanting to have anything to do with me? These things just don't make sense.

I have a very brave cat.

Soft Core Surrealism says:
sally was protecting us from tom's cat
all of a sudden we heard a battle cry
so mom and i went out front
and mom started shooing minnie away
and sally was hissing
the last thnig we wanted is for sally to be hurt again
so i grabbed her and put her in the livingroom
but she kind of wet herself
and it got on my leg
so i had to go wash my leg
but she was so brave
so when you come over next
make sure to tell her how brave she was

erin says:
alright
will do
she's such a good kitty

Soft Core Surrealism says:
yeah
dad says your stereo is fixed
and wants you to check otu a site

erin says:
yep, I noticed

Soft Core Surrealism says:
http://voluntourism.org/

erin says:
sounds interesting

Soft Core Surrealism says:
did you get your cds out?

erin says:
yes
finally

Soft Core Surrealism says:
we accidentally left the back of the van wide open
after bringing in the groceries
and mom just noticed

erin says:
I see

Soft Core Surrealism says:
and so she was all pissed off
because someone could have stolen her kitty litter

erin says:
we wouldn't want that at all

Soft Core Surrealism says:
no
because then everything would be that much shittier

I bought a dress. yay.

When you walk into a vintage store and try something on and it miraculously fits, it's a sign, because nothing ever fits. I think I might just wear it to the wedding on Sunday. Kathy will probably kill me, but whatevs. I love retro stuff, it makes me look really skinny and I can guarantee noone else is going to be wearing the same thing.

I took other pictures but this is the only one that wasn't blurry, too dark or had my face all scrunched up.

Ignore the mess behind me. Please.

I'm still on the lookout for a tweed jacket. You wouldn't think it would be as hard as this, but I've managed to find men's tweed jackets but not a petite woman's jacket. I found a tweed skirt suit today that was really cute, a sort of 60's collarless, asymetric jacket with two huge maroon buttons the size of coffee coasters and a matching pencil skirt. It was very Jackie Kennedy. Too small though.

Deja

My dad runs a whole bunch of subsidized afterschool programs for kids with families that can't afford to send their kids to brownies or soccer, the idea being that kids that play sports and do crafts and things under the guidance of responsible adults are a lot less likely to go off the rails.

So all of a sudden his sewing teacher is moving and I'm the replacement. Yay. I have to come up with some stuff to do with these kids fast.

That means I've been doing a lot of hunting around Dressew lately, because you can pick up all sorts of weird and wonderful things there cheap, like a huge bag of buttons for a dollar, or 50 cent lace shawls or an entire Canadian Airlines stewardess uniform for under $10 or 10 kg of belgian chocolate for $10. Their selection of fabric is usually pretty good too.

The only problem is that you never know what you're going to find there, and that just because they have tons of jean jackets and novelty feathered masks this week, doesn't mean they'll have them next week. They might carry a specific kind of yarn in a specific colour, but once they run out, they may or may not bring that colour back in. They're kind of like a consignment store that way. You can find ridiculously good deals there but you have to be on the lookout for them at all times.

But they carry a lot of cool specialty stuff too. If you need sequinned, lacy appliques for a wedding dress, that's where you should look. Or if you need foot and a half long fringe, they've got it. Unimpressed by the fashion industry? Why not make your very own bra? They have underwires for every size up to something ridiculous like EEEE. Some of those things are so huge I could easily fit three or four breasts in there.

Why do I feel like I've already written this post before?

You can smell my breath from a mile off

In order to tell you what I was doing today, I'd need a specific photo that is on my sister's camera right now. Sometimes she's fast at these things. Other times she is not. Today she's not, so I'll write up the post later.

We managed to arrive just before the lineup at Anton's which was cool because I haven't eaten there in a good ten years. Usually we drive past and see people lined up half way down the block and decide to go elsewhere. Today I had a dish with mushrooms, artichokes and tuna in a tomato, wine and cream sauce, which was delicious. The portions are so large there that I'll probably be eating the leftovers at least until Friday.

I have very garlicky breath.

Uneventful day

I'm positively speechless right now.

I had plans today but they fell through. I did a little bit of cleaning and baked some scones because it was cooler out today and I'm out of bread. I read a bit for school and took notes because I'm ueber cool like that.

Things my sister has said within the past 20 minutes:

"I wonder what shampoo Beck uses."

Me: "Oh Sally, are you being a sphinx cat?"

Du: "As long as she's not being a sphincter cat!"

I'm turning into my mother

I heard from someone once that one of the great tragedies of this day and age is that music has gone from being a collective thing to something that people do alone. Add this to the fact that I live on my own, I haven't listened to the radio in three years and have random taste at the best of times, and suddenly I get Nickelback tickets for my birthday.

Not that this is an entirely bad thing. At the risk of completely destroying whatever indie cred I have, I will actually admit to having their first four albums, even though I haven't listened to them in a long time. I've found their albums alternate. They'll put out one I don't mind listening to, and then I will think the next one sucks, and then the next one decent. Unfortunately for the most recent album, the pattern dictates that I will think it will suck if I listen to the whole thing through. Not to mention, I don't listen to the radio anymore so I really wasn't aware of when it was released.

But still, they do put on an exciting show, if you can get through the openers (none of which I liked). They throw beer at the audience and explode lots of stuff, which is good because I'm a pyro at heart.

It's like somehow or other someone flipped the male attention switch on about three months ago and now all of a sudden I get ogled in public and poked on facebook and such on a near daily basis so I wasn't overly surprised when the tool that sat down beside me wanted to start a conversation.

"So, you ladies aren't drinking anything?"

"No, I've got a stick up my ass."

Though you'd think that he would have known that without even talking to me. I mean I was wearing a non-cleavage showing merino wool sweater and a pair of conservative black slacks to a Nickelback concert. I guess I could have brought a change of clothes to work with me but I didn't feel like it. No matter. He soon found the kind of girls he was originally after - plastered and loose, which worked out well for all of us.

Christ, some days I sound just like my mother.

I happen to have the world's smallest bladder, and that if I have one glass of beer, it's pretty much guaranteed that I'm going to have to pee twice within the next fourty minutes, or else sit and look really uncomfortable until I've waited a period of time which I consider to be 'normal' before I relieve myself. I find I'm better off with shots, but they don't sell those at GM Place. I think I should find the perfect mathematical equation to describe whether or not I should drink a given alcoholic beverage, call it the "piss factor", write a book about it and make myself rich.

The Victoria trip of awesomeness

Kevin commented on a photo on my flickr which reminded me that I really haven't said much about going to Victoria two weeks ago.



Well, we can't seem to go to Victoria without going to Roger's chocolates. There's one in Vancouver now which is actually within walking distance of where I work but it's not quite the same because the original store has stained glass and fancy woodwork and such that is pretty hard and expensive to replicate elsewhere.





I've always loved this mural. I think it must be the orange stripe that does it for me.



There was a hot rod show the same weekend. It meant that we were stuck in a crappier motel than usual, and that the whole town was filled with things that had formerly been beautiful cars that had been souped up, painted ugly colours and completely bastardized. They were driven by old men who went up and down the same streets over and over and over. Can we say juvenile?

I'm happy to say that the above car was completely stock, and as such, it was the only one I took a picture of.





Stopped at Munro's books, just because it's a really cool bookstore. Just look at t and try to tell me that you too would probably succumb to the temptation of buying books at such a place. Walked out with arms full.



Went to a restaurant where they had this fishtank thing. If they'd left me there I would have been amused for hours because the fish just. keep. swimming. by.



Came home with the sunset.

In which I experience a temporary bout of paranoia

All I can say is that I've been really, really on edge since yesterday. I went to bed tired last night and woke up genuinely paranoid about practically everything.

Part of it's just where my head is at right now and part of it is that I'm taking a course overload at school next semester and the books aren't in at the bookstore yet. Part of it is that I've got a lot of social stuff happening in the next couple of weeks when I'm usually used to doing absolutely nothing that doesn't involve work or getting groceries.

So then all of a sudden I'm in a band because "you're in our band and you're coming to jam with us" and someone on Facebook is quite insistent that we absolutely have to have brunch and I'm wondering why the hell that is, especially since we've never met and are you just being friendly or do you like me or something? And why this week? Why not later? Why not never? Why not let me curl up under a rock and die?

And then there's the damn wedding coming up and if there's a possible way that I can get out of it I will. But it's looking like there won't be. As much as I don't really feel all that close to the bride I've known the maid of honour for almost 17 years and I can't really leave her can I? But as much as I try to be positive, everything about this whole thing makes me feel bitter and angry and I just want it to be over with.

Then I'm going to go see Wilco with Peter and his entourage which is cool because I wanted to go anyways, and I don't think it would be even possible for him to come across as anything but a really nice person. It's getting home afterward that's got me paranoid, because I could take the bus and if all else fails, I could walk home from wherever. And then I start going off on a tangent and think that I could just round a bunch of people up and take them home with me but do I have enough sleeping bags? And wouldn't I feel bad about possibly waking them up accidentally when I have to work in the morning (because as far as I'm concerned I can leave people with a spare key and they can let themselves out)? And what if someone falls down the ladder from the loft and cracks their head open (do I have insurance for that?) and what if I don't have enough cheerios and aren't you a dumbass for expecting people to have to bus an extra hour to get back to the ferry the next day.

But at the same time I think I've got a couch and lots and lots of room and foam and five sleeping bags and I could easily offer it to anyone but I'd rather they just ask nicely and I'd just say yeah, go ahead but be warned I'm out of food and toothpaste and I get dibs on the shower and let me know you're coming so I can clean a little.

And I know that I get lonely sitting at home alone sometimes, and that I think that I should meet some new people and get out more, but damn it, I'm not feeling good about some of this stuff at all.

I'm not usually like this. I am not usually like this at all. Sheisse.

David vs. Godzilla

Today, which is actually yesterday because I never bothered to post this post, I picked the blueberries in my parents' backyard, ate more cat shit cake and read all about Faust and Gretchen for school. Yay.

I watched this video called Process Enacted that I found on Wooster Collective, that I found to be pretty cool.



Then my sister showed me this next one, which is also pretty cool. It's a way of multiplying big numbers with each other, but it would be cooler if it was better lit and if the camera didn't shake as much.



Yesterday Mom, Abby and I discussed whether the Bible would have been more exciting if it had Godzilla vs. David and whether we thought that Godzilla could take King Kong or not.

After about twenty minutes and a variety of different possibilities, we decided that it came down to climate. Godzilla's a reptile, so in order for us to rig it so that King Kong wins, we'd have to have the match in the winter. Godzilla would be cold and sluggish and King Kong would have an easy time of it.

But Godzilla's Japanese, and the Japanese are good at making all sorts of cool technology and gadgets so if Godzilla made himself a heat lamp backpack he'd be pretty much invincible.

My mom begins to choke on her food and says "I have two university degrees, you know. I went to graduate school." I told her that the reason why we go to university is so that we can examine such questions far more thoroughly than uneducated people, because clearly, the outcome of a tv monster throwdown is really important.

I mean, why else would you bother with education anyways?

Happy birthday to me.

It's my birthday my sister baked me a cake. It was, well... Just look at it:

Fireworks

Enough fireworks for you? I posted some more to my flickr. There aren't very many because not a lot of them turned out very well. Once again I left my tripod at home so some were kind of blurry. On top of that, the wind wasn't going in the right direction so it was kind of smoky, and hard to get clear pictures of the fireworks anyways. Add that to the fact that half the show was kind of repetitive and not particularly memorable and the fact that my autofocus has been particularly temperamental lately. Oh well.

But still, if you take a couple hundred photos you're bound to get a couple that are half decent so I stuck them up on my flickr.

Don't you worry though. I've got tons of photos from Victoria to dump on you too.

Some people are barbecuing just underneath my window and the wind is bringing the smoke right through my apartment. I can either close my windows and bake to death or breathe smoke and asphyxiate myself. I'm having trouble breathing and the smell has already made me vomit once. I think I'm going to go for a walk.

My father has conscripted me into teaching afterschool sewing and craft classes to kids at inner-city schools. I'll get paid reasonably well to do it but all the same I'm scrambling to find stuff to do with the kids because by the time the program starts in September I'm going to be in over my head with student union stuff and my course overload at school.

I'm going to walk to the library. The air should be cleaner there.

I pry open elevator doors with my bare hands. You will bow to my awesome strength.

I used to work in a building that had really fast closing elevators. The moment you approached them, they'd slam closed and you'd be left in the lobby. Another one would open and then I'd run over only to have the doors slam on my face.

I didn't work there for very long but I think it rattled me because now every single time an elevator closes before I can get to it, I think that maybe I could have stopped it by sticking my arm in it or something and I vow that next time I will. I never do.

Until earlier this week. That was when I snapped. I saw the elevator doors closing and I ran up to shove my arm in. I must have hesitated at the last minute because I only managed to get my fingers in before the door closed on them.

It was at that moment that it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I was doing something stupid. It was also the same moment that instead of working my trapped hand out, I shoved my other hand in and began to pry open the doors. After a tense moment, they opened.

This would have been perfectly fine, had there been no witnesses but it just so happened that a couple of my coworkers were standing right behind me. Lovely.

But now that I have a taste for blood I've been tempted to do the same thing over and over. It's kind of like having a touch with death and seeing what's on the other side. Only kind of.

Not really.

Today's not really my day.

I have tons and tons and tons of photos to upload. It's going to take me a while.

Today while I was standing at an intersection, a man started talking pleasantries while he unzipped his fly and began to pee all over the pavement. Few things shock me anymore.

I got off work early today because it's a long weekend and once home, quickly descended into a not-so-good mood. To cheer myself up, I popped the copy of Hospital Music I bought on Tuesday into my CD player. I don't really buy many CD's anymore, especially now that I've put some speakers on my computer that sound reasonably good.

It really didn't take it long to become my favourite album, so when I played it once through, it sounded excellent. Then I decided to play it a second time. I pressed the button and the machine started to shuffle.

All of a sudden a high-pitched squeal came from out of the middle of it. It's a sound I've heard before, the sound of my CD player eating another CD. Sonofabitch.

If I had a guarantee that I wouldn't be evicted, and if I didn't have two other CDs in there that are probably fine, I would throw it out the window.

Instead I'm going to have to pull the whole fucking thing apart with a screwdriver. Graaaargh!

Hotdog stands make crappy landmarks

My mission last night: find my friends at the fireworks.

Main obstacles: by the time I got down to the beach it was dark. I had been told to meet someone in front of the Sylvia Hotel, which isn't all that hard to find.

When I got there, there was no one waiting for me. Instead, they decided that they would give me directions to their spot, which they said was right in front of the hotel. Right in front of the porto potties in front of the Sylvia hotel.

"Okay, I'm right beside the porto potties now. Where are you?"

"Right beside the St. John Ambulance truck."

"I don't see you."

"See the guys with the light sabres?"

"No."

"Where the hell are you then?"

"I'm right beside the porto potties in front of the Sylvia Hotel, standing in front of the crowd of police."

"What police?"

Long story short, they were nowhere near the Sylvia and my friends really suck at directions.